Galen Beknighted

Menacingly she extended her arms.

'This way,' she said, her voice almost musical, 'we can be together forever!'

Her mouth opened, and yellow troll-like fangs protruded, dripping water and lacquer and blood. I backed down the corridor, with Marigold floating after me, as close as fog, a hint of cheap cologne borne somehow on the stagnant air. Then the Weasel of my beginnings resurged in my here and now, and I panicked and turned to run…

And collided with Alfric.

It is lucky I have a sound heart. Not good or compassionate, I fear, though in my last several years, I have tried to render it so. Nonetheless, it is sound and able to bear a shock or two. Shock one: Marigold. Shock two: my dear, dead brother.

There, sandwiched between the departed brother and the evidently departed other, I was speechless, unarmed, and tracked down, as Firebrand had prophesied, by the ghost of my ruinous past.

'Well,' I said, my fears giving way to despair, to a bleak bravado of sorts, 'I expect there is nothing in the world that you can ever live down. Once you do it, it more or less runs at you till it has you at bay, then guts you and skins you and hangs you on a wall…'

But neither of them was interested in my gibbering philosophy. Impassively Alfric stared over me and met Marigold's gaze.

'Why bother with him,' he asked her unexpectedly, 'when you could have me?'

Marigold's face softened. The burning whirl of her eyes slowed and faded, the fangs receded-all but one, anyway, which she pulled her lips over daintily. For a moment, she looked as she always looked in life: burly and selfish and a bit overdone, but strangely compelling in a tarty sort of way.

She snorted and vanished into nothingness, and I turned to my spectral brother with something approaching gratitude. For Alfric had called her off, it seemed-had saved me from an eternity of badgering and ethereal pastry.

'Thank you, Brother,' I began in all sincerity.

'We will see if you're inclined to thank me, Galen,' he said, 'after you have reckoned with me. For you and me have got scores to settle.'

I stepped back one stride, then another. My heel touched stone behind me.

'We have odds to even, Galen.' My ghostly brother came closer. 'And the reckoning begins now.'

With the flat of his broadsword blade, Alfric struck my head. Then again and harder he struck, as my vision burst into a hundred glittering flames and I reeled up the corridor.

'You done this to me, too, Weasel!' he shouted, the shrill rise of his voice blending with the rumbling around me and above me.

The dale worm was stirring. Old Tellus, foster son of Chaos and Night, was lifting his lidless eye.

Alfric raised the sword again and stepped forward.

All my weaseling could not avail in this cramped, narrow passage. I was cornered, brought to bay as I had been so many times in the nooks of the moathouse and beneath the beds of unswept guest chambers. But here there was no place to hide or dodge.

There was not enough room to grovel.

So I stood to my full height, and my older brother seemed to shrink a little before me. Perhaps death had diminished his stature-I cannot be sure. For instead of the Weasel who cowered before a formidable larger brother, I was every bit as big as the oaf in front of me.

The punch surprised me, even though I threw it. My right fist hurtled through the dark air of the corridor and caught my brother squarely on the left side of his prominent nose. He reeled, shook his head, almost regained his footing…

And then my left fist came calling, surging out of the shadows below him as it hooked up into the underside of Alfric's chin.

'Whaaa-' he began, but he was falling backward, his arms spread out like the useless wings of a vespertile. Into the wall he tumbled, growing suddenly transparent, almost liquid, as he passed into mud and rock, his sword clattering to the corridor floor behind him.

He looked back at me as he faded, once and for all, into the stone of the tunnel. He smiled-not the wicked grin that had harried me over the past two decades of brotherly abuse, but a smile considerably warmer, perhaps even apologetic, carrying with it the faintest hint of respect.

The most generous moment of his life, it seemed, had come when that life was over.

'I'm sorry, Alfric,' I breathed. 'But I will avenge you.'

I hadn't the time for good-byes. Around me, the corridor was collapsing, filling with palpable dust and fist- sized boulders, while before me somewhere was daylight and air and Firebrand with the opals.

The options were clear. I picked up the sword and began to run with new strength toward the last wavering lights in the burrowing distance.

Chapter XXIII

A seventh, an eighth, and a ninth stone followed into the twining silver, until the twelfth was in place. With confident fingers, the Namer tested each setting, shifting the stone once, twice, until it held fast.

'Now they are all together,' he announced. 'Each fixed in a holy permanence, bound to each other always in memory.'

As she slept in the saddle, Dannelle di Caela dreamed she was riding with Sir Galen.

The two of them, astride the enormous Carnifex, galloped into a clearing of towering pine and aeterna; the light was blue and white about them.

She was proud to ride with him, behind him on the back of this formidable horse they had broken together. Carnifex snorted and steamed, but he was bested and knew it, his wild strength bridled in obedience to the combined will of man and woman.

In the dream, the horse reared up, its forelegs pawing the misted air. Galen twisted in the saddle and reached for Dannelle…

But she was falling… falling…

As she jerked awake, riding with Birgis atop the racing Carnifex, it seemed to Dannelle that the trees she passed were blurring, transforming themselves into huge swaths of blue and green. It seemed that the landscape around her was dissolving, that only she and the dog-who sniffed and rumbled amiably at her shoulder-remained from the world she remembered.

She was relieved to see the Cat Tower pierce the horizon. As the walls of the castle and the fluttering pennants atop it became clear in front of her, she lowered her head and pressed the strong flanks of the horse with her knees. Birgis stirred a bit in the harness on her back.

'Sit back, damn it!' she started to exclaim, but the wind rushed into her face, choking her and drowning the words. Her thoughts moved quickly over the ground ahead of her, outrunning Carnifex and the wind and even the reddening sunlight breaking across the pennantry.

Now the walls loomed before her, the crenellation and windows sharply defined. Now she made out the arms of di Caela, of Brightblade and Pathwarden and Rus on the fluttering pennants.

Good, she thought. They all are here. And fifty miles of riding has come down to the next half hour.

For Dannelle di Caela intended an arrival that was showy and brilliant, nothing short of completely spectacular.

Riding Carnifex over the drawbridge she came, full speed across the courtyards, amid a flurry of hoofbeat and color and the shouting of heralds, straight to Sir Robert di Caela, who in her dreams of this moment stood agape before the double oaken doors of the Great Tower, scarcely believing his eyes.

For this red-haired slip of a girl he so often disparaged had not only arrived in time to save her companions beneath the Vingaards, but also arrived on the back of Carnifex, the horse Sir Robert had claimed she