“She’s better,” Trevin grinned. “But we may not be.”
“What is it?”
“Those eyes of yours seem to see better in the night than mine, but I swear I can see a small fire a few miles behind us.” Trevin gave Vanx a look of deep concern, and then his eyes fell on Gallarael. “Matty said her fever broke a short while ago.”
“Appears so.” Vanx grabbed the bow and quiver from Trevin. He took a moment to clench his eyes shut and shivered off the ill feelings the dream had left him with. He looked up, and through the trees he saw the moon was already long past its zenith. “Why didn’t you wake me sooner?”
“The fire only appeared a short while ago, or maybe I only noticed it then. It’s a good ways off and I thought you needed the rest.”
Vanx nodded his thanks. “Let me go piss, and then we can go get a better look at what’s riled you.”
While Vanx relieved himself, the eerie memory of Gallarael’s dream voice crept back into his skull. Had she reached to him across the empty space? While many Zythians were clairvoyant to a small degree, very few, if any, humans could manage to project their thoughts without the aid of magic. He remembered eating some bread covered with spoiled butter once. The fever dreams had plagued him for two days and nights. His stomach roiled and he vomited profusely after eating it. Gallarael’s dream image was burning up. Did it represent her feeling her own fever breaking? She’d called him a Zythian too. Did she know? Did her mother suspect?
Lacing his britches up, he sensed more than heard movement in the darkness. His eyes sought the sensation, and then found for the briefest of moments a sight that stopped his heart cold. A wolf, poised to bound away — but it was no ordinary wolf. This wolf was saddled like a horse and one of the dark-skinned Kobalts sat in the rig glaring at him. Reflexively, he blinked and the image was gone. There wasn’t a wavering limb, or even a rustling leaf, to indicate if he had imagined the sight or not.
Trying not to alarm Trevin and the others, he eased toward the lookout tree. He stopped and grabbed a second quiver of arrows. Trevin was hunched over Gallarael and Matty was rousting Darbon for his turn. Vanx hurried his pace, and with no concern over his companions seeing his true Zythian grace in action, he literally ran up the tree trunk like a scrabbling squirrel. In less than a heartbeat he settled himself in the branches and started to scan the distance in search of the fire. What he saw, though, nearly caused him to tumble out of the tree.
Trevin’s fire was there, just where he estimated it to be, flickering like a tiny jewel in the night. What had Vanx grasping for reason was the three score other twinkles of firelight he could see. They were all around them, and just out of the range of human sight.
They were surrounded. Knowing this gave credence to his vision of the wolf-riding Kobalt. Vanx was certain that if they were aggressive, they would have attacked already. What wolf-riding Kobalts would do to a peaceful group of travelers was the question now. Be it good or bad, he had no doubt they would soon find the answer.
CHAPTER TEN
The king saw the wizard and the wizard did speak
“You might be a king, but your kingdom is weak.”
Wrong said the king, for I’ve a wizard too
now out of my castle with the sorry likes of you.
“She’s alive, my lady, but barely,” Orphas, the spiritual advisor to Duchess Gallarain, told her.
He was hunched over a melon-sized sphere that formed a flawless crystal, at a small, three-legged table in the middle of a dark, candlelit cellar. The room seemed like a cavern to Gallarain, and it smelled like hot steel. The amber glow of the crystal before Orphas shone upward onto his elderly face, giving him a sinister look. The sharp widow’s peak of his polished silver skull cap and his high-collared crimson robe lent to the eerie image. In truth, he was no spiritual advisor at all; he was a wizard, and so far, one of the most honorable men Gallarain Martin had ever met. She conveniently overlooked the fact that he dishonestly paraded around as her spiritual advisor and had been sent there by King Oakarm himself to spy on her husband. To her, those particulars made him seem even more wise and mysterious, like some scholarly well-traveled uncle figure. Why he had revealed his true identity was a mystery to her, but she was sure that it had a great deal to do with the fact that Gallarael was King Oakarm’s illegitimate daughter.
“Barely alive?” Gallarain gasped. “What do you mean?”
“She’s not conscious, my lady, but alive.” Orphas looked at her with sympathetic eyes. “Apparently she is in good hands, for her spirit is calm and at peace.”
Orphas took a deep breath and sighed. With a flick of his hand a pair of lanterns hanging from wall hooks flared to life. The room was crowded with tables loaded with vials, racks, and beakers, some containing colorful liquids, some with stoppers wired tightly shut. There were sagging shelves full of books and unthinkable things floating in jars of liquid. Only the wall with the old iron-banded door set in one side of it was empty, but it was scorched black with a dizzying set of arcane symbols drawn into the soot by a fingertip. A crude, man-sized archway had been drawn there among the ruins.
To Duchess Gallarain, the blackness looked impossibly darker inside the archway, as if it led into the sky of a moonless, starless night.
“Tell me what you overheard,” Orphas commanded in a soft voice. “And try not to worry. Trevin is surely with her, keeping her safe. If he weren’t, her spirit would be uneasy at best.” His confident tone and steady gaze settled her enough that she could remember what he wanted to know.
She pulled up a stool, gave a look of distaste at the thick coating of dust on its surface, but sat down anyway. With a groan of frustration she started speaking in a quick, furious clip.
“He had the caravan attacked to kill Vanx Malic. The man who returned somehow survived the ordeal and is accusing some men he recognized. He said trolls came down on them all and only a few survived.” She paused, but only long enough to draw a breath. “Now he’s sending his commander to make sure that the tale of his murderous plot stays secret. I–I — I was behind that old tapestry, the one hiding the narrow passage that opens up on that little cubby in the linen pantry. He didn’t know I overheard.” She looked down at hands that were wringing of their own accord. “It was all I could do to keep from storming out of my hiding place to tell him that he had killed his own daughter.”
“But she’s not his daughter,” Orphas said quietly. The look on his face was curious and distant. It was as if he were seeing something in his mind, or with his vacant eyes, that no one else could see.
His appearance distracted Gallarain to a moment of confused silence.
“Is there any possible way the duke might have learned that Gallarael wasn’t of his loins?” Orphas finally asked, as his eyes refocused.
“None!” Gallarain answered defensively. “The night I spent with Ravier Oakarm was the night before I married Humbrick. Humbrick was too eager to consummate our union to even notice that he wasn’t my first.”
“But her eyes, my lady, and her features? The duke’s lineage favors dark hair and dark eyes on the women’s side. Gallarael has neither, nor is she thin and willowy.”
“There’s no doubt she favors the women of my ancestry, but there’s nothing about her that resembles the king, or his sisters. The worst part is that Humbrick has designs to marry her to Prince Russet. They are brother and sister, Orphas; it cannot happen.”
“No, it can’t,” Orphas nodded his agreement. “But they, the king’s mother and sisters, all know that she is the king’s daughter. They would never allow it to happen. I doubt they would ever put her in jeopardy by letting the cat out of the sack, so to speak.”
“Father Orphas, Humbrick didn’t know that I sent her on my errand, I’m sure of it.” She was wringing her hands again. “He may be a monster and a fool, but he loves Gal.” She frowned. “It’s the only good quality he
