She bit her lip. 'Very well, uh, Sunbright. You know, it's not often we have a visitor so tall and strong, so handsome and dashing. You make a girl wonder what the future might bring.' As if scratching idly, she tugged open the fluffy black robe, revealing the soft upper curve of a modest breast.
Dully, the barbarian nodded. Without knowing why, he reached for her, and she leaned to meet him. But his hand didn't stray to her throat or breast. Rather, the knotty scarred brown hand stroked her hair along one side. She smiled shyly, confused by a gentle touch from such a fearsome man.
As if speaking in a foreign tongue, Sunbright said, 'One day a fine and simple man with violet eyes will ask a drink of water, then marry you, get you with strong children, a round half-dozen. But you'd best get about it soon. It's unnatural to live here on high, suspended on naught but magic. T'will come a time when thunder tolls and these castles fall.'
Surprise flickered in the girl's brown eyes, then fright. Sunbright felt her fear, and sensed it within himself. How had he made such a pronouncement? He'd spoken like a seer, a prophet.
A shaman.
Dazed by his own behavior, his hand dropped from the girl's hair. She bit her lip, excused herself, and bustled away, robe pulled tight around her neck.
Sunbright shook his head, laid a hand on the inner wall for support. The rough stone tingled under his fingers, as if he felt stone for the first time in his life. The floor too seemed full of imperfections: dips and whorls, and huge cracks where before it had been smooth.
Why was he seeing things so clearly, so brightly? Had someone cast a spell on him? Or had he cast one upon himself?
What power? What knowledge?
Why here?
Why now?
Chapter 3
Even Sunbright's nights were disturbed, for he dreamt of Greenwillow.
Three nights now he'd dreamt of her, visions of love, memories of battle, miles of travel they'd made together.
But tonight was different.
A dark forest was rife with roots and rocks, a foot-tripping tangle impossible to see. Black boles surrounded him. But ahead, as if between prison bars, flitted his elven lover. Greenwillow of the Cormanthyr was tall and slim but with a woman's curves, her face pale as milk, her eyes and ears slanted and exotic, her hair flowing down her back in black billows. This night she wore a sheer gown of white silk, embroidered all over with elaborate runes and vines, and that was strange, for Sunbright had never seen her in anything but emerald green and black leather armor. She tripped among the dark trunks like an errant bird, and he stumbled to catch her. Occasionally she cast a glance over her shoulder, but always tripped onward, eager to lead him. To show him something? What could it be?
Hard pressed to keep her in sight, Sunbright thrashed through the woods. In the pitchy night, he banged his shoulder against rough bark, stubbed his toes on roots, conked his forehead and scratched his face on branches. But Greenwillow sailed on, light as a breeze. They ran for dream-miles. Sunbright gasped for her to slow down, heard only his own panting. 'Greenwillow! Wait! Wait for me…'
The blackness began to change, to wane. A bright light like a single torch speared the night. It came from high overhead, gathering strength, banishing the blackness. Sunbright squinted, picked out Greenwillow only as a dark, slim silhouette against white light. Then it was too painful to look, so he plowed on blindly.
He grunted as he fetched up hard against an up-thrust chunk of granite, skinning his knees. He slapped at the barrier to find a way around, found it rose only higher on each side. Cursing, shading his eyes against the fiery glare, he swung a knee on the stone to climb over. But the top surface felt strange: cold and very smooth. Too smooth to be natural. A quarried rock here in the forest? The wall of a ruin?
Backing, he felt the wall. Square everywhere. How…?
'Sunbright, wake up!'
Greenwillow's voice, the first time in a long tune he'd heard it, clear and sweet as a lark's warble.
He opened his eyes, and his blood ran chill.
The dreamer stood in the stone hallway of Castle Delia. The barrier he'd struck was the windowsill. Sleepwalking, he'd tried to mount it, climb over. With a gasp, he looked down. He'd have fallen a mile or more to the forest floor.
Gagging, Sunbright stumbled back from the open window. He clawed sweat from his face and eyes. But he still had to squint, for the fiery glare out the window was no dream.
High in the sky, slicing the night in an arc, was a shooting star. Even as he watched, it completed its journey from the heavens to the earth. The glare illuminated distant tall trees like twigs in a campfire-for just a second, then the light was snuffed out. Sunbright thought he felt the earth under his boots shake, but that was his imagination. He wasn't on the earth, but floating a mile above it.
On trembling legs, he staggered back to his plain chambers and tousled bed. He closed the bedchamber door and bolted it, then wedged a heavy chair under the latch.
He collapsed on the sodden bed, tried in vain to recall Greenwillow's face and sweet voice.
'What do you mean, you want to go down to the forest? There's nothing down there but-but trees!'
'I want to see a tree.' Sunbright sounded petulant. His head ached and he was dizzy. He wasn't sleeping well, and never would until he stood on firm ground.
'Walk in the gardens! We have nine of them! What about our agreement, our working together? Do you know how many artifacts I have to interpret?'
'No.' The barbarian's tone suggested he didn't care, either.
'I'll show you!' Candlemas ignored Sunbright's reticence as he marched across the big workshop.
Sunbright followed. Slowly he was learning his way around Castle Delia, or Candlemas's small corner of it. The mage's realm was mostly this tower on one corner of the floating mountain that supported Delia. The tower was a dozen stories high, big enough inside for a chariot race on any floor. Candlemas's workshop occupied the topmost floor, a room bigger than Sunbright's village. Tables and screens and partition walls split the chamber into smaller areas, but always the high windows loomed in all four walls. The floors below, Sunbright had seen, contained more rooms and workshops where some thirty lesser mages worked at dirty, complicated, and arcane tasks per Candlemas's orders. The pudgy mage was an Inventive, he'd explained, one of the empire's leading experts at creating and destroying artifacts, and so a favored employee of Lady Polaris. Secondly Candlemas was a Variator, but the barbarian hadn't grasped that word's meaning. There were more flavors of magic in this society than colors to the forest, and everyone from the mightiest archwizard to the dumbest stable hand practiced magic. Everyone except Sunbright.
And this single tower was only a tiny fraction of the castle, for Candlemas's other realm of responsibility was steward, overseer of the holdings of Lady Polaris. Below and far out of sight were farms and orchards, plantations and ponds, mills and mines that belonged to this one woman who, it was carefully explained by the maid who'd fetched his breakfast, was one of the supreme archwizards of the empire, but not the uppermost: merely the tenth or twelfth. Archwizards spent most of the time scrambling to one-up their rivals, to step upon their enemies while climbing the ladder.
Like salmon hurrying to mount a cataract and spill into a fisher's trap, Sunbright thought.
Castle Delia was almost a square league in area, and the mansions, outbuildings, and battlements on it ran for acre upon acre, stacked six and seven stories high in places. Two hundred and sixty rooms made up the main house, a maid had breathed. Or so it was rumored: no one knew for sure. Over two thousand servants kept it tidy under the all-seeing eye of Umeko, Acting Chamberlain (the former chamberlain, Sysquemalyn, had vanished) for those few occasions when Lady Polaris actually visited. For it stunned Sunbright to learn that this vast castle was only one of seven such keeps owned and maintained by Lady Polaris, in addition to her mansions in many of the
