her waist and drew her closer.
Her eyes closed in the dark, and her lips parted.
Descending from the battlements, Verminaard heard muffled laughter from the shadows below.
He stopped on the ladder, caution giving way to curiosity. After all, sounds such as these promised no ambush, no escaping hostage or prisoner. Quietly, holding his breath, he leaned forward on the ladder …
And saw the couple kissing, embracing, the girl's dark hair caught in a thin shaft of moonlight.
Dark hair, dark skin…
He imagined the lavender eyes, the tattoo, and he knew who it was that stood with her in the dark beneath the walls. For a moment, he reeled on the ladder, and the thoughts of murder that rose through the heart of his anger were murky and monstrous, as deep as the caverns that spawned them.
I shall not forget this, Aglaca, he thought. And he perched there, huddled in blackness like a roosting raven until the couple walked across the bailey back toward the lamplit keep.
Chapter 14
In the hands of the druidess, the seneschal recovered miraculously.
Robert had expected the mending to take weeks, perhaps months, given his age and the severity of the broken bone. But within two days, the bones had knitted, and in a week's time he was walking-warily, unsteadily, and with a hardwood cane, but walking nonetheless.
L'Indasha had carried and dragged him above the worst of the fire, to a small cave in the foothills due east of the Neraka Forest. The cave itself was pleasant enough, bright and neat and well settled. In its recesses, surrounded by a cage of drasil roots, a fresh underground spring bubbled and spouted, and the druidess's stores- barrels of dried fruit and waybread wrapped in moist, preservative vallen wood leaves-had escaped the burning when the ogres' fires razed the countryside. The stores served L'Indasha and her guest as their sole source of food while Robert was immobilized and the forest began to heal.
In that same week, as Robert grew stronger, L'Indasha had grown increasingly distressed. Robert had watched as the woman's bright auburn hair became muted and brown, as though she were enduring a kind of gloomy autumn of the heart. Her once-bright eyes grew dull and lifeless, and her skin seemed to tighten, to become almost transparent, until one afternoon, three days after the fire, the seneschal believed she would just dwindle away. He feared that the next morning would find him disabled and alone on the hilltop, his only companion and guardian fallen like a dried leaf.
That had been a week ago. There were signs of late that L'Indasha was now recovering, but from what ailment, what mishap, Robert could only guess.
At first he had thought it was the strange and lingering discomforts of an unknown intrusion, for when L'Indasha had brought him back to the cave, she discovered that someone else had been there. While she tended to Robert's leg, the druidess had fretted over the disarray that someone had wrought amid the kindling and stores, andoddly enough, the seneschal thought-seemed even more concerned about a wooden bucket that had been moved. Finally, and as the last insult, she had discovered that some prized piece of jewelry, a pendant with a purple stone, was missing.
It was a day or two before Robert gently inquired and found that her anger and sorrow had more to do with the fire in the forest and foothills than with burglary or trespass.
'It makes sense now,' he said to her. 'After all, don't you druids worship trees?'
'Of course not,' she said. 'We love them and tend them, but they are only our responsibility, not our gods. They and all the other life of the land. My gardens. The flowers. You see, when a tree dies, it takes a while-several days, even when the damage is severe and sudden. The agony is constant until the roots go. And what fell to the fire a week ago was the show of my life's work. How would you feel?'
Robert thought of South Moraine and of the departing horsemen. 'I see,' he murmured.
And he did.
On the eighth day, she examined his leg, her strong, gentle fingers coursing from ankle to knee, and her own hollow countenance showed a little color and life once more as she pronounced him mended.
'Mended, that is. Not healed,' she insisted. 'You'll do the healing yourself-with walk and exercise and a change in heart from fear to certainty.'
'Will you walk with me, Lady?' the seneschal asked with a grin. 'I mean… seeing as it's medicinal and all? Perhaps I could be of some use to you as well.'
So they began their walks as the seneschal's leg grew stronger and the spirit of the druidess was restored in the soft rains and new undergrowth of the repairing land.
But little was left of the grove-covered foothills to the east. The fire had climbed practically to the height of the mountains, and except for the steepest peaks-Berkanth, for example, and Minith Luc-the foliage was blasted to the timberline, and the big trees would take years to recover or return.
Perhaps he had never understood the druids before now, Robert thought, glancing often at the woman who walked beside him, turning away as her intent brown eyes locked with his. All the talk he had heard in Nidus- of tree worship, of entombing enemies in hollow logs, of stealing babies-seemed like rumor and foolishness now. For what he saw in this woman was none of the mystical, green treachery against which a generation of mages had warned him. She was instead a keeper of life, a seneschal of the land.
He thought again of Daeghrefn, of the riders vanishing into the smoke, of the words hurled coldly at him from horseback: I'm sorry, Robert! I cannot help you where you are going.
'Are you alone?' he continued to ask, and asked again one day as they stood on a bare obsidian rise overlooking the plains. There, scarce a fortnight before, he had been left for dead by his commander. 'Are you alone, L'Indasha Yman?'
Her hair-bright auburn again, as though the last days had been but a fitful, nightmarish dream-was bound with dried holly. She looked up at him, her dark eyes hooded and elusive. She thought of the promise the god had made her twenty years before. 'Not for long,' she murmured. 'Or so says Paladine.'
Robert nodded. He leaned against his cane and climbed a step along the rising trail.
'And when does your… visitor arrive?'
'I had been told,' the druidess replied, 'to expect her any day.'
'Her?'
'Yes. I believe my visitor is a woman, sent to help me with a wearisome task,' L'Indasha said mysteriously. Then, turning toward Robert, she regarded him with a level, disarming directness.
'Do you remember the young woman who passed through the smoke that afternoon on the South Moraine, when you lay on the field of battle? She is the one. At least, I think she is. But I found her only to lose her, it seems.'
'I remember little of her, m'Lady,' the seneschal replied with an ironic smile. He bent and rubbed his leg. 'I must allow that my thoughts were elsewhere at the time-on fire and ogres and what in the devouring name of Hiddukel was happening in that purple smoke. But I am certain of the young men who rode with her. If they were homeward bound, they're no doubt in Castle Nidus.'
'I believe I am healed now,' Robert said the next morning.
The druidess glanced up alertly from a caldron.
'Healed, not merely mended,' the seneschal continued with a smile. 'I expect I've imposed on your hospitality too long.'
'Where will you go?' L'Indasha asked.
'I'm not sure. Not back to Nidus.' He rose carefully and walked without aid to the mouth of the cavern. Below, at the edge of the forest, there was more green than blackness and ruin, and to the south, the faint song of a larkenvale. L'Indasha's work had not been in vain, he noted, and more than ever he longed to stay with her, to see through the greening of a thousand things.
'You offered to be of service not long ago,' L'Indasha said, seeming to read his thoughts. 'And there's a journey I must make-not an easy one, but you say you're healed now.'
Robert leaned against the stone and smiled. 'Nidus?'
