Fiddler Fair (anthology)

The grey palfrey Martis rode was of a more placid disposition, for which she was profoundly grateful. She signed to the groom to release his hold and turned its head to face the open wooden gate set into the stone walls of the court. At Lyran’s nod she nudged it with her heels and sent it ambling out beneath the portcullis.

They rode in single file through the city, Lyran trailing the mule at a respectful distance from “his employer.” Four times the bay started and shied at inconsequential commonplaces; each time Lyran had to fight the beast back onto all four hooves and into sweating good behavior. The last time seemed to convince it that there was no unseating its rider, for it did not make another attempt. Once outside the city walls, they reversed their positions, with Lyran and the mule going first. Ordinarily Martis would now be spending her time in half-trance, gathering power from the living things around her. But her mount was not her faithful Tosspot, who could be relied upon to keep a falling-down drunk in the saddle—and Lyran’s beast was all too likely to shy or dance again, and perhaps send her gelding off as well. So instead of gathering always-useful energy, she fumed and fretted, and was too annoyed even to watch the passing landscape.

They reached the Gate at sunset. The ring of standing stones in the center of the meadow stood out black against the flaming glow of the declining sun. The wide, weed-grown fields around them were otherwise empty; not even sheep cared to graze this near a Gate. The evening wind carried a foretaste of autumnal chill as it sighed through the grasses around them. Martis squinted against the bloody light and considered their options.

Lyran had finally decided to exhaust his misbehaving mount by trotting it in circles around her as they traveled down the road until it was too tired to fuss. Now it was docile, but plainly only because it was weary. It still rolled its eyes whenever a leaf stirred. The sorceress urged her gelding up beside his.

“Can you get one last run out of him?” Martis asked ­anxiously.

“Probably,” Lyran replied. “Why?”

“I’d like to take this Gate now, if we can, while that misbegotten horse of yours is too tired to bolt.”

He looked at her in that silent, blank-faced way he had when he was thinking. “What if he did bolt?”

“The gods only know where you’d end up,” she told him frankly. “If he got out of my influence—I can’t predict what point beyond the Gate you’d come out at, or even what direction it would be in.”

“And if I can’t get him to a gallop?”

“Almost the same—if you didn’t keep within my aura you’d come out somewhere between here and where I’d land.”

He reached out and touched her face with the tips of his fingers. “You seem tired, beloved.”

“I am tired,” she admitted, confessing to him what she would admit to no other living person. “But I’m not too tired to Gate-spell, and I think it’s safer to do it now than it will be later.”

“Then I will force this bundle of contrariness disguised as a horse into keeping up with you.”

“Hold butter-brains here, would you?” she passed him the reins of her mount, not trusting it to stand firm on its own. She drew entirely into herself, centering all her concentration on the hoarded power within herself, drawing it gradually to the surface with unspoken words and careful mental probes. Her eyes were closed, but she could feel the energy stirring, flowing, coming up from—elsewhere—and beginning to trickle along the nerves of her spine. At first it was barely a tingle, but the power built up quickly until she was vibrating to its silent song.

At that point she opened the channels to her hands, raising her arms out in front of her and holding her hands out with the open palms facing the ring of standing stones.

The power surged along her arms and leapt for the ring of the Gate with an eagerness that was almost an emotion. She sang the words of the Gate-spell now, sang it in a barely audible whisper. Her eyes were half open, but she really wasn’t paying a great deal of attention to anything but the flow of power from her to the Gate.

The ring of stones began to glow, glowing as if they were stealing the last of the sun’s fire and allowing it to run upon their surfaces. The color of the fire began to lighten, turning from deep red to scarlet to a fiery orange. Then the auras surrounding each Gate-stone extended; reaching for, then touching, the auras beside it, until the circle became one pulsating ring of golden-orange light.

Martis felt the proper moment approaching, and signed to Lyran to hand her back her reins. She waited, weighing, judging—then suddenly spurred her mount into one of the gaps between the stones, with Lyran’s gelding practically on top of her horse’s tail.

They emerged into a forest clearing beneath a moon already high, exactly five leagues from the next Gate.

“Gods, I wish I had Tosspot under me,” Martis muttered, facing the second Gate under a bright noontide sun. This one stood in the heart of the forest, and the stones were dwarfed by the stand of enormous pine trees that towered all about them. The sorceress was feeling depleted, and she had not been able to recuperate the energy she’d spent on the last spell.

“We could wait,” Lyran suggested. “We could rest here, and continue on in the morning.”

Martis shook her head with regret. “I only wish we could. But it isn’t healthy to camp near a Gate—look at the way the magic’s twisted those bushes over there, the ones growing up against the stones! And besides, we need to come as close to surprising our hosts as we can.”

She coughed; there was a tickle in the back of her throat that threatened to turn into a cold. Lyran noted that cough, too, and tightened his mouth in unvoiced disapproval, but made no further objections. Martis handed him her reins, and began the second spell— But they emerged, not into a sunlit clearing as she’d expected, but into the teeth of the worst storm she’d ever seen.

Rain, cold as the rains of winter, lashed at them, soaking them to the skin in moments. It would have been too dark to see, except that lightning struck so often that the road was clearly lit most of the time. Lyran spurred his horse up beside the sorceress as she gasped for breath beneath the onslaught of the icy water. He’d pulled his cloak loose from the lashings that held it to his saddle and was throwing it over her shoulders before she even had recovered the wit to think about the fact that she needed it. The cloak was sodden in seconds, but it was wool—warm enough, even though wet. She stopped shivering a little, but the shock of chill coming on top of the strain of the spells had unbalanced her a little. She fumbled after her reins, but her mind wouldn’t quite work; she couldn’t seem to think where they should be going.

Lyran put his hand under her chin, and turned her face toward his. She blinked at him, at his searching expression as revealed by the flickers of lightning. Some rational little bit of her that hadn’t been stunned hoped idly