Sturm lunged at his opponent, this time with a forceful thrust, but the caped man parried it easily, almost thoughtlessly. Sturm stumbled forward, caught off balance by the sheer recklessness of his own attack. He fell to one knee and skidded over the wet ground, scrambling to his feet at the sound of the caped man's laughter.
Spinning about in rage, Sturm raised his sword above his head and brought it whistling down in a sudden, blindingly quick movement. It was all the caped man could do to raise his sword. Blade crashed against blade, and the rainy hillside echoed with the sound.
Both men staggered back, each surprised at the force of the blow. Quietly they regarded one another through the dwindling rain, on a hillside furrowed and torn by their awkward battle.
The caped man rubbed his shoulder and transferred his sword to his left hand. Slowly, confidently, he pointed the blade at Sturm, who looked down at his own blade, shattered and useless in his hand.
In desperation, Sturm drew his knife, stepped back, and stared into the glittering eyes of his enemy, who closed with him confidently, preparing for the final blow.
Chapter 11
The caped man was on him at once, all quickness and slippery dark strength. Sturm felt a hand snake to his wrist and then, with a quick and violent shake, send his knife flying into the tall grass. He struggled desperately, but the man was too strong for him, pinning his shoulders and pushing him onto his back.
Dazed, Sturm felt the sword's blade at his throat.
'Be still!' the caped man shouted. Suddenly he looked around him, alertly and uneasily, as if his words had echoed across the plains, across the continent itself. He sprang to his feet and sheathed the sword, brushing back his hood in the same crisp, athletic movement.
'You…' Sturm began, but the surprise stole his words.
'Jack Derry it is, sir!' the young man whispered with a fleeting smile. 'You remember me from the Tower? The gardener? With the barrow in the courtyard?'
'Y-Yes,' Sturm replied, as the name and the face came together in his memory. Here in the dividing moonlight, Jack Derry looked unnaturally youthful, his face smooth and beardless like that of a small boy. On closer look, though, the soft brown eyes were weatherworn with hard travel, the black hair matted and tangled, and his leather breastplate was tattered and cracked, its ornamental green roses faded but still recognizable.
It was Jack Derry, all right. But something about him was different-different beyond weather and attire.
'But how… how did you… and why?' Sturm sputtered, struggling for words.
'Questions go better in a dry spot, somewhere out of the rain,' Jack replied softly. 'When you show me that spot, you can ask and I can answer.'
Sturm's eyes narrowed. The water coursed off his muddy face. 'How do I know that this isn't a trap?' he asked.
'By the Seven!' Jack Derry swore, reaching out and grabbing Sturm's arm, 'What need had I for traps a moment ago, when my blade's edge rested on your throat?'
It was a convincing argument. Convincing, that is, unless this Jack planned a greater crime, needing only a guide to the elf maiden, who suddenly seemed smaller, more vulnerable than Sturm had thought her before.
'No,' Jack said quietly, his face close to Sturm's now, so that the lad saw only the gardener's sharp, black eyes and smelled only the deep odors of root and moist earth. 'I mean
Panic-stricken, Cyren had wrapped himself up in webbing. He dangled helplessly from a single thick filament in the back of the cave, a struggling cocoon of gray silk.
Mara was at work on disentangling Cyren, her knife sawing at the webbing as Sturm and Jack entered the cave, behind them Jack's squat little mare, whom they had collected on their way to the shelter.
'I need your help,' Mara urged, looking over her shoulder.
Sturm set down his broken sword and started to her side, but Jack passed him by, crouched beside Mara, and freed the spider with an effortless turn of his sword. Cyren scrambled to the topmost strands of the web, where he clung and shivered.
'It is the spider in him that… that frightens him so,' Mara explained unconvincingly.
Mara looked at him, then at Jack, and shrugged. 'I said there was something out there besides wind and rain,' she said impatiently. 'I do not recall telling you to attack it.'
'But…' Sturm began and, looking from elf to spider to gardener and back again, seated himself abruptly on the floor of the cave.
'Never mind what might have been, Master Sturm,' Jack said, crouching by the fire and extending his muddy hands to its warmth. 'There are other questions you have, and rightful they are, and I shall do my utmost to answer them now.'
Jack had followed Sturm's pursuer, it seems, and in following had uncovered a conspiracy of sorts.
That was the only way Sturm could explain the strange report from the High Clerist's Tower. Jack, it seems, had trundled his wheelbarrow after the Knight and his squire, Derek, and what the gardener heard was a litany of traps and entanglements for Sturm, stretching from the Wings of Habbakuk to the borders of the Darkwoods themselves.
'Snares of all sorts Lord Boniface had planned,' Jack said, his gaze alert and unnervingly intent. 'From ambush to pitfall to something about the ford I couldn't hear for the distance.'
'Perhaps there was more you did not hear, Jack,' Sturm suggested. It seemed impossible: Lord Boniface, his father's friend, conspiring with Derek to bring him down on the road to the Southern Darkwoods. Why would he sink to such treachery?
And if it were treachery he fashioned, why bother with a lad not yet even a squire?
Sturm leaned forward toward the fire. It was all too suspicious. There was something about this messenger that hinted at more than greens and servitude, though what it was he could not quite locate. And Jack was hardly the simpleton he played in the Tower.
There was trickery somewhere in the midst of this, he feared. And yet…
'Distant it might have been, sir,' Jack continued, not at all disturbed at Sturm's disbelief. 'So distant a fox might not have heard it-that I'll give you.'
He looked at Sturm, and his black eyes narrowed. For a moment, there in the firelight as rainy afternoon passed into rainy evening, the gardener looked like a rough carving wrought from oak or alder by some ancient forest people.
'I'll give you distance,' Jack Derry murmured ominously. 'But what do you make of your stay in the castle? And poor Luin's shoe-who loosened the nails, I ask you?
'And last, who was it that gave you the marred sword? For it shows plainly here where the break was begun before our fight…' He pointed to a tiny, perfectly straight notch running all around the broken blade's snapped edge.
'Coincidences, all of them,' Sturm replied, the edge of a question in his voice.
' 'Coincidence' is Old Solamnic for 'I don't know,' ' Jack said to Mara with a wink. 'Now, now, Master Sturm,' he added hastily. 'There's no need for challenge and fisticuffs, for you can believe me or believe me not; it's no concern of my own.'
'And yet you have followed us for days now,' Sturm said, staring angrily across the fire at this unexpected visitor.
'Followed you? I think not!' Jack replied merrily. 'I'm bound for your part of the world, I'll grant, to visit my mother. But our paths divide there, if you're asking me. Or even now, if you'd rather.'
'You mean to tell me you didn't come all this way to warn me?' Sturm asked. 'That our meeting here on the
