Arch Wizard

'Am I hearing you promise your obedient loyalty?' his father asked gloatingly, from very close by.

Through welling tears Pelmard stared at his own left hand, splayed on the flagstones in front of his nose. It was bone-white, which surprised him not in the slightest.

'Y-yes,' he managed to sob. 'I'll lead your mad-foolish attack on Irontarl. And die heroically, along with loyal Lyrose knights you'll thereafter urgently need, but then no longer have. You're hurling us all to our deaths.'

No one replied to that bitter opinion, but the air crackled above Pelmard, and he felt the roiling, vaguely sickening flows of restless magic. His father's wards were all active, no doubt to prevent a desperate heir erupting in knifings-or a tripping followed by frantic flight.

Pelmard shook his head, sweat spattering the smooth stone floor nigh his nose. He could barely stand; violence and sprinting out of his family's clutches were… far beyond possible.

Somehow he found his feet, the floor yawing alarmingly in front of him as he clutched at nothing… then bent low to keep from crashing face-first back to the floor.

'Come,' his father said, the sharp note of impatience barely overriding an overall smugness. 'If it's falling you crave just now, many steps await yonder to afford you more spectacular descents. I'll take you to join the knights I've chosen. You are to prepare this foray, so you can move in at dawn and take Irontarl before the sun's truly up-to say nothing of yawn-a-bed knights of Hammerhold. Show me a true Lyrose, son, and I might just manage to forget most of the words I've heard out of your mouth here this day. Might, I said.'

Shaking, Pelmard mumbled out a few words more foul than anything he'd ever said before.

'I'm the stranger here,' Rod said politely, as they came to another fork in a narrow forest trail, and took the smaller and more tangled way on, 'but surely the Lyrose lands lie back behind us? Down the valley from Hammerhold, across the river?'

'They do,' Syregorn said curtly. 'Yet it is not Lord Hammerhand's will that all of us be slaughtered when the echoes of our boots on Hammerhold's cobbles have barely died away. We're making a wide loop through the forest, along older, nigh-forgotten back trails, to come at Lyraunt Castle from a less-than-expected direction.'

Rod's stomach rumbled loudly. Again.

'Nor has it escaped my attention,' the bald, scarred warcaptain snapped, 'that you are more than a little hungry, Lord Archwizard. Hungry men have little patience, and do foolish things. This way will take us along the flank of a hill to a clearing-where we will eat, and wait for night to come. Now, silence. Idle talk carries far, and warns many.'

Without another word the small band of leather-clad knights set off again along the trail, flitting like shadows through the tree-gloom. The way was barely more than a line through the thick thornbushes, and the lead knight stalked along it slowly, peering carefully and stopping from time to time. It dawned on Rod, with a little shiver, that the man was seeking snares and trip-lines and hidden pitfalls.

None were found, as the trail rose along the hillside, then forked again. Without hesitation the lead man turned left again, upslope. The slope became steeper, then rock-strewn, and then came out into a place where rising rocks burst out of the trees at last, and bright sunlight dazzled.

Syregorn tapped Rod's chest and pointed where he should go, across a drift of loose, tumbled stones that were sprouting tiny vines and creeping flowers. Rod followed one of the knights, and found himself in a little hollow amid the soaring rocks.

Shaded by a great toothlike slab that soared overhead, it was about the size of Rod's kitchen-minus the cupboards, fridge, and stove. Two leaping strides could have taken Rod from one end clear to the other, and halfway up the waiting stone wall there. Amid the lowest rocks underfoot, a spring gurgled faintly, rising up to run away again to unseen depths.

'Can we talk now?' he muttered, as Syregorn and his six knights settled into the rocky bowl around him, all facing each other.

'Yes. You have questions,' the warcaptain said flatly, accepting a helm from one knight and various small cloth-wrapped bundles from others. Upending the helm to make it a bowl, he set to work mixing together various powders and green leaves from the bundles in it. 'I'll give few answers, so ask sparingly.'

'I-well, forgive my asking, but if darkness is cloak enough for a foray like this, why isn't every night full of knights creeping about Ironthorn, daggers drawn, and every morning after having its harvest of corpses?'

'Once, they were,' Syregorn told the bowl, 'and many Ironthar died. Then came the wizards and their nightmists, and cold iron seared and poisoned at a touch, wherever light or wardings did not reach.'

He looked up with a glance both cold and sharp. 'How is it that the Lord Archwizard knows not such things?'

'Nightmists,' Rod replied in a voice that was as grim as he could make it, as he invented magical 'facts' off the top of his head, 'are not my way. They poison the land. What price a feast, if you've tainted all the food to get it?'

Several of the knights nodded acceptance of that, and Syregorn's voice was the barest shade warmer when he said, 'You use words as swords.' It cooled again when he added, 'Like the Lord Leaf.'

Someone passed him a belt-flask, and the warcaptain poured its contents into the mixture in the bowl, stirred it with the blade of his dagger, then looked to the only one of the knights who looked older than him.

That Hammerhold veteran unwrapped three gigantic, many-veined leaves from around two long, thin loaves of dark bread that he'd already sliced-into thick, generous slabs-and wordlessly held them out. Syregorn started slapping the contents of the bowl pinned between his knees onto the bread, and passing the slices around, Rod's first.

Rod wasn't unobservant enough not to notice the thick sprinkling of dark powder on Syregorn's knife before it spread his slice-powder that wasn't on the knife when it spread any of the later slices.

Yet he also wasn't unobservant enough not to feel the wary gazes of all the knights fixed on him, and the drawn daggers ready in their hands or across their laps. Keeping his shrug an inward, private thing, he bit into the slice without any hesitation.

Whatever was in the mixture-lots of herbs and fragments of crushed leafy greens, plus a wet paste that might have been crayfish mixed with quail, but was almost certainly something else-tasted very good. By the way the knights ate, and their faces, they thought so, too.

In what seemed no time at all, Rod's slice of the dark, nutty bread was gone, and the curt warcaptain was wordlessly handing him another. He ate that one just as eagerly, even as the first threads of warmth and strangeness started to stir in him.

Well, whatever that powder was, here it came. He didn't think they'd go to all this trouble just to poison him, when a dagger in the back could have delivered the same fate many, many trudging strides ago.

No, this was something else. Drugging, intended to… what? Rod wasn't feeling sleepy. On the contrary, every inch of him was starting to tingle, his fingers curling and twitching by themselves, and a fire was rising in him.

He felt more awake than he'd done in years. It was like the shock of plunging into icy waters-without the shock, or the cold. Rod felt hot all over. Not burning, hot. He reached for his brow, to wipe away the sweat he knew would be there… but his trembling fingers came away dry.

Then it really hit him.

Whooooo! His heart was racing, adrenalin surged through him like a flood of mint-laced water, his mind started throwing up visions, memories racing past so wildly and swiftly that he had to fight to keep a grasp on here and now…

Rod gasped aloud, staring all around at knights. They sat still, daggers in hands, staring expressionlessly back at him. Except for the old one, who gave Syregorn a glance that asked as clearly as if he'd shouted it: 'Mixed it wrongly, aye?'

The only response the warcaptain gave was to look at Rod and ask, as gently as any concerned chambermaid, 'Lord Archwizard?'

'I-yes, ah, that's me, yes indeed, Rod Everlar, creator of Falconfar, every castle and Aumrarr and glowing sunset of it, well, except for the Holdoncorp stuff, and that's-and the-uh, the Dark Helms, uh-ah-'

He was babbling, and couldn't stop! Syregorn's powder-or, no, it would have come from the Lord Leaf, that