Storm Breaking

Hardorn is threatened first.'

Darkwind kissed her forehead, then rested his head back against the back of the couch, staring up at the ceiling. 'At the moment, I feel a great deal of sympathy for him. This may not be a punishment commensurate with what he did to our people, but he is going to be suffering real and sometimes serious discomfort for quite some time if I am any judge of these things.'

''Because of the state of the country you mean?' she asked.

He nodded. 'Absolutely. You heard Janas; Hardorn is sick, injured, and only now beginning to recover. He gets to experience all that, until the land is healed again. What's more, when the mage-storms start up again, whatever they do to the land, he'll feel as if it's happening to him!'

She chuckled, a little heartlessly. 'I wonder what having bits of the countryside plucked out and transplanted elsewhere will feel like?'

''Nothing I would care to share,' Darkwind said emphatically.

She contemplated the prospect, and it didn't displease her. And she knew someone else who would find the new situation very much to her liking.

'I wonder how long it will take to get word of this to Solaris?' she mused aloud.

:Not long, trust me,: Gwena replied. :And, oh, to be a fly on the wall when it does!:

As the official-unofficial liaisons to Tremane on behalf of the rest of Hardorn, Elspeth and Darkwind found themselves dealing with a dozen requests the next morning that were the direct result of Father Janas' work the previous day. 'You know, it is just a good thing that all this is happening in the dead of winter,' Elspeth remarked to her mate, as she dealt with yet another request for 'Royal Patronage' from a merchant in the town. 'If we were in the midst of decent weather, we'd have half the country trying to get here for this coronation Janas wants to arrange.'

Darkwind had handed most of the correspondence over to her, for the Hawkbrothers had no equivalent to royalty and the pomp and display that went with such personages. He shook his head. 'I feel as lost as a tiny frog in the midst of Lake Evendim. Or a forest-hare in the middle of the Dhorisha Plains,' he said ruefully. 'Now I know what your people mean when they speak of feeling like a 'country cousin.' I haven't any idea what half these people want from Tremane.'

'Frankly, neither have they,' she replied dryly. 'Royalty is rather like a touchstone to those who are accustomed to kings and queens and the like. One judges one's own worth by one's worth to the king, whether or not the king is himself a worthy person. All these people are attempting to gather about Tremane in the hope that some of the glitter will rub off.'

She would have said more, but at that moment, there came a knock on their door. When Darkwind went to answer it, much to her surprise, Tremane himself stood in the doorway, guarded by his older aide, and looking a bit wan.

'Might I come in?' he asked. 'Something in these memories of mine says that you might be able to help me. Sort things out, that is.'

Darkwind waved him in; the aide remained behind, but with a look that said he would station himself at the door and not move until Tremane left again.

The Duke took a seat on their couch, and Elspeth made a quick assessment of him. For once he was hiding nothing; she suspected that at the moment he simply was unable to. He was still quite unsettled, disoriented, and distinctly wild eyed. She handed him a fragrant cup of kav, a beverage the Imperials favored that she had also begun to enjoy, as much for the effect it had of waking one up as for the flavor.

'You know,' he began plaintively, 'when you came here, I told you that I accepted this mind-magic of yours, but to tell you the truth, I didn't entirely believe in it. You could have done everything you claimed simply by having two well-trained beasts and a clever set of subtle signals. Spirits, putting one's thoughts into someone else's head—that was all so much nonsense and only the really credulous would have given it much credence....'

His voice trailed off, and Elspeth nodded. 'Now, for the first time, you are in the grip of something you can't explain. Right?' she asked.

He nodded, looking oddly vulnerable and forlorn. 'Magic is supposed to be a thing of logic!' he protested. 'It has laws and rules, they are all perfectly understandable, and they bring predictable results! This is all so—so—intuitive. So unpredictable, so messy—'

Darkwind started to laugh, and the Duke looked at him suspiciously. 'I don't see what is so amusing.'

'Forgive me, sir,' Darkwind choked. 'But very recently a friend of ours, who truly and with all of his heart believed that magic was wholly a thing of intuition and art, having nothing to do with laws and logic, was confronted with the need to regard magic as you and your mages do. And he sounded