sent a detail of four men to carry them back to the castle.
It was moments later that a captain came and reported, “We’ve searched the city. There are no signs of the prisoners that were taken here last night, or of the Knights Eternal. But there are fresh wagon marks on the road north, and many feet have trod it.”
“So,” Madoc said, “they’ve gone north.”
The morning was half over. Most likely, the wyrmlings were far, far ahead.
“We must follow, then,” King Urstone said. “We must reach them before nightfall.”
THE TEMPLE OF DEATH
The fiercest battles we fight in life seldom leave visible scars.
Fallion came to, rising up out of dreams of ice and snow. Ice water seemed to be flowing through his veins instead of blood. His hands and feet were frozen solid. He tried to remember how he’d gotten here, when it had gotten so cold.
“Someone left the window open,” he said. That was it. Jaz liked to sleep with the bedroom window open, and often times in the fall, Fallion got too cool in the night. In his distorted dreams, he imagined that Jaz had left the window open all winter, and that was the cause of his current predicament.
He moaned in pain and peered about, but there was no light.
“Fallion,” Rhianna whispered urgently. “Draw heat from me.”
He wondered how she had gotten here. He tried to recall what the weather had been like when he went to sleep last night, but everything was a blank. All that he knew was bitter cold and pain.
“Draw heat from me, Fallion,” Rhianna whispered urgently.
Without thought, Fallion reached out and pulled a little warmth from her. She gasped in pain, and instantly Fallion regretted what he’d done. He lay there trembling from the cold, numb and filled with pain.
Rhianna pressed herself against him. She could feel him trembling all over. She’d never known anyone to shake so badly. Even as a child, when the strengi-saats had taken her into the forest, wet and nearly naked, she had not suffered so.
Now, Rhianna began to shiver too, and she felt as if she were sinking endlessly into deep, icy water.
She dared not tell Fallion that she was afraid he was killing her. My life is his, she told herself. It always has been, and it always will be.
But something in her ached. She didn’t want to die without really ever having lived. Her childhood had been spent with her mother, running and hiding endlessly from Asgaroth. Then for years, her mind and body were taken captive by Shadoath. For a couple of years she had finally been free, but every minute of her freedom had been a torment, for she had fallen in love with Fallion so deeply that her life was no longer her own.
I don’t want to die without ever having learned to live, she told herself, and lay there with teeth chattering, struggling to give Fallion her warmth.
Slowly, Fallion became aware of his predicament. His legs and arms were bound tightly, cutting off the circulation. It seemed to make the cold keener. He remembered the squeak of wagon wheels, the jostling. The muggy air in the stone box.
But now they were somewhere outside the box. He could feel an open space above, and suddenly heard a wyrmling’s barking growl in another room.
We’re in a building, he realized. Distantly, he heard the chatter of a squirrel, and if he listened hard, he could hear nesting birds up above, cheeping to their mother.
We’re in the woods, he realized. It’s daylight outside.
The night came flooding back to him-the battle at Cantular, his ruthless attackers, the news that Talon was dead. Despair washed through him.
I must get free, he thought. If I don’t do it, no one can. He tried to clear his mind of numbness, of fatigue, of pain.
He reached out with his mind, felt for sources of heat. He touched lightly on Rhianna, Jaz, and Talon. She was still warm, too warm.
Talon’s alive! he realized, tears filling his eyes. But the spell that the Knight Eternal had cast had drained her, leaving her torpid, near death.
“Talon’s alive,” Fallion whispered for the benefit of Jaz and Rhianna, “barely.” Rhianna began to sob in gratitude.
Fallion reached out, quested farther, and found the wyrmlings in another room, off to his right. There were several of them. Their huge bodies were warm.
He wouldn’t need to drain much from them. He touched them, let their warmth flood him.
There was a shout in the other room. “Eckra, Eckra!”
Heavy feet rushed through the door, and Fallion heard the rustle of robes. He knew what was coming. The Knight Eternal would drain him of all heat.
Unless I drain him first, Fallion thought.
In a desperate surge, Fallion reached up to drain the life’s warmth from the Knight Eternal. To do so would require more control than he had ever mastered.
But as he did, he discovered too late that the creature looming above him had no life’s heat. It was as cold as the stone floor beneath them.
“Eckra,” it cursed, and suddenly the cold washed over Fallion again, and he was lost in a vision of winter, where icy winds blew snow over a frozen lake, and somehow Fallion was trapped beneath the ice, peering up from the cold water, longing for air, longing for light, longing for warmth.
High King Urstone sprinted through the early morning, a thousand warriors at his back, as they raced along.
With the great change, dirt and grasses had sprung up over the old road in a single night. It didn’t erase the road so much as leave a light layer of soil over it with clumps of stubble growing here and there. The wyrmling trail was easy to follow.
There was only one set of wagon tracks in the dust, along with the tracks of a dozen wyrmling warriors.
They stopped at a brook that burbled over the road, and several men bellied down to drink. It was the heat of the day, and sweat rolled off them. A few cottonwood trees shaded the brook, making it a welcome spot, and King Urstone shouted out, “Ten minutes. Take ten minutes here to rest.”
He saw a fish leap at a gnat in the shadows, and watched for a moment. There was a pair of fat trout lying in the water.
Warlord Madoc came up at his back, and asked, “Will we catch them today, do you think?” At first the king thought that the warlord was talking about the fish. King Urstone shook his head, trying to rid it of cobwebs and weariness.
“Aye, we’ll catch them,” the king assured him. “We got a late start, but it should be enough. The wyrmlings are forced by their nature to travel at night. But the days are far longer than the nights, this time of year. We should be on them well before dark.”
Madoc nodded and seemed to find no fault with the logic. That was odd. It seemed to the king that Madoc always sought to find fault with his logic nowadays.
“It will be a rough fight,” Madoc said, “with two Knights Eternal in the battle.”
“We have weapons to fight them with,” the king said.
Madoc bore one of those weapons, a dainty sword that was nearly useless in his immense hand. He pulled it from its sheath, showed it to the High King. A patina of rust had formed on the fine steel blade. “Sisel said that these had been blessed, but I say they’re cursed. This rust has been spreading like a fungus since dawn.”
The High King smiled, not in joy, but in admiration for the enemies’ resourcefulness. “I would say that they
