In the end, there was not that much that I had to do. Bathe. Choose a travelling outfit. Move the rest of my clothes from my wardrobe to my wizard’s chest. Dispose of food that would spoil in my absence. Terminate a handful of experiments. My life in So’renner was simple. Leaving it was only a little more complicated.
There was a brass box that I would leave in the care of Alric del Mathews, the Grand Master Smith of Renner and the one person who had recognized me in the years that I had lived here. The box contained instructions for the disposal of my worldly goods. It would open in the event of my untimely demise.
There was a letter to be written to Sara, explaining in detail some things that I had attempted to explain this morning. She deserved better, but it was the best that I could do given way the day had unfolded. I hoped that I would be able to return some day and say it all properly.
I tried to deliver the letter on my way to deliver the box to Alric.
“I’m sorry, sir,” her doorman said. He seemed sincere. Fredrick had always liked me. “She’s left instructions that all callers are to be turned away, even you.”
Especially me, most likely. I was disappointed, but not at all surprised.
“Has she left any instructions about packages?” I asked, holding out the letter.
Fredrick gave me a sympathetic smile.
“I can’t promise she’ll read it,” he said. “But I can promise to deliver it.”
“That’s all I can ask,” I said, handing him the scrollcase.
I had hoped to say goodbye in person, but Sara had every right to be angry and every reason to believe that letting me in right now would only cause her trouble. Being a widow could be complicated in Georg.
When Alric’s wife Brin opened their door instead of their butler, I thought I was going to be turned away, here, as well. But she just sighed and waved me in.
“You’ve missed dinner,” she told me, “but so’s he, so if you can get him to come out of the shop I’ll see you both fed.”
It was a great deal more hospitality than I had expected. Alric had known everything. Brin – in theory – had not.
“So, you finally got caught,” he said, once I’d coaxed him out of his workshop and back into his house proper.
“I did.”
“How’d Sara take it?”
“Better than I deserve.”
Alric laughed.
“She’ll come around.”
“Even after I ruined the wedding?”
“The gate-folk probably won’t ever forgive that,” Alric admitted. “But Sara’s a city girl, and they didn’t even approach the walls.”
I conceded that point.
“And leaving…” Alric went on. “Well, that might do you a favor. Keep you both from saying anything to be regretted.”
He was right about that, as well.
“How soon will you be leaving?”
“In the morning.
Alric nodded sagely.
“That’s probably for the best,” he said. “Word is certainly already on its way to the duke, and probably to the king, as well. You’ve probably a few days before their envoys can arrive, but you’re lucky the Lady Rolynna’s magistrate isn’t already on your doorstep.”
I grunted.
“I expect them at my door by noon, which is why I’m leaving before dawn. Is there any chance of you writing an appropriately apologetic letter in my name and seeing that she gets it?”
He laughed, and refused me flatly.
“As your known friend,” he said, “I’ll already be answering too many awkward questions. Perhaps you could write it yourself and leave it nailed to your door.”
In the end, there wasn’t much more to say. We reminisced about my early days in Renner. I told a few stories about my days in Vencar. Then I went home.
When morning came, I stuffed my wizard’s chest into my backpack, and buckled my sword around my hips. I sealed the doors to my house and smithy with iron chains and heavy locks and spilled blood and words of power. Then I walked away.
I met the prince and her fighters and her elven wizard at the Stallion. They offered me a silent breakfast, which I accepted. When I went to say goodbye to Eril, he was conspicuously absent. Thus we set out from So’renner, only a little more than an hour after dawn.
“What’s the plan?” I asked, once we’d hit the road.
“We return to the court-in-exile,” said the prince, glancing over her shoulder toward me. I should start thinking of her that way, now that I’d signed on to her rebellion. “Seeing that you have joined us will raise morale, and we can begin to plan in detail what we have only been able to discuss in the broadest theory.”
I nodded, but she had already turned away.
Crown Prince in Exile, Elana Traiana. Sir Rennin Ösh. Lord Sir Orland Borgon. Shan Khul Master Veralar Tann. Master Khanaarre of the Order of the Black Mask. And now myself, Master Derrek Rowan of the Obsidian Cabal.
The prince and her knights rode at the front, heads close together. Veralar rode behind, head on a swivel, guarding our rear and our flanks – the best of us for the task, though she sat her saddle unsteadily. This left me riding at Khanaarre’s right hand, and somewhat idle.
To the best of my knowledge, no other elf had made more than an academic study of human wizardry. I wondered how she had come to it. Elves had their own arts, after all: sorceries of song and dance, arts and artifice, taught to them or bred into them by their father god Esthraal and which required none of the arcane literature or bloody sacrifice that were the heart of wizardry.
That it was a wizard of the Black Mask that had trained her was no surprise. Elves loved masks and the Order of the Black Mask existed to push boundaries, often those best left untested. But still … who? And where? And when? How had she come to travel with the prince and her closest allies?
I would suss all that out soon enough. For the moment, I merely asked her, “Where will we cross the border?”
“The original plan had been to cross just south of here at Tamarin Tower Bridge,” she said. “But after yesterday’s raid, we’re concerned that they might be looking for us there. So we’re crossing into Namora, first. Elana and Rennin are trying to decide how far south they dare go.”
I nodded. It was a reasonable precaution. I would have gone north and come in by the Northgate Tower Ferry, or maybe hired a smuggler from Bray Lake to take us across. But I had not been asked, and I was not in the mood to provide unsolicited advice.
Khanaarre eyed me from her saddle, much as I was eying her. Her face was well composed, so I could not say whether she was more curious or distrustful, but her ears flicked whenever she looked away, so I knew she was thinking something.
We were only few miles out of sight of Renner when the road forked and Rennin directed us to ride south instead of east, away from the fortified bridge that would take us directly across the mighty River Venn into Vencar and toward the grassy Namoran lowlands. The prince let her horse fall back, wedging in between myself and Khanaarre. Veralar and Borgon traded places, the former general taking the rear and the Shan Khul Master taking point.
The prince flashed me a grin.
“I don’t suppose you carry the King’s Writ for that sword of yours?”
I laughed.
“No,” I admitted. “Not in a very long time. But I can return it to my wizard’s chest before we approach the border and it becomes a problem.”
I did just that when, a little after noon, we stopped to rest and graze the horses and to feed ourselves. The wizard’s chest was a simple thing, really, requiring much more care to construct than power, but it never failed to impress the uninitiated: a box that seemed bigger on the inside than the outside. The trick was that the box was never any bigger inside than the day it was made, it was just compressed for ease of carriage. Khanaarre was impressed as well – not by the chest, one hoped, but by the pack I’d had made to accommodate it so that I could deposit or retrieve something like my sword without fully unpacking my bag.
As I was stowing my sword, the prince and her knights were adorning theirs with complicated knots of seals and rope and ribbon – different from the false peace knots they had worn in So’renner – and retrieving the letters that proved their taxes were paid up to date. Veralar, whose Shan Khul vestments exempted her, did not bother. Nor did Khanaarre, who did not carry a sword.
Khanaarre did carry a short hunting bow, and surprised me by picking up a pair of rabbits and a small deer for the stewpot while we traveled. I was certain that there were still rations in the saddlebags my horse had carried before me, but I was also glad to see that we were not in such a hurry that we could not stop for fresh game.
When we came to the Namoran border, the crossing was guarded by little more than an armed tradepost. The sun was still above the horizon, but the guards insisted that it was too late for the crossing. Perhaps we would like to stay at the tradepost? Veralar rolled her eyes and led us back up the road a little to a camp site she had spotted as we’d passed. She and Khanaarre cooked our traveler’s feast while the prince and her knights sat close and whispered.
A little surprised to be so left to my own devices, I decided to simply enjoy the spring air. Renner was behind me, now. The court-in-exile was at least a week away. I didn’t know where it was, of course, but if it were within four or five days’ travel of the river border, it would have been found already. For now, unless the prince decided to include me in her councils, I was very much between.
When dinner was ready, Khanaarre brought me a plate and settled in beside me.
“Elana does not mean to ignore you,” she said. Her elven accent was very light, just a slight over-emphasis on the vowels, so that she sounded almost a native of Vencar City. It was likely that her Black Mask master had been from the city, but it was also possible she had picked up the accent from the court-in-exile. “Yesterday’s attack has made them very nervous. It’s not that they doubt your assessment, it’s just that the possibility that our enemy can hear his name spoken at a distance, and teleport soldiers to where he hears it spoken, is even more terrifying than that we might have been identified on the road, or that we have a traitor at court.”
I nodded. I had guessed as much.
“How long have you been travelling with the prince?” I asked.
“A little more than a year,” she said. “I met her two autumns ago, on the road to Tanirinaal when she made her last embassy to the Queen for aid.”
Implicitly, I took it, in the Elvenwood. That surprised me.
“I was,” she paused, then went on, “at loose ends, I believe is the phrase in your tongue. I was in search of purpose and Elana’s plight moved me. On the road to the Queen, and on the road back, we had a great deal of time to talk. We became friends.”
I nodded, taking a bite.
“I see,” I said. A romantic, then. Or utterly mercenary. But my guess was the former. Unwed, probably, but possibly widowed. Questing was a not unheard-of way for widowed elves to work through their grief. Guessing an elf’s age was always a challenge, but my suspicion was that she was young for that. If I had to guess, I would put her at sixty or seventy: old enough to wed but probably too young to be widowed. She probably hoped that her time with the prince would earn her enough to buy into a better marriage. I could live with that. Romantics always made better travelling companions than cynics. “And you’ve enjoyed your time among humans?”
Khanaarre gave me a shrewd look.
“Overall,” she said. “The court-in-exile is not without its conflicts. But the prince and her fighters are good company, and it has been very educational.”
It was a hedging answer. It was also a revealing one. Unless she was meticulously lying by omission, her wizard master must have lived among elves. An expatriot? An exile? The latter was more likely, given the proclivities of the Black Mask.
I smiled, knowing that my scar complicated the expression and hoping, as always, that my otherwise boyish face made it more charming. It worked well enough: she smiled back.
“How did you come to Renner?” she asked me.
A fair question.
“I travelled for a few years,” I told her, “after I left the court of he who is now our enemy. When I was ready to settle down, I wanted somewhere quiet but where I could keep my ear to the ground. Honestly, I walked the length of the River Venn from the elven border south. Too big. Too small. Too many Rats. If I hadn’t liked the look of So’renner, I would have crossed into Namora and kept walking until I reached the Great Crystal Lake.”
We both laughed a little. I almost wished that I had made the whole walk. It would have been the greatest journey I’d made since I’d left the priestesses who raised me and come down from the mountains into the lands of the Compact.
“Rats?” she asked me, after a moment.
“The Brotherhood of the Black Hand,” I elaborated. “The criminal underworld of Georg and Handar. People call them Rats because, well, that’s been a common idiom for criminals since the time of Illustria, and because it’s said that they can turn themselves into rats or rat-men in order to facilitate their most outrageous crimes.”
“Can they?”
“Yes,” I said. “I haven’t seen it for myself, but I do have it on very good authority.”
Kendel Twinblade, who had bought two swords from me, now, had talked about how he always got into trouble with the Rats when he came back to Georg to visit his sister. She was a full Initiate of the Brotherhood, and he’d had stories about that, as well.
“Fascinating,” she said. “I don’t suppose you’ve studied the uurnigath of the Draddiaal?”
“Yes, actually. I lived among them for a year. And, to answer the question you’re implying, I was never able to satisfy for myself one way or the other if they merely live with their dire wolves or if they can also take their shape.”
That failure had been a matter of great frustration. The uurnigath had been excellent hosts, and had shared a great deal with me about their life and culture, but they had also – as, to be fair, was their right – kept a great deal back. And the matter of their transformation or not had been a secret that they had gone to comedic lengths to conceal and confuse, with me and my questions as the butts of their jokes.
“On the journey of life there are no answers,” she quoted to me in her native tongue, “only paths to more questions.”
I resisted the impulse to roll my eyes and adjusted my estimate of her age back five or ten years. A talented young woman. Brilliant, probably smarter than almost anyone she knew. But not well travelled or experienced. How long ago had she left her master? What had she done for her journeyman’s quest?
Then she smiled at me again, a wicked grin peeking through the curtain of braids that fell in front of her face.
“Or so my Aunt Neriishai would tell us,” she said, “when she wanted to avoid a question or admitting failure.”
That startled a belly laugh from me, loud enough to startle the prince and her fighters on the far side of the fire. Veralar raised an eyebrow. Sir Rennin scowled. Elana and Orland looked as if they hoped we might share the joke with them.
“We have all had teachers like that, I think,” I said to her, shaking my head. “And as for the Rats and the wolfmen … the Rats of the Hand are not Children of Enhyl, like the uurnigath. The Rats are the result of wizardry gone astoundingly sideways. There was a wizard in Kemlin, a big city north of Renner, who caught a thief breaking into his tower. He cursed the thief and turned him into a rat. But the curse didn’t quite take. That first thief was a rat by night and a man by day. His son could turn into a rat and back at will. And his son, in turn, discovered that it could be passed by blood contact as well as from parent to child.”
“Fascinating,” Khanaarre said again. “And how did that long-ago wizard feel about his results?”
I laughed again, this time more darkly.
“He was run out of town on a rail.”
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