Author's Note

Copyright 1988 by Tad Williams.

All Rights Reserved.

Jacket art by Michael Whelan.

Maps by Tad Williams.

DAW Books are distributed by New American Library,

1633 Broadway, New York, NY 10019.

"I have undertaken a labor, a labor out of love for the

world and to comfort noble hearts: those that I hold dear,

and the world to which my heart goes out. Not the com-

mon world do I mean, of those who (as I have heard)

cannot bear grief and desire but to bathe in bliss. (May

God then let them dwell in bliss!) Their world and man-

ner of life my tale does not regard: its life and mine lie

apart. Another world do I hold in mind, which bears to-

gether in one heart its bitter sweetness and its dear grief,

its heart's delight and its pain of longing, dear life and

sorrowful death, dear death and sorrowful life. In this

world let me have my world, to be damned with it, or to be

saved."

GOTTFRIED VON STRASSBURG

(author of Tristan und Isolt)

All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead

is strictly coincidental.

This work would not have been possible without the help of many

people. My thanks go out to: Eva Cumming, Nancy Deming-Wil-

liams, Arthur Ross Evans, Peter Stampfel, and Michael Whelan,

who all read a dreadfully long manuscript, then offered support,

useful advice, and clever suggestions; to Andrew Harris, for logisti-

cal support above and beyond the call of friendship; and especially

to my editors, Betsy Wollheim and Sheila Gilbert, who worked long

and hard to help me write the best book I could. They are great

souls all.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

This book is dedicated to my mother, Barbara Jean Evans, who

taught to me a deep affection for Toad Hall, the Hundred Aker

Woods, the Shire, and many other hidden places and countries be-

yond the fields we know. She also induced in me a lifelong desire to

make my own discoveries, and to share them with others. I wish to

share this book with her.

Author's Warning

Wanderers in the land of Osten Ard are cautioned not to put blind

trust in old rules and forms, and to observe all rituals with a careful

eye, for they often mask being with seeming.

The Qanuc-folk of the snow-mantled Trollfells have a proverb.

"He who is certain he knows the ending of things when he is only

beginning them is either extremely wise or extremely foolish; no

matter which is true, he is certainly an unhappy man, for he has put

a knife in the heart of wonder."

More bluntly, new visitors to this land should take heed:

Avoid Assumptions.

The Qanuc have another saying: "Welcome stranger. The paths

are treacherous today."

Foreword

". . . The book of the mad priest Nisses is large, say those who

have held it, and as heavy as a small child. It was discovered at

Nisses' side as he lay, dead and smiling, beside the tower window from

which his master King Hjeldin had leaped to his own death moments

before.

"The rusty brown ink, concocted oflambsfoil, hellebore, and rue

as well as some redder, thicker liquidis dry, and flakes easily from

the thin pages. The unadorned skin of a hairless animal, the species

unprovable, forms the binding.

"Those holy men ofNabban who read it after Nisses' passing pro-

nounced it heretical and dangerous, but for some reason did not bum

it, as is usually done with such texts. Instead, it lay for many years in

Mother Church's near-endless archives, in the deepest, most secret

vaults of the Sancellan Aedonitis. It has now apparently disappeared

from the onyx casket which housed it; the never-gregarious Order of

the Archives is vague as to its present whereabouts.

"Some who have read Nisses' heretical work claim that it contains

all the secrets ofOsten Ard, from this land's murky past to the shad-

ows of things unborn. The Aedonite priest-examiners will say only that

its subject matter was 'unholy.'

"It may indeed be true that Nisses' writings predict the what-will-be

as clearlyand, we may presume, eccentricallyas they chronicle

the what-has-been. It is not known, however, whether the great deeds

of our ageespecially, for our concern, the rise and triumph ofPres-

ter Johnare included in the priest's foretellings, although there are

suggestions that this may be true. Much of Nisses' writing is mysteri-

ous, its meaning hidden in strange rhymes and obscure references. I

have never read the full work, and most of those who have are now

long dead.

"The book is titled, in the cold, harsh runes of Nisses' northern

birthplace, Du Svardenvyrd, which means The Weird of the

Swords ..."

from

The Life and Reign of King John Presbyter,

by Morgenes Ercestres

PART ONE

^

Simon Mooncaff

The Grasshopper

and the King

ON THIS day of days there was an unfamiliar stirring deep inside the

dozing heart of the Hayholt, in the castle's bewildering warren of

quiet passages and overgrown, ivy-choked courtyards, in the monk's

holes and damp, shadowed chambers. Courtiers and servants alike

goggled and whispered. Scullions exchanged significant glances

across the washing tubs in the steamy kitchen. Hushed conversa-

tions seemed to be taking place in every hallway'and dooryard of the

great keep-

It might have been the first day of spring, to judge from the air of

breathless anticipation, but the great calendar in Doctor Morgenes*

cluttered chamber showed differently: the month was only No-

vander. Autumn was holding the door, and Winter was trudging in.

What made this a day different from all others was not a season

but a placethe Hayholt's throne room. For three long years its

doors had been shut by the king's order, and heavy draperies had

cloaked the multicolored windows. Even the cleaning servants had

not been permitted to cross the threshold, causing the Mistress of

Chambermaids no end of personal anguish. Three summers and

three winters it had stood undisturbed. Today it was no longer

empty, and all the castle hummed with rumor.

In truth, there was one person in the busy Hayholt whose atten-

tion was not fixed on that long-untenanted room, one bee in the

murmuring hive whose solitary song was not in key with the greater

droning. That one sat in the heart of the Hedge Garden, in an alcove

between the dull red stone of the chapel and the leafless side of a

skeletal hedge-lion, and thought he was not missed. It had been an

irritating day so farthe women all busy, with scant time to answer

4Tad Williams

questions; breakfast late, and cold into the bargain. Confusing or-

ders had been given to him, as usual, and no one had any time to

waste with any of his problems. . . .

And that was also, he thought grumpily, quite predictable. If it

hadn't been for his discovery of this huge, magnificent beetle

which had come strolling across the garden, as self-satisfied as any

prosperous villagerthen the entire afternoon would have been a

waste of time.

With a twig he widened the tiny road he had scraped in the dark,

cold earth beside the wall, but still the captive would not walk for-

ward. He tickled gently at its glossy carapace, but the stubborn

beetle would not budge. Frowning, he sucked at his upper lip.

"Simon! Where in the name of holy Creation have you been!"

The twig dropped from his nerveless fingers, as though an arrow

had pierced his heart. Slowly, he turned to look at the looming

shape.

"Nowhere . . ." Simon began to say, but even as the words

passed his lips a pair of bony fingers caught his ear and brought him

sharply to his feet, yelping in pain.

"Don't you dare 'nowhere* me, young layabout," Rachel the

Dragon, Mistress of Chambermaids, barked full into his facea

juxtaposition made possible only by Rachel's tiptoed stance and the

boy's natural inclination to slouch, for the head chambermaid

lacked nearly a foot of Simon's height.

"Sorry, then, mistress, I'm sorry," Simon muttered, noting with

sadness the beetle nosing toward a crack in the chapel wall and

freedom.

" 'Sorry' is not going to get you by forever," Rachel growled.

"Every single body in the house is at work a-getting things ready but

you! And, bad enough that is, but then / have to waste my valuable

time trying to find you! How can you be such a wicked boy, Simon,

when you should be acting like a man? How can you?"

The boy, fourteen gangly years old and furiously embarrassed,

said nothing. Rachel stared at him.

Sad enough, she thought, that red hair and those spots, but when

he squints his eyes all up that way and scowlswhy, the child looks

half-witted!

Simon, staring in turn at his captor, saw Rachel breathing heavily,

pluming the Novander air with puffs of vapor. She was shivering,

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR5

too, although whether from the cold or anger, Simon couldn't tell. It

didn't really matter. It just made him feel worse.

She's still waiting/or an answerhow tired and cross she looks! He

curled himself into an even more pronounced slump and glared at

his own feet.

"Well, you'll just come with me, then. The good Lord knows I've

got things to keep an idle boy busy with. Don't you know the king is

up out of his sickbed? That he's gone to his throne room today? Are

you deaf and blind?" She grabbed his elbow and frog-marched him

across the garden.

"The King? King John?" Simon asked, surprised.

"No, you ignorant boy. King Stone-in-the-RoadI Of course King

John!" Rachel halted in her tracks to push a wisp of limp steel-gray

hair back under her bonnet. Her hand trembled. "There, I hope

you're happy," she said. "You've gotten me so flummoxed and upset

that I've gone and been disrespectful to the name of our good old

King John. And him so sick and all." She snuffled loudly and then

leaned over to deal Simon a stinging slap on the-fat part of his arm.

"Just you come."

She stumped forward, wicked boy in tow.

Simon had never known any other home but the ageless castle

called Hayholt, which meant High Keep. It was well named: Green

Angel Tower, its loftiest point, soared far above even the eldest and

tallest of trees. If the Angel herself, perched on the tower top, had

dropped a stone from her verdigrised hand it would have plummeted

nearly two hundred cubits before splashing into the brackish moat

and troubling the sleep of the great pikefish bobbing close above the

centuried mud.

The Hayholt was older by far than all the generations of Erkyn-

landish peasants who had been born, labored, and died in the fields

and villages surrounding the great keep. The Erkynlanders were

only the latest to claim the castlemany others had called it their

own, but none had been able to make it wholly so. The outwall

around the sprawling keep showed the work of diverse hands and

times: the rough-hewn rock and timber of the Rimmersmen, the

haphazard patching and strange carvings of the Hemystiri, even the

meticulous stonework of Nabbanai craftsmen. But looming over all

stood Green Angel Tower, erected by the undying Sithi long before

6Tad Williams

men had come to these lands, when all of Osten Ard had been their

dominion. The Sithi had been the first to build here, constructing

their primeval stronghold on the headlands overlooking the Kyn-

slagh and the river-road to the sea. They had called their castle

Asu 'a; if it had a true name, this house of many masters, then Asu'a

was that name.

The Fair Folk had vanished now from the grassy plains and roll-

ing hill country, fled mostly to the woods and craggy mountains and

other dark places inconvenient to men. The bones of their castlea

home to usurpersremained behind.

Asu'a the paradox; proud yet ramshackle, festive and forbidding,

seemingly oblivious to changes of tenantry. Asu'athe Hayholt. It

bulked mountainously above the outlands and town, hunched over

its fief like a sleeping, honey-muzzled bear among her cubs.

It often seemed that Simon was the only dweller in the great castle

who had not settled into his place in life. The masons plastered the

whitewashed facing of the residence and shored up the castle's

crumbling wallsalthough the crumbling did sometimes seem to

outpace the restorationswith never a thought toward how the

world spun or why. The pantlers and butlers, whistling merrily,

rolled huge casks of sack and salted beef here and there. With the

castle seneschal beside them, they haggled with farmers over the

whiskery onions and soil-moist carrots brought in sacks to the

Hayholt's kitchen every morning. And Rachel and her chamber-

maids were always excruciatingly busy, flourishing their brooms of

bound straw, chasing dust balls as if herding skittish sheep, mutter-

ing pious imprecations about the way some people left a chamber

when they departed, and generally terrorizing the slothful and slov-

enly.

In the midst of such industry, gawky Simon was the fabled grass-

hopper in the nest of ants. He knew he would never amount to

much: many people had told him so, and nearly all of them were

olderand presumably wiserthan he. At an age when other boys

were clamoring for the responsibilities of manhood, Simon was still

a muddier and a meanderer. No matter what task he was given to

do, his attention soon wandered, and he would be dreaming of bat-

tles, and giants, and sea voyages on tall, shining ships . . . and

somehow, things would get broken, or lost, or done wrong.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR7

Other times he could not be found at all. He skulked around the

castle like a scrawny shadow, could shinny up a wall as well as the

roof-masons and glaziers, and knew so many passageways and hid-

ing holes that the castle folk called him "ghost boy." Rachel boxed

his ears frequently, and called him a mooncalf.

Rachel had finally let go of his arm, and Simon dragged his feet

glumly as he followed the Mistress of Chambermaids like a stick

caught in a skirt hem. He had been discovered, his beetle had es-

caped, and the afternoon was ruined.

"What must I do, Rachel," he mumbled unpleasantly, "help in

the kitchen?"

Rachel snorted disdainfully and waddled on, a badger in an

apron. Simon looked back regretfully on the sheltering trees and

hedges of the garden. Their commingled footfalls resounded sol-

emnly down the long stone hallway.

He had been raised by the chambermaids, but since he was cer-

tainly never going to be one himselfhis boy-ness aside, Simon was

obviously not to be trusted with delicate domestic operationsa

concerted effort had been made to find suitable labors for him. In a

great house, and the Hayholt was doubtless the greatest, there was

no place for those who did not work. He found employment of a sort

in the castle kitchens, but even at this undemanding job he was not

completely successful. The other scullions would laugh and nudge

each other to see Simonelbow-deep in hot water, eyes squinted

shut in oblivious reverielearning the trick of bird flight, or saving

dream-maidens from imaginary beasts as his scrubbing stick floated

off across the washing vat.

Legend had it that Sir Fluirena relative of the famous Sir

Camaris of Nabbanhad in his youth come to the Hayholt to be a

knight, and had worked a year in disguise in this same scullery, due

to his ineffable humility. The kitchen workers had teased himor so

the story wentcalling him "Pretty-hands" because the terrible toil

did not diminish the fine whiteness of his fingers.

Simon had only to look at his own cracked-nail, pink-boiled paws

to know that he was no great lord's orphan son. He was a scullion

and a comer sweeper, and that was that. At a not much greater age,

everyone knew, King John had slain the Red Dragon. Simon wres-

Tad Williams

tied with brooms and pots. Not that it made much difference: it was

a different, quieter world than in John's youth, thanks largely to the

old king himself. No dragonsliving ones, anywayinhabited the

dark, endless halls of the Hayholt. But Rachelas Simon often

cursed to himselfwith her sour face and terrible, tweezing fingers,

was near enough.

They reached the antechamber before the throne room, the center

of the inordinate activity. The chambermaids, moving at a near-run,

careened from wall to wall like flies in a bottle. Rachel stood with

fists set on hips and surveyed her domainseeming, from the smile

that tightened her thin mouth, to find it good.

Simon lurked against a tapestried wall, forgotten for a moment.

Slouching, he stared from the comer of his eyes at the new girl

Hepzibah, who was plump and curly-haired and walked with an

insolent sway. Passing by with a sloshing bucket of water she caught

his glance and smiled widely, amused. Simon felt fire crackling up

his neck into his cheeks and turned to pick at the tattered wall

hanging.

Rachel had not missed the exchange of looks.

"Lord whip you for a donkey, boy, didn't I tell you to get to

work? Have at it, then!"

"At what?' Do what?'" Simon shouted, and was mortified to hear

Hepzibah's silvery giggle float out from the hallway. He pinched his

own arm in frustration. It hurt.

"Take this broom, and go and sweep out the Doctor's chambers.

That man lives like a pack rat, and who knows where the king will

want to go now that he's up?" It was clear from her tone that Rachel

found the general contrariness of men to be undiminished by king-

ship.

"Doctor Morgenes' chambers?" Simon asked; for the first time

since he had been discovered in the garden his spirits rose. "I'll do it

straight away!" He snatched the broom at a dead run and was gone.

Rachel snorted and turned back to examine the spotless perfection

of the antechamber. She briefly wondered what could possibly be

going on behind the great throne-room door, then dismissed the

errant thought as mercilessly as she might swat a hovering gnat.

Herding her legions with clapping hands and steely eye, she led

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR9

them out of the antechamber and off to another pitched battle

against her archenemy, disorder.

In that hall beyond the door dusty banners hung, row upon row

along the walls, a faded bestiary of fantastic animals: the sun-golden

stallion of Clan Mehrdon, Nabban's gleaming kingfisher crest, owl

and ox, otter, unicorn, and cockatricerank after rank of silent,

sleeping creatures. No draft stirred these threadbare hangings; even

the spiderwebs sagged empty and unstitched.

Some small change had come to the throne room, thoughsome-

thing lived once more in the shadowed chamber. Someone was sing-

ing a quiet tune in the thin voice of a very young boy or a very old

man.

At the farthest end of the hall a massive tapestry hung on the

stone wall between the statues of the High Kings of the Hayholt, a

tapestry bearing the royal coat of arms, the Firedrake and the Tree.

The grim malachite statues, an honor guard of six, flanked a huge,

heavy chair that seemed entirely carved from yellowing ivory, the

chair arms knobbed and knuckled, the back capped with a huge,

many-toothed, serpentine skull whose eyes were pools of shadow.

It was on and before this chair that two figures sat. The small one

clothed in worn motley was singing; it was his voice that floated up

from the foot of the throne, too weak to chip loose even a slight

echo. Over him bent a gaunt shape, perched at the edge of the chair

like an aged raptora tired, hobbled bird of prey shackled to the

dull bone.

The king, three years sick and enfeebled, had returned to his dusty

hall. He listened as the small man at his feet sang; the king's long,

mottled hands grasped the arms of his great, yellowing throne.

He was a tall manonce very tall, but now hunched like a monk

at prayer. He wore a sagging robe of sky blue, and was bearded like

a Usirean prophet. A sword lay athwart his lap, shining as though

new-polished; on his brow sat an iron crown, studded all about with

sea-green emeralds and secretive opals.

The mannekin at the king's feet paused for a long, silent moment,

then began another song:

"Can tha count th' rain-drops

When th' sun is high?

10Tad Williams

Can tha swim th' river

When th' bed gang dry?

Can tha catch a cloud?

Nay, canst not, nor I . . .

An' th' wind a cry 'Wait.'

As a passeth by.

Th'wind a cry 'Wait.'

As a passeth by . . ."

When the tune was finished, the tall old man in the blue robe

reached down his hand and the jester took it. Neither said a word.

John the Presbyter, Lord of Erkynland and High King of all

Osten Ard; scourge of the Sithi and defender of the true faith,

wielder of the sword Bright-Nail, bane of the dragon Shurakai . . .

Prester John was sitting once more upon his chair made of dragon's

bones. He was very, very old, and had been crying.

"Ah, Towser," he breathed at last, his voice deep but flawed with

age, "it is surely an unmerciful God who could bring me to this

sorry pass."

"Perhaps, my lord." The little old man in the checkered jerkin

smiled a wrinkled smile. "Perhaps ... but doubtless many others

would not complain of cruelty if brought to your station in life."

"But that is just what I mean, old friend!" The king shook his

head angrily. "In this shadow-age of infirmity, all men are leveled.

Any thick-witted tailor's apprentice sups more of life that I!"

"Ah, la now my lord, my lord . . ." Towser's grizzled head

wagged from side to side, but the bells of his caplong since clap-

periessdid not jingle. "My lord, you complain seasonably, but un-

reasonably. All men come to this pass, great or small. You have had

a fine life."

Prester John lifted the hilt of Bright-Nail before him, holding it as

though it were a Holy Tree. He pulled the back of a long thin hand

across his eyes.

"Do you know the story of this blade?" he asked.

Towser looked up sharply: he had heard the story many times.

"Tell me, 0 King," he said quietly.

Prester John smiled, but his eyes never left the leather-bound hilt

before him. "A sword, small friend, is the extension of a man's right

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR11

hand . . - and the end point of his heart." He lifted the blade up

higher, so that it caught a glimmer of light from one of the tiny, high

windows. "Just the same is Man the good right hand of GodMan

is the sharp executor of the Heart of God. Do you see?"

Suddenly he was leaning down, eyes bird-bright beneath shaggy

brows. "Do you know what this is?" His shaking finger indicated a

bit of crimped, rusty metal bound into the sword haft with golden

wire.

"Tell me, Lord," Towser knew perfectly well.

"This is the only nail of the true Execution Tree still remaining in

Osten Ard." Prester John brought the hilt forward to his lips and

tossed it, then held the cool metal against his cheek. "This nail came

from the palm of Usires Aedon, our Savior . . . from His

hand . , ." The king's eyes, catching for a moment a strange half-

light from above, were fiery mirrors.

"And there is also the relic, of course," he said after a quiet

moment, "the finger-bone of martyred Saint Eahlstan, the dragon-

slain, right here in the hilt. ..."

There was another interval of silence, and when Towser looked up

his master was weeping again.

"Fie, fie on it!" John moaned. "How can I live up to the honor of

God's Sword? With so much sin, such a weight of it, still staining

my soulthe arm that once smote the red dragon can now scarce

lift a milk-cup. Oh, I am dying, my dear Towser, dying!"

Towser leaned forward, pulling one of the king's bony hands free

from the sword-grip and kissing it as the old man sobbed.

"Oh, please, master," the jester beseeched. "Weep no more! All

men must dieyou, I, everyone. If we are not killed by youthful

stupidity or ill-luck, then it is our fate to live on like the trees; older

and older until at last we totter and fall. It is the way of all things.

How can you fight the Lord's will?"

"But I built this kingdom!" A quivering rage was on John the

Presbyter as he pulled his hand free from the jester's grasp and

brought it sharply down on the arm of his throne. "That must weigh

against any blot of sin on my soul, however darki Surely the Good

Lord will have that in his Book of Accounts! I dragged these people

up from the mud, scourged the cursed, sneaking Sithi out of the

countryside, gave the peasantry law and justice ... the good I

12Tad Williams

have done must weigh strongly." For a moment John's voice became

fainter, as though his thoughts wandered elsewhere.

"Ah, my old friend," he said at last in a bitter voice, "and now I

cannot even walk down to the marketplace on Main Row! I must lie

in bed, or shuffle about his cold castle on the arms of younger men.

My ... my kingdom lies corrupting on the vine, while servants

whisper and tiptoe outside my bedchamber door! All in sin!"

The king's words echoed back from the chamber's stone walls and

slowly dissipated up among the swirling dust motes. Towser

regained John's hand and squeezed it until the king was composed

once more.

"Well," said Prester John after some time had passed, "my Elias

will rule more firmly than I now can, at least. Seeing the decay of all

this," he swept his hand around the throne room, "today I have

decided to call him back from Meremund. He must prepare to take

the crown." The king sighed. "I suppose I should leave off my wom-

anish weeping, and be grateful I have what many kings have not: a

strong son to hold my kingdom together after I am gone."

"Two strong sons. Lord."

"Fan." The king grimaced. "I should call Josua many things, but

I do not believe 'strong' is one of them."

"You are too hard on him. Master."

"Nonsense. Do you think to instruct me, jester? Do you know the

son better than the father does?" John's hand trembled, and for a

moment it seemed he would struggle to his feet. Finally, the tension

slackened.

"Josua is a cynic," the king began again in a quieter voice. "A

cynic, a melancholic, cold to his inferiorsand a king's son has

nothing but inferiors, each one a potential assassin. No, Towse, he is

a queer one, my youngermost especially since . . . since he lost

his hand. Ah, merciful Aedon, perhaps the fault is mine."

"What do you mean. Lord?"

"I should have taken another wife after Ebekah died. It has been a

cold house without a queen . . . perhaps that caused the boy's odd

humors. Elias is not that way, though."

"There is a certain crude directness to Prince Elias' nature,"

Towser muttered, but if the king heard he gave no sign.

"I thank beneficent God that Elias was first-born. He has a brave,

martial character, that oneI think that if he were the younger,

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

13

Josua would not be secure upon the throne." King John shook his

head with cold fondness at the thought, then groped down and

grasped his jester's ear, tweaking it as if that old worthy were a child

of five or six years.

"Promise me one thing, Towse . . . ?"

"What, Lord?"

"When I diedoubtless soon, I do not think I shall last the win-

teryou must bring Elias to this room ... do you suppose they

will hold the crowning here? Never mind you, if they do then must

wait until it has ended. Bring him here and give him Bright-Nail.

Yes, take it now and hold it. I fear that I may die while he is away at

Meremund or some other place, and I want it to come straight to his

hand with my blessing. Do you understand, Towse?"

With shaking hands Prester John pushed the sword back into its

tooled scabbard, and struggled for a moment to unbuckle the baldric

on which it hung. The twining was caught, and Towser got up on his

knees to work on the knot with his strong old fingers.

"What is the blessing, my Lord?" he asked, tongue between teeth

as he picked at the tangle.

"Tell him what I have told you. Tell him that the sword is the

point of his heart and hand, just as we are the instruments of the

Heart and Hand of God the Father . . . and tell him that no prize,

however noble, is worth ... is worth , . ." John hesitated, and

drew his trembling fingers to his eyes. "No, pay that no mind. Speak

only what I told you about the sword. Tell him that."

"I shall, my King," said Towser. He frowned, although he had

solved the knot. "I will gladly do your wish."

"Good." Prester John leaned back once more in his dragonbone

chair and closed his gray eyes. "Sing for me again, Towse."

Towser did. Above, the dusty banners seemed to sway slightly, as

if a whisper passed among the crowd of watchers, among the ancient

herons and dull-eyed bears, and others stranger still.

2

A Two-Frog Story

AN IDLE MIND is the Devil's seedbed.

Simon reflected ruefully on this, one of Rachel's favorite expres-

sions, as he stared down at the display of horse-armor which now

lay scattered the length of the chaplain's walking-hall. A moment

before he had been leaping happily down the long, tiled hallway

which ran along the outer length of the chapel, on his way to sweep

Doctor Morgenes' chambers. He had been waving the broom about

a little, of course, pretending it was the Tree and Drake flag of

Prester John's Erkynguard, and that he was leading them into bat-

tle. Perhaps he should have been paying better heed to where he was

waggling itbut what sort of idiot would hang a suit of horse-armor

in the chaplain's hallway, anyway? Needless to say, the clatter had

been ferocious, and Simon expected skinny, vengeful Father Dre-

osan to descend at any minute.

Hurrying to gather up the dingy armor plates, some of which had

torn loose from the leather straps that bound the suit together, Si-

mon considered another of Rachel's maxims"the Devil finds

chores for empty hands." That was silly, of course, and made him

angry. It was not the emptiness of his hands, or the idleness of his

thoughts that got him into trouble. No, it was the doing and the

thinking that tripped him up time and time again. If only they would

leave him alone!

Father Dreosan had still not made an entrance by the time he at

last worried the armor into a precarious stack, then hastily pushed it

beneath the skin of a table rug. In doing so he nearly upset the

golden reliquary seated on the table top, but at lastand with no

further mishapsthe sundered armor was gone from view, with

nothing but a slightly cleaner-looking patch on the wall to proclaim

that the suit had ever existed at all. Simon picked up his broom and

scuffed away at the sooty stone, trying to even up the edges so that

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR15

the bright spot was not so noticeable, then hurried on down the hall

and out past the winding choir-loft stairs.

Emerging once more into the Hedge Garden from which he had

been so brutally abducted by the Dragon, Simon halted for a mo-

ment to inhale the pungent smell of greenery, to drive the last of the

tallow-soap stench from his nostrils. His eye was caught by an un-

usual shape in the upper branches of the Festival Oak, an ancient

tree at the far end of the garden, so gnarled and convoluted of

branch that it looked as though it had grown for centuries beneath a

giant bushel basket. He squinted, hand raised to block the slanting

sunlight. A bird's nesti And so late in the yearl

It was a very near thing. He had dropped the broom and taken

several steps into the garden before he remembered his mission to

Morgenes. If it had been any other errand he would have been up

the tree in an instant, but getting to see the doctor was a treat, even

when it entailed work. He promised himself that the nest would not

remain long unexamined, and passed on through the hedges and into

the courtyard before the Inner Bailey Gate.

Two figures had just entered the gate and were coming toward

him; one slow and stumpy, the other stumpier and slower still. It

was Jakob the chandler and his assistant Jeremias. The latter was

carrying a large, heavy-looking bag over his shoulder, and walking

if such was possiblemore sluggishly than usual. Simon called a

greeting as they passed. Jakob smiled and waved.

"Rachel wants new candles for the dining room," the chandler

shouted, "so candles she gets!" Jeremias made a sour face.

A short trot down the sloping greensward brought Simon to the

massive gatehouse. A sliver of afternoon sun still smoldered above

the battlements behind him, and the shadows of the pennants of the

Western Wall flopped like dark fish on the grass. The red-and-white

liveried guardscarcely older than Simonsmiled and nodded as

the master spy pounded past, deadly broom in hand, head held low

in case the tyrant Rachel should happen to peep from one of the

keep's high windows. Once through the barbican and hidden in the

lee of the high gatewall he slowed to a walk. Green Angel Tower's

attenuated shadow bridged the moat; the distorted silhouette of the

Angel, triumphant on her spire, lay in a pool of fire at the water's

farthest edge.

As long as he was here, Simon decided, he might as well catch

16

Tad Williams

some frogs. It shouldn't take too long, and the doctor frequently had

use for such things. It wouldn't really be putting off the errand so

much as expanding the nature of the service. He would have to

hurry, thoughevening was coming on swiftly. Already he could

hear the crickets laboriously tuning up for what would be one of the

waning year's last performances and the bullfrogs beginning their

muffled, clunking counterpoint.

Wading out into the lily-crusted water, Simon paused for a mo-

ment to listen, and to watch the eastern sky darkening to a dull

violet. Next to Doctor Morgenes' chambers, the moat was his favor-

ite spot in all Creation . . . all of it that he had seen so far, anyway.

With an unconscious sigh he pulled off his shapeless cloth hat and

sloshed along toward where the pond grass and hyacinths were

thickest.

The sun had completely vanished and the wind was hissing

through the cattails ringing the moat by the time Simon had reached

the Middle Bailey to stand, clothes a-drip and a frog in each pocket,

before the door of Morgenes' chambers. He knocked on the stout

paneling, careful not to touch the unfamiliar symbol chalked on the

wood. He had learned by hard experience not to carelessly lay hands

on something of the doctor's without asking. Several moments

passed before Morgenes' voice was heard.

"Go away," it said, in a tone of annoyance.

"It's me ... Simon!" called Simon, and knocked again. There

was a longer pause this time, then the sound of rapid footfalls. The

door swung open. Morgenes, whose head barely reached Simon's

chin, stood framed in bright blue light, the expression on his face

obscured. For a moment he seemed to stare.

"What?" he said finally. "Who?"

Simon laughed. "Me, of course. Do you want some frogs?" He

pulled one of the captives from its prison and held it up by a slippery

leg-

"Oh. Oh!" The doctor seemed to be coming awake as from a deep

sleep. He shook his head. "Simon ... but naturally! Come in, boy!

My apologies ... I am a little distracted." He opened the door

wide enough for Simon to slip past him into the narrow inner hall-

way, then pulled it closed again.

"Frogs, is it? Hmmmm, frogs . . ." The doctor angled past and

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR17

led him along the corridor. In the glow of the blue lamps that lined

the hall the doctor's spindly form, monkeylike, seemed to bound

instead of walk. Simon followed, his shoulders nearly touching the

cold stone walls on either side. He could never understand how

rooms that seemed as small as the doctor's did from outsidehe had

looked down on them from the bailey walls, and paced the distance

in the courtyardhow they could have such long corridors.

Simon's musings were interrupted by a hideous eruption of noise

echoing down the passagewaywhistles, bangs, and something that

sounded like the hungry baying of a hundred hounds.

Morgenes jumped in surprise and said: "Oh, Name of a Name, I

forgot to snuff the candles. Wait here." The small man hurried down

the hallway, wispy white hair fluttering, pulled the door at the end

open just a crackthe howling and whistling doubled its intensity

and slipped quickly inside. Simon heard a muffled shout.

The horrendous noise abruptly ceasedas quickly and completely

as ... as ...

As the snuffing of a candle, he thought.

The doctor poked his head out, smiled, and beckoned him in.

Simon, who had witnessed scenes of this type before, followed

Morgenes cautiously into his workshop. A hasty entrance could, at

the very least, cause one to step on something strange and unpleas-

ant to contemplate.

There was now not a trace of whatever had set up that fearful

yammering. Simon again marveled at the discrepancy between what

Morgenes' rooms seemed to bea converted guard-barracks per-

haps twenty paces in length, nestled against the ivy-tangled wall of

the Middle Bailey's northeastern comerand the view inside, which

was of a low-ceilinged but spacious chamber almost as long as a

tournament field, although not nearly so wide. In the orange light

that filtered down from the long row of small windows overlooking

the courtyard Simon peered at the farthest end of the room and

decided he would be hard-pressed to hit it with a stone from the

doorway in which he stood.

This curious stretching effect, however, was quite familiar. In fact,

despite the terrifying noises, the whole chamber seemed much as it

usually didas though a horde of crack-brained peddlers had set up

shop and then made a hasty retreat during a wild windstorm. The

long refectory table that spanned the length of the near wall was

18

Tad Williams

littered with fluted glass tubes, boxes, and cloth sacks of powders

and pungent salts, as well as intricate structures of wood and metal

from which depended retorts and phials and other unrecognizable

containers. The centerpiece of the table was a great brazen ball with

tiny angled spouts protruding from its shiny skin. It seemed to float

in a dish of silvery liquid, the both of them balanced at the apex of a

carved ivory tripod. The spouts chuffed steam, and the brass globe

slowly revolved.

The floor and shelves were littered with even stranger articles.

Polished stone blocks and brooms and leather wings were strewn

across the flagstones, vying for space with animal cagessome

empty, some notmetal armatures of unknown creatures covered

with ragged pelts or mismatched feathers, sheets of seemingly clear

crystal stacked haphazardly against the tapestried walls . . . and

everywhere books, books, books, dropped halfway open or propped

upright here and there about the chamber like huge, clumsy butter-

flies.

There were also glass balls of colored liquids that bubbled without

heat, and a flat box of glittering black sand that rearranged itself

endlessly, as if swept by unfelt desert breezes. Wooden cabinets on

the wall from time to time disgorged painted wooden birds who

cheeped impertinently and disappeared. Beside these hung maps of

countries with totally unfamiliar geographyalthough geography,

admittedly, was not something Simon felt too confident about.

Taken altogether, the doctor's lair was a paradise for a curious

young man . . . without doubt, the most wonderful place in Osten

Ard.

Morgenes had been pacing about in the far comer of the room

beneath a drooping star-chart that linked the bright celestial points

together by painted line to make the shape of an odd, four-winged

bird. With a little whistle of triumph the doctor suddenly leaned

down and began to dig like a squirrel in spring. A flurry of scrolls,

brightly painted flannels, and miniature flatware and goblets from

some homunculate supper table rose in the air behind him. At last

he straightened up, netting a large glass-sided box. He waded to the

table, set the glass cube down, and picked a pair of flasks out of a

rack, apparently at random.

The liquid in one of them was the color of the sunset skies outside;

it smoked like a censer. The other was full of something blue and

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

19

viscous which flowed ever so slowly down into the box as Morgenes

upended the two flasks. Mixing, the fluids turned as clear as moun-

tain air. The doctor threw his hand out like a traveling performer,

and there was a moment's pause.

"Frogs?" Morgenes asked, waggling his fingers. Simon rushed for-

ward, pulling the two he had caught out of his coat pockets. The

doctor took them and dropped them into the tank with a flourish.

The pair of surprised amphibians plunked into the transparent liq-

uid, sank slowly to the bottom, then began to swim vigorously about

in their new home. Simon laughed with as much surprise as amuse-

ment.

"Is it water?"

The old man turned to look at him with bright eyes. "More or

less, more or less . . . So!" Now Morgenes dragged long, bent fin-

gers through his sparse fringe of beard. "So . . . thank you for the

frogs. I think I know what to do with them already. Quite painless.

They may even enjoy it, although I doubt they'll like wearing the

boots."

"Boots?" wondered Simon, but the doctor was off and bustling

again, this time pushing a stack of maps from a low stool. He beck-

oned Simon to sit.

"Well then, young man, what will you take as due coin for your

day's work? A fithing piece? Or perhaps you would like Coccindrilis

here for a pet?" Chuckling, the doctor brandished a mummified

lizard.

Simon hesitated for a moment over the lizardit would be a

lovely thing to slip into the linen basket for the new girl Hepzibah to

discoverbut no. The thought of the chambermaids and cleaning

stuck in his mind, irritating him. Something wanted to be remem-

bered, but Simon pushed it back. "No," he said at last, "I'd like to

hear some stories."

"Stories?" Morgenes bent forward quizzically. "Stories? You

would be much better off going to old Shem Horsegroom in the

stables if you want to hear such things."

"Not that kind," Simon said hastily. He hoped he hadn't offended

the little man. Old people were so sensitive! "Stories about real

things- How things used to bebattles, dragonsthings that hap-

pened!"

"Aaahh." Morgenes sat up, and the smile returned to his pink

20

Tad Williams

face. "I see. You mean history." The doctor rubbed his hands.

"That's bettermuch better!" He sprang to his feet and began pac-

ing, stepping nimbly over the oddments scattered about the floor.

"Well, what do you want to hear about, lad? The fall of Naarved?

The Battle of Ach Samrath?"

"Tell me about the castle," Simon said. "The Hayholt. Did the

king build it? How old is it?"

"The castle . . ." The doctor stopped pacing, plucked up a cor-

ner of his wom-shiny gray robe, and began to rub absently at one of

Simon's favorite curiosities: a suit of armor, exotically designed and

colored in wildflower-bright blues and yellows, made entirely from

polished wood.

"Hmmm ... the castle . . ." Morgenes repeated. "Well, that's

certainly a two-frog story, at the very least. Actually, if I were to tell

you the whole story, you would have to drain the moat and bring

your warty prisoners in by the cartload to pay for it. But it is the

bare bones of the tale that I think you want today, and I can cer-

tainly give you that. Hold yourself still for a moment while I find

something to wet my throat."

As Simon tried to sit quietly, Morgenes went to his long table and

picked up a beaker of brown, frothy liquid. He sniffed it suspi-

ciously, brought it to his lips, and downed a small gulp. After a

moment of consideration he licked his bare upper lip and pulled his

beard happily.

"Ah, the Stanshire Dark. No doubt on the subject, ale is the stuff!

What were we talking about, then? Oh, yes, the castle." Morgenes

cleared a place on the table and thenholding his flask carefully

vaulted up with surprising ease to sit, slippered feet dangling half a

cubit above the floor. He sipped again.

"I'm afraid this story starts long before our King John. We shall

begin with the first men and women to come to Osten Ardsimple

folk, living on the banks of the Gleniwent. They were mostly

herdsmen and fisherfolk, perhaps driven out from the lost West over

some land-bridge that no longer exists. They caused little trouble for

the masters of Osten Ard. . . ."

"But I thought you said they were the first to come here?" Simon

interrupted, secretly pleased he had caught Morgenes in a contradic-

tion.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

21

"No. I said they were the first men. The Sithi held this land long

before any man walked on it."

"You mean there really were Little Folk?" Simon grinned. "Just

like Shem Horsegroom tells of? Pookahs and niskies and all?" This

was exciting.

Morgenes shook his head vigorously and took another swallow.

"Not only were, arealthough that jumps ahead of my narrative

and they are by no means 'little folk' . . . wait, lad, let me go on."

Simon hunched forward and tried to look patient. "Yes?"

"Well, as I mentioned, the men and Sithi were peaceful neighbors

true, there was an occasional dispute over grazing land or some

such, but since mankind seemed no real threat the Fair Polk were

generous. As time went on, men began to build cities, sometimes

only a half a day's walk from Sithi lands. Later still a great kingdom

arose on the rocky peninsula of Nabban, and the mortal men of

Osten Ard began to look there for guidance. Are you still following

my trail, boy?"

Simon nodded.

"Good." A long draught. "Well, the land seemed quite big enough

for all to share, until black iron came over the water."

"What? Black iron?" Simon was immediately stilled by the doc-

tor's sharp look.

"The shipmen out of the near-forgotten west, the Rimmersmen,"

Morgenes continued. "They landed in the north, armed men fierce

as bears, riding in their long serpent-boats."

"The Rimmersmen?" Simon wondered. "Like Duke Isgrimnur at

the court? On boats?"

"They were great seafarers before they settled here, the Duke's

ancestors," Morgenes affirmed. "But when they first came they were

not searching for grazing or farming land, but for plunder. Most

importantly though, they brought ironor at least the secret of

shaping it. They made iron swords and spears, weapons that would

not break like the bronze of Osten Ard; weapons that could beat

down even the witchwood of the Sithi."

Morgenes rose and refilled his beaker from a covered bucket

standing on a cathedral of books beside the wall. Instead of re-

turning to the table he stopped to finger the shiny epaulets of the

armor suit.

"None stood against them for longthe cold, hard spirit of the

22 Tad Williams

iron seemed in the shipmen themselves as much as in their blades.

Many folk fled south, moving closer to the protection of Nabban's

frontier outposts. The Nabbanai legions, well-organized garrison

forces, resisted for a while. Finally they, too, were forced to abandon

the Frostmarch to the Rimmersmen. There . . . was much slaugh-

ter."

Simon squirmed happily. "What about the Sithi? You said they

had no iron?"

"It was deadly to them." The doctor licked his finger and rubbed

away a spot on the polished wood of the breastplate. "Even they

could not defeat the Rimmersmen in open battle, but," he pointed

the dusty finger at Simon, as if this fact concerned him personally,

"but the Sithi knew their land. They were close to ita part of it,

evenin a way that the invaders could never be. They held their

own for a long time, falling slowly back on places of strength. The

chiefest of theseand the reason for this whole discoursewas

Asu'a. The Hayholt."

"This castle? The Sithi lived in the Hayholt?" Simon was unable

to keep the disbelief out of his voice. "How long ago was it built?"

"Simon, Simon . . ." The doctor scratched his ear and returned

to his perch on the table. The sunset was completely gone from the

windows, and the torch light divided his face into a mummer's

mask, half illumined, half dark. "There may, for all I or any mortal

can know, have been a castle here when the Sithi first came . . .

when Osten Ard was as new and unsullied as a snow-melt brook.

Sithi-folk certainly dwelled here countless years before man arrived.

This was the first place in Osten Ard to feel the work of Grafting

hands. It is the stronghold of the country commanding the water

ways, riding herd on the finest croplands. The Hayholt and its pre-

decessorsthe older citadels that lie buried beneath ushave stood

here since before the memories of mankind. It was very, very old

when the Rimmersmen came."

Simon's mind whirled as the enormity of Morgenes' statement

seeped in. The old castle seemed suddenly oppressive, its rock walls

a cage. He shuddered and looked quickly around, as though some

ancient, jealous thing might even at this moment be reaching out for

him with dusty hands.

Morgenes laughed merrilya very young laugh from so old a

manand hopped down from the table. The torches seemed to glow

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

23

a little brighter. "Fear not, Simon. I thinkand I, of all people,

should knowthat there is not much for you to fear from Sithi

magic. Not today. The castle has been much changed, stone laid

over stone, and every ell has been rigorously blessed by a hundred

priests. Oh, Judith and the cooking staff may turn around from time

to time and find a plate of cakes missing, but I think that can be as

logically ascribed to young men as to goblins . . ."

The doctor was interrupted by a short series or raps upon the

chamber door. "Who is it?" he cried.

"It's me," said a doleful voice. There was a long pause. "Me,

Inch," it finished.

"Bones ofAnaxos!" swore the doctor, who favored exotic expres-

sions. "Open the door, then . . . I am too old to run about waiting

on fools."

The door swung inward. The man framed against the glow of

inner hallway was probably tall, but hung his head and hunched his

body forward in such a way that it was difficult to make sure. A

round, vacant face floated like a moon just above his breastbone,

thatched by spiky black hair that had been cut with a dull and

clumsy knife.

"I'm sorry I ... I bothered you, Doctor, but . . . but you said

come early, now didn't you?" The voice was thick and slow as drip-

ping lard.

Morgenes gave a whistle of exasperation, and tugged on a coil of

his own white hair. "Yes, I did, but I said early after the dinner

hour, which has not yet arrived. Still, no sense in sending you away.

Simon, have you met Inch, my assistant?"

Simon nodded politely. He had seen the man once or twice;

Morgenes had him come in some evenings to help, apparently with

heavy lifting. It certainly wouldn't be for anything else, since Inch

did not look as though he could be trusted to piss on the fire before

going to bed.

"Well, young Simon, I'm afraid that will have to put an end to my

windiness for the day," the old man said. "Since Inch is here, I must

use him. Come back soon, and I will tell you moreif you like."

"Certainly." Simon nodded once more to Inch, who rolled a cow-

like gaze after him. He had reached the door, almost touched it,

when a sudden vision blazed into life in his head: a clear picture of

24 Tad Williams

Rachel's broom, lying where he had left it, on the grass beside the

moat like the corpse of a strange water bird.

Mooncalf!

He would say nothing. He could collect the broom on his way

back, and tell the Dragon that the chore was finished. She had so

much to think about, and, although she and the doctor were two of

the castle's oldest residents, they seldom spoke. It was obviously the

best plan.

Without understanding why, Simon turned back. The little man

was scrutinizing a curling scroll, bent over the table while Inch

stood behind him staring at nothing particular.

"Doctor Morgenes . . ."

At the sound of his name the doctor looked up, blinking. He

seemed surprised that Simon was still in the room; Simon was sur-

prised, too.

"Doctor, I've been a fool."

Morgenes arched his eyebrows, waiting.

"I was supposed to sweep your room. Rachel asked me to. Now

the whole afternoon has gone by."

"Oh. Ah!" Morgenes' nose wrinkled as if it itched him, then he

broke out a wide smile. "Sweep my chamber, eh? Well, lad, come

back tomorrow and do it. Tell Rachel that I have more work for

you, if she will be so good as to let you go." He turned back to his

book, then looked up again, eyes narrowing, and pursed his lips. As

the doctor sat in silent thought, the elation Simon was feeling

changed suddenly to nervousness.

Why is he staring at me like that?

"Come to think of it, boy," the man finally said, "I will be having

many chores coming up that you could help me withand eventu-

ally I will need an apprentice. Come back tomorrow, as I said. I will

talk with the Mistress of Chambermaids about the other." He smiled

briefly, then turned back to his scroll. Simon was suddenly aware

that Inch was staring across the doctor's back at him, an unreadable

expression moving beneath the placid surface of his whey-colored

face. Simon turned and sprinted through the door. Exhilaration

caught him up as he bounded down the blue-lit hallway and

emerged under dark, cloud-smeared skies. Apprentice! To the doc-

tor!

When he reached the gatehouse, he stopped and climbed down to

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

25

the edge of the moat to look for the broom. The crickets were well

into the evening's chorale. When he found it at last, he sat down for

a moment against the wall near the water's brink to listen.

As the rhythmic song rose around him, he ran his fingers along

the nearby stones. Caressing the surface of one worn as smooth as

hand-burnished cedar, he thought:

This stone may have been standing here since . . . since before

our Lord Usires was born. Perhaps some Sithi boy once sat here in this

same quiet place, listening to the night. . . .

Where did that breeze come from?

A voice seemed to whisper, whisper, the words too faint to hear.

Perhaps he ran his hands across this same stone. . . .

A whisper on the wind: We will have it back, manchild. We will

have it all back. . . .

Clutching the neck of his coat tight against the unexpected chill,

Simon got up and climbed the grassy slope, suddenly lonesome for

familiar voices and light.

Birds in the Chapel

"BY THE Blessed Aedon . . ."

Whack!

(t. . . And Elysia his mother . . ."

Whack! Whack!

". . . And all the saints that watch over . . ."

Whack!

". . . Watch over . . . ouch!" A hiss of frustration. "Damned

spiders'" The whacking resumed, curses and invocations laid on

between. Rachel was cleaning cobwebs from the dining hall ceiling.

Two girls sick and another with a twisted ankle. This was the kind

of day that put a dangerous glint in Rachel the Dragon's agate eye.

Bad enough to have Sarrah and Jael down with the fluxionRachel

was a hard taskmistress, but she knew that every day of working a

sick girl could mean losing her three days in the longer runyes,

bad enough that Rachel had to pick up the slack left by their ab-

sence. As if she did not do two people's work already! Now the

seneschal said the king would dine in the Great Hall tonight, and

Elias, the Prince Regent, had arrived from Meremund, and there

was even more work to do!

And Simon, sent off an hour before to pick a few bundles of

rushes, was still not back.

So, here she stood with her tired old body perched on a rickety

stool, trying to get the spiderwebs out of the ceiling's high corners

with a broom. That boy! That, that . . .

"Holy Aedon give strength . . ."

Whack! Whack! Whack!

That damnable boy!

It was not enough, Rachel reflected later as she slumped red-faced

and sweaty on the stool, that the boy was lazy and difficult. She had

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR27

done her best over the years to thump the contrariness out of him;

he was certainly a better person for it, she knew. No, by the Good

Mother of God, what was worse was that no one else seemed to care!

Simon was man-tall, and at an age when he should be doing nearly a

man's workbut no! He hid and slid and mooned about. The

kitchen workers laughed at him. The chambermaids coddled him,

and snuck dinner to him when she, Rachel, had banished him from

table- And Morgenes! Merciful Elysia, the man actually encouraged

him!

And now he had asked Rachel if the boy could come and work for

him every day, sweeping up, helping to keep things cleanhah!

and assisting the old man with some of his work. As if she didn't

know better. The two of them would sit about, the old souse guz-

zling ale and telling the boy Heaven knew what kind of devil's sto-

ries.

Still, she couldn't help considering his offer. It was the first time

anyone had asked for the boy, or wanted him at allhe was so

underfoot all the time! And Morgenes had really seemed to think he

could do the boy some good. . . .

The doctor often irritated Rachel with his fancy talk and his flow-

ery speecheswhich the Mistress of Chambermaids felt sure were

disguised mockerybut he did seem to care about the boy. He had

always kept an eye out for what was best for Simon ... a sugges-

tion here, an idea there, a quiet intercession once when the Master of

Scullions had thrashed him and banished him from the kitchens.

Morgenes had always kept a watch on the boy.

Rachel looked up at the broad beams of the ceiling, her gaze

traveling off into the shadows. She blew a strand of damp hair off of

her face.

Starting back on that rainy night, she thoughtwhat was it, al-

most fifteen years ago? She felt so old, thinking back this way . . .

it seemed only a moment. . . .

^

The rain had been sheeting down all day and night. As Rachel

went gingerly across the muddy courtyard, holding her cloak over

her head with one hand, the lantern in the other, she stepped in a

28 Tad Williams

wide wagon rut and felt the water splash her calves. Her foot came

free with a sucking sound, but without a shoe. She cursed bitterly

and hurried forward. She would catch her death running around on

such a night with one foot bare, but there was no time to go digging

about in puddles.

A light was burning in Morgenes' study, but it seemed to take

forever for the footsteps to come. When he opened the door she saw

that he had been abed: he wore a long nightshirt in need of mending,

and rubbed his eyes groggily in the lantern-glare. The tangled blan-

kets of his bed, surrounded by a leaning palisade of books in the

room's far comer, made Rachel think of some foul animal's nest.

"Doctor, come quick!" she said. "You must come quick, now!"

Morgenes stared, then stepped back. "Come in, Rachel. I have no

idea what nocturnal palpitations have brought you, but since you are

here . . ."

"No. no, you foolish man, it's Susanna! Her time is here, but she

is very weak. I'm afraid for her."

"Who? What? Never mind, then. Just a moment, let me get my

things. What a dreadful night! Go on, I shall catch up to you."

"But, Doctor Morgenes, I brought the lantern for you."

Too late. The door was closed, and she was alone on the step with

rain dribbling off her long nose. Cursing, she splashed back to the

servants' quarters.

It was not long before Morgenes was stamping up the stairs shak-

ing the water from his cloak. At the doorway he absorbed the scene

in a single glance: a woman on the bed with her face turned away,

big with child and groaning. Dark hair lay across her face, and she

squeezed in a sweaty fist the hand of another young woman who

kneeled beside her. At the foot of the bed Rachel stood with an older

woman.

The old one stepped toward Morgenes while he shed his bulky

outer clothing.

"Hello, Elispeth," he said quietly- "How does it look?"

"Not good, I'm afraid, sir. You know I could have dealt with it

otherwise. She's been trying for hours, and she's bleeding. Her heart

is very faint." As Elispeth spoke, Rachel moved nearer.

"Hmmm." Morgenes bent and rummaged in the sack he had

brought. "Give her some of this, please," he said, handing Rachel a

stoppered vial. "Just a swallow, but mind she gets it." He returned

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

29

to searching his bag as Rachel gently pried open the clenched, trem-

bling jaw of the woman on the bed and poured a little of the liquid

into her mouth. The odor of sweat and blood that suffused the room

was suddenly supplemented by a pungent, spicy scent.

"Doctor," Elispeth was saying as Rachel returned, "I don't think

we can save both mother and childif we can even save one."

"You must save the child's life," Rachel interrupted. "That's the

duty of the Godfearing. The priest says so. Save the child."

Morgenes turned to her with a look of annoyance, "My good

woman, I will fear God in my own way, if you don't mind. If I save

herand I do not pretend to know I canthen she can always have

another child."

"No, she can't," Rachel said hotly. "Her husband's dead."

Morgenes of all people should know that, she thought. Susanna's

fisherman husband had often visited the doctor before he drowned

although what they might have had to talk about, Rachel could not

imagine.

"Well," Morgenes said distractedly, "she can always find another

what? Her husband?" A startled look came to his face, and he

hurried to the bedside. He seemed to finally realize who it was lying

there, bleeding her life out on the rough sheet.

"Susanna?" he asked quietly, and turned the woman's fearful,

pain-clenched face toward him. Her eyes opened wide for a moment

as she saw him, then another wave of agony shut them again. "Ah,

what has happened here?" Morgenes sighed. Susanna could only

moan, and the doctor looked up at Rachel and Elispeth with anger

on his face. "Why didn't anyone inform me that this poor girl was

ready to bear her child?"

"She was not due for two months more," Elispeth said gently.

"You know that. We are as surprised as you."

"And why should you care that a fisherman's widow was going to

have a baby?" Rachel said. She could be angry, too. "And why are

you arguing about it now?"

Morgenes stared at her for a moment, then blinked twice. "You

are absolutely correct," he said, and turned back to the bed. "I will

save the child, Susanna," he told the shivering woman.

She nodded her head once, then cried out.

30 Tad Williams

It was a thin, keening wail, but it was the cry of a living baby.

Morgenes handed the tiny, red-smeared creature to Elispeth.

"A boy," he said, and returned his attention to the mother. She

was quiet now and breathing more slowly, but her skin was white as

Harcha marble.

"I saved him, Susanna. I had to," he whispered. The comers of

the woman's mouth twitchedit might have been a smile.

"I ... know ..." she said, voice coming ever so softly in her

raw throat. "If only ... my Eahlferend . . . had not . . ." The

effort was too much, and she stopped. Elispeth leaned down to show

her the child, wrapped in blankets, still attached by the bloody um-

bilicus.

"He's small," the old woman smiled, "but that's because he ar-

rived so early. What is his name?"

". . . Call . . . him . . . Seoman . . ." Susanna croaked out.

". . . it means . . . 'waiting' . . ." She turned to Morgenes and

seemed to want to say something more. The doctor leaned closer, his

white hair brushing her snow-pale cheek, but she could not make the

words come. A moment later she gasped once, and her dark eyes

rolled up until the whites showed. The girl holding her hand began

to sob.

Rachel, too, felt tears come to her eyes. She turned away and

pretended to begin cleaning up. Elispeth was severing the infant's

last tie to his dead mother.

The movement caused Susanna's right hand, which had been

tightly tangled in her own hair, to sag free and drop limply to the

floor. As it struck, something shiny flew from her clutching palm

and rolled across the rough boards to stop near the doctor's foot.

From the comer of her eye Rachel saw Morgenes stoop down and

pick the object up. It was small, and disappeared easily into the

palm of his hand, and from there into his bag.

Rachel was outraged, but no one else seemed to have noticed. She

whirled to confront him, teardrops still standing in her eyes, but the

look on his face, the terrible grief, stilled her before she breathed a

word.

"He will be Seoman," the doctor said, his eyes strange and shad-

owed now as he moved closer, his voice hoarse. "You must take care

of him, Rachel. His parents are dead, you know."

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR31

^

A swift intake of breath. Rachel had caught herself just before she

slipped off the stool. Nodding off in bright daylightshe was

ashamed of herself! Then again, it only went to show the criminal

length to which she had driven herself today, all in an effort to make

up for the three girls off ... and for Simon.

What she needed was a little fresh air. Up on a stool, swatting the

broom around like a madwomanno wonder a body started in get-

ting the vapors. She'd just step outside for a moment. The lord knew

she had every right to a little fresh air. That Simon, such a wicked

boy.

They'd raised him, of course, she and the chambermaids. Susanna

hadn't any kinfolk nearby, and no one seemed to know much of

anything about her drowned husband Eahlferend, so they kept the

boy. Rachel had pretended to raise a fuss over it, but she would no

more have let him go than she would have betrayed her King, or left

beds unmade. It was Rachel who had given him the name Simon.

Everyone in the service of King John's household took a name from

the king's native island, Warinsten. Simon was the closest to Se-

oman, and so Simon it was.

Rachel went slowly down the stairs to the bottom floor, feeling

just a little shaky in the legs. She wished she'd brought a cloak, as

the air was bound to be nippy. The door creaked open slowlyit

was such a heavy door, needed the hinges oiled, most likelyand

she walked out into the entry yard. The morning sun was just nosing

over the battlement, peeping like a child.

She liked this spot, just underneath the stone span that connected

the dining hall building with the main body of the chapel. The little

courtyard in the shadow of the span was full of pine trees and

heather, all set about on small, sloping hills; the whole garden was

not more than a stone's throw in length. Looking up past the stone

walkway she could see the needle-slim thrust of Green Angel Tower,

shining white in the sunlight like an ivory tusk.

There had been a time, Rachel remembered, long before Simon

came, when she herself had been a girl playing in this garden. How

some of those maids would laugh to think of that: the Dragon as a

32 Tad Williams

little girl. Well, she had been, and after that a young ladynot

unpleasant to look at, either, and that was only the truth. The gar-

den then had been full of the rustle of brocade and silk, of lords and

ladies laughing, with hawks on their fists and a merry song on their

lips.

Now Simon, he thought he knew everythingGod just made

young men stupid, and that was that. Those girls had nearly spoiled

him beyond redemption, and would have if Rachel hadn't kept her

eye out. She knew what was what, even if these young ones thought

otherwise.

Things were different once, Rachel thought . . . and as she

thought it the pine smell of the shaded garden seemed to catch at

her heart. The castle had been such a beautiful, stirring place: tall

knights, plumed and shiny-mailed, and beautiful girls in fine dresses,

the music ... oh, and the tourney field all jewel-bright with tents!

Now the castle slept quietly, and only dreamed. The towering battle-

ments were commanded by Rachel's kind: by cooks and chamber-

maids, seneschals and scullions. . . .

it was a little chilly. Rachel leaned forward, hugging her shawl

tighter, then straightened up staring. Simon stood before her, hands

hidden behind his back. How on the earth had he managed to slip

up on her that way? And why did he have that idiot grin smeared

across his face? Rachel felt the strength of righteousness come surg-

ing back into her body. His shinclean an hour beforewas black-

ened with dirt and torn in several places, as were his breeches.

"Blessed Saint Rhiap save me!" Rachel shrieked. "What have you

done, you fool boy!?" Rhiappa had been an Aedonite woman of

Nabban who had died with the name of the One God on her lips

after being repeatedly violated by sea-pirates. She was a great favor-

ite with domestics.

"Look what I have, Rachel!" Simon said, producing a tattered,

lopsided cone of straw: a bird's nest. It gave off faint chirps. "I found

it underneath Hjeldin's Tower! It must have blown off in the wind.

Three of them are still alive, and I'm going to raise them!"

"Are you utterly mad?" Rachel lifted her broom on high, like the

vengeful lightnings of the Lord that had surely destroyed Rhiap's

ravishers. "You are no more going to raise those creatures in my

household than I am going to swim to Perdruin! Filthy things flying

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR33

around, getting in people's hairand look at your clothes! Do you

know how long it will take Sarrah to patch all that?" The broom-

stick quivered in the air.

Simon cast his eyes down. He had not found the nest on the

ground, of course: it was the one he had spotted in the Hedge Gar-

den, partially dislodged from its seat in the Festival Oak. He had

climbed up to rescue it, and in his excitement at the thought of

having the young birds for his own he had not given a thought to the

work he was making for Sarrah, the quiet, homely girl who did the

downstairs mending. A wave of gloom and frustration washed over

him-

"But Rachel, I remembered to pick the rushes!" He balanced the

nest carefully and pulled from beneath his jerkin a meager, bedrag-

gled clump of reeds.

Rachel's expression softened somewhat, but the scowl remained.

"It's just that you don't think, boy, you don't thinkyou're like a

little child. If something gets broken, or something is done late,

someone has to take responsibility for it. That's the way the world is.

I know you mean no real harm, but must you be so By-Our-Lady

stupid?"

Simon looked up cautiously. Although his face still showed sor-

row and contrition in proper measure, Rachel with her basilisk eye

could see that he thought he was through the worst of it. Her brow

re-beetled.

"I'm sorry, Rachel, truly I am . . ." he was saying when she

reached out and poked his shoulder with her broom handle.

"Don't you come to the old 'sorry' with me, lad. Just you take

those birds out of here and put them back. There'll be no flapping,

flying creatures 'round these parts."

"Oh, Rachel, I could keep them in a cage! I could build one!"

"No, no, and once more means no. Take them and give them to

your useless doctor if you want, but don't bring them 'round to

trouble honest people who have work to do."

Simon trudged off, the nest cupped in his hands. He had made a

miscalculation somewhereRachel had almost given in, but she was

a tough old stalk. The slightest error in dealing with her meant swift,

terrible defeat.

"Simon!" she called. He whirled.

"I can keep them?!"

34 Tad Williams

"Of course not. Don't be a mooncalf." She stared at him. An

uncomfortably long time passed; Simon shifted from foot to foot and

waited.

"You go work for the doctor, boy," she said at last. "Maybe he

can squeeze some sense into you. I give up." She glowered at him.

"Mind you do what you're told, and thank himand what little

luck you have leftfor this one last chance. Understand?"

"Yes, certainly!" he said happily.

"You're not escaping from me all that easily. Be back at dinner

hour."

"Yes, mistress!" Simon turned to hurry off to Morgenes, then

stopped.

"Rachel? Thank you."

Rachel made a noise of disgust and marched back toward the

stairs to the dining hall. Simon wondered how she had gotten so

many pine needles stuck in her shawl.

A gentle mist of snow had begun to float down from the low, tin-

colored clouds. The weather had turned for good, Simon knew: it

would be cold right through to Candlemansa. Rather than carry the

baby birds across the windy courtyard, he decided to duck through

the chapel and continue through to the western side of the Inner

Bailey. Morning prayers had been over for an hour or two, and the

church should be empty. Father Dreosan might not look kindly on

Simon tramping through his lair, but the good father was undoubt-

edly entrenched at table with his usual large midmorning meal,

humming ominously at the quality of the butter or the consistency

of the honey-and-bread pudding.

Simon climbed the two dozen steps up to the chapel's side door.

The snow had started to flurry; the gray stone of the doorway was

dotted with the wet residue of dying flakes. The door swung back on

surprisingly silent hinges.

Rather than leave telltale wet footprints across the tile floor of the

chapel, he pushed through the velvet hangings at the back of the

entry chamber and climbed another set of stairs to the choir loft.

The cluttered, stuffy loft, a steaming misery-box during high sum-

mer, was now pleasantly warm. The floor was strewn with bits of the

monks' leavings: nutshells, an apple core, scraps of slate roof tiles on

which messages had been written in petty contravention of the si-

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR35

lence vowsit looked more like a cage for apes or festival bears than

a room where men of God came to sing the Lord's praises. Simon

smiled, threading his way quietly among the various other oddments

strewn aboutbolts ofplaincloth, a few small, flimsy wooden stools.

It was nice to know that those dour-faced, shaven-headed men could

be as unruly as farm boys,

Alarmed by the sudden sound of conversation, Simon stopped

and edged back into the wall hanging that blanketed the rear of the

loft. Crushed into the musty fabric, he held his breath as his heart

raced. If Father Dreosan or Bamabas the sexton were below, he

would never make his way down and out the far door unobserved.

He would have to sneak back out the way he had come, using the

courtyard route after allthe master-spy in the enemy's camp.

Squatting, silent as cotton wool, Simon strained to locate those

who spoke. He seemed to hear two voices; as he concentrated the

birdlings peeped quietly in his hands. He balanced the nest carefully

for a moment in the crook of his elbow while he pulled off his hat

more woe to him if Father Dreosan should catch him hatted in the

chapel!then slid the soft brim down over the top of the nest. The

chicks went promptly silent, as if night had fallen. Parting the edges

of the hanging with trembling care he leaned his head out. The

voices were rising from the aisle below the altar. Their tone seemed

unaltered: he had not been heard.

Only a few torches were lit. The vast roof of the chapel was al-

most entirely painted in shadow, the shining windows of the dome

seeming to float in a nighttime sky, holes in the darkness through

which the lines of Heaven could be seen. His foundlings capped and

delicately cradled, Simon crept forward on noiseless feet to the rail

of the choir loft. Positioning himself at the shadowy end nearest the

staircase descending to the chapel proper, he poked his face between

the carved rails of the balustrade, one cheek against the martyrdom

of Saint Tunath, the other rubbing the birth of Saint Pelippa of the

Island.

". . . And you, with your God-be-cursed complaining!" one of

the voices railed. "I have grown unutterably tired of it." Simon

could not see the speaker's face; his back was to the loft, and he

wore a high-collared cloak. His companion, howeverslumped

across from him on a pew-benchwas quite visible; Simon recog-

nized him at once.

36 Tad Williams

"People who are told things they do not want to hear often call

such tidings 'complaining,' brother," said the one on the bench, and

waved a slim-fingered left hand wearily. "I warn you about the

priest out of love for the kingdom." There was a moment's silence.

"And in memory of the affection we once shared."

"You may say anything, anything you wish to!" the first man

barked, his anger sounding strangely like pain, "but the Chair is

mine by law and our father's wish. Nothing you think, say, or do

can change that!"

Josua Lackhand, as Simon had often heard the King's younger

son called, pushed himself stiffly up from the bench. His pearl-gray

tunic and hose bore subtle patterns of red and white; he wore his

brown hair cropped close to his face and high upon his forehead.

Where his right hand should have been, a capped cylinder of black

leather protruded from his sleeve.

"I do not want the Dragonbone Chairbelieve that, Elias," he

hissed. His words were soft-spoken, but they flew to Simon's hiding

place like arrows. "I merely warn you against the priest Pryrates, a

man with . . . unhealthy interests. Do not bring him here, Elias.

He is a dangerous manbelieve me, for I know him of old from the

Usirean seminary in Nabban. The monks there shunned him like a

plague carrier. And yet you continue to give him your ear, as though

he were trustworthy as Duke Isgrimnur or old Sir Fluiren. Fool! He

will be the ruin of our house." He composed himself. "I seek only to

offer a word of heartfelt advice to you. Please believe me. I have no

designs on the throne."

"Then leave the castle!" Elias growled, and turned his back on his

brother, arms crossed on his chest. "Go, and let me prepare to rule

as a man shouldfree of your complaints and manipulation."

The older prince had the same high brow and hawklike nose, but

was far more powerfully built than Josua; he looked like a man who

could break necks with his hands. His hair, like his riding boots and

tunic, was black. His cloak and hose were a travel-stained green.

"We are both our father's sons, 0 King-to-be . . ." Josua's smile

was mocking. "The crown is yours by right. The griefs we bear

against each other need not worry you. Your soon-to-be-royal self

will be quite safemy word on that. But," his voice gained force, "I

will not, do you hear me, will not be ordered out of my sire's house

by anyone. Not even you, Elias."

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR37

His brother turned and stared; as their eyes met it seemed to

Simon a flash of swords.

"Griefs we bear against each other?" Elias snarled, and there was

something broken and agonized in his voice. "What grief can you

bear against me? Your hand?" He walked away from Josua a few

steps, and stood with his back to his brother, his words thick with

bitterness. "The loss of a hand. Because of you, / stand a widower,

and my daughter half an orphan. Do not speak to me of grief!"

Josua seemed to hold his breath for a time before replying.

"Your pain . . . your pain is known to me, brother," he said at

last. "Do you not know, I would have given not just my right hand,

but my life . . . !"

Elias whirled, reaching a hand to his throat, and pulled something

glittering from out of his tunic. Simon gaped between the railings. It

was not a knife, but something soft and yielding, like a swatch of

shimmering cloth. Elias held it before his brother's startled face for a

sneering moment, then threw it to the floor, pivoted on his heel and

stalked away up the aisle. Josua stood motionless for a long moment,

then bent, like a man in a dream, to pick up the bright objecta

woman's silver scarf. As he stared, its gleam cupped in his hand, a

grimace of pain or rage twisted his face. Simon breathed in and out

several times before Josua at last tucked the thing into the breast of

his shirt and followed his brother out of the chapel.

A lengthy interval had passed before Simon felt safe to creep

down from his spying-place and make his way to the chapel's main

door. He felt as though he had witnessed a strange puppet show, a

Usires Play enacted for him alone. The world suddenly seemed less

stable, less trustworthy, if the princes of Erkynland, heirs to all of

Osten Ard, could shout and brawl like drunken soldiers.

Peering into the hall, Simon was startled by a sudden movement:

a figure in a brown jerkin hurrying away up the corridora small

figure, a youth of perhaps Simon's age or less. The stranger nicked a

glance backwarda brief glimpse of startled eyesand then was

gone around the comer. Simon did not recognize him. Could this

person have been spying on the princes, too? Simon shook his head,

feeling as confused and stupid as a sun-struck ox. He pulled his hat

off the nest, bringing daylight and chirping life back to the birds.

Again he shook his head. It had been an unsettling morning.

4

Cricket Cage

MORGENES was rattling about his workshop, deeply engaged in a

search for a missing book. He waved Simon permission to find a

cage for the young birds, then went back to his hunt, toppling piles

of manuscripts and folios like a blind giant in a city of fragile towers.

Finding a home for the nestlings was more difficult than Simon

had expected: there were plenty of cages, but none seemed quite

right. Some had bars so widely spaced that they seemed built for

pigs or bears; others were already crammed full of strange objects,

none of which resembled animals in the least. Finally he found one

that seemed suitable beneath a roll of shiny cloth. It was knee-high

and bell-shaped, made of tightly twisted river reeds, empty but for a

layer of sand on the bottom; there was a small door on the side held

closely by a twist of rope. Simon worried the knot loose and opened

it.

"Stop! Stop that this instant!"

"What?!" Simon leaped back. The doctor hopped past him and

pushed the cage door shut with his foot.

"Sorry to alarm you, boy," Morgenes panted, "but I should have

thought before sending you off to dig and muck about. This is no

good for your purposes, I'm afraid."

"But why not?" Simon leaned forward, squinting, but could see

nothing extraordinary.

"Well, my grub, stand here for a bit and don't touch, and I'll show

you. Silly of me not to have remembered." Morgenes cast about for

a moment until he found a long-ignored basket of dried fruit. He

blew the dust off a fig as he walked to the cage.

"Now observe carefully." He opened the door and tossed in the

fruit; it landed in the sand on the cage bottom.

"Yes?" asked Simon, puzzled.

"Wait," whispered the doctor. No sooner had the word passed his

39

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

lips than something began to happen. At first it seemed that the air

in the cage was shimmering; it quickly became apparent that the

sand itself was shifting, eddying delicately around the fig. Suddenly

so suddenly that Simon jumped backward with a surprised grunt

a great toothy mouth opened in the sand, gulping the fruit as

swiftly as a carp might break the surface of a pond to take a mos-

quito. There was a brief ripple along the sand, and then the cage was

still again, as innocent-seeming as before.

"What's under there?" Simon gasped. Morgenes laughed.

"That's it!" He seemed very pleased. "That's the beastie itself!

There is no sand: it's just a masquerade, so to speak. The whole

thing at the bottom of the cage is one clever animal. Lovely, isn't

it?"

"I suppose so," said Simon, without much conviction. "Where

does it come from?"

"Nascadu, out in the desert countries. You can see why I didn't

want you poking about in thereI don't think your feathered or-

phans would have had a very happy time of it, either."

Morgenes shut the cage door again, binding it closed with a

leather thong, and placed it on a high shelf. Having climbed onto his

table to accomplish this, he then continued along its great length,

stepping expertly over the litter until he found what he wanted and

hopped down. This container, made of thin strips of wood, held no

suspicious sand.

"Cage for crickets," the doctor explained, and helped the youth

move the birds into their new home. A small dish of water was

placed within; from somewhere else Morgenes even produced a tiny

sack of seeds, which he scattered on the cage floor.

"Are they old enough for that?" Simon wondered. The doctor

waved a careless hand.

"Not to worry," he said. "Good for their teeth."

Simon promised his birds that he would be back soon with some-

thing more suitable, and followed the doctor across the workshop.

"Well, young Simon, charmer of finch and swallow," Morgenes

smiled, "what can 1 do for you this cold forenoon? It seems to me

that we had not completed your just and honorable frog transaction

the other day when we were forced to stop."

"Yes, and I was hoping . . ."

"And I believe there was another thing, too?"

40 Tad Williams

"What?" Simon thought hard.

"A little matter of a floor in need of sweeping? A broom, lone and

lorn, aching in its twiggy heart to be put to use?"

Simon nodded glumly. He had hoped an apprenticeship might

start on a more auspicious note.

"Ah. A small aversion to menial labor?" The doctor cocked an

eyebrow. "Understandable but misplaced. One should treasure those

humdrum tasks that keep the body occupied but leave the mind and

heart unfettered. Well, we shall strive to help you through your first

day in service. I have thought of a wonderful arrangement." He did

a funny little jig-step. "I talk, you work. Good, eh?"

Simon shrugged. "Do you have a broom? I forgot mine."

Morgenes poked around behind the door, producing at last an

object so worn and cobwebby it was scarcely recognizable as a tool

for sweeping,

"Now," the doctor said, presenting it to him with as much dignity

as if it were the king's own standard, "what do you want me to talk

to you about?"

"About the sea-raiders and their black iron, and the Sithi . . .

and our castle, of course. And King John."

"Ah, yes." He nodded thoughtfully. "A longish list, but if we are

not once again interrupted by that cloth-headed sluggard Inch, I

might be able to whittle it down a bit. Set to, boy, set tolet the

dust fly! By the by, where exactly in the story was I . . . ?"

"Oh, the Rimmersmen had come, and the Sithi were retreating,

and the Rimmersmen had iron swords and they were chopping peo-

ple up, and killing everyone, killing the Sithi with black iron . . ."

"Hmmm," said Morgenes dryly, "it comes back to me now.

Hmm. Well, truth be told, the northern raiders were not killing quite

everybody; neither were their expansions and assaults quite so relent-

less as I may have made them sound. They were many years in the

north before they ever crossed the Frostmarcheven then they ran

into a major obstacle: the men of Hemystir."

"Yes, but the Sithi-folk . . . !" Simon was impatient. He knew all

about the Hemystirihad met many people from that pagan west-

ern land. "You said that the little people had to flee from the iron

swords!"

"Not little people, Simon, I ... oh, my!" The doctor slumped

down onto a pile of leather-bound books and pulled at his sparse

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR41

chinwhiskers."I can see that I must give this story in greater depth.

Are you expected back for the midday meal?"

"No," Simon lied promptly. An uninterrupted story from the doc-

tor seemed a fair bargain for one of Rachel's fabled thrashings.

"Good. Well, then, let us find ourselves some bread and onions

. . . and perhaps a noggin of something to drinktalking is such

thirsty workthen I shall endeavor to turn dross to purest Metal

Absolute: in short, to teach you something."

When they had provisioned themselves, the doctor once more

took a seat.

"Well and well, Simonoh, and don't be bashful about wielding

that broom while you eat. The young are so flexible!now, correct

me please if I misspeak. The day today is Drorsday, the fifteenth

sixteenth?no, fifteenth of Novander. And the year is 1164, is it

not?"

"I think so."

"Excellent. Do put that over on the stool, will you? So, the eleven-

hundred and sixty-fourth year since what? Do you know?"

Morgenes leaned forward.

Simon pulled a sour face. The doctor knew he was a mooncalf and

was testing him. How was a scullion supposed to know about such

things? He continued to sweep in silence.

After some moments he looked up. The doctor was chewing, star-

ing at him intently over a crusty chunk of dark bread.

What sharp blue eyes the old man has!

Simon turned away again.

"Well, then?" the doctor said around a mouthful. "Since what?"

"I don't know," Simon muttered, hating the sound of his own

resentful voice.

"So be it. You don't knowor you think you don't. Do you listen

to the proclamations when the crier reads them?"

"Sometimes. When I'm at Market. Otherwise Rachel tells me

what they say."

"And what comes at the end? They read the date at the end, do

you remember?and mind that crystal um, boy, you sweep like a

man shaving his worst enemy. What does it say at the end?"

Simon, nettled with shame, was about to throw the broom down

and leave when suddenly a phrase floated up from the depths of his

memory, bringing with it market-soundsthe wind-snapping of

42 Tad Williams

pennants and awningsand the clean smell of spring grass strewn

underfoot.

"Since the Founding." He was sure. He heard it as though he

were standing on Main Row.

"Excellent!" The doctor lifted his jar as if in salute and knocked

back a long swallow. "Now, the 'Founding' of what? Don't worry,"

he continued as Simon began to shake his head, "I'll tell you. I don't

expect young men these daysraised as they are on apocryphal

errantry and derring-doto know much of the real substance of

events." The doctor shook his own head, mock-sadly. "The Nab-

banai Imperium was foundedor declared to be foundedeleven-

hundred and sixty-whatever-it-was years ago, by Tiyagaris, the first

Imperator. At that time the legions of Nabban ruled all the coun-

tries of Men north and south, on both sides of the River Gleniwent."

"Butbut Nabban is small!" Simon was astonished. "It's just a

small part of King John's kingdom!"

"That, young man," Morgenes said, "is what we call 'history.'

Empires have a tendency to decline; kingdoms to collapse. Given a

thousand years or so, anything can happenactually, Nabban's

zenith lasted considerably less than that. What I was getting to,

however, is that Nabban once ruled Men, and Men lived side by side

with the Sithi-folk. The king of the Sithi reigned here in Asu'athe

Hayholt, as we call it. The Eri-king'eri' is an old word for Sitha

refused humans the right to enter his people's lands except by spe-

cial grant, and the humansmore than a little afraid of the Sithi

obeyed."

"What are Sithi? You said they're not the Little Folk."

Morgenes smiled. "I appreciate your interest, ladespecially

when I haven't put in killing or maiming once yet today!but I

would appreciate it even more if you were not so shy with the

broom. Dance with her, boy, dance with her! Look, clean that off, if

you will."

Morgenes trotted over to the wall and pointed to a patch of soot

several cubits in diameter. It looked very much like a footprint.

Simon decided not to ask, and instead set to sweeping it loose from

the white-plastered stone.

"Ahhhh, many thanks to you. I've been wanting to get that down

for monthssince last year's Harrow's Eve, as a matter of fact.

Now, where in the name of the Lesser Vistrils was I . . . ? Oh,

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR43

your questions. The Sithi? Well, they were here first, and perhaps

will be here when we're gone. When we're all gone. They are as

different from us as Man is from the Animalbut somewhat simi-

lar, too. . . ." The doctor stopped to consider.

"To be fair, Man and Animal both live a similarly brief span of

years in Osten Ard, and this is not true of Sithi and Man. If the Fair

Folk are not actually deathless, they are certainly much longer-lived

than any mortal man, even our nonagenarian king. It could be they

do not die at all, except by choice or violenceperhaps if you are a

Sitha, violence itself might be a choice. . . ."

Morgenes trailed off. Simon was staring at him open-mouthed.

"Oh, shut that jaw, boy, you look like Inch. It's my privilege to

wander in thought a little bit. Would you rather go back and listen

to the Mistress of Chambermaids?"

Simon's mouth closed, and he resumed sweeping the soot off the

wall. He had changed the original footprint shape to something re-

sembling a sheep; he stopped from time to time to eye it apprais-

ingly. An itch of boredom made itself known at thettack of his neck:

he liked the doctor, and would rather be here than anywhere else

but the old man did go on so! Maybe if he swept a little more of the

top part away it would look like a dog . . . ? His stomach growled

quietly.

Morgenes went on to explain, in what Simon thought was perhaps

unnecessary detail, about the era of peace between the subjects of the

ageless Eri-king and those of the upstart human Imperators.

". . . so, Sithi and Man found a sort of balance," the old man

said. "They even traded together a little . . ."

Simon's stomach rumbled loudly. The doctor smiled a tiny smile

and put back the last onion, which he had just lifted from the table.

"Men brought spices and dyes from the Southern Islands, or pre-

cious stones from the Grianspog Mountains in Hemystir; in return

they received beautiful things from the Eri-king's coffers, objects of

cunning and mysterious workmanship."

Simon's patience was at an end. "But what about the shipmen, the

Rimmersmen? What about the iron swords?" He looked about for

something to gnaw on. The last onion? He sidled cautiously over.

Morgenes was facing the window; while he gazed out at the gray

noontide, Simon pocketed the papery brown thing and hurried back

44 Tad Williams

to the wall-spot. Much diminished in size, the splotch now looked

like a serpent.

Morgenes continued without turning away from the window. "I

suppose there has been quite a bit of peaceful-times-and-people in

my history today." He wagged his head, walking back to his seat.

"Peace will soon give waynever fear." He shook his head again,

and a lock of thin hair settled across his wrinkled forehead. Simon

gnawed furtively at his onion.

"Nabban's golden age lasted a little over four centuries, until the

earliest coming of the Rimmersmen to Osten Ard. The Nabbanai

Imperium had begun to turn in on itself. Tiyagaris' line had finally

died out, and every new Imperator who seized power was another

cast of the dice cup; some were good men who tried to hold the

realm together. Others, like Crexis the Goat, were worse than any

northern reavers. And some, like Enfortis, were just weak.

"During Enfortis' reign the iron-wielders came. Nabban decided

to withdraw from the north altogether. They fell back across the

river Gleniwent so quickly that many of the northern frontier out-

posts found themselves entirely deserted, left behind to join the on-

coming Rimmersmen or die.

"Hmmm . . - Am I boring you, boy?"

Simon, leaning against the wall, jerked himself upright to face

Morgenes' knowing smile.

"No, Doctor, no! I was just closing my eyes to listen better. Go

on!"

Actually, all of these names, names, names were making him a bit

drowsy . . . and he wished the doctor would hurry along to the

parts with battles in them. But he did like to be the only one in the

entire castle to whom Morgenes was speaking. The chambermaids

didn't know anything about these kind of things . . . men things.

What did maids or serving girls know about armies, and flags, and

swords . . . ?

"Simon?"

"Oh! Yes? Go on!" He whirled to sweep off the last of the wall-

blot as the doctor resumed. The wall was clean. Had he finished

without knowing?

"So I will try and make the story a little briefer, lad. As I was

saying, Nabban withdrew its armies from the north, becoming for

the first time purely a southern empire. It was just the beginning of

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR45

the end, of course; as time passed, the Imperium folded itself up just

like a blanket, smaller and smaller until today they are nothing more

than a duchya peninsula with its few attendant islands. What in

the name of Paldir's Arrow are you doing?"

Simon was contorting himself like a hound trying to scratch a

difficult spot. Yes, there was the last of the wall dirt: a snake-shaped

smear across the back of his shirt. He had leaned against it. He

turned sheepishly to Morgenes, but the doctor only laughed and

continued.

"Without the Imperial garrisons, Simon, the north was in chaos.

The shipmen had captured the northernmost part of the

Frostmarch, naming their new home Rimmersgard. Not content

with that, the Rimmersmen were fanning out southward, sweeping

all before them in a bloody advance. Put those folios in a stack

against the wall, will you?

"They robbed and ruined other Men, making captives of many,

but the Sithi they deemed evil creatures; with fire and cold iron they

hunted the Fair Folk to their death everywhere . - . careful with

that one, there's a good lad."

"Over here. Doctor?"

"Yesbut. Bones of Anaxos, don't drop them! Set them down! If

you knew the terrible midnight hours I spent rolling dice in an

Utanyeat graveyard to get my hands on them . . . ! There! Much

better.

"Now the people ofHemystira proud, fierce people whom even

the Nabbanai Imperators never really conqueredwere not at all

willing to bend their necks to Rimmersgard. They were horrified by

what the northerners were doing to the Sithi. The Hemystiri had

been of all Men the closest to Fair Folkthere is still visible today

the mark of an ancient trade road between this castle and the Taig at

Hemysadharc. The lord of Hemystir and the Eri-king made a des-

perate compact, and for a while held the northern tide at bay.

"But even combined, their resistance could not last forever.

Fingil, king of the Rimmersmen, swept down across the Frostmarch

over the borders of the Eri-king's territory . . ." Morgenes smiled

sadly. "We're coming to the end now, young Simon, never fear,

coming to the end of it all. . . .

"In the year 663 the two great hosts came to the plains of Ach

Samrath, the Summerfield, north of the River Gleniwent. For five

46 Tad Williams

days of terrible, merciless carnage the Hemystiri and the Sithi held

back the might of the Rimmersmen. On the sixth day, though, they

were set on treacherously from their unprotected flank by an army

of men from the Thrithings, who had long coveted the riches of

Erkynland and the Sithi for their own. They made a fearful charge

under cover of darkness. The defense was broken, the Hemystiri

chariots smashed, the White Stag of the House of Hem trampled

into the bloody dirt. It is said that ten thousand men of Hemystir

died in the field that day. No one knows how many Sithi fell, but

their losses were grievous, too. Those Hemystiri who survived fled

back to the forest of their home. In Hemystir, Ach Samrath is today

a name only for hatred and loss."

"Ten thousand!" Simon whistled. His eyes shone with the terror

and grandness of it all.

Morgenes noted the boy's expression with a small grimace, but

did not comment.

"That was the day that Sithi mastery in Osten Ard came to an

end, even though it took three long years of siege before Asu'a fell to

the victorious northerners.

"If not for strange, horrible magics worked by the Eri-king's son,

there would likely have been not a single Sithi to survive the fall of

the Castle. Many did, however, fleeing to the forests, and south to

the waters and . . . and elsewhere."

Now Simon's attention was fixed as though nailed. "And the Eri-

king's son? What was his name? What kind of magic did he do?"a

sudden thought"How about Prester John? I thought you were

going to tell me about the kingour king!"

"Another day, Simon." Morgenes fanned his brow with a sheaf of

whisper-thin parchments, although the chamber was quite cool.

"There is much to tell about the dark ages after Asu'a fell, many

stories. The Rimmersmen ruled here until the dragon came. In later

years, while the dragon slept, other men held the castle. Many years

and several kings in the Hayholt, many dark years and many deaths

until John came. . . ." He trailed off, passing a hand over his face

as though to brush weariness away.

"But what about the king of the Sithi's son?" Simon asked quietly.

"What about the ... the 'terrible magic'?"

"About the Eri-king's son ... it is better to say nothing."

"But why?"

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR47

"Enough questions, boy!" Morgenes growled, waving his hands.

"I am tired of talking!"

Simon was offended. He had only been trying to hear the whole

story; why were grown people so easily upset? However, it was best

not to boil the hen who lays golden eggs.

"I'm sorry, Doctor." He tried to look contrite, but the old scholar

looked so funny with his pink, flushed monkey-face and his wispy

hair sticking up! Simon felt his lip curling toward a smile. Morgenes

saw it, but maintained his stem expression.

"Truly, I'm sorry." No change. What to try next? "Thank you for

telling me the story."

"Not a 'story'!" Morgenes roared. "History! Now be off with you!

Come back tomorrow morning ready to work, for you have still

barely begun today's work!"

Simon got up, trying to keep his smile in check, but as he turned

to go it broke loose and wriggled across his face like a ribbon-snake.

As the door closed behind him he heard Morgenes cursing whatever

eldritch demons had hidden his jug of porter.

Afternoon sunlight was knifing down through chinks in the heavy

clouds as Simon made his way back to the Inner Bailey. On the face

of it he seemed to dawdle and gape, a tall, awkward, red-haired boy

in dust caked clothes. Inside he was aswarm with strange thoughts,

a hive of buzzing, murmuring desires.

Look at this castle, he thoughtold and dead, stone pressed upon

lifeless stone, a pile of rocks inhabited by small-minded creatures.

But it had been different once. Great things had happened here.

Horns had blown, swords had glittered, great armies had crashed

against each other and rebounded like the waves of the Kynslagh

battering the Seagate wall. Hundreds of years had passed, but it

seemed to Simon it was happening just now only for him, while the

slow, witless folk who shared the castle with him crawled past,

thinking of nothing but the next meal, and a nap directly afterward.

Idiots.

As he came through the postern gate a glimmer of light caught his

eye, drawing it up to the distant walkway that ringed Hjeldin's

Tower. A girl stood there, bright and small as a piece of jewelry, her

green dress and golden hair embracing the ray of sunlight as if it had

arrowed down from the sky for her alone. Simon could not see her

48 Tad Williams

face, but he was somehow certain she was beautifulbeautiful and

forgiving as the image of the Immaculate Elysia that stood in the

chapel.

For a moment that flash of green and gold kindled him like a

spark on dry timber. He felt all the bother and resentment that he

had carried disappear, burned away in a hasty second. He was as

light and buoyant as swansdown, prey to any breeze that might

carry him away, might waft him up to that golden gleam.

Then he looked away from the wonderful faceless girl, down at his

own ragged garments. Rachel was waiting, and his dinner had got-

ten cold. A certain indefinable weight climbed back into its accus-

tomed seat, bending his neck and slumping his shoulders as he

trudged toward the servants' quarters.

The Tower Window

NOVANDER was sputtering out in wind and delicate snow; Decander

waited patiently, year's-end in its train.

King John Presbyter had been taken ill after calling his two sons

back to the Hayholt, and had returned to his shadowed room, again

to be surrounded by leeches, learned doctors, and scolding, fretting

body servants. Bishop Domitis swept in from Saint Sutrin's, Erches-

ter's great church, and set up shop at John's bedside, shaking the

king awake at all hours to inspect the texture and heft of the royal

soul. The old man, continuing to weaken, bore both pain and priest

with gallant stoicism.

In the tiny chamber next to the king's own that Towser had occu-

pied for forty years the sword Bright-Nail lay, oiled and scabbarded,

wrapped in fine linens at the bottom of the jester's oaken chest.

Far and wide across the broad face of Osten Ard the word flew:

Prester John was dying. Hemystir in the west and northern

Rimmersgard immediately dispatched delegations to the bedside of

stricken Erkynland. Old Duke Isgrimnur, John's left-hand compan-

ion at the Great Table, brought fifty Rimmersmen from Elvritshalla

and Naarved, the whole company wrapped head to foot in furs and

leather for the winter crossing of the Frostmarch. Only twenty

Hemystiri accompanied King Lluth's son Gwythinn, but the bright

gold and silver they wore flashed bravely, outshining the poor cloth

of their garments.

The castle began to come alive with the music of languages long

unheard, Rimmerspakk and Perdruinese and Harcha-tongue.

Naraxi's rolling island speech floated in the gateyard, and the stables

echoed to the singsong cadences of the Thrithings-menthe

grasslanders, as always, most comfortable around horses. Over these

and all others hung the droning speech of Nabban, the busy tongue

50 Tad Williams

of Mother Church and her Aedonite priests, taking charge as always

of the comings and goings of men and their souls.

In the tall Hayholt and Erchester below these small armies of

foreigners came together and flowed apart, for the most part without

incident. Although many of these peoples had been ancient enemies,

nearly four score years beneath the High King's Ward had healed

many wounds. More gills of ale were bought than harsh words

traded.

There was one worrisome exception to this rule of harmonyone

difficult to miss or misunderstand. Everywhere they met, under

Hayholt's broad gates or in the narrow alleyways of Erchester,

Prince Elias' green-liveried soldiers and Prince Josua's gray-shirted

retainers jostled and argued, mirroring in public the private division

of the king's sons. Prester John's Erkynguard were called upon to

break up several ugly brawls. At last, one of Josua's supporters was

stabbed by a young Meremund noble, an intimate of the heir-appar-

ent. Luckily, Josua's man took no fatal harmthe blow was a

drunken one, and poorly aimedand the partisans were forced to

heed the rebukes of the older courtiers. The troops of the two

princes returned to cold stares and disdainful sneers; open bloodshed

was averted.

These were strange days in Erkynland, and in all of Osten Ard,

days freighted with equal measures of sorrow and excitement. The

king was not dead, but it seemed he soon would be. The whole world

was changinghow could anything remain the same once Prester

John no longer sat the Dragonbone Chair?

^

". . . Udunsday: dream . . . Drorsday: better . . . Frayday:

best . . . Satrinsday: market day . . . Sundayrest!"

Down the creaking stairs two at a clip, Simon sang the old rhyme

at the top of his voice. He almost knocked over Sophrona the Linen

Mistress as she led a squadron of blanket-burdened maids in at the

Pine Garden door. She threw herself back against the doorjamb with

a little shriek as Simon pounded by. then waved a skinny fist at his

fast-departing back.

"I'll tell Rachel!" she shouted. Her charges stifled laughter.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

51

Who cared for Sophrona? Today was Satrinsdaymarket day

and Judith the cook had given Simon two pennies to buy some

things for her, and a fithing pieceglorious Satrinsday!to spend

on himself. The coins made a lovely, suggestive clink in his leather

purse as he spiraled out through the castle's acres of long, circular

courtyards, out the Inner Bailey gate to Middle Bailey, nearly empty

now since its residents, the soldiers and the artisans, were mostly on

duty or at market.

In Outer Bailey animals milled in the commons yard, bumping

miserably together in the cold, guarded by herders who looked

scarcely more cheerful. Simon bustled along the rows of low houses,

storage rooms, and animal sheds, many of them so old and over-

grown with winter-naked ivy that they seemed only warty growths

on the High Keep's inner walls.

The sun was glinting through the clouds on the carvings that

swarmed the mighty chalcedony face of the Nearulagh Gate. As he

slowed to a puddle-dodging trot, staring open-mouthed at the intri-

cate depictions of King John's victory over Ardrivisthe battle that

had brought Nabban at last under the royal handSimon heard the

tumult of swift hooves and the shrill squeak of cart wheels. He

looked up in horror to find himself faced with the white, rolling eyes

of a horse, mud gouting from beneath its hooves as it plunged

through the Nearulagh Gate. Simon flung himself out of the way

and felt wind on his face as the horse thundered by, the cart drawn

behind it pitching wildly. He had a brief glimpse of the driver,

dressed in a dark hooded cloak lined with scarlet. The man's eyes

raked him as the cart hurtled pastthey were black and shiny, like

the cruel button-orbs of a shark; although the contact was fleeting,

Simon felt almost that the driver's gaze burned him. He reeled back,

clutching at the stone facing of the gate, and watched as the cart

disappeared around the track of Outer Bailey. Chickens squawked

and flapped in its wake, except for those that lay crushed and bloody

in the wagon's ruts. Muddied feathers drifted to the ground.

"Here, boy, not hurt are you?" One of the gatewarders peeled

Simon's trembling hand from the carvings and set him back upright.

"Get on with you, then."

Snow swirled in the air and stuck melting to his cheeks as he

walked down the long hill toward Erchester. The chink of the coins

in his pocket now played to a slower, wobbly-kneed rhythm.

52 Tad Williams

"That priest is mad as the moon," Simon heard the warder say to

his gate companion. "Were he not Prince Elias' man . . ."

Three little children following their toiling mother up the damp

hillpath pointed at long-legged Simon as he passed, laughing at the

expression on his pale face.

Main Row was roofed all over with stitched skins that stretched

across the wide thoroughfare from building to building. At each

waycrossing were set great stone fire-cairns, mostbut certainly not

allof their smokes billowing up through holes in the roof-tenting.

Snow fluttering down through the chimney holes sizzled and hissed

in the hot air. Warming themselves by the flames or strolling and

talkingall the while surreptitiously examining the goods displayed

on every sideErchester and Hayholt folk mixed with those of the

outer fiefs, eddying together in and out of the wide central row

which ran two full leagues from the Nearulagh Gate to Battle

Square at the city's far end. Caught up in the press, Simon found his

spirits reviving. What should he care for a drunken priest? After all,

it was market day!

Today the usual army of marketers and shrill-voiced hawkers,

wide-eyed provincials, gamblers, cutpurses, and musicians was

swelled by the soldiery of the various missions to the dying king.

Rimmersman, Hemystiri, Warinstenner or Perdruinese, their swag-

ger and bright garb caught Simon's jackdaw fancy. He followed one

group of blue and gold clad Nabbanai legionaries, admiring their

strut and easy superiority, understanding without language the off-

hand way they insulted each other. He was edging up closer, hoping

for a clear look at the short stabbing-swords they wore scabbarded

high on their waists, when one of thema bright-eyed soldier wear-

ing a thin, dark mustacheturned and saw him.

"Hea, brothers!" he said with a grin, grabbing at one of his fel-

lows' arms. "Look now! A young sneaking thief, I wager, and one

who has his eye on your purse, Turis!"

Both men squared to face Simon, and the heavy, bearded one

called Turis gave the youth a grim stare. "Did he touch it, then I

would kill," he growled- His command of the Westerling speech was

not as sure as the first man's; he seemed to lack the other's humor as

well.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR53

Three other legionaries had now come back to join the first pair.

They gradually closed in until Simon felt like a winded fox.

"What's here, Gelles?" one of the new arrivals asked Tuns' com-

panion. "Hue fauge? Did this one steal?"

"Nai, nai . . ." Gelles chuckled, "I was but having sport with

Turis. Skinny-one here did nothing."

"I have my own purse!" Simon said indignantly. He untied it from

his belt and waved it in the soldiers' smirking faces. "I am no thief! I

live in the king's household! Your king!" The soldiers all laughed.

"Hea, listen to him!" Gelles shouted. "Our king he says, so very

bold!"

Simon could see now that the young legionary was drunk. Some

but not allof his fascination turned to disgust.

"Hea, lads," Gelles waggled his eyebrows. " 'Mulveiz-nei cenit

drenisend,' they saylet us beware this pup, then, and let him

sleep!" Another round of hilarity followed. Simon, red-faced, se-

cured his purse and turned to go.

"Goodbye, castle-mouse!" one of the soldiers called mockingly.

Simon did not turn or speak, but hurried away.

He had gone past one of the fire-caims and out from under the

Main Row awnings when he felt a hand upon his shoulder. He

whirled, thinking that the Nabban-men had returned to insult him

further, but instead found a plump man with a weather-hardened

pink face. The stranger wore the gray robe and tonsure of a mendi-

cant friar.

"Your pardon, my young lad," he said, with a Hemystirman's

crackling burr, "I only wished to find out if you were safe, then, if

those goirach fellows had done you harm." The stranger reached out

to Simon and patted him, as if searching for damage. His heavy-

lidded eyes, fitted round about with wrinkles marking the curves of a

frequent smile, nevertheless held something back: a deeper shadow,

troubling but not frightening. Simon realized he was staring, almost

against his will, and shied back.

"No, thank you. Father," he said, startled into the patterns of

formality. "They were just making sport of me. No harm."

"Good that is, very good . . . Ah, forgive me, I have not intro-

duced myself. I am Brother Cadrach ec-Crannhyr, of the Vilderivan

Order." He pulled a small, self-deprecatory smile. His breath

54 Tad Williams

smelled of wine "I came with Pnnce Gwythmn and his men Who

might you be9"

"Simon I live in the Hayholt " He made a vague gesture toward

the castle

The fnar smiled again, saying nothing, then turned to watch a

Hyrkaman walk by, dressed in bright, disparate colors and leading a

muzzled bear on a chain When the duo had passed, Cadrach re-

turned his small, sharp eyes to Simon.

"There are some that say the Hyrkas can talk to animals, have

you heard9 Especially their horses And that the ammals understand

perfectly " The fnar gave a mocking shrug, as if to show that a man

of God naturally would not believe such nonsense.

Simon did not reply He, of course, had also heard such tales

related about the wild Hyrkamen Shem Horsegoom swore the sto-

nes were pure truth The Hyrkas were often seen at market, where

they sold beautiful horses at outrageous prices, and befuddled the

villagers with tncks and puzzles Thinking about themespecially

their less-than-honest reputationSimon put a hand down and

grabbed his leather purse, reassunng himself by the feel of the corns

inside

"Thank you for your help, Father," he said at lastalthough he

could not actually remember the man doing anything helpful "I

must go now. I have spices to buy "

Cadrach looked at him for a long moment, as if trying to remem-

ber something, a clue to which might be hidden in Simon's face At

last he said- "I would like to ask you a favor, young man "

"What?" Simon said suspiciously

"As I mentioned, I am a stranger in your Erchester Perhaps you

would be good enough to guide me around for a short while, just to

help me You could then go on your way, having done a good turn."

"Oh." Simon felt somewhat relieved His first impulse was to say

noit was so rarely that he got an afternoon to himself at the mar-

ket But how often did you get to talk with an Aedonite monk from

pagan Hernystir9 Also, this Brother Cadrach did not seem like the

type who only wanted to lecture you about sin and damnation He

looked the man over again, but the monk's face was unreadable

"Well, I suppose socertainly Come alongdo you want to

see the Nascadu-dancers in Battle Square?"

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

55

*

Cadrach was an interesting companion Although he talked

freely, telling Simon of the cold journey from Hemysadharc to

Erchester with Prince Gwythmn, and made frequent jests about the

passersby and their various exotic costumes, still he seemed re-

strained, watching always for something even as he laughed at his

own stones He and Simon wandered the market for a good part of

the afternoon, looking at the tables of cakes and dned vegetables

that stood against the shop walls of Main Row, smelling the warm

smells of the bread bakers and chestnut vendors Noting Simon's

wistful gaze, the fnar insisted they stop and buy a rough straw

basket of roasted nuts, which he kindly paid for, giving the chap-

faced chestnut man a half-fithmg piece nimbly plucked from a

pocket in his gray cassock After burning fingers and tongues trying

to eat the nut meats they conceded defeat and stood watchmg a

comical argument between a wine merchant and a Juggler blocking

his wine-shop doorway while they waited for their purchase to cool

Next they halted to watch a Usires Play being enacted for a gaggle

of shnekmg children and fascinated adults The puppets bobbed and

bowed, Usires in his white gown being chased by the Imperator

Crexis weanng goat-horns and a beard, and waving a long, barb-

headed pike At last Usires was captured and hung upon the Execu-

tion Tree; Crexis, his voice high and shnll, leaped about poking and

tormenting the tree-nailed Savior The children, wildly excited,

shouted abuse at the capenng Imperator

Cadrach nudged Simon "Do you see9" he asked, pointing a thick

finger toward the front of the puppet-stage The curtain that hung

from the stage to the ground billowed, as if in a strong breeze

Cadrach nudged Simon again

"Would you not say that this is a fine representation of Our

Lord9" he asked, never once taking his eyes from the flapping cloth

Above, Crexis jigged and Usires suffered. "While man plays out his

show, the Manipulator remains unseen, we know Him not by sight,

but by the ways His puppets move And occasionally the curtain

stirs, that hides Him from His faithful audience Ah, but we are

grateful even for just that movement behind the curtaingrateful!"

Simon stared; at last Cadrach looked away from the puppet show

and met his gaze A strange, sad smile cnmped the comer of the

friar's mouth, for once the look in his eyes seemed to match

56 Tad Williams

"Ah, boy," he said, "and what should you know of religious mat-

ters, anyway?"

They strolled for some while longer before Brother Cadrach at

last took his leave with many thanks to the young man for his

hospitality. Simon continued to walk aimlessly long after the monk

was gone, and the patches of sky that could been seen through the

roof-tenting were filmed with early darkness before he remembered

his errand.

At the spice-merchant's stall he discovered that his purse was

gone.

His heart thumped triple-time as he thought back in panic. He

knew that he had felt it swinging on his belt when he and Cadrach

had stopped to buy chestnuts, but could summon no memories of

having it later in the afternoon. Whenever it had disappeared,

though, it was definitely gone nowalong with not just his own

flthing piece, but also the two pennies entrusted to him by Judith!

He searched the market vainly until the sky-holes had gone black

as an old kettle. The snow that he had barely felt before seemed very

cold and very wet as he returned, empty-handed, to the castle.

Worse than beatingas Simon discovered when he came home

without spices or moneywas the look of disappointment that

sweet, fat, flour-dusted Judith gave him. Rachel also used this most

unfair of gambits, punishing him with nothing more painful than an

expression of disgust at his childishness and a promise that he would

"work fingers to the nubbin" earning the money back. Even

Morgenes, whom Simon went to half in hope of sympathy, seemed

faintly surprised at the youth's carelessness. All in all, although

spared a thrashing, he had never felt lower or more sorry for him-

self-

^

Sunday came and went, a dark, slushy day in which most of the

Hayholt's staff seemed to be at chapel saying a prayer for King John

that, or telling Simon to go away. He had exactly the kind of

scratchy, irritable, kick-things-across-the-floor sort of feeling that

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

57

could usually be soothed by visiting Morgenes or trekking out of

doors to do some exploring. The doctor, however, was busylocked

in with Inch, working on something that he said was large, danger-

ous, and likely to catch fire; Simon would not be needed for any-

thing. The weather outside was so cold and dismal that even in his

misery he could not convince himself to go a-roving. Instead, he

spent the endless afternoon with the chandler's fat apprentice Jere-

mias, tossing rocks from one of the turrets of the Inner Bailey wall

and arguing in a desultory way as to whether the fish in the moat

froze during the winter or, if not, where they went until Spring's

arrival.

The chill outsideas well as the different kind of chill in the

servants' quartersstill prevailed Moonday when he arose, feeling

weedy and unpleasant. Morgenes also seemed in a damp and unre-

sponsive mood, and so when Simon had finished his chores in the

doctor's chambers he filched some bread and cheese from the pantry

larder and went off to be by himself.

For a while he moped by the Hall of Records in the Middle Bai-

ley, listening to the dry, insectlike sounds of the Writing-Priests, but

after an hour he begin to feel as though it was his own skin on which

the scribes' pens were scratching and scratching and scratch-

ing. ...

He decided to take his dinner and climb the stairs of Green Angel

Tower, something he had not done since the weather had begun to

turn. Since Bamabas the sexton would as gladly chase him off as go

to Heaven, he resolved to bypass the chapel route to the tower en-

tirely, taking instead his own secret path to the upper floors. Tying

his meal securely in his handkerchief, he set out.

Walking through the seemingly endless halls of the Chancelry,

passing continuously from covered passage to open courtyard and

back under cover againthis part of the castle was dotted with

small, enclosed yardshe superstitiously avoided looking up at the

tower. Eminently slender and pale, it dominated the southwestern

comer of the Hayholt like a birch tree in a rock garden, so impossi-

bly tall and delicate that from ground level it almost appeared to be

standing on some far hillside, miles and miles beyond the castle's

wall. Standing beneath he could hear it shudder in the wind, as

though it were a lute string tight-cinched on some celestial peg.

58 Tad Williams

The first four stories of Green Angel Tower looked no different

than any of the other hundreds of varied structures of the castle.

Past masters of the Hayholt had cloaked its slim base in granite

outwalls and battlementswhether out of legitimate desire for im-

proved security or because the alienness of the tower was unsettling,

no one could know. Above the level of the encircling bailey wall the

armoring stopped; the tower thrust nakedly upward, a beautiful al-

bino creature escaping its drab cocoon. Balconies and windows in

strangely abstract patterns were cut directly into the stone's glossy

surface, like the carved whalefish teeth Simon often saw at market.

At the tower's pinnacle shimmered a distant flare of copper-gold and

green: the Angel herself, one arm outstretched as if in a gesture of

farewell, the other shading her eyes as she stared into the eastern

distance.

The huge, noisy Chancelry was even more confounding than

usual today. Father Helfcene's cassocked minions dashed back and

forth from one chamber to another, or huddled for shivering discus-

sions in the chill, snowflecked air of the courtyards. Several, bearing

rolled papers and distracted expressions, tried to commandeer Si-

mon for errands to the Hall of Records, but he bluffed his way

through, protesting a mission for Doctor Morgenes.

In the throne room antechamber he halted, pretending to admire

the vast mosaics while he waited for the last of the Chancelry priests

to hurry through to the chapel beyond. When his moment came, he

levered the door open and slid through into the throne room.

The huge hinges creaked, then went silent. Simon's own footsteps

echoed and re-echoed, then stopped, fading at last into the deep,

breathing quiet. No matter how many times he snuck through this

roomfor several years he had been, as far as he knew, the only

castle resident who dared enter itit never seemed less than awe-

inspiring.

Just last month, after King John's unexpected rising, Rachel and

her crew had finally been allowed past the forbidden threshold; they

had indulged themselves with a two-week assault on years of dust

and grit, on broken glass and birds' nests and the webs of spiders

long since gone to their eight-legged ancestors. But even thoroughly

cleaned, with its flagstones mopped, its walls washed down, and

somebut not allof the banners shed of their armor of dust, de-

spite relentless and implacable tidying, the throne room emanated a

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR59

certain age and stillness. Time here seemed bound only to the mea-

sured tread of antiquity.

The dais stood at the great room's far end, in a pool of light that

poured down from a figured window in the vaulted ceiling. Upon it

the Dragonbone Chair stood like a strange altaruntenanted, sur-

rounded by bright, dancing motes of dust, flanked by the statues of

the Hayholt's six High Kings.

The bones of the chair were huge, thicker than Simon's legs, pol-

ished so that they gleamed dully like burnished stone. With a few

exceptions they had been cut and fitted in such a way that, although

their size was evident, it was difficult to guess in which part of the

great fire-worm's mighty carcass they had once sheltered. Only the

chair back, a great seven-cubit fan of curving yellow ribs behind the

king's velvet cushions, reaching far above Simon's head, could be

seen immediately for what it wasthat and the skull. Perched atop

the back of the great seat, jutting far enough to serve as an awning

if more than a thin film of sunlight ever penetrated the shadowed

throne roomwere the brain-case and jaws of the dragon Shurakai.

The eye-holes were broken black windows, the teeth curving spikes

as long as Simon's hands. The dragon's skull was the color of old

parchment, and webbed with tiny cracks, but there was something

alive about itterribly, wonderfully alive.

In fact, there was an astonishing and holy aura about this entire

room that went far beyond Simon's understanding. The throne of

heavy, yellowed bones, the massive black figures guarding an empty

chair in a high, deserted chamber, all seemed filled with some dread

power. All eight inhabitants of the room, the scullion, the statues,

and the huge eyeless skull, seemed to hold their breath.

These stolen moments filled Simon with a quiet, almost fearful,

ecstasy. Perhaps the malachite kings but waited with black, stony

patience for the boy to touch a blasphemous commoner's hand to

the dragonbone seat, waited . . . waited . . . and then, with a

horrible creaking noise, they would come to life! He shivered with

nervous pleasure at his own imaginings and stepped lightly forward,

surveying the dark faces. Their names had been so familiar once,

when they had been strung-together nonsense in a child's rhyme, a

rhyme RachelRachel? Could that be right?had taught him

60 Tad Williams

when he was a giggling ape of four years or so. Could he remember

them still?

If his own childhood seemed so long ago, he suddenly wondered,

how must it feel to Prester John, who wore so many decades? Merci-

lessly clear, as when Simon remembered past humiliations, or soft

and insubstantial, like stories of the glorious past? When you were

old, did your memories crowd out your other thoughts? Or did you

lose themyour childhood, your hated enemies, your friends?

How did that old song go? Six kings . . .

Six Kings have ruled in Hayholt's broad halls

Six masters have stridden her mighty stone walls

Six mounds on the cliff over deep Kynslagh-bay

Six kings will sleep there until Doom's final day

That was it!

Fingil first, named the Bloody King

Flying out of the North on war's red wing

Hjeldin his son, the Mad King dire

Leaped to his death from the haunted spire

Ikferdig next, the Burned King hight

He met the fire-drake by dark of night

Three northern kings, all dead and cold

The North rules no more in lofty Hayholt

Those were the three Rimmersgard kings on the left of the throne.

Wasn't Fingil the one Morgenes spoke of, the leader of the dreadful

army? The one who killed the Sithi? So, on the right side of the

yellowed bones the rest must be ...

The Heron King Suits, called Apostate

Fled Nabban, but in Hayholt he met his fate

The Hemystir Holly King, old Tethtain

Came in at the gate, but not out again

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR61

Last, Eahlstan Fisher King, in lore most high

The dragon he woke, and in Hayholt he died . . .

Hah! Simon stared at the Heron King's sad, pinched face and

gloated. My memory is better than most people thinkbetter than

that of most mooncalves! Of course, now there was at last a seventh

king in the Hayholtold Prester John. Simon wondered if someone

would add King John to the song someday.

The sixth statue, closest to the throne's right arm, was Simon's

favorite: the only native Erkynlander who had ever sat on the

Hayholt's great seat. He moved closer to look into the deep-cut eyes

of Saint Eahlstancalled Eahlstan Fiskeme because he came from

the fisher-people of the Gleniwent, called The Martyr because he too

had been slain by the fire-drake Shurakai, the creature destroyed at

last by Prester John.

Unlike the Burned King on the throne's other side, the Fisher

King's face was not carved in a twist of fear and doubt: rather the

sculptor had brought radiant faith into the stony features, had given

opaque eyes the illusion of seeing faraway things. The long-dead

artisan had made Eahlstan humble and reverent, but had also made

him bold. In his secret thoughts, Simon often imagined that his own

fisherman father might have looked like this.

Staring, Simon felt a sudden coldness on his hand. He was touch-

ing the Chair's bone armrest! A scullion touching the throne! He

snatched his fingers awaywondering all the while how even the

dead substance of such a fiery beast could feel so chilland stum-

bled back a step.

It seemed for a heart-seizing moment that the statues had begun

to lean toward him, shadows stretching on the tapestried wall, and

he skittered backward. When nothing resembling actual movement

followed, he straightened himself with what dignity he could, bowed

to Kings and Chair, and backed across the stone floor. Searching

with his handcalmly, calmly, he thought to himself, don't be a

frightened foolhe at last found the door into the standing room,

his original destination. With a cautious look back at the reassur-

ingly immobile tableau, he slipped through.

Behind the standing room's heavy tapestry, thick red velvet em-

broidered with festival scenes, a staircase inside the wall mounted to

a privy at the top of the throne room's southern gallery. Chiding

62 Tad Williams

himself for his nervousness of moments before, he climbed it. At the

top it was a simple enough matter to squeeze out of the privy's long

window-slit and onto the wall that ran beneath. The trick, however,

was a little more difficult now than when he had been here last in

Septander: the stones were snow-slippery, and there was a deter-

mined breeze. Fortunately the wall top was wide; Simon negotiated

it carefully.

Now came the pan that he liked best. The comer of this wall

came out within only five or six feet of the broad lee of Green Angel

Tower's fourth-floor turret. Pausing, he could almost hear the bray

of trumpets, the clash of knights battling on the decks below him as

he prepared to leap through the fierce wind from mast to burning

mast. . . .

Whether his foot slipped a little as he jumped, or his attention was

distracted by the imaginary sea-skirmish below, Simon landed badly

on the edge of the turret. He caught his knee a tremendous crack on

the stone, nearly sliding back and off, which would have dropped

him two long fathoms onto the low wall at the tower's base or into

the moat. The sudden realization of his peril spurred his heart into a

terrified gallop. Instead he managed to slide down into the space

between the turret's upstanding merlons, crawling forward to slip

down onto the floor of long boards.

A light snow sifted down as he sat, feeling horribly foolish, and

hugged his throbbing knee. It hurt like sin, betrayal, and treachery;

if he had not been conscious of how childish he must already seem,

he would have cried.

At last he climbed to his feet and limped into the tower. One piece

of luck, anyway: no one had heard his painful landing. His disgrace

was his alone. He felt in his pocketthe bread and cheese were

rather nastily flattened, but still eatable. That, too, was a small so-

lace.

Climbing stairs on his aching knee was an effort, but it was no

good getting into Green Angel Tower, tallest building in Erkynland

probably in all ofOsten Ardand then not getting up any higher

than the Hayholt's main walls.

The tower staircase was low and narrow, the steps made of a

clean, smooth white stone unlike any other in the castle, slippery to

the touch but sure beneath one's feet. The castle folk said that this

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR63

tower was the only part of the original Sithi stronghold that re-

mained unchanged. Doctor Morgenes had once told Simon that this

was untrue. Whether that meant that the tower had indeed been

changed, or simply that other unsullied remnants of old Asu'a still

remained, the doctorin his maddening stylewould not say.

Having climbed for several minutes, Simon could see from the

windows that he was already higher than Hjeldin's Tower. The

somewhat sinister domed column where the Mad King had long ago

met his death gazed up at Green Angel across the expanse of the

throne room roof, as a jealous dwarf might stare at his prince when

no one was looking.

The stone facing on the inside of the stairwell was different here: a

soft fawn color, traced across with minute, puzzling designs in sky

blue. Turning his attention away from Hjeldin's Tower, he stopped

for a moment where the light of a high window shone on the wall,

but when he tried to follow the course of one of the delicate blue

scrolls it made his head dizzy and he gave up.

At last, when it seemed he had been climbing" painfully for hours,

the staircase opened out onto the shiny white floor of the bell tower,

this, too, constructed from the unusual stair-stone. Although the

tower stretched up another near-hundred cubits, tapering to the An-

gel herself perched on the cloudy horizon, the staircase ended here

where the great bronze bells hung row by row from the vaulted

rafters like solemn green fruit. The bell chamber itself was open on

all sides to the cold air, so that when Green Angel's chimes sang

from its high-arched windows the whole countryside might hear.

Simon stood with his back against one of the six pillars of dark,

smooth, rock-solid wood that spanned floor to ceiling. As he chewed

his crust of bread he looked out across the western vista, where the

Kynslagh's waters rolled eternally against the Hayholt's massive sea

wall. Although the day was dark, and snowflakes danced crazily

before him, Simon was startled by the clarity with which the world

below rose to his eyes. Many small boats rode the Kynslagh's swells,

lake men in black cloaks bent stolidly over their oars. Beyond, he

thought he could dimly make out the place where the river

Gleniwent issued out of the lake at the start of its long journey to the

ocean, a winding course of half a hundred miles, past dock-towns

and farms. Out of Gleniwent, in the arms of the sea herself, Warin-

64 Tad Williams

sten island watched the river mouth; beyond Warinsten to the west

lay nothing but uncountable, uncharged leagues of ocean.

He tested his sore knee and decided for the moment against sitting

down, which would necessitate rising again. He pulled his hat down

over his ears, which were reddening and stinging in the wind, and

started in on a piece of crumbling cheese. To his right, but far past

the limits of his vision, were the meadows and jutting hills of Ach

Samrath, the outermost marches of the kingdom of Hemystir, and

the site of the terrible battle Morgenes had described. On his left

hand, across the broad Kynslagh, rolled the Thrithingsgrasslands

seemingly without end. Eventually, of course, they did end; beyond

lay Nabban, Pirranos Bay and its islands, and the marshy Wran

country ... all places Simon had never seen and most likely never

would.

Growing bored at last with the unchanging Kynslagh and imagin-

ings of the unseeable South, he limped to the other side of the bell

chamber. Seen from the center of the room, where no details of the

land below were visible, the swirling, featureless cloud-darkness was

a gray hole into nowhere, and the tower was momentarily a ghost-

ship adrift on a foggy, empty sea. Wind howled and sang around the

open window frames; the bells hummed faintly, as if the storm had

driven small, frightened spirits into their bronze skins.

Simon reached the low sill and leaned out to look at the mad

jumble of the Hayholfs roofs below him. At first the wind tugged as

though it wished to catch him up and toss him, like a kitten sporting

with a dead leaf. He tightened his grip on the wet stone, and soon

the wind eased. He smiled: from this vantage point the Hayholfs

magnificent hodgepodge of roofseach a different height and style,

each with its forest of chimney pots, rooftrees, and domeslooked

like a yard full of odd, square animals. They sprawled half-atop one

another, struggling for space like hogs at their feed.

Shorter only than the two towers, the dome of the castle chapel

dominated the Inner Bailey, colorful windows draped in sleet. The

keep's other buildings, the residences, dining hall, throne room and

chancelry, were each one of them stacked and squeezed with addi-

tions, mute evidence of the castle's diverse tenantry. The two outer

baileys and the massive curtain wall, descending concentrically

down the hill, were similarly cluttered. The Hayholt itself had never

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR65

expanded past the outwall; the people crowding in built upward, or

divided what they already had into smaller and smaller portions.

Beyond the keep the town of Erchester stretched out in street

after careless street of low houses, wrapped in a mantle of white

drifts; only the cathedral reared up from their midst, itself dwarfed

by the Hayholt and by Simon in his sky-tower. Here and there a

feather of smoke drifted upward to shred in the wind.

Past the city walls Simon could make out the dim, snow-

smoothed outlines of the Itch-yardthe old pagan cemetery, a place

of ill repute. The downs beyond it ran almost to the forest's edge;

above their humble congregation the tall hill called Thisterborg

stood as dramatically as the cathedral in low-roofed Erchester. Si-

mon could not see them, but he knew that Thisterborg was crowned

with a ring of wind-polished rock pillars that the villagers called the

Anger Stones.

And beyond Erchester, past the lich-yard and downs and stone-

capped Thisterborg, lay the Forest. Aldheorte was its name

Oldheartand it stretched outward like the sea, vast, dark, and

unknowable. Men lived on its fringes, even maintained a few roads

along its outer edges, but very few ventured inward beyond its skirts.

It was a great, shadowy country in the middle of Osten Ard; it sent

no embassies, and received few visitors. Placed against its eminence

even the huge Circoille, the Combwood of Hernystir in the west, was

a mere copse. There was only one Forest.

The sea to the West, the Forest to the East; the North and its iron

men, and the land of shattered empires in the South . . . staring

out across the face of Osten Ard, Simon forgot his knee for a while.

Indeed, for a time Simon himself was king of all the known world.

When the shrouded winter sun had passed the top of the sky, he

moved at last to leave. Straightening his leg forced out a gasp of

pain: the knee had stiffened in the long hour he had stood at the sill.

It was obvious that he would not be able to take his strenuous secret

route down from the bell tower. He would have to chance his luck

against Bamabas and Father Dreosan.

The long stairway was a misery, but the view from the tower

window had pushed away his other regrets; he did not feel nearly as

sorry for himself as he otherwise might have. The desire to see more

of the world glowed within him like a low-banked fire, warming him

66 Tad Williams

to his fingertips. He would ask Morgenes to tell him more of Nabban

and the Southern Islands, and of the Six Kings.

At the fourth level, where he had made his original entry, he

heard a sound: someone moving quickly down the stairwell below

him. For a moment he stood still, wondering if he had been discov-

eredit was not strictly forbidden to be in the tower, but he had no

good reason for his presence; the sexton would presume guilt. It was

strange, thoughthe footfalls were receding. Certainly Bamabas or

anyone else would not hesitate to come up and get him, to lead him

down by the much-handled scruff of his neck. Simon continued

down the winding stairs; cautiously at first; then, despite his throb-

bing knee, faster and faster as his curiosity got the better of him.

The staircase ended at last in the huge entry hall of the tower. The

hall was dimly lit, its walls cloaked in shadows and faded tapestries

of subjects probably religious but long since obscured. He paused at

the last step, still concealed in the darkness of the stairwell. There

was no sound of footstepsor of anything else. He walked as si-

lently as possible across the nagged floor, every accidental boot-

scrape hissing up toward the oak-ribbed ceiling. The hall's main

door was closed; the only illumination streamed in from windows

above the lintel.

How could whoever had been on the stairs have opened and

closed the giant door without his knowing? He had easily heard the

light footfalls, and had himself been worrying about the squeak that

the large hinges would make. He turned to again scan the portal-

hall.

There. From beneath the fringed trim of the stained silver tapestry

hung by the stairs, two small, rounded shapes protrudedshoes. As

he looked carefully now, he could see how folds of the old hanging

bellied out where someone hid behind it.

Balancing on one foot like a heron, he quietly pulled off first one

boot, then the other. Who could it be? Perhaps fat Jeremias had

followed him here to play a trick? Well, if so, Simon would soon

show him.

Bare feet nearly silent on the stones, he crept across the hall until

he stood immediately before the suspicious bump. For a moment,

reaching a hand out to the edge of the hanging, he remembered the

strange thing Brother Cadrach had said about curtains while they

67

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

had watched the puppet show. He hesitated, then felt ashamed of his

own timidity, and swept the tapestry aside.

Instead of flying open to reveal the spy, the massive hanging tore

free of its stays and billowed down like a monstrous, stiffened blan-

ket. Simon had only a momentary glimpse of a small, startled face

before the weight of the tapestry knocked him to the ground. As he

lay cursing and struggling, badly tangled, a brown-clad figure shot

by.

Simon could hear whoever-it-was struggling with the heavy door

as he himself wrestled the dusty, enveloping fabric. At last he pulled

free and rolled to his feet, moving across the room in a bound to

catch the small figure before it slipped through the partially opened

door. He got a firm handhold on a rough jerkin- The spy was cap-

tured, half-in and half-out.

Simon was angry now, mostly from embarrassment. "Who are

you?" he snarled. "You spier-on-people!" His captive said nothing,

but only struggled harder. Whoever he was, he-was not big enough

to loosen Simon's restraining grasp.

Fighting to pull the resisting figure back through the doorway

no easy taskSimon was startled to recognize the sand-colored

broadcloth he was gripping. This must be the young man who had

been spying at the door of the chapel! Simon gave a fierce pull and

got the youth's head and shoulder back through the doorframe so he

could look at him.

The prisoner was small, and his features were fine, almost sharp:

there was something a shade foxlike in nose and chin, but not un-

pleasantly so. His hair was as dark as a crow's wing. For a moment

Simon thought he might be a Sitha-man, because of his heighthe

tried to remember Shem's stories about not letting go of a Pookah's

foot, and so winning a cauldron of goldbut before he could spend

any of his dream-treasure he saw the fear-sweat and reddened

cheeks and decided that this was no supernatural creature.

"What is your name, you?" he demanded. The captured youth

tried to pull free again, but was obviously tiring. After a moment he

stopped his struggling altogether. "Your name?" Simon prompted,

this time in a softer tone.

"Malachias." The youth turned away panting.

"Well, Malachias, why are you following me?" He gave a little

68 Tad Williams

shake to the youth's shoulder, to remind him just who had captured

whom.

The youth turned and stared sullenly. His eyes were quite dark.

"I wasn't spying on you!" he said vehemently.

As the boy averted his face once more, Simon was struck by a

feeling that he had seen something familiar in this Malachias' face,

something he should recognize.

"Who are you then, sirrah?" Simon asked, and reached out to

turn the boy's chin toward him. "Do you work in the stableswork

somewhere here in the Hayholt?"

Before he could bring the face around to look at it once more,

Malachias suddenly put both hands in the middle of Simon's chest

and gave a surprisingly hard push. He lost his grip on the youth's

jerkin and staggered backward, then fell on his seat. Before he could

even attempt to rise, Malachias had whisked through the doorway,

pulling it shut behind him with a loud, reverberating squeal of

bronze hinges.

Simon was still sitting on the stone floorsore knee, sore rump,

and mortally wounded dignity clamoring for attentionwhen the

sexton Bamabas came in out of the Chancelry hall to investigate the

noise. He stopped as if stunned in the doorway, looking from Simon

bootless on the floor to the torn and crumpled tapestry in front of

the stairwell, then turned his stare back to Simon. Bamabas said not

a word, but a vein began to drumbeat high on each temple, and his

brow beetled downward until his eyes were the merest slits.

Simon, routed and massacred, could only sit and shake his head,

like a drunkard who had tripped over his own jug and landed upon

the Lord Mayor's cat.

6

The Cairn

on the Cliffs

^

SIMON'S punishment for his most recent crime was suspension from

his new apprenticeship and confinement to the servants' quarters.

For days he strode the boundaries of his prison, from the scullery

to the linens room and back again, restless as a hooded kestrel.

/ have done this to myself, he sometimes thought. I'm just as

stupid as the Dragon says I am.

Why do they all make such trouble for me? he fumed at other

moments- Anyone would think I was a wild animal that can't be

trusted.

Rachel, with a form of mercy in mind, found a series of petty

tasks to which he could turn his hand; the days did not pass as

excruciatingly slowly as they might have, but to Simon it seemed

only more proof that he was to be a draft horse forever. He would

fetch and haul until he was too old to labor any longer, then be

taken out back and knocked on the head with Shem's splintered

mallet.

Meanwhile the final days of Novander crept by, and Decander

sidled in like a sneak thief.

At the end of the new month's second week Simon was given his

freedomsuch as it was. He was forbidden Green Angel Tower and

certain other favorite haunts; he was allowed to resume service for

the doctor, but given additional afternoon chores which required

him to return promptly at dinnertime to the servants' quarters. Even

these short visits, however, were a grand improvement. In fact, it

seemed that Morgenes was more and more coming to rely on Simon.

The doctor taught him many things about the uses and care of the

fantastic variety of oddments littering the workshop.

70 Tad Williams

He was also, painfully, learning to read It was infinitely more

laborious than sweeping floors or washing dusty alembics and bea-

kers, but Morgenes drove him through it with a determined hand,

saying that without letters Simon could never be a useful apprentice

On Saint Tunath's Day, Decander the twenty-first, the Hayholt

was bustling with activity The saint's day was the last high holiday

before Aedonmansa, and a mighty feast was being laid on Serving

girls set spngs of mistletoe and pnckly holly around dozens of slen-

der white beeswax candlesthese were all to be lit at sunset, when

their flames would pour light from every window, summoning wan-

dering Saint Tunath in from the midwinter darkness to bless the

castle and its occupants. Other servants stacked pitchy, new-split

logs in the fireplaces, or strewed fresh rushes on the floor

Simon, who had done his best all afternoon to remain unnoticed,

was nevertheless discovered and deputed to go to Doctor Morgenes

and find if he had any oil suitable for polishing thingsRachel's

troops had used up all the available supply putting a blinding gloss

on the Great Table, and work had barely begun on the Main Hall.

Simon, who had already spent an entire morning in the doctor's

rooms reading aloud word by boggling word from a book entitled

The Sovran Remedys of the Wranna Healers, still infinitely preferred

anything Morgenes might want of him to the horrors of Rachel's

steel-glint gaze He practically flew from the Main Hall, down the

long Chancelry hall, and out into the Inner Commons beneath

Green Angel He was across the moat-bndge seconds later like a

spar-hawk on the wing, only moments passed before he was at the

doctor's doors for the second time that day

The doctor did not answer his knock for some time, but Simon

could hear voices within He waited as patiently as he could, picking

long splinters from the weathered doorframe, until at last the old

man came Morgenes had seen Simon only a short while earlier, but

made no comment on his reappearance He seemed distracted as he

ushered the young man in; sensing his strange mood, Simon fol-

lowed quietly down the lamplit corridor.

Heavy draperies cloaked the windows At first, as his eyes ad-

justed to the darkness of the chamber, Simon could see no sign of

any visitor Then he made out a dim shape sitting on a large sea-

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR71

chest m the comer The gray-cloaked man was gazing at the floor,

face concealed, but the boy knew him

"Forgive me, Pnnce Josua," Morgenes said, "this is Simon, my

new apprentice "

Josua Lackhand looked up His pale eyeswere they blue9

gray9flicked over him with an air of detachment, as a Hyrka

trader might examine a horse he did not intend to buy After a

moment's inspection the pnnce turned his attention back to

Morgenes as completely as if Simon had just winked out of exis-

tence. The doctor motioned for the boy to go and wait at the far end

of the room.

"Highness," he said to the pnnce, "I am afraid there is nothing

further I can do. My skills as a doctor and apothecary have been

exhausted " The old man rubbed his hands together nervously

"Forgive me You know that I love the king, and hate to see him

suffering, butbut some things are not to be meddled m by

such as Itoo many possibilities, too many unforeseeable conse-

quences One of those things is the passing of a kingdom,"

Now Morgenes, whom Simon had not seen m this sort of mood,

plucked an object on a golden chain out of his robe and handled it

agitatedly In Simon's knowledge, the doctorwho loved to scom

pretension and showhad never worn jewelry of any kind, either

"But, God curse it, I am not asking you to interfere with the

succession!" Josua's quiet voice was taut as a bowstnng. Having to

overhear such a conversation embarrassed Simon tremendously, but

there was nowhere for him to go without making himself even more

conspicuous

"I ask you to 'meddle' with nothing, Morgenes," Josua continued,

"only give me something that will make the old man's last mo-

ments easier If he dies tomorrow or next year, Ehas is still the High

King, and I am still liege-lord only of Naglimund " The pnnce

shook his head. "At least think of the ancient bond you and my

father shareyou, who have been his healer, and have studied and

chronicled his life for scores of years'" Josua swept his hand across

his body to point at a pile of loose book-leaves stacked on the doc-

tor's worm-bored writing desk

Writing about the life of the king? Simon wondered This was the

first he had heard of such a work The doctor seemed very full of

secrets this morning

72 Tad Williams

Josua was still trying. "Can you not take pity? He is like an aged

lion at bay, a great beast dragged down by jackals! Sweet Usires, the

unfaimess ..."

"But, Highness . . ." Morgenes had painfully begun when all

three in the room became aware of the sound of running feet and

voices in the courtyard outside. Josua, pale-faced and fever-eyed,

was on his feet with his sword drawn so quickly it seemed to have

simply appeared in his left hand. A loud pounding shook the door.

Morgenes, starting forward, was restrained by a hiss from the

prince- Simon felt his heart racingJosua's obvious fear was conta-

gious.

"Prince Josua! Prince Josua!" someone called. The rapping re-

sumed. Josua scabbarded his sword with a flick and moved past

Doctor Morgenes into the workshop corridor. He flung the door

open to reveal four figures standing on the courtyard porch. Three

were his own gray-liveried soldiers; the last, who dropped to one

knee before the prince, was dressed in a shining white robe and

sandals. Dreamily, Simon recognized him as Saint Tunath, long-

dead subject of countless religious paintings. What could this

mean . . . ?

"Oh, your Highness . . ." said the kneeling saint, and stopped to

catch his breath. Simon's mouthwhich had begun to quirk upward

in a grin as he realized that this was only another soldier, dressed up

to enact the saint's part at tonight's festivitiesnow froze as he saw

the stricken look on the young man's face. "Your Highness . . .

Josua . . ." the soldier repeated.

"What is it, Deornoth?" the prince demanded. His voice was

strained.

Deomoth looked up, dark, rough-cut soldier's hair framed in the

white gleam of his hood. He had in that moment true martyr's eyes,

blasted and knowing.

"The king. Lord, your father the kind . . . Bishop Domitis said

. . . that he is dead."

Soundlessly, Josua pushed past the kneeling man and was gone

across the courtyard, the soldiers trotting behind. After a moment

Deomoth rose too and followed, hands clasped monkishly before

him as if the breath of tragedy had changed imposture to reality.

The door swung listlessly in a cool wind.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR73

When Simon turned to Morgenes, the doctor was staring after

them, his old eyes shining and brimful.

^

So it was that King John Presbyter died at last on Saint Tunath's

Day, at an exceedingly advanced age: beloved, revered, and as thor-

oughly a pan of his people's lives as the land itself. Although it had

been long expected, still the sorrow of his passing reached out and

touched all the countries of Men.

Some of the very oldest remembered that it had been Tunath's

Day in the Founding-year 1083exactly eighty years beforewhen

Prester John had slain the devil-worm Shurakai and ridden back in

triumph through the gates of Erchester. When this tale was retold,

not without some embellishing, heads nodded wisely. Anointed by

God as Kingthey saidas revealed by that great deed, then taken

back to the bosom of the Redeemer on its anniversary. It should

have been foreseen, they said.

It was a sad midwinter and Aedontide, although people nocked to

Erchester and the High Castle from all the lands of Osten Ard.

Indeed, many of the local folk began to growl about the visitors who

came to take up the best benches in church, and the same in the

taverns. There was more than a little resentment of outlanders mak-

ing such a fuss over their king: although he had been master of all,

John had been more like a simple fiefholder to the townsmen of

Erchester. In younger, haler days he had loved to go out among the

people, cutting a beautiful figure all gleaming-armored and a-horse-

back. The citizens of the town, in the poorer quarters at least, often

spoke with familiar, possessive pride of "our old man up to th'

Hayholt."

Now he was gone, or at least out of the reach of such simple souls.

He belonged to the history-scribes, the poets, and priests.

In the forty days mandated between the death and burial of a

king, John's body went to the Hall of Preparing in Erchester, where

the priests bathed it in rare oils, rubbed it with pungent herbal resins

from the southern islands, then bound it up from ankle to neck in

white linen, saying all the while prayers of overmastering piety.

74 Tad Williams

King John was next clothed in a simple gown of the type used by

young knights at their first vows, and gently laid on a bier in the

throne room, slender black candles burning all around.

As Prester John's body lay in state. Father Helfcene, the king's

chancellor, ordered the Hayefur kindled atop the rock-fortress at

Wentmouth, something done only in times of war and great happen-

ings. Few living could remember the last time the mighty torch-

tower had been fired.

Helfcene also commanded a great pit to be dug at Swertclif, on

the headlands east of Erchester overlooking the Kynslaghthe

windy hilltop, where stood the six snow-thatched barrows of the

kings who had held the Hayholt before John. It was miserable

weather for digging, the ground winter-frozen, but the Swertclif la-

borers were proud, and suffered the biting air and bruises and bro-

ken skin for the honor of the task. Much of the chill month of

Jonever passed before the excavation was completed and the pit was

covered with a vast tent of red and white sailcloth.

Preparations at the Hayholt proceeded at a less deliberate pace.

The castle's four kitchens glowed and smoked like busy foundries as

a horde of perspiring scullions prepared the funeral baked goods, the

meats and bread and festival wafers. The seneschal Peter Gilded-

Bowl, a small, fierce man with yellow hair, was everywhere at once

like an avenging angel. With equal facility he tasted the broth bil-

lowing in giant vats, looked for dust in the cracks of the Great Table

thin chance, since that was Rachel's provinceand threw impre-

cations after scurrying servitors. It was, all agreed, his finest hour.

The mourning-party gathered at the Hayholt from all the nations

of Osten Ard. Skali Sharp-nose of Kaldskryke, Duke Isgrimnur's

unloved cousin, arrived from Rimmersgard with ten suspicious,

deep-bearded kinsmen. From the three clans that among them ruled

the wild, grassy Thrithings came the Marchthanes of their reigning

houses. Oddly enough, the clansmen put enmity aside for once and

arrived togethera token of their respect for King John. It was even

said that when news of John's death reached the Thrithings the

Randwarders of the three clans had met at the borders they guarded

so jealously against each other; weeping together, they had drunk to

John's spirit all through the night.

From the Sancellan Mahistrevis, the ducal palace in Nabban,

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

75

Duke Leobardis sent his son Benigaris with a column of legionaries

and mail-clad knights numbering almost a hundred head. As they

disembarked from the warships, each of the three with Nabban's

golden kingfisher on its sail, the crowd at wharfside oohed apprecia-

tively. A few respectful cheers were even raised for Benigaris as he

passed, mounted on a tall gray palfrey, but many people whispered

that if this was the nephew of Camaris, greatest knight of the age of

John, then he was a cutting from his father's tree and not his uncle's.

Camaris had been a mighty, towering manor so said those old

enough to have remembered himand Benigaris, truth to tell,

looked to run a little to fat. But it had been almost forty years since

Camaris-sa-Vinitta had been lost at sea: many of the younger folk

suspected that his stature had grown somewhat in the memories of

gaffers and gossips.

Another great delegation also came from Nabban, one only

slightly less martial than Benigaris': the Lector Ranessin himself

sailed into the Kynslagh on a beautiful white ship, upon whose

azure sail gleamed the white Tree and golden Pillar of Mother

Church. The wharfside crowd, which had greeted Benigaris and the

Nabbanai soldiers mildlyas if in dim remembrance of days when

Nabban had striven with Erkynland for masteryhailed the lector

with a loud, welcoming cry. Those gathered on the quay surged

forward, and it took the combined force of the king's and lector's

guardsmen to hold them back; still, some two or three were crowded

so that they fell into the bone-cold lake, and only swift rescue saved

them from freezing.

^

"This is not as I would have wanted it," the lector whispered to

his young aide. Father Dinivan. "I mean, just look at this gawdy

thing they have sent me." He gestured at the litter, a splendid cre-

ation of carved cherry wood and blue and white silks. Father

Dinivan, robed in homely black, grinned-

Ranessin, a slender, handsome man of nearly seventy years,

frowned down in annoyance at the waiting litter, then gently beck-

oned over a nervous Erkynguard officer.

76 Tad Williams

"Please take this away," he said. "We appreciate Chancellor

Helfcene's thought, but we prefer to walk near the people."

The offending conveyance was hustled away, and the lector

moved toward the crowded Kynslagh stairs. As he made the sign of

the Treethumb and small finger as hooked branches, then a verti-

cal stroke with the middle fingersthe jostling crowd slowly opened

an aisle up the length of the great steps.

"Please don't walk so fast. Master," said Dinivan, pushing past

reaching, waving arms. "You'll outpace your guardsmen."

"And what makes you think,"Ranessin allowed a mischievous

smile to cross his face, so quickly none but Dinivan saw"that this

is not what I am trying to achieve?"

Dinivan cursed quietly, then immediately regretted his weakness.

The lector had gained a step on him, and the crowd was pushing in.

Luckily, the dockside wind now sprang to life and Ranessin was

forced to slow down, clutching with his unoccupied hand at his hat,

which seemed nearly as tall, thin, and pale as His Sacredness him-

self. Father Dinivan, seeing the lector begin to tack slightly into the

wind, struggled forward. When he caught up with the older man, he

took a firm grip on an elbow.

"Forgive me, Master, but Escritor Velligis would never under-

stand it if I were to let you fall into the lake."

"Of course, my son," Ranessin nodded, continuing to trace the

Tree in the air on either side of their progress up the long, wide

staircase. "I was thoughtless. You know how much I despise this

unnecessary pomp."

"But Lector," Dinivan argued gently, lifting his bushy eyebrows

in a look of mock-surprise, "you are Usires Aedon's worldly voice.

It won't do to have you scrambling up stairs like a seminary boy."

Dinivan was disappointed when this raised only a faint smile. For

a while they climbed in silent lockstep, the young man retaining his

protective grasp on the older's arm.

Poor Dinivan, Ranessin thought. He tries so hard, and is so care-

ful. Not that he doesn '? treat methe Lector of Mother Church, after

allwith a certain lack of respect. Of course he does, because I have

allowed itfor my own good. But I am not in a light mood today,

and he knows it.

It was John's death, of coursebut not merely the loss of a good

friend and fine king: it was change, and the Church, in the person of

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR77

Lector Ranessin, could not afford to trust change too easily. Of

course it was also the partingin this world only, the lector re-

minded himself firmlyfrom a man of good heart and intention,

although John certainly had been at times over-direct in the fulfilling

of those intentions. Ranessin owed much to John, not least that the

king's influence had played a large part in the elevation of the for-

mer Oswine of Stanshire to the heights of the church, and eventually

to the Lectorship that no other Erkynlander had held in five centu-

ries. The king would be much missed.

Fortunately, Ranessin held hope for Elias. The prince was un-

doubtedly courageous, decisive, boldall traits rare in the sons of

great men. The king-to-be was also short-tempered and somewhat

careless, butDuos wulsteithese were faults often cured, or at

least softened by responsibility and good counsel.

As he reached the top of the Kynslagh stairs and entered with his

struggling retinue onto the Royal Walk that circumscribed the walls

of Erchester,. the lector promised himself that he would send a trust-

worthy advisor to help the new kingand of course to keep a wary

eye out for the Church's welfaresomeone like Velligis, or even

young Dinivan ... no, he wouldn't part with Dinivan. Anyway,

Ranessin would find somebody to counteract Elias' bloody-minded

young nobles, and that blowing idiot. Bishop Domitis.

^

The first of Feyever, the day before ElysiamansaLady Day

dawned bright, chill and clear. The sun had barely scaled the stee-

pled peaks of the far mountains when a slow, solemn crowd began to

file into the Hayholt's chapel. The king's body was already lying

before the altar on a bier draped in cloth-of-gold and black silk

ribbons.

Simon watched the nobles in their rich, somber dress with resent-

ful fascination. He had come to the unused choir loft straight from

the kitchens, still wearing his gravy-stained shirt; even crouched

hidden in the shadows he felt ashamed to be so poorly clad.

And me the only servant here, he thought. The only one of all who

lived in the castle with our king. Where are all these fancy lords and

78 Tad Williams

ladies from? I recognize only a fewDuke Isgrimnur. the two princes,

some others.

There was certainly something wrong, that those seated in the

chapel below should be so splendid in their funeral silks while he

carried the stink of the scullery on him like a blanketbut wrong in

what way? Should the castle serving help be welcomed in among the

nobles? Or was he himself at fault for daring to intrude?

What if King John is watching? He felt a chill as he thought it.

What if he is somewhere, watching? Will he tell God that I snuck in

wearing a dirty shirt?

Lector Ranessin entered at last, arrayed in the full circumstance

of his holy office robes of black, silver, and gold. On his head he

wore a wreath of sacred ciyan leaves, and he held a censer and wand

crafted from black onyx. Motioning the crowd to their knees, he

began the opening prayers of the Mansa-sea-Cuelossan: the Death

Mass. As he called out the lines in his rich, but still ever-so-slightly

accented Nabbanai, and censed the body of the dead king, it seemed

to Simon that a light shone on Prester John's face, that he could see

for a moment how the king must have looked when he had first

ridden, bright-eyed and battle-stained, out of the gates of the new-

conquered Hayholt. How he wished he could have seen him then!

When the numerous prayers were finished, the company of nobles

rose to sing the Cansim Falis; Simon contented himself with mouth-

ing the words. As the mourners sat down again, Ranessin began to

speak, surprising everyone by abandoning Nabbanai to use the coun-

try-plain Westerling speech that John had made the common tongue

of his kingdom.

"It may be remembered," Ranessin intoned, "that when the last

nail had been driven into the Execution Tree, and our Lord Usires

was left to hang in terrible agony, a noble woman of Nabban named

Pelippa, daughter of a mighty knight, saw him and her heart was

filled with pity for His suffering. As the darkness fell that First

Night, while Usires Aedon hung dying and alonefor His disciples

had been scourged from the Temple courtyardshe came to Him

with water, which she gave to Him by dipping her rich scarf in a

golden bowl and then bringing it to His dry lips.

"As she gave Him to drink, Pelippa wept to see the Ransomer's

pain. She said to Him: 'Poor man, what have they done to you?'

Usires answered her: 'Nothing that poor Man is not bom to.'

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR79

"Now Pelippa wept afresh, saying: *But terrible enough that they

kill you for words, without also they hang you heels-high for the

sake of humiliation.' And Usires the Reclaimer said: 'Daughter, it

matters not which way I hang, top-first or the oppositeI am still

looking full into the face of God my Father.'

"So, then . . ." the lector lowered his gaze to the assemblage,

"... as was said by our Lord Usires, so may we say it is with our

beloved John. The common people in the city below us say that John

Presbyter is not gone, but remains to watch over his people and his

Osten Ard. The Book of the Aedon promises that even now he has

ascended to our beautiful Heaven of light and music and blue moun-

tains. Othersour brethren, John's subjects in Hemystirwill say

that he has gone to join the other heroes in the stars. It matters not-

"Whatever he is, he who was once young John the King, be he

enthroned in bright mountains or stellar fields, we know this; he is

happily gazing full into the face of God. . . ."

When the lector had finished speaking, tears standing in even his

eyes, and the final prayers had been recited, the assembled company

left the chapel.

Simon watched in reverent silence as King John's black-clad body

servants began their final services in his behalf, stalking like beetles

around a fallen dragonfly, dressing him in his royal raiment and

war-gear. He knew he should leavethis was beyond sneaking and

spying; it bordered on blasphemybut he could not make himself

move. Fear and sorrow had been replaced by a strange sense of

unreality. Everything seemed a pageant or mummer's play, the char-

acters moving stiffly through their parts as though their limbs were

freezing and thawing and then freezing once more.

The dead king's servants dressed him in his ice-white armor, tuck-

ing his folded gauntlets into his baldric but leaving his feet bare.

They drew a tunic of sky blue over John's corselet, and pulled a

shiny crimson cloak about his shoulders, moving all the while as

slowly as fever victims. His beard and hair were knotted up in war-

braids, and the iron circlet that signified mastery of the Hayholt was

set upon his brow. At last Noah, the king's aged squire, brought out

the iron ring of Fingil which he had been keeping back; the sudden

sounds of his grief shattered the enveloping silence. Noah sobbed so

80 Tad Williams

bitterly that Simon wondered how he could see through his tears to

slip the ring onto the king's white finger.

Finally the black-cloth beetles lifted King John back onto his bier.

Draped in the cloth-of-gold mantle, he was carried out of his castle

for the last time, three men on each side. Noah followed behind

carrying the king's dragon-crested war helmet.

In the shadows of the loft overhead, Simon released what seemed

an hour's worth of prisoned breath. The king was gone.

^

As Duke Isgrimnur saw Prester John's body pass out through the

Nearulagh Gate, and the procession of nobility began to fall into

place behind, a slow, fog-shrouded feeling overtook him, like a

dream of drowning.

Don't be such an ass, old man. he told himself. No one lives forever

even if John did take a mighty swipe at it.

The funny thing was, even when they had stood side to side in the

screeching hell of battle, the black-fletched Thrithings arrows

whistling past like Udun's owndamn. God's ownlightning, Is-

grimnur had always known that John Presbyter would die abed. To

see the man at war was to see a man anointed by Heaven, untouch-

able and commanding, a man who laughed as the blood-mist dark-

ened the sky. If John had been a Rimmersman, Isgrimnur smiled

inwardly, he would have been a bear-shirt for certain.

But he is dead, and that's the hard thing to understand. Look at

them, knights and lords . . . they thought he'd last forever, too.

Frightened, the greater pan of them.

Elias and the lector had taken their places directly behind the

king's bier. Isgrimnur, Prince Josua, and fair-haired Princess

MiriameleElias' only childfollowed closely. The other high fam-

ilies had taken their places as well, with none of their usual elbowing

for favorable position. As the body was carried down the Royal

Walk toward the headlands, the common people fell into step at the

rear, a huge crowd quieted and overawed by the procession.

Resting on a bed of long poles at the base of the Royal Walk lay

the king's boat Sea-Arrow, in which it was said he had long ago

come to Erkynland out of the Westerling islands. It was but a small

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR81

vessel, no more than five ells in length; Duke Isgrimnur was glad to

see that its woods have been new-lacquered until they glimmered in

the dim Feyever sunlight.

Gods. but he loved that boat! Isgrimnur remembered. Kingship

had left him scant time for the sea, but the duke recalled one wild

night, thirty years or more ago, when John had been in such a mood

that nothing would do but that he and Isgrimnura young man

thenmust get Sea-Arrow rigged and go out upon the windlashed

Kynslagh. The air had been so cold it stung. John, almost seventy

years old, had whooped and laughed as Sea-Arrow bucked on the

high swells. Isgrimnur, whose ancestors had taken to land long be-

fore his time, had held on tightly to the gunwale and prayed to his

many old gods and his one new one.

Now the king's servants and soldiers were laying John's body into

the boat with great tenderness, lowering it onto a platform that had

been prepared to hold the bier. Forty soldiers of the king's

Erkynguard picked up the long poles and placed them on their

shoulders, bearing the boat up and carrying it forward.

The king and Sea-Arrow led the vast company half a league along

the headlands above the bay; at last they reached Swertclif, and the

grave. The covering tent had been removed, and the hole was like an

open wound beside the six solemn, rounded barrows of the

Hayholt's earlier masters.

On one side of the pit stood a massive pile of cut turves and a heap

of stones and undressed timbers. Sea-Arrow was laid down on the

grave's far side, where the earth had been dug down at a shallow

angle. When the boat came to rest, the noble houses of Erkynland

and the Hayholt's servants filed by to place some small thing in boat

or barrow as a token of love. Each of the lands beneath his High

Ward had also sent some thing of mighty craft, that Prester John

might carry it with him to Heavena robe of precious Pisa-island

silk from Perdruin, a white porphyry Tree from Nabban. Is-

grimnur's party had brought from Elvritshalla in Rimmersgard a

silver axe of Dveming-make with mountain-blue gems in its haft.

Lluth, the Hemystiri king, had sent from the Taig at Hemysadharc

a tall ashwood spear all inlaid with red gold, and with a golden

point.

82 Tad Williams

The noon sun seemed to hang too high in the sky, Duke Is-

grimnur thought as he made his way forward at last; though it rolled

unhindered across the gray-blue dome of the sky, it seemed to hold

back its warmth. The wind blew harder, skirling across the clifftop.

Isgrimnur carried John's battered black war-boots in his hand. He

could not find it in his heart to look up at the white faces that peered

from the crowd like glimmers of snow in the deep forest.

As he approached Sea-Arrow he looked one last time at his King.

Although paler than a dove's breast, still John looked so stem and

fine and full of sleeping life that Isgrimnur caught himself worrying

for his old friend, lying out in the wind this way with no blanket. For

a moment he almost smiled-

John always said I had the heart of a bear and the wit of an ox,

Isgrimnur chided himself. And if it be cold up here, think how chill it

will be for him in the frozen earth . . .

Isgrimnur moved carefully but nimbly around the steep ramp of

earth, using a hand to steady himself when necessary. Although his

back hurt him fiercely, he knew no one suspected it; he was not too

old to find some pride in that.

Taking John Presbyter's blue-veined feet in his hands one at a

time, he slipped the boots on. He silently commended the skilled

hands in the House of Preparing for the ease with which his task was

accomplished. Without looking again at his friend's face he quickly

took the hand and kissed it, then walked away, feeling stranger still.

Suddenly it seemed to him that this was not his king's lifeless husk

that was being condemned to the soil, the soul fluttered free like a

newly-unfurled butterfly. The suppleness of John's limbs, the so-

familiar face in reposeas Isgrimnur had seen it countless times

when the king snatched an hour or two of sleep in the lull of battle

alt these things made him feel as though he deserted a living friend.

He knew John was deadhe had held the king's hand as the last

breaths fluted out of himstill, he felt a traitor.

So possessed was he by his thoughts that he nearly stepped into

Prince Josua, who moved nimbly around him on his path to the

barrow. Isgrimnur was shocked to see that Josua carried John's

sword Bright-Nail on a gray cloth.

What happens here? Isgrimnur wondered. What is he doing with

the sword?

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR83

As the Duke reached the first row of the crowd and turned to

watch, his unease deepened: Josua had laid Bright-Nail on the king's

chest, and was clasping John's hands about the hilt.

This is madness, the duke thought. That sword is for the king's heir

I know John would have wanted Elias to have it! And even ifElias

chose to bury it with his father, why does he not lay it in the grave

himself? Madness! Does no one else marvel at such a thing?

Isgrimnur looked from side to side, but saw nothing on the faces

around him but sorrow.

Now Elias walked down, passing his younger brother slowly, like

a participant in a stately danceas in fact he was. The heir to the

throne bent over the gunwale of the boat. What he sent with his

father no one could see, but it was noted by all that although a tear

sparkled on Elias' cheek when he turned, Josua's eyes were dry.

The company now made one more prayer. Ranessin, robes billow-

ing in the lake-breeze, sprinkled Sea-Arrow with holy oils. Then the

boat was gently lowered down the sloping pitfall, soldiers laboring in

silence with their heavy staves until it lay at last a fathom deep in

the earth. Above, timbers were raised into a great arch and work-

men laid the turves about, one atop the other. Finally, as stones were

being lifted into place to complete John's caim, the mourning party

turned and made its slow way back along the dins above the Kyn-

slagh.

^

The funeral feast that night in the castle's great hall was not a

solemn gathering, but rather a brave and merry occasion. John was

dead, of course, but his life had been longfar beyond that of most

menand he had left behind a kingdom wealthy and at peace, and a

strong son to rule.

The fireplaces were banked high; the leaping flames threw strange,

capering shadows on the walls as sweating servants hurried in and

out. The feasters waved their arms and shouted toasts to the old

king gone, and the new one to be crowned in the morning. The

castle hounds, large and small, barked and scrabbled over discarded

scraps and rooted in the straw that covered the floor. Simon, pressed

into service bearing one of the heavy wine ewers from table to table,

84 Tad Williams

shouted at and splashed by roaring merrymakers, felt as though he

served wine in some noisy hell from Father Dreosan's sermons; the

bones scattered across the tables and crunching underfoot could be

the remains of sinners, tormented and then cast aside by these laugh-

ing demons.

Not yet crowned, Elias already had the look of a warrior-king. He

sat at the main table surrounded by the young lords in his favor:

Guthwulf of Utanyeat, Fengbald the Earl of Falshire, Breyugar of

the Westfold, and otherseach wearing some bit of Elias1 green on

the mourning black, each vying to make the loudest toast, the sharp-

est jest. The king-to-be presided over all their striving, rewarding the

favorites with his loud laughter. From time to time he leaned over to

say something to Skali of Kaldskryke, Isgrimnur's kinsman, who sat

at Elias' table by special invitation. Although he was a large man,

hawk-faced and blond-bearded, Skali seemed a little overwhelmed at

the crown prince's sideespecially when Duke Isgrimnur had re-

ceived no similar honor. Something Elias now said, though, struck

home; Simon saw the Rimmersman smile, then break out into a

great guffaw and clang his metal goblet against the prince's. Elias,

grinning wolfishly, turned and said something to Fengbald; he, too,

joined the merriment.

By comparison, the table at which Isgrimnur sat with Prince

Josua and several others was much more subdued, seeming to match

in mood the prince's gray raiment. Although the other nobles were

doing their best to make conversation, Simon could see as he passed

by that the two chief figures were having none of it. Josua stared into

space, as though fascinated by the tapestries that lined the walls.

Duke Isgrimnur was just as unresponsive to the table talk, but his

reasons were no mystery. Even Simon could see the way the old

duke glowered at Skali Sharp-nose, and how his huge, gnarled hands

plucked distractedly at the fringe of his bear-skin tunic.

Elias' slight to one of John's most faithful knights was not going

unnoticed at other tables: some of the younger nobles, although

courteous enough not to make a show of it, seemed to find the

duke's discomfiture amusing. They whispered behind their hands,

eyebrows raised to signal the magnitude of the scandal.

As Simon swayed in place, amazed by the din and the smoke and

his own confused observations, a voice rang out from a back table,

THE DRAGON BONE CHAIR

85

cursing him and calling for more wine, stirring him into scurrying

life once more.

Later in the evening, when Simon finally found a chance to snatch

a moment's rest in an alcove beneath one of the giant tapestries, he

noticed that a new guest was seated at the head table, wedged in

between Elias and Guthwulf on a tall stool. The newcomer was

robed in most unfunereal scarlet, with black and gold piping wound

about the hem of his voluminous sleeves. As he leaned forward to

whisper in Elias' ear, Simon watched him with helpless fascination-

The man was completely hairless, without even eyebrows or lashes,

but his features were those of a youngish man. His skin, tight-

stretched on his skull, was notably pale even in the flaring orange

rushlight; his eyes were deep-sunken, and so dark that they seemed

only shiny black spots below his naked brows. Simon knew those

eyesthey had glared out at him from the hooded cloak of the cart-

driver who had nearly run him down at Nearulagh Gate. He shud-

dered and stared. There was something sickening but enthralling

about the man, like a swaying serpent.

"He's a nasty looking one, isn't he?" said a voice at his elbow.

Simon jumped. A young man, dark-haired and smiling, stood in the

alcove behind him, an ashwood lute cradled against his pigeon-gray

tunic.

"I ... I'm sorry," Simon stuttered. "You took me by surprise."

"I didn't mean to," the other laughed, "I was just coming to see if

you could give me a bit of help." He pulled his other hand from

behind his back and showed Simon an empty wine cup.

"Oh . . ." said Simon, "I'm so sorryI was resting, master . . .

I'm very sorry . . ."

"Peace, friend, peace' I did not come to cause trouble for you, but

if you do not stop apologizing, then I will be upset. What's your

name?"

"Simon, sir." He hastily upended the ewer and filled the young

man's flagon. The stranger set his cup down in a niche, readjusted

his grip on the lute, and reached into his tunic to produce another

cup. He proffered it with a bow.

"Here," he said, "I was going to steal this. Master Simon, but

instead I think we shall drink each other's health, and the old king's

memoryand please don't call me 'sir,' for that I am not." He

86 Tad Williams

bumped the cup against the ewer until Simon poured again.

"There!" said the stranger. "Now, call me Sangfugolor, as old

Isgrimnur mangles it, 'Zong-vogol.' "

The stranger's excellent imitation of the Rimmersgard accent

brought a tiny smile to Simon's face. After looking around furtively

for Rachel he sat the ewer down and tipped back the flagon that

Sangfugol had given him. Strong and sour, still the red wine rolled

down his parched throat like spring rain; when he lowered the cup,

his smile had widened.

"Are you part of Duke Isgrimnur's . . . retinue?" Simon asked,

wiping his lips with his sleeve.

Sangfugol laughed. Mirth seemed to come quickly to him.

"Retinue! Quite a word for a bottle boy! No, I am Josua's harper.

I live at his keep at Naglimund, in the North."

"Does Josua like music?!" For some reason this thought as-

tounded Simon. He poured himself another cupful. "He seems so

serious."

"And serious he is . . . but that doesn't mean he dislikes harping

or lute playing. True, it is my melancholy songs that are most often

to his liking, but there are times when he calls for the Ballad of

Three-Legged Tom or some such."

Before Simon could ask another question, there was a great

whoop of hilarity from the high table. Simon turned to see that

Fengbald had knocked a flagon of wine into the lap of another man,

who was drunkenly wringing out his shirt while Elias and Guthwulf

and the other nobles jibed and shouted. Only the bald stranger in the

scarlet robe was aloof, with cold eyes and a tight, tooth-baring smile.

"Who is that?" Simon turned back to Sangfugol, who had finished

his wine and was holding his lute up to his ear, plucking at the

strings as he delicately turned the pegs. "I mean the man in red."

"Yes," said the harper, "I saw you looking at him when I came

up. Frightful fellow, eh? That is Pryratesa Nabbanai priest, one of

Elias' counselors. People say that he is a marvelous alchemist

although he does look rather young for it, doesn't he? Not to men-

tion that it doesn't quite seem a fitting practice for a priest. Actually,

if you listen closely, you may also hear it whispered that he is a

warlock: a black magician. If you listen closer still . . ."Here, as if

to demonstrate, Sangfugol's voice dropped dramatically; Simon had

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

87

to lean forward to hear. He realized, as he swayed slightly, that he

had just drunk a third flagon of wine.

"If you listen very, very carefully . . ." the harper continued,

"you will hear people say that Pryrates' mother was a witch, and his

father . . . a demon!" Sangfugol loudly twanged a lute-string, and

Simon leaped back, surprised. "But Simon, you cannot believe ev-

erything you hearespecially from drunken minstrels," Sangfugol

finished with a chuckle and extended his hand. Simon stared at it

stupidly.

"To clasp, my friend," the harper grinned. "I have enjoyed speak-

ing with you, but I fear I must return to table, where other diver-

sions impatiently await me. Farewell!"

"Farewell . . ." Simon grasped Sangfugol's hand, then watched

as the harper wound his way across the room with the nimbleness of

an experienced drunkard.

As Sangfugol took his seat again, Simon's eyes came to rest on

two of the serving girls leaning against a wall in the hallway at the

room's far side, fanning themselves with their aprons and talking.

One of them was Hepzibah, the new girl; the other was Rebah, one

of the kitchen maids.

There was a certain warmth in Simon's blood. It would be so easy

to walk across the room and speak to them. There was something

about that Hepzibah, a sauciness in her eyes and mouth when she

laughed. . . . Feeling more than a little lightheaded, Simon stepped

out into the room, the roar of voices rising around him like a flood.

A moment, a moment, he thought feeling suddenly flushed and

frightened, how can I just walk up and speakwon't they know I've

been watching them? Wouldn't they . . .

"Hi there, you lazy clodpoll! Bring us some more of that wine!"

Simon turned to see red-faced Earl Fengbald waving a goblet at

him from the king's table. In the hallway the serving girls were

sauntering away. Simon ran back to the alcove to get his ewer, and

fetched it out from a tangle of dogs fighting over a chop. One pup,

young and scrawny, with a splotch of white on its brown face,

whined piteously at the fringe of the mob, unable to compete with

the larger dogs. Simon found a scrap of greasy skin on a deserted

chair and tossed it to the little dog. It wagged its stub of tail as it

bolted the treat, then followed at Simon's heels as he carried the

ewer across the room.

88 Tad Williams

Fengbald and Guthwulf, the long-jawed Earl of Utanyeat, were

involved in some kind of wrist-wrestling contest, their daggers

drawn and plunged into the tabletop on either side of the combat-

ants' arms. Simon stepped around the table as nimbly as he could,

pouring wine from the heavy ewer into the cups of the shouting

spectators and trying not to trip over the dog, which was darting in

and out between his feet. The king was watching the contest with

amusement, but he had his own page at his shoulder so Simon left

his goblet alone. He poured Pryrates' wine last, avoiding the priest's

glance, but could not help noticing the strange scent of the man, an

inexplicable amalgam of metal and over-sweet spices. Backing away,

he saw the little dog rooting in the straw near Pryrates' shiny black

boots, on the track of some fallen treasure.

"Come!" Simon hissed, backing farther away and slapping his

knee, but the dog paid no heed. It began to dig with both paws, its

back bumping against the priest's red-robed calf. "Come along!"

Simon whispered again.

Pryrates turned his head to look down, shiny skull pivoting slowly

on his long neck. He lifted his foot and brought his heavy boot down

on the dog's backa swift, compact movement finished in a heart-

beat. There was a crack of splintered bone, and a muffled squeal; the

little dog writhed helplessly in the straw until Pryrates lifted his heel

again and crushed its skull.

The priest stared for a disinterested moment at the body, then

lifted his gaze, his eyes alighting on Simon's horrified face. That

black stareremorseless, unconcernedcaught and held him.

Pryrates' flat, dead eyes flicked down again to the dog, and when

they returned to Simon a slow grin stretched across the priest's face.

What can you do about it, boy? the smile said. And who cares?

The priest's attention was drawn back to the table; Simon, freed,

dropped the ewer and stumbled away, looking for a place to throw

up.

It was just before midnight; fully half the revelers had staggered,

or been carried, off to bed. It was doubtful many of them would be

present for the morrow's coronation. Simon was pouring into a

drunken guest's cup the heavily watered wine that was all Peter

Gilded-Bowl would serve at this late hour, when Earl Fengbald, the

only one remaining of the king's party, staggered into the hall from

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

89

the commons outside. The young noble was disheveled and his

breeches were half-undone, but he wore a beatific smile on his face.

"Come outside, everybody!" he shouted. "Come outside now!

Come see!" He lurched back out the door. Those who could do it

pulled themselves to their feet and followed him, elbowing and jest-

ing, some singing drunkenly.

Fengbald stood in the commons, head tilted backward, black hair

hanging unbound down the back of his stained tunic as he stared up

into the sky. He was pointing; one by one, the faces of the followers

turned up to look.

Across the sky a strange shape was painted, like a deep wound

that spurted blood against the nightblack: a great, red comet,

streaming across the sky from north to south.

"A bearded star!" someone shouted. "An omen!"

"The old king is dead, dead, dead!" cried Fengbald, waving his

dagger in the air as if daring the stars to come down and fight.

"Long live the new king!" he shouted. "A new age is begun!"

Cheers rang out, and some of those present stamped their feet and

howled. Others began a giddy, laughing dance, men and women

holding hands as they whirled in a circle. Above them the red star

gleamed like a smoldering coal.

Simon, who had followed the merrymakers outside to see the

cause of the ruckus, turned back to the hall; the shouts of the danc-

ers floated up behind him. He was surprised to see Doctor Morgenes

standing in the shadows of the bailey wall. The old man, wrapped in

a heavy robe against the chill air, did not notice his apprenticehe,

too, was staring up at the bearded star, the scarlet slash across the

vault of Heaven. But unlike the others, there was no drunkenness or

glee upon his face. He looked fearful and cold and small.

He looked, Simon thought, like a man alone in the wilderness

listening to the hungry song of wolves. . . .

The Conqueror Star

THE SPRING and summer of Elias' first regnal year were magical,

sun-bright with pomp and display. All Osten Ard seemed reborn.

The young nobility came back to fill the Hayholfs long-quiet halls,

and so marked was the difference that they might have brought

color and daylight with them to what had been a dark place. As in

John's young days the castle was full of laughter and drinking, and

the swagger of shining battle-blades and armor. At night music was

heard in the hedged gardens once more, and the splendid ladies of

the court flitted toor fled fromassignations in the warm dark-

ness like graceful, flowing ghosts. The tourney field sprang back to

life, sprouting multicolored tents like a bank of flowers. To the com-

mon people it seemed as though every day was holiday, and that the

merrymaking would have no end. King Elias and his friends made

furious sport, in the manner of children who must soon be put to

bed, and know it. All of Erkynland seemed to roister and tumble like

a summer-drunken dog.

Some of the villagers muttered darklyit was hard to get the

spring crop sowed with such heedlessness in the air. Many of the

older, sourer priests grumbled at the spread of licentiousness and

gluttony. But most people laughed at these doomsayers. Elias' mon-

archy was but newly-coined, and Erkynlandall of Osten Ard, it

seemedhad come out of a long winter of age into a season of

headlong youth. How could that be unnatural?

^

Simon felt his fingers cramping as he laboriously traced the letters

onto the gray parchment. Morgenes was at the window, holding a

long, fluted piece of glass pipe up to the sunlight as he examined it

for dirt.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR91

If he says one word about the thing not being properly cleaned, I'll

walk out, Simon thought. The only sunshine I see anymore is what's

reflected in the beakers I polish.

Morgenes turned from the window and brought the piece of glass

pipe over to the table where Simon slaved at his writing. As the old

man approached, Simon prepared himself for the scolding, feeling a

swelling of resentment that seemed to lodge between his shoulder

blades.

"A lovely job, Simon!" Morgenes said as he laid the pipette down

beside the parchment. "You take much better care of things around

here than I ever could by myself." The doctor gave him a pat on the

arm and leaned over. "How are you coming there?"

"Terribly," Simon heard himself say. Even though the resentful

knot was still there, he was disgusted by the petty tone of his own

voice. "I mean, I'll never be good at this. I can't make the letters

cleanly without the ink blobbing up, and I can't read any of what

I'm writing anyway!" He felt a little better for having said it, but he

still felt stupid.

"You're worrying about nothing, Simon," the doctor said, and

straightened up. He seemed distracted: as he spoke his eyes darted

about the room. "First of all, everybody's writing 'blobs up' at first;

some folk spend their whole lives blobbing upthat doesn't mean

they have nothing important to say. Secondly, of course you can't

read the things you're writingthe book is written in Nabbanai.

You can't read Nabbanai."

"But why should I copy words that I don't understand?" Simon

growled. "That's foolish."

Morgenes turned sharp eyes back to Simon. "Since I told you to

do it, I suppose I'm foolish, too?"

"No, I didn't mean that . . . it's just that . . ."

"Don't bother to explain." The doctor pulled up a stool and sat by

Simon's side. His long, bent fingers scrabbled aimlessly in the rub-

bish of the tabletop. "I want you to copy these words because it's

easier to concentrate on the form and shape of your letters if you're

not distracted by the subject matter."

"Hmmmph." Simon felt only partially satisfied. "Can't you tell

me what book it is, anyway? I keep looking at the pictures, but I still

can't figure it out." He flipped the page back to an illustration that

he had stared at many times in the past three days, a grotesque

92 Tad Williams

woodcut of an antlered man with huge staring eyes and black hands.

Cringing figures huddled at his feet; above the honied man's head a

flaming sun hung against an ink-black sky.

"Like this," Simon pointed at the strange picture, "here at the

bottom it says, 'Sa Asdridan Condiquilles'what does that mean?"

"It means," Morgenes said as he closed the cover and picked the

book up, " "The Conqueror's Star,' and it is not the kind of thing

that you need to know about." He placed the book on a precariously

balanced stack against the wall.

"But I'm your apprentice!" Simon protested. "When are you go-

ing to teach me something?"

"Idiot boy! What do you think I'm doing? I'm trying to teach you

to read and to write. That's the most important thing. What do you

want to learn?"

"Magic!" Simon said immediately. Morgenes stared at him.

"And what about reading . . . ?" the doctor asked ominously.

Simon was cross. As usual, people seemed determined to balk him

at every turn. "I don't know," he said. "What's so important about

reading and letters, anyway? Books are just stories about things.

Why should I want to read books?"

Morgenes grinned, an old stoat finding a hole in the henyard

fence. "Ah, boy, how can I be mad at you . . . what a wonderful,

charming, perfectly stupid thing to say!" The doctor chuckled ap-

preciatively, deep in his throat.

"What do you mean?" Simon's eyebrows moved together as he

frowned. "Why is it wonderful and stupid?"

"Wonderful because I have such a wonderful answer," Morgenes

laughed. "Stupid because . . . because young people are made stu-

pid, I supposeas tortoises are made with shells, and wasps with

stingsit is their protection against life's unkindnesses."

"Begging your pardon?" Simon was totally flummoxed, now.

"Books," Morgenes said grandly, leaning back on his precarious

stool, "books are magic. That is the simple answer. And books are

traps as well."

"Magic? Traps?"

"Books are a form of magic" the doctor lifted the volume he

had just laid on the stack, "because they span time and distance

more surely than any spell or charm. What did so-and-so think

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR93

about such-and-such two hundred years agone? Can you fly back

through the ages and ask him? Noor at least, probably not.

"But, ah! If he wrote down his thoughts, if somewhere there exists

a scroll, or a book of his logical discourses ... he speaks to you!

Across centuries! And if you wish to visit far Nascadu, or lost

Khandia, you have also but to open a book. . . ."

"Yes, yes, I suppose I understand all that." Simon did not try to

hide his disappointment. This was not what he had meant by the

word "magic." "What about traps, then? Why "traps'?"

Morgenes leaned forward, waggling the leather-bound volume un-

der Simon's nose. "A piece of writing is a trap," he said cheerily,

"and the best kind. A book, you see, is the only kind of trap that

keeps its captivewhich is knowledgealive forever. The more

books you have," the doctor waved an all-encompassing hand about

the room, "the more traps, then the better chance of capturing some

particular, elusive, shining beastone that might otherwise die un-

seen." Morgenes finished with a grand flourish, dropping the book

back on the pile with a loud thump. A tiny cloud of dust leaped up,

the flecks milling in the banded sunlight leaking past the window

bars.

Simon stared at the shimmering dust for a moment, collecting his

thoughts. Following the doctor's words was like trying to catch mice

while wearing mittens.

"But what about real magic?" he said at last, a stubborn crease

between his brows. "Magic like they say Pryrates does up in the

tower?"

For a brief instant a look of angeror was it fear?contorted the

doctor's face.

"No, Simon," he said quietly. "Do not throw Pryrates up to me.

He is a dangerous, foolish man."

Despite his own horrid memories of the red priest, Simon found

the intensity of the doctor's look strange and a little frightening. He

nerved himself to ask another question. "You do magic, don't you?

Why is Pryrates dangerous?"

Morgenes stood suddenly, and for a wild moment Simon feared

that the old man might strike him, or shout. Instead Morgenes

walked stimy to the window and stared out for a moment. From

where Simon sat, the doctor's thin hair was a bristly halo above his

narrow shoulders.

94 Tad Williams

Morgenes turned and walked back. His face was grave, troubled

by doubt. "Simon," he said, "it will probably do me no good at all to

say this, but I want you to keep away from Pryratesdon't go near

him, and don't talk about him . . . except to me, of course."

"But why?" Contrary to what the doctor might think, Simon had

already decided to stay far away from the alchemist. Morgenes was

not usually so forthcoming, though, and Simon was not going to

waste the opportunity. "What is so bad about him?"

"Have you noticed that people are afraid of Pryrates? That when

he comes down from his new chambers in Hjeldin's Tower people

hurry to get out of his way? There is a reason. He is feared because

he himself has none of the right kinds of fear. It shows in his eyes."

Simon put the pen nib to his mouth and chewed, thoughtfully,

then took it out again. "Right kinds of fear? What does that mean?"

"There is no such thing as 'fearless,' Simonnot unless a man is

mad. People who are called fearless are usually just good at hiding

it, and that is quite a different thing. Old King John knew fear, and

both his sons certainly have known it ... I have, too. Pryrates

. . . well, people see that he doesn't fear or respect the things that

the rest of us do. That is often what we mean when we call someone

mad."

Simon found this fascinating. He wasn't sure that he could believe

either Prester John or Elias had ever been afraid, but the subject of

Pryrates was itself compelling.

"Is he mad, doctor? How could that be? He is a priest, and one of

the king's counselors." But Simon remembered the eyes and toothy

smile, and knew Morgenes was right.

"Let me put it another way." Morgenes twined a curl of snowy

beard around his finger. "I spoke to you of traps, of searching for

knowledge as though hunting an elusive creature. Well, where I and

other knowledge-seekers go out to our traps to see what bright beast

we may have been lucky enough to capture, Pryrates throws open

his door at night and waits to see what comes in." Morgenes took

the quill pen away from Simon, then lifted the sleeve of his robe and

dabbed away some of the ink that had smeared on Simon's cheek.

"The problem with Pryrates' approach," he continued, "is that if

you do not like the beast that comes to call, it is hardvery, very

hardto get the door closed again."

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

95

^

"Hah!" Isgrimnur growled. "A touch, man, a touch! Admit it!"

"The barest whisper across my vest," Josua said, raising an eye-

brow in feigned surprise. "I'm sorry to see that infirmity has driven

you to such desperate devices . . ." In mid-sentence, without alter-

ing tone, he lunged forward. Isgrimnur caught the wooden blade on

his own hilt with a clack, and skewed the thrust aside.

"Infirmity?" the older man hissed through bared teeth. "1*11 give

you an infirmity that will send you crying back to your wet nurse!"

Still swift for all his years and bulk, the Duke of Elvritshalla

pressed forward, his two-handed grip enabling him to keep good

control as he swung the wooden sword in wide arcs. Josua leaped

backward, parrying, thin hair hanging in sweat-dampened points

across his forehead. At last he saw an opening. As Isgrimnur

brought the practice sword around in another whistling sweep, the

prince ducked down, using his own blade to help angle the duke's

cut past his head, then hooked a foot behind Isgrimnur's heel and

pulled. The duke crashed backward onto the ground like an old tree.

A moment later Josua, too, had slumped to the grass at Isgrimnur's

side. With his single hand he nimbly unlaced his thick, padded vest

and rolled onto his back.

Isgrimnur, puffing like a bellows, said nothing for several long

moments. His eyes were closed; sweat-beads in his beard gleamed in

the strong sunlight. Josua leaned over to stare. Then, a look of worry

crossing his face, he reached over to undo Isgrimnur's vest. As he

got his fingers under the knot the duke's great pink hand came up

and buffeted him on the side of the head, rolling him again onto his

back. The prince lifted a hand to his ear and winced.

"Hah!" Isgrimnur wheezed. "That'll leam you . . . Young

pup . . ."

Another stretch of silence followed as the two men lay gasping,

staring up into the cloudless sky.

"You cheat, little man," Isgrimnur said at last, levering himself

into a sitting position. "The next time you wander back here to the

Hayholt I will have some revenge. Besides, had it not been so gods-

96 Tad Williams

cursed hot, and me so damnably fat, I would have staved in your

ribs an hour ago."

Josua sat up, shading his eyes. Two figures were approaching

across the yellow grass of the tourney field. One was draped in a

long robe. "It is hot," Josua said.

"And in Novander!" Isgrimnur grunted, pulling off the dueling-

vest- "The Days of the Hound are long behind us, and still this by-

the-Mother heat! Where is the rain?"

"Frightened away, perhaps." He squinted at the two figures as

they drew nearer.

"Ho, my young brother!" one of the two figures called- "And old

Nuncle Isgrimnur! It looks like you have worn yourselves out at

your play!"

"Josua and the heat have damn near killed me, Your Majesty,"

Isgrimnur called out as the king approached. Elias was garbed in a

rich tunic of sea green. Dark-eyed Pryrates walked at his side in

flapping red robe, a comradely scarlet bat.

Josua stood, extending his hand to Isgrimnur as the older man

clambered to his feet. "Duke Isgrimnur, as usual, exaggerates," the

prince said softly. "I was forced to knock him to the ground and sit

on him to save my own life."

"Yes, yes, we were watching your horseplaying from Hjeldin's

Tower," Elias said, waving a careless hand back to where the tower's

bulk loomed over the Hayholt's outwall, "weren't we, Pryrates?"

"Yes, Sire." Pryrates' smile was thin as thread, his voice a dry

rasp. "Your brother and the duke are mighty men indeed."

"By the way. Your Majesty," Isgrimnur said, "may I ask you

about something? I hate to trouble you with state business at such a

time."

Elias, who had been staring out across the field, turned to the old

duke with a look of mild annoyance. "I am, as it happens, discussing

some important matters with Pryrates. Why do you not come to see

me when I am holding court on such things?" He turned back again.

Across the tourney field Guthwulf and Count Eolair of Nad Mul-

lacha kinsman of Hemystir's King Lluthwere chasing a frac-

tious stallion that had broken its traces. Elias laughed at the sight

and elbowed Pryrates, who favored him with another perfunctory

smile.

"Urn, your pardon. Majesty," Isgrimnur resumed, "but I have

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR97

been trying to take this matter up with you for a fortnight. Your

chancellor Helfcene keeps telling me that you're too busy"

"At Hjeldin's Tower," Josua added curtly. For a moment the

brothers locked eyes, then Elias turned to the duke.

"Oh, very well, then. What is it?"

"It's the royal garrison at Vestvennby. They have been gone for

well over a month now, and remain unreplaced. The Frostmarch is

still a wild place, and I do not have enough men to keep the north-

ern Wealdhelm Road open without the Vestvennby garrison. Will

you not send another troop?"

Elias had returned his gaze to Guthwulf and Eolair, two small

figures shimmering in the heat as they chased the diminishing stal-

lion. He answered without turning. "Skali of Kaldskryke says that

you have more than enough men, old Uncle. He says you are hoard-

ing your soldiers at Elvritshalla and Naarved. Why is that?" His

voice was deceptively light.

Before the startled Isgrimnur could reply, Josua spoke up. "Skali

Sharp-nose is a liar if he says that. You are a fool if you believe him."

Elias whirled, his lip curling. "Is that right, brother Josua? Skali is

a liar? And I should take your word for that, you who have never

tried to hide your hatred of me?"

"Now then, now then . . ." Isgrimnur interrupted, flustered and

more than a little frightened- "Elias . . , Your Majesty, you know

my loyaltyI was the firmest friend your father ever had!"

"Oh, yes, my father/" Elias snorted.

". . . And please do not take your displeasure over these scandal-

ous rumorsfor that is all they areout on Josua. He does not hate

you! He is as loyal as I am!"

"Of that," said the king, "I have no doubt. I shall garrison

Vestvennby when I am ready to, and not before!" For a moment

Elias stared at them both, eyes wide. Pryrates, long-silent, reached

up a white hand to tug at Elias' tunic sleeve.

"Please, my lord," he said, "this is not the time or place for such

things . . ." he flicked an impudent, heavy-lidded glance at Josua,

". . . or so I humbly submit."

The king stared at his minion, and then nodded once. "You are

right. I have allowed myself to become angered over nothing. For-

give me, Uncle," he said to Isgrimnur, "for as you said, it is a hot

day. Forgive my temper." He smiled.

98 Tad Williams

Isgrimnur bobbed his head. "Of course. Sire. It is easy to let ill-

humors get the best of us in such stifling weather. It is strange, this

late in the year, is it not?"

"That it is." Elias turned and grinned broadly at the red-cloaked

priest. "Pryrates, here, for all his holy standing in the Church, can-

not seem to convince God to give us the rain we are praying for

can you, counselor?"

Pryrates looked at the king strangely, ducking his head back into

the collar of his robe like an albino tortoise. "Please, my Lord . . ."

he said, "let us resume our talk and leave these gentlemen to their

swordplay."

"Yes." The king nodded. "I suppose so." As the pair began to

move off, Elias stopped. He wheeled slowly around to face Josua,

who was picking the wooden practice swords up from the dry grass.

"You know, brother," the king said, "it has been a long time since

the two of us crossed staves. Watching you has put me in mind of

those old times. What do you say we make a few passes, as long as

we are all here upon the field?"

A quiet moment passed. "As you wish, Elias," Josua replied at

last, and tossed one of the wooden blades to the king, who caught

the hilt deftly in his right hand.

". . . As a matter of fact," Elias said, a half-smile playing across

his lips, "I don't believe we have engaged since your . . . acci-

dent." He put on a look of greater solemnity. "Lucky for you it was

not your sword-wielding hand that was lost."

"Lucky, indeed." Josua measured himself a pace and a half, then

turned to face Elias.

"On the other hand," Elias began, "ah, that was a poor choice

of words, wasn't it? My apologies. Alternately, it is unlucky that we

must fence with these poor wooden oars." He waggled the practice

sword. "I do so enjoy watching you usewhat do you call that thin

blade of yours?ah, Naidel. It is a pity you do not have it here."

Without warning Elias leaped forward, swinging a hard backhand

toward Josua's head. The prince caught the blow, allowing it to slide

by, then thrust forward. Elias trapped the oncoming lunge and

deftly turned it aside. The two brothers backed apart, circling.

"Yes." Josua leveled his sword before him, his thin face slick with

sweat. "It is too bad that Naidel is not with me. It is also too bad

that you do not have Bright-Nail." The prince made a swift down-

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR99

ward cut, and slid into another looping thrust. The king

backpedaled swiftly, then counter-attacked.

"Bright-Nail?" said Elias, breathing a little heavily. "What do you

mean by that? You know that it is buried with our father." He

ducked an arching backhand and pushed Josua back.

"Oh, I know," said Josua, parrying, "but a king's swordjust like

his kingdomshould be wisely,"a thrust"and proudly,"a

counter-thrust". . . should be wisely and carefully used ... by

his heir."

The two wooden blades slid together with a noise like an axe

cleaving timber. The pressure moved down until the hilts locked

together, and Elias' and Josua's faces were merely inches apart.

Muscles bunched beneath the brothers' shirts; for a moment they

were nearly still, the only movement a slight trembling as they

strained against each other. Finally Josua, who could not grip his

hilt with two hands as the king could, felt his blade begin to slide.

With a supple shrug he disengaged and sprang backward, lowering

the blade before him again.

As they faced each other across the expanse of grass, chests heav-

ing, a loud, deep tolling rang out across the tourney field: the bells of

Green Angel Tower marking the noontide.

"There you are, gentlemen!" cried Isgrimnur, a sickly smile on his

face. There had been no mistaking the naked hatred that flowed

between the two. "There're the bells, and that means dmnertime.

Shall we call it a draw? If I don't get out of the sun and find a flagon

of wine, I'm afraid I won't make it to Aedonmansa this year. These

old northern bones weren't meant to stand such cruel heat."

"The duke is right, my lord," Pryrates rasped, laying his hand on

Elias' wrist, which still held the upraised sword. A reptilian smile

tightened the priest's lips. "You and I can finish our business as we

walk back."

"Very well," Elias grunted, and tossed the sword over his shoul-

der where it struck the ground and cartwheeled once, then fell flat.

"Thank you for the exercise, brother." He turned and offered his

arm to Pryrates. They moved away, scarlet and green.

"What do you say, Josua?" Isgrimnur asked, taking the wooden

sword from the prince's hand, "Shall we go and have some wine?"

"Yes, I suppose so," Josua replied, bending to pick up the vests as

Isgrimnur retrieved the sword the king had flung away. He straight-

100 Tad Williams

ened, staring into the distance. "Do the dead always stand between

the living, Uncle?" he asked quietly, then drew his hand across his

face. "Never mind you. Let us go and find someplace cool."

^

"Really, Judith, it's all right. Rachel won't mind . . ."

Simon's questing hand was captured mere inches away from the

mixing bowl. Judith's grip, for all her pinkness and plumpness, was

quite strong.

"Get on with you. 'Rachel wouldn't mind,' indeed! Rachel would

break every bone in this frail old body of mine." Pushing Simon's

hand back into his lap, Judith blew a strand of hair out of her eyes

and wiped her fingers on her stained apron. "I should have known

that the merest whiff of the Aedontide bread a-baking would bring

you 'round like an Inniscnch camp-dog."

Simon traced sad patterns in the flour-strewn counter.

"But Judith, you've got mounds and mounds of doughwhy

can't I have a taste from the bowl?"

Judith levered herself up from the stool and moved gracefully to

one of the kitchen's hundreds of shelves, like a barge on a placid

river. Two young scullions scattered before her like startled seagulls.

"Now, where . . ." she mused, ". . . where is that crock of sweet

butter?" As she stood, finger to mouth in a thoughtful pose, Simon

edged nearer to the mixer bow!.

"Don't you dare, laddie." Judith cast the words over her shoulder

without even turning to look at him. Did she have eyes on all sides?

"It's not that there's not dough to spare, Simon. Rachel doesn't

want you spoiling your supper." She continued her perusal of the

orderly shelves stacked with goods as Simon sat back and glowered.

Despite the occasional frustrations, the kitchen was a fine place.

Longer even than Morgenes' chambers, it seemed nevertheless small

and intimate, full of the pulsing warmth of the ovens and the scents

of good things. Lamb stew seethed in iron pots, Aedontide breads

were rising in the oven, and papery brown onions hung like copper

bells in the fogged window. The air was thick with the smells of

spices, tangy ginger and cinnamon, saffron, cloves, and scratchy

pepper. Scullions rolled barrels of flour and pickled fish through the

101

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

door, or pulled loaves from the baking ovens with flat wooden pad-

dles. One of the chief apprentices was boiling rice paste over the fire

in a pot of almond milk, making a blanchesweet for the king's des-

sert. And Judith herself, a huge, gentle woman who made the giant

kitchen seem as intimate as a farmer's cot, directed all without once

raising her voice, a kingly but sharp-eyed sovereign in her kingdom

of bricks and pots and firelight.

She returned with the missing crock, and as Simon regretfully

watched she took a long-handled brush and dabbed the butter over

the braided Aedontide loaves.

"Judith," Simon asked at last, "if it's almost Aedonmansa, why is

there no snow? Morgenes said he's never seen it wait this late in the

year."

"That I don't know, I'm sure," Judith said briskly. "We had no

rain in Novander, either. I expect it's just a dry year." She frowned,

and brushed again at the nearest loaf.

"They have been watering the sheep and cows from the town in

the Hayholt's moat," Simon said.

"Have they, then?"

"Yes. You can see the brown rings around the edges where the

water's gone down. There are places you can stand where the water

doesn't even reach your knees!"

"And you've found them all, I don't doubt."

"I think so," Simon replied proudly. "And last year this time it

was all frozen. Think of it!"

Judith looked up from her loaf-glazing to fix Simon with her pale,

kind blue eyes. "I know it's exciting when things like this happen,"

she said, "but just remember, laddie, we need that water. There'll be

no more fine meals if we get neither rain nor snow. You can't drink

the Kynslagh, you know." The Kynslagh, like the Gleniwent that

fed it, was as salty as the sea.

"I know that," Simon said. "I'm sure it will snow soonor rain,

since it's so warm. It's just that it will be a very strange midwinter."

Judith was about to say something else when she stopped, looking

over Simon's shoulder at the doorway.

"Yes, girl, what is it?" she asked. Simon turned to see a familiar

curly-haired serving girl standing a few feet awayHepzibah.

"Rachel sent me to find Simon, mum," she replied, giving a lazy

102 Tad Williams

half-curtsy. "She needs him to get something down from a high

shelf."

"Well, dearie, you don't need to ask me. He's just sitting here

mooning over my baking, not being any help or anything." She

made a shooing gesture at Simon. He did not see it, as he was

admiring Hepzibah's tight-cinched apron, and the wavy hair which

her cap could neither control nor contain. " 'Lysia's mercy, boy, get

on with you." Judith leaned over and poked him with the handle of

the brush.

Hepzibah had already turned and was nearly out the door. As

Simon scrambled down off his stool to follow, the kitchen-mistress

laid a warm hand on his arm.

"Here," she said, t<! seem to have spoiled this onesee, ifs all

crooked." She handed him a loaf of warm bread, twisted like a piece

of rope and smelling of sugar.

'Thank you!" he said, tearing off a piece and pushing it into his

mouth as he hurried to the door. "It's good!"

"Of course it is!" Judith called after him. "If you tell Rachel, I'll

skin you!" By the time she had finished, she was shouting at an

empty doorway.

It only took a few paces before Simon caught up with Hepzibah,

who was not walking very quickly.

Was she waiting for me? he wondered, feeling oddly breathless,

then decided it was more likely that anyone given an errand which

took them out of Rachel's clutches would dawdle all they could.

"Would you . . . would you like some of this?" he asked, gasp-

ing slightly. The serving-girl took a piece of the sweet bread and

sniffed it, then popped it into her mouth.

"Oh, that's good, that is," she said, then gifted Simon with a

dazzling smile, eyes crinkling at the corners. "Give me another,

won't you?" He did.

They passed out of the hall and into the courtyard. Hepzibah

crossed her arms as if to hug herself. "Ooh, it's cold," she said. It

was actually fairly warmblazing hot, considering it was Decander-

monthbut now that Hepzibah had mentioned it, Simon was sure

that he could detect a breeze.

"Yes, it is cold, isn't it?" he said, and fell silent again.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR103

As they walked past the comer of the inner keep that housed the

royal residences, Hepzibah pointed up to a small window just below

the upper turret. "See there?" she asked. "Just the other day I saw

the princess standing there, combing her hair ... oh, my, but

hasn't she got nice hair?"

A dim memory of gold catching the afternoon sunlight floated up

in Simon's mind, but he was not to be distracted.

"Oh, I think you have much nicer hair," he said, then turned

away to look at one of the guardtowers in the Middle Bailey wall, a

treacherous blush stealing up his cheeks.

"Do you really?" laughed Hepzibah. "I think it's the worst tangle.

Princess Miriamele has ladies to brush hers. Sarrahyou know her,

the fair-haired girl?knows one of them. Sarrah says that this lady

told her the princess is very sad, sometimes, and that she wants to go

back to Meremund where she grew up."

Simon was looking with great interest at Hepzibah's neck,

wreathed by the sprays of curly brown hair that hung down from

her cap. "Hmmm," he said,

"You want to know something else?" Hepzibah asked, turning

away from the tower. "What are you staring at?" she squealed,

but her eyes were merry. "Stop it, I told you my hair was in a strew.

Do you want to know something else about the princess?"

"What?"

"Her father wants her to marry Earl Fengbald, but she doesn't

want to. The king is very angry with her, and Pengbald is threaten-

ing to leave the court and go back to Falshirealthough why he'd

want to do that, who knows. Lofsunu says he never will, since no

one in his earldom has enough money to appreciate his horses and

clothes and things."

"Who's Lofsunu?" Simon wanted to know.

"Oh." Hepzibah looked coy. "He's a soldier I know. He's with

Count Breyugar's household force. He's very handsome."

The last of the Aedontide bread turned to wet ashes in Simon's

mouth. "A soldier?" he said quietly. "Is he ... a relative of

yours?"

Hepzibah giggled, a sound that Simon was beginning to find a

little irritating. "A relative? Merciful Rhiap, no, I should say not!

Mooning around after me all the time!" She giggled again. Simon

104 Tad Williams

liked it even less. "Maybe you've seen him," she continued, "he's

a guard in the eastern barracks? Big shoulders and a beard?" She

sketched in the air a man in whose shadow two Simons could com-

fortably have sat on a summer day.

Simon's feelings were at war with his more sensible nature. His

feelings won. "Soldiers are stupid," he grunted.

"They are not!" said Hepzibah. "You take that back! Lofsunu is a

fine man! Someday he's going to marry me!"

"Well, you'll make a fine couple," Simon snarled, then felt sorry.

"I hope you'll be happy," he finished, hoping that the reasons for his

resentment were not as crystallinely clear as he felt sure they were.

"Well, we will be," said Hepzibah, mollified. She stared at a pair

of yeomen warders walking on the battlements above their heads,

long pikes couched on shoulders. "Someday Lofsunu will be a ser-

geant, and we shall have a house of our own in Erchester. We'll be

happy as ... as can be. Happier than that poor princess, anyway."

Grimacing, Simon picked up a round stone and rattled it off the

bailey wall.

Doctor Morgenes, pacing the battlements, looked down as Simon

and one of the young serving girls passed beneath him. A dry breeze

blew his hood back from his head as the couple passed below- He

smiled and silently wished Simon good luckthe boy appeared to

need it. His awkward carriage and bouts of sullenness made him

seem more child than man, but he had the height, and showed the

promise of growing into it some day. Simon was straddling the bor-

derline, and even the doctor, whose age no one in the castle now

could guess, remembered what that was like.

There was a sudden whirring of wings in the air behind him;

Morgenes turned, but slowly, as if it was no surprise. Anyone watch-

ing would have seen a fluttering gray shadow that hung in the air

before him for the span of a few heartbeats, then disappeared into

the spacious folds of his gray sleeves.

The doctor's hands, which had been empty a moment earlier, now

held a small roll of fine parchment bound with a slender blue ribbon.

Cupping it in one palm, he unrolled it with a gentle finger. The

message upon it was in the southern tongue of Nabban and the

Church, but the letters were stark Rimmersgard runes.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR105

Morgen

The fires ofStormspike have been lit. From Tungoldyr I have

seen their smokes nine days, and their flames eight nights. The

White Foxes are awake again, and in the darkness they trouble

the children. I have also sent winged words to our smallest

friend, but I doubt they will find him unawares. Someone has

been knocking at dangerous doors.

Jamauga

Beside the signature the author had drawn a crude feather in a

circle.

"Odd weather, is it not?" a dry voice said. "And yet so pleasant

for walking on the battlements."

The doctor whirled, crumpling the parchment in his hand.

Pryrates stood at his shoulder, smiling.

"The air is full of birds today," the priest said. "Are you a student

of birds, doctor? Do you know much of their habits?"

"I have some small knowledge of them," Morgenes said quietly.

His blue eyes were narrowed.

"I myself have thought of studying them," Pryrates nodded.

"They are easily captured, you know . . . and they hold so many

secrets that the inquiring mind would find valuable." He sighed and

rubbed his smooth chin. "Ah, well, merely another thing to consider

my time is so full already. Good day, doctor. Enjoy the air." He

moved off down the battlement, boots clicking on the stone.

For a long while after the priest had gone Morgenes stood quietly,

staring at the blue-gray northern sky.

8

Bitter Air

and Sweet

^

IT WAS LATE in the month of Jonever. The rains had still not come.

As the sun began to sink behind the western walls, and insects gos-

siped in the tall dry grass, Simon and Jeremias the chandler's boy sat

back to back and panting.

"Come on, then." Simon forced himself to his feet. "Let's have

another go." Jeremias, now unsupported, slumped backward until

he lay outstretched in the scratchy grass like an upended tortoise.

"You go on," he wheezed. "I'll never be a soldier."

"Of course you will," said Simon, annoyed at such talk. "We both

will. You were much better last time. Come on, get up."

With a groan of pain Jeremias allowed himself to be tugged up-

right. He reluctantly took the barrel stave Simon handed to him.

"Let's go in, Simon. I hurt all over."

"You think too much," Simon responded, and lifted his own

stave. "Have at you!" Stave smacked on stave.

"Oucht" Simon yelped.

"Ho, ho!" chortled Jeremias, much heartened. "A mortal blow!"

The clicking and smacking resumed.

It had not been just his unsuccessful flirtation with Hepzibah that

reawakened Simon's old fascination with the glories of the military

life. Before Elias had come to the throne Simon had felt sure that his

true desirethe one for which he would give anythingwas to be

Morgenes' apprentice, and to leam all the secrets of the doctor's

muddled, magical world. But now that he had it, and had replaced

plodding Inch as the doctor's helper, the glory had begun to pale.

There was so much work, for one thing, and Morgenes was so dam-

nably rigorous about everything. And had Simon learned to do any

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR107

magic at all? He had not. Placed against hours of reading and writ-

ing and sweeping and polishing in the doctor's dark chamber, great

deeds on the battlefield and the admiring glances of young women

were not to be sneered at.

Deep in Jakob the Chandler's tallow-scented den, fat Jeremias

had also been caught up in the martial splendor of the king's first

year. During the week-long pageants that Elias seemed to hold vir-

tually every month, all the color of the realm settled on the jousting

lists, the knights like shiny butterflies of silk and gleaming steel, far

more beautiful than any mortal thing. The glory-spiced wind that

blew across the tournament field awakened deep longings in the

breasts of young men.

Simon and Jeremias went to the cooper for long slats to fashion

into swords, just as they had in childhood. They traded blows to-

gether for hours after chores were finished, at first staging their

mock battles in the stables until Shem Horsegroom threw them out

for the peace of his wards, then moving to the unmowed grass just

south of the tourney field. Night after night Simon came limping

back to the servants' quarters, breeches snagged and shirt torn, and

Rachel the Dragon turned up her eyes and prayed aloud for Saint

Rhiap to save her from the blockheadedness of boys, then rolled up

her sleeves and added some bruises to those Simon had already

garnered.

"I think . . ." Simon puffed, "that's . . . enough." Jeremias,

pink-faced and doubled over, could only nod his agreement.

As they trooped back toward the castle in the fading light, sweat-

ing and huffing like plow oxen, Simon noted with approval that

Jeremias was beginning to lose some of his lumpishness. Another

month or so and he would begin to resemble a soldier. Before their

regular dueling began, he had looked more like something his mas-

ter might put a wick into.

"That was good today, wasn't it?" Simon asked. Jeremias rubbed

his head through his cropped hair and gave Simon a look of disgust.

"I don't know how you talked me into this," he grumbled. "They

will never let folk like us be anything but cook-fire boys."

"But on the field of battle anything can happen!" Simon said.

"You might save the king's life from Thrithings-men or Naraxi raid-

ersand be knighted on the spot!"

108 Tad Williams

"Hmmm." Jeremias was not impressed. "And how are we going

to get them to take us in the first place, with no families, nor horses,

nor swords even?" He waggled his stave.

"Yes," said Simon, "well . . . well then, I'll think of something."

"Hmmm," agreed Jeremias, and mopped his flushed face with the

hem of his tunic.

The flare of torchlight sprang up before them in a score of places

as they neared the castle walls. What had been open, grassy space in

the shadow of the Hayholt's outwall was now an infestation of

wretched huts and tents, piled together and overlapping each other

like the scales of an old, sick lizard. The grass was long gone,

cropped to the soil by sheep and goats. As the ragged shanty dwell-

ers milled about, setting up their campfires for the night and calling

their children in ahead of the darkness, the dust kicked into gritty

plumes that swirled briefly before settling, dyeing clothes and tent-

fabric alike a dusky gray-brown.

"If it doesn't rain soon," said Jeremias, frowning at a pack of

shrieking children who tugged at the faded garments of a faded-

looking woman, "the Erkynguard will have to drive them away. We

don't have enough water to keep giving it to them. Let them go and

dig their own wells."

"But where . . ." Simon started to ask, then broke off, staring.

Down at the end of one of the squatter-town byways he saw what

seemed a familiar face. It had appeared for only a moment in a

crowd, then disappeared, but he was sure it was that of the boy he

had caught spying, the one who had left him to the wrath of the

sexton Barnabas.

"It's that one I told you about!" he hissed excitedly. Jeremias

looked back without comprehension. "You know, Mal - . .

Malachias! I owe him something!" Simon reached the knot of people

where he felt sure he had seen the spy's sharp-featured face. They

were mostly women and young children, but a few older men stood

among them, bent and withered like old trees. They had surrounded

a young woman crouching on the ground before the opening to a

half-tumbled hovel, which backed directly onto the stone of the

great outwall. She held the pale body of a tiny child in her lap as she

rocked herself from side to side, weeping. Malachias was nowhere in

sight.

THE DRACONBONE CHAIR109

Simon looked at the impassive, battered faces around him, and

then down at the crying woman.

"Is the child sick?" he asked someone next to him. "I am Doctor

Morgenes' apprentice. Should I go and fetch him?"

An old woman turned her face up to him. Her eyes, set in an

intricate net of dirty wrinkles, were as harsh and dark as a bird's.

"Get away from us, castle man," she said, and spat into the dirt,

"King's man. Just get away."

"But I want to help . . ." Simon began, when a strong hand

gripped his elbow.

"Do what she says, lad." It was a wiry old man with a matted

beard. The look on his face was not unkind as he tugged Simon

away from the circle. "You can do nought here, and people are bad

angry. The child is dead. Go on with you." He gave Simon a gentle

but firm push.

Jeremias was still standing in the same spot when Simon returned.

The campfires all around outlined his worried expression in flicker-

ing light.

"Don't do that, Simon," he whined. "I don't like it out here,

especially after the sun has gone down."

"They looked at me like they hated me," Simon murmured, puz-

zled and upset, but Jeremias was already hurrying ahead.

^

None of the torches were lit, but strange, smoky light filled the long

hall. He could see not a soul stirring anywhere in the Hayholt, but

down every passageway echoed the sound of voices lifted in song and

laughter.

Simon moved from one room to another, pulling aside curtains,

opening pantry doors, but still could find no one. The voices seemed

almost to mock him as he searchednow swelling in volume, now

diminishing, chanting and singing in a hundred different languages

not one of them his own.

At last he stood before the door of the throne room. The voices were

louder than ever, all seeming to cry out from inside the great cham-

ber. He reached a hand down; the door was not locked. As he pushed

it open the voices stilled, as though startled into silence by the creak of

110 Tad Williams

the hinges. The misty light poured out past him like shimmering

smoke. He stepped inside.

The yellowing throne, the Dragonbone Chair, stood in the room's

center. Around it danced a linked circle of figures, hands clasped,

moving as slowly as though they were in deep, deep water. He recog-

nized several; Judith, Rachel, Jakob the Chandler and other castle

folk, their faces stretched with wild merriment as they bowed and

capered. Among them moved dancers more grand: King Elias,

Guthwulf of Utanyeat, Gwythinn of Hernystir; these, like the castle

folk, wheeled as slowly and deliberately as ageless ice grinding moun-

tains down to dust. Scattered about the silent circle were looming

figures, shiny-black as beetlesthe malachite kings come down from

their pedestals to join the sluggish festivity. And in the middle bulked

the great chair, a skull-peaked mountain of dull ivory that seemed

somehow full of vitality, suffused with an ancient energy thai held the

circling dancers by taut, invisible reins.

The throne room was silent but for a thin thread of melody that

wavered in the air: the Cansim Falls, the Hymn to Joy. The tune was

stretched and discomforting, as if the invisible hands that plucked it

out were not made to handle earthly instruments.

Simon felt himself drawn toward the terrible dance, as to a whirl-

pool; he dragged his feet, but still moved inexorably inward. The

dancers' heads turned toward his approach with a slow twisting mo-

tion like the unwinding of crumpled stems of grass.

In the center of the ring, on the Dragonbone Chair itself, a dark-

ness was coalescinga darkness of many flittering parts, like a cloud

of flies. Near the top of this swarming, rolling dark, two smoldering

sparks of crimson began to brighten, as though fanned by a sudden

breeze.

The dancers were staring at him now as they swam by, mouthing

his name: Simon, Simon, Simon . . . On the far side of the ring,

beyond the crawling obscurity on the throne, a gap opened: two

clasped hands sliding apart like the tearing of a rotted rag.

As the opening moved around to him, one of the hands fluttered out

in fishlike undulation. It was Rachel's, and as she neared she beck-

oned to him. Instead of her usual look of suspicion, her face was set in

lines of desperate cheerfulness. She reached out: across from her fat

Jeremias held the gap open, a dull smile on his pale features.

"Come boy . . ." Rachel said, or at least it was her lips that

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR111

movedthe voice soft and hoarse, was a man's. "Come, can you not

feel the place we have left for you? A place especially prepared?"

The grasping hand caught at his collar and began to pull him into

the dance's orbit. He struggled, slapping at the clammy fingers, but

his arms were strengthless. Rachel's and Jeremias' lips split in wide

grins. The voice deepened.

"Boy! Don't you hear me?! Come on, boy!"

"No!" The cry came out at last, leaping from the prison of

Simon's constricted throat. "No! I won't! Nol"

"Oh, Frayja's Garters, boy, wake up! You've woken everyone

else!" The hand shook him again, roughly, and there was a sudden

gleam of light. Simon sat up, tried to scream and fell back in a

coughing fit. A dark shape leaned over him, starkly outlined by an

oil lamp.

Actually the boy hasn't really wakened anyone, Isgrimnur realized.

The rest of 'em have been tossing and moaning since I walked in

like they were all having the same nightmare. What a gods-cursed

strange night!

The duke watched as the restless shapes around him slowly lapsed

back into quietude, then returned his attention to the boy.

Look therethe little puppy is coughing something fierce. Truth-

fully, though, he's not so littlejust thin as a starveling colt.

Isgrimnur put the lantern down in a niche, then pulled the sheet

of homespun stretched across the alcove to one side, so he could get

a good grip on the youth's shoulder. He pulled the boy upright in

bed and gave him a firm swat on the back. The boy coughed once

more and then stopped. Isgrimnur patted him a few more times with

a wide, hairy hand.

"Sorry, fellow, sorry. Take your time, there."

While the youth regained his breath the Duke looked around the

curtained-off alcove in which the boy's slat bed was set. From be-

yond the drooping cloth came the murmuring night-sounds of the

dozen or so scullions bedded nearby.

Isgrimnur picked up the lantern again, peering at the odd shapes

pegged on the shadowed wall: an unraveling bird's nest, a silky

streamerit looked green in the poor lamplightthat had probably

come from some knight's festival gear. Nearby, also hanging from

nails driven into cracks, were a hawk feather, a crude wooden Tree,

and a picture whose ragged edge showed it to be torn from a book.

112 Tad Williams

Squinting, Isgrimnur thought he could make out a staring man with

wild hair standing out from his head ... or were they ant-

lers ...?

When he looked down again, smiling to himself at the unholy

clutter of younglings, the boy had regained his breath. He was look-

ing up at the duke with wide, nervous eyes.

With that nose and thatch ofwhat is it, red?hair, the boy looks

like a be-damned marsh bird, Isgrimnur thought.

"Sorry to startle you," the old duke said, "but you were closest to

the door. I need to speak to Towserthe jester. Do you know who

he is?" The boy nodded, watching his face intently. Good, thought

the Rimmersman, at least he isn 't simple-minded. *'I was told that he

dossed down here tonight, but I don't see him. Where is he?"

"You're - . . you're . . ." The youth was having trouble coming

out with it.

"Yes, I'm the Duke ofElvritshallaand don't start in bowing and

'sir'-ing. Just tell me where the jester is and I'll let you go back to

sleep."

Without another word the boy slid off his pallet and stood up,

pulling his blanket free and wrapping it about his shoulders. The

hem of his shirt hung down below, flapping against bare legs as he

stepped over the slumbering men around him, some of whom lay

wrapped in their cloaks in the middle of the floor as though they had

not been able to make it all the way to their beds. Isgrimnur fol-

lowed with the lamp, stepping carefully over the dark forms as

though he followed one of Udun's ghost-maidens through a field of

battle-slain.

They went through two more rooms this way, the big spirit and

the small, the larger just as silent for all his bulk. In the last room a

few dim coals sparkled in the fireplace. On the bricks before the

grate, curled in a nest of coats and with a sheepskin winebag still

gripped in his horny old fist, Towser the jester lay snoring and mum-

bling.

"Ah," Isgrimnur grunted. "Well, thanks then, boy. Go back to

your bed with my apologiesalthough I think you were dreaming a

dream you'd be just as happy to wake from. Go on now."

The youth turned and went back past Isgrimnur toward the door-

way. As he brushed by, the duke was mildly surprised to note that

the youth was nearly as tall as he wasand Isgrimnur was not a

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR113

small man. It was the boy's slendemess, and the way he hunched

when he walked, that made his size less evident.

It's a pity nobody's taught that one to stand up, he thought. And

most likely he never will learn in the kitchens, or wherever.

When the youth had disappeared a moment later, Isgrimnur bent

and shook Towsergently at first, then with increasing vigor as it

became apparent that the little man was well and truly swotted; even

the firmest agitation produced only faint noises of protest. At last

Isgrimnur's patience ended. He bent down, clutching one of the

older man's ankles in each hand, and pulled them up in the air until

Towser dangled upside down, only the crown of his bald head touch-

ing the floor. Towser's grumbling turned to gurgles of discomfort,

and at last became good, understandable Westerling words.

"What ...?... Down! Put . . . down,Aed'n damn

you . . ."

"If you don't wake up, old souse, I shall knock your head against

the ground until you think wine is poison forever!" Isgrimnur wed-

ded word to deed, lifting the jester's ankles a few hand-spans, then

setting his head back down none too gently on the cold stone.

"Desist! Demon, I ... surrender! Turn me 'round, man, turn

me 'roundI am not Usires, to hang heels-o'er-head for the instruc-

tion of ... of the masses!"

Isgrimnur lowered him gently until the little jester lay stretched

full length on his back.

"Don't add blasphemy to besottedness, old fool," Isgrimnur

growled. Watching Towser roll painfully onto his stomach, the duke

failed to see a slender shadow take up a position in the doorway

behind him.

"Oh, merciful, merciful Aedon," Towser groaned as he levered

himself into a sitting position, "did you have to use my head for a

digging stick? If it is a well you wish to scrape, I could have told you

the ground is too stony here in the servants' chambers."

"Enough, Towser. I didn't wake you two hours before sunrise to

bandy jokes. Josua is gone."

Towser rubbed his crown, searching blindly with the other hand

for his wineskin. "Gone where, Isgrimnur? For pity's sake, man,

have you broken my pate because Josua failed to meet you some-

where? I had nothing to do with it, I promise you." He took a long,

self-pitying swig from the bag.

114 Tad Williams

"Idiot," Isgrimnur said, but his tone was not harsh. "I mean the

prince is gone. Left the Hayholt."

"Impossible," said Towser firmly, recovering some of his self-pos-

session with his second trembling swallow of malmsey. "He is not

leaving until next week. He said so. He told me I could go with him

if I wished then, and be his jester at Naglimund." Towser leaned his

head to the side and spat. "I told him I would give him my answer

tomorrowtoday, I suppose nowsince Elias doesn't seem to care

if I stay or I go." He shook his head. "And me his father's dearest

companion . . ."

Isgrimnur shook his head impatiently, his gray-shot beard wag-

ging. "No, man, he is gone. Left sometime after middle-night, as far

as I can tellor so said the Erkynguardsman I found at his empty

chamber when I went to keep a meeting-time with him. He had

asked me to come so late, though I would have rather been abed, but

he said it was something that would not wait. Does that sound like a

man who would leave without even a message for me?"

"Who knows?" said Towser, his wrinkled face screwed up as he

pondered. "Mayhap that is why he wished to speak to youbecause

he was leaving secretly."

"Then why did he not wait till I arrived? I do not like it." Is-

grimnur squatted down and poked at the coals with a stick lying

there. "There is a queer air in the halls of this house tonight."

"Josua is often strange in his action," said Towser with calm as-

surance. "He is moodyby the Lord, is he moody! He has probably

gone out to hunt owls by moonlight, or some other tricksy pastime.

Fear not."

After a long moment of silence, Isgrimnur let out a long breath.

"Ah, I am sure you're right," he said, and his tone was quite nearly

convincing. "Even were he and Elias at open odds, nothing could

ever happen here in his father's house, before God and the court."

"Nothing but you thumping me on the head in the middle-night.

God seems to be a bit slow in doling out punishments tonight."

Towser grinned a wrinkly grin.

As the two men carried on their talking, voices hushed near the

dull embers, Simon stole quietly back to his bed. He lay awake for

some long time wrapped in his blanket, staring up into the darkness;

but by the time the cock in the court yard below finally saw the sun's

first rising glow, he had fallen back into sleep.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

^

"Now you just remember," Morgenes cautioned, wiping the swe<

from his forehead with a bright blue kerchief, "don't eat anythin

until you've brought it back and asked me. Especially if it has re

spots. Understood? Many of the articles I've asked you to gather ai

direst poison. Avoid stupidity, if such a thing is possible. Simon, yo

are in charge, boy. I hold you responsible for the safety of the oti

ers."

The others were Jeremias the chandler's lad and Isaak, a youn

page from the upstairs residence. The doctor had picked this he

Feyever afternoon to organize a mushroom and herb-hunting exps

dition to the Kynswood, a small forest of less than a hundred acre

that huddled on the high bank of the Kynslagh along the Hayholt'

western wall. Because of the drought, Morgenes' supplies of impol

tant commodities had dwindled alarmingly, and the Kynswooc

standing as it did beside the great lake, seemed a good place t

search for the doctor's moisture-loving treasures.

As they fanned out through the forest, Jeremias hung back, wai<

ing until the sound of Morgenes' crunching footsteps had dimin

ished into the crackly brown undergrowth.

"Have you asked him yet?" Jeremias* clothes were already so we

with perspiration that they clung.

"No." Simon had squatted down to watch a press-gang of ant

hurrying single file up the trunk of a Vestivegg pine. "I'm going ti

do it today. I just have to think of the right way to do it."

"What if he says no?" Jeremias eyed the procession with sonn

distaste. "What will we do then?"

"He won't say no." Simon stood up. "And if he does . . . well

1*11 think of something."

"What are you two whispering about?" Young Isaak had reap

peared in the clearing. "It's not right to keep secrets." Though hi

was some three or four years younger than Simon and Jeremias

Isaak had already developed an "upstairs" tone. Simon scowled a

him.

"Never you mind."

116 Tad Williams

"We were looking at this tree," Jeremias offered, quick to feel

guilt.

"I should have thought," Isaak said archly, "that there were

plenty of trees to look at without skulking and telling secrets."

"Oh, but this one," Jeremias began. "This one is . . ."

"Forget the stupid tree," said Simon in disgust. "Let's go.

Morgenes had gotten the jump on us, and will let us know if he

outgathers us." He ducked a branch and waded into the ankle-high

tangle of undergrowth.

It was hard work; when they stopped to drink water and rest in

the shade some hour and a half later, all three of the boys were

covered in fine red dust up to their elbows and knees. Each carried a

small bundle of goods wrapped in his kerchief: Simon's the largest,

Isaak's and Jeremias' of more modest size. They found a large

spruce which they shared as a backrest, dusty legs fanning out

around it like the spokes on a wheel. Simon tossed a stone across the

clearing; it thumped into a pile of broken branches, setting dead

leaves a-tremble.

"Why is it so hot?" moaned Jeremias, swabbing his brow. "And

why is my handkerchief full of ridiculous mushrooms, so that I have

to wipe the sweat away with my hands?" He held up slick, wet

palms.

"It's hot because it's hot," Simon grumbled. "Because there's no

rain. And that's that."

A longish stretch of time passed in silence. Even the insects and

birds seemed to have disappeared, gone to dark places to sleep the

dry, still afternoon away in silence.

"I suppose we should be glad we are not at Meremund," said

Jeremias at last. "They say that a thousand have died there from the

plague."

"A thousand?" said Isaak, scornful. The heat had brought high

color to his thin, pale face. "Thousands! It is the talk of the resi-

dence. My master goes about the Hayholt with a kerchief doused in

holy water clapped to his face, and the plague has not come within a

hundred leagues of here."

"Does your master know what is happening in Meremund?" Si-

mon asked, interestedIsaak did have his uses. "Does he speak of it

to you?"

117

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

"All the time." The young page was smug. "His wife's brother is

the mayor. They were among the first to flee the plague. He has

gotten much news from them."

"Elias made Guthwulf of Utanyeat the King's Hand," said Si-

mon. Jeremias groaned and slid away from the trunk, stretching out

full-length on the pine needle-matted ground.

"That's right," Isaak replied, scratching in the dirt with a long

twig. "And he has kept the plague there. It has not spread."

"What caused it, this pestilence?" Simon asked. "Do any of the

residence people know?" He felt stupid asking questions of a child so

much younger than himself, but Isaak did hear the upstairs gossip

and was not reticent in sharing it.

"Nobody knows for sure. Some people say that jealous Hemystir

merchants from Abaingeat across the river poisoned the wells.

Many people in Abaingeat have died, too." Isaak said this with a

certain air of satisfactionafter all, the Hemystiri were not

Aedonites but heathens, however noble an ally the House of Lluth

might be under the High King's Ward. "Others say that the drought

has cracked the earth with dryness, and poisonous airs have escaped

from the ground. Whatever it is, my master says that it spares no-

body, rich man, priest, or peasant. You first become hot and fever-

ish . . ."Jeremias, on his back, groaned and mopped at his fore-

head". . . then you blister up, like you had laid on hot coals.

Then the blisters begin to ooze . . ." He emphasized this last word

with a childish grimace, fine blond hair hanging in his flushed face.

"And then you die. Painfully."

The forest breathed heat around them as they sat without speak-

ing.

"My master Jakob," Jeremias said at last, "fears that the plague

shall come to the Hayholt, on account of all the dirty peasants living

by the walls." The Kynswood took another slow breath. "Ruben the

Bear. the blacksmith, told my master that he had gotten news from a

mendicant friar that Guthwulf has taken very harsh measures in

Meremund."

"Harsh measures?" Simon asked, eyes closed. "What does that

mean?"

"The friar told Ruben that Guthwulf, when he arrived in Mer-

emund as King's Hand, took the Erkynguard and went to the homes

118 Tad Williams

of the sick. They took hammers, nails, and boards, and sealed the

houses up."

"With the people inside?" Simon asked, horrified but fascinated.

"Of course. To stop the spread of plague. They boarded up the

houses so families of the diseased could not run away and spread the

plague to others." Jeremias raised his sleeve and mopped again.

"But I thought the plague came from bad airs, from the ground?"

"Even so, it can be spread. That is why so many priests and

monks and leeches have died. The friar said that at night, for many

weeks, the streets of Meremund were . . . were . . . what did he

say . . . ? 'Like the Halls of Hell.' You could hear the people howl-

ing like dogs in the boarded-up houses. Finally, when they all went

silent, Guthwulf and the Erkynguard burned them. Unopened."

As Simon marveled at this last detail, there was a sound of break-

ing branches.

"Ho there, you lazy lumps!" Morgenes appeared from a knot of

trees, his robes festooned with twigs and leaves, a fringe of moss

clinging to the brim of his wide hat. "I should have known I would

find you flat on your backs."

Simon struggled to his feet. "We have only been sitting a short

while. Doctor," he said. "We gathered for a long time."

"Don't forget to ask him!" hissed Jeremias, pulling himself up.

"Well," Morgenes said, eyeing their bundles critically. "I suppose

you have not done badly, considering the conditions. Let me see

what you have found." He squatted like a farmer weeding a hedge-

row and began sifting through the boys' collections. "Ah! Devil's

Ear!" he cried, holding a scalloped mushroom up to the shaft of

sunlight. "Excellent!"

"Doctor," Simon said, "I wanted to ask you a favor."

"Hmmm?" Morgenes was poking through bits of fungus, using an

unrolled kerchief as a table.

"Well, Jeremias is interested in joining the guardsor trying to.

The problem is. Count Breyugar knows us castle folk hardly at all,

and Jeremias has no connection into such circles."

"That," said Morgenes dryly, "is no surprise." He emptied out

the next kerchief.

"Do you think you could write him a letter of introduction? You

are well known to all." Simon tried to keep his voice calm. Isaak

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR119

looked at sweating Jeremias with a mixture of respect and amuse-

ment.

"Hmmm." The doctor's tone was neutral. "I suspect I am only

too well known to Breyugar and his friends." He looked up, fixing

Jeremias with a sharp eye. "Does Jakob know?"

"He ... he knows my feelings," stammered Jeremias.

Morgenes bundled all the gatherings together in a sack and re-

turned the boys' kerchiefs. The doctor stood, shaking the clinging

leaves and tree needles from his robe.

"I suppose I could," he said, as they started back toward the

Hayholt. "I don't think I approveand I don't think a note from

me will quite bring them to respectful attentionbut I suppose if

Jakob knows, then it's all right." They waded single file through the

scratching thicket.

"Thank you, Doctor," said Jeremias breathlessly, struggling to

keep up.

"I doubt they shall want you." Isaak sounded a little envious. As

they moved closer to the castle, his haughtiness seemed to return

apace.

"Doctor Morgenes," Simon said, mustering as best he could a

tone of benign unconcern, "why don't / write the letter, and then

you can look at it and sign it? It would be good practice for me,

don't you think?"

"Why, Simon," the doctor said, stepping over a fallen tree trunk,

"that's an excellent idea. I'm glad to see you take such initiative.

Maybe I will make a true apprentice of you yet."

The doctor's cheerful statement, his tone of pride, weighed Simon

down like a cape of lead. He hadn't done anything yet, let alone

anything bad, and already he felt like a murderer or some worse

thing. He was about to say something else when the stifling forest air

was ripped by a scream.

Simon turned around to see Jeremias, his face white as wheat

paste, pointing at something in a thicket beside the fallen log. Isaak

stood beside him, frozen in shock. Simon hurried back, Morgenes

only a step behind him.

It was a corpse, lying tumbled half-in and half-out of the thicket.

Although the face was mostly covered by bushes, the near-fleshless

state of the exposed parts showed that the body had been dead for

some time.

120 Tad Williams

"Oh, oh, oh," gasped Jeremias, "he's dead! Are there outlaws

here? What shall we do?"

"Oh, hush," snapped Morgenes. "That will be a start. Let me

have a look." The doctor picked up the hem of his robe and waded

forward into the thicket, then stopped and gingerly lifted the

branches that masked much of the body.

From the tendrils of beard that still clung to his bird- and insect-

gnawed face, he seemed to have been a northernera Rimmersman

perhaps. He wore unremarkable traveling clothes, a light wool cloak

and tanned leather boots, rotting now so that bits of the fur lining

showed through.

"How did he die?" asked Simon. The eyeless sockets, dark and

secretive, unnerved him. The toothy mouth, flesh shrunken and

pulled away, seemed to be grinning, as though the cadaver had been

lying here for weeks enjoying a bleak joke.

Morgenes used a stick to pull the tunic aside. A few flies rose

lazily and circled. "Look," he said.

From a puckered hole in the corpse's desiccated trunk rose the

stump of an arrow, broken off a handsbreadth above the ribs.

"Done by someone in a hurry, perhapssomeone who did not

want their arrow recognized."

They had to wait a moment for Isaak to finish being noisily ill

before they could hurry on to the castle.

9

Smoke on the Wind

"DID YOU get it? Did he guess?" Still pale for all his hours in the

sun, Jeremias bobbed along at Simon's side like the sheep's-bladder

float on a fisherman's net.

"I've got it," Simon growled. Jeremias' agitation irritated him; it

seemed out of keeping with the masculine gravity of their mission.

"You think too much."

Jeremias took no offense. "As long as you've got it," he said.

Main Row, open to the harsh noontide sky, tent-roofing skinned

back, was nearly deserted. Here and there the constabulary guard

yellow-liveried to show their immediate allegiance to Count Breyu-

gar, bearing sashes of Elias' royal greenlounged in the doorways

or diced with one another against the walls of shuttered shops. Even

though the morning market was long over, still it seemed to Simon

that there were fewer common people in the streets than was usual.

Those to be seen were mostly the homeless who had been flooding

into Erchester in the recent winter months, driven out of the coun-

tryside by drying streams and failing wells. They stood or sat in the

shadows of stone walls and buildings, knots of indifference, their

movements slow and purposeless. The constables pushed past or

stepped over them as though they were dogs in the street.

The pair turned right off Main Row onto Tavern Way, the largest

of the thoroughfares running perpendicular to the Row. Here there

was more activity, although still the largest number of folk in sight

were soldiers. The heat had driven most of them indoors; they

leaned out of the low windows with flagons in their hands, watching

Simon and Jeremias and the half a dozen or so other pedestrians

with beery disinterest.

A peasant girl in a homespun skirtsome ostler's daughter most

likely, by the jug she balanced on her shoulderhurried past up the

street. A few soldiers whistled and called out to her, spilling great

122 Tad Williams

sloshes of beer into the dust below the tavern windowsills. The girl

did not look up as she trotted by, chin on chest. Her haste, combined

with the heavy jug, kept her steps short. Simon watched the fluid

sway of her hips appreciatively, even turning completely around to

keep her in view until she swooped abruptly into an alleyway and

disappeared.

"Simon, come on!" Jeremias called. "There it is!"

In the middle of the block of buildings, standing up from Tavern

Row like a rock in a rutted road, stood Saint Sutrin's cathedral. The

stone of its great face dully reflected the patient sun. Its tall arches

and vaulting buttresses cast thin shadows over the nests of gar-

goyles, whose lively, twisted faces peered down happily, cackling

and joking over the shoulders of the humorless saints. Three limp

pennants hung from the flagpole over the high double doors: Ellas'

green dragon, the Pillar and Tree of the church, and at the bottom

the gold coronet of Erchester-town on a white field. A pair of con-

stabulary guards leaned on the open doors, their pikes point down in

the wide stone doorway.

"Well, here's for it," said Simon grimly, and with Jeremias trot-

ting at his heels he made his way up the two dozen marble steps. At

the top one of the guards lifted his pike lazily and barred their

entrance. His chain mail hood was pulled back, hanging like a veil

across his shoulders.

"What do you want, then?" he asked, narrowing his eyes.

"A message for Breyugar." Simon was embarrassed to hear his

voice break. "For Count Breyugar, from Doctor Morgenes at the

Hayholt." A little defiantly, he thrust out the rolled parchment. The

guardsman who had spoken took it and gave the seal a cursory

glance. The other was staring intently up at the carved door-lintel,

as if hoping to see written there his dismissal from duty for the day.

The first guard handed the parchment back with a shrug. "Inside

and to the left. Don't be scamping about."

Simon drew himself up to his full height, indignant. When he was

a guardsman, he would carry himself with a great deal more style

than these bored, unshaven idiots. Didn't they know what an honor

it was to wear the king's green? He and Jeremias climbed past them

into Saint Sutrin's cool interior.

Nothing moved in the antechamber, not even the air, but Simon

could see the play of light on figures in motion beyond the far door-

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR123

way. Instead of going directly to the door on the left, he looked back

to see if the guards were watchingthey weren't, of coursethen

strode forward to look into the cathedral's grand chapel.

"Simon!" Jeremias hissed, alarmed. "What are you doing?! They

said over there!" He pointed to the leftmost doorway.

Ignoring his companion, Simon leaned his head through the door-

way. Jeremias, muttering nervously, came up behind.

It's like one of those religious pictures, Simon thought. Where you

see Usires and the Tree way in the back, and the faces of Nabbanai

peasants and all very close up front,

Indeed, the chapel was so large and high-ceilinged that it seemed

a whole world. Sunlight, softened by the colored windows as though

by clouds, streamed down from the uppermost reaches. White-robed

priests moved around the altar, cleaning and polishing like shaven-

headed chambermaids. Simon supposed they were preparing for the

Elysiamansa services only a week or two away.

Closer to the door, moving equally busily but with no other com-

mon reference, Breyugar's yellow-tunicked constables milled back

and forth on various errands, dotted here and there with the green of

one of the castle's Erkynguard, or the dun or black clothes of some

Erchester notable. The two groups seemed completely separated; it

took a moment for Simon to see the row of boards and stools that

had been mounted between the front and back of the cathedral. In a

flash of insight, Simon realized that it was not a fence to keep the

scurrying priests in, as was the first impressionno, rather it was to

keep the soldiers out. It seemed that Bishop Domitis and the priests

had still not given up hope that the Lord Constable's occupation of

their cathedral would be less than permanent.

As they climbed the stairs, they had to show their parchment to

three more guards in turn, all of these more alert than those at the

massive front dooreither because they were inside out of the sun,

or else due to their increased proximity to the object of protection.

At last they stood in a crowded guardroom before a seam-faced,

gap-toothed veteran whose belt full of keys and air of harried dis-

interest bespoke authority.

"Yes, the Lord Breyugar's here today. Give me the letter, and I'll

be passing it on." The sergeant scratched his chin impassively.

"No, sir, we must give it to him. It's from Doctor Morgenes."

Simon tried to sound firm. Jeremias was staring at the floor.

124 Tad Williams

"Oh, is it then? Well, think of that." The man spat on the saw-

dust-covered floor. Here and there the gleam of marble tiles showed

through. "Aedon bite me, what a day. Wait here, then."

"So, what have we here?" Count Breyugar, sitting at the table

beside the bony remnants of a meal of small birds, raised an eye-

brow. He had delicate features, nearly lost in jowly flesh, and the

hands of a musicianfine, long-fingered hands.

"A letter, my Lord." Simon, on one knee, extended the tube of

parchment.

"Well give it to me, then, boy. Can't you see I'm at dinner?" The

count's voice was high-pitched and effeminate, but Simon had heard

that Breyugar was a terrifying swordsmanthose slender hands had

killed many men.

As the count read the message, lips moving, shiny with grease,

Simon tried to keep his shoulders straight and his back stiff as a pike

handle. Out of the comer of his eye he thought he saw the grizzled

sergeant looking at him, so he tilted his chin back and stared

straight ahead, thinking about what a favorable comparison he must

make to the slouching dullards on watch at the cathedral doors.

". . . Please consider the . . . bearers ... for service under

your Lordship's guidance . . ." Breyugar read aloud. His emphasis

gave Simon a panicky momenthad he noticed the "s" Simon had

added to "bearer"? He had made it a bit squeezy so it would fit.

Count Breyugar, his eyes on Simon, handed the letter to the staff

sergeant. As the sergeant read, slower even than Breyugar, the no-

bleman looked the youth up and down, then flicked a brief glance to

the still-kneeling Jeremias. When the sergeant handed the letter

back, he wore a smile that showed two teeth missing, and a pink

tongue probing in the dark gulf.

"So." Breyugar fluted the sound like a sorrowful breath.

"Morgenes, the old apothecary, wants me to take on a couple of

castle-mice and turn them into men." He picked up a tiny haunch

from his plate and chewed on the bone. "Impossible."

Simon felt his knees buckle and his stomach push up toward his

throat. "But ... but why?" he stammered.

"Because I don't need you. I have fighting men enough. I can't

afford you. No one can plant if it doesn't rain, and I have men lined

up already looking for a job of work that will feed them. But most

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR125

important, I don't want youa couple of suet-soft castle boys who

have felt nothing more painful in their lives than a smack on their

pink arses for stealing cherries. Go on with you. If war comes, if

those sneering heathen in Hemystir continue to resist the king's will,

or treacherous Josua turns up, then you can carry a pitchfork or

scythe with the rest of the peasantsmaybe you can even follow the

army and water the horses, if manpower gets short enough. But

you'll never be soldiers. The king didn't make me Lord Constable to

nursemaid groundlings. Sergeant, show these castle-mice a hole to

scamper out."

Neither Simon or Jeremias said a word all the long journey back

to the Hayholt. When Simon was alone in his curtained alcove he

broke his barrel-stave sword over his knee. He did not cry. He would

not cry.

^

There is something strange in the north wind today, thought Is-

grimnur. Something that smells like an animal, or a storm about to

happen, or both . . . some scratchy thing that puts the hair on my

neck right up.

He rubbed his hands together as though the air were cold, which

it was not, and pushed the sleeves of his light summer tunicworn

months early in this oddest of yearsup over his corded old fore-

arms- He went again to the doorway and looked out, feeling embar-

rassed that an old soldier like himself should be playing such strip-

ling's games.

Where is that damned Hernystirman?

Turning to pace again he nearly tripped over a stack of writing

boxes, instead catching a boot buckle in the bottommost of a small

pyramid of parchment scrolls that hemmed in his confined walking

space. Cursing roundly, he bent in time to keep the arrangement

from toppling. Certainly the deserted room in the Hall of Records,

emptied so that the writing-priests could make their Elysiamansa

observances, was as good a place as could be found on short notice

for a clandestine meetingbut why couldn't they leave enough

room among their damned daubings for a grown man to move

around?

126 Tad Williams

The door latch rattled Duke Isgnmnur, relieved of waiting at

last, sprang forward Instead of peering out cautiously he flung the

door open to find not two men, as expected, but one

"Praise Aedon you're here, Eclair'" he barked "Where's the es-

cntor?"

"Sshh " The Count of Nad Mullach held two fingers to his hps as

he entered, pulling the door closed behind him "More quiet The

archive-master is nattering about just up the hall"

"And why should I care?" the duke exclaimed, but not so loudly

as the first time. "Are we children, to hide from that leathery old

eunuch?"

"If you wanted a meeting that all know about," Eclair asked,

settling himself on a stool, "then why are we hiding in a closet^"

"It's no closet," the Rimmerman grumbled, "and you know per-

fectly well why I told you to come here, and why no secret is safe in

the Inner Keep Where's Escntor Velhgis^"

"He felt that a closet was no place for the lector's nght-hand

man " Eolair laughed Isgnmnur did not. He thought the Hemys-

tirman drunk by his flushed face, or at least a little so He wished he

were the same

"I thought it important that we meet somewhere we could talk

freely," Isgnmnur said, a little defensively "We have been much

seen in deep conversation lately "

"No, Isgnmnur, it's you that's right." Eolair waved a hand reas-

suringly He was dressed for the Lady Day celebrations, playing the

part of respectful outsidera part which the pagan Hernystin had

learned well- His festival tunic of white was belted three times, each

belt covered in gold or enameled metals, and his long mane of black

hair was pulled back behind his head and tied with golden nbbon "I

was only making a joke, and a sad joke it is," he resumed, "when

King John's loyal subjects must meet in secret to speak of things

which are no treason."

Isgnmnur moved slowly to the door and juggled the latch, mak-

ing sure it had closed He turned, putting his wide back against the

wood, and crossed his arms across his substantial chest He, too, was

dressed for the festivities in a fine, light-weight blue tunic and hose,

but the braids of his beard had already been frayed loose by nervous

tugging, and the hose bagged at the knee Isgnmnur hated dressing

up

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR127

"Well," he growled at last, tilting his head defiantly, "should I

speak first, or will you9"

"There is no need to worry who will speak first," the count said

For a moment the flush ofEolair's face, the color on his high, thin

cheekbones, reminded the older man of something he had seen once,

years ago, a haunting figure glimpsed across fifty yards of Rimmers-

gard snow

One of the '^white foxes," my father called that one.

Isgnmnur wondered if the old stones were truewas there really

Sithi blood in the Hernystin noble houses?

Eolair ran a hand across his forehead as he continued speaking,

blotting away the tiny droplets of sweat, and the momentary likeness

was gone "We have spoken enough to know that things have gone

fiercely wrong What we need to speak onand what we need pn-

vacy to speak on," he waved his hand at the cluttered archive room,

a dark nest of paper and parchment lit by a high tnangular window,

*'is what we can do about it If anything But that is it What can

be done?"

Isgnmnur was not yet willing to jump so boldly into talk that,

whatever Eolair might say, had already the faint, sickening tang of

treason

"It's this way," he said, "I would be the last to hold Ehas to

blame for this bedamned weather I should know while it's hot as

the Devil's breath and dry as a bone here, in my land in the north

we're having a temble winter snows and ice that beat anything

remembered So weather here is no fault of the king's, any more

than the roofs collapsed and the cattle frozen in the bam halls in

Rimmersgard are mine" He tugged fiercely, and another beard-

braid raveled loose, the nbbon hanging limply down from the gray

tangle "Of course, Elias is to blame for keeping me here while my

kinsfolk and people suffer, but that is another line and another

hook

"No, it's that the man doesn't seem to care! The wells drying up,

the farms lying fallow, starving people sleeping in the fields and

cities a-choke with the plagueand he seems not to notice. The

taxes and levies go up, those bedamned arse-licking pups of the

nobihty he has befriended nng him 'round all day dunking and

singing and fighting andand" The old duke grunted in

disgust "And the tournaments' Udun's red spear, I was as much for

128 Tad Williams

the tourney as any man in my day, but Erkynland is crumbling to

dust beneath his father's throne, the countries of the High Ward are

restless as a spooked coltand still the tournaments go on! And the

barge parties on the Kynslagh! And the jugglers, and the tumblers,

and the bearbaitings! It's as bad as what they say of the worst days

of Crexis the Goat!" Red in the face himself now, Isgrimnur balled

his fists and stared at the floor.

"In Hemystir,"Eolair's voice was soft and musical after the

Rimmerman's hoarse tirade"we say: 'A shepherd, not a butcher,'

meaning a king should preserve his land and people like a flock,

taking from them only what he needs to get bynot use them up

until there's nothing left to do but eat what remains." Eolair stared

at the small window and the particles of parchment dust that eddied

in its diffuse light. "That's what Ehas is doing: eating his land bite

by bite, as surely as did the giant Croich-ma-Feareg once devoured

the mountain at Crannhyr."

"He was a good man once, Elias was," Isgrimnur said wonder-

ingly, "far easier to deal with than his brother. Surely, not all men

are meant for kingship, but it seems more is wrong than just a man

made ill by power. Something is damnably wrongand it is not only

Fengbald and Breyugar and those that are leading him to the cliff."

The duke had somewhat regained his breath. "You know it is that

vicious bastard Pryrates who fills his head with strange notions, and

keeps him up nights in that tower with lights and unholy noises,

until sometimes it seems that the king does not know where he is

when the sun is up. What could Elias want from such a creature as

that whoreson priest? He is king of the known worldwhat could

Pryrates possibly have to offer him?"

Eolair stood, still with eyes fixed to the light above, and dampened

his sleeve against his forehead. "I wish I knew," he said at last. "So.

What then is there to do?"

Isgrimnur narrowed his old, fierce eyes. "What said Escritor Vel-

ligis? It is, after all, Mother Church's cathedral that is confiscate at

Saint Sutrin's. It is Duke Leobardis' Nabbanai ships, along with

your King Lluth's, that Guthwulf has stolen under the lie of 'plague

danger' at the sovereign harbor of Abaingeat. Leobardis and Lector

Ranessin are close; they rule Nabban like one two-headed monarch.

Surely Velligis must have had something to say on his master's be-

half."

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR129

"He has much to say, but little of substance, my friend." Eolair

slumped back on his stool. The bright shaft of sunlight was dimin-

ished now, its source partially blocked as the sun sank, the little

room in even denser shadow. "Of what Duke Leobardis thinks of

this act of piracythree grain ships thieved outright in a Hemystir

harborVelligis professes not to know. On his master's behalf he is,

as ever, vague. His Sacredness Ranessin, I think, has designs to be a

peacemaker between Elias and Duke Leobardis, and perhaps at the

same time improve the position of your Aedonite Church here at

court. My master King Lluth has directed me next to travel to

Nabban, and perhaps I will find out the truth of that when I am

there, I fear, however, that if such is the case, the lector has mis-

judged: if the snubbing that Elias and his sycophants have given

VeUigis is any indication, the King is more restless even than his

father was under Mother Church's broad shadow."

"So many plots!" Isgrimnur groaned. "So many intrigues! It

makes my head swim. I am not a man for such things. Give me a

sword or an axe and let me deal blows!"

"Is that why you have taken to closets?" Eolair smiled, and pro-

duced from beneath his cloak a skin of sour-honey mead. "There

does not seem anyone to swing at here. I think you are taking rather

well to intrigue late in life, my good Duke."

Isgrimnur frowned, and took the offered skin. He's a born in-

triguer himself, our Eolair, he thought. / should be grateful, if noth-

ing else, to have someone to talk to. For all that Hemystiri poetry-talk

I've heard him trot out for the ladies, he's hard as shield-steel under-

neatha good ally for treacherous times.

"There's something else." Isgrimnur handed the skin back to Eo-

lair and wiped his mouth. The count took a long swallow and then

nodded his head.

"Out with it. I'm all ears like a Circoille hare."

"That dead man old Morgenes found out in the Kynswood?"

Isgrimnur said, "the arrowshot one?" Eolair nodded again. "He

was mine. Bindesekk by name, although by the time he was discov-

ered I would never have known him but for a broken bone in his

face that was got in an earlier service for me. Of course I said

nothing."

"Yours?" Eolair cocked an eyebrow. "And doing what? Do you

know?"

130 Tad Williams

Isgrimnur laughed, a short, barking sound. "Certainly. That is

why I kept quiet. I sent him out when Skali of Kaldskryke took his

kinsmen and departed north. Sharp-nose has been making too many

new friends among Elias* court for my liking, so I sent Bindesekk

out with a message to my son Isom. As long as Elias is keeping me

here with these ridiculous errands, these shows of mock-diplomacy

that he claims are so importantand if they were so important, why

entrust them to a blunt old war-dog like me?then I wanted Isom

to be on especial close watch. I don't trust Skali any more than I

would a starving wolf, and my son has troubles enough at home

already, from what I hear. All the reports that have trickled down

across the Frostmarch are badraging storms in the north, the

roads unsafe, villagers forced to huddle together in the main halls. It

makes for troubled times, and Skali knows that."

"'Do you think, then, it was Skali killed your man?" Eolair leaned

forward, passing the skin back.

"I don't know, to be sure." The duke tipped back his head for

another long swallow, the muscles in his thick neck pulsing; a thin

drizzle of mead spattered down his blue tunic. "What I mean is: it's

the most obvious thing, but I have many doubts." He wiped at the

stain absently for a moment. "First of all, even if he caught

Bindesekk, it's an act of treason to kill him. For all his contempt,

Skali is my liege-man and I am his liege-lord."

"But the body was hidden."

"Not well. And why so close to the castle? Why not wait until

they had reached the Wealdhelm Hillsor the Frostmarch Road if

it's even passableand kill him there, where I'd never find out?

Also, the arrow doesn't strike me as Skali's way. I could see him

chopping Bindesekk up in a rage with that great axe of his, but

shooting him and then dropping him in the Kynswood? It doesn't sit

right, somehow."

"Then who?"

Isgrimnur shook his head, feeling the mead at last. "That's what

worries me, Hemystinnan," he said at last. "I just don't know.

There are strange things afoot. Travelers' tales, castle rumors . . ."

Eolair went to the door and unlatched it, pushing it open to allow

fresh air into the small room.

"These are indeed strange times, my friend," he said, and took a

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR131

deep breath. "And, perhaps the most important question of all

where in this strange world is Prince Josua?"

^

Simon picked up a small piece of flint and sent it spinning into

space. After describing a graceful arc through the morning air the

stone descended with a muffled snap into a leafless topiary animal in

the garden below. Crawling to the edge of the chapel roof, Simon

marked its impact point like a skilled catapult man, noting the

quiver at the haunches of the hedge-squirrel. He rolled back from

the roof gutter and into the shadow of a chimney, savoring the cool

solidity of the stones beneath his spine. Overhead the fierce eye of

the Marris sun glared down, nearing its noon apex.

It was a day to evade responsibility, to escape Rachel's chores and

Morgenes' explanations. The doctor had not yet found outor had

not mentionedSimon's thwarted foray into the military arts, and

Simon was content to keep it that way.

Spread-eagled and squint-eyed in the morning brightness, he

heard a faint ticking noise near his head. He opened one eye in time

to see a tiny gray shadow whisk past. Rolling slowly over onto his

stomach, he scanned the rooftop.

The great chapel roof spread before him, a field of humped and

irregular slate tiles in whose cracks sprouted tight-coiled hanks of

brown and pale green moss that had somehow miraculously sur-

vived the drought, clinging to life as grudgingly as they clung to the

splintered tiles- The plain of slates marched uphill from the guttered

edge to the chapel's dome, which pushed up through the roof like a

sea turtle's shell breaching the shallow wavelets of a quiet cove. Seen

from this angle the dome's colorful glass panelswhich shone inside

the chapel with magical pictures of the lives of saintslooked dark

and flat, a parade of crude figures across a dun-colored world. At the

dome's apex an iron knob held aloft a golden Tree, but from Simon's

viewpoint it was merely gilded, the gold leaf peeling in slender,

shimmering strips that revealed the corrosion beneath.

Beyond the castle chapel the sea of roofs spread out in all direc-

tions: the Great Hall, the throne room, the archives and servants'

quarters, all pitched and uneven, repaired or replaced many times as

132 Tad Williams

the seasons in their passing licked at gray stone and lead shingle,

then nibbled them away. To Simon's left loomed the slender white

arrogance of Green Angel Tower; farther back, protruding above the

arch of the chapel dome, the gray, squat bulk of Hjeldin's Tower sat

up like a begging dog.

As Simon surveyed the expanse of the roof-world, a flirt of gray

appeared again at the edge of his vision. Turning swiftly, he saw the

hindquarters of a small soot-colored cat disappear into a hole at the

roof's edge. He crawled across the slates to investigate. When he

was close enough to observe the hole, he dropped back down onto

his stomach, balancing his chin onto the back of his hands. There

was no sign of movement now.

A cat on the roof, he thought. Well, someone might as well live up

here besides flies and pigeonsI suppose he eats those scrabbling roof

rats,

Simon, despite having seen only its tail and back legs thus far, felt

a sudden affinity with this outlaw roof cat. Like him, the cat knew

the secret passages, the angles and crannies, and went where it

would without leave. Like himself, this gray hunter made its way

without the concern or charity of others. . . .

Even Simon knew that this was a terrible exaggeration of his own

situation, but he rather liked the comparison.

For example, hadn't he crept unsuspected onto this same rooftop

four days ago, the day after Elysiamansa, to watch the mustering

out of the Erkynguard? Rachel the Dragon, irritated by his infatua-

tion with everything except maintenance of the household, which

she felt was his trueand neglectedduty, had earlier forbidden

him to go down and join the crowd at the main gate.

Ruben the Bear, the hump-shouldered, slab-muscled master of the

castle smithy, had told Simon that the Erkynguard was going to

Falshire, up the River Ymstrecca to the east of Erchester. The wool

merchants' guild there was causing trouble, Ruben had explained to

the youth as he dropped a red-hot horseshoe into a bucket of water.

Waving away the hissing steam, Ruben had then tried to describe the

complicated situation: it seemed that the drought had caused such

distress that the sheep of Falshire's farmerstheir main livelihood

must now be appropriated by the crown to feed the starving, dis-

possessed masses crowding into Erchester. The wool merchants, cry-

ing that this would ruin themthat they, too, would be made to

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR133

starvewere swarming in the streets, inflaming the local folk

against the unpopular edict.

So Simon had climbed secretly onto the chapel roof Tiasday-last

to watch the Erkynguard ride out, several hundred well-armed foot

soldiers and a dozen knights under the command of Earl Fengbald,

whose fief Falshire was. As Fengbald rode out at the front of the

Guard, helmed and corseleted, splendid in his red tunic and silver-

stitched eagle, several of the more cynical in the watching crowd

suggested the Earl was taking so many soldiers for fear that his

Falshire subjects would not recognize him, owing to his extended

absences. Others suggested he might fear that they would recognize

himFengbald had not exactly been tireless in the interests of his

hereditary domain.

Simon thought back warmly on Fengbald's impressive helmet, a

gleaming silver casque crested with a pair of spreading wings.

Rachel and the others are right, he thought suddenly. Here I am

daydreaming again. Fengbald and his noble friends will never know if

I live or die. I must make something of myself. I don't want to be a

child forever, do I? He scratched at a slate tile with a piece of gravel,

trying to draw an eagle. Besides, I would probably look foolish in

armor . . . wouldn't I?

The memory of the soldiers of the Erkynguard marching so

proudly out the great Nearulagh Gate touched him in sore spots, but

it warmed him, too; he kicked his feet lazily as he watched the cat's

cave for sign of its denizen-

It was an hour past noon before a suspicious nose appeared at the

front of the hole. By this time Simon was riding a stallion through

the gates of Falshire, flowers raining down from the windows above.

Tugged back to attention by the sudden movement, he held his

breath as the nose was followed by the rest of the beast: a small,

short-furred gray cat with a patch of white running from right eye to

chin. The youth stayed stock-still as the cata mere half a fathom

from his own positiontook momentary fright at something and

arched its back, eyes narrowing. Simon feared it had seen him, but

as he remained motionless it suddenly moved forward, bounding out

of the shadow of the roof's upcurved edge and into the broad path of

the sun's passage. As Simon watched, delighted, the gray catling

134 Tad Williams

found a loose piece of flint and batted it skittering across the tiles,

following to hook it with an agile paw and begin the game anew.

He watched the roof cat's antics for some time, until a particu-

larly ridiculous pratfallthe catling had skidded to a stop with both

front paws on the slate chip, tumbled head over heels into a crack

between the tiles, then lay there with its tail wriggling in exaspera-

tionforced him to reveal his position. His long-suppressed snort of

laughter broke forth; the little beast leaped tumbling into the air,

landed, and bolted for its hole with no more than a brief glance in

Simon's direction. This scrambling exit convulsed him again.

"Scatter, cat!" he called after the vanished creature. "Scatter, you

catter! Scatter-scatter!"

As he was crawling toward the hole-mouth to sing a little song of

shared outlook on roofs and stones and solitude to the gray cat

who he was somehow certain would be listeningsomething else

caught his eye. He put his hands on the roof edge and poked his

head up to look. The beginnings of a breeze traced subtle designs

through his hair.

Away to the southeast, far beyond the limits of Erchester and the

headlands above the Kynslagh, a deep gray mark was smeared

across the clear Marris sky, as if a dirty thumb had been dragged

across a newly-painted wall. The wind shredded the dark smudge

even as he watched, but darker billows were rising from below, a

turbulent darkness too thick for any wind to diffuse. A regular black

cloud was mounting upward on the eastern horizon.

It took him a long, puzzled moment before he realized that what

he was seeing was smoke, a dense plume of it besmirching the pale,

clean sky.

Falshire was burning.

10

King Hemlock

Two DAYS later, on the morning of Marris' last day, Simon was

going down to breakfast with the other scullions when he was

brought up short by a heavy black hand on his shoulder. For an

unreal, terrifying moment his thoughts skipped back to his throne

room dream, and the ponderous dancing of the malachite kings.

This hand, though, proved to be wearing a cracked, fingerless

black glove. Neither was its owner made of dark stonealthough as

Simon stared up in surprise at the face of Inch, it did seem that God

had somehow neglected to provide enough living stuff while this

Inch-person was being made, and that last-minute substitutions of

some inert, imperturbable matter had been necessary.

Inch leaned down until his whiskered face was very close to

Simon's; even his breath seemed to smell more of stone than of wine

or onions or anything ordinary.

"Doctor wants to see you." He rolled his eyes from side to side.

"Right away, like."

The other scullions had scattered past Simon and the hulking

Inch with curious looks and continued on their way. Simon, trying

to squirm out from underneath the weighty hand, watched them go

despairingly.

"Very well. I'll be right there," he said, and with a wiggle tugged

free. "Just let me get a crust of bread that I can eat as I go." He

trotted on down the corridor toward the servants' eating room,

stealing a backward glance; Inch was still standing in the same

place, following his retreat with the tranquil eyes of a bull in a

meadow.

When he emerged in a short while with a heel of bread and a

wedge of chewy white cheese, he was dismayed to find that Inch had

waited for him. The large man fell into step alongside as he headed

136 Tad Williams

toward Morgenes' chambers. Simon offered him some food, trying

to smile as he did so, but Inch only stared at it incuriously and said

nothing.

As they walked across the dry-rutted open ground of the Middle

Bailey, threading through the flocks of writing-priests making their

daily pilgrimages between the Chancelry and the Hall of Archives,

Inch cleared his throat as if to speak. Simon, who felt so uncomfort-

able around this person that even silence made him nervous, looked

up expectantly.

"Why . . ." Inch at last began, ". . . why do you take my

place?" He did not turn his waxy eyes away from the priest-clogged

pathway before them.

It was Simon's heart that now took on the qualities of stone: cold,

heavy, and burdensome. He was sorry for this farm animal that

thought itself a man, but frightened by him, too.

"I ... I haven't taken your place." His protestations sounded

false even to his own ears. "Doesn't the doctor still have you in to

help out with carrying things, and setting things up? He is teaching

me to do other things, things that are very different."

They walked on in silence. At last Morgenes' chambers were in

view, crouched in choking ivy like the nest of a small but resourceful

beast. When they were perhaps ten paces away, Inch's hand

clutched Simon's shoulder once more.

"Before you came," Inch said, his wide, round face moving down

toward Simon's like a basket being lowered from an upstairs win-

dow, ". . . before you came, / was his helper. / was going to be

next." He frowned, pushing his lower lip out and knitting his single

bar of eyebrow into a steeper angle, but his eyes were still mild and

sad. "Doctor Inch, I would have been." He focused his gaze on

Simon, who half-feared he would be crumpled beneath the weight of

the paw on his collarbone. "I don't like you, little kitchen boy."

Turning him loose, Inch shuffled away, the back of his head barely

visible above the mountainous rise of his bowed shoulders. Simon,

rubbing his neck, felt a little sick.

Morgenes was ushering a trio of young priests out of his cham-

bers. They were conspiciouslyand somewhat shockingly, as far as

Simon was concerneddrunk.

"They came for my contribution to the All Fool's Day celebra-

137

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

tion," Morgenes said as he shut the door behind the trio, who had

already burst into ragged song. "Hold this ladder, Simon."

A bucket of red paint was perched on the ladder's topmost step,

and when the doctor reached it he fished out a brush that had fallen

in and began daubing strange characters above the doorframean-

gular symbols, each one a tiny, puzzling picture. They looked to

Simon a little like the ancient writings contained in some of

Morgenes' books.

"What are those for?" he asked. The furiously painting doctor did

not reply, Simon took his hand off the rung to scratch his ankle and

the ladder began to sway ominously. Morgenes had to grasp the

door lintel to keep from toppling.

"No, no, no!" he barked, trying to keep the ebb and flow of the

paint from overtopping the bucket's edge. "You know better, Simon.

The rule is: all questions written out! But wait until I'm down from

hereif I fall off and die, there'll be no one to answer you."

Morgenes went back to his painting, sputtering quietly to himself.

"Sorry, Doctor," Simon said, a touch indignantly, "I just forgot."

A few moments passed with no other sounds than the whiskery

swish of Morgenes' brush.

"Will I always have to write down my questions? I can't hope to

write as fast as I think up things I want to know about."

"That," said Morgenes, squinting at his last stroke, "was the gen-

eral idea behind the rule. You, boy, devise questions like God makes

flies and poor peoplein droves. I am an old man, and prefer to set

my own pace."

"But," Simon's voice took on a despairing tone, "I shall be writ-

ing the rest of my days!"

"I can think of many less worthwhile ways you might spend your

life," Morgenes responded, beetling down the ladder. He turned to

survey the complete effect, the arch of strange letters all along the

top of the door frame. "For instance," he said, casting a sharp,

knowing eye over to Simon, "you might forge a letter and join

Breyugar's guardsmen, then spend your time having little bits of you

hacked off by men with swords."

Curses, thought Simon, caught like a rat.

"So you . . . heard, did you?" he asked at last. The doctor nod-

ded, retaining his tight, angry smile.

138 Tad Williams

Usires save me, but he has such eyes! Simon thought. Like needles.

He has a stare worse than Rachel's dragon-voice.

The doctor continued to watch him. Simon's gaze dropped to the

floor. At last, in a sullen voice that sounded years younger than he

would have preferred, Simon said it.

"I'm sorry."

Now the doctor, as if a restraining cord had been cut, began to

pace. "If I'd had any idea of what you were going to use that letter

for . . ." he fumed. "What were you thinking of? And why, why

did you feel you had to lie to me!?"

Somewhere deep inside, a part of Simon was pleased to see the

doctor upseta part that enjoyed the attention. Another part, how-

ever, felt ashamed. Somewhere else inside himhow many Simons

were there?was a calm, interested observer who waited to see

which part would speak for all.

Morgenes' pacing was beginning to make him nervous. "Besides,"

he called to the old man, "why should you care? It's my life, isn't it?

A kitchen boy's stupid life! They didn't want me, anyway . . ." he

finished in a mutter.

"And you should be grateful!" Morgenes said sharply. "Grateful

that they don't want you. What kind of life is it? Sitting around the

barracks playing dice with know-nothing louts during time of peace;

getting hacked, arrow-pierced and stallion-stamped in time of war.

You don't know, you stupid boyto be a simple kern while all of

these high-living, peasant-cudgeling knights are on the battlefield is

no better than being a shuttlecock at the Lady's Day games." He

whirled to face Simon. "Do you know what Fengbald and his

knights did at Falshire?"

The youth did not answer.

"They put the entire wool district to the torch, that's what they

did. Burned women and children along with the restjust because

they didn't want to give up their sheep. Fengbald had the sheep-

dipping vats filled with hot oil and scalded the leaders of the wool

merchants' guild to death. Six hundred of Earl Fengbald's own sub-

jects slaughtered, and he and his men marched back to the castle

singing! And this is the company you wish to join!?"

Simon was truly angry, now. He felt his face getting hot, and was

terrified that he might burst into tears. The dispassionate observer-

Simon had disappeared entirely. "So?" he shouted. "What does it

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR139

matter to anyone!?" Morgenes' apparent surprise at this unusual

outburst made him feel worse. "What is to become of me?" he

asked, and slapped at his thighs in frustration. "There is no glory in

the scullery, no glory among the chambermaids . . . and no glory

here in a dark room filled with stupid . - - books!"

The hurt look on the old man's face burst the straining dikes at

last; Simon fled in tears to the far part of the doctor's chamber to

huddle sobbing on the sea-chest, his face pressed against the cold

stone wall. Outside, somewhere, the three young priests were singing

hymns in distracted, drunken harmony.

The little doctor was at his side in a moment, patting with an

awkward hand at the youth's shoulder.

"Now, boy, now . . ." he said bewilderedly, "what is all this talk

of glory? Have you caught the sickness, too? Curse me for a blind

beggar, I should have seen. This fever has cankered even your simple

heart, hasn't it, Simon? I'm sorry. It takes a strong will or practiced

eye to see through the glitter to the rotten core." He patted Simon's

arm again.

Simon had no idea what the doctor was talking about, but the

tone of Morgenes' voice was soothing. Despite himself, he felt his

anger begin to slip awaybut the feeling of what seemed like weak-

ness that followed made him sit up and shake off" the doctor's hand.

He wiped his wet face roughly with his jerkin sleeve.

"I don't know why you're sorry. Doctor," he began, trying to

keep his voice from shaking. "/ am sorry ... for acting like a

child." He stood up, and the little man's eyes followed him as he

crossed the room to the long table, where he stood drawing a finger

across a scatter of open books. "I have lied to you, and I have made

a fool of myself," he said, not looking up. "Please forgive the stupid-

ity of a kitchen boy, Doctor ... a kitchen boy who thought he

could be more than that."

In the silence that followed this brave speech, Simon heard

Morgenes make a strange soundwas he actually crying? But a

moment later it became all too clear; Morgenes was chucklingno,

laughing, trying to muffle it behind his billowing sleeve.

Simon whirled, ears burning like coals. Morgenes caught his eye

for a moment, then looked away, shoulders heaving.

"Oh, lad ... oh, lad," he wheezed at last, putting a restraining

hand out toward the outraged Simon, "don't go! Don't be angry.

140

Tad Williams

You would be wasted on the field of battle! You should be a great

lord, and win the victories at treaty-table that always outweigh vic-

tories of the fieldor an escritor of the Church, and wheedle the

eternal souls of the rich and dissolute." Morgenes snickered again,

and chewed on his beard until the fit passed. Simon stood stone-still,

face a-frown, unsure if he was being paid compliment or insult.

Finally the doctor regained his composure; he vaulted to his feet and

made his way to the ale butt. A long swallow completed the calming

procedure, and he turned to the youth with a smile.

"Ah, Simon, bless you! Don't let the clanking and boasting of

King Elias' goodfellows and bravos impress you so much. You have

a keen witwell, sometimes, anywayand you have gifts you know

nothing about yet. Leam what you can from me, young hawk, and

those others you find who can also teach you. Who knows what your

fate will be? There are many kinds of glory." He upended the butt

for another frothy mouthful.

After a moment's careful inspection of Morgenes, to make sure

that the last speech was not just another tease, Simon at last permit-

ted himself a shy grin. He liked being called "young hawk."

"Very well, then. And I am sorry that I told you a lie. But if I

have keen wit, why will you not show me anything important?"

"Like what?" Morgenes asked, his smile fading.

"Oh, I don't know. Magic ... or something."

"Magic!" Morgenes hissed. "Is that all you think about, boy? Do

you think I am some hedge-wizard, some cheap-cloth court conju-

ror, that I should show you tricks?" Simon said nothing. "I am still

angry with you for lying to me," the doctor added. "Why should I

reward you?"

"I will do any chores you want, at any hour," Simon said. "I'll

even wash the ceiling."

"Here now," Morgenes responded, "I will not be bullied. I tell

you what, boy: leave off this endless fascination with magic and I

will answer all your other questions for a month entire, and you

shall not have to write down a one! How's that, hey?"

Simon squinted, but said nothing.

"Well then, I shall let you read my manuscript on the life of

Prester John!" the doctor offered. "I remember you asked about that

once or twice."

Simon squinted harder. "If you'll teach me magic," he suggested,

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR141

"I'll bring you one of Judith's pies every week, and a barrel of

Stanshire Dark from the larder."

"There now!" Morgenes barked triumphantly. "See?! Do you see,

boy? So convinced are you that magical tricks will bring you power

and good luck that you are quite willing to steal to bribe me into

teaching you! No, Simon, I cannot make bargains with you over

this."

Simon was angry again, but took a deep breath and pinched his

arm. "Why are you so set against it, Doctor?" he asked when he felt

calmer. "Because I am a scullion?"

Morgenes smiled. "Even if you still labor in the scullery, Simon-

lad, you are no scullion. You are my apprentice. No, there is no

deficiency in youexcept for your age and immaturity. You simply

do not comprehend what you are asking."

Simon slumped onto a stool. "I don't understand," he murmured.

"Exactly." Morgenes downed another gulp of ale. "What you call

'magic' is really only the action of things of nature, elemental forces

much like fire and wind. They respond to natural lawsbut those

laws are very hard to leam and understand. Many may never be

understood."

"But why don't you teach me the laws'?"

"For the same reason I wouldn't give a burning torch to an infant

sitting on a pile of straw. The infantand no insult is meant, Simon

is not prepared for the responsibility. Only those who have stud-

ied many years in many other subjects and disciplines can begin to

master the Art that fascinates you so. Even then they are not neces-

sarily fit to wield any power." The old man drank again, wiped his

lips and smiled. "By the time most of us are capable of using the

Art, we are old enough to know better. It is too dangerous for the

young, Simon."

"But . . ."

"If you say: 'But Pryrates . . .' I shall kick you," Morgenes said.

"I told you once, he is a madmanor as good as. He sees only the

power to be gained from wielding the Art, and ignores the conse-

quences. Ask me about the consequences, Simon."

He asked dully: "What about the con . . ."

"You cannot exert force without paying for it, Simon. If you steal

a pie, someone else goes hungry. If you ride a horse too fast, the

142 Tad Williams

horse dies. If you use the Art to open doors, Simon, you have little

choice of houseguests."

Simon, disappointed, glared around the dusty room. "Why do you

have those signs painted over your door, Doctor?" he asked at last.

"So no one else's houseguests come a-visiting me." Morgenes

stooped to put his flagon down, and as he did so something gold and

shining fell out of the collar of his gray robe, tumbling down to

dangle swinging on its chain. The doctor seemed not to notice. "I

should send you back, now. But remember this lesson, Simon, one fit

for kings ... or the sons of kings. Nothing is without cost. There is

a price to all power, and it is not always obvious. Promise me you

will remember that."

"I promise, Doctor." Simon, feeling the effects of the earlier cry-

ing and shouting, was as lightheaded as if he had run a race. "What

is that thing?" he asked, bending forward to watch the golden object

pendulum back and forth. Morgenes held it out on his palm, giving

Simon a brief look.

"It's a feather," the doctor said shortly. As he dropped the gleam-

ing thing back into his robe, Simon saw that the quill end of the

golden feather was attached to a writing scroll carved of pearly

white stone.

"No, ifs a pen," he said wonderingly, "a quill pen, isn't it?"

"Very well, it's a pen." Morgenes growled. "Now if you have

nothing better to do than interrogate me about my personal orna-

ments, be off with you! And don't forget your promise! Remember!"

Wandering back to the servants' quarters across the hedged court-

yard gardens, Simon wondered at the events of a strange morning.

The doctor had found out about the letter, but didn't punish him, or

throw him out, never to return. However, he had also refused to

teach Simon anything about magic. And why had his assertion

about the quill-pendant irritated the old man so?

Pondering, plucking absently at the dry, unbudded rosebushes,

Simon pricked his finger on a hidden thorn. Cursing, he held up his

hand. The bright blood was a red bead on his fingertip, a single

crimson pearl. He stuck his finger in his mouth and tasted salt.

^

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR143

In the darkest part of the night, on the very cusp of All Fools'

Day, a tremendous crash reverberated through the Hayholt. It rat-

tled sleepers awake in their beds and drew a long, sympathetic hum

from the dark bell clusters in Green Angel Tower.

Some of the young priests, gleefully ignoring midnight prayers on

this, their once-yearly night of freedom, were struck from their

stools as they sat swilling wine and insulting Bishop Domitis; the

concussive force of the blow was so great that even the drunkest felt

a wave of terror run through them, as though in a deep-sunken part

of themselves they had known all along that God would eventually

make his displeasure felt.

But when the ragged, startled crew milled out to the courtyard to

see what had happened, shaven acolyte heads like so many pale

mushrooms in the silky moonlight, there was no shape of the univer-

sal cataclysm they had all expected. Except for a few faces of other

recently-wakened castle-dwellers peering curiously from the win-

dows, the night was untroubled and clear.

Simon was dreaming in his spare, curtained bed, nested among

the treasures he had so carefully collected; in his dream he climbed a

pillar of black ice, every straining inch upward eroded by a nearly

identical slip backward. He clutched a parchment in his teeth, a

message of some sort. At the topmost point of the cold-burning

pillar was a door; in the doorway a dark presence crouched, waiting

for him . . . waiting for the message.

As he finally reached the threshold a hand snaked out, grasping

the parchment in an inky, vaporous fist. Simon tried to slide back, to

fall away, but another dark claw jabbed out from the doorway and

caught his wrist. He was drawn upward toward a pair of eyes, red-

bright as paired crimson holes in the belly of an infernal black

oven . . .

As he woke gasping from sleep he heard the sullen voices of the

bells, moaning their displeasure as they descended back into cold,

brooding sleep.

Only one person in all the great castle claimed to have seen any-

thing. Caleb the horse-boy, Shem's slow-witted assistant, had been

terribly excited and unable to sleep all night. The next morning he

was to be crowned King of Fools, and carried on the shoulders of

144 Tad Williams

the young priests as they marched through the castle singing bawdy

songs and tossing oats and flower petals. They would take him to the

refectory hall where he would preside over the All Fools* banquet

from his mock throne built of Gleniwent river reeds.

Caleb had heard the great roar, he told any who would listen, but

he had also heard words, a booming voice speaking a language that

the stable boy could only say was "bad." He also seemed to think he

had seen a great snake of fire leap from the window of Hjeldin's

Tower, looping itself around the spire in flaming coils and then

splintering into a shower of sparks.

No one paid Caleb's story much heedthere was a reason the

simpleminded boy had been chosen King of Fools. Also, the dawn

brought something to the Hayholt that eclipsed any thunder in the

night, and even the prospects of Fools' Day.

Daylight revealed a line of cloudsrain cloudscrouching on the

northern horizon like a flock of fat, gray sheep.

^

"By Dror's becrimsoned mallet, Udun's one dread eye, and . . .

and . - . and our Lord Usires! Something must be done!"

Duke Isgrimnur, nearly forgetting his Aedonite piety in his wrath,

brought his scarred, fur-knuckled fist down on the Great Table hard

enough to make the crockery jump six feet away. His broad body

swayed like an over-cargoed ship in a squall as he cast his eyes from

one end of the table to the other, then brought his fist down again. A

goblet teetered briefly, then surrendered to gravity.

"Steps must be taken, sire!" he roared, and tugged angrily at his

belt-length whiskers. "The Frostmarch is in a state of bedamned

anarchy! While I sit here with my men like so many knots on a log,

the Frostmarch Road has become a byway for bandits! And I have

had no word from Elvritshalla for two months or more!" The duke

blew out a great gust of air that made his mustache flutter. "My son

is in dread need, and I can do nothing! Where is the High King's

ward of safety, my Lord?"

Reddening like a beet the Rimmersman dropped back into his

chair, Elias raised a languid eyebrow and surveyed the other knights

scattered about the circumference of the table, far outnumbered by

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR145

the empty chairs between them. The torches in the wall sconces

threw long wavering shadows onto the high tapestries.

"Well, now that the aged but honorable Duke has made himself

known, would anyone else like to join his suit?" Elias toyed with his

own gold goblet, scuffing it along the crescent-shaped scars in the

oak. "Is there anyone else who feels that the High King of Osten

Ard had deserted his subjects?" At the king's right hand Guthwulf

smirked.

Isgrimnur, smarting, began to climb back to his feet, but Eolair of

Nad Mullach laid a restraining hand on the old duke's arm.

"Sire," Eolair said, "neither Isgrimnur nor anyone else who has

spoken is accusing you of anything." The Hemystirman placed his

palms flat on the table. "What we are all saying then, is that we are

askingentreating, my lordthat you pay more heed to the prob-

lems of those of your subjects who live outside your view here at the

Hayholt." Perhaps thinking his words too harsh, Eolair summoned

a smile onto his mobile face. "The problems, they are there," he

continued. "Outlawry is everywhere in the north and west. Starving

men have few scruples, and the drought just ended has brought out

the worst ... in everyone."

Elias, unspeaking, continued to stare at Eolair after the westerner

had finished. Isgrimnur couldn't help noticing how pale the king

looked. It reminded the older man of the time in the southern is-

lands that he had nursed Elias' father John through a bout of fever.

That bright eye, he thought, that nose like a hunting bird. Odd how

these bits, these brief expressions and reminders, go on generation

after generationlong after the man and his works are dead.

Isgrimnur thought of Miriamele, Elias' pretty, melancholy child.

He wondered what baggage of her father's she would carry on, what

disparate images of her beautiful haunted mother, dead ten years

nowor was it twelve?

Across the table Elias shook his head slowly, as if waking from a

dream or trying to dispel the wine fumes from his head. Isgrimnur

saw Pryrates, seated at the king's left side, quickly withdraw his pale

hand from Elias' sleeve. There was something abhorrent about the

priest, Isgrimnur thought, not for the first time, something far

deeper than merely his hairiessness and scratchy voice.

"Well, Count Eolair," the king said, an elusive smile briefly

twitching on his lips, "as long as we are speaking of'obligations' and

146 Tad Williams

such, what does your kinsman King Lluth have to say about the

message I sent him?" He leaned forward with apparent interest, his

powerful hands folded on the table.

Eolair replied in measured tones, choosing his words with care.

"As always. Lord, he sends his respects and love to noble Erkyn-

land. He does feel, though, that he cannot afford to send more in the

way of taxes . . ."

"Tribute!" snorted Guthwulf, picking his nails with a slim pon-

iard.

". . . In the way of taxes right now," Eolair finished, ignoring

the interruption.

"Is that so?" Elias asked, and smiled again.

"Actually, my lord," Eolair deliberately misread the smile's im-

port, "he sent for me to ask you for royal help. You know the

troubles the drought has caused, and the plague. The Erkynguard

must work with us to keep the trade roads open."

"Oh, they must, must they?" King Elias' eyes glinted, and a tiny

throb began between the strong cords of his neck. "It is *must' now,

is it?" He leaned farther forward, shaking off Pryrates' serpent-swift

restraining hand. "And who are you," he growled, "the weanling

stepcousin of a sheepherder-kingwho is only a king at all by my

father's weak-willed forebearance!who are you to tell me 'must'!?"

"My Lord!" cried old Fluiren of Nabban in horror, flapping his

spotted handsmighty hands once, now bent and curled like a

hawk's feet. "My Lord," he panted, "your anger is kingly, but Her-

nystir is a trusted ally under your father's High Wardnot to men-

tion his country was the birth-land of your saintly mother, rest her

soul! Please, sire, do not speak so of Lluth!"

Elias swung his emerald gaze to Fluiren, and seemed about to

focus his wrath on that diminished hero, but Pryrates tugged the

king's dark sleeve again and leaned close to mouth a few words in

Elias' ear. The king's expression softened, but the line of his jaw

remained taut as a bowstring. Even the air over the table seemed

pulled tight, a grinding net of awful possibility.

"Forgive me for the unforgivable. Count Eolair," Elias said at

last, a strange, stupid grin stretching the comers of his mouth wide.

"Forgive me my harsh, causeless words. It has been less than a

month since the rains began, and it was a difficult twelvemonth for

us all before that."

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR147

Eolair nodded, his clever eyes uneasy. "Of course. Highness. I

understand. Please, you'll grant me your pardon for provoking

you." Across the oval table Fluiren folded his mottled hands with a

satisfied nod.

Isgrimnur now rose to his feet, ponderous as a brown bear climb-

ing an ice floe. "I, too, Sire, shall try to speak in a gentle fashion,

though you all know it is clean against my soldier's nature."

Elias' cheerful grimace remained. "Very good. Uncle Bear-skin

we will all practice gentility together. What would you of your

king?"

The Duke of Elvritshalla took a deep breath, nervously finger-

tangling his beard. "Mine and Eolair's people are in dire need, Lord.

For the first time since the earliest part of John Presbyter's reign, the

Frostmarch Road has again become impassableblizzards in the

north, highway robbers further south. The royal North Road past

Wealdhelm is not much better. We need these roads open, and kept

so." Isgrimnur leaned to the side and spat on the floor. Fluiren

winced. "Many of the clan-villages, according to my son Isom's last

letter, are suffering for lack of food. We cannot trade our goods, we

cannot keep contact with the more remote clans."

Guthwulf, carving at the table's edge, yawned conspicuously.

Heahferth and Godwig, two younger barons wearing prominent

green sashes, quietly tittered.

"Surely, Duke," Guthwulf drawled, leaning back against the arm

of his chair like a sun-warmed cat, "you don't blame us for that. Has

our lord the king powers like God Almightyto stop the snows and

storms with a wave of his hand?"

"I do not suggest that he should!" Isgrimnur rumbled.

"Perhaps," Pryrates said from the head of the table, his wide

smile strangely inappropriate, "you also blame the king for his

brother's disappearance, as we have heard it rumored?"

"Never!" Isgrimnur was genuinely shocked. Beside him Eolair

narrowed his eyes, as if seeing something unexpected. "Never!" the

duke repeated, looking helplessly at Elias.

"Now, men, I know Isgrimnur would never think such a thing,"

the king said, waving a listless hand. "Why, old Uncle Bear-skin

dandled both Josua and myself on his knees. I hope, of course, that

Josua has suffered no harmthe fact that he has not appeared at

Naglimund in all this time is troublingbut if anything foul is afoot

148 Tad Williams

it is not my conscience that will need soothing " But as he finished,

for a moment Ellas did look troubled, staring at nothing as though

he wandered through a confusing memory

"Let me get back to the point. Lord," Isgnmnur said. "The north-

ern roads are not safe, and weather is not the only factor My earls

are spread too thin. We need more menstrong men to make the

Frostmarch safe again. The marchland is aswann with robbers and

outlaws and .. and worse things, some say."

Pryrates leaned forward interestedly, chin perched on long-fin-

gered hands like a child watching ram through a window, sunken

eyes catching the torches* gleam. "What 'worse things,' noble Is-

gnmnur?"

"It's not important People thinkthings, that is all You

know how the marchdwellers are . . " The Rimmersman trailed

off, taking an embarrassed draft of his wine.

Eolair rose. "If he will not voice his thoughts, what we have heard

in the markets and among the servants, I will. The northern people

are afraid. There are things going about that cannot be explained by

deadly weather and bad harvests In my land we do not need to

name things angels or devils We of Hemystu-we of the West

know that things walk upright on this earth that are not men . . .

and we know whether to fear them or not. We Hemystm knew the

Sithi when they still lived in our fields, when the high mountains and

wide meadows of Erkynland were theirs."

The torches were guttering now, and Eolair's high forehead and

cheeks seemed to shine with a faint scarlet radiance "We have not

forgotten," he said quietly His voice carried even to half-sleeping

Godwig, who lifted his drunken head like a hound hearing a distant

call- "We, the Hemystm, remember the days of the giants, and the

days of the northern curse, the White Foxes, so now we speak

plainly: evil is abroad in this ill-omened winter and spring. It is not

only the bandits that prey on travelers, and who cause the disappear-

ance of isolated farmers The people of the North are afraid

" *We the HemystinT' Pryrates' mocking voice lanced out

through the silence, skewering the spell of otherworidhness " 'We

the Hemystin'' Our noble pagan friend claims to speak plainly!"

Pryrates traced an exaggerated Tree on the breast of his unpnestly

red vestments Ellas' expression turned to sly good humor. "Very

well!" the pnest continued "He has delivered us the plainest pack of

149

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

riddles and shadow-talk I have ever heard' Giants and elves'"

Pryrates flicked his hand, and his sleeve fluttered above the dinner

plates "As if his majesty the king did not have enough to worry

abouthis brother vanished, his subjects hungry and frightenedas

if even the king's great heart was not near-to-breakmg' And you,

Eolair, you bnng him pagan ghost stones from the mouths of old

wives'"

"He be pagan, yes," growled Isgnmnur, "but there be more

Aedomte good will in Eolair than in the pack of lazy pups I have

seen lolling around this court. ."Baron Heahferth barked,

drawing drunken laughter from Godwig"lolling around while the

people have been living on meager hope and less harvest!"

"It's all nght then, Isgnmnur," said Eolair weanly

"My lords!" Flmren flapped.

"Well, I will not hear you insulted so for your honesty!" Is-

gnmnur rumbled at Eolair He lifted his fist to hammer the table

again, then thought better of it, bunging it instead to his breast

where it enfolded the wooden Tree hanging there "Forgive my out-

burst, my king, but Count Eolair tells the truth Whether their fears

have substance or no, the people do fear "

"And what do they fear, dear old Uncle Bear-skin?" asked the

king as he held his goblet for Guthwulf to refill

"They fear the dark," the old man said, all dignity now "They

fear the winter's dark, and they fear the world will grow darker

still"

Eolair turned his empty cup upside-down on the table. "In

Erchester's market the few merchants who have been able to come

south fill the people's ears with news of a strange vision I have

heard the same story so many times that I do not doubt everyone in

the town has heard it, too " Eolair paused and looked at the Rim-

mersman, who nodded once, gravely, creasing the gray-shot beard

"WelP" said Elias impatiently

"In the Frostmarch wastes at night, a wonderful thing has been

seena cart, a black cart, drawn by white horses

"How unusual'" Guthwulf sneered, but Pryrates and Elias locked

eyes of a sudden The king raised an eyebrow as he rechanneled his

gaze to the westerner

"Go on "

"Those who have seen it say it appeared a few days after All

150 Tad Williams

Fools* Day. They say the can bears a casket, and that black-robed

monks walk behind it."

"And to what heathen nature-sprite do the peasants attribute this

vision?" Elias leaned slowly backward in his chair, until he was

looking down the bridge of his nose at the Hemystinnan.

"They say, my king, that it is your father's death-cartbegging

your pardon, sireand that as long as the land suffers, he shall not

sleep peacefully in his barrow."

After an interval the king spoke, his voice barely louder than the

hissing of the torches-

"Well, then," he said, "we will have to make sure my father gets

his well-earned rest, will we not?"

^

Look at them, old Towser thought as he dragged his bent leg and

tired body up the aisle of the throne room. Look at them, all lollying

and smirkingthey look more like heathen chiefs of the Thrithings

than Aedonite knights of Erkynland.

Elias' courtiers hooted and called out as the jester limped by,

wagging their heads at him as though he were a Naraxi ape on a

chain. Even the king and the King's Hand, Earl Guthwulf, whose

chair was pulled up next to the throne, contributed to the rough

jests; Elias sat with a leg up on the arm of the Dragonbone Chair

tike a farm lout on a gate. Only the king's young daughter

Miriamele sat stiffly silent, pretty face solemn, shoulders pulled back

as if she were expecting a blow. Her honey-colored hairwhich

came from neither her dark father nor raven-haired motherhung

down on either side of her face like curtains.

She looks like she's trying to hide behind that hair, thought

Towser. What a shame. They say that the freckled darling is stubborn

and forward, but all I see in her eyes is fear. She deserves better, I

suspect, than the swaggering wolves who prowl our castles these days,

but they say her father's promised her already to that be-damned

drunken strutter Fengbald.

He did not make swift progress, his path to the throne hindered

by the hands that reached out to pat or lightly slap at him. It was

said to be good luck to touch the head of a dwarf. Towser was not

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR151

one, but he was old, very old, and bent, it amused the courtiers to

treat him as if he were.

He reached Elias' throne at last. The king's eyes were red-rimmed

with too much drink or too little sleep, ormost likelyboth.

Elias turned his green gaze downward to the little man. "So, my

dear Towser," he said, "you grace us with your company." The

jester noticed that the buttons of the King's white blouse were un-

done, and that there was a gravy stain on the beautiful doeskin

gloves tucked into his belt.

"Yes, sire, I have come." Towser assayed a bow, difficult with his

stiff leg; a sputter of mirth came from the lords and ladies.

"Before you entertain us, oldest jester," Elias said, swinging his

leg down off the throne arm and fixing the old man with his most

sincere stare, "may I perhaps beg of you a small favor? A question I

have long wanted to ask?"

"Of course, my king."

"Then tell me, Towser dear, however did you happen to be given a

dog's name'*" Elias raised his eyebrows in mock puzzlement, turning

first to look at Guthwulf, who grinned, and then to Miriamele, who

looked away. The rest of the courtiers laughed and whispered be-

hind their hands.

"I was not given a dog's name, sire," said Towser quietly. "I chose

it for myself."

"What!" said Elias, turning to the old man once more. "I don't

think that I heard you properly."

"I gave myself a dog's name, sire. Your noble father used to tease

me for being so faithful, because I would always go with him, would

be at his side. As a jest he named one of his hounds 'Cruinh,' the

which was my given name." The old man turned slightly, so as to

play to the crowd more fully. " 'So then,' quoth I, 'if the dog be

given my name by John's will, then I shall take the dog's in turn.' I

have never answered since to any name but Towser, and never

shall." Towser permitted himself a tiny smile. "It is possible that

your revered father regretted somewhat his joke thereafter."

Elias did not seem altogether pleased with this answer, but

laughed sharply anyway and slapped his knee. "A saucy dwarf, is he

not?" he said, looking around. The others assembled, trying to take

the king's mood, laughed politelyall but Miriamele, who looked

152 Tad Williams

down on Towser from her high-backed chair, her face caught in an

intricate expression whose meaning he could not unpuzzle.

"Well," said Elias, "if I were not the good king that I amwere I,

say for instance, a pagan king like Hernystir's LluthI might have

thy minuscule, wrinkled head off for speaking so of my late father.

But, of course, I am not such a king."

"Of course not, sire," Towser said.

"Are you come to sing for us, then, or to tumblewe hope not,

since you appear over-frail for such anticsor what? Come, tell us."

Elias eased himself back in his throne and clapped for more wine.

"To sing. Majesty," the jester replied. He took the lute from off

his shoulder and began to turn the pegs, bringing it into tune. As a

young page scurried over to fill the king's cup, Towser looked up to

the ceiling where the banners of Osten Ard's knights and nobles

hung before the rain-splashed upper windows. The dust was now

gone and the cobwebs dispersed, but to Towser the bright colors of

the pennoncels seemed falsetoo bright, like the painted skin of a

drab who hopes to mimic her own younger days, thus destroying

what true beauty remains.

As the nervous page finished filling the goblets of Guthwulf,

Fengbald, and the others, Elias waved his hand at Towser.

"My lord," he nodded, "I will sing of another good kingthis

one an unfortunate and sad monarch, however."

"I do not like sad songs," said Fengbald; he was, predictably, well

into his cups. Beside him, Guthwulf smirked.

"Hush," The King's Hand made a show of elbowing his compan-

ion. "If we do not like the tune when he has finished, then we can

make the dwarf hop."

Towser cleared his throat and strummed, singing then in his thin,

sweet voice:

"Old King Juniper

Mickle old was he

Snowy-white his beard that hung

From chin to bony knee.

Noble old King Juniper

Sitting on his throne

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR153

Called: 'Now bring my sons to me,

For soon I will be gone.'

They brought him then his princely sons

They came with hounds and hawks

The younger hight Prince Holly

The older Prince Hemlock.

'We have heard thy summons, sire,

And left our hunt withal.'

So Hemlock said, 'What wouldst thou

That thou biddest us to thy hall?'

'I soon must die, my princely sons.'

The aged king he said.

'And would see peace between thou twain

When I at last am dead . . .' "

"I do not think I like the sound of this song," growled Guthwulf.

"It has a mocking tone."

Elias bade him be silent; his eyes gleamed as he signaled Towser to

continue.

" 'But father dear, why dost thou fear?

Prince Hemlock has the right.'

Said Holly. 'I could not counter him

And be a Godly knight.'

His mind thus eased, the King did bid

His sons go out again

And thanked merciful Aedon

That they were such goodly men.

But in the heart of Hemlock

Who was the king-to-be

Prince Holly's words so gentle

Sparked a fire of infamy.

"That speaks so sweet a princely tongue

Must wicked heart disguise.'

Thought Hemlock, 'Gainst my crafty kin

I must some scheme devise.'

154Tad Williams

So fearing then the gentle heart

That beat in Holly's breast

He took a draught of poison

From out the lining of his vest.

And when the brothers sate at meat

He poured it in a cup

And bade Prince Holly drink it down . . ."

"Enough! This is treason!" roared Guthwulf as he leaped up,

knocking his chair back among the startled courtiers; his long sword

hissed free of its scabbard. Had Fengbald not sprung up in befuddle-

ment, entangling his arm, Guthwulf would have lunged at the quail-

ing Towser.

Elias, too, was quickly on feet. "Sheathe that bodkin, you

lackwit!" he shouted. "No one draws sword in the king's throne

room!" He turned from the snarling Earl of Utanyeat to the jester.

The old man, having recovered somewhat from the alarming specta-

cle of Guthwulf enraged, struggled to put on dignity.

"Do not think, dwarfish creature, that we are amused by your

little song," the king snarled, "or that your long service for my

father makes you untouchablebut do not think either that you can

prickle the royal skin with such dull barbs. Get you out of my

sight!"

"I confess, sire, that the song was a new-minted one," began the

jester shakily. His belled hat was askew. "But it was not . . .'*

"Get you hence!" U\ias spat, all pale face and beast's eyes. Towser

hobbled quickly out of the throne room, shuddering at the king's

last, wild look, and the caged, hopeless face of his daughter. Princess

Miriamele.

11

An Unexpected Guest

MIDDLING afternoon on the last day of Avrel, Simon was sunk in

the stable's dark hayloft, comfortably adrift in a scratchy yellow sea,

only his head above the dusty billows. The haydust sparkled down

past the wide window as he listened to his own measured breath.

He had just come down from the shadowed gallery of the chapel,

where the monks had been singing the noon rites. The clean,

sculpted tones of their solemn prayers had touched him in a way

that the chapel, and the dry doings within its tapestried walls, sel-

dom dideach note so carefully held and then lovingly released,

like a woodcarver putting delicate toy boats into a stream. The sing-

ing voices had wrapped his secret heart in a sweet, cold net of silver;

the tender resignation of its strands still clutched him. It had been

such a strange sensation: for a moment he had felt himself all feath-

ers and racing heartbeata frightened bird cupped in the hands of

God.

He had run down the gallery steps, feeling suddenly unworthy of

such solicitousness and delicacyhe was too clumsy, too foolish. It

seemed that he might, with his chapped scullion's hands, somehow

mishandle the beautiful music, as a child might unwittingly trample

a butterfly.

Now, in the hayloft, his heart began to slow. He buried himself

deep in the musty, whispering straw, and with his eyes closed lis-

tened to the gentle snorting of the horses in their stalls below. He

thought he could feel the almost insensible touch of the dust motes

as they drifted down onto his face in the still, drowsy darkness.

He might have dozedhe couldn't be surebut the next thing

Simon noticed was the sudden, sharp sound of voices below him.

Rolling over, he swam through the tickling straw to the loft's edge,

until he could see down to the stable below-

156 Tad Williams

There were three: Shem Horsegroom, Ruben the Bear, and a little

man that Simon thought might be Towser, the old jesterhe

couldn't be sure because this one wore no motley, and had a hat that

covered much of his face. They had all come in through the stable

doors like a trio of comic fools; Ruben the Bear swung a jug from a

fist as broad as a leg of spring lamb. All three were drunk as birds in

a berry-bush, and Towserif it was hewas singing an old tune:

"Jack take a maid

Up on the cheery hill

Sing a way-o, hey-o

Half-a-crown day ..."

Ruben handed the jug to the little man. The weight over-balanced

him in midchorus so that he staggered a step and then tumbled over,

his hat flying off. It was indeed Towser; as he rolled to a stop Simon

could see his seamed, purse-mouthed face begin to wrinkle up at his

eyes, as though he would cry like a baby. Instead he began to laugh

helplessly, leaning against the wall with the jug between his knees.

His two companions tromped unsteadily over to join him. They sat

all in a row, like magpies on a fence.

Simon was wondering if he should announce himself; he didn't

know Towser well, but he had always been friendly with Shem and

Ruben. After a moment's consideration he decided against it. It was

more fun watching them unsuspectedperhaps he would be able to

think of a trick to play! He made himself comfortable, secret and

silent in the high loft.

"By Saint Muirfath and the Archangel," Towser said with a sigh

after a few sodden moments had passed, "I had sore need of this!"

He ran his forefinger around the lip of the jug, then put the finger in

his mouth.

Shem Horsegroom reached to him across the smith's broad stom-

ach and took the jug for a swallow. He wiped his lips with the back

of a leathery hand. "Whur will ye go, then?" he asked the jester.

Towser vented a sigh. The life suddenly seemed to drain out of the

little drinking party; all stared glumly at the floor.

"I have some kinfolkdistant kinfolkin Grenefod, at the river's

mouth. Mayhap I will go there, although I doubt they'll be too

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR157

happy with another mouth to feed. Mayhap I will go north to Nag-

limund."

"But Josua is gone," said Ruben, and belched.

"Aye, goon away," added Shem.

Towser closed his eyes and bumped his head back against the

rough wood of the paddock door. "But Josua's people still hold

Naglimund, and they will have sympathies for someone chased out

of his home by Ellas' churlseven more sympathy now, when peo-

ple say that Elias has murdered poor Prince Josua."

"But other'uns say that Joosua has turn traitor," Shem offered,

rubbing his chin sleepily.

"Pfagh." The little jester spat. In the loft above, Simon, too, felt

the warmth of the spring afternoon, the drowsy, dragging weight of

it. It lent the conversation below an air of unimportance, of distance

murder and treachery seemed the names of faraway places.

During the long pause which followed, Simon felt his eyelids

creeping inexorably downward . . .

"Mayhap it been not sich a wise thing t'do, brother Towser . . ."

Shem was speaking now, skinny old Shem, as gaunt and weath-

ered as something hung in a smokehouse". . . baitin' the king, I

mean. Did ye need to sing sich a goadin' song?"

"Hah!" Towser scratched his nose busily. "My western ancestors,

they were true bards, not limping old tumblers like me. They would

have sung him a song to curl his ears up rightly! They say that the

poet Eoin-ec-Cluias once made an anger-song so mighty that all the

golden bees of the Grianspog descended on the chieftain Gormhbata

and stung him to death . . . that was a song!" The old jester leaned

his head back once more against the stable wall- "The king!? God's

teeth, I cannot stand even to call him such. I was with his sainted

father man and boythere was a king you could call a king! This

one is no better than a brigand ... not half the man that his ...

father John was. . . ."

Towser's voice wavered sleepily. Shem Horsegroom's head slowly

fell forward onto his breast- Ruben's eyes were open, but it was as

though he looked into the darkest spaces between the rafters. Beside

him Towser stirred once more.

"Did I tell you," the old man abruptly said, "did I tell you about

the king's sword? King John's swordBright-Nail? He gave it to

me, you know, saying: 'Towser, only you can pass this to my son

158 Tad Williams

Elias. Only you . . . !" A tear winked on the jester's furrowed

cheek. " 'Take my son to the throne room and give him Bright-

Nail,' he told meand I did! I brought it to him the night his dear

father died ... put it in his hand just the way his father told me to

. . . and he dropped it! Dropped it!" Towser's voice rose in anger.

"The sword that his father carried into more battles than a brachet

has fleas! I could scarce believe such clumsiness, such . . . disre-

spect! Are you listening, Shem? Ruben?" Beside him the smith

grunted.

"Hist! I was horrified, of course. I picked it up and wiped it with

the linen wrappings and gave it to him; this time he took it with two

hands. 'It twisted,' he said, like an idiot. Now as he held it again the

strangest look passed over his face, like . . . like ..." The jester

trailed off. Simon was afraid he had fallen asleep, but apparently the

little man was merely thinking, in a slow, wine-addled way.

"The look on his face," Towser resumed, "was like a child caught

doing something very, very wickedthat was it exactly! Exactly! He

turned pale, and his mouth went all slackand he handed it back to

me! 'Bury this with my father,' he said, 'It is his sword; he should

have it with him.*'But he wanted it given to you, my lord!' I said

. . . but would he listen? Would he? No. "This is a new age, old

man,* he told me, 'we do not need to dote on these relics of the past.'

Can you imagine the thundering gall of such a man!?"

Towser searched around with his hand until he found the jug and

lifted it up for a long drink. Both his companions now had closed

their eyes and were breathing hoarsely, but the little old man paid

no notice, lost in indignant reverie.

"And then he would not even do his poor dead father the courtesy

of ... placing it in the grave himself. Wouldn't . . . wouldn't

even touch it! Made his younger brother do it! Made Josua . . ."

Towser's bald head nodded. "You'd have thought it bumed him

... to see him hand it back ... so swift . . . damned

puppy . . ." Towser's head bobbed once more, sank to his breast,

and did not come up again.

As Simon came quietly down the hayloft ladder, the three men

were already snoring like old dogs before a fireplace. He crept past

them on his toe-tips, kindly halting to stopper the jug lest one of

them knock it over with a sleep-flung arm. He moved out into the

slanting sunlight on the commons.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR159

So many strange things have happened this year, he thought as he

sat dropping pebbles into the well in the center of the commons

yard. Drought and sickness, the prince disappeared, people burned

and killed in Falshire . . . But somehow none of it seemed very

serious.

Everything happens to someone else, Simon decided, half-glad,

half-regretful. Everything happens to strangers.

^

She was curled up in the window seat, staring down through the

delicately etched panes at something below. She did not look up

when he entered, although the scuff of his boots on the flagstones

announced him clearly; he stood for a moment in the doorway, arms

folded across his breast, but still she did not turn. He strode forward

and then stopped, looking over her shoulder.

There was nothing to see in the commons but a kitchen boy sitting

on the rim of the stone cistern, a long-legged, shock-haired youth in

a stained smock. The yard was otherwise empty of anything but

sheep, dirty bundles of wool searching the dark ground for patches

of new grass.

"What is wrong?" he asked, laying a broad hand on her shoulder.

"Do you hate me now, that you should stalk away without a word?"

She shook her head, briefly netting a stripe of sunlight in her hair.

Her hand stole up to his and grasped it with cool fingers.

"No," she said, still staring at the deserted acre below. "But I hate

the things I see around me." He leaned forward, but she quickly

pulled her hand free and lifted it to her face, as if to shade it from

the afternoon sun.

"What things?" he asked, a measure of exasperation creeping into

his voice. "Would you rather be back in Meremund, living in that

drafty prison of a place my father gave me, with the smell of fish

poisoning the air of even the highest balconies?" He reached down

and cupped her chin, turning it with firm gentleness until he could

see her angry, tearful eyes.

"Yes!" she said, and pushed his hand away, but now she held his

gaze. "Yes, I would. You can smell the wind there, too, and you can

see the ocean."

160 Tad Williams

"Oh, God, girl, the ocean? You are mistress of the known world

and yet you cry because you can't see the damnable water? Look!

Look there!" He pointed out past the Hayholt's walls. "What, then.

is the Kynslagh?"

She looked back with scom. "That is a bay, a king's bay, which

waits passively for the king to boat on it, or swim in it. No king

owns the sea."

"Ah." He dropped onto a hassock, his long legs splayed to either

side. "And the thought behind this all, I suppose, is that you are

prisoned here too, eh? What nonsense! I know why you are upset."

She turned fully away from the window, her eyes intent. "You

do?" she asked, and beneath the scom fluttered a tiny breath of

hope. "Tell me why, then. Father."

Elias laughed. "Because you are about to be married- It is not

surprising at all!" He slid nearer. "Ah, Miri, there's nothing to be

afraid of. Fengbald is a swaggerer, but he's young and still foolish.

With a woman's patient hand at work he'll learn manners soon

enough. And if he doesn'twell, it would show him a fool indeed

were he to mistreat the king's daughter."

Miriamele's face hardened into a look of resignation. "You don't

understand." Her tone was flat as a tax collector's. "Fengbald is of

no more interest to me than a rock, or a shoe. It's you who I care

aboutand it's you who has something to fear. Why do you show

off for them? Why do you mock and threaten old men?"

"Mock and threaten?!" For a moment Elias' broad face curled

into an ugly snarl. "That old whoreson sings a song that as much as

accuses me of doing away with my brother, and you say I mocked

him?" The king stood up suddenly, giving the hassock an angry

push with his foot that sent it spinning across the floor. "What do I

have to fear?" he asked suddenly.

"If you don't know, Fatheryou who spend so much time

around that red snake Pryrates and his deviltryif you can't feel

what's happening ..."

"What in Aedon's name are you saying?" the king demanded.

"What do you know?" He struck his hand against his thigh with a

crack. "Nothing! Pryrates is my able servanthe will do for me

what no one else can."

"He is a monster and a necromancer!" the princess shouted. "You

are becoming his tool, Father! What has happened to you? You have

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR161

changed!" Miriamele made an anguished sound, trying to bury her

face in her long blue veil, then leaped up to dash past on velvet-

slippered feet into her bedchamber. A moment later she had pushed

the heavy door closed behind her.

"Damn all children!" Elias swore. "Girl!" he shouted, striding to

the door, "you understand nothing! You know nothing about what

the king is called on to do. And you have no right to be disobedient.

I have no son! / have no heir! There are ambitious men all around

me, and I need Pengbald. You will not thwart me!"

He stood for a long moment, but there was no reply- He struck

the heel of his hand against the door and the timbers shuddered.

"Miriamele! Open the door!" Only silence answered him.

"Daughter," he said at last, leaning his head forward until it

touched the unyielding wood, "only bear me a grandson, and I will

give you Meremund. I will see that Fengbald does not hinder your

going. You may spend the rest of your life staring at the ocean." He

brought up his hand and wiped something from his face. "I do not

like to look at the ocean myself ... it makes me think of your

mother."

One more time he struck the door. The echo bloomed and died. "I

love you, Miri . . ." the king said softly.

^

The turret at the corner of the western wall had taken the first bite

out of the afternoon sun. Another pebble rattled down the cistern,

following a hundred of its fellows into oblivion.

Pm hungry, Simon decided.

It would not be a bad idea, he reflected, to wander over to the

pantry and beg something to eat from Judith. The evening meal

would not be served for at least an hour, and he was uncomfortably

aware that he hadn't had a bite since early morning. The one prob-

lem was that Rachel and her crew were cleaning out the long refec-

tory hallway and chambers alongside the dining hall, the latest bat-

tle in Rachel's strenuous spring campaign. It would certainly be

better, if possible, to circumvent the Dragon and any words she

might have to offer on the subject of begging food before supper.

After a moment's consideration, during which time he sent three

162 Tad Williams

more stones tick-tack-ticking down the well, Simon decided it would

be safer to go under the Dragon than around her. The refectory hall

took up the entire length of the upper story along the seawall of the

castle's central keep; it would take a very long time to go all the way

around by the Chancelry to come at the kitchens on the far side. No,

the storage rooms were the only route.

He took a chance on a quick dash from the commons yard across

the western portico of the refectory, and made it through unob-

served. A whiff of soapy water and the distant slosh of mops has-

tened his steps as he ducked into the darkened lower floor, and the

rooms of stored goods that took up most of the area below the

dining halls.

Since this floor was a good six or seven ells below the top of the

Inner Bailey walls, only the faintest gleam of reflected light made its

way in through the windows. The deep shadows reassured Simon.

Because of many combustibles, torches were almost never brought

down to these roomsthere was little chance he would be discov-

ered.

In the large central chamber great piles of iron-banded casks and

butts were stacked to the ceiling, a murky landscape of rounded

towers, and close-hemmed passages. Anything might be stored in

these barrels: dried vegetables, cheeses, bolts of fabric from years

long past, even suits of armor like shining fish in casks of midnight-

dark oil. The temptation to open some and see what treasures lay

hidden privily inside was very strong, but Simon had no prybar to

unlid the heavy, tight-nailed barrelsneither did he dare make too

much noise with the Dragon and her legions dusting and polishing

away just above like the charwomen of the damned.

Midway across the long, shadowed room, threading his way be-

tween barrel-towers that leaned like cathedral buttressess, Simon

nearly fell down a hole into darkness.

Dancing back in heart-thumping surprise, he quickly saw that

rather than a mere hole it was a hatchway that gaped in the floor

before him, its door flung open and back. With care he could step

around it, despite the narrowness of the path ... but why was it

open? Obviously, heavy hatch-doors did not swing open unaided.

Doubtless one of the housekeepers had brought something up from a

storeroom farther below, and been unable to both manage the bur-

den and close the door.

163

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

With only an instant's hesitation, Simon scrambled down the lad-

der into the hatchway. Who could say what strange, exciting things

might be hiding in the room below?

The space beneath was darker than the room above, and at first he

could see nothing at all. His groping foot encountered something

below him; as he gingerly lowered his weight it took on the solidity

of familiar board flooring. When he took the other foot off the lad-

der, however, it met no resistance at allonly his tight grip on the

ladder-rung kept him from toppling off balance. There was still open

space immediately below the ladderanother hatchway to a floor

even further below. He maneuvered his swinging foot until it found

the lip of the lower hatch, then moved off onto the security of this

middle room's floor.

The hatch-door above him was a gray square in the wall of dark-

ness. By its faint light he saw with disappointment that this area was

little more than a closet: the roof was far lower than that of the

upper room, and the walls extended back only a few arm's lengths

from where he stood. This small room was crowded to the rafters

with barrels and sacks, with only a small aisle that reached back to

the far wall separating the leaning dry goods.

As he surveyed the closet with disinterest a board creaked some-

where, and he heard the measured sound of footsteps in the black-

ness below him.

Oh, God's Pain, who's that?! And what have I done now?

How stupid of him not to think that the hatchway might be open

because someone was still down in the rooms below! He had done it

again! Silently cursing himself for an idiot, he slid into the narrow

aisle between the packed goods. The footfalls below approached the

ladder. Simon wedged himself back off the aisle into a space between

two musty plaincloth sacks that smelled and felt like they might be

full of old linen. Realizing that he would still be visible to anyone

who stepped away from the hatch and into the pathway, he sank

into a half-crouch, resting his weight carefully on an oak-ribbed

trunk. The steps halted, and the ladder began to creak as someone

climbed up. He held his breath. He had no idea why he was sud-

denly so frightened; if he was caught it would only mean more

punishment, more of Rachel's hard looks and peppery remarks

why then did he feel like a rabbit scented by hounds?

The sound of climbing continued, and for the moment it seemed

164 Tad Williams

that whoever it was would continue up to the large room above . . .

until the steady creaking stopped. The silence sang in Simon's ears.

There was a creak, then anotherbut he realized with a heavy feel-

ing in his stomach that the noises were coming back down. A muf-

fled bump as the unseen figure stepped off the ladder onto the floor

of the closet, and again there was silence, but this time the very

stillness seemed to throb. The slow tread moved closer down the

slender aisle, until it halted directly across from Simon's hastily-

chosen hiding place. In the dim light he could see pointed black

boots, almost close enough to touch; above hung the black-trimmed

hem of a scarlet robe. It was Pryrates.

Simon crouched back among the dry goods and prayed that

Aedon would stop his heart, which seemed to be beating like thun-

der. He felt his gaze drawn upward against his will until he stared

out between the sagging shoulders of the sacks that hid him.

Through the narrow gap he could see the alchemist's bleak face; for

a moment it seemed Pryrates looked right at him, and he nearly

squealed in terror. An instant later he saw it was not so: the red

priest's shadow-shrouded eyes were focused on the wall above

Simon's head. He was listening.

Come out.

Pryrates' lips had not moved, but Simon heard the voice as plainly

as if it had whispered in his ear.

Come out. Now.

The voice was firm but reasonable. Simon found himself ashamed

at his conduct: there was nothing to fear; it was childish foolishness

to crouch here in the dark when he could stand up and reveal him-

self, admit the little joke he had played ... but still . . .

Where are you? Show yourself.

Just as the calm voice in his ear had finally convinced him that

nothing would be simpler than to stand and speakhe was reaching

for the sacks to help himself upPryrates' black eyes swept for a

scant moment across the dark crack through which Simon peered,

and the glancing touch killed any thought of rising as a sudden frost

shrivels a rose blossom. Pryrates' gaze touched Simon's hidden eyes

and a door opened in the boy's heart; the shadow of destruction

filled that doorway.

This was deathSimon knew it. He felt the cold crumble of grave

soil beneath his scraping fingers, the weight of dark, moist earth in

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR165

his mouth and eyes. There were no more words now, no dispassion-

ate voice in his head, only a pullan untouchable something that

was dragging him forward by fractions of inches. A worm of ice

clasped itself around his heart as he foughtthis was death waiting

. . . his death. If he made a sound, the merest tremble or gasp, he

would never see the sun again. He shut his eyes so tightly that his

temples ached; he locked teeth and tongue against the straining need

for breath. The silence hissed and pounded. The pull strengthened.

Simon felt as though he were sinking slowly down into the crushing

depths of the sea.

A sudden yowl was followed by Pryrates' startled curse. The in-

tangible, throttling grip was gone; Simon's eyes popped open in time

to see a sleek gray shape skitter past, leap over Pryrates' boots and

streak to the hatchway, where it bounded down into darkness. The

priest's surprised laughter scraped out, echoing dully in the cluttered

room.

"A cat . . . r

After a pause of half a dozen heartbeats, the-black boots turned

away and moved back up the aisle. In a moment, Simon heard the

ladder-thongs squeaking. He continued to sit rigidly, his breathing

shallow, all of his senses alarmed. Chill sweat was running into his

eyes, but he did not lift his hand to wipe it awaynot yet.

At last, after many minutes had passed and the ladder-sounds had

faded, Simon rose from the sheltering sacks, balancing on weak,

trembling legs. Praise Usires and bless that little gray scattercat! But

what to do? He had heard the upper hatchway close, and the sound

of booted footfalls on the floor overhead, but that did not mean that

Pryrates had gone very far. It would be a risk even to lift the heavy

door and look; if the priest were still in the storeroom the chances

were good that he would hear. How could he get out?

He knew he should just stay where he was, waiting in the dark.

Even if the alchemist were in the upper room now, eventually he

must finish his business and depart. This seemed by far the safest

planbut part of Simon's nature rebelled. It was one thing to be

frightenedand Pryrates frightened him witlessit was another

thing to spend the whole evening locked in a dark closet, and suffer

the attendant punishments, when the priest was almost certainly on

his way back to his eyrie in Hjeldin's Tower.

166 Tad Williams

Besides, I don't think he really could have made me come out . . .

could he? Likely I was just scared nearly to death. . . .

The memory of the broken-backed dog rose in his mind. He

gagged and spent long moments breathing deeply.

And what of the cat who had saved him from being caught

caught: the image of Pryrates' pit-black eyes would not leave him:

they were no fear-fantasy. Where had the cat gone? If it had jumped

down to the lower floor it was doubtless trapped, and would never

find its way back without Simon's assistance. That was a debt of

honor.

As he moved quietly forward he could see a dim glow from the

doorway in the floor. Was there a torch lit down there? Or perhaps

there was some other way out, a doorway opening into one of the

lower baileys?

After a few moments of listening silently at the open hatchway,

making sure that no one would surprise him this time, Simon

stepped cautiously onto the ladder and began to climb down. A

breath of cold air ruffled his tunic and goosebumped his arms; he bit

the inside of his lip and hesitated, then continued.

Instead of being halted by another landing directly below, Simon's

careful descent continued for some moments. At first the only light

rose from below him, as though he were climbing down some sort of

bottleneck. At last the illumination became more general, and soon

after that his downward-groping exploration met with resistance. He

touched wood with his toes to one side of the ladder: he had found

the floor. Stepping down he saw that there was no further passage-

way below, that the bottom rung of the ladder rested here. The only

source of light in the chamberand with the topmost hatchway

now closed, the only source of illumination at allwas a strange,

glowing rectangle that shone against the far wall, a misty door

painted on the wall in fitful yellowish light.

Simon superstitiously made the sign of the Tree as he looked

around. The rest of the room contained only a broken quintain and a

few other pieces of discarded jousting furniture. Although the

room's elongated shadows left many comers obscure, Simon could

see nothing that would interest a man like Pryrates. He moved to-

ward the gleaming design on the wall with hands extended, five-

fingered silhouettes outlined in amber. The glowing rectangle flared

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR167

suddenly, then quickly faded, dropping a shroud of absolute black

over all.

Simon was alone in darkness. There was no sound except for that

of his own blood booming in his ears like a distant ocean. He took a

cautious step forward; the sound of his shoe scraping the floor filled

the emptiness for a moment. He took another step, and then one

more: his outstretched fingers felt cold stone . . . and something

else: strange, faint lines of warmth. He slumped to his knees beside

the wall.

Now I know what's it's like to be at the bottom of a well. I only

hope no one starts pitching stones down at me.

As he sat, pondering what he should do next, he heard a faint

whisper of movement. Something struck him in the chest, and he

gave a shout of surprise. At his cry the touch was gone, but it

returned a moment later. Something was butting gently at his tunic

. . . and purring.

"Cat!" he whispered.

You saved me, you know. Simon rubbed at the invisible shape.

Slow down, there. It's hard to tell which end is which when you

squirm around so. That's right, you saved me, and I'm going to get

you out of this hole you've gotten into.

"Of course, I've gotten myself into the same hole," Simon said

aloud. He picked the furry shape up and lifted it into his tunic. The

cat's purring took a deeper note as it settled itself against his warm

stomach. "I know what that glowing thing was," he whispered. "A

door. A magic door."

It was also Pryrates' magic door, and Morgenes would skin him

for even going near it, but Simon felt a certain stubborn indignation:

this was his castle too, after all, and the storage rooms did not

belong to any upstart priest, no matter how fearsome. In any case, if

he went back up the ladder and Pryrates was still there . . . well,

even Simon's returning pride did not permit him to delude himself

about what would happen then. So, it was sit at the bottom of a

pitch-black well all evening, or ...

He flattened his palm on the wall, sliding it across the chill stones

until he found the streaks of warmth again. He traced them with his

fingers and found they corresponded roughly with the rectangular

shape he had first seen. Laying his hands flat in the middle he

pushed, but met only the stolid resistance of unmortared stone. He

168 Tad Williams

pushed again, as hard as he could; the cat stirred uneasily beneath

his shirt. Again nothing happened. As he leaned panting against the

spot, he felt even the warm spots growing chill beneath his hands. A

sudden vision of Pryratesthe priest waiting in the dark overhead

like a spider, a grin stretching his bony facesent Simon's heart a-

pounding.

"Oh, Elysia Mother of God, open!" he murmured hopelessly,

fear-sweat making his palms slippery. "Open!"

The stone became suddenly warm, then hot, forcing Simon to lean

away. A thin golden line formed on the wall before him, running

like a stream of molten metal along the horizontal until both ends

dropped down and then ran back together. The door was there,

shimmering, and Simon had only to lift his hand and touch it with a

finger for the lines to grow brighter; actual cracks became visible,

running the length of the silhouette. He placed his fingers carefully

in one edge and pulled; a stone door swung silently outward, spilling

light into the room.

It took a moment for his eyes to adjust to the wash of brilliance-

Behind the door a stone corridor sloped away and disappeared

around a comer, carved directly into the rough rock of the castle. A

torch bumed brightly in a sconce just inside; it was this that had

dazzled him so. He climbed to his feet, the cat a comfortable weight

inside his shirt.

Would Pryrates have left a torch burning if he didn't plan to

return? And what was this strange passageway? Simon recalled

Morgenes saying something of old Sithi ruins beneath the castle.

This was certainly old stonework, but crude and raw, completely

unlike the polished delicacy of Green Angel Tower. He resolved to

make a quick inspection: if the corridor led nowhere, he would have

to climb the ladder after all.

The coarse stone walls of the tunnel were damp. As Simon padded

down the walkway he could hear a dull booming sound through the

very rock.

/ must be below the level of the Kynslagh. No wonder the stones,

even the air, everything is so damp. As if to punctuate this thought,

he felt water coming in at the seams of his shoes.

Now the corridor turned again, continuing its downward slope.

The dimming light from the entranceway torch was supplemented

by some new source. As he turned one last comer he came onto a

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR169

leveled, widened floor that ended some ten paces away in a wall of

craggy granite. Another torch guttered in its bracket there.

Two dark holes loomed in the wall at his left; at the end just

beyond them was what looked to be another door, seated almost

flush with the corridor's end. Water splashed near his shoe-tops as

he moved forward.

The first two spaces seemed to have once been chambers of some

kindcells, most likelybut now splintered doors hung lazily off

their hinges; the flickering torchlight revealed nothing inside but

shadows. A damp odor of decay hung in these untenanted holes, and

he quickly passed them by to stand before the door at the end. The

hidden cat pricked him with gentle claws as he examined the blank,

heavy timbers in the wavering light. What might lie beyond? An-

other rotting chamber, or a corridor leading still farther into the sea-

bitten stone? Or was it perhaps Pryrates' secret treasure room, con-

cealed from all spying eyes . . . well, most spying eyes . . . ?

Midway up the door was fixed a plate of metal: Simon could not

tell if it was a latch or a peephole cover. When he tried it the rusty

metal did not budge, and he came away with red flecks covering his

fingers. Casting about, he saw a bit of broken hinge lying beside the

open doorway to his left. He picked it up and pried at the metal

until, with a begrudging squeak, the plate tilted upward on a rust-

and-salt-stiffened hinge. After a quick look up the corridor and a

moment of silence listening for footfalls, he leaned forward and put

his eye to the hole in the door.

To his great surprise there was a handful of rushes burning in a

wall bracket in the chamber, but any heady and terrifying thought of

having found Pryrates1 secret hoard-room was quickly dashed by the

dank, straw-covered floor and bare walls- There was something at

the back of the chamber, though . . . some dark bundle of shadow.

A clanking noise pulled Simon around in surprise. Fear washed

through him as he looked frantically about, expecting any moment

to hear the thump of black boots in the corridor. The noise came

again; Simon realized with astonishment that it sounded from the

chamber beyond the door. Putting his eye cautiously back to the

hole, he stared into the shadows.

Something was moving at the back wall, a dark shape, and as it

slowly swayed to one side the harsh, metallic sound echoed again in

the small space. The shadow-shape raised its head.

170 Tad Williams

Choking, Simon jumped back from the spy-hole as though

slapped across the face. In a whirling moment he felt the firm earth

totter beneath him, felt that he had turned over something familiar

to find crawling corruption beneath. . . .

The chained thing that had stared out at himthe thing with the

haunted eyeswas Prince Josua.

12

Six Silver Sparrows

SIMON stumbled across the commons yard, his thoughts shouting in

his head like a great crowd. He wanted to hide. He wanted to run

away. He wanted to bellow the terrible truth and laugh, to bring the

castlefolk tripping and tumbling out of doors. How sure they were,

sure about everything, guessing and gossipingbut they knew noth-

ing! Nothing! Simon wanted to howl and knock things over, but he

could not free his heart from the spell of fear cast by Pryrates'

carrion-bird eyes. What could be done? Who would help to turn the

world right side up again?

Morgenes.

Even as Simon ran shamble-jointed across the dusky commons,

the doctor's calm, quizzical face appeared in his thoughts, pushing

back the priest's deathly countenance and the chained shadow in the

dungeon below. Without another conscious thought he fled past the

chained, black-painted gate of Hjeldin's Tower and up the stairs to

the Chancelry. In mere moments he was through the long hallways

and pulling open the door to forbidden Green Angel Tower. So

violent was his need to reach the doctor's chambers that had Barna-

bas the sexton been waiting there to catch him, Simon might have

turned to quicksilver in the man's hands. A great wind rushed

through him, filling him with wild haste, pushing him on. Before the

tower's side door had swung shut behind him he was on the draw-

bridge; seconds later he was pounding on Morgenes' door. A pair of

Erkynguardsmen looked up incuriously, then went back to their

dice.

"Doctor! Doctor! Doctor!" Simon shouted, banging away like a

demented cooper. The doctor quickly appeared, feet bare and eyes

alarmed.

"Horns of snorting Cryunnos, boy! Are you mad!? Have you eaten

bumblebees?!"

172 Tad Williams

Simon pushed past Morgenes without a word of explanation and

headed down the corridor. He stood panting before the inner door as

the little man came up behind. After a moment of shrewd inspection

Morgenes let himself and Simon m.

No sooner had the door closed than Simon began the story of his

expedition and its results. The doctor fussed up a small fire and

poured a jar of spicy hippocras into a pan to warm. As he worked

Morgenes listened, carefully poking an occasional question into

Simon's tirade as a man might reach a stick into a bear cage. He

shook his head grimly, handing the youth a cup of mulled wine, then

sat down with his own cup in a scarred highback chair. He had put

slippers on his thin white feet; as he sat cross-legged on the chair

cushion, his gray robe rucked up above his bony shins.

". . . And I know I shouldn't have touched a magic door, Doc-

tor, I know it, but I didand it was Josua' I'm sorry, I'm getting

things out of order, but I'm sure I saw him! He had a beard, I think,

and he looked terrible ... but it was him!"

Morgenes sipped his wine and dabbed at his chin-whiskers with a

long sleeve. "I believe you, lad," he said. "I wish that I didn't, but it

makes an evil kind of sense. It confirms some strange information I

received."

"But what will we do?!" Simon almost shouted. "He's dying! Did

Elias do that to him? Does the king know?"

"I really can't sayit is certain, however, that Pryrates knows."

The doctor put down his wine cup and stood. Behind his head the

last of the afternoon sun reddened the narrow windows. "As for

what to do, the first thing is for you to go and eat supper."

"Supper?!" Simon choked, spattering hippocras down his tunic.

"With Prince Josua . . . ?"

"Yes, boy, that's what I said. Supper. There's nothing we can do

right this instant, and I need to think. If you miss your supper, it

will just raise a hue and cryalbeit a small oneand it will help to

do just what we don't want to do: attract attention. No, go now and

eat supper . . . and between bites, keep your mouth shut, will

you?"

Mealtime seemed to pass as slowly as spring thaw. Wedged be-

tween loudly chewing scullions, his heart beating double time, Si-

mon resisted the wild impulse to lash out and knock cups and crock-

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR173

ery spinning to the rush-strewn floor. The conversation infuriated

him with its irrelevance, and the shepherd's pie that Judith had

prepared especially for Belthainn Eve was as tasteless and unchew-

able in his mouth as wood.

Rachel watched his fidgeting with displeasure from her seat at the

head of the table. When Simon had sat still as long as he could and

leaped up to make his excuses, she followed him to the door.

"I'm sorry, Rachel, I'm in a hurry!" he said, hoping to stave off

the lecture she seemed primed to deliver. "Doctor Morgenes has

something very important he wants me to help him with. Please?"

For a moment the Dragon looked as though she were going to get

that fearful grip on his ear and bring him forcibly back to table, but

something in his face or tone caught at her; for a moment she almost

smiled.

"All right, boy, just this oncebut you thank Judith for that nice

bit of pie before you go. She worked on it the whole afternoon."

Simon bolted over to Judith, pitched like a huge tent at her own

table. Her plump cheeks colored prettily while he praised her exer-

tions. As he hurried back to the door, Rachel leaned out and cap-

tured his sleeve. He stopped and turned, mouth already open to

complain, but Rachel only said; "Now just calm yourself and be

carefiil, you mooncalf boy. Nothing's so important that you should

kill yourself getting there." She patted his arm and released him; he

was through the door and gone as she watched.

Simon had pulled on his vest and coat by the time he reached the

well. Morgenes had not yet arrived, so he paced impatiently in the

deeper shadow of the dining hall until a soft voice at his elbow made

him start in surprise.

"Sorry to make you wait, lad. Inch came by, and I had a devilish

time convincing him that I didn't need him after all." The doctor

pulled his hood forward, hiding his face.

"How did you come up so quietly?" Simon asked, his whisper an

imitation of the doctor's.

"I can still get about a little, Simon," the doctor said in an injured

tone. "I am old, but not yet moribund."

Simon did not know what "moribund" meant, but he caught the

general idea. "Sorry," he whispered.

The two made their way silently down the dining room stairs and

174 Tad Williams

into the first storage room, where Morgenes produced a crystal

sphere the size of a green apple. When he rubbed it, a small spark

flickered into being at the center, gradually brightening until it

limned the encircling casks and bundles with soft honey-colored

light. Morgenes shrouded the nether half of it in his sleeve and held

it before them as they paced carefully through the stacked dry

goods.

The hatchway was closed; Simon did not remember whether or

not he had shut it himself in his mad dash out. They went down the

ladder carefully, Simon leading, Morgenes above him casting about

this way and that with the shining glove- Simon pointed out the

closet where Pryrates had almost captured him. They passed on,

down to the bottom floor.

The lowermost room was as untenanted as before, but the door

leading to the stone passageway was shut. Simon was almost positive

that he had not done this, and told Morgenes so, but the little man

just waved his hand and strode to the wall, finding the spot where

the crack had been according to Simon's directions. The doctor

rubbed his hand in a circular movement across the wall, muttering

something under his breath, but no crevice appeared. After

Morgenes had squatted by the wall talking to himself for some time,

Simon grew tired of bouncing from one foot to the other and

crouched down at the doctor's side.

"Can't you just say some magic and make it open?"

"No!" Morgenes hissed. "A wise man never, I repeat, never uses

the Art when he doesn't need toespecially when dealing with an-

other adept, like our Father Pryrates. We might as well sign my

name to it."

As Simon sat back on his heels and scowled, the doctor placed his

left hand flat in the middle of the area where the door had been;

after a moment's light palpation of the surface he hit it smartly with

the heel of his right hand. The door popped open, pouring torchlight

into the room. The doctor peeked through, then dropped his lamp-

crystal into the hem of his voluminous sleeve and pulled out a

stitched leather bag.

"Ah, Simon-lad," he chuckled, quietly, "what a thief I would

have made. It was not a 'magic door'only hidden by use of the

Art. Come on, now!" They stepped through into the damp stone

corridor.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR175

Their footfalls made syrupy echoes as they slipped and stepped

down the walkway to the corridor's end and the locked door. After a

moment's examination of the lock Morgenes stepped to the peephole

and peered inside.

"I think you're right, lad," he hissed. "Nuanni's Shinbonel But I

wish you weren't." He returned to the scrutiny of the lock. "Run up

to the end of the corridor and keep an ear open, won't you?"

As Simon stood guard, Morgenes fished around in his leather bag,

at last extracting a long, needle-thin blade set in a wooden handle.

He waved it merrily at Simon.

"Naraxi pig-sticker. Knew it would come in useful one day!"

He tested it against the keyhole; it slid into the aperture with

room to spare. He removed it and shook a tiny jar from his bag

which he uncorked with his teeth. As Simon watched, fascinated,

Morgenes upended the jar and poured a dark, sticky substance onto

the needle blade, then quickly poked the tip back into the keyhole; it

left glistening traces as it passed into the lock.

Morgenes wiggled the pig-sticker for a moment, then stepped

back and counted on his fingers. When he had talked both hands

three times each, he grasped the slender handle and twisted. He

grimaced and let go.

"Come here, Simon. We need your strong young arms."

At the doctor's direction Simon grasped the strange tool by the

butt end and began to twist. For a moment his sweaty palms slipped

on the polished wood; he tightened his grip, and after a short inter-

val felt something catch inside the lock. An instant later he heard

the bolt slide back. Morgenes nodded his head, and Simon shoul-

dered the door open.

The smoldering rushes in the wall socket threw only faint light.

As Simon and the doctor approached they saw the shackled figure at

the rear of the cell look up, and his eyes widen slowly, as if in some

kind of recognition. His mouth worked, but only a scratchy huff of

breath came out. The smell of wet, foul straw was overwhelming.

"Oh ... oh ... my poor Prince Josua . . ." Morgenes said.

As the doctor gave a quick inspection to Josua's manacles, Simon

could only look on, feeling as helpless to affect the rush of events as

if he dreamed. The prince was achingly thin, and bearded like a

roadsider doomcrier; the parts of his skin that showed through the

miserable sacking were covered with red sores.

176 Tad Williams

Morgenes was whispering in Josua Lackhand's ear. He had again

produced his bag, and held in his hand a shallow pot, the sort that

ladies kept for their lip-paint. Briskly rubbing something from the

pot on first one palm, then the other, the little doctor once more

looked over Josua's restraints. Both arms were shackled to a massive

iron ring in the wall, one manacled about the wrist, the handless

other by a cuff about the prince's thin upper arm.

Morgenes finished smearing his hands and passed pot and bag to

Simon. "Now be a good lad," he said, "and cover your eyes. I traded

a silkbound volume of Plesinnen Myrmenisthe only one north of

Perdruinfor this muck. I just hopeSimon, do cover your

eyes . . ."

As the youth raised his hands he saw Morgenes reaching for the

ring that bound the prince's chains to the stone. An instant later a

flash of light glared pinkly through Simon's meshed fingers, accom-

panied by a crack like hammer on slate. When the youth looked

again Prince Josua lay with his chains in a heap on the floor and

Morgenes kneeled beside him, palms smoking. The wall-ring was

blackened and twisted like a burnt bannock.

"Faugh!" the doctor gasped, "I hope ... I hope I ... never

have to do that again. Can you pick up the prince, Simon? I am very

weak."

Josua rolled stiffly over and looked around. "I ... think ... I

can . . . walk. Pryrates . . . gave me something."

"Nonsense." Morgenes took a deep breath and climbed shakily to

his feet. "Simon is a strong ladcome on, boy, don't gape! Pick him

up!"

After some maneuvering Simon managed to wrap the hanging

strands of Josua's chains, still attached at wrist and arm, into a loop

around the prince's waist. Then, with Morgenes' assistance, he

somehow hoisted Josua up like a pickaback child. He stood and

sucked in a great draught of air. For a moment he feared he could

not bear up, but with a clumsy hop he moved Josua higher on his

back and found that even with the added weight of the chains it was

not impossible.

"Wipe that silly smile off your face, Simon," the doctor said, "we

still have to get him up the ladder."

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR177

**

Somehow they managedSimon grunting, almost weeping with

the exertion, Josua pulling weakly at the rungs, Morgenes pushing

behind and whispering encouragement. It was a long, nightmarish

climb, but at last they reached the main storeroom. Morgenes scur-

ried past as Simon leaned against a bale to rest, the prince still

clinging to his back.

"Somewhere, somewhere . . ." Morgenes muttered, pushing his

way between the close-stacked goods. When he reached the southern

wall of the room, shining his crystal before him, he began to search

in earnest.

"What . . . ?" Simon started to ask, but the doctor silenced him

with a gesture. As they watched Morgenes appear and disappear

behind piles of barrels, Simon felt a delicate touch on his hair. The

prince was patting gently at his head.

"Real- Real!" Josua breathed. Simon felt something wet run down

his neck.

"Found if" came Morgenes' hushed but triumphant cry. "Come

along!" Simon rose, staggering a little, and carried the prince for-

ward. The doctor was standing beside the blank stone wall, ges-

turing toward a pyramid of large casks. The lamp-crystal gave him

the shadow of a looming giant.

"Found what?" Simon adjusted the prince and stared. "Barrels?"

"Indeed!" the doctor crackled. With a flourish he twisted the

round rim of the topmost cask a half-turn. The whole side of the

barrel swung open as if it were a door, revealing cavernous darkness

beyond.

Simon stared suspiciously. "What's that?"

"A passageway, you foolish boy." Morgenes took his elbow and

guided him toward the open-sided barrel, which stood scarcely more

than chest-high. "This castle is honeycombed with such secret by-

ways."

With a frown Simon stooped, peering at the black depths beyond.

"In there?"

Morgenes nodded. Simon, realizing he could not walk through,

got down on his knees to inch inside, the prince riding his back as if

he were a festival pony. "I didn't know there were such passages in

the storerooms," he said, his voice echoing in the barrel. Morgenes

leaned down to guide Josua's head under the low entrance.

178 Tad Williams

"Simon, there are more things you don't know than there are

things that I do know. I despair of the imbalance. Now close your

mouth and let's hurry."

They were able to stand again on the far side: Morgenes' crystal

revealed a long, angled corridor, unremarkable but for a fabulous

accumulation of dust.

"Ah, Simon," Morgenes said as they hurried along. "I only wish I

had time to show you some of the rooms past which this hallway

creepssome were the chambers of a very great, very beautiful lady.

She used this passage to keep her secret assignations." The doctor

looked up at Josua, whose face lay against Simon's neck. "Sleeping,

now," Morgenes murmured. "All sleeping."

The corridor climbed and dipped, turning one way and another.

They passed many doors, some whose locks were rusted shut, some

whose handles were as shiny as a new fithing piece. Once they

passed a series of small windows; in a brief glance Simon was star-

tled to see the sentries on the western wall, silhouetted against the

sky. The clouds were tinted a faint rose where the sun had gone.

We must be above the dining hall, Simon marveled. When did we

do all the climbing?

They were stumbling in exhaustion when Morgenes finally

stopped. There were no windows in this part of the winding corri-

dor, only tapestries. Morgenes lifted one, revealing gray stone be-

neath.

"Wrong tapestry," the doctor panted, lifting the next one to reveal

a door of rough wood. He laid his ear against it and listened for a

moment, then pulled it open.

"Hall of Records." He gestured at the torchlit hallway beyond.

"Only a few . . . hundred paces from my chambers . . ." When

Simon and his passenger had come through, he let the door swing

shut behind; it closed with an authoritative bump. Looking back,

Simon could not distinguish it from other wooden panels that lined

the corridor wall.

There was only one last dash to be made in the open, a relatively

rapid sprint from the easternmost door of the archive rooms, across

the open commons. As they lurched across the shadowed grass,

staying as close to the walls as they could without tripping through

the ivy, Simon thought he saw a movement in the shadows of the

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR179

wall across the yard: something large that shifted slightly as though

to watch their passage, a familiar, stoop-shouldered form. But the

light was dying fast and he could not be sureit was only one more

black spot moving before his eyes.

He had a stitch in his side that felt as though someone had caught

his rib with Ruben's foundry-tongs. Morgenes, who had limped

ahead, held the door open. Simon tottered through, carefully put his

burden down, then pitched full-length on the cool flagstones, sweaty

and breathless. The world spun about him in a giddy dance.

"Here, your Highness, drink thisgo on," he heard Morgenes

say. After some little while he opened his eyes and lifted himself on

one elbow. Josua sat propped against the wall; Morgenes crouched

over him holding a brown ceramic jug.

"Better?" the doctor asked.

The prince nodded weakly. "Stronger already. This liquor feels

like what Pryrates gave me ... but not so bitter. Said that I was

weakening too fast . . . that they needed me tonight."

"Needed you? 1 don't like the sound of that, hot at all." Morgenes

brought the jug over to Simon. The drink was busy and sour to the

taste, but warming. The doctor peered out the door, then dropped

the bolt.

"Tomorrow is Belthainn Day, the first of Maia," he said. "To-

night is ... tonight is a very bad night, my prince. Stoning Night,

it is called."

Simon felt the doctor's liquor burning pleasantly as it moved

down to his stomach. The ache in his joints lessened, as though a

twisted length of cloth had been slackened a turn or two. He sat up,

feeling dizzy.

"I find it ominous, their 'needing' you on such a night," Morgenes

repeated. "I fear worse things even than the imprisoning of the

king's brother."

"The imprisoning itself was bad enough for me." A wry grimace

stretched Josua's gaunt features, then disappeared- Deep lines of

sorrow took its place. "Morgenes," he said a moment later, his voice

cracking, "those . . . those whoreson bastards killed my men.

They ambushed us."

The doctor raised his hand as though to grasp the prince's shoul-

der, then put it awkwardly back down. "I'm sure, my lord, I'm sure-

180 Tad Williams

Do you know for certain whether your brother was responsible?

Could it have been Pryrates acting alone?"

Josua shook his head wearily. "I don't know. The men who at-

tacked us wore no insignia, and I never saw anyone but the priest

once I was brought here . . . but it is astonishing to consider

Pryrates doing such a thing without Elias."

"True."

"But why?! Why, damn them? I do not covet powerthe reverse,

if anything! You know that, Morgenes. Why should they do this?"

"My prince, I am afraid I do not have the answers right this

instant, but I must say this goes far toward confirming my suspi-

cions about . . . other things. About . . . northern matters. Do

you remember hearing of the white foxes?" Morgenes* tone was sig-

nificant, but the prince only cocked an eyebrow and said nothing.

"Well, there is no time to spend talking of my fears at this moment.

Our time is short, and we must attend to more immediate matters."

Morgenes helped Simon up from the floor, then went puttering off

in search of something. The youth stood looking shyly at Prince

Josua, who remained slumped against the wall, eyes closed. The

doctor returned with a hammer, its head rounded by much use, and

a chisel.

"Strike offJosua's chains, will you, lad? I have a few things left to

attend to." He scuttled off again.

"Your Highness?" Simon said quietly, approaching the prince.

Josua opened bleary eyes and stared first at the youth, then at the

tools he carried. He nodded.

Kneeling at the prince's side he burst the lock on the band that

encircled Josua's right arm with a pair of sharp blows. As he moved

round to the prince's left, Josua opened his eyes again and laid a

restraining hand on Simon's arm.

"Take only the chain from this side, young one." A ghostly smile

nickered across his face. "Leave me the shackle to remember my

brother by. Leave me his band." He displayed the puckered stump

of his right wrist. "We have a sort of tally system, you see."

Simon, suddenly chilled, trembled as he braced Josua*s left fore-

arm against the stone flags. With a single stroke he sliced through

the chain, leaving the cuff of blackened iron above the hand.

Morgenes appeared, carrying a bundle of dark clothing. "Come,

Josua, we must hurry. It is almost an hour after dark, and who

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

181

knows when they will go looking for you? I broke my lock-pick off

in the door, but that will not long prevent them discovering your

absence."

"What will we do?" asked the prince, standing unsteadily on his

feet as Simon helped him into the musty peasant gear. "Who in the

castle can we trust?"

"Nobody at presentnot on such short notice. That is why you

must make your way to Naglimund. Only there will you be safe."

"Naglimund . . ." Josua seemed bemused. "I have dreamed so

often of my home there in these horrible monthsbut no! I must

show the people my brother's duplicity. I will find strong arms to aid

me!"

"Not here ... not now." Morgenes' voice was firm, his bright

eyes commanding. "You will find yourself back in a dungeon, and

this time you will go quickly to a private beheading. Don't you see?

You must get to a strong place where you are safe from treachery

before you can press any claim. Many kings have imprisoned and

killed their relativesmost got away with it. Jt takes more than

familial infighting to excite the populace."

"Well," said Josua reluctantly, "even if you are correct, how

would I escape?" A fit of coughing shook him. "The castle gates

... are ... are doubtless closed for the night. Should I walk up

to the inner gate dressed as a traveling minstrel and try to sing my

way out?"

Morgenes smiled. Simon was impressed by the spirit of the grim

prince, who an hour before had been chained in a damp cell with no

hope of rescue.

"As it happens, you have not caught me unprepared with that

question," the doctor said. "Please observe."

He walked to the back of the long chamber, to the comer where

Simon had once cried against the rough stone wall. He gestured to

the star chart whose connected constellations formed a four-winged

bird. With a little bow he swept the chart aside. Behind it lay a great

square hole cut into the rock, set with a wooden door.

"As I demonstrated already, Pryrates is not the only one with

hidden doors and secret passages." The doctor chuckled. "Father

Red-Cape is a newcomer, and has much yet to leam about the castle

that has been my home for longer than you two could guess."

Simon was so excited that he could hardly stand still, but Josua's

182 Tad Williams

expression was doubtful. "Where does it go, Morgenes?" he asked.

"It will do me scant good to escape Ellas' dungeon and rack only to

find myself in the Hayholt's moat."

"Never fear. This castle is built on a warren of caves and tunnels

not to mention the ruins of the older castle beneath us. The whole

maze is so vast that even I do not know the half of itbut I know it

well enough to give you safe-passage out. Come with me."

Morgenes led the prince, who went leaning on Simon's arm, over

to the chamber-spanning table; there he spread out a rolled parch-

ment whose edges were gray and feathery with age.

"You see," said Morgenes, "I have not been idle while my young

friend Simon here was at supper. This is a plan of the catacombsof

necessity only a partial one, but with your route marked. If you

follow this carefully, you will find yourself above ground at last in

the lich-yard beyond the walls of Erchester. From there I am sure

you can find your way to safe haven for the night."

After they had studied the map, Morgenes pulled Josua aside and

the two of them engaged in whispered conversation. Simon, feeling

more than a little left out, stood and examined the doctor's chart.

Morgenes had marked the path with bright red ink; his head swam

following the twists and turns.

When the two men finished their discussion, Josua collected the

map. "Well, old friend," he said, "if I am to go, then I should go

quickly. It would be unwise for another hour to find me still here in

the Hayholt, I shall think carefully on these other things you have

told me." His gaze swept around the cluttered room. "I only fear

what your braves acts might bring down on you."

"There is nothing you can do about that, Josua," Morgenes re-

plied. "And I am not without some defenses of my own, a few feints

and tricks I can employ. As soon as Simon told me about finding

you, I began to make some preparations. I have long feared that my

hand would be forced; it has only been hastened slightly by this.

Here, take this torch."

So saying, the little doctor removed a brand from the wall and

gave it to the prince, next handing him a sack that hung next to it on

a hook.

"I have put some food in here for you, and some more of the

curative liquor. It is not much, but you must travel light. Please

hurry." He held the star chart up and away from the doorway.

183

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

"Send word to me soon as you are safe at Naglimund and I will have

more things to tell."

The prince nodded, limping slowly into the corridor mouth. The

torch's flame pushed his shadow far down the dark shaft as he

turned back.

"I will never forget this, Morgenes," he said. "And you, young

man . . . you have done a brave thing today. I hope it will be the

making of your future, someday."

Simon knelt, embarrassed by the emotions he felt. The prince

looked so haggard and grim ... He felt pride, sorrow, and fear all

pulling at him, his thoughts stirred and muddied.

"Fare you well, Josua," Morgenes said, resting a hand on Simon's

shoulder. Together they watched the prince's torch recede down the

low passageway until it was swallowed by the murk. The doctor

pulled the door shut and dropped the hanging back into place.

"Come, Simon," he said then, "we still have much to do. Pryrates

is missing his guest this Stoning Night, and I cannot think he will be

pleased."

An interval crept by in silence. Simon dangled his feet from his

perch on the tabletop, frightened but nevertheless savoring the ex-

citement that charged the roomthat now hung over all of the staid

old castle. Morgenes fluttered back and forth past him, hurrying

from one incomprehensible task to another.

"I did most of this while you were eating, you see, but there are

still a few things left, a few unknotted ends."

The little man's explanation enlightened Simon not one whit, but

things had been happening fast enough to satisfy even his impatient

nature. He nodded and dangled his feet some more.

"Well, I suppose that's all I can do tonight," Morgenes said at

last. "You had better wander back and go to bed. Come here early in

the morning, perhaps right after you do your chores."

"Chores?" gasped Simon. "Chores? Tomorrow?"

"Certainly," snapped the doctor. "You don't think anything out

of the ordinary is going to happen, do you? Do you suppose that the

king is going to announce: *0h, by the way, my brother escaped

from the dungeon last night, so we'll all have a holiday and go look

for him,'you don't think that, do you?"

"No, I ..."

184 Tad Williams

*'. . . And you would certainly not say: 'Rachel, I can't do my

chores because Morgenes and I are plotting treason,'would you?"

"Of course not ... !"

"Good. Then you will do your chores and come back as soon as

you can, and then we will assess the situation. This is far more

dangerous than you realize, Simon, but I am afraid you are now a

part of things, for good or for ill, I had hoped to keep you out of all

this . . ."

"Out of all what? Part of what. Doctor?"

"Never mind, boy. Isn't your plate full enough already? I'll try to

explain what I safely can tomorrow, but Stoning Night is not the

best occasion to speak of things like . . ."

Morgenes' words were chopped short by a loud pounding at the

outer door. For a moment Simon and the doctor stood staring at one

another; after a pause the knocking was repeated.

"Who's there?" Morgenes called, in a voice so calm Simon had to

look again at the fear showing on the little man's face.

"Inch," came the reply. Morgenes visibly relaxed.

"Go away," he said. "I told you I didn't need you tonight."

There was a brief silence. "Doctor," Simon whispered, "I think I

saw Inch earlier . . ."

The dull voice came again. "I think I left something . . . left it in

your room. Doctor."

"Come back and get it another time," Morgenes called, and this

time the irritation was genuine. "I'm far too busy to be disturbed

right now."

Simon tried again. "I think I saw him when I was carrying

Jos . . ."

"Open this door immediatelyin the king's name!!"

Simon felt cold despair grip his stomach: this new voice did not

belong to Inch.

"By the Lesser Crocodile!" Morgenes swore in soft wonderment,

"the cow-eyed dullard has sold us out. I didn't think he had the

sense/ will be disturbed no longer!" he shouted then, jumping to

the long table and straining to push it in front of the bolted inner

door. "I am an old man, and need my rest!" Simon leaped to help,

his terror mixed with an inexplicable rush of exhilaration.

A third voice called from the hallway, a cruel, hoarse voice:

185

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

"Your rest will be a long one indeed, old man." Simon stumbled and

nearly fell as his knees buckled beneath him. Pryrates was here.

A hideous crunching noise began to echo through the inner hall-

way as Simon and the doctor finally slid the heavy table into place.

"Axes," said Morgenes, and sprang along the table in search of

something.

"Doctor!" Simon hissed, bouncing up and down in fright. The

sound of splintering wood reverberated outside. "What can we do?"

He whirled to find himself confronted with a scene of madness.

Morgenes was up on his knees on the tabletop, crouching beside

an object that Simon recognized after an instant as a birdcage. The

doctor had his face pressed close against the slender bars; he was

cooing and muttering to the creatures within even as Simon heard

the outer door crash down.

"What are you doing!?" Simon gasped. Morgenes hopped down

carrying the cage, and trotted across the room to the window. At

Simon's yelp he turned to look calmly at the terrified youth, then

smiled sadly and shook his head.

"Of course, boy," he said, "I must make provision for you, too,

just as I promised your father. How little time we had!" He set the

cage down and scuttled back to the table, where he groped about in

the clutter even as the chamber door began to rock with the impact

of heavy blows. Harsh voices could be heard, and the clatter of men

in armor. Morgenes found what he sought, a wooden box, and up-

ended it, dumping some shining golden thing into his palm. He

began to move back to the window, then stopped and retrieved also

a sheaf of thin parchments from the chaos of the tabletop.

"Take this, will you please?" he said, handing the bundle to Si-

mon as he hurried back to the window. "It's my life of Prester John,

and I begrudge Pryrates the pleasure of criticism." Stupefied, Simon

took the papers and tucked them into his waistband beneath his

shirt. The doctor reached into the cage and removed one of its small

inhabitants, cupping it in his hand. It was a tiny, silver-gray spar-

row; as Simon watched in numb astonishment the doctor calmly tied

the shiny baublea ring?to the sparrow's leg with a bit of twine.

A tiny scrap of parchment was bound already to its other leg. "Be

strong with this heavy burden," he said quietly, speaking, it seemed,

to the little bird.

The blade of an axe crashed through the heavy door just above the

186

Tad Williams

bolt. Morgenes bent over and picked a long stick up off the floor and

broke the high window, then lifted the sparrow to the sill and let it

go. The bird hopped along the frame for a moment, then took wing

and disappeared into the evening sky. One by one, the doctor re-

leased five more sparrows that way, until the cage stood empty.

A large piece had been bitten from the door's center; Simon could

see the angry faces and the flare of torchlight on metal beyond.

The doctor beckoned. "The tunnel, boy, and quickly!" Behind

them another ragged chunk of wood tore loose and clattered to the

floor. As they sped across the room the doctor handed Simon some-

thing small and round.

"Rub this and you will have light, Simon," he said. "It is better

than a torch.'* He swept the hanging aside and pulled the door open.

"Go on, hurry! Look for the Tan'ja Stairs, then climb!" As Simon

entered the corridor mouth the great door sagged on its hinges and

collapsed. Morgenes turned.

"But, Doctor!" Simon shouted. "Come with me! We can escape!"

The doctor looked at him and smiled, shaking his head. The table

before the doorway was overturned with a smash of glass, and a

group of armed men in green and yellow began to push past the

wreckage. In the midst of the Erkynguard, crouched like a toad in a

garden of swords and axes, was Breyugar, the Lord Constable. In

the littered hallway stood the bulky form of Inch; behind him

Pryrates' cloak flashed scarlet.

"Stop!" a voice thundered through the roomSimon was still

able to marvel, in the midst of all his fear and confusion, that such a

sound could come from Morgenes' frail body. The doctor stood now

before the Erkynguard, fingers splayed in a strange gesture. The air

began to bend and shimmer between the doctor and the startled

soldiers. The very substance of nothingness seemed to grow solid as

Morgenes' hands danced strange patterns. For a moment the torches

outlined the scene before Simon's eyes as if it were frozen on an

ancient tapestry.

"Bless you, boy," Morgenes hissed. "Go! Now!" Simon retreated

another step down the corridor.

Pryrates pushed past the stunned guards, a blurry red shadow

behind the wall of air. One of his hands stabbed forth; a seething,

coruscating web of blue sparks marked where it touched the thick-

ening air. Morgenes reeled, and his barrier began to melt like a sheet

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR187

of ice. The doctor bent and swept up a pair of beakers from a rack

on the floor.

"Stop that youth!" Pryrates shouted, and suddenly Simon could

see his eyes above the scarlet cloak . . . cold black eyes, serpentine

eyes that seemed to hold him . . . transfix him . . .

The shimmering pane of air dissolved. "Take them!" spat Count

Breguyar, and the soldiers surged forward. Simon watched in sick

fascination, wanting to run but unable to, nothing between him and

the Erkynguards' swords but . . . Morgenes.

"ENKJANNUKHAI SHFIGAOf" The doctor's voice boomed and

tolled like a bell made of stone. A wind shrieked through the cham-

ber, flattening and extinguishing the torches. In the center of the

maelstrom Morgenes stood, a flask in each outstretched band. In the

brief instant of darkness there was a crash, then a flare of incandes-

cence as the glass beakers shattered into fiame. In a heartbeat fiery

streams were running down the arms of Morgenes' cloak, and then

his head was haloed in leaping, crackling tongues of fire. Simon was

buffeted by terrible heat as the doctor turned to him once more;

Morgenes' face seemed already to shift and change behind the blaz-

ing mist that enveloped it.

"Go, my Simon," he breathed, and he was voiced in flame. "It is

too late for me. Go to Josua."

As Simon staggered backward in horror, the doctor's frail form

leaped with burning radiance. Morgenes wheeled. Taking a few halt-

ing steps, he threw himself with outspread arms onto the screeching,

quailing guardsmen, who tore at each other in their desperation to

escape back through the broken doorway. Hellish flames billowed

upward, blackening the groaning roofbeams. The very walls began

to shudder. For a brief moment Simon heard the harsh choking

voice of Pryrates intertwined with the sounds of Morgenes' final

agonies . . . then there was a great crack of light and an ear-

thumping roar. A hot whip of air flung Simon down the passageway,

blowing the door shut behind him with a noise like the Hammer of

Judgment. Stunned, he heard the grinding, splintering shriek of the

roof timbers collapsing. The door shuddered, wedged shut by many

thousandweight of scorched oak and stone.

188

Tad Williams

***

For a long time he lay wracked with sobs, the tears of his eyes

sucked away by the heat. At last he crawled to his feet. He found the

warm stone wall with his hand and went stumbling down into dark-

ness.

13

Between Worlds

VOICES, many voiceswhether birthed in his own head or in the

comfortless shadows that surrounded him, Simon could not tell

were his only companions in that first terrible hour.

Simon mooncalf! Done it again, Simon mooncalf!

His friend is dead, his only friend, be kind, be kind!

Where are we?

In darkness, in darkness forever, to bat-flitter like a lost shrieking

soul through the endless tunnels . . .

He is Simon Pilgrim now, doomed to wander, to wonder . . .

No. Simon shuddered, trying to rein in the clamoring voices, / will

remember. I will remember the red line on the old map, and to look

for the Tan'J'a Stairswhatever they might be. I will remember the

flat black eyes of that murderer Pryrates: I will remember my friend

. . . my friend Doctor Morgenes . . .

He sank down onto the gritty tunnel floor, weeping with helpless,

strengthless anger, a barely beating heart of life in a universe of

black stone. The blackness was a choking thing that pressed down

on him, squeezing out his breath.

Why did he do it? Why didn't he run?

He died to save you, idiot boyand Josua. If he had run, they

would have followed; Pryrates had the stronger magic. You would

have been caught, and they would have been free to follow the prince,

to hunt him down and drag him back to his cell. Morgenes died for

that.

Simon hated the sound of his own crying, the hacking, sniveling

sound echoing on and on. He pushed it all up from inside him,

sobbing until his voice was a dry raspa sound he could live with,

not the weepy bleat of a lost mooncalf in the dark.

Lightheaded and sick, wiping his face with his shirtsleeve, Simon

felt the forgotten weight of Morgenes' crystal sphere in his hand.

190 Tad Williams

Light. The doctor had given him light. Along with the papers

crimped uncomfortably in the waistband of his breeches, it was the

last gift the doctor had given him.

No, a voice whispered, the second-to-last, Simon Pilgrim.

Simon shook his head, trying to dispel the licking, murmuring

fear. What had Morgenes said as he tied the glinting bauble to the

sparrow's slender leg? To be strong with its heavy burden? Why was

he sitting in the pitch dark, mewling and dribblingwasn't he

Morgenes' apprentice, after all?

He clambered to his feet, dizzy and trembling. He felt the glassy

surface of the crystal warm beneath his stroking fingers. He stared

into the darkness where his hands must be, thinking of the doctor.

How could the old man laugh so often, when the world was so full

of hidden treachery, of beautiful things with rot inside of them?

There was so much shadow, so little . . .

A pinprick of light flared before hima needle hole in the sun-

shrouding curtain of night. He rubbed harder and stared. The light

bloomed, folding back the shadows; the passageway's walls leaped

out on either side, brushed with glowing amber. Air seemed to rush

into his lungs. He could see!

The momentary elation evaporated as he turned to look up and

down the corridor. A pain in his head made the walls waver before

his gaze. The tunnel was nearly featureless, a lonely hole burrowing

down into the underbelly of the castle, festooned with pale cobwebs.

Back up the passage he could see a crossway he had already passed,

a gaping mouth in the wall. He walked back. A quick shine of the

crystal revealed nothing beyond the opening but tailings and rubble,

a sloping pile of debris leading down out of reach of the sphere's thin

light. How many other cross-paths had he missed? And how would

he know which ones were the right ones? Another wave of choking

hopelessness washed over him. He was hopelessly alone, hopelessly

lost. He would never find himself back in the world of light.

Simon Pilgrim, Simon mooncalf . . . family dead. friend dead,

see him wander and wander forever . . .

"Silence!" he growled out loud, and was startled to hear the word

caroming down the path before him, a messenger carrying a procla-

mation from the king of Under-the-ground: "Silence . . . silence

. . . silen ... si ..."

King Simon of the Tunnels began his staggering progress.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

191

***

The passageway squirmed downward into the stone heart of the

Hayholt, a smothering, winding, cobwebbed track lit only by the

gleam of Morgenes' crystal sphere. Broken spiderwebs performed a

slow, ghostly dance in the wake of his passage; when he turned to

look back the strands seemed to wave after him, like the clutching,

boneless fingers of the drowned. Hanks of silky thread stuck to his

hair and draped stickily across his face, so that he had to hold his

hand before his eyes as he walked. Often he would feel some small,

leggy thing scuttling away across his fingers as he broke through its

netting, and would have to stop for a moment, head down, until the

shivers of disgust subsided.

It was becoming colder, and the close-cramped walls of the pas-

sageway seemed to breathe with moisture. Parts of the tunnel had

crumbled; in some places dislodged dirt and stone were piled so high

in the center of the path that he had to push his back against the

damp walls and edge around them.

He was doing just thatsqueezing around an obstruction, the

light-wielding hand held over his head, the other feeling before him

for a way pastwhen he felt a searing pain like a thousand needle-

pricks run up his questing hand and onto his arm. A flash of the

crystal brought a vision of horrorhundreds, no, thousands of tiny

white spiders swarming up his wrist and under his shirt sleeve, bit-

ing like a thousand burning fires. Simon shrieked and slammed his

arm against the tunnel wall, bringing a shower of clotted dirt down

into his mouth and eyes. His terrified shouts echoed down the pas-

sageway, quickly failing- He fell to his knees in damp soil, smacking

his stinging arm up and down into the dirt until the flaring pain

began to subside, then crawled forward on his hands and knees,

away from whatever horrible nest or den he had disturbed. As he

crouched and frantically scrubbed his arm with loose soil the tears

came again, racking him like a whipping.

When he could stand to look at his arm, the crystal's light re-

vealed only reddening and swelling skin beneath the dirt, instead of

the bloody wounds he had been sure he would find. The arm

throbbed, and he wondered dully if the spiders were poisonousif

the worst was yet to come. When he felt the sobs climbing once

more in his chest, shortening his breath, he forced himself to his feet.

He must go on. He must.

192 Tad Williams

A thousand white spiders.

He must go on.

He followed the sphere's dim light downward. It gleamed on

moisture-slick stone and earth-choked cross-corridors, twining with

pallid roots. Surely he must be far below the castle by nowfar

down into the black earth. There was no sign of Josua's passage, or

of anyone's. He was sickeningly certain he had missed some turning-

place in the darkness and confusion, and was even now spiraling

downward into an inescapable pit.

He had trudged on so long, making so many twists and turns, that

the memory of the narrow red line on Morgenes' old parchment was

now useless. There was nothing remotely like stairs anywhere in

these narrow, strangling wormholes. Even the glowing crystal was

beginning to flicker. The voices escaped his control again, surround-

ing him in the crazy shadows like a shouting throng.

Dark and getting darker. Dark and getting darker.

Let us lie down for a while. We want to sleep, just for a while,

sleep . . .

The king has an animal inside him, and Pryrates is its keeper . . .

"My Simon." Morgenes called you '"my Simon" . . . he knew

your/other. He kept secrets.

Josua is going to Naglimund. The sun shines there all day and

night Naglimund. They eat sweet cream and drink clear, shining

water at Naglimund. The sun is bright.

Bright and hot. It is hot. Why?

The damp tunnel was suddenly very warm. He stumbled on,

hopelessly sure that he felt the first fever of spider-poison. He would

die in the dark, the terrible dark. He would never again see the sun,

or feel its ...

The warmth seemed to push into his lungs. It was getting hotter!

Stifling air enfolded him, sticking his shirt to his chest and his hair

to his forehead. He felt a moment of even greater panic.

Have I circled round? Have I walked for years only to come back to

the ruins of Morgenes' chamber the burned, blackened remains of

his life?

But it was not possible. He had been going downward steadily,

never once mounting back to anything more than a moment's level

going. Why was it so hot?

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

193

The memory of one of Shem Horsegroom's stories pushed for-

ward, a story of young Prester John wandering through darkness

toward a great, brooding heatthe dragon Shurakai in its lair be-

neath the castle . . . this castle.

But the dragon is dead! I've touched its bones, a yellow chair in the

throne room. There is no dragon anymoreno sleepless, deep-

breathing red hulk the size of the toumey field, waiting in the dark-

ness with claws like swords and a soul as old as the stones of Osten

Ardthe dragon is dead.

But did dragons never have brothers?

And what was that sound? That dull, grumbling roar?

The heat was oppressive, and the air was thick with itching

smoke. Simon's heart was a lump of dull lead in his chest. The

crystal began to dim as broad smears of reddish light blotted out the

sphere's weaker radiance. The tunnel flattened, turning now neither

left nor right, leading down a long, eroded gallery to an arched

doorway that danced with a flickering orange radiance. Shivering

despite the sweat streaming down his face, Simon felt himself drawn

toward it,

Turn and run, mooncalf?

He could not. Each step was a labor, but he moved closer. He

reached the archway and craned his neck fearfully around the por-

tal's rim.

It was a great cavern, awash in leaping light. The rock walls

seemed to have melted and set like wax at the base of a candle, the

stone smoothed in long, vertical ripples. For a moment Simon's

light-stunned eyes opened wide in amazement; at the cavern's far

side a score of dark figures were kneeling before the shape of . . . a

monstrous, flame-blazing dragon!

An instant later he saw that it was not so; the huge shape

crouched against the stone was a great furnace. The dark-clad fig-

ures were forking logs into its flaming maw.

The foundry! The castle foundry!

All around the cavern heavily dressed and scarf-masked men were

smithying the tools of war. Massive buckets of glowing liquid iron

were pulled from the flames on the ends of long poles. Molten metal

jumped and hissed as it drizzled into plate-shaped molds, and above

the groaning voice of the furnace reverberated the clang of hammer

on anvil.

194 Tad Williams

Simon shrank back from the doorway. For a heartbeat he had felt

himself about to leap forward and run to these menfor men they

were, despite their strange dress. It had seemed in that instant that

anything was better than the dark tunnel, and the voicesbut he

knew better. Did he think these foundrymen would help him to

escape? Doubtless they knew only one route from the blazing cav-

ern: up and back into the clutches of Pryratesif he had survived

the inferno of Morgenes' chambersor the brutal justice of Elias.

He sank down onto his haunches to think. The noise of the fur-

nace and his own painful head made it difficult. He could not re-

member passing any cross-tunnels for some time. He could see what

looked like a row of holes along the far wall of the foundry-cavem; it

could be that they were nothing but storage chambers . . .

Or dungeons . . .

But it seemed just as likely that they were other routes in and out

of the chamber. To retreat back up the tunnel seemed foolish . . .

Coward! Scullion!

Numb, battered, he balanced on the knife-edge of indecision. To

go back, and wander through the same dark, spider-haunted tun-

nels, his only light nickering into extinction ... or to make his

way across the roaring infemo of the foundry floorand from there,

who could know? Which should it be?

He will be King of Under-ground, Lord of the Weeping Shades!

No, his people are gone, let him be!

He smacked himself on the head, trying to dispe! the chittering

voices.

If I'm going to die, he decided, wresting back the mastery of his

speeding heart, at least let it be in the light.

He bent over, head throbbing, to stare at the cupped gleam of the

crystal sphere. Even as he looked, the light died, then throbbed back

into tenuous life. He slipped it into his pocket.

The furnace flame and the dark shapes that passed before them

laid pulsing stripes of red, orange and black along the wall; he

dropped down from the archway to huddle beside the downsloping

ramp. The nearest hiding place was a shabby brick structure some

fifteen or twenty ells from where he crouched, a disused kiln or oven

that squatted on the chamber's fringe. After a few deep breaths he

bolted for it, half-running, half-crawling. His head ached from the

motion, and when he reached the bulky kiln he had to lower his face

195

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

between his knees until the black spots went away. The harsh roar of

the feeding furnace rang like thunder inside his head, silencing even

his voices with its painful clamor.

He made his way from dark place to dark place, little islands of

shadowed safety in the ocean of smoke and red noise. The foun-

drymen did not look up and see him; they barely communicated

among themselves, limited in the crushing din to broad gestures, like

armored men in the chaos of battle. Their eyes, points of reflected

light above the masking cloth, seemed instead to stare at one thing

only: the bright, compelling glow of hot iron. Like the red map-line

that still snaked a wistful course through Simon's memory, the radi-

ant metal was everywhere and all the same, like a dragon's magical

blood. Here it splashed over the edge of a vat, spattering in gemlike

drops; over there it wound serpentlike away across the rock to flow

hissing into a pool of brackish water. Great tongues of incandes-

cence sluiced down from buckets, coloring the bundled foundrymen

in demonic scarlet.

Creeping, scuttling, Simon made his slow way around the rim of

the smelting-cave until he reached the nearest ramp leading out of

the chamber. The oppressive, breathing heat and his own sickened

spirit urged him to climb up, but the packed earth of the ramp

showed a deep, crisscrossing scrawl of cartwheel tracks. This was a

much-used doorway, he reasoned, thoughts blurry and slow. It was

not a place he should try.

At last he reached a mouth in the cavern wall that had no ramp.

It was a difficult scrabble up the smoothfire-melted? Dragon-

melted?rock, but his flagging strength held up long enough for

him to pull himself over the lip and collapse full length in the shel-

tering shadows just inside, the unpocketed sphere glowing weakly in

his hand like a trapped firefly.

When he knew who he was once more, he was crawling.

On your knees again, mooncalf?

The blackness was virtually complete, and he was moving blindly

downward. The tunnel floor was dry and sandy beneath his hands.

He crawled for a long, long time; even the voices began to sound

as if they felt sorry for him.

Simon lost . . . Simon lost lost los . . .

Only the slowly diminishing heat behind convinced him he was

196 Tad Williams

actually movingbut toward what? Where? He crept like a

wounded animal, through solid shadow, heading down, always

down. Would he crawl downward to the very center of the world?

Scuttling, leggy things beneath his fingers meant nothing now.

The darkness was complete, inside and outside. He felt himself al-

most bodiless, a bundle of frightened thoughts bumping down into

the cryptic earth.

Somewhere, sometime later, the darkened sphere he had clutched

for so long that it seemed a pan of him began to glow again, this

time with a strange azure light. From a core of pulsing blue the light

expanded until he had to hold the sphere away from him, squinting.

He climbed slowly to his feet and stood panting, his hands and knees

tingling where they no longer touched sand.

The tunnel walls were covered in fibrous black growths, tangled as

uncombed wool, but through the twining strands gleamed shining

patches, reflecting the new-flowered light. Simon hobbled closer to

investigate, drawing his hand back with a thin wheeze of disgust as

he touched the greasy black moss. Some of his self had come back

with the light, and as he stood swaying he thought about what he

had crawled through, and trembled.

The wall beneath the moss was covered in some kind of tile,

chipped and scored in many places, missing in others so that the dull

earth showed through. Behind him the tunnel sloped upward, the

rut of his passage stopping where he now stood. Before him the

darkness led on. He would try walking on two legs for a while.

The passage soon widened. The arched entrances of scores of

other corridors joined the one he traveled, most of them filled with

soil and stone. Soon there were also flagstones beneath his shambling

feet, uneven, fractured stone that nonetheless caught the light of the

lantern-sphere with strange opalescence. The ceiling gradually an-

gled away above him, out of reach of the blue light; the corridor

continued downward into the earth. Something that might have

been the beat of leathery wings fluttered in the emptiness above.

Where am I now? How could Hayholt run so deep? Doctor said

castles under castles, down into the world's bones. Castles under cas-

tles . . . under castles . . .

He had stopped without knowing it, and had turned to stand

before one of the cross-passages. In some part of his head he could

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR197

see himself and how he must looktattered, dirt-smeared, head

wagging from side to side like a half-wit. A strand of spittle dangled

from his lower lip.

The doorway before him was unblocked; a strange scented air like

dried flowers hung in the black arch. He stepped forward, dragging

an arm that felt like heavy, useless meat across his mouth, holding

aloft the crystal sphere in his other hand.

, . . / Beautiful! Beautiful place . . . !

It was a chamber, perfect in the blue glow, as perfect as if some-

one had left it only a moment before. The ceiling was high-vaulted,

covered in a tracery of delicate painted lines, a pattern suggesting

thom bushes, or flowering vines, or the meandering of a thousand

meadow streams. The rounded windows were choked with rubble,

and dirt had poured down from them to silt the tiled floor beneath,

but all else was untouched. There was a beda miracle of subtle,

curving woodand a chair as fine as the bones of a bird. In the

room's center stood a fountain of polished stone that looked as if it

might fill with singing water at any moment.

A home for me. A home beneath the ground. A bed to sleep in, sleep

and sleep until Pryrates and the king and the soldiers have all gone

away . , .

A few dragging steps forward and he stood beside the bed, the

pallet as clean and unsmirched as the sails of the blessed. There was

a face staring down at him from a niche above it, a splendid, clever

woman's facea statue. Something about it was wrong, though: the

lines were too angular, the eyes too deep and wide, the cheekbones

high and sharp. Still it was a face of great beauty, captured in trans-

lucent stone, forever frozen in a sad, knowing smile.

As he reached out to gently touch the sculpted cheek his shin

nudged the bedframe, a touch delicate as a spider's step. The bed

crumbled into powder. A moment later, as he stared in horror, the

bust in the niche dissolved into fine ash beneath his fingertips, the

woman's features melting away in an instant. He took a stumbling

step back and the light of the sphere glared and then waned to a dim

glow. The thump of his foot on the floor leveled the chair and deli-

cate fountain, and a moment later the ceiling itself began to sift

down, the twining branches moldering into soft dust- The sphere

flickered as he lurched for the door, and as he plunged back out into

the corridor the blue light guttered out.

198

Tad Williams

Standing in the darkness again, he heard someone crying. After a

long minute he reeled forward, down into the never-ending shadows,

wondering who it was that could still have tears left to shed.

The passage of time had become a thing only of fits and starts.

Somewhere behind him he had dropped the spent crystal to lie for-

ever in darkness, a pearl in the blackest trenches of the secret sea. In

a last, sane part of his wandering thought, thoughts now unbounded

by the hedge of light, he knew that he was moving still further

downward.

Going down. Into the pit. Going down.

Going where? To what?

From shadow to shadow, as a scullion always travels.

Dead mooncalf. Ghost mooncalf . . .

Drifting, drifting . . . Simon thought of Morgenes with his

wispy beard curling in flame, thought of the shining comet glaring

redly down on the Hayholt . . . thought of himself, descending

mounting?through the black nothing spaces like a small, cold star.

Drifting.

The emptiness was complete. The darkness, at first just an absence

of light and life, began to assume qualities of its own: narrow, chok-

ing dark when the tunnels narrowed, Simon clambering over drifts

of rubble and tangling roots, or the lofty, airy darkness of invisible

chambers, full of the parchment scrape of bat wings. Feeling his way

through these vast, underground galleries, hearing his own muffled

footfalls and the hissing patter of dirt shaken loose from the walls,

any remaining sense of direction fell away. He might be walking

straight up the walls, for all he could tell, or staggering across the

ceilings like a maddened fly. There was no left or right; when his

fingers found solid walls again, and doors leading to other tunnels,

he groped mindlessly on through more constricted passageways and

into other bat-squeaking, measureless catacombs.

Ghost of a mooncalf!

The odor of water and stone was everywhere. His sense of smell,

like his hearing, seemed to have grown more acute in the blind,

black night, and as he fumbled his way ever downward the scents of

this midnight world washed over himdamp, loamy earth, nearly

as rich as bread dough, and the bland but harsh fragrance of rocks.

He was awash in the vibrant, breathing odors of moss and roots, the

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR199

busy, sweet rottenness of tiny things living and dying. And floating

through everything, permeating and complicating all, was the sour,

mineral tang of seawater.

Seawater? Sightless, he listened, hunting the booming sounds of

the ocean. How deep had he come? All he heard were the minute

shufflings of digging things and his own ragged breathing. Had he

tunneled beneath even the unsounded Kynslagh?

There! Faint musical tones, chiming in the farther depths. Water

dripping.

Down he went. The walls were moist.

You are dead, Simon Mooncalf. A spirit, doomed to haunt a void.

There is no light. There never was such a thing. Smell the dark-

ness? Hear the resounding nothing? This has ever been.

The fear was all he had left, but even that was somethinghe was

afraid, so he must be alive! There was darkness, but there was Si-

mon, too! They were not one and the same. Not yet. Not quite . . .

And now, so slowly he did not perceive the difference for a long

time, light came back. It was a light so faint, so dim, that at first it

was less than the points of color hovering before his useless eyes.

Then curiously, he saw a black shape before him, a deeper shadow.

A clot of worms, wriggling? No. Fingers ... a hand . . . his

hand! It was silhouetted before him, bathed in a faint glow-

The close-bending tunnel walls were thick with twining moss, and

it was the moss itself that gleameda pale, green-white shimmer

that threw only enough light to show the greater darkness of the

tunnel before him, and the light-blocking shadow of his own hands

and arms. But it was light! Light! Simon laughed soundlessly, and

his nebulous shadows crisscrossed the passageway.

The tunnel opened out into another open gallery. As he looked

up, astounded at the constellation of radiant mosses sprouting on

the faraway ceiling, he felt a drop of cold water on his neck. More

water drizzled slowly from above, each drop striking the rocks be-

low with a sound like a tiny mallet falling on glass. The vaulting

chamber was full of long pillars of stone, fat on either end, narrow in

the middle; some were as slender as a hair's-breadth, like strands of

oozing honey. As he trudged forward he realized, in some remote

part of his battered mind, that most of this was the work of stone

and dripping water, not of laboring hands. But still, there were lines

200 Tad Williams

in the dimness that did not seem natural: right-angled creases on the

moss-girdled walls, ruined pillars among the stalagmites too orderly

to be accidental. He was moving through a place that had once

known something other than the ceaseless rhythm of water pattering

in stone pools. Once it had echoed to other footsteps. But "once"

only meant something if Time was still a barrier. So long had he

been crawling in dark places, he might have dug through into the

misty future or the shadowed past, or into unmapped realms of

madnesshow was he to know . . . ?

Putting his foot down, Simon felt a moment of shocking empti-

ness. He plunged into cold, wet blackness. His hands lit on the far

edge as he fell, and the water proved only as deep as his knees. He

thought some clawed thing clutched at his leg as he yanked himself

back out onto the passageway, shaking from more than the cold.

/ don't want to die. I want the sun again.

Poor Simon, his voices responded. Mad in the dark.

Dripping, shivering, he limped on through the green-glimmered

chamber, watching carefully for the empty blacknesses that next

time might not be so shallow. Faint flickers, glowing pink and white,

darted to and fro in the holes as he stepped across or made his way

carefully around them- Fish? Shining fish in the deeps of the earth?

Now, as one large chamber opened into another, and another, the

lines of hand-wrought things began to show more clearly beneath

the cloak of moss and stone-drip. They made strange silhouettes in

the dim half-light: crumbled spans that might once have been balco-

nies, arched depressions matted in pallid moss that could have been

windows or gateways. As he squinted, trying to make out details in

the near-darkness, he began to feel his vision was slipping sideways,

somehowthe overgrown shapes, smothered in shadow, seemed to

simultaneously nicker with the lineaments they had once worn.

From the comer of his eye he saw one of the shattered columns

lining the gallery suddenly standing straight, a shining white thing

carved with trains of graceful flowers. When he turned to stare, it

was only a clump of broken stone once more, half-shrouded in moss

and encroaching earth. The deep gloom of the chambers bent crazily

at the comers of his sight, and his head pounded. The ceaseless

sound of falling water now began to feel like hammerblows to his

reeling mind. His voices came chittering back, revelers excited by

wild music.

201

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

Mad! The boy is mad!

Have pity, he's lost, lost, lost . . . !

We will have it back, manchild! We will have it all back!

Mad mooncalf!

And as he passed down yet one more sloping tunnel he began to

hear other voices in his head, voices he had not heard before, some-

how both more real and more unreal than those which had long

been his unwanted companions. Some of these shouted in languages

that he did not know, unless he had glimpsed them in the doctor's

ancient books.

Ruakha, ruakha Asu'a!

T'si e-isi'ha as-irigu!

The trees are burning! Where is the prince?! The witchwood is in

flames, the gardens are burning!

The half-darkness was contorting around him, bending, as though

he stood at the center of a spinning wheel. He turned and stumbled

blindly down a passageway and into one more lofty hall, holding his

agonized head in his hands. There was other,'different light here:

thin blue beams angling down from cracks in the unseen ceiling

above, light that pierced the darkness but illuminated nothing where

it fell. He smelled more water, and strange vegetation; he heard men

running, shouting, women crying and the ring of metal on metal. In

the strange ahnost-blackness the sound of some terrible battle raged

all around, but did not touch him. He screamedor thought he did

but could not hear his own voice, only the ghastly din in his head.

Then, as if to confirm his already certain madness, dim figures

began to rush past in the blue-lanced darkness, bearded men with

torches and axes chasing others more slender who bore swords and

bows. All of them, pursuers and pursued, were as transparent and

ill-defined as mist. None touched or saw Simon, although he stood

squarely in their midst.

Jinguzul Aya'aif 0 Jingizu! came a wailing cry.

Kill the Sithi demons, harsher voices shouted. Put fire to their nest!

Hands clutched tight over his ears could not keep the voices away.

He stumbled forward, trying to escape the swirling shapes, and fell

through a doorway, coming to rest at last on a flat landing of gleam-

ing white stone. He could feel cushioning moss beneath his groping

hands, but his eyes saw nothing but polished blankness. He crawled

forward on his stomach, still trying to escape the horrible voices

202 Tad Williams

shrieking in pain and anger. His fingers felt cracks and pits, but still

the stone looked as flawless as glass. He reached the Up and stared

out across a great, level field of black emptiness which smelled of

time and death and the patient ocean. An invisible pebble rolled

from beneath his hand to fall silently for long moments and then

splash in the depths below.

Something large and white gleamed beside him. He lifted his

heavy, aching head from the lip of the dark tarn and looked up.

Scant inches from where he lay jutted the bottom steps of a great

stone staircase, an upward-sweeping spiral that climbed away,

mounting the side of the cavem and circling the underground lake

to disappear at last into upper darkness. He gaped as an urgent,

fractured memory pushed through the clamor in bis head.

Stairs. Tan 'za Stairs. Doctor said look for stairs. . . .

He clambered forward, pulling himself up onto the cool, polished

stone, and knew that he was mad beyond salvation, or had died and

was trapped in some terrible netherworld. He was beneath the earth

in final darkness: there could be no voices, no phantom warriors.

There would be no light making the steps gleam before him like

moonlit alabaster.

He began to climb, pulling himself up to the next high step with

trembling, sweat-slippery fingers. As he mounted higher, sometimes

standing, sometimes clawing his way up in a scrabbling crouch, he

peered out from the stairs. The silent lake, a vast pool of shadow

below him, lay at the bottom of a great circular hall, bigger by far

than the foundry. The ceiling stretched immeasurably upward, lost

in the blackness above with the top of the slender, beautiful white

pillars ringing the chamber. A foggy, directionless light glinted on

the sea-blue and jade-green walls, and touched the frames of high-

vaulting windows that flickered now with an ominous crimson glare.

In the middle of the pearly mists, hovering above the silent lake,

sat a dark, wavering shape. It cast a shadow both of wonder and of

terror, and it filled Simon with inexpressible, pitying dread.

Prince Ineluki! They come! The Northerners come!

As this last impassioned cry echoed in the dark walls of Simon's

skull, the figure at the room's center lifted its head. Gleaming red

eyes bloomed in its face, cutting through the fog like torches.

Jingizu. a voice breathed. Jingizu. So much sorrow.

The crimson light flared. The shriek of death and fear rose from

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR203

below like a great wave. At the center of it all, the dark figure lifted a

long slender object and the beautiful chamber shuddered, shimmer-

ing like a shattered reflection, then fell away into nothingness. Si-

mon turned away in horror, enveloped in a strangling pall of loss

and despair.

Something was gone. Something beautiful had been destroyed be-

yond retrieval. A world had died here, and Simon felt its failing cry

embedded in his heart like a gray sword. Even his consuming fear

was driven out by the terrible sadness that cut through him, bringing

painful, shuddering tears from reservoirs that should have been long

dry. Embracing the darkness, he lurched on up the endless climb,

winding around the mighty chamber. The shadows and silence swal-

lowed the dream-battle and the dream-chamber below him, bringing

a black shroud to pull over his fevered mind.

A million steps passed beneath his blind touch. A million years

slid past as he traveled in the void, drowning in sorrow.

Darkness without and darkness within. The last thing he felt was

metal beneath his fingers and fresh air on Bis face.

The Hill Fire

HE AWAKENED in a long, dark room, surrounded by still, sleeping

figures. It had all been a dream, of course. He was back in his bed

among the other slumbering scullions, the only light a thin film of

moonglow sliding in through a crack in the door. He shook his

aching head.

Why am I sleeping on the floor? These stones are so cold . . .

And why did the others lie so unmovingly, their shadowy shapes

fantastic with helmets and shields, laid out on their beds in neat

rows, like . . . like the dead awaiting judgment . . . ? It had all

been a dream . . . hadn't it . . . ?'

With a gasp of terror Simon crawled away from the black mouth

of the tunnel toward the blue-white chink in the doorway. The im-

ages of the dead, fixed in immobile stone atop their ancient tombs,

did not stay his passing. He shouldered open the heavy door of the

crypt and fell forward into the long, damp grass of the lien-yard.

After what had seemed countless years in the black places below,

the round ivory moon that ranged high in the darkness above looked

like yet another hole, this one leading to a cool, lamplit place beyond

the sky, a country of shining rivers and forgetfulness. He lowered his

cheek to the ground and felt the wet strands bend beneath his face.

Fingers of time-worn rock thrust up on either side through the

prisoning grass, or stretched headlong in broken segments, etched by

the moon in bone-white light, nameless and uncaring as the ancient

dead whose graves they marked.

In Simon's mind the dark span of hours from the last fiery mo-

ments in the doctor's chambers to the night-damp grass of the pres-

ent was as unreachable as the nearly invisible clouds threading the

sky. The shouting and the cruel flames, Morgenes* burning face,

Pryrates' eyes like punch-holes into ultimate darknessthese were

as genuine as the breath he had just taken. The tunnel was only

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR205

dwindling, half-remembered pain, a fog of voices and empty mad-

ness. He knew there had been rough walls, and cobwebs, and end-

lessly forking tunnels. It seemed there had also been vivid dreams of

sadness and the death of beautiful things. Altogether he felt drained

dry like an autumn leaf, fragile and without strength. He thought he

had crawled at the endhis knees and arms were certainly sore

enough, and his clothing was tornbut his memory seemed cloaked

in darkness. None of it was quite real. Not like the lich-ground

where he now lay, the moon's quiet commons yard.

Sleep was pushing at the back of his neck with soft, heavy hands.

He fought it, rising to his knees with a slow shake of the head. It

would not do to doze off here: there had been, as far as he knew, no

pursuit through the blocked doorway of the doctor's chamber, but

that didn't mean a great deal. His enemies had soldiers, and horses,

and the king's authority.

Drowsiness was pushed aside by fear, and not a little anger. They

had stolen all else from him; his friends, his homethey would not

take his life and freedom, too. He climbed carefully to his feet and

looked around, steadying himself on the leaning stones of the tomb

as he wiped away tears of exhaustion and fear.

The town wall of Erchester loomed some half a league away, a

moonlit belt of stone separating the sleeping citizens from the lien-

yard and the world beyond. Before the outer gates sprawled the pale

band of the Wealdhelm Road; on Simon's right it meandered gradu-

ally north to the hills; on his left it companioned the river Ymstrecca

through the farmlands below Swertclif, past Falshire on the far

bank, and ultimately to the grasslands of the East.

It seemed likely that these towns along the great road would be

the first place that the Erkynguard would search for a fugitive. Also,

much of the road's length wandered through the valley farms of

Hasu Vale, where he would be hard-pressed to find a hiding place if

forced off the path.

Turning his back on Erchester, and the only home he had yet

known, Simon hobbled out across the lich-yard toward the far

downs. His first steps set off a flair of pain at the base of his skull,

but he knew it would be best to ignore the aches of body and spirit

for a while longer, fleeing as far away from the castle as possible

while it was still dark; he could worry about the future when he had

found a safe place to lie up.

206 Tad Williams

As the moon scudded across the warm sky toward midnight,

Simon's steps grew heavier and heavier The lich-yard seemed to

have no endingindeed, the ground had begun to nse and fall over

the gentle humps of the outer downs while he still walked among the

weathered stone teeth, some solitary and upright, others leaning

together like old men in senile colloquy He wove in and out among

the buned pillars, stumbling across the uneven, tussocky ground

Every step became a struggle, as though he waded in high waters

Staggering with weariness, he tripped over yet one more con-

cealed stone and fell heavily to the ground He tried to nse, but his

hmbs felt like sacks of wet sand. After crawling forward a short

distance he curled up on the sloping shoulder of a grassy mound.

Something dug into his back and he rolled clumsily to one side, this

made him almost equally uncomfortable, since he was now lying on

Morgenes' folded manuscript, tucked under his belt Staring, eyes

half-shut with exhaustion, he reached out to find the original source

of irritation It was a piece of metal, thick with corrosion and perfo-

rated like worm-gnawed wood He tried to pull it free, but it was

stuck fast in the earth Perhaps the rest of it, whatever it might be,

lay deep in the soil of the moon-frosted mound, anchored by dirta

spear point? A belt buckle or greave from some costume whose

owner had long since gone to feed the grass on which he lay0 Simon

thought for a bleary moment of all the bodies lying deep beneath the

earth, the flesh that had once been quick with life but now moldered

m silence and darkness

As sleep captured him at last, it seemed that he was again on the

roof of the chapel Below him sprawled the castlebut this

castle was made of damp, crumbling soil and blind white roots The

people in the castle slept on and on, tossing uneasily as in their

dreams they heard Simon walking on the rooftop above their

beds

He walked nowor dreamed he didalong a black nver that

splashed noisily but reflected no light, like fluid shadow He was

surrounded by mist, and could discern nothing of the land he

walked on but a certain dimness He heard many voices in the ob-

scurity behind him, their murmurs intermixed with the slurring

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR207

voice of the black water, coming closer, rushing like wind through

the leaves

No mist or fog shrouded the far side of the nver The grass on the

nether bank stretched out before his gaze, and beyond it a somber

grove of alder trees sloped up to the skirts of the hills All the

country beyond the nver was dark and moist, as though it stood at

dawn or twilight; after a moment it seemed clear that it must be

evening, for the close-leaning hills echoed with the distant, solitary

song of a nightingale. Everything seemed fixed and unchanging.

He peered across the burbling water and saw a figure standing by

the river's edge on the far shore, a woman dressed all in gray, long

straight hair shadowing the sides of her face; in her arms she held

something close-cradled When she turned her eyes up to him he

saw that she was weeping. It seemed that he knew her

"Who are you0" he cned His voice died out as the words left his

mouth, swallowed up by the damp hiss of the nver The woman

stared at him as if to memorize every feature with her wide dark

eyes At last she spoke.

"Seoman." Her words came as down a long corndor, faint and

hollow "Why have you not come to me, my son0 The wind is drear

and chill, and I have been such a long tune waiting."

"Mother?" Simon felt a terrible coldness. The soft rush of the

water seemed everywhere She spoke again.

"We have not met for so long, my beautiful child. Why do you not

come to me? Why do you not come and dry a mother's tears0 The

wind is cold, but the nver is warm and gentle. Come. will you

not cross over to me0" She held her arms outstretched, her mouth

below her black eyes opened in a smile Simon moved toward her,

his lost mother who called to mm, walking down the soft nverbank

toward the laughing black nver Her arms were open for him

for her son-

And then Simon saw that what she had cradled, that which now

dangled from an outflung hand, was a doll .a doll made from

reeds and leaves and twining stems of grass But the doll was black-

ened, the shnveled leaves curling back from their stems, and Simon

knew suddenly that nothing alive crossed that nver into the twilight

country He stopped at the water's edge and looked down

Down in the inky water there was a faint gleam of light; as he

watched, it rose toward the surface, becoming three slender, shining

208 Tad Williams

shapes. The sound of the river changed, became a kind of prickling,

unearthly music. The water leaped and boiled, obscuring the objects'

true forms, but it seemed that if he desired to, he could reach down

and touch them. . . .

"Seoman . . . !" his mother called again. He looked up to see her

farther away, receding swiftly, as though her gray land were a tor-

rent rushing away from him. Her arms were held wide, and her

voice was a thing of vibrant loneliness, of the cold's lust for the

warm, and the darkness' hopeless desire for the light.

"Simon . . . Simon . . . !" It was a wail of despair.

He sat stock-upright on the grass, in the lap of the ancient caim.

The moon still hung high, but the night had gone cold. Tendrils of

mist caressed the broken stones around him as he sat, heart working

madly.

". . . Simon ..." The cry came whispering up from the black-

ness beyond. It was a gray figure, surely, and a woman's voice call-

ing faintly to him from the misty lien-yard he had crossedonly a

tiny, wiggling gray shape, a faraway flicker in the ground-clutching

fog that wound through the barrows, but seeing it Simon felt his

heart would burst in his chest. He began to run across the downs,

running as though the very Devil chased him with grasping hands.

The dark bulk of Thisterborg rose on the shrouded horizon, and the

downs were all around him, and Simon ran and ran, and ran. . . .

A thousand speeding heartbeats later he slowed at last to a ragged

walk. He could not have run farther even if he had been the arch-

demon's quarry: he was exhausted, limping, and hungry beyond be-

lief. His fear and confusion hung on him like a mantle of chains; the

dream had frightened him so that he felt even weaker than before his

sleep.

Plodding forward, always with the castle at his back, he felt the

memories of better times raveling away, leaving him with nothing

but the thinnest of strands still tied to the world of sunlight and

order and safety.

What did it feel like when I used to lie in the hayloft, in the quiet?

There's nothing in my head now, only words. Did I like to be there in

the castle? Did I sleep there, run there, eat and talk and . . . ?

I don't think so. I think I have always walked these downs beneath

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR209

the moonthat white facewalked and walked like the pitiful,

lonely ghost of a mooncalf, walked and walked . . .

A sudden shiver of flame on the hilltop halted his gloomy imagin-

ings. For some time the ground had been sloping steadily upward,

and he had nearly reached the base of shadowy Thisterborg; its

mantle of tall trees was a solid, impenetrable darkness against the

obscurity of the hill itself. Now a fire bloomed along the hill's crest,

a sign of life amidst the downs and damp and centuries of death. He

broke into a slow trot, the most he could manage in his present

condition. Perhaps it was a shepherd's campfire, a merry blaze to

keep the night at bay.

Perhaps they have food! A shank of mutton . . . a knob of bread

He had to lean forward. His innards twitched and cramped at the

thought of eating. How long had it been? Only supper last . . . ? It

was astonishing to consider.

Even if they have no food. how wonderful it will be just to hear

voices, to warm myself before a fire . . . a fire . . .

A memory of hungry flames leaped before his mind's eye, bring-

ing a different kind of hollowness.

He climbed upward through the trees and tangled brush. The base

of Thisterborg was ringed all around by mist, as if the hill was an

island upthrust from a cobweb-gray sea. As he approached the sum-

mit he saw the blunt shapes of the Anger Stones crowning the final

rise, etched in red relief against the sky.

More stones. Stones and more stones. What did Morgenes say this

was, this nightif it was still the same moon, the same darkness

cradling the same dim starswhat did he call it?

Stoning Night. As though the very stones celebrated. As if while

Erchester lay sleeping behind shuttered window and latched door

the stones made holiday. In his weary thoughts Simon could see

them ponderously a-step, the merrymaking stones bowing and

wheeling . . . slowly turning. . . .

Stupid! he thought. Your mind is wanderingand no surprise. You

need food and sleep: otherwise, you'll go truly madwhatever going

mad meant . . . angry all the time? Frightened of nothing? He had

seen a mad woman in Battle Square, but she had merely clutched a

bundle of rags and rocked herself to and fro, keening like a gull.

Mad beneath the moon. A mad mooncalf.

210 Tad Williams

He had reached the last stand of trees that surrounded the hill-

crown. The air was still, as though expectant; Simon felt his hairs go

all a-prickle. It suddenly seemed a good idea to walk quietly, to have

a cautious look at these night-shepherds instead of crashing sud-

denly from the underbrush like an angry boar. He worked his way

closer to the light, ducking beneath the twisted limbs of a wind-

wracked oak. Just above him jutted the Anger Stones, concentric

rings of tall, storm-sculpted pillars.

Now he saw a cluster of man-shapes huddled about the leaping

fire at the center of the stone rings, cloaks hunched up at their

shoulders. Something about them seemed stiff and uneasy, as though

they waited on something expected but not necessarily desired. To

the northeast, past the stones, the cap of Thisterborg narrowed. The

windswept grass and heather there clung closely to the downsloping

ground, which stretched away from the stones to sink at last out of

the firelight at the hill's northern edge.

Staring at the statue-still figures around the fire, Simon again felt

the weight of his fear drag at him. Why did they stand so unmoving?

Were they living men at all, or some eerie carvings of hill-demons?

One of the shapes moved to the fire and poked it with a stick. As

the flames jumped, Simon saw that this one at least was a mortal

man. He crawled stealthily forward, stopping just beyond the outer

circle of stones. The firelight caught and reddened a momentary

glimpse of metal beneath the cloak of the nearest figurethis shep-

herd wore a mail shin.

The vast night sky seemed to shrink down, a prisoning blanket.

All the half-a-score of shrouded men were armored: it was the

Erkynguardhe was sure of it. He cursed himself bitterly: he had

come straight to their fire, like a moth flinging itself into the can-

dieflame.

Why am I always such a damnable, damnable fool?!

A thin night-wind sprang up, setting the high flames whipping

like a burning pennant. The cloaked and hooded guardsmen turned

their heads in unison, slowly and almost reluctantly, gazing out into

the darkness at the hill's northern rim.

Then Simon heard it, too. Above the hissing wind that rimed the

grass and gently shook the trees there came a faint sound, growing

ever so gradually louder: the aching creak of wooden cart wheels. A

bulky shape was climbing upward out of the obscurity of the north

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR211

edge. The guardsmen moved away from the approach, circling the

fire to cluster together on the side nearest Simon; no word had yet

been uttered by any of them.

Dim, pale shapes that slowly became horses appeared at the fringe

of the fireglow; following behind, growing distinct from the night,

was a great black wagon. Black-hooded figures walked on either

side, four in all, matching the wagon's stately, funeral pace. The

flickering light revealed a fifth atop the wagon, hunched over the

team of ice-white stallions- This last figure was somehow larger than

the others, and darker, as if it wore some cloak of obscurity; its very

stillness seemed to speak of a hidden, brooding power.

The guards still did not move, but stood rigidly watching. Only

the thin mewing of the wagon wheels punctured the silence. Simon,

transfixed, felt cold pressure in his head, a gnawing clutch in his

vitals.

A dream, a bad dream . . . Why can't I move?!

The black cart and its attendants drew to a halt just within the

circle of firelight. One of the four standing figures raised an arm, the

black sleeve falling away to reveal a wrist and hand as thin and

white as bone.

It spoke, voice silvery-cold, toneless as ice cracking.

"We are here to fulfill the covenant."

There was a stir among those who had been waiting. One of them

stepped forward.

"As are we."

Watching helplessly as this mad fancy progressed, Simon was not

at all surprised to recognize the voice of Pryrates. The priest pulled

back his hood; firelight traced the high arc of his forehead and em-

phasized the skeletal depths of his eyes. "We are here ... as

agreed," he continued. Was there a faint quaver in his voice? "Have

you brought that which was promised?"

The bone-white arm swept back, gesturing to the looming wagon.

"We have- Have you?"

Pryrates nodded his head. Two of the guardsmen bent and wres-

tled some burden up from the grass where it lay, dragging it forward

to be dropped ungently at the alchemist's booted feet. "It lies here,"

he said. "Bring forth your master's gift."

Two of the robed figures moved to the wagon, carefully lifting

down a long, dark object. As they brought it forward, one holding

212 Tad Williams

either end, a biting wind sprang up and whistled over the hilltop.

The black robes billowed, and the hood on the nearest blew back,

spilling a flurry of gleaming white hair. The face revealed in the brief

moment was delicate as a mask of the thinnest, most exquisite ivory -

An instant later the hood napped back.

Who are these creatures? Witches? Ghosts? Behind the shielding

rocks Simon brought a trembling hand up to make the sign of the

Tree.

The white foxes . . . Morgenes said '^vhite foxes" . . .

Pryrates, these demonsor whatever they might beit was all

too much. He must still be dreaming in the graveyard. He prayed it

was so, and closed his eyes to block out the unholy imaginings . . .

but the ground beneath him was pungent with the unmistakable

smell of wet earth, and the fire crackled in his ears. Opening his eyes

he found the nightmare unchanged.

What is happening?

The two shadowy figures reached the edge of the fire-circle; as the

soldiers edged even farther away they set their burden down and

stepped back. It was a coffin, or at least coffin-shaped, but only three

hands high. A ghastly bluish light smoldered along its edge.

"Bring forth that which you have promised," said the first dark-

robed creature. Pryrates gestured and the bundle at his feet was

dragged forward. When the soldiers stepped back, the alchemist

pushed the object over with the toe of his boot. It was a man, gagged

and bound at the wrists. Simon only slowly recognized the round,

pale face of Count Breyugar, the Lord Constable.

The robed figure regarded Breyugar's bruised features for a long

interval. Its expression was hidden in the hood's shadowed folds, but

when it spoke there was a twist of anger in the clear, unearthly

tones.

"This does not seem to be what was promised."

Pryrates tilted his body a little to the side, as if narrowing his

exposure to the hooded thing. "This one allowed the promised one

to escape," he said, seeming to betray some apprehension. "He will

take the promised one's place."

Another figure shouldered its way out from between a pair of

guardsmen, moving forward to loom at Pryrates' side.

"Promised? What is this 'promised'? Who was promised?"

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR21

The priest raised his hands placatingly, but his expression wa

stem. "Please, my king, I think you know. Please."

Elias snapped his head around to stare at his counselor. "Do

know, pnest? What did you promise on my behalf?"

Pryrates leaned toward his master; his harsh voice slipped into

wounded tone. "Lord, you bade me do what I must for this meeting

I did it . . . or would have, had not thiscenit," he dug a toe int

bound Breyugar, "failed in his duty to his sovereign." The alchemii

looked over to the dark-robed figure, whose impassivity carrie

nonetheless a hint of impatience. Pryrates frowned. "Please, m

king, the one we speak of is gone; the point is moot. Please." He laii

a light hand on Elias' cloaked shoulder. The king shook it off, stai

ing out of the shadows of his hood at the priest, but saying nothin|

Pryrates turned to the black-robed figure once more.I

"This one we offer you ... his blood, too, is noble. His lineage i

high."

"Of high lineage?" the dark thing asked, and then its shouldei

shook as though it laughed. "Oh, yes, that is very important. Dof

its family go back many generations of men?" The dark hood tume

and met the shrouded gaze of its fellows.

"Certainly," said Pryrates, seemingly disconcerted. "Hundreds (

years."

"Well, our master will certainly be pleased." And then it di

laugh, a blade-edged trill of merriment that made Pryrates take

step backward. "Proceed."i

The priest looked to Elias, who pulled back his hood. Simon fe

the looming sky crouch still closer. The king's face, pale even in th

ruddy firelight, seemed to float in midair. The night swirled, and th

king's impassive gaze drew light like a mirror in a torchlit hallwal

Finally, Elias nodded.

Pryrates stepped forward and grasped Breyugar by the collai

dragging him to the coffin-box where he let him slump to the earti

The priest then unclasped his cloak, revealing a dull flare of re

robe, and reached into the inner folds to withdraw a long, curve

blade like a sickle. He raised it before his eyes as he faced the norti

emmost point of the rings of stones, then began to chant, his voic

rising in volume and authority:

"To the Dark One, who is master of this world:

214Tad Williams

Who bestrides the Northern Sky:

Vasir Sombris, feata concordin!

To the Black Huntsman,

Possessor of the icy Hand:

Vasir Sombris, feata concordin 1

To the Storm King, the Outreaching

The Dweller in the Stony Mountain,

The Frozen and Burning,

The Sleeping but Awakened:

Vasir Sombris, feata concordin!

The black-robed figures swayedall but the one atop the wagon,

who sat as still as the Anger Stonesand a hiss went up from their

midst, mingling with the new-risen wind.

"Hear now Your supplicant!"

Pryrates cried,

"The beetle beneath Your black heel;

The fly between Your cold fingers;

The whispering dust in Your endless shadow

Oveiz meil Hear me!

Timior cuelos exaltat meif

Shadow-Fatherlet the bargain be struck!"

The alchemist's hand snaked down and grasped Breyugar's head.

The count, who had been lying limp at his feet, suddenly lurched

forward and away, leaving the startled Pryrates holding nothing but

a hank of bloodied hair.

Simon watched helplessly as the pop-eyed Lord Constable stum-

bled directly toward his hiding place; he dimly heard Pryrates' an-

gry shouting. The close-leaning night tightened around him, choking

his breath and blackening his vision as a pair of guards leaped after

Breyugar.

The count was only a few paces away, running awkwardly be-

cause of his tied hands, when he tripped and fell. His legs kicked,

and his breath sawed noisily behind the gag as the guardsmen bore

down on him. Simon had risen to a half-crouch behind the conceal-

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

ing stone, and his weary heart was hammering as though it m

rupture. He tried desperately to still his trembling legs. The gua

close enough to touch, yanked Breyugar to his feet with fea

curses. One of them raised a sword and struck the count with

flat of his blade. Simon could see Pryrates staring out from the cu

of light, and the king's ashen, fascinated face beside him. Even

Breyugar's limp form was wrestled back toward the fire, Pryra

continued to squint at the place where the count had fallen.

Who is there?

The voice seemed to fly on the back of the wind straight ir

Simon's head. Pryrates was staring right at him! He must see hi]

Come out. whoever you are. I command you to come forward.

The black-robed figures began a strange, ominous humming, ai

Simon struggled against the alchemist's will. He remembered wh

had almost happened to him in the storeroom, and braced himsi

against the compelling force, but he was weakened, wrung dry like

piece of cloth.

Come out, the voice repeated, and a questing something reache

out to touch his mind. He fought, trying to hold shut the doors c

his soul, but the probing thing was stronger than he by far. It hai

only to find him, to grasp him. . . .

"If the covenant no longer suits you," a thin voice said, "then Ie

it be broken off" now. It is dangerous to leave the ritual half-spoken

very dangerous."

It was the hooded figure speaking, and Simon could feel the red

priest's questing thoughts shaken.

"Wh . . . What?" Pryrates spoke like a man new-wakened.

"Perhaps you do not understand what you are doing here," the

black shape hissed. "Perhaps you do not comprehend who and what

is involved."

"No . . . yes, I do . . ." the priest stammered; Simon could

somehow sense his nervousness, as if it were an odor. "Quickly," he

turned to the guardsmen, "bring that sack of offal here before me."

The guards dragged their burden back to lie again at his feet.

"Pryrates . . ." the king began.

"Please, your majesty, please. It is only a moment now."

Horribly, a part of Pryrates' thought had not left Simon's mind,

some clinging tag-end that the priest had not pulled back: he could

almost taste the alchemist's quivering expectancy as Pryrates pulled

216 Tad Williams

up Breyugar's head, could sense the priest responding to the low

murmuring of the hooded ones. And now he felt something deeper,

too, a chill wedge of horror driving into his raw and sensitive mind.

Some inexplicable other was there in the nighta terrible something'

else. It hovered over the hilltop like a choking cloud, and burned

inside the seated figure on the wagon like a hidden black flame; it

dwelt also in the bodies of the standing stones, infusing them with its

greedy attention.

The sickle rose. For a moment the flashing crimson curve of the

blade was a second moon against the sky, an old, red crescent moon.

Pryrates cried out in a high-pitched language Simon could not un-

derstand.

"Ai Samu 'sitech 'atAt Nakkiga!"

The sickle descended and Breyugar sagged forward. Purplish

blood pumped from his throat, spattering down onto the coffin. For

a moment the Lord Constable twitched violently beneath the priest's

hand, then went limp as an eel; the dark flow continued to drizzle on

the black lid. Enmeshed in the bizarre intermixture of thought, Si-

mon helplessly experienced Pryrates' panicky exhilaration. Behind

that he felt the something-elsea cold, dark, horribly vast thing. Its

ancient thoughts sang with obscene joy.

One of the soldiers was throwing up; but for the flabby numbness

that unmanned and silenced him, Simon would have done the same.

Pryrates pushed the count's body aside; Breyugar tumbled in a

disordered heap, oyster-pale fingers curled toward the sky. The

blood smoked on the dark box, and the blue light flickered more

brightly. The line it described around the edge became more pro-

nounced. Slowly, dreadfully, the lid began to open, as if forced up

from within.

Holy Usires Who loves me. Holy Usires Who loves meSimon's

thoughts were a rush, a panicked tanglehelp me, help me help it's

the Devil in that box, he's coming out help save me oh help . . .

We have done it.. we have done it!other thoughts, foreign, not his

Too late to turn back. Too late.

The first stepthe coldest, most terrible thoughts of allHow

they will pay and pay and pay . . .

As the lid tilted up the light within burst forth, throbbing indigo

touched with smoky gray and sullen purple, a terrible bruised light

that pulsed and glared. The lid fell open, and the wind tightened its

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR217

pitch as if frightened, as if sickened by the radiance of the long black

box. At last what was inside could be seen.

Jingizu, a voice whispered in Simon's head. Jingizu . . .

It was a sword. It lay inside the box, deadly as an adder; it might

have been black, but a floating sheen mottled the blackness, a crawl-

ing gray like oil on dark water. The wind shrieked.

/; beats like a heartthe heart of all sorrow . . .

Calling, it sang inside Simon's head, a voice both horrible and

beautiful, seductive as claws gently scraping his skin.

"Take it. Highness!" Pryrates urged through the hiss of the wind.

Enthralled, helpless, Simon suddenly wished he had the strength to

take it himself. Could he not? Power was singing to him, singing of

the thrones of the mighty, the rapture of desire fulfilled.

Elias took a dragging step forward. One by one the soldiers

around him stumbled back, turning to run sobbing or praying down

the hill, lurching into the darkness of the girdling trees. Within

moments only Elias, Pryrates, and hidden Simon-remained on the

hilltop with the hooded ones and their sword. Elias took another

step; now he stood over the box. His eyes were wide with fear; he

seemed stricken by wrenching doubt, his lips working soundlessly.

The unseen fingers of the wind plucked at his cloak, and the hill

grasses twined about his ankles.

"You must take it!" Pryrates said again, and Elias stared at him as

though seeing the alchemist for the first time. "Take it!" Pryrates'

words danced frantically through Simon's head like rats in a burning

house.

The king bent, reaching out his hand. Simon's lust turned to sud-

den horror at the wild, empty nothingness of the sword's dark song.

It's wrong/ Can't he feel it?! Wrong!

As Elias' hand neared the sword, the wail of the wind subsided.

The four hooded figures stood motionless before the wagon; the fifth

seemed to sink into deeper shadow. Silence fell on the hilltop like a

palpable thing.

Elias grasped the hilt, lifting the blade out of the coffin in one

smooth movement. As he held it before him the fear was suddenly

wiped from his face, and his lips parted in a helpless, idiot smile. He

lifted the sword high; a blue shimmer played along the edge, mark-

218 Tad Williams

ing it out from the blackness of the sky. Elias' voice was almost a

whimper of pleasure.

"I ... will take the master's gift. I will . . . honor our pact."

Slowly, the blade held before him, he sank to one knee. "Hail to

Ineluki Storm King!"

The wind sprang up anew, shrieking. Simon reeled back from the

flapping, whirling hill-fire as the four robed figures lifted their white

arms, chanting: "Ineluki, ai! Ineluki, ai!"

No! Simon's thoughts flurried, the king . . . all is lost! Run,

Josua!

Sorrow . . . Sorrow on all the land . . .

The fifth hooded shape began to writhe atop the wagon. The black

robe fell away, and a shape of fire-crimson light was revealed, flap-

ping like a burning sail. A ghastly, heart-gnawing fear beat outward

from the thing as it began to grow before Simon's terror-fixed eyes

bodiless and billowing, larger and larger until the empty, wind-snap-

ping bulk of it loomed over all, a creature of howling air and glow-

ing redness.

The Devil is here! Sorrow, his name is sorrow . . . I The king has

brought the Devil! Morgenes, Holy Usires, save me save me save mell

He ran mindlessly down through black night, away from the red

thing and the exulting somethmg-else. The sound of his flight was

lost in the screaming wind. Branches tore at his arms and hair and

face like claws. . . .

The icy claw of the North . . . the ruins ofAsu'a.

And when he fell at last, tumbling, and his spirit fled from such

horror, fled away into deeper darkness, it seemed that in the final

instant he could hear the very stones of the earth moaning in their

beds beneath him.

is

A Meeting

at the Inn

^

THE FIRST thing Simon heard was a humming noise, a dull buzz

that pushed insistently against his ear as he struggled toward wake-

fulness. Half-opening an eye, he found himself staring at a mon-

strositya dark, indistinct mass of squirming legs and glittering

eyes. He sat up with a startled yelp and a great flailing of arms; the

bumblebee that had been guilelessly exploring his nose leaped away

in a whir of translucent wings to search for a less excitable perch.

He lifted a hand to shade his eyes, startled by the vibrant clarity

of the world around him. The daylight was dazzling. The spring sun,

as if on imperial procession, had scattered gold on all sides across

the grassy downs; everywhere he looked the gentle slopes were rich

with dandelions and long-stemmed marigolds. Bees hurried among

them, nipping from flower to flower like little doctors discovering

much to their surpriseall their patients getting well at the same

time.

Simon slumped back down into the grass, clasping his hands be-

hind his head. He had slept a long while: the rich sun was almost

straight overhead. It made the hairs on his forearms glow like mol-

ten copper; the tips of his ragged shoes looked so far away he could

almost imagine them the peaks of distant mountains.

A sudden cold sliver of memory pierced his drowsiness. How had

he gotten here? What . . . ?

A dark presence at his shoulder brought him quickly onto his

knees; he turned to see the tree-mantled mass of Thisterborg loom-

ing behind him, not half a league away. Every detail was stunningly

clear, a pattern of precise edges; but for the troubling throb of mem-

ory it might have seemed comfortable and cool, a placid hill rising

through encircling trees, banded with shade and bright green leaves.

222

Tad Williams

Along its crest were the Anger Stones, faint gray points against the

blue sky.

The vivid spring day was now corrupted by a mist of dream

what had happened last night? He had fled the castle, of course

those moments, his last with Morgenes, were burned into his very

heartbut after? What were these nightmarish memories? Endless

tunnels? Elias? A fire, and white-haired demons?

Dreamsidiot, bad dreams. Terror and tiredness and more terror.

I ran through the graveyard at night, fell down at last, slept and

dreamed.

But the tunnels, and ... a black casket? His head still hurt, but

there was also an odd sense of numbness, as if ice had been laid on

an injury. The dream had seemed so real. Now it was distant, slip-

pery and meaninglessa dark pang of fear and pain that would drift

away like smoke if he allowed it toor, at least, he hoped it would.

He pushed the memories down, burying them as deeply as he could,

and closing his mind over them like the lid of a box.

It's not as though I don't have enough things to worry about. . . .

The bright sun of Belthainn Day had smoothed some of the kinks

from his muscles, but he was still sore . . . and very hungry. He

clambered stiffly to his feet and brushed the clinging grass from his

tattered, mud-smeared clothes. He stole another look at Thisterborg.

Did the ashes of a great fire still smolder among the stones there? Or

had the shattering events of the day before pushed him for a while

into madness? The hill stood, impassive; whatever secrets might lurk

beneath the cloak of trees, or nestle in the crown of stones, Simon

did not want to know. There were already too many hollows that

needed filling.

Turning his back on Thisterborg, he faced across the downs to the

dark breakfront of the forest. Staring across the vast expanse of open

land, he felt a deep sorrow welling up within him, and pity for

himself. He was so alone! They had taken everything from him, and

left him without a home or friends- He slapped his hands together in

anger and felt the palms sting. Later! Later he would cry; now he

had to be a man. But it was all so horribly unfair!

He breathed in and out deeply, and looked again to the distant

woods. Somewhere near that thin line of shadow, he knew, ran the

Old Forest Road. It rolled for miles along Aldheorte's southern pe-

rimeter, sometimes at a distance, sometimes sidling up close to the

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

223

old trees like a teasing child. In other places it actually passed be-

neath the forest's eaves, winding through dark bowers and silent,

sun-arrowed clearings. A few small villages and an occasional road-

house nestled in the forest's shadow.

Perhaps I can find some work to doeven to earn a meal, anyway.

I feel hungry as a bear . . . a just-woken bear, at that. Starved! I

haven't eaten since before . . . before . . .

He bit his lip, hard. There was nothing else to do but start walk-

ing.

The touch of the sun felt like a benediction. As it warmed his sore

body, it seemed also to cut a little way through the clinging, trou-

bling pall of his thoughts. In a way he felt new-bom, like the colt

Shem had brought him to see last spring, all shaky legs and curios-

ity. But the new strangeness of the world was not all innocent; some-

thing strange and secretive lurked behind the bright tapestry laid out

before him; the colors were almost too bright, the scents and sounds

over-sweet.

He was soon uncomfortably aware of Morgenes' manuscript

tucked into his waistband, but after he had tried carrying the sheaf

of parchment in his sweating palms for a few hundred paces he gave

up and slipped it back under his belt- The old man had asked him to

save the thing, and save it he would. He pushed his shirttail behind

it to ease the rubbing.

When he tired of searching patiently for places to ford the small

streams that webbed the meadows he took off his shoes. The smell of

the grasslands and the moist Maia air, untrustworthy indicators

though they were, nevertheless went some way toward keeping his

thoughts from straying toward the black, hurting places; the feel of

mud between his toes helped, too.

Before long he reached the Old Forest Road. Instead of continu-

ing along the road itself, which was wide and muddy and scored

with the rain-filled ruts of wagon wheels, Simon turned west and

accompanied its passage atop the high grass bank. Below him white

asphodels and blue gillyflowers stood abashed and unprotected be-

tween the wheelmarks, as though surprised in the midst of a slow

pilgrimage from one bank to the other. Puddles caught the sky's

afternoon blue, and the humble mud seemed studded with shining

glass.

224Tad Williams

A furlong away across the road the trees of Aldheorte stood in

endless formation hke an army asleep on its feet. Darknesses so

complete that they might have been portals into the earth gaped

between some of the trunks. In other places were things that must be

woodcutter's huts, noticeably angular against the forest's graceful

lines.

Walking, staring at the interminable forest porch, Simon tripped

over a berry-bush and painfully scratched both his feet. As soon as

he realized what he had stumbled over, he stopped cursing. Most of

the berries were still green, but enough had ripened that his cheeks

and chin were thoroughly stained with berry juice when he contin-

ued on some minutes later, chewing contentedly. The berries were

not quite sweet yet, but still they seemed the first serious argument

he had found in a long time for the benevolent ordering of Creation.

When he finished, he wiped his hands on his ruined shirt.

As the road, with Simon for company, began to mount a long

track of rising ground, definite evidence of human habitation finally

appeared. Here and there in the southerly distance the rough spines

of split-wood fences pushed up from the high grass; beyond these

weathered boundary wardens were indistinct figures moving in the

slow rhythms of planting, putting down the spring peas. Somewhere

nearby, others would be moving deliberately down the rows plying

the weed hooks, doing their best to save the fruits of a bad year. The

younger folk would be up on the cottage roofs, turning back the

thatch, beating it down firmly with long sticks and pulling off the

moss that had grown during the rains of Avril- He felt a strong urge

to head out across the fields toward those calm, ordered farms.

Someone would surely give him work, take him in ... feed him.

How stupid can I be? he thought. Why don't I just walk back to the

castle and stand shouting in the commons yard?! Country folk were

notoriously suspicious of strangersespecially these days, with ru-

mors of banditry and worse drifting down from the north. The

Erkynguard would be looking for him, Simon felt sure. These iso-

lated farms would be very likely to remember a red-haired young

man who had recently passed by. Besides, he was in no hurry to

speak to strangers, anywaynot so close to the Hayholt. Perhaps he

would be better off in one of the inns that bordered the mysterious

forestif one would have him.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR225

/ do know something about working in kitchens, don't I? Someone

will give me work . . . won't they?

Topping a rise, he saw the road before him intersected by a dark

swath, a crease of wagon tracks that emerged from the forest and

meandered south across the fields; a woodsman's road, perhaps, a

route from the woodchopper's harvesting-place to the farmlands

west of Erchester. Something dark stood, angular and erect, at the

meeting point of the two roads. A brief twinge of fear passed

through him before he realized that it was too tall an object to be

someone waiting for him. He guessed it to be a scarecrow, or a

roadside shrine to Elysia, the Mother of Godcrossroads were infa-

mously strange places, and the common folk often mounted a holy

relic to keep away loitering ghosts.

As he neared the crossing he decided that he had been right about

it being a scarecrowthe object seems to be hanging from a tree or

pole, and swayed softly, breeze-blown. But as he came closer he saw

it was no scarecrow. Soon he could no longer convince himself that

it was anything other than what it was; the body of a man swinging

from a crude gibbet.

He reached the crossroad. The wind subsided; thin roadway dust

hung about him in a brown cloud. He stopped to stare helplessly.

The road grit settled, then leaped into swirling motion once more.

The hanged man's feet, bare and swollen black, dangled at the

height of Simon's shoulder. His head lolled to one side, like a puppy

picked up by the neck-scruff; the birds had been at his eyes and face-

A broken shingle of wood with the words "M THE KINGS LAND"

scratched upon it bumped gently against his chest; in the road below

lay another piece. On it was scrawled: "POACHED FRO."

Simon stepped back; an innocent breeze twisted the sagging body

so that the face tipped away to stare sightlessly across the fields. He

hurried across the lumber-road, tracing the four-pointed Tree on his

chest as he passed through the thing's shadow. Normally such a

sight would be fearful but fascinating, as dead things were, but now

all he could feel was sick terror. He himself had stolenor helped to

stealsomething far greater than this poor sneak thief could ever

have dreamed of: he had stolen the king's brother from the king's

own dungeon. How long would it be until they caught him, as they

had caught this rook-eaten creature? What would his punishment

be?

226 Tad Williams

He looked back once. The ruined face had swung again, as if to

watch his retreat. He ran until a dip in the road had blocked the

crossing from view.

It was late afternoon when he reached the tiny village of Flett. It

was truthfully not much of a village, just an inn and a few houses

crouching beside the road within a stone's-throw of the woods- No

people were about except a thin woman standing in the doorway of

one of the rude houses, and a pair of solemn, round-eyed children

that peered out past her legs. There were, however, several horses

farm nags, mostlytied to a log before the town's inn, the Dragon

and Fisherman. As Simon walked slowly past the open door, looking

cautiously all around, men's loud voices rolled out from the beery

darkness, frightening him. He decided to wait and try his luck later,

when there might be more customers stopping off the Old Forest

Road for the night, and his dirty, tattered appearance would be less

notable.

He followed the road a little farther. His stomach was rumbling,

making him wish he had saved some of his berries. There were only

a few more houses and a little one-room cottage-church, then the

road swerved up and under the forest's eaves and Flett, such as it

was, ended.

Just past the edge of town he found a small stream gurgling along

over the black, leafy soil. He knelt and drank. Ignoring the brambles

and the dampness as best he could, he took his shoes back off again

to use for a pillow and curled up at the base of a live oak, just out of

sight of the road and the last house. He fell asleep quickly beneath

the trees, a grateful guest in their cool hall.

Simon dreamed . . .

He found an apple lying on the ground at the foot of a great white

tree, an apple so shiny and round and red that he hardly dared to

bite it. But his hunger was strong, and soon he lifted it to his mouth

and set his teeth in it. The taste was wonderful, all crunch and

sweetness, but when he looked where he had bitten he saw the thin,

slippery body of a worm coiled beneath the bright surface. He could

not bear to throw the apple away, howeverit was such a beautiful

fruit, and he was famished. He turned it around and bit into the

other side, but as his teeth met he pulled away and saw once more

the sinuous body of the worm. Over and over he bit, each time in a

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR22

different place, but each time the slithering thing lay beneath the

skin. It seemed to have no head or tail, but only endless coils wounq

around the core, spreading through the apple's cool, white flesh.

Simon awoke beneath the trees with an aching head and a sour

taste in his mouth. He went to the streamlet to drink, feeling faint

and weak of spirit. When had anyone ever been so alone? The slant-

ing afternoon light did not touch the sunken surface of the creek; as

he kneeled for a moment staring down into the murmuring dark

water, he felt he had been in a place like this before. As he won-

dered, the soft wind-speech of the trees was overwhelmed by a rising

murmur of voices. For a moment he feared he was dreaming again,

but as he turned he saw a crowd of people, a score at least, coming

up the Old Forest Road toward Flett. Still in the shadow of the

trees, he moved forward to watch them, drying his mouth with the

arm of his shirt.

The marchers were peasant folk, dressed in the rough cotsman's

cloth of the district, but with a festive air. The women had ribbons

twined in their unpinned hair, blue and gold and green. Skirts

twirled about bare ankles. Some who ran in front carried flower

petals in their aprons which they cast fluttering to the ground- The

men, some young and lightfooted, some limping gaffers, carried on

their shoulders a felled tree. Its branches were as ribbon-festooned as

the women, and the menfolk held it high, swinging it jauntily as they

came up the road.

Simon smiled weakly. The Maia-tree! Of course. It was Belthainn

Day today, and they were bringing the Maia-tree. He had often

watched the tree go up in Erchester's Battle Square. Suddenly his

smile felt too wide. He was lightheaded. He crouched lower among

the concealing brush.

Now the women were singing, their sweet voices mixing unevenly

as the throng danced and whirled.

"Come now to the Breredon,

Come to the Hill of Briars!

Put on your merry flower-crown!

Come dance beside my fire!"

228Tad Williams

The men replied, voices ragged and cheerful:

"HI dance before your fire, lass,

Then, in the forest's shadow

We'll lay a bed of blossoms down

And put an end to sorrow!"

Both together sang the refrain:

"So stand beneath this Yrmansol

Sing hey-up! Hey-yarrow!

Stand beneath the Maia-pole

Sing hey-upl God is growing!"

The women were beginning another verse, one about hollyhock

and lily-leaves and the King of Flowers, as the noisy band drew

abreast of Simon. Caught up for a moment in the high spirits, his

dizzy head full of the exuberant music, he began to push forward.

Not ten paces away on the sun-blotted road one of the men nearest

him stumbled, a trailing ribbon coiled about his eyes. A companion

helped him to disentangle himself, and as he pulled the gold

streamer loose his whiskery face creased in a broad grin. For some

reason the flash of laughing teeth held Simon a step short of leaving

the concealment of the trees.

What am I doing!? he berated himself. The first sound of friendly

voices and I go bounding out into the open? These people are merry-

makers, but a hound will play with his master, tooand woe to the

stranger that comes up unannounced.

The man he had been watching shouted something to his compan-

ion which Simon could not hear over the din of the crowd, then

turned and held up a ribbon, shouting to someone else. The tree

jounced along, and when the procession's last stragglers had passed,

Simon slipped out on to the road and followeda thin, rag-wrapped

figure, he might have been the tree's mournful spirit wistfully pursu-

ing its stolen home.

The lurching parade turned up a small hill behind the church.

Across the broad fields the last splinter of sun was vanishing fast; the

shadow of the church's rooftop Tree lay across the hillock like a

long, curve-hilted knife. Not knowing what was planned, Simon

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR22!

hung well back of the group as they carried the tree up the sligh

rise, stumbling and catching on the new-sprung briars. At the to)

the men gathered, sweaty and full of loud jests, and levered thi

trunk upright into a hole dug there. Then, while some held th<

swaying bulk steady, others shored up the base with stones. At las

they stepped back. The Maia-tree tottered a bit, then tipped slightl]

to one side, drawing a gasp of apprehensive laughter from th

crowd. It held, only slightly out of plumb; a great cheer went up

Simon, in the tree-shadows, gave voice himself to a small, happs

noise, then had to retreat into hiding as his throat tightened. He

coughed until blackness fluttered before his eyes: it had been neariii

a full day since he had uttered a spoken word.

Eyes watering, he crept back out. A fire had been kindled at thd

hill's foot. With its highest point painted by the sunset, and the

flames jigging down below, the tree seemed a torch fired at botn

ends. Irresistibly drawn by the scent of food, Simon moved near to

the gaffers and gossips who were spreading cloths and laying supper

by the stone wall behind the little church. He was surprised ana

disappointed to see how meager the stores wereslim rewards for a

festival day, and, dreadful luck, an even slimmer chance of him

making off with any unnoticed.

The younger men and women had begun to dance around the base

of the Maia-tree, trying to make a ring. The circle, with drunken

tumbling-down-the-hill and other impediments, never became corn-1

pletely joined; the spectators whooped to see the dancers vainly

reaching for a hand to close on as they whirled giddily by. One by I

one the merrymakers reeled away from the dance, staggering, some-!

times rolling down the low hill to lie at the bottom laughing help-

lessly. Simon ached to join them.

Soon knots of people were sitting all about the grass and along the

wall. The highest tip of the tree was a ruby spearhead, capturing the

sun's final rays. One of the men at the base of the hill brought out a

shinbone flute and began to play. A gradual silence descended as he

piped, touched only by whispers and an occasional squeak of muf-

fled laughter. At last the breathing blue darkness surrounded them

all. The plaintive voice of the flute soared above, like the spirit of a

melancholy bird, A young woman, black-haired and thin-faced, got

to her feet, steadying herself on the shoulder of her young man.

Swaying gently, like a slim birch tree in the wind's path, she began

230 Tad Williams

to sing; Simon felt the great hollowness inside himself open up to the

song, to the evening, to the patient, contented smell of the grass and

other growing things.

"0 faithful friend, 0 Linden tree."

she sang,

^That sheltered me when I was young,

0 tell me of my faithless one

Befriend again to me.

The one who was my heart's desire

Who promised all for all in turn

Has left me lorn, my heart has spurned

And made of Love a liar.

Where has he gone, 0 Linden tree?

Into the arms of what sweet friend?

What call will bring him back again?

0 spy him out for me!

Ask me not that, my mistress fair

I'd fain not make answer to you.

For I could only answer true

And I would your feelings spare.

Deny me not. 0 Linden tall

Tell me who holds him close tonight!

What woman has o'erthrown my right?

Who keeps him from my call?

0 mistress fair, then truth HI tell

He'll not to you come anymore.

Tonight he walked the river shore

And stumbled there and fell.

The river-woman now he holds

And she in turn holds fast to him.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR231

But she will send him back again

All river-wet and cold.

Thus will he come from there again.

All river-wet and cold . . ."

As the black-haired girl sat down again the fire crackled and spat,

as if in mockery of such a damp, tender song.

Simon hurried away from the fire, his eyes filling with tears. The

woman's voice had awakened in him a fierce hunger for his home;

for the joking voices of the scullions, the offhand kindnesses of the

chambermaids, his bed, his moat, the long, sun-speckled expanse of

Morgenes' chambers, evenhe was chagrined to realizethe stem

presence of Rachel the Dragon.

The murmurs and laughter behind him filled the spring darkness

like the whir of soft wings.

A score or so of people were in the street before the church. Most

of them, in knots of two or three or four, seemed headed through the

settling darkness toward the Dragon and Fisherman. Firelight

glowed within the door there, stippling the loiterers on the porch

with yellow light. As Simon approached, still wiping at his eyes, the

odors of meat and brown ale rolled over him like an ocean wave. He

walked slowly, several paces behind the last group, wondering if he

should ask for work right off, or just wait in the sociable warmth

until later, when the innkeeper might have a moment to speak with

him and see that he was a trustworthy lad. It made him fearful just

to think about asking a stranger to take him in, but what else could

he do? Sleep in the forest like a beast?

As he squirmed through a clump of drunken farmers arguing the

merits of late-season shearing, he nearly tripped over a dark figure

huddled against the wall beneath the inn's swinging sign. A round

pink face with small dark eyes turned up to stare at him. Simon

mumbled noises of apology, and was moving on when he remem-

bered.

"I know you!" he said to the crouching figure; the dark eyes

widened as if in alarm. "You're the friar I met in the Main Row!

Brother . . . Brother Cadrach?"

Cadrach, who for a brief moment had looked as though he might

232 Tad Williams

scramble away on hands and knees, narrowed his eyes to stare in

turn.

"Don't you remember me?" he said excitedly. The sight of a fa-

miliar face was as heady as wine. "My name is Simon." A couple of

the farmers turned to look blearily and incuriously in their direction,

and he felt a stab of fright, remembering that he was a fugitive. "My

name is Simon," he repeated in a softer voice.

A look of recognition, and something else, passed over the monk's

plump face. "Simon! Ah, of course, boy! What brings you, then, up

from the great Erchester to dismal little Flett?" With the aid of a

long stick that had been leaning against the wall beside him,

Cadrach climbed to his feet.

"Well . . ." Simon was nonplussed.

Yes, what have you been doing, you idiot, that you should strike up

conversation with near-strangers. Think, stupid! Morgenes tried to tell

you that this was no game.

"I have been on an errand ... for some people at the cas-

tle . . ."

"And you decided to take the small bit of money left to you and

stop at the famous Dragon and Fisherman," Cadrach made a wry

face, "and have a bit of something to eat," Before Simon could

correct him, or decide if he wanted to, the monk continued. "What

you should be after, then, is taking your supper with me, and let me

pay your countno, no, lad, I insist! It is only a fairness, after the

kindly ways you showed to a stranger." Simon could not utter a

word before Brother Cadrach had his arm, pulling him into the

public room.

A few faces turned as they entered, but no one's eyes lingered.

The room was long and low-ceilinged, lined along both walls with

tables and benches so wine-stained, hacked, and carved-upon that

they seemed held together only by the dried gravy and suet with

which they were so generously splattered. At the end nearest the

door a roaring fire burned in a wide stone fireplace. A sooty, sweat-

ing peasant lad was turning a joint of beef on a spit; he winced as the

dripping fat made the flames sizzle. To Simon it all suddenly looked

and smelled like heaven.

Cadrach dragged him to a spot along the back wall; the tabletop

was so cracked and pitted that it hurt to rest his skinned elbows on

its surface. The monk took the seat across from him, leaning back

233

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

against the wall and extending his legs down the length of the bench.

Instead of the sandals that Simon would have expected, the friar

wore ragged boots, splitting from weather and hard use.

"Innkeeper! Where are you, worthy publican?!" Cadrach called.

A pair of beetle-browed, blue-jawed locals that Simon would have

sworn were twins looked over from the opposite table with annoy-

ance written in every facial furrow. After a little wait the owner

appeared, a barrel-chested, bearded man with a deep scar across his

nose and upper lip.

"Ah, there you are," said Cadrach. "Bless you, my son, and bring

us each a mug of your best ale. Then, will you be so good as to carve

us off some of that jointthat, and two trenchers of bread to sop

with. Thanks to you, laddie."

The owner frowned at Cadrach's words, but nodded his head

curtly and walked away. As he left, Simon heard him grumble:

". . . Hemystiri buggerer . . ."

The ale came soon, and then the meat, then more ale. At first

Simon ate like a starving dog, but after easing his initial, desperate

hunger, and looking about the room to make sure no one was paying

them undue attention, he slowed his pace and began to attend to

Brother Cadrach's meandering conversation.

The Hemystirman was a wonderful storyteller, despite the burr of

his accent that sometimes made him a little difficult to understand.

Simon was vastly amused by the tale of the harper Ithineg and his

long, long night, despite being a bit shocked to hear such a story told

by a man of the cloth. He laughed so hard at the adventures of Red

Hathrayhinn and the Sithi woman Finaju that he sprayed ale over

his already stained shirt.

They had lingered a long while; the inn was half-empty when the

bearded innkeeper finished filling their mugs for the fourth time.

Cadrach, with broad gesticulation, was telling Simon of a fight he

had once witnessed on the docks of Ansis Pelippe in Perdmin. Two

monks, he explained, had cudgeled each other into near-uncon-

sciousness during an argument about whether or not the Lord

Usires had magically freed a man from a pig-spell on the island of

Grenamman. Just at the most exciting pointbrother Cadrach was

waving his arms so enthusiastically in the description that Simon

feared he would fall off the benchthe tavemkeeper thumped an ale

234 Tad Williams

jug loudly down in the middle of the table. Cadrach, caught in mid-

exclamation, looked up-

"Yes, my good sir?" he asked, cocking a bushy brow. "And how

can we be helping you?"

The innkeeper stood with arms folded, a look of suspicion pinch-

ing his face. "I've let you stand credit so far 'cause you're a man of

the faith, father," he said, "but I must be closing up soon."

"Is that all that's afflicting you?" A smiled raced across Cadrach's

round face. "We'll be right over to reckon up with you, good fellow,

What was your name, then?"

"Freawaru."

"Well, never fear then, goodman Freawaru. Let the lad and me be

finishing these noggins and then we'll let you get your sleep."

Freawaru nodded in his beard, more or less satisfied, and stumped

off to yell at the turnspit boy. Cadrach emptied his mug with a long

and noisy swallow, then turned his grin on Simon.

"Drink up, now, lad. We must not keep the man waiting. I am of

the Granisian order, you know, and have a feeling for the poor

fellow. Among other things, good Saint Granis is the patron of inn-

keepers and drunkardsa natural enough pairing!"

Simon chuckled and drained his cup, but as he put it down a

finger of memory tugged at him. Hadn't Cadrach told him when

they first met in Erchester that he was of some other order? Some-

thing with a "v"? Vilderivan?

The monk was fishing about the pockets of his robe with a look of

great concentration on his face, so Simon let the question pass- After

a moment Cadrach pulled out a leather purse and dropped it on the

table; it made no soundno clink, no jingle. Cadrach's shining fore-

head wrinkled in a look of concern, and he held the purse up to his

ear and slowly shook it. There was still no sound. Simon stared.

"Ah, laddie, laddie," said the friar mournfully, "will you look at

that now? I stopped to help a poor beggar-man todaycarried him

down to the water I did, and washed his bleeding feetand look

what he has done to repay my kindness." Cadrach turned the purse

over so that Simon could see the gaping hole slit across the bottom.

"Can you wonder why I sometimes fear for this wicked world,

young Simon? I helped the man, and, why, he must have robbed me

even as I was carrying him." The monk heaved a great sigh. "Well,

lad, I'm afraid I'll have to prevail on your human kindness and

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR235

Aedonite charity to lend me the money that we are owing hereI

can soon pay you back, never fear. Teh, tch," he clucked, waving the

slit wallet at the gape-eyed Simon, "oh, but this world is sick with

sin."

Simon heard Cadrach's words only vaguely, a babble of sounds in

his ale-muddled head. He was looking not at the hole, but at the

seagull worked on the leather in heavy blue thread. The pleasant

drunkenness of a minute before had turned heavy and sour. After a

moment he raised his stare until his eyes met Brother Cadrach's.

The ale and the warmth of the commons room had flushed Simon's

cheeks and ears, but now he felt a tide of blood that was hotter still

mounting up from his fast-beating heart.

"That's ... my ... purse!" he said. Cadrach blinked like an

undenned badger.

"What, lad?" he asked apprehensively, sliding slowly away from

the wall to the middle of the bench. "I'm afraid I was not hearing

you well."

"That . . . purse ... is mine." Simon felt all the hurt, all the

frustration of losing it come welling upJudith's disappointed face,

Doctor Morgenes* sad surpriseand the shocked sickness of trust

betrayed. All the red hairs on his neck stood up like boar's bristles.

"Thief!" he shouted suddenly, and lunged, but Cadrach had seen it

coming: the little monk was off the bench and skittering backward

up the length of the inn toward the door.

"Now wait, boy, it's a mistake you're making!" he shouted, but if

he really thought so, he did not seem to have much faith in his

ability to convince Simon. Without pausing for a moment he

grabbed his stick and sprang out the doorway. Simon was after him

at a sprint, but was barely through the doorjamb when he felt him-

self grappled around the waist by a pair ofbearlike arms. A moment

later he was up off the floor, breath pressed out, legs helplessly

dangling.

"Now what do you think you're doing, hey?" Freawaru grunted

in his ear. Turning in the doorway, he flipped Simon back into the

fire-painted commons room. Simon landed on the wet floor and lay

gasping for a moment.

"It's the monk!" he groaned at last. "He stole my purse! Don't let

him get away!"

Freawaru poked his head briefly outside the door. "Well, if that's

236 Tad Williams

true he's long gone, that onebut how do I know this isn't all pan

of the plan, hey? How do I know that you two don't play this monk-

and-catamite trick in every inn between here and Utanyeat?" A

couple of late drinkers laughed behind him. "Get up, boy," he said,

grasping Simon's arm and yanking him roughly onto his feet. "I'm

going to see if Deorhelm or Godstan has heard of you pair before.

He hustled Simon out the door and around the side of the build-

ing, holding his arm prisoned in a firm grip. The moonlight picked

out the stable's roof of pallid thatch, and the first tree-sentinels of

the forest a stone-throw away.

"I don't know why you didn't just ask for work, you donkey,"

Freawaru growled as he propelled the stumbling youth before him.

"With my Heanfax just quit I could have used a good-sized young

fellow like you. Bloody foolishnessand just you keep your mouth

shut."

Alongside the stable was a small cottage, standing out but still

connected to the main body of the inn. Freawaru banged his fist on

the door.

"Deorhelm!" he called. "Are you up? Come look at this lad and

tell me if you've seen him before." The sound of footsteps could be

heard within.

"S'bloody Tree, is that you, Freawaru?" a voice grumbled. "We

have to be on the road at cockcrow." The door swung open. The

room behind was lit by several candles.

"Lucky for you we were dicing, and not abed yet," said the man

who'd opened the door. "What is it?"

Simon's eyes went wide, and his heart exploded into horrified

pounding. This man, and the one polishing his sword on one of the

bed sheets, wore the green livery of Elias' Erkynguard'

"This young ruffian and thief of a . . ." Freawaru had just time

to say, when Simon turned and butted his head into the innkeeper's

stomach. The bearded man went down with a startled outrush of

breath. Simon sprang over his kicking legs and headed for the shel-

ter of the forest; in a few leaping steps he had disappeared. The two

soldiers gazed after him in mute surprise. On the ground in front of

the candlelit doorway Freawaru the tavernkeeper cursed and rolled

and kicked and cursed.

16

The White Arrow

"IT'S NOT FAIR?' Simon sobbed for perhaps the hundredth time,

fisting the wet ground. Leaves stuck to his reddened knuckles; he did

not feel the least bit warmer. "Not fair!" he murmured, curling back

into a ball. The sun had been up for an hour, but the thin light

brought no heat, Simon shivered and wept.

And it wasn't fairit wasn't at all. What had he done that he

should be lying damp, miserable and homeless in the Aldheorte

forest while others were asleep in warm beds, or just risen to bread

and milk and dry clothes? Why should he be hunted and chased like

some filthy animal? He had tried to do what was right, to help his

friend and the prince, and it had made of him a starveling outcast.

But Morgenes got far worse, didn't he? a part of him pointed out

contemptuously. The poor doctor would probably shift places with

you gladly.

Even that, though, was beside the point: Doctor Morgenes at least

had possessed some idea of what was involved, of what might hap-

pen, He himself had been, he thought disgustedly, as innocent and

stupid as a mouse who goes out of doors to play tag with the cat.

Why does God hate me so? Simon wondered, sniffling. How could

Usires Aedon, who the priest said watched over everyone, have left

him to suffer and die in the wilderness like this? He burst out in

fresh weeping.

Rubbing his eyes some time later, he wondered how long he had

been lying there staring at nothing. He pulled himself up, moving

away from the sheltering tree to shake the life back into his hands

and feet. He returned to the tree long enough to empty his bladder,

then stalked sullenly down to the tiny stream to drink. The merciless

ache in his knees, back, and neck rebuked him with every step.

238 Tad Williams

Damn everyone to Hell. And damn the bloody forest. And God, too,

for that matter.

He looked up fearfully from his chill handful of water, but his

silent blasphemy went unpunished.

When he had finished he moved upstream a short distance to a

place where the stream eddied out into a pool, and the turbulent

waters were smoothed. As he crouched, staring at his tear-rippled

reflection, he felt a resistance at his waist that made it difficult to

bend over without steadying himself with his hands.

The doctor's manuscript! he remembered.

He half-stood, pulling the warm, flexible mass out from between

pants and shirt-front. His belt had smashed a crease the length of the

whole bundle. He had carried them so long that the pages were

molded to the curve of his belly like a piece of armor; in his hand

they lay bowed like a wind-breasted sail. The top page was smeared

and caked with dirt, but Simon recognized the doctor's small, intri-

cate script: he had been wearing the thin armor ofMorgenes' words.

He felt a sudden fierce pang like hunger, and put the papers gently

aside, returning his gaze to the pool.

It took a moment to separate his own reflection from the bands

and blotches of shadow cast on the water's surface. The light was

behind him; his image was largely silhouette, a dark figure with only

the suggestion of features along the illuminated temple, cheek, and

jaw. Twisting his head to catch the sun, he looked from the comer of

his eye to see a hunted animal mirrored in the water, its ear tilted as

though listening for pursuit, hair a tangled hedge of tufts, neck an-

gled in a way that spoke not of civilization, but of watchfulness and

fear. He quickly gathered up the manuscript and walked up the

stream bank.

I'm completely alone. No one will take care of me ever again. Not

that anyone ever did. He thought he could feel his heart breaking

within his chest.

After searching for a few minutes he found a patch of sunlight,

and settled down to dry his tears and think. It seemed obvious, as he

listened to the echoing speech of birds in the otherwise soundless

forest, that he must find warmer clothes if he was going to spend

nights out of doorsand that he would certainly have to do until he

got farther away from the Hayholt. He also needed to decide where

he was going.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR239

He began to leaf absently through Morgenes' papers, each one

dense with words. Wordshow could anyone think of so many

words at one time, let alone write them down? It made his brain

hurt just thinking about it. And what good were they, he thought,

his lip trembling with bitterness, when you were cold, and hungry

. . , or when Pryrates was at your door? He pulled two pages apart.

The bottom one tore, and he felt as though he had unwittingly

insulted a friend. He stared at it for a moment, solemnly tracing the

familiar calligraphy with a scratched finger, then held it up to catch

the light, squinting his eyes to read.

". . . // is strange, then, to think how those who wrote the songs

and stories that entertained John's glittering court made of him,

in an effort to construct him larger than life. less than he truly

was."

Reading it through the first time, puzzling it word by word, he

could make nothing of it; but as he read it again the cadences of

Morgenes' speech came out. He almost smiled, forgetting for a mo-

ment his horrible situation. It still made little sense to him, but he

recognized the voice of his friend.

"Consider for example," it continued, "his coming to Erkyn-

land out of the island of Warinsten. The balladeers would have it

that God summoned him to slay the dragon Shurakai; that he

touched shore at Grenefod with his sword Bright-Nail in hand,

his mind set only on this great task.

"While it is possible that a benevolent God called him to free

the land from the fearsome beast, it remains to be explained why

God allowed said dragon to lay waste to the country for long

years before raising up its nemesis. And of course, those who

knew him in those days remembered that he left Warinsten a

swordless farmer's son, and reached our shores in the same con-

dition; nor did he even think on the Red Worm until he had the

better part of a year in our Erkynland . . ."

It was vastly comforting to hear Morgenes' voice again, even if it

was only in his own head, but he was puzzled by the passage. Was

Morgenes trying to say that Prester John had not killed the Red

240 Tad Williams

Dragon, or only that he had not been chosen by God to do so? If he

hadn't been chosen by the Lord Usires in heaven, how had he killed

the arch-beast? Didn't the people of Erkynland say he was the king

anointed by God?

As he sat thinking, a cold wind kited down through the trees and

raised gooseflesh on his arms.

Aedon curse it, I must find a cloak, or something warm to wear, he

thought- And decide where I am going, instead of sitting here moon-

ing like a half-wit over old writings.

It seemed obvious now that his plan of the previous daythat of

covering himself with a shallow layer of anonymity, becoming a

turnspit or a scrubber at some rural hostelwas an impossible no-

tion. Whether the two guardsmen he had escaped would have

known him was not the issue: if they hadn't recognized him, some-

one eventually would. He felt sure that Elias' soldiers were already

beating the countryside for him: he was not just a runaway servant,

he was a criminal, a terrible criminal. Several deaths had already

been paid out over the issue of Josua's escape; there would be no

mercy for Simon if he fell into the hands of the Erkynguard.

How could he escape? Where would he go? He felt the panic

rising again, and tried to suppress it. Morgenes' dying wish had been

that he follow Josua to Naglimund. It seemed now that was the only

useful course. If the prince had made good his escape, surely he

would welcome Simon. If not, then doubtless Josua's liegemen

would trade sanctuary for news of their lord. Still, it was a dismally

long way to Naglimund; Simon knew the route and distance only by

repute, but no one would call it short. If he continued to follow the

Old Forest Road west, eventually it would cross the Wealdhelm

Road, which ran northward along the base of the hills from which it

took its name. If he could find the Wealdhelm way, he would at least

be headed in the right direction.

With a strip torn from the hem of his shirt he bound the papers

up, rolling them into a cylinder and wrapping the cloth around it,

tying it with a careful twist of the ends. He noticed that he had

neglected a page; it lay to one side, and as he picked it up he saw

that it was the one his own sweat had smeared. In the blur of ruined

letters one sentence had escaped; the words leaped out at him.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR241

!'

" . . If he was touched by divinity, it was most evident in his

nings and goings, in his finding the correct place to be at the

most suitable time, and profiting thereby ..."

It was not exactly a fortune-telling or a prophecy, but it strength-

d him a little, and hardened his resolve. Northward it would be

lorthward to Naglimund.

A prickly, painful, miserable day's journey in the lee of the Old

Forest Road was salvaged in part by a fortuitous discovery. As he

"tilted through the brush, skirting the occasional cottage that

crouched within hailing distance of the road, he caught a glimpse

through the chink in the forest cover of a treasure beyond price:

someone's untended washing. As he crept toward the tree, whose

branches were festooned with damp clothes and one rank, sodden

blanket, he kept his eye on the shabby, bramble-thatched cabin that

stood a few paces away. His heart beat swiftly as he-pulled down a

wool cloak so heavy with moisture that he staggered when it slid

free into his arms. No alarm was raised from the cottage; in fact, no

one seemed to be about anywhere. For some reason this made him

^l even worse about the theft. As he scrambled back into the tan-

trees with his burden, he saw again in his mind's eye a crude

den sign bumping against an unbreathing chest.

^

The thing of it was, Simon quickly realized, living the outlaw life

was nothing at all like the stories of Jack Mundwode the Bandit that

Shem had told him- In his imaginings Aldheorte Forest had been a

sort of endless high hall with a floor of smooth turf and tall tree-

trunk pillars propping a distant ceiling of leaves and blue sky, an

airy paviUion where knights like Sir Tallistro of Perdruin or the

great Camaris rode prancing chargers and delivered ensorcelled la-

dies from hideous fates. Stranded in an uncompliant, almost malevo-

lent reality, Simon found that the trees of the forest fringe huddled

close together, branches intertwining like slip-knotted snakes. The

undergrowth itself was an obstacle, an endless humped field of

.

242 Tad Williams

brambles and fallen trunks that lay nearly invisible beneath moss

and moldering leaves.

In those first days, when he occasionally found himself in a clear-

ing and could walk unencumbered for a short while, the sound of his

own footfalls drumming on the loose-packed soil made him feel ex-

posed. He caught himself hurrying across the dells in the slanting

sunlight, praying for the security of the undergrowth again. This

failure of nerve so infuriated him that he forced himself to cross

these clearings slowly. Sometimes he even sang brave songs, listen-

ing to the echo as though the sound of his voice quailing and dying

in the muffling trees was the most natural thing in the world, but

once he had regained the brambles he could seldom remember what

he had sung.

Although memories of his life at the Hayholt still filled his head,

they had become wisps of remembrance that seemed increasingly

distant and unreal, replaced by a growing fog of anger and bitterness

and despair. His home and happiness had been stolen from him. Life

at the Hayholt had been a grand and easeful thing: the people kind,

the accommodations wonderfully comfortable. Now, he crashed

through the tortuous forest hour after bleak hour, awash in misery

and self-pity. He felt his old Simon-self vanishing away, and more

and more of his waking thought revolving around only two things:

moving forward and eating.

At first he had pondered long over whether he should take tr

open roadway for speed and risk discovery, or try and follow it froml

the safety of the forest. The last had seemed the better idea, but he

quickly discovered that the two, road and forest fringe, diverged

widely at certain points, and in the thick tangle of Oldheart it was

often frighteningly difficult to find the road again. He also realized

with painful embarrassment that he did not have the slightest idea of

how to make a fire, something he had never thought about as he

listened to Shem describing droll Mundwode and his bandit fellows

feasting on roast venison at their woodland table. With no torch to

light his way, it seemed that the only possible thing to do was to

follow the road at night, when moonlight permitted it. He would

then sleep by daylight, and use the remaining hours of sun to slog

through the forest.

No torch meant no cook-fire, and this was in some ways the hard-

est blow of all. From time to time he found clutches of speckled eggs

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR243

deposited by the mother grouse in hiding-holes of matted grass.

These provided some nourishment, but it was hard to suck out the

sticky, cold yolks without thinking of the warm, scented glories of

Judith's kitchen, and to reflect bitterly on the mornings when he had

been in such a tearing hurry to see Morgenes or get out to the

tourney field that he had left great chunks of butter and honey-

smeared bread untouched on his plate. Now, suddenly, the thought

of a buttered crust was a dream of riches.

Incapable of hunting, knowing little or nothing about what wild

plants might be eaten without harm, Simon owed his survival to

pilferage from the gardens of local cotsmen. Keeping a wary eye out

for dogs or angry residents, he would swoop down from the shelter

of the forest to rifle the pitifully sparse vegetable patches, scraping

up carrots and onions or hurriedly plucking apples from lower

branchesbut even these meager goods were few and far between.

Often as he walked, the hunger pains were so great that he would

shout out in anger, kicking savagely at the tangling shrubbery. Once

he kicked so hard and screamed so loudly that when he fell down on

his face in the undergrowth he could not get up for a long time. He

lay listening to the echoes of his cries disappear, and thought he

would die.

No, life in the forest was not a tenth so glorious as he had imag-

ined it in those long-ago Hayholt afternoons, crouching in the sta-

bles smelling hay and tack leather, listening to Shem's stories. The

mighty Oldheart was a dark and miserly host, jealous of doling

comforts out to strangers. Hiding in thorny brush to sleep away the

hours of sun, making his damp, shivering way through the darkness

beneath the tree-netted moon, or scuttling furtively through the gar-

den plots in his sagging, too-large cloak, Simon knew he was more

rabbit than rogue.

Although he carried the rolled pages of Morgenes' life of John

wherever he went, clutching them like a baton of office or a priest's

blessed Tree, less and less often as the days passed did he actually

read them. At the thin end of the day, between a pathetic mealif

anyand the frightening, close-leaning darkness of the world out of

doors, he would open the bundle and read a part of a page, but every

day the sense of it seemed harder to grasp. One page, on which the

names of John, Eahlstan the Fisher King, and the dragon Shurakai

244

Tad Williams

were prominent, caught his mayfly attention, but after he had read it

through four times, struggling, he realized that it made no more

sense to him than would the year-lines on a piece of timber. By his

fifth afternoon in the forest he only sat, crying softly, with the pages

spread on his lap- He absently stroked the smooth parchment, as he

had once scratched the kitchen cat uncountable years ago, in a

warm, bright room that smelled of onions and cinnamon. . . .

A week and a day out from the Dragon and Fisherman he passed

within shouting distance of the village of Sistan, a settlement only

slightly larger than Flett. The twin clay chimneys of Sistan's road-

house were smoking, but the road was empty, the sun bright. Simon

peered down a hillside from the clump of silvery birches and the

memory of his last hot meal struck him like a physical blow, weak-

ening his knees so that he almost fell. That long-lost evening, despite

its conclusion, seemed almost like Doctor Morgenes' onetime de-

scription of the pagan paradise of the old Rimmersgarders; eternal

drinking and storytelling; merrymaking without end.

He crept down the hill toward the quiet roadhouse, hands trem-

bling, forming wild plans of stealing a meat pie from an unguarded

windowsill, or slipping in a back door to pillage the kitchen. He was

out of the trees and halfway down the slope when he suddenly real-

ized what he was doing: walking out of the woods at unshadowed

noon, a sickened, feverish animal that had lost its self-protective

instincts. Feeling suddenly naked despite his bramble-studded wool

cloak he froze in place, then whirled and scrambled away, back up

to the swan-slim birch trees. Now even they seemed too exposed;

cursing and sobbing, he clambered past to the thicker shadows,

drawing Oldheart around him like a cloak.

^

Five days west of Sistan the begrimed and famished youth found

himself crouched on another slope, peering down into a forest dell at

a rough split-log hut- He was sureas sure as he could be with his

thoughts so piteously scatted and fragmentedthat another day

without real food or another solitary night spent in the chill, uncar-

ing forest would leave him really and finally deranged: he would

245

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

become completely the beast he more and more frequently felt him-

self to be. His thoughts were turning foul and brutish: food, dark

hiding-places, weary forest tramping, these were his all-consuming

preoccupations. It was increasingly difficult to remember the castle

had it been warm there? Had people spoken to him?and when a

branch had lanced his tunic and scored his ribs the day before he

had only been able to growl and flail at ita beast!

Somebody . . . somebody lives here . . .

The woodsman's cottage had a front path lined with tidy stones.

A stack of halved timbers nestled beneath the eaves against the side

wall. Surely, he reasoned, sniffling quietly, surely somebody here

would take pity on him if he walked to the door and calmly asked

for some food.

I'm so hungry. It's not fair. It's not right! Somebody must feed me

. . . somebody . . .

He went slowly down the hill on stiff legs, his mouth gaping open

and closed. A flagging recollection of the social contract told him

that he must not frighten these rustic people, these suspicious

woodsfolk in their tree-tiered hollow. He held his empty palms be-

fore him as he walked, pale fingers thrust wide apart in a dumb show

of harmlessness.

The cottage was empty, or else the inhabitants were simply not

responding to his sore-knuckled knocking. He walked around the

little hut, dragging his fingertips along the rough wood. The single

window was shuttered with a wide plank. He rapped again, harder;

only hollow echoes answered.

As he sank into a crouch beneath the boarded window, wondering

desperately if he could batter it open with a piece of firewood, a

rustling, snapping noise from the stand of trees before him brought

him back upright so quickly that his vision momentarily narrowed

to a core of light surrounded by blackness; he wavered, feeling sick.

The tree-fence bulged outward as though struck by a huge hand,

then sprang back with a quiver. A moment later the silence was

skewered again, this time by a strange, staccato hiss. The noise was

transmuted into a rapid stream of wordsin no language that Si-

mon knew, but words nonetheless. After a percussive instant the

glade was quiet again.

Simon was stone-struck; he could not move. What should he do?

Perhaps the cottager had been attacked by an animal on his way

246 Tad Williams

home . . . Simon could help him . . . then they would have to

give him food. But how could he help? He could barely walk. And

what if it was a beast, only a beastwhat if he had only imagined

hearing words in that abrupt spatter of sound?

And what if it was something worse? The king's guardsmen with

bright sharp swords, or a starvation-slender, white-haired witch?

Perhaps it was the very Devil himself, with ember-red robes and

nightshade eyes?

Where he found the courage, even the strength, to unbend his

rigid knees and walk forward into the trees Simon could not say. If

he had not felt so ill and so desperate he might not have . . . but he

was ill, and starved, and as dirty and lonely as a Nascadu jackal.

Wrapping his cloak tightly about his chest, holding the furl of

Morgenes* writings before him, he limped toward the copse.

In the trees the sunlight fell unevenly, strained through a sieve of

spring leaves, dotting the forest floor like a scatter of fithing pieces.

The air seemed taut as held breath. For a moment he saw nothing

but dark tree-shapes and slivers of lancing daylight. In one spot the

shafts of light were jigging fitfully; he realized a moment later that

they shone on a struggling figure. As he took a step forward, the

leaves whispered beneath his foot, and with that sound the strug-

gling ceased. The hanging thingit dangled fully a yard off the

spongy groundlifted its head and stared at him. It had the face of

a man, but the merciless topaz eyes of a cat.

Simon leaped back, his heart tipping in his chest; he flung out his

hands, fingers spread wide as though to block out the sight of this

bizarre gallows bird. Whatever or whoever he was, he was not like

any man Simon had seen. Still, there was something achingly famil-

iar about him, as from a half-remembered dreambut so many of

Simon's dreams were now bad ones. What a strange apparition! Al-

though caught in a cruel trap, pinioned at waist and elbows by a

noose of snaky black rope and hanging from a bobbing branch out of

reach of the earth, still this prisoner looked fierce, unhumbled: a

treed fox who would die with his teeth in a hound's throat.

If he was a man, he was a very slender man. His high-cheeked,

thin-boned face reminded Simon for a momenta horrifyingly cold

momentof the black-robed creatures on Thisterborg, but where

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR247

they had been pale, white-skinned as blindfish, this one was golden

brown like polished oak.

Trying to get a better look in the dim light, Simon took a step

forward; the prisoner narrowed his eyes, then skinned back his lips,

baring his teeth in a feline hiss. Something in the way he did it,

something inhuman about the way his quite-human face moved, told

Simon in an instant that this was no man trapped here like a weasel

. . . this was something different. . . .

Simon had moved closer than was prudent, and as he stared into

the flecked-amber eyes the prisoner lashed out, bringing cloth-

booted feet up into the youth's ribcage. Simon, though he had seen

the momentary backswing and anticipated the assault, still received

a painful blow in the side, so swift was the prisoner's movement. He

stumbled back, glowering at his attacker, who scowled horribly in

return.

As he faced the stranger across the span of a man's height, Simon

watched the somehow unnatural muscles draw the mouth open in a

sneer, and the Sithafor Simon had realized suddenly, as if some-

one had told him, that this hanging creature was exactly thatthe

Sitha spat out a single awkward word in Simon's Westerling tongue.

"Coward!"

Simon was so angered by this that he nearly charged forward,

starvation and fear and aching limbs notwithstanding . . . until he

realized that this was just what the Sitha's oddly-accented jibe had

been meant to accomplish. Simon pushed down the pain of his

kicked ribs, folded his hands over his chest, and stared at the

trapped Sitha-man; he had the grim satisfaction of seeing what he

felt sure was a squirm of frustration.

The Fair One, as Rachel had always superstitiously referred to the

race, wore a strange, soft robe and pants of a slithery brown material

only a shade darker than his skin. Belt and ornaments of shiny green

stone contrasted most wonderfully with his hairlavender-blue like

mountain heather, pulled back close against his head by a bone ring,

dangling in a horse-tail behind one ear. He seemed only slightly

shorter, although much thinner, than Simonbut the youth had not

seen himself recently in any reflection but murky forest pools; per-

haps now he, too, looked this scrawny and wild. But even so, still

there were differences, not-quite-definable things: birdlike motions of

the head and neck, an odd fluidity in the pivoting of joints, an aura

248 Tad Williams

of power and control that was discernible even while its possessor

hung like an animal in the crudest of traps. This Sitha, this dream-

haunter, was unlike anything Simon had known. He was terrifying

and thrilling ... he was alien.

"I don't . . . don't want to hurt you," Simon said at last, and

realized he was speaking as though to a child. "I didn't set the trap."

The Sitha continued to regard him with baleful crescent eyes.

What terrible pain he must be hiding, Simon marveled. His arms

are pulled up so far that . . . that I would be screaming . . . if it

were me/

Protruding above the prisoner's left shoulder was a quiver, empty

but for two arrows. Several more arrows and a bow of slim, dark

wood lay strewn on the turf beneath his dangling feet.

"If I try to help you, will you promise not to hurt me?" Simon

asked, forming his words slowly. "I'm very hungry, myself," he

lamely added. The Sitha said nothing, but as Simon took another

step he coiled his legs up before him to kick; the youth retreated.

"Be damned!" Simon shouted. "I only want to help you!" But

why did he? Why let the wolf out of the pit? "You must . . ." he

began, but the rest of his words were snuffed out as a large dark

form came swishing and crackling out of the trees toward them.

"Ah! Here it be, here it be ... !" a deep voice said. A man,

bearded and dirty, waded into the little clearing. His clothes were

heavy and much mended: in his hand he swung an axe.

"Now then, you . . ." he stopped when he saw Simon huddled

against a tree. "Here," he growled, "who be you? What are you

about?"

Simon looked down at the pitted axe-blade. "I'm . . . I'm just a

traveler ... I heard a noise here in the trees . . ." He waved his

hand toward the odd tableau. "I found him here, in ... in this

trap."

"My trap!" the woodsman grinned. "My damned trapand there

he be, too." Turning his back on Simon the man looked the dangling

Sitha over coolly. "I promised I'd stop their sneakin* and spyin' and

sourin' the milk, that I did." He reached out a hand and pushed the

prisoner's shoulder, swinging him helplessly back and forth in a

slow arc. The Sitha hissed, but it was an impotent sound. The

woodsman laughed.

"By the Tree, they got fight in 'em they do. Got fight."

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR249

"What . . . what are you going to do with him?"

"What do you think, boy? What do you think God'd have us do

with sprites an' imps an' devils when we catch 'em? Send 'em back

to hell with my good chopper, that'll tell you."

The prisoner slowly stopped swinging, revolving in a lazy circle at

the end of the black rope like a webbed fly. His eyes were downcast,

his body limp.

"Kill him?" Simon, ill and weak as he was, still felt a cold wash of

shock. He tried to marshal his straggling thoughts. "You're going to

... but you can't! You can't! He's . . . he's a ..."

"What he's not is no natural creature, that's sure! Get away from

here, stranger. You're in my bit o' garden, as it were, an* you got no

call to be. / know what these creatures are a-gettin' up to." The

woodsman contemptuously turned his back on Simon and moved

toward the Sitha, axe raised as though to split timber. This timber,

though, suddenly heaved, became a struggling, kicking, snarling

beast fighting for its life. The cotsman's first blow went awry, graz-

ing the bony cheek and digging a jagged furrow down the arm of the

strange, shiny garment. A ribbon of all too human-looking blood

dribbled down the slender jaw and neck. The man advanced again.

Simon dropped down to his sore knees, looking for something to

stop this ghastly struggle, to halt the man's grunting and cursing,

and the scratchy snarl of the beleaguered prisoner that punished his

ears. Groping, he found the bow, but it was even lighter than it had

looked, as though strung on marsh reed. An instant later his hand

closed on a half-buried rock. He heaved, and it broke free from the

clinging soil- He held it over his head.

"Stop!" he shouted. "Leave him be!" Neither combatant gave him

even a flicker of notice. The woodsman now stood at arm's length,

swiping at his swirling target, landing only glancing blows but con-

tinuing to draw blood. The Sitha's thin chest was heaving like a

bellows; he was weakening quickly.

Simon could not stand the cruel spectacle any longer. Setting free

the howl that had been coiling itself within him through all the

interminable, terrifying days of his exile, he sprang forward, crossing

the tiny clearing in a bound to bring the rock down on the back of

the cotsman's head. A dull smack reverberated through the trees;

the man seemed to go boneless in an instant. He pitched heavily

250 Tad Williams

forward onto his knees and then his face, a surge of red welling up

through his matted hair-

Staring down at the bloody wreckage, Simon felt his insides heave;

he fell to his knees retching, bringing up nothing but a sour strand of

spittle. He pressed his dizzy head against the damp ground and felt

the forest sway and rock about him.

When he was able, he stood and turned to the Sithi-man, who

again dangled quietly in the noose. The snaky tunic was laced with

streamers of blood, and the feral eyes were dimmed, as though some

internal curtain had rolled down to block the light within. As halt-

ingly as a sleepwalker, Simon picked up the fallen axe and traced the

taut rope up from the prisoner to where it wrapped around a high

limb of the treea limb too high to reach. Simon, too numb for fear,

worked the nicked blade-edge against the knot behind the Sitha's

back. The Fair One winced as the noose pulled tighter, but made no

sound.

After a long moment of scraping and rubbing, the slippery knot

parted. The Sitha fell to the ground, legs buckling, and tumbled

forward onto the motionless woodsman. He rolled away from the

mute hulk immediately, as though burned, and began gathering up

his scattered arrows. Holding them like a clutch of long-stemmed

flowers, he picked up his bow in the other hand and paused to stare

at Simon. His cold eyes glinted, stopping the words in Simon's

mouth. For an instant the Sitha, injuries forgotten or ignored, stood

poised and tense as a startled deer; then he was gone, a flash of

brown and green that vanished into the trees, leaving Simon gape-

jawed and deserted.

The spotted sunlight had not finished rippling on the leaves where

he had passed when Simon heard a buzz like an angry insect and felt

a shadow flit across his face. An arrow stood out from a tree trunk

beside him, quivering gradually back into visibility less than an

arm's length from his head. He stared at it dully, wondering when

the next one would strike him. It was a white arrow, shaft and

feathers alike bright as a gull's wing. He waited for its inevitable

successor. None came. That stand of trees was silent and motionless.

After the strangest and most terrible fortnight of his life, and after

a particularly bizarre day, it should not have surprised Simon to

hear a new and unfamiliar voice speaking to him from the darkness

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR251

beyond the trees, a voice that was not the Sitha's, and certainly did

not come from the woodsman, who lay like a felled tree.

"Go ahead to take it," the voice said. "The arrow. Take it. It is

yours."

Simon should not have been surprised, but he was. He dropped

helplessly to the ground and began to crygreat choking sobs of

exhaustion and confusion and total despair-

"Oh, Daughter of the Mountains," the strange new voice said.

"This does not seem good."

17

Binabik

^

WHEN SIMON at last looked up to the source of the new voice, his

tearful eyes widened in surprise. A child was walking toward him.

No, not a child, but a man so small that the top of his black-

haired head would probably not reach much higher than Simon's

navel. His face did have something of the childish about it: the

narrow eyes and wide mouth both stretched toward the cheekbones

in an expression of simple good humor.

"This is not a good place for crying," the stranger said. He turned

from kneeling Simon to briefly survey the fallen cotsman- "It is also

my feeling that it will not accomplish muchat least for this dead

fellow."

Simon wiped his nose on the sleeve of his coarse shirt and hic-

coughed. The stranger had moved toward him to examine the pale

arrow, which stood from the tree trunk near Simon's head like a stiff

ghost-branch.

"You should take this," the little man said, and again his mouth

widened in a froggy smile, baring for an instant a palisade of yellow

teeth.

He was not a dwarf, like the fools and tumblers Simon had seen at

court and in the Main Row of Erchesteralthough big-chested, he

seemed otherwise well-proportioned. His clothes looked much like a

Rimmersman's; jacket and leggings of some thick animal hide

stitched with sinew, a fur collar turned up below his round face. A

large skin bag hung bulging from a shoulder strap, and he held a

walking stick that looked to be carved from some long, slender bone.

"Please excuse my suggestions, but you should be taking this ar-

row. It is a Sithi White Arrow, and it is very precious. It signifies a

debt, and the Sithi are conscientious folk."

"Who ... are you?" Simon asked around another hiccough. He

was wrung out, beaten flat like a shirt pounded dry on a rock. If this

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR253

little man had come out of the trees snarling and waving a knife, he

did not think he could have reacted any differently.

"Me?" the stranger asked, pausing as though giving the question

much thought. "A traveler like yourself. I will be happy to explain

more things at a later time, but now we should go. This fellow," he

indicated the woodsman with a sweep of his stick, "will reliably not

become more alive, but he may have friends or family who will be

unsettled to find him so extremely dead. Please. Take the White

Arrow and come with me."

Mistrustful and wary, Simon nevertheless found himself rising to

his feet. It was too much effort to not trust, for the moment; he no

longer had the strength to stay on guarda part of him wanted only

to lie down and quietly die. He levered the arrow loose from the

tree. The tiny man was already on the march, climbing back up the

hillside above the cottage. The little house crouched as silently and

tidily as if nothing had happened.

"But . . ." Simon gasped as he scrambled up after the stranger,

who moved with surprising quickness, ". . . but what about the

cottage? I am ... I am so hungry . . . and there might be

food . . ."

The small man turned on the hillcrest to stare down at the strug-

gling youth. "I am very shocked!" he said. "First you make him

dead, then you wish to rob his larder. I fear I have fallen in with a

desperate outlaw!" He turned and continued into the close-knit

trees.

The far side of the crest was a long, gradual downslope. Simon's

limping strides finally brought him abreast of the stranger; in a few

moments he had caught his breath.

"Who are you? And where are we going?"

The strange little man did not look up, but kept his eyes moving

from tree to tree, as though looking for some landmark in the unre-

mitting sameness of the deep woods. After twenty silent paces he

turned his eyes up to Simon's and pulled his stretchy smile.

"My name is Binbiniqegabenik, "he said. "but around the cookfire

I am called Binabik. I hope you will honor me by using the shorter

version of friendship."

"I ... I will. Where are you from?" He hiccoughed again.

"I am of the troll-folk of Yiqanuc," Binabik replied. "High

254

Tad Williams

and

Yiqanuc in the snowing and blowing northern mountains

you are?"

He stared suspiciously for a moment before answering. "Simon.

Simon of the ... of Erchester." This was all happening rather

quickly, he thought . . . like a marketplace meeting, but in the

middle of a forest after a bizarre slaying. Holy Usires, did his head

hurt! And his stomach, too. "Where . . . where are we going?"

"To my camp. But first I must find my mount ... or rather, she

must find me. Please, do not be startled."

So saying, Binabik put two fingers in his wide mouth and blew a

long, trilling note. After a moment he did it again. "Remember, do

not be startled or anxious."

Before he could ponder the troll's words there was a crackle like

wildfire in the underbrush. A moment later a huge wolf burst into

the clearing, bounding past a shocked Simon to leap like a shaggy

thunderbolt onto little Binabik, who tumbled end over end beneath

his growling attacker.

"Qantaqa!" The troll's cry was muffled, but there was amusement

in his voice. Master and mount continued to wrestle across the forest

floor. Simon distractedly wondered if the world outside the castle

was always like thiswas the entirety of Osten Ard but a playing

field for monsters and lunatics?

Binabik at last sat up, Qantaqa's great head cradled in his lap. "I

have left her alone all the day, today," he explained. "Wolves have

much affection, and they become easily lonely." Qantaqa grinned

hugely and panted. Much of her girth was heavy gray fur, but still

she was immense.

"Make yourself free," Binabik laughed. "Scratch upon her nose."

Despite the continuing unreality of his situation, Simon did not

yet feel quite ready for that; instead he asked: "I'm sorry . . . but

did you say you had food at your camp, sir?"

The troll clambered to his feet, laughing, and retrieved his stick.

"Not sirBinabik! And as for food: yes. We will eat togetheryou,

I, even Qantaqa. Come along. Being deferential to your weak and

hungry feeling, I will walk and not ride."

Simon and the troll were on the march for some time. Qantaqa

accompanied them for stretches, but more often trotted ahead, dis-

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR255

appearing in a few bounds into the dense undergrowth. Once she

came back licking her muzzle with her long pink tongue.

"Well," Binabik said cheerfully, "one is fed already!"

At last, when it seemed to the aching, dragging Simon that he

could walk no farther, when he lost the thread of Binabik's every

sentence within a couple of words, they reached a little dell, empty

of tree trunks but roofed overhead with a lattice of intertwined

branches. Beside a fallen log lay a ring of blackened stones. Qantaqa,

who had been pacing along beside them, bounded ahead to make a

sniffing circuit of the dingle.

" 'Bhojujik mo qunquc,' as my people say." Binabik made an ex-

pansive gesture around the clearing. " 'If the bears do not eat you,

it is home.' " He led Simon to a log; the youth collapsed, breathing

heavily. The troll looked him up and down with concern. "Oh,"

Binabik said, "you are not going to be crying again, are you?"

"No." Simon smiled weakly. His bones felt cumbersome as dead

stone. "I ... I don't think so. I'm just very hungry and tired. I

promise not to cry."

"Look you. I shall make a fire. Then, I shall produce a supper."

Binabik swiftly gathered a pile of sticks and twigs, hayricking them

in the middle of the ring of stones. "These are spring wood, and

damp," he said, "but luckily that is a matter easily dealt with."

Sliding the skin bag from his shoulder, the troll placed it on the

ground and began to rummage determinedly through it. To Simon,

in his fatigue-bom whimsy, the small squatting figure looked more

than ever like that of a child: Binabik stared into his sack with lips

pursed and eyes narrowed in concentrationa six year old studying

a limping beetle with high seriousness

"Hah!" said the troll at last, "it is found." He pulled from the

sack a smaller sack, about the size of Simon's thumb. Binabik took a

pinch of some powdery substance from it and sprinkled it on the

green wood, then took two pieces of stone from his belt and struck

them together. The spark that leaped down sputtered for a moment,

then a slender curl of yellow smoke spiraled up. A moment later the

wood puffed into flame, and within instants it was a merry, crackling

fire. The pulsing warmth lulled Simon, despite the pangs of his

empty stomach. His head was nodding, nodding . . . But waita

rush of fear swept over himhow could he just fall asleep, all un-

guarded in a stranger's camp! He ought to ... he should . . .

256 Tad Williams

"Sit and be warm, friend Simon." Binabik dusted off his hands as

he stood. "I will return very quickly."

Although a deep unease was fighting to make itself known in the

back of his thoughtwhere was the troll going? To get confeder-

ates? Fellow bandits?still Simon could not muster the effort to

watch Binabik leave. His eyes were again fixed on the wavering

names, the tongues like the petals of some shimmering flower . . .

a fire-poppy quivering in a warm summer wind. . - .

He awakened from a great cloudy emptiness to find the gray

wolf's massive head lying across his thighs. Binabik crouched over

the fire, fussing at some project. Simon felt there was something

slightly wrong about having a wolf in one's lap, but could not find

the proper puppet strings in his mind to do anything about it ...

it didn't seem truly important, anyway.

The next time he woke, Binabik was shooing Quantaqa from his

lap to offer him a large cup of something warm.

"It is cool enough now for drinking," the troll said, and helped

Simon raise the vessel to his lips. The broth was musky and deli-

cious, tangy as the smell of autumn leaves. He drank it all; it seemed

he could feel it flowing directly into his veins, the molten blood of

the forest, warming and filling him with the secret strength of trees.

Binabik gave him a second cupful and he drank that, too. A dense,

leaden clutch of worry at the juncture of his neck and shoulders

melted away, swept aside by the rush of good feelings. A new airi-

ness coursed through him, bringing with it a paradoxical heaviness,

a warm, diffuse drowsiness. As he slipped away he heard his own

cradled heartbeat, muffled though it was in the tickling wool of

exhaustion.

^

Simon was almost certain that when he came to Binabik's camp it

had been at least an hour short of sunset, but when he opened his

eyes again the forest glade was bright with new-smithied morning.

As he blinked he felt the last strands of dream pulling freea

bird . . . ?

A bright-eyed bird in a sun-catching golden collar . . . an old,

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR257

strong bird whose eyes were full of the wisdom of high places and

broad vision . . . from his chitinous claw hung a beautiful, rainbow-

shimmering fish . . .

Simon shivered, pulling his heavy cloak nearer about him. As he

stared up at the overarching trees, their budding spring leaves

picked out by the sun in emerald filigree, he heard a moaning sound

and rolled over on his side to look,

Binabik sat cross-legged beside the firepit, swaying gently from

side to side. Before him an assortment of odd, pale shapes were

spread on a flat rockbones. The troll was making the unusual

noisewas he singing? Simon stared for a moment, but could not

puzzle out what the little man might be doing. What a strange

world!

"Good morning," he said at last. Binabik jumped guiltily.

"Ah! It is friend Simon!" The troll grinned over his shoulder and

quickly swept the objects into his open skin bag, then stood up and

hastened to Simon's side. "How are you now feeling?" he asked,

bending over to place a small, rough hand on Simon's forehead.

"You must have needed a great sleep."

"I did." Simon moved closer to the small fire. "What's that . . .

that smell?"

"A pair of wood pigeons who have stopped to dine with us this

morning," Binabik smiled, pointing out two leaf-wrapped bundles in

the coals at the edge of the campfire. "Keeping their company are

some berries and nuts recently gathered. I would have been waking

you up soon to help entertain them all. They are very good-tasting, I

think. Oh, a moment please." Binabik walked back to his skin bag,

drawing forth two thin packages.

"Here." He handed them across. "Your arrow, and something

else,"that was Morgenes' papers"you had placed them in your

beH, and I feared they would be broken when you were sleeping."

Suspicion flared in Simon's breast. The idea of someone handling

the doctor's writings while he slept made him covetous, distrustful.

He snatched the proffered bundle from the troll's hand and replaced

it in his belt. The little man's cheerful look changed to one of dis-

may. Simon felt ashamedalthough one couldn't be too careful

and took the arrow, which had been wound in thin cloth, more

gently.

"Thank you," he said stiffly. Binabik's expression was still that of

258 Tad Williams

a man whose kindness had been scorned. Guilty and confused, Si-

mon unwrapped the arrow. Although he had not yet had a chance to

study it closely, at the moment he was most concerned with finding

something to do with his hands and eyes.

The arrow was not painted, as Simon had assumed: rather it was

carved from some wood as white as birch bark, and fletched with

snow-white feathers. Only the arrowhead, carved from some milky

blue stone, had any color. Simon hefted it, weighing its surprising

lightness against its amazing flexibility and solidity, and the memory

of the day before came back in a rush. He knew he could never

forget the feline eyes and disturbingly swift movements of the Sitha.

All the stories that Morgenes had told were true.

All along the shaft of the arrow slender whorls, curlicues, and

dots were pressed into the wood with infinite care. "It's all thick

with carvings," Simon mused aloud.

"They are very important things," the troll replied, and shyly

reached out his hand. "Please, if I may?" Simon felt another wash of

guilt and quickly handed him the arrow. Binabik tilted it back and

forth, catching the sunlight and firelight just so. "This is an old-

fellow." He squinted his narrow eyes until the dark pupils disap-

peared altogether. "It has been around for quite some long time.

You are the holder now of a quite-honorable thing, Simon: the

White Arrow is not given in lightness. It seems that this one was

affletched in Tamet'ai, a Sithi stronghold long since gone below the

blue ice east of my homeland."

"How do you know all that?" Simon asked. "Can you read those

letters?"

"Some. And there are things an eye that is trained can see."

Simon took it back, handling it with a good deal more care than

before. "But what should I do with it? You said it was payment for a

debt?"

"No, friend. It is a mark of a debt that is owing. And what you

should be doing is to keep it safe. If it has nothing else to be, it will

be a beautiful thing to look on."

A thin mist still clung to the clearing and forest floor beyond.

Simon propped the arrow point-downward against the log and slid

closer to the fire. Binabik pulled the pigeons from the embers,

pincering with a pair of sticks; he put one bundle down on the warm

rock before Simon's knees.

259

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

"Remove the folded leaves," the troll instructed, "then wait for a

short passing-time so the bird will slightly cool." It was very difficult

to obey the last, but somehow Simon managed.

"How did you get these?" he asked at one point, mouth full and

fingers sticky with grease.

"Later I will show you," the troll replied.

Binabik was picking his teeth with a bowed rib bone. Simon

leaned back against the log and belched contentedly.

"Mother Elysia, that was wonderful." He sighed, feeling for the

first time in a long while that the world was not an entirely hostile

place. "A little food in your stomach changes everything."

"I am glad your cure was so simple for effecting," the troll smiled

around the slender bone.

Simon patted his middle. "I don't care about anything right this

moment." His elbow brushed the arrow, which began to topple. As

he caught it and straightened it a flicker of memory came to him. "I

don't even feel bad anymore about . . . about that man yesterday."

Binabik turned his brown eyes to Simon. Although he continued

to probe his teeth, his forehead creased above the bridge of his nose.

"You do not feel bad about him being dead, or about making him

dead?"

"I don't understand," said Simon. "What do you mean? What's

the difference?"

"There is as much difference as between a big rock and a little,

little bugbut I shall leave the pondering to you."

"But . . ." Simon was confused again. "Well, but ... he was a

bad man."

"Hmmmm ..." Binabik nodded his head, but the gesture car-

ried no suggestion of agreement. "This world is certainly filling itself

with bad men, of that there can be no doubts."

"He would have killed the Sitha-man!"

"That is also a truth."

Simon stared sullenly at the plundered heap of bird bones piled

before him on the rock. "I don't understand. What do you want me

to tell you?"

"Where it is that you are going to." The troll tossed his toothpick

into the fire and stood up. He was so small!

260 Tad Williams

"What?" Simon stared suspiciously as the import of the little

man's words caught up at last.

"I wish to know where you are going, so that perhaps we can be

traveling together for a while." Binabik spoke slowly and patiently,

as though to a beloved but stupid old dog. "I think that perhaps the

sun is too young in the sky for the other questions to be troubled

with. We trolls say: 'Make Philosophy your evening guest, but do

not let her stay the night.* Now, if my question is not of a too-much

inquiring nature, where do you go to?"

Simon rose, knees stiff as unoiled hinges. Again he felt doubt.

Could the little man's curiosity really be as innocent as it seemed?

He had made the mistake of trusting at least once already, with that

damnable monk. But what choice did he have? He did not have to

tell the troll everything, and it was certainly preferable to have a

companion versed in woodcraft. The little man seemed to know just

what to do, and suddenly Simon longed to have someone to rely on

again.

"I am going north," he said, and then took a calculated risk. "To

Naglimund." He watched the troll carefully. "And yourself?"

Binabik was packing his few implements into his shoulder bag.

"Ultimately, I expect to be traveling far north," he replied without

looking up. "It seems that we have a coincidence of paths." Now he

raised his dark eyes. "How strange that you should be traveling

toward the Naglimund, which stronghold's name I have heard much

in recent weeks." His lips quirked in a tiny, secret smile.

"You have?" Simon had picked up the White Arrow, and tried to

look studiously unconcerned as he pondered how to carry it.

"Where?"

"Time there will be for talking as we take to the road." The troll

grinned, a full, friendly yellow grin. "I must call Qantaqa, who is

without doubt spreading horror and despair among the rodents of

this vicinity. Feel yourself welcome to empty your bladder now, so

that we may swiftly walk."

Simon had to hold the White Arrow between clenched teeth as he

followed Binabik's advice.

18

A Net of Stars

BLISTERED, sore-footed, and clothed in rags, Simon nevertheless felt

the pall of despair begin to lift a little. Both mind and body were

badly bruised by mischance, and he had developed a startled eye and

reflexive flinchneither of which escaped the sharp gaze of his new

companionbut the brooding horror had been pushed back a short

way; it had become, for the moment, just another painful half-mem-

ory. The unexpected companionship helped to ease the ache of lost

friends and lost homeat least to the extent that he allowed it. A

large, secret part of his thoughts and feelings he continued to hold

back. He was still suspicious, and also unwilling to invest again and

risk further loss.

As they trekked through the cool, bird-trilling halls of the mom-

ing forest, Binabik explained to Simon that he had come down from

his lofty home of Yiqanuc, as he apparently did once a year, on

"business"a series of errands that carried him to eastern Hemystir

and Erkynland. Simon gathered that it involved some sort of trad-

ing.

"But, oh! my young friend, what disturbances I find this spring-

tide! Your peoples are very upset, very frightened!" Binabik waved

his hands in mock-agitation. "In the outlying provinces the king is

not popular, is he? And they are fearful of him in Hemystir. Else-

where there is anger and there is starving. People are afraid to travel;

the roads are no longer safe. Well," he grinned, "if you wish truth to

be told, the roads never were safe, at least in the areas of isolation

but it is real that there is a change for the worse in the north of

Osten Ard."

Simon was observing how the noon sun had set vertical columns

of light among the tree trunks. "Have you ever traveled to the

South?" he asked at last.

"If by 'South' you mean south of Erkynland, my answering is:

262 Tad Williams

yes, once or twice. But please remember: among my people almost

any leaving of Yiqanuc is 'travel to the South.' "

Simon was not paying very close attention. "Did you travel by

yourself? Did ... did ... did Qantaqa go with you?"

Binabik wrinkled another smile. "No. It was long ago, before my

wolf-friend was born, when I was . . ."

"How did you . . . how did you get this wolf?" Simon inter-

rupted. Binabik gave an exasperated hiss.

"It is a difficult thing answering questions when one is having

continual interruptions with more questions'"

Simon tried to look penitent, but he was feeling the spring as a

bird feels wind in its feathers. "Sorry," he said. "I've been told

before ... by a friend . . . that I ask too many questions."

"It is not 'too many,' " Binabik said, using his stick to push a low-

hanging branch away from their path, "it is 'piled on top of one

and another.' " The troll barked a short laugh. "Now, which do you

want for my answering?"

"Oh, whichever you want. You decide," Simon replied meekly,

then jumped as the troll smacked him lightly on the wrist with his

walking stick.

"It would please me your not being obsequious. That is a trait of

marketplace people who are selling shoddy goods. I am sure to pre-

fer endless, stupid questions to that."

"Ob . . . obseek . . . ?"

"Obsequious. Flattering with oiliness. It is not liked by me. In

Yiqanuc we say: 'Send the man with the oily tongue to go and lick

the snowshoes.'"

"What does that mean?"

"It means that we do not like flatterers. Never mind, then!"

Binabik threw back his head and laughed, black hair swinging, eyes

nearly disappearing as his round cheeks rose toward his brows.

"Never mind! We have wandered as far as the wandering of Lost

Piqipegwandered in our conversing, I mean. No, do not ask any-

thing. We will stop here for a rest, and I will be telling you now

about how I met my friend Qantaqa."

They chose a huge stone, an outcropping of granite thrusting up

from the forest floor like a speckled fist, its upper half painted by a

swath of sunlight. The young man and the troll climbed up to perch

on top. The forest was silent around them; the dust of their passage

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR263

slowly settled. Binabik reached into his bag and produced a stick of

dried meat and a goatskin of thin, sour wine. As Simon chewed, he

kicked off his shoes and wiggled his sore toes in the warming sun.

Binabik looked at the shoes critically.

"We shall have to be finding something else." He poked the tat-

tered, blackened leather. "A man's soul is in peril when his feet are

hurting."

Simon grinned at this thought.

They spent a while in silent contemplation of the surrounding

forest, the living greenery of Oldheart. "Well," said the troll at last,

"the first thing that needs understanding is that my people do not

shun the wolfalthough we are not usually having friendships with

them, either. Trolls and wolves have lived side by side for many

thousands of years, and we are leaving each other alone most times.

"Our neighbors, if so polite a term can be used, the hairy men of

the Rimmersgard, think the wolf a dangerous animal of great

treachery. You are familiar with the men of Rimmersgard?"

"Oh, yes." Simon was pleased to be in the know. "They were all

about in the Hay" he caught himself, "in Erchester. I have talked

to many of them. They wear their beards long," he added, demon-

strating his familiarity.

"Hmmm. Well, since we live in the high mountains, we Qanuc

we trollsand we do not kill these wolves, the Rimmersmen think

we are wolf-demons. In their frost-crazy, blood-feuding brains,"

Binabik put on a look of comical disgust, "it is their thought that

troll-folk are magical and evil. There have been bloody fights, very

many many, between RimmersmenCroohok we call themand

my Qanuc-folk."

"I'm sorry," said Simon, thinking guiltily of the admiration he

had felt for old Duke Isgrimnurwho, on reflection, did not seem

like the type to massacre innocent trolls, testy though he was re-

puted to be.

"Sorry? You should not be. Now myself, I am thinking that men

and womenof Rimmersgard are clumsy, stupid, and suffer with

excessive tallnessbut I do not think they are then evil, or deserving

of being made dead. Ahhh," he sighed, shaking his head like a phi-

losopher-priest in a dead-end tavern, "Rimmersmen are a puzzle-

ment to me."

264 Tad Williams

"But what about the wolves?" Simon asked, then silently chided

himself for interrupting. This time Binabik did not seem to mind.

"My people live on craggy Mintahoq, in the mountains called

Trollfells by the Rimmersmen. We ride the shaggy, nimble-footed

rams, raising them up from tiny lambkins until they have enough

bigness to bear us through the mountain passes. There is nothing,

Simon, that is in this world quite like being a ram-rider of Yiqanuq.

To sit your steed, to be wending the pathways of the Roof of the

World ... to be leaping in a single bound of greatness across

mountain chasms so very deep, so exquisitely deep that if a rock was

dropped by you it would take half a day to strike bottom . . ."

Binabik smiled and squinted in happy reverie. Simon, trying to

visualize such heights, suddenly felt a little dizzy and put his palms

flat on the reassuring stone. He looked down. This perch, at least,

stood only a man's height above the earth.

"Qantaqa was a pup when she was found by me," Binabik contin-

ued at last. "Her mother had been probably killed, or from starva-

tion had died. She snarled at me when I discovered her, a ball of

white far given away in the snow by black nose." He smiled. "Yes,

she is gray now. Wolves, like people are doing, often change their

colors as they grow, I found myself . . . touched by her effort at

defending. I brought her back with me. My master . . ." Binabik

paused. The harsh cry of a jay filled the moment. "My master said if

I would be taking her from the arms of Qinkipa the Snow Maiden,

then I was assuming duties of a parent. My friends had thought that

I was not being sensible. Aha! I said. I will teach this wolf to carry

me just like a ram with horns. It was not believedit was not a

thing that had been done before. So many things are things not done

before . . ."

"Who is your master?" Below them Qantaqa, who had been nap-

ping in a splash of sun, rolled onto her back and kicked, the white

fur of her belly thick as a king's mantle.

"That, Simon-friend, is another tale to tell: not today. To finish,

though, I will say that I did teach Qantaqa to carry me. The teach-

ing was a very . . ."he wrinkled his upper lip"diverting experi-

ence. But there is no regret in me for this. 1 travel often, farther than

my tribesmen. A ram is a wonderful jumping animal, but their

minds are very small. A wolf is clever-clever-clever, and they are

faithful as a debt unpaid. When they take a mate, do you know, they

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR265

are taking only one for their entire lives? Qantaqa is my friend, and I

think her much preferable to any sheep. Yes, Qantaqa? Yes?"

The great gray wolf sat up, her wide yellow eyes fixed on Binabik.

She dipped her head and uttered a short bark.

"You see?" the troll grinned. "Come now, Simon. I think we

should be to marching while this sun stands high." He slid down the

rock, and the boy followed, hopping as he pulled on his ruined

shoes.

As the afternoon passed, and they tramped on through the crowd-

ing trees, Binabik answered questions about his travels, displaying

an enviable familiarity with places Simon had trod only in

daydreams. He spoke of the summer sun revealing the gleaming

inner facets of icy Mintahoq like a jeweler's deft hammer; of the

northernmost regions of this same Aldeorte Forest, a world of white

trees and silence and the tracks of strange animals; of the cold outer

villages of Rimmersgard that had barely heard of the Court of Pres-

ter John, where wild-eyed, bearded men huddled-over fires in the

shadows of high mountains, and even the bravest of them feared the

shapes that walked the howling darkness above. He spun tales of the

hidden gold mines of Hernystir, secret, serpentine tunnels that

wound down into the black earth among the bones of the Grainspog

mountains, and he spoke of the Hemystiri themselves, artful,

dreamy pagans whose gods inhabited the green fields and the sky

and stonesthe Hemystiri, who of all men had known the Sithi

best.

"And the Sithi are real . . ." Simon said quietly, with wonder

and more than a little fear as he remembered. "The doctor was

right."

Binabik cocked an eyebrow. "Of course Sithi are real. Do you

suppose they sit here in the forest wondering if men are real? What a

nonsense! Men are but a recentness compared to themalthough a

recentness that has terribly damaged them."

"It's just that I had never seen one before!"

"You had never seen me or my people, either," Binabik replied.

'*You have never seen Perdruin or Nabban or the Meadow Thrithing

... is this, then, meaning that they do not have existence? What a

fund of superstitious silliness is owned by you Erkynlanders! A man

whose wisdom is true does not sit in waiting for the world to come at

266 Tad Williams

him piece by piece for proving its existence!" The troll stared

straight ahead, eyebrows knotted; Simon was afraid he might have

offended him.

"Well, what does a wise man do, then?" he asked, a little defiantly.

"The wise man is not waiting for the realness of the world to

prove itself to him. How can one be an authority before the experi-

encing of this realness? My master taught meand to me it seems

chash. meaning correctthat you must not defend against the enter-

ing of knowledge."

"I'm sorry, Binabik," Simon kicked at an oak boll and sent it

tumbling, "but I'm just a sculliona kitchen boy. That kind of talk

makes no sense to me."

"Aha!" Quick as a snake, Binabik leaned over and whacked Si-

mon on the ankle with his stick. "That is being an example, exactly!

Aha!" The troll shook his small fist. Qantaqa, thinking herself sum-

moned, came galloping back to dan in circles around the pair, until

they had to halt to avoid tripping over the frisking wolf.

"Hinik, Qantaqa!" Binabik hissed. She bounded off, tail bobbing

like any tame castle hound. "Now, friend Simon," the troll said,

"please forgive my squeaking, but you have made my point." He

held his hand up to stall Simon's question. The youth felt a smile

twitching his lips at the sight of the little troll so rapt and serious.

"First," said Binabik, "scullion boys are not from fish spawned, or

chicken eggs hatched. They can be thinking like the wisest wise folk,

if only they do not fight entering knowledge: if they do not say 'can't'

or 'won't.' Now, it was explaining that I was going to do about this

do you mind?"

Simon was amused. He didn't even mind being struck on the

ankleit hadn't really hurt, anyway. "Please, explain to me."

"Then, let us be considering knowledge like a river of water. If

you are a piece of cloth, how are you finding out more about this

waterif someone dips in your comer and then pulls it out again, or

if you are having yourself thrown in without resistance, so that this

water is flowing all through you, around you, and you are becoming

soaking wet? Well, then?"

The thought of being flung into a cold river made Simon shiver a

little- The sunlight had begun to take a sideways angle: the afternoon

was dwindling. "I suppose ... I suppose getting soaked might

make you know more about water."

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR267

"With exactness!" Binabik was pleased. "With exactness! Thus,

you are seeing my lesson-point." The troll resumed walking.

In truth, Simon had forgotten the original question, but he cared

little. There was something quite charming about this little person

an eamestness beneath the good humor. Simon felt himself to be in

good, although small, hands.

It was hard not to notice that they were now headed in a westerly

direction; as they tramped along the slanting rays of the sun were

nearly full in their eyes. Sometimes a dazzling bolt would find its

way through a chink in the trees and Simon would stumble for a

moment, the forest air suddenly full of glittering pinpricks of light.

He asked Binabik about their westward turn.

"Oh, yes," the troll replied, "we are heading ourselves toward the

Knock. We shall not get there today, though. Soon we will stop to

make some camp and eat."

Simon was glad to hear this, but could not forgo asking another

questionit was, after all, his adventure too. "What is the Knock?"

"Oh, it is not a dangerous thing, Simon. It is the point at which

the southern foothills of Wealdhelm dip down with a saddle-like air,

and one can easily be leaving the thick and not-too-safe forest and

cross to the Wealdhelm Road. As I was saying, though, we shall not

reach it this day. Let us cast around for a camp."

Within a few furlongs they found a site that looked promising: a

cluster of large rocks on a gently sloping bank beside a forest stream.

The water splashed quietly along a course of round, dove-colored

stones, eddying noisily around the twisted branches that had tum-

bled into the stream, disappearing at last into a thicket a few yards

below. A stand of aspens, green coins for leaves, rattled softly in the

beginnings of an evening breeze.

The pair quickly built a fire circle with dry stones found by the

watercourse. Qantaqa seemed fascinated by their project, darting

close at intervals to growl and lightly snap at the rocks as they were

carried laboriously into place. A short while later the troll had a

campfire flickering, pale and spectral in the last potent sunbeams of

the fading afternoon.

"Now, Simon," he said, elbowing the intrusive Qantaqa into an

unwilling crouch, "we find it hunting time. Let us discover some

268 Tad Williams

suitable supper-bird and I will show you clever tricks." He rubbed

his hands together.

"But how will we catch them?" Simon looked at the White Arrow

clutched in his own sweat-grimed paw. "Will we have to throw this

at them?"

Binabik chortled, slapping his hide-suited knee. "You have some

funniness for a scullion boy! No, no, I said I will show you clever

tricks. Do you see, where I live there is only a short season for the

hunting of birds. In the cold winter there are not any birds at all,

except for the cloud-high-flying snow geese who pass our mountain

home on their way to the Northeastern Wastes. But in some of the

southern lands I have traveled, they are hunting and eating only

birds. There I learned some cleverness. I will show you!"

Binabik picked up his walking staff and signed for Simon to fol-

low. Qantaqa leaped up, but the troll waved her off.

"Hinik aia, old friend," he told her kindly. Her ears twitched, and

her gray brow furrowed. "We are going on a mission of stealthiness,

and your big paws will not be a help." The wolf turned and slouched

back to stretch by the campfire. "Not that she cannot be deadly

quiet," the troll told Simon, "but it is when she wants to only."

They crossed the stream and waded into the underbrush. Within a

short time they were into deep woods again; the noise of the water

behind them had faded to a murmur. Binabik squatted down, invit-

ing Simon to join him.

"Now we are going to work," he said. He gave his walking stick a

quick twist; to Simon's surprise it separated into two segments. The

short one, he now saw, was the handle of a knife whose blade had

been concealed within the hollow length of the longer section. The

troll up-ended the longer segment and shook it, and a leather pouch

slid out onto the ground. He then removed a small piece from the

other end; the long segment was now a hollow tube. Simon laughed

with pure delight.

"That's wonderful!" he exclaimed. "Like a conjuring trick."

Binabik nodded sagely. "Surprises in small packagesthe Qanuc

credo, that is!" He took the knife up by its cylindrical bone handle

and poked for a moment in the hollow tube. Another bone tube slid

partway out, and he finished the removal with his fingers. When he

held it up for inspection, Simon could see that this tube had a row of

holes along one side.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR269

"A ... flute?"

"A flute, yes. Of what good is supper without music following?"

Binabik put the instrument aside and poked the leather pouch with

the knife tip. Unfolded, it revealed a pressed clump of carded wool

and yet one more slim tube, this one no longer than a finger.

"Smaller and smaller we go, yes?" The troll twisted this open to

show Simon the contents, tiny needles of bone or ivory, packed close

together. Simon reached out a hand to touch one of the delicate

slivers, but Binabik hastily pulled the container away.

"Please, no," he said. "Be observing." He plucked one of the

needles out with thumb and arched forefinger, holding it up to catch

the dying afternoon light; the dart's sharp tip was smeared with

some black and sticky substance.

"Poison?" breathed Simon. Binabik nodded seriously, but his eyes

showed a certain excitement.

"Of course," he said. "Not all are so poisonedit is not a neces-

sity for the killing of small birds, and it has an unpleasant tending to

ruin the meatbut one cannot stop a bear or other large, angered

creature with only a tiny dart." He slid the envenomed needle down

among its fellows and selected another, unstained dart.

"You've killed a bear with one?" Simon asked, extremely im-

pressed.

"Yes, I have done itbut the wise troll does not stay in the area

while waiting for the bear to know he is dead. The poison is not

finishing its work immediately, you see. Very big are bears."

While talking, Binabik had torn off a piece of the coarse wool and

unraveled the fibers with the point of his knife, fingers working as

quickly and competently as Sarrah the upstairs maid going at the

mending. Before this homely memory could summon any compan-

ions, Simon's attention was captured again as Binabik began wrap-

ping the threads rapidly around the base of the dart, weaving them

over one another until the butt end was a soft globe of wool. When it

was finished he pushed the whole thing, needle and wad, into one

end of the hollow walking stick. He wrapped the other needles in

their pouch, tucked it in his belt, and handed the rest of the disman-

tled staff to Simon.

"Carry these, if you will please," he said. "I do not see many birds

here, although quite often they are emerging now for feeding on the

insects. It is perhaps we shall have to be settling for a squirrelnot

270 Tad Williams

that they are not tasting good," he hastened to explain as they

stepped over a fallen tree, "but there is a certain more delicate touch

and experience in the hunting of small birds. When the dart hits,

you will be understanding. I think it is their flying that touches me

so, and how quickly their tiny hearts are beating."

Later, in the leaf-whisper of the spring evening, as Simon and the

little troll lazed by the fire digesting their mealtwo pigeons and a

fat squirrelSimon thought on what Binabik had said. It was

strange to realize how little you understood someone that you had

grown to like. How could the troll feel such affection toward some-

thing he was going to kill?

/ certainly don't feel that way about that bloody woodsman, he

thought. He probably would have killed me as quickly as he would

have killed the Sitha-man.

But would he have? Would he have taken the axe to Simon?

Maybe not: he had thought the Sitha a demon. He had turned his

back on Simon, something he would not have done had he feared

him.

/ wonder if he had a wife? Simon suddenly thought. Did he have

children? But he was a wicked man! Still, bad men can have children

King Ellas has a daughter. Would she feel bad if her father died? I

certainly wouldn';. And I don 'tfeel bad that the woodsman is dead

but I would feel sad for his family if they found him dead in the forest

that way. I hope he didn 't have any family, that he was alone, that he

lived all alone in the forest by himself . . . alone in the forest. . . .

Simon started upright, full of fear. He had nearly drifted off, alone

by himself and helpless . . . but no. There was Binabik sitting back

against the bank, humming to himself. Simon felt suddenly very

grateful for the little man's presence.

"Thank you ... for the supper, Binabik."

The troll turned to look at him, an indolent smile tugging at the

corners of his mouth. "It is happily given. Now you have seen what

the southern blow-darts can do, perhaps you would like to learn

their using yourself?"

"Certainly!"

"Very good. Then I will be showing you tomorrowperhaps then

you can be hunting our supper, hmm?"

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR271

"How long . . ." Simon found a twig and stirred the embers,

"how long will we be traveling together?"

The troll closed his eyes and leaned back, scratching his head

through his thick black hair. "Oh, a while at least, I am thinking.

You are going to Naglimund, correct? Well, I have sureness I will

travel at least the great pan of the way there. Is that a fair thing?"

"Yes! . . . ummm, yes." Simon felt much better. He, too, leaned

back, wiggling his unshod toes before the coals.

"However," Binabik said beside him, "I am still not understanding

why you are wishing to go there. I am hearing reports that the

Naglimund stronghold is being garrisoned for war. I am hearing

rumors that Josua the princewhose disappearing became known

even in the remote places of my travelsmay be hiding there to

make war on his brother the king. Do you not know these sayings?

Why, if I may so presume, are you going there?"

Simon's moment of nonchalance evaporated. He's just small, he

chided himself, not stupid/ He forced himself to breathe deeply sev-

eral times before answering. "I don't know much about these things,

Binabik. My parents are dead, and . . . and I have a friend at Nag-

limund ... a harper." All true, more or lessbut convincing?

"Hmmmm." Binabik had not opened his eyes. "There are perhaps

better destinations than a fortress in caparison for a sieging. Still,

you show quite the bravery for setting out alone, although, 'Brave

and Foolish often live in the same cave,* as we say. Perhaps if your

destination proves not likable to you, you may come and be living

with we Qanuc. It is a great, towering troll you would be!" Binabik

laughed, a high, silly giggle like a scolding squirrel. Simon, despite a

certain rawness of nerves, could not help but join in.

The fire had burned down to a dull glow, and the surrounding

forest was an indeterminate, undistinguished clump of darkness. Si-

mon had pulled his cloak tightly about him. Binabik was absently

running his fingers across the holes of his flute as he stared up into

the velvety patch of sky visible through a gap in the trees.

"Look!" he said, extending his instrument to point up into the

night. "Do you see?"

Simon tilted his head closer to the little man's. Nothing was in

view above but a thin train of stars. "I don't see anything."

"Don't you see the Net?"

272 Tad Williams

"What net?"

Binabik looked strangely at him. "Are they teaching you nothing

in that boxy castle? Mezumiiru's Net."

"Who's that?"

"Aha." Binabik let his head fall back. "The stars. That drift that

you are seeing above you there: it is Mezumiiru 's Net. They say that

she spreads it to catch her husband Isiki, who has run away. We

Qanuc call her Sedda, the Dark Mother."

Simon stared up at the dim points; it looked as though the thick

black fabric separating Osten Ard from some world of light was

wearing thin. If he squinted he could make out a certain fan shape to

the arrangement.

"They're so faint."

"The sky is not clear, you are right. It is said that Mezumiiru

prefers it that way, that otherwise the bright light that the jewels of

her net are making warns Isiki away. Still, there are often cloudy

nights, and she is not catching him yet . . ."

Simon squinted. "Mezza . . . Mezo . . ."

"Mezumiiru. Mezumiiru the Moon Woman."

"But you said that your people call her ... Sedda?"

"That is right. She is the mother of all, as the Qanuc believe."

Simon thought for a moment. "Then why do you call that," he

pointed up" 'Mezumiiru's Net.' Why not 'Sedda's Net9?"

Binabik smiled and lifted his eyebrows. "A good question. My

people do call it thator, actually, they are saying 'Sedda's Blan-

ket. ' I travel more, however, and am learning other names, and, after

all is said, it is the Sithi who were here first. It is the Sithi who were

long ago naming all the stars."

The troll sat for a moment, staring with Simon up at the black

roof of the world. "I know it," he said suddenly. "I will go to singing

you the song of Seddaor a little part, perhaps. It is song of great

length, after all. Should I assay this singing?"

"Yes!" Simon snuggled himself even deeper in his cloak. "Sing,

please!"

Qantaqa, who had been snoring softly across the troll's legs, now

woke up, raising her head to look this way and that, giving a low

growl. Binabik, too, stared around, narrowing his eyes as he tried to

pierce the gloom outside the campfire. A moment later Qantaqa,

apparently satisfied that all was well, poked Binabik into a more

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR273

pleasing configuration with her huge head, then settled back down

and closed her eyes. Binabik patted her, took up his flute, and blew

several preparatory notes.

"Be understanding," he said, "that this can only be a shortness of

the whole song. I will be explaining things. Sedda's husband, by the

Sithi named Isiki, my people are calling Kikkasut He is the Lord of

all Birds . . ."

Solemnly, the troll began to chant in a high-pitched voice

strangely tuneful, like wind in a high place. He paused at the end of

each line to pipe skirling notes on his flute.

"'Water is flowing

By Tohuq's cave

Shining sky-cave

Sedda is spinning

Sky-lord's dark daughter

Pale, black-haired Sedda.

Bird-king is flying

On the star path

Gleaming bright path

Now he sees Sedda

Kikkasut sees her

Vows she'll be his.

'Give me your daughter.

Your daughter who spins.

Spins slender thread.'

Kikkasut calls then.

Til clothe her finely

All in bright feathers!'

Tohuq he listens

Hears these fine words

Rich bird-king's words

Thinks of the honor

Sedda he'll give up

Old, greedy Tohuq."

274

Tad Williams

"So," Binabik explained in his speaking voice, "old Tohuq the

sky-lord is selling his daughter to Kikkasut for a beautiful cape of

feathers, which he will use to make the clouds. Sedda is then going

with her new husband to his country beyond the mountains, where

she is becoming the Queen of Birds. But the marriage has not much

happiness. Soon Kikkasut, he begins to ignore her, coming home

only to eat and curse at Sedda." The troll laughed quietly, wiping

the end of his flute on his fur collar. "Oh, Simon, this is always being

such a length of story . . . Well, Sedda goes to a wise woman, who

tells that she could gain back Kikkasufs wandering heart if she will

be giving him children.

"With a charm the wise woman has given, made from bones and

mockfoil and black snow, Sedda is able to then conceive, and she

gives birth to nine children. Kikkasut is bearing, and sends word

that he is coming to take them from her, so that it is properly raised

as birds they will be, and not by Sedda raised as useless moon-

children.

"When she is hearing this, Sedda takes the two most young and

hides them. Kikkasut comes for taking away the others, and he asks

of her the happenstances of the missing two. Sedda tells him they

had become sick and dead. He goes away from her, and she curses

him."

Again he sang.

"Kikkasut winging

Sedda she weeps

Weeps for her lost

Her children all taken

But for the hidden pair

Lingit and Yana.

Sky-lord's grandchildren

Moon-woman's twins

Secret and pale

Yana and Lingit

Hid from their father

Deathless she'll keep them ..."

"You are seeing," Binabik interrupted himself, "Sedda did not

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR275

want her children to have mortalness and be dying, as the birds and

the beasts of the fields. They were her all and onlyness . . .

"Sedda is mourning

Lone and betrayed

Vengeance she plots

Takes her bright jewels

Kikkasut's love gift

Weaves them together.

Mountain-top lofty

Dark Sedda climbs

Blanket new-woven

She spreads on night's sky

A trap for her husband

Thief of her children ..."

Binabik trilled a melody for a while, wagging his head slowly

from side to side. At last he put the flute down. "It is a song of

strenuous length, Simon, but it speaks of most important things. It

goes on to tell of the children Lingit and Yana, and their choosing

between the Death of the Moon and the Death of the Birdthe

moon, you are seeing, dies, but then has return as itself. The birds

die, but leave their egged young to survive them. Yana, we trolls

think, chose the way of the Moon-death, and was being the matri-

archa word meaning grandmotherthe matriarch of the Sithi.

The mortals, myself and yourself, Simon-friend, are of the descent of

Lingit. But it is a long, very long song . . . would you like to be

hearing more some time?"

Simon made no reply. The song of the moon and the gentle brush

of night's feathered wing had sent him swiftly down to sleep.

19

The Blood of

Saint Hoderund

^

IT SEEMED that every time Simon opened his mouth to speak, or

even to breathe deeply, it was immediately filled with leaves. No

matter how often he bobbed and ducked, he could not avoid the

branches that seemed to grab for his face like the greedy hands of

children.

"Binabik!" he wailed, "why can't we go back to the road? I'm

being torn to pieces!"

"Do not complain so much. We will soon be returning toward the

road."

It was infuriating to watch the tiny troll threading his way be-

tween the tangling twigs and branches. Easy for him to say "don't

complain!" The denser the forest got the more slippery Binabik

seemed to become, slithering gracefully through the thick, clutching

underbrush while Simon crashed on behind. Even Qantaqa bounded

lightly along, leaving barely a ripple in the foliage behind her. Simon

felt as though half of Oldheart must be clinging to him in the form

of broken twigs and scratching thorns.

"But why are we doing this? Surely it wouldn't take any longer to

follow the road around the edge of the forest than it's taking me to

burrow through it inch by inch!?**

Binabik whistled for the wolf, who was momentarily out of sight.

She soon loped back into view, and as the troll waited for Simon to

catch up he ruffled the thick collar of fur around her neck.

"You are most correct, Simon,'* he said as the youth dragged up.

"It is just as good time we might be making the longer way about.

But," he held up a stubby, admonitory finger, "there are other con-

siderations."

Simon knew he was supposed to ask. He didn't, but stood panting

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR277

beside the small man and inspected the most recent of his lacera-

tions. When the troll realized Simon would not rise to the bait, he

smiled.

" 'Why?', you are asking curiously? What 'considerations'? The

answer is being all around, up every tree and beneath all rocks. Feel!

Smell!"

Simon stared miserably around him. All he could see were trees.

And brambles. And even more trees. He groaned.

"No, no, is it no senses you have left at all?" Binabik cried- "What

manner of teachings did you have in that lumpish stone anthill, that

. . . castle!?"

Simon looked up, "I never said I lived in a castle."

"It is having great obviousness in all your actions." Binabik

turned quickly around to face the barely-visible deer trail they had

been following. "You see," he said in a dramatic voice, "the land is a

book that you should be reading. Every small thing,"a cocky grin

"is having a story to tell. Trees, leafs, mosses and stones, all have

written on them things of wonderful interest . ..."

"Oh, Elysia, no," Simon moaned and sank to the ground, drop-

ping his head forward to rest on his knees. "Please don't read me the

book of the forest right this moment, Binabik. My feet ache and my

head hurts."

Binabik leaned forward until his round face was inches from

Simon's. After a moment's scrutiny of the youth's bramble-matted

hair the troll straightened up again-

"I suppose we may quietly rest," he said, trying to hide his disap-

pointment. "I will tell you of these things in a later moment."

"Thank you," Simon mumbled into his knees.

Simon avoided the task of hunting for supper that night by the

simple expedient of falling asleep the moment they made camp.

Binabik only shrugged, took a long draught from his water bag and

a similar one from his wineskin, then made a short walking tour of

the area, Qantaqa sniffing sentry at his side. After an undistin-

guished but filling meal of dried meat, he cast the knucklebones to

the accompaniment of Simon's deep breathing. On the first pass he

turned up Wingless Bird, Fish-Spear, and The Shadowed Path. Un-

settled, he closed his eyes and hummed a tuneless tune for a while as

the sound of night-insects slowly rose about him. When he threw

278 Tad Williams

again, the first two had changed to Torch at the Cave-Mouth and

Balking Ram, but The Shadowed Path turned up again, the bones

propped against each other like the leavings of some fastidious carni-

vore. Not the sort to follow the bones to hasty decisionshis master

had taught him too wellBinabik nonetheless slept, when he finally

could, with his staff and bag cradled close.

^

When Simon awakened, the troll presented him with a satisfying

meal of roasted eggsquail, he saidsome berries, and even the

pale orange buds of a flowering tree, which proved quite edible and

rather sweet in an odd, chewy way. The morning's walking also

went considerably easier then the previous day's: the country was

gradually becoming more open, the trees more distantly spaced.

The troll had been rather quiet all morning. Simon felt sure that

his disinterest in Binabik's woodlore was the reason. As they were

coming down a long, gentle slope, the sun high in its morning climb,

he felt driven to say something.

"Binabik, do you want to tell me about the book of the forest

today?"

His companion smiled, but it was a smaller, tighter grin than

Simon was used to seeing. "Of course, friend Simon, but I am afraid

I have given you a wrong thinking. You see, when I am speaking of

the land as a book, I am not suggesting you should be reading it to

improve your spiritual well-feeling, like a religious tomealthough

paying attention to your surroundings for that reason is certainly

possible. No, I am speaking of it more as a book of physic, some-

thing one learns for the sake of health."

It is truly amazing, Simon thought, how easy it is for this little

fallow to confuse me. And without trying/

Aloud, he said, "Health? Book of physic?"

Binabik's face took on a sudden look of seriousness. "For your

living or dying, Simon. You are not in your home, now. You are not

in my home, although I am undoubtedly being an easier guest than

you here. Even the Sithi, for all the ages they have watched the sun

as it is rolling around and around the skies, even they do not claim

Aldheorte as theirs." Binabik stopped, and laid his hand on Simon's

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR279

wrist, then squeezed. "This place where we stand, this great forest, is

the oldest place. That is why it is called, as your people say, Aldhe-

orte; it is always the old heart of Osten Ard. Even these trees of

younger age," he poked with his stick on all sides, "were pitting

themselves against flooding, wind, and fire before your great King

John was first drawing baby-breath on the Warinsten Island."

Simon looked around, blinking,

"Others," Binabik continued, "others there are, some that / have

seen, whose roots are growing into the very rock of Time; older they

are than all the kingdoms of Man and Sithi that were thrown up in

glory and were then crumbling in obscurity."

Binabik squeezed his wrist again, and Simon, looking down the

slope into the vast bowl of trees, felt suddenly small: infinitesimal,

like an insect crawling up the sheer side of a cloud-lancing moun-

tain.

"Why . . . why are you saying these things to me?" he asked at

last, sucking breath and fighting back something that felt like tears.

"Because," said Binabik, reaching up and patting his arm, "be-

cause you must not think that the forest, the wide world, is anything

like the alleyways and such of Erchester. You must watch, and you

must be thinking and thinking."

A moment later the troll was off again. Simon stumbled after him.

What had brought all this on? Now the crowding trees seemed a

hostile, whispering throng. He felt like he had been slapped.

"Wait!" he called. "Thinking about what?" But Binabik did not

slow down or turn.

"Come now," he called over his shoulder. His voice was even but

curt. "We must be making better time. With luck we will reach the

Knock before darkness is falling." He whistled for Qantaqa. "Please,

Simon," he said.

And those were his last words for the morning.

^

"There!" Binabik finally broke his silence. The pair stood atop a

ridge, the treetops a humped blanket of green below. "The Knock."

Two more strands of trees were stair-stepped below them, and

beyond these a sloping ocean of grass stretched out to the hills,

280 Tad Williams

which stood profiled by the afternoon sun. "That is Wealdhelm, or

at least its foothills." The troll pointed with his staff. The shadowed,

silhouetted hills, rounded like the backs of sleeping animals, seemed

only a stone's toss away across the expanse of green.

"How far are they ... the hills?" Simon asked. "And how did

we get so high up? I don't remember climbing."

"Climbing we did not do, Simon. The Knock is a dipping-down

place, sunken low like someone has been pushing at it. If you could

be looking backward," he waved back up the ridge, "you would see

that where we now stand, we are a little lower than the Erchester

Plain. And, to give your second question answering, the hills are

being quite some far ways, but your sight is deceiving you to make

them close. In truth, we had better be at climbing if we wish to make

my stopping-place with sun still on us."

The troll trotted a few paces along the ridge. "Simon," he said,

and as he turned the boy could see some of the tightness had left his

jaw and mouth, "I must tell you that even though those Wealdhelm

Hills are babies only compared to my Mintahoq, still to be near high

places again will be ... like wine."

Suddenly childlike again, Simon thought, watching Binabik's

short legs carrying him rapidly down the slope between the trees

. . . No, he thought then, not childlike, that's just the size, but

young, very young.

How old is he, anyway?

The troll was in fact becoming smaller and smaller even as he

watched. Simon cursed mildly and hurried after him.

They went fairly quickly down the broad and well-forested ridges,

even though actual climbing was necessary in some places. Simon

was not at all surprised by the dexterity which Binabik could exer-

ciseleaping softly as a feather, kicking up less dust than a squirrel,

showing a sureness of foot that Simon was sure the rams of Qanuc

themselves would not scorn. Binabik's nimbleness did not surprise

him, but his own did. He was recovering a little from his earlier

deprivations, it seemed, and a few good meals had gone far toward

restoring the Simon who had once been known around the Hayholt

as "the ghost-boy,"the fearless scaler-of-towers and tumbler-off-

of-walls. While no match for his mountain-bom companion, he nev-

ertheless felt he made a good account of himself. It was Qantaqa

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR281

who had a few problems, not because she was not surefooted, but

instead because of the few steep downward climbschildishly easy

with handholdsthat were too far to jump. Faced with these situa-

tions she growled a little, sounding more annoyed than upset, and

trotted off to find some longer way down, rejoining them usually

within a short time.

When they finally found a winding deer track down the last hum-

mock, the afternoon sun had fallen below the middle of the sky,

warm on their necks and bright in their faces, A tepid breeze rifned

the leaves but failed to dry the sweat on their brows. Simon's cloak,

tied around his waist, made him as middle-heavy as if he had eaten a

large meal.

To his surprise, when they at last reached the upper slopes of the

meadowthe beginnings of the KnockBinabik elected to bear

northeast, hugging the line of the forest, rather than striking out

directly across the whispering, gently undulating ocean of grass.

"But the Wealdhelm Road is on the other side of the hills!" Simon

said. "It would be so much faster to ..."

Binabik held up a stubby paw, and Simon lapsed into sullen si-

lence. "There is faster, Simon-friend, and then there is being ./aster,"

he said, and the cheerful knowingness of his tone almostbut not

quiteincited Simon to say something mocking and childish, but

temporarily satisfying. When he had carefully shut his already

opened mouth, Binabik continued. "Do you see, I thought it might

be nicebeaniceness? . . . a nicety?to take some respite tonight

in a place where you may be sleeping in a bed, and eating at a table.

What are you thinking about that, hmmm?"

All his resentment boiled away at that, like a steam from beneath

a raised pot lid. "A bed? Are we going to an inn?" Recalling Shem's

story of the Pookah and the Three Wishes, Simon knew how a

person felt seeing his first wish made real . . . until he abruptly

remembered the Erkynguard, and the hanged thief.

"Not an inn." Binabik laughed at Simon's eagerness. "But just as

good it isno, it is a better thing. It is a place where you are being

fed, and rested, and no one is asking who you are or where you come

from." He pointed out across the Knock, toward where the far side

of the forest bowed back around until its perimeter at last ended at

the base of the Wealdhelm's foothills. "Across there, it is, although it

cannot be seen from where we are standing. Come now."

282 Tad Williams

But why can't we walk straight down across the Knock? Simon

wondered. It's as though Binabik doesn't want to be so out in the

open, so . . . exposed.

The troll had indeed taken the northeasterly path, skirting the

wide meadow to travel in Aldheorte's shadow.

And what did he mean about a place where no one asks . . .

whatever all that was . . . ? Is he hiding, too?

"Slow down, Binabik!" he called. At intervals Qantaqa's white

rump bobbed up from the grass, like a seagull floating on the choppy

Kynslagh. "Slow down!" he called again, hurrying now. The wind

caught at his words and gently carried them away up the rippling

slope behind him.

When Simon had drawn abreast of him at last, the sun on both of

their backs, Binabik reached up and patted his elbow.

"Earlier I was being very sharp, very abrupt with you. It was not

my place to so speak. Apologies." He squinted up at the youth, then

turned his eyes ahead to where Qantaqa's tail was waving above the

swaying grass, now here, now there, the banner of a tiny but swiftly

moving army.

"There is nothing . . ." Simon began, but Binabik interrupted.

"Please, please, friend Simon," he said, a note of embarrassment

clear in his voice, "it was not being my place. Say no more." He

lifted both hands up by his ears and waggled them in a strange

gesture. "Rather, let me tell you something of where we goSaint

Hoderund's of the Knock."

"What is that?"

"It is the place we will stay. Many times I have been there myself.

It is a retreating placea 'monastery' as you Aedonites say. They

are kind to travelers."

This was enough for Simon. Immediately visions of long, high

halls, roasting meat, and clean pallets swarmed through his heada

delirium of comforts. He began to walk faster, accelerating almost to

a trot.

"Running is not needed," Binabik admonished him. "It will be

waiting there still, regardless." He cast a look back at the sun, still

several hours above the western horizon. "Do you want me to tell

you of Saint Hoderund's? Or are you knowing already?"

"Tell me," Simon replied. "I know about such places. Someone I

know stayed at the abbey in Stanshire once."

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR283

"Well, this is an abbey of speciamess. It has a history."

Simon raised his eyebrows, willing to listen.

"A song there is," Binabik said, "the Lay of Saint Hoderund. It is

much more popular in the south than it is in the northnorth, by

which I am saying Rimmersgard, not Yiqanuc my homeand it is

obvious why. Are you knowing anything about the battle of Ach

Samrath?"

"That's where the northerners, the Rimmersmen, beat the

Hemystirmen and the Sithi."

"Oho? Then it was some educating you received after all? Yes,

Simon-friend, it was Ach Samrath that saw the Sithi and Hemystir

armies driven from the field by Fingil Redhand. But there were

other, earlier battles, and one of them was here." He spread his hand

to encompass the waving field beside them. "This land was differ-

ently named, then. The Sithi, who were, I suppose, those who knew

it best, called it Ereb IriguWestern Gate, that means."

"Who named it the Knock? It's a funny name."

"I do not know with certainty. Myself, I am thinking that the

Rimmersmen's name for the battle is the root. This place they called

Du Knokkegard the Boneyard."

Simon looked back across the rustling grass, watching as row

after row bowed in turn beneath the footsteps of the wind. "Bone-

yard?" he asked, and a chill of premonition ran through him.

The wind is always moving out here, he thought. Restlesslike it's

looking for something lost . . .

"Boneyard, yes. There were many underestimations made on both

sides for that battle. These grasses are growing above the graves of

many thousands of men."

Thousands, like the Itch-yard. Another city of the dead beneath

the feet of the living. Do they know? he suddenly wondered. Do they

hear us and hate us for . . . for being in the sun? Or are they hap-

pier being through with it all?

I remember when Shem and Ruben had to put down old Rim the

plow horse. Just before Ruben and the Bear's mallet had fallen, Rim

had looked up at Simoneyes mild but knowing, Simon had

thought. Knowing, and yet not caring.

Did King John feel that way at last, old as he was? Ready to go to

sleep, like old Rim?

"And it is a song any harper south of the Frostmarch will sing,"

284 Tad Williams

Binabik said. Simon shook his head and tried to concentrate, but the

sighing of the grass, the drawn whisper of wind, was loud in his ears.

"I, and you may be thanking me for it, will sing no song," Binabik

continued, "but about Saint Hoderund I should explain, since it is to

his house, as it were, we are going."

Boy, troll, and wolf reached the easternmost end of the Knock

and turned again, left sides to the sun. As they waded through the

high grass Binabik pulled off his jacket of hide and knotted the

sleeves about his waist. The shirt that he wore beneath was white

wool, loose-woven and baggy.

"Hoderund," he began, "was a Rimmersman by birth who, after

many experiences, became converted to the Aedonite religion. Even-

tually he was by the church made a priest.

"As it is said, no single stitch is interesting until the cloak has

fallen apart. We would not have a care what Hoderund did, I am

quite sure, had not King Fingil Redhand and his Rimmersmen

crossed the Greenwade River and for the first time moved them-

selves into the lands of the Sithi.

"This, as with most tales of importance, is too long for describing

in an hour of walking. I will avoid those explainings and tell this: the

Northmen had driven all before them, winning for themselves sev-

eral battles in their southern movement. The Hemystiri, under their

Prince Sinnach, decided to meet the Rimmersmen here," Binabik

again waved an all encompassing hand across the breadth of the

sun-tipped prairie, "to put a stop to their onslaught for all and once.

"All people and Sithi were fleeing from the Knock, fearing to be

crushed between two armiesall were fleeing but Hoderund. Battle,

it is seeming, draws priests like it does flies, and Hoderund it drew.

He went to Fingil Redhand in his tent and then was begging that

king to withdraw, so by sparing the thousands of lives that would be

lost. He preached, in hisif I may saysilliness and bravery to

Fingil, telling him of the words ofUsires Aedon to take your enemy

to breast and make him brother.

"Fingil, it is not surprising, thought him a madman, and was

much disgusted to be hearing such words from a fellow Rim-

mersman . . . Oho, is that smoke?"

Catching Simon by surprise with the change of subjectBinabik's

narrative had lulled him into a sort of sunstruck, walking dream

the troll pointed up the far side of the Knock. Indeed, from behind a

285

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

series of gentle hills, the farthest of which looked to bear the marks

of cultivation, a thin tendril of smoke was rising. "Supper, I am

thinking," Binabik grinned. Simon's mouth fell open in anticipatory

longing. This time the troll quickened his steps as well. They turned

back toward the sun as the forest's dark edge curved around.

"As told," the troll resumed, "Fingil was finding Hoderund's new

Aedonite ideas most offensive. He commanded the priest be exe-

cuted, but a merciful soldier instead let him go.

"But go away Hoderund did not do. When the two armies met at

last, he rushed out onto the battlefield, between directly the Hemys-

tiri and Rimmersgarders, brandishing his Tree and calling down on

to them all the peace of Usires God. Caught between two angry

pagan armies, he was quickly killed very dead.

"So," Binabik waved his stick, beating down a high tussock of

grass, "a story whose philosophy is difficult, hmmm? At least for we

Qanuc, who prefer both being wh&tyou call pagan, and being what /

call alive. The Lector in Nabban, however, called Hoderund a mar-

tyr, and in the early days of Erkynland named this place a church

and abbey for the Order Hoderundian."

"Was it a terrible battle?" Simon asked.

"The Rimmersgard men called this place Boneyard. The later

battle at Ach Samrath was perhaps bloodier, but there was treachery

there. Here at the Knock it was breast to breast, sword on sword,

and blood running like the streams of first thaw."

The sun, sliding low in the sky, beat full in their faces. The after-

noon breeze, which had sprung up in earnest, bent the long grasses

and tossed the hovering insects so that they danced in the air, tiny

flashes of golden light. Qantaqa came charging back through the

field, obliterating in her approach the sawing, hissing music of stem

on stem. As they began to trudge up a long incline she circled them,

waggling her wide head in the air and yipping excitedly. Simon

shielded his eyes, but could see nothing beyond the rise but the

treetops of the forest's edge. He turned to ask Binabik if they were

almost there, but the troll was staring down as he walked, brows

knit in concentration, paying no heed to Simon or the capering wolf.

After some time had passed in silence, sullied only by the swish of

their passage through the heavy grass and an occasional agitated

bark from Qantaqa, Simon's empty stomach steeled him to ask

286 Tad Williams

again He had no sooner opened his mouth when Bmabik astonished

him by breaking into high, keening song

"Ai-Ereb Ingu

Ka'ai shikisi aruya'a

Shishel, shishel burusa'eya

Pikuuru n'dai-tu."

As Simon climbed that light-soaked, wind-nppled hill, the words

and the strange tune seemed a lament of birds, a desolate call from

the high, lonely, unforgiving spaces of the air

"A Sithi song " Bmabik gave Simon an odd, shy look "I am not

singing it well It is about this place, where the first Sithi died at the

hands of Man, where blood was first spilled by the warring of men

on the lands of the Sithi " As he finished speaking he flapped a hand

at Qantaqa, who was bumping his leg with her broad muzzle

"ffimk aid!" he told her "She is smelling people now, and food

cooking," he muttered apologetically

"What did the song say9" Simon asked "The words, I mean "

The strangeness still chilled him, but at the same moment it re-

minded him how big the world truly was, and how little he had seen

even in the busy Hayholt. Small, small, small he felt, smaller than

the little troll climbing beside him

"I doubt, Simon, whether the Sithi words can truly be made for

singing in mortal languageswhether their thought is being prop-

erly passed on, do you see9 Even worse, it is not the language of my

birthplace that we are speaking, you and Ibut I can try "

They strode on some moments longer Qantaqa had grown bored

at last, or had thought better of sharing her lupine enthusiasms with

these cloddish humans, and had disappeared over the top of the rise

"This, I am thinking, is near in meaning," Bmabik said at last,

and then chanted, rather than sang.

"At the Gate of the West

Between the sun's eye and the hearts

Of the ancestors

Falls a tear

Track of light, track of earthward-falling light

Touches iron and becomes smoke"

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR287

Bmabik laughed self-consciously "Do you see, in the woodcrafty

hands of a troll, the song of air is becoming words of lumpish

stone "

"No," Simon said, "I don't understand it, exactlybut it

makes mefeel something . . "

"That is then good," Bmabik smiled, "but no words of mine can

be matching the Sithi's own songs, especially this one. It is one of

the longest, I am told, and saddest. It is also said that the Eri-kmg

lyu'umgato made it himself, in the last hours before he was killed by

, by . -Ah! Look, we are now at the top!"

Simon raised his eyes, in truth, they had almost reached the sum-

mit of the long rise, the endless sea ofAldheorte's huddling treetops

stretching before them

But I don't think he stopped talking because of that, Simon

thought. / think he was about to say something he didn't want to

say. .

"How did you leam to sing Sithi songs, Bmabik?" he asked as

they clambered the last few steps to stand on the hill's wide bask,

"We will speak of it, Simon," the troll replied, staring around.

"But now, look! There is the way down to Samt Hoderund'sl"

Starting barely more than a long stone's throw beneath them,

clinging to the hill's sloping side like moss growing on an ancient

tree, twined rows and rows of evenly spaced, carefully tended vines.

They were separated one from the other by horizontal terraces cut

into the hillside, edges rounded as though the soil had been shaped

long ago Paths ran between the vines, winding down the slope as

sinuously as the plants themselves In the valley below, sheltered on

one side by this first, small cousin of the Wealdhelm Hills, and on

the other by the dark border of the forest, a whole basket-weave

pattern of farming plots could be seen, laid out with the meticulous

symmetry of an illuminated manuscript. Farther along, just visible

around thejut of the hill, were the small outbuildings of the abbey, a

rough but well-tended collection of wooden sheds and a fenced-in

field, empty now of sheep or cows A gate, the one small movmg

object in the massive tapestry, swung slowly back and forth

"Follow the paths, Simon, and it is soon we shall be eating, and

perhaps also imbibing a small of the monastenal vintage " Bmabik

started down at a quick walk Within moments he and Simon were

threading their way among the grapevines while Qantaqa, scornful

288 Tad Williams

of the slow traverse of her companions, sprang down the hillside,

leaping over the curling vines without touching a stake or crushing a

single grape beneath her great paws.

Watching his feet as he hurried down the steep path, feeling his

heels skid a little on every long stride, Simon suddenly felt rather

than saw a presence before him. Thinking that the troll had halted

to wait for him, he looked up with a sour expression, about to say

something about showing some mercy for folk who did not grow up

on a mountain. Instead, when his eyes met the nightmare shape

before him, he shouted in fear and lost his footing, tumbling back

onto his rump and sliding two arm's lengths down the path.

Binahik heard him and turned, racing back up the hill to find

Simon sitting in the dirt beneath a large, tattered scarecrow. The

little man looked at the scarecrow, hanging off-center on a wide

stake, its crude, painted face all but wiped away by wind and rain,

then looked down to Simon sucking his scuffed palms in the path.

Binabik suppressed his laughter until he had helped the boy up,

grabbing with his small, strong hands at Simon's elbow and levering

him to his feet, but then could hold back no longer. He turned and

started back down, leaving Simon frowning angrily as the smothered

sounds of the little man's mirth floated up to him.

Simon bitterly knocked the worst of the dirt off his breeches and

checked the two packages tucked in his belt, arrow and manuscript,

to make sure neither was damaged. It was obvious Binabik couldn't

know about the thief hanged at the crossroads, but he had been

there to see the Sithi strung up in the woodsman's trap. So why

should it be so laughable for Simon to be startled?

He felt very foolish, but as he looked again at the scarecrow he

still felt a tremor of foreboding. He reached up to it, grasped the

hollow sack of a headrough and cool to the touchand folded it

over, tucking the top into the shapeless, tattered cloak that napped

at its shoulders so that the blurry sightless eyes would be hidden. Let

the troll laugh.

Binabik, composed now, was waiting farther down. He did not

apologize, but patted Simon on the wrist and smiled. Simon re-

turned the smile, but his was smaller than Binabik's.

"When I was here three moons ago," Binabik said, "on my trip

passing southward, I ate the most wonderful venison! The brothers

are permitted to take a very few deer from the king's forest for the

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR289

succoring of wayfarersand themselves, it needs no saying. Oho,

there it is ... and smoke is risingi"

They had rounded the last curve of the hill; the mournful sound of

the squeaking gate was directly below them. Just ahead and down

the slope were the clustered thatch roofs of the abbey- Smoke was

indeed rising, a thin plume floating up to whirl and dissipate in the

wind off the hilltop. But it was not coming from chimney or smoke

hole.

"Binabik . . ." Simon said, surprise not quite turned to alarm.

"Bumed," Binabik whispered. "Or burning. Daughter of the

Mountains . . . !" The gate banged shut and immediately popped

open again. "It is a terrible guest who has come to Saint Hoderund's

house."

To Simon, who had never seen the abbey before, the smoking

waste below seemed Binabik's very story of the Boneyard come to

life. As in the terrible, mad hours beneath the castle, he felt the

jealous claws of the past pushing through to drag present time down

into a dark place of regret and fear.

The chapel, the main abbey, and most of the outbuildings had

been reduced to steaming husks. The charred roof beams, their bur-

dens of wattle and thatch burned away, lay exposed to the ironic

spring sky like the blackened ribs of a hungry god's feast. Scattered

about the surroundings, as if dice-thrown by the selfsame god, were

the bodies of at least a score of men, as rag-jointed and lifeless as the

scarecrow on the hilltop.

"Chukku's Stones . . ." Binabik breathed, still staring, and

tapped himself lightly on the chest with the heel of his hand. He

moved forward, pulling his bag from his shoulder, and hurried down

the hill. Qantaqa, vindicated, barked and capered joyfully.

"Wait," Simon said, barely a whisper. "Wait!" he called, and

lurched after, "Come back! What are you doing? You'll be killedl"

"Hours old this isl" Binabik called without turning. Simon saw

him halt briefly to lean over the first body he reached. A moment

later he trotted on.

Gasping, heart racing with fear despite the obvious truth of the

little man's words, Simon looked at the same body as he passed. It

was a man in a black robe, a monk by his appearancehis face was

hidden, pressed into the grass. An arrowhead had pushed violently

290 Tad Williams

out through the back of his neck. Flies walked daintily on the dried

blood.

A few steps later Simon tripped and fell, catching himself pain-

fully with the palms of his hands on the gravel path. When he saw

what he had tripped over, and saw the flies resettling on the up-

turned eyes, he was violently, excruciatingly sick.

When Binabik found him, Simon had crawled into the shade of a

chestnut tree. The youth's head nodded bonelessly as Binabik, like a

tender but efficient mother, wiped the bile from his chin with a hank

of grass. The carrion stench was everywhere.

"Bad it is. Bad." Binabik touched Simon's shoulder gently, as if to

reassure himself that the youth was real, then squatted on his

haunches, narrowing his eyes against the last red rays of sunshine.

"I can find no one that is living here. Monks for the greatest part, all

dressed in abbey robes, but there are others, too."

"Others . . . ?" It was a gurgle.

"Men in traveler's clothes . . . Frostmarch men, stopping here

for a night perhaps, although there is a goodish quantity of them.

Several are wearing beards, and to me have the looking of Rim-

mersmen. It is a puzzlement."

"Where's Qantaqa?" Simon asked weakly. He found himself

strangely worried for the wolf, although she of all of them was

probably least in danger.

"Running. Smelling. She is very excited." Binabik, Simon noticed,

had his stick pulled apart, and had tucked the knife section into his

belt. "I wonder," the troll said, staring at the rising smoke as Simon

finally sat up, "what was bringing this on? Bandits? A kind of bat-

tling for religious mattersI hear that is not uncommon with you

Aedonitesor what? Most curious . . ."

"Binabik . . ." Simon hawked and spat. His mouth tasted like a

pigkeeper's boots. "I'm frightened." Somewhere in the distance

Qantaqa barked, a surprisingly high-pitched sound.

"Frightened." Binabik's smile was thin as twine. "Frightened is

what you should be." Though his face appeared clear and unwor-

ried, a kind of stunned defenselessness lurked behind the troll's eyes.

That scared Simon more than had anything else. There was some-

thing more; a hint of resignation, as if the awful thing had not been

entirely unexpected.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR291

"I am thinking . . ." Binabik began, when Qantaqa's yipping

suddenly rose into a snarling crescendo. The troll sprang to his feet.

"She has found something," he said, and pulled the startled youth to

his feet with a strong tug on the wrist. "Or something finds

her . . ." With Simon staggering behind him, impulses of flight and

fear twittering through his skull like bats, Binabik dug away in the

direction of the sounds. As he ran, he reached his finger into his

blowpipe to push something into place. Simon knewa heavy, for-

bidding realizationthat this dart was black-tipped.

They ran across the abbey grounds, away from the wreckage and

through the orchard, following the sounds of Qantaqa's distress. A

blizzard of apple blossoms fell all around; the wind prodded and

pushed along the edge of the forest.

Less than ten running steps into the wood they saw Qantaqa,

hackles upraised, her growl so deep that Simon could feel it in his

stomach. She had caught a monk, and had backed him against a

poplar trunk. The man held his pectoral Tree on high, as if to call

heavenly lightning down on the offending beast. Despite his heroic

stance, the sick pallor of his face and his trembling arm showed that

he expected no lightning to come. His pop-eyes, exaggerated by fear,

were fixed on Qantaqa: he had not yet seen the two newcomers.

". . . Aedonis Fiyellis extulanin mei . . ." His wide lips worked

convulsively; the shadows of leaves mottled his pink skull.

"Qantaqa!" Binabik shouted, "Sosaf" Qantaqa growled, but her

ears twitched. "Sosa aia!" The troll whacked his hollow stick

against his thigh. The crack echoed. With a last hacking snarl

Qantaqa dropped her head and trotted back toward Binabik. The

monk, staring at Simon and the troll as though they were quite as

terrifying as the wolf, swayed slightly and then toppled backward to

land sitting on the ground with the stunned expression of a child

who has hurt himself but has not yet realized that he wants to cry.

"Usires the merciful," he gabbled at last as the pair hurried to-

ward him, "Usires the merciful, the merciful ..." A wild look

came into his bulging eyes. "Leave me alone, you pagan monsters!"

he shouted, and tried to struggle to his feet. "Murdering bastards,

pagan bastards!" His heel skidded from beneath him and he sat

down again, mumbling. "A troll, a murdering troll . . ." He began

to pinken, his color coming back. He sucked in a great convulsive

breath, then looked as if at last he truly would cry.

292 Tad Williams

Binabik stopped. Grabbing. Qantaqa by the neck, he gestured Si-

mon forward, saying: "Help him."

Simon walked slowly, trying with some difficulty to compose his

face into something befitting a friend coming to helphis own

heart, after all, was drumming at his ribcage like a woodpecker. "It's

all well, now," he said, "all well."

The monk had covered his face with his sleeve. "Killed them all,

now you want us, too," he cried, his voice, though muffled, sounding

more of self-pity than fear.

"A Rimmersman, he is," said Binabik, "as if you would not be

guessing already to hear him at slandering the Qanuc. Pfah." The

troll made a disgusted noise. "Help him up, friend Simon, and let us

take him out into the light."

Simon got the man's bony, black-robed elbow and laboriously

steered him onto his feet, but when he tried to guide him toward

Binabik the man pulled away.

"What are you doing?'" he shouted, feeling on his chest for his

Tree. "Making me desert the others? No, you just get away from

me!"

"Others?" Simon turned questioningly to Binabik. The troll

shrugged and scratched the wolf's ears. Qantaqa seemed to grin as if

the spectacle amused her.

"Are there others alive?" the boy asked gently. "We will help you,

and them, too, if we can. I am Simon, and that is my friend

Binabik." The monk stared at him suspiciously. "I believe you met

Qantaqa already," Simon added, and immediately felt sorry for the

poor joke. "Come, who are you? Where are these others?"

The monk, whose composure was beginning to return, gave him a

long, mistrustful look, then turned to stare briefly at troll and wolf.

When he turned back to Simon, some of the tension had left his face.

"If you are indeed . . . a good Aedonite acting in charity, then I

ask your forgiveness." The monk's tone was stiff, as in one unused to

apologizing. "I am Brother Hengfisk- Does that wolf . . ." he

turned his gaze sideways, "does he accompany you?"

"She does," Binabik said sternly before Simon could answer. "Too

bad it is that she frightened you, Rimmersman, but you must notice

that she did you no harm."

Hengfisk did not reply to Binabik. "I have left my two charges for

too long a time," he told Simon. "I must go to them now."

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR293

"We'll come with you," Simon replied. "Perhaps Binabik can

help. He is very gifted with herbs and things."

The Rimmersman briefly raised his eyebrows, which made his

eyes seem to bulge all the more. His smile was bitter. "It is a kind

thought, boy, but I am afraid Brother Langrian and Brother

Dochais are not going to be helped by any . . . woodland poul-

tices." He turned on his heel and struck off", rather unsteadily, into

the deeper forest.

"But wait!" called Simon. "What happened to the abbey?"

"I do not know," Hengfisk said without turning, "I was not here."

Simon looked to Binabik for help, but the troll made no immedi-

ate move to follow. Instead, he called after the limping monk.

"Oh, Brother Hangfish?"

The monk whirled, furious. "My name is Hengfisk, troll!" Simon

noted how quickly color came to his face.

"I was merely making translation for my friend," Binabik grinned

his yellow grin, "who is not speaking the language of Rimmersgard.

You say you are not knowing what happened. Where were you when

your brethren were being so very slaughtered?"

The monk seemed about to spit back a reply, but instead reached

his hand up to his Tree and clutched it, A moment later, in a quieter

voice, he said: "Come, then, and see. I have no secrets from you,

troll or from my God." He stalked away.

"Why were you making him mad, Binabik?" Simon whispered.

"Haven't enough bad things happened here already?"

Binabik's eyes were slits, but he had not lost his grin. "Perhaps I

am being unkind, Simon, but you heard his speaking. You have not

been seeing his eyes. Do not let yourself be fooled by the wearing of

a holy robe. We Qanuc have wakened too many times in the night,

finding eyes like this Hengfisk's looking down on us, and torches and

axes close by. Your Usires Aedon has not burned with success that

hatred from his northern heart." With a cluck for Qantaqa to fol-

low, the troll moved after the stiff-backed priest.

"But, listen to you!" Simon said, holding Binabik's eye. "You're

full of hatred, too,"

"Ah." The troll lifted a finger before his now-expressionless face.

"But I am not claiming to believe in yourforgive the saying

upside-down God of Mercy."

Simon took a breath to say something, then thought better of it.

294 Tad Williams

*

Brother Hengfisk turned once, silently taking notice of their pres-

ence. He did not speak again for some time. The light that filtered

through the leaves was fast diminishing; within a short time his

angular, black-robed form was little more than a moving shadow

before them. Simon was startled when he turned and said: "Here."

He led them around the base of a great fallen tree whose exposed

roots resembled more than anything else a huge brooma broom

that would have fired the imagination of Rachel the Dragon toward

heroic, legendary feats of sweeping.

Simon's wry thought of Rachel, coupled with the day's events,

brought on a pang of homesickness so intense that he stumbled,

catching himself with a hand against the scaly bark of the fallen tree.

Hengfisk was kneeling, throwing branches into a small fire that

glowed in a shallow pit. Lying beside the fire, one on either side in

the shelter of the tree's toppled length, were two men.

"This is Langrian," Brother Hengfisk said, indicating the one on

the right, whose face was largely obscured by a bloody bandage

made of sacking. "I found him, the only one alive at the abbey when

I returned. I think Aedon will take him back soon." Even in the

fading light Simon could see that Brother Langrian's skin, that

which showed, was pale and waxy. Hengfisk threw another stick on

the fire as Binabik, without meeting the Rimmersman's eyes once,

kneeled down beside the injured man and began to gently examine

him.

"That one is Dochais," Hengflsk said, gesturing to the other man,

who lay as limply as Langrian, but without visible injury. "It was

him I went out to find when he did not come back from his vigil.

When I brought Dochais backcarried him" there was bitter

pride in Hengfisk's tone, "I returned to find ... to find all dead."

He made the sign of the Tree on his breast. "All but Langrian."

Simon moved close to Brother Dochais, a thin, young man with a

long nose and the blue chin-stubble of the Hemystiri. "What hap-

pened to him? What's wrong?"

"I do not know, boy," Hengfisk said. "He is mad. He has caught

up some fever of the brain." He returned to his search for firewood.

Simon watched Dochais for a moment, noting the man's labored

breathing and the slight trembling of his thin eyelids. As he turned

to look over to Binabik, who was delicately unwinding the bandage

THE DRACONBONE CHAIR295

around Langrian's head, a white hand came up like a snake from the

black robe before him and caught his shirt-front in a horrifically

powerful grip.

Dochais, eyes still shut, had stiffened, his back so bowed that his

waist rose from the ground. His head was thrown back, and snapped

from side to side.

"Binabik!" Simon shouted in terror, "he's . . . he's . . ."

"Aaaahhhh!" The voice that pushed up from Dochais' straining

throat was harsh with pain. "The black wagon! See, it is coming for

met" He thrashed again, like a landed fish, and his words brought

Simon a thrill of reawakening horror.

The hilltop ... 7 remember something . . . and the creak of

black wheels . . . oh, Morgenes, what am I doing here?!

A moment later, while Binabik and Hengfisk stared in amazement

from the far side of the fire pit, Dochais had pulled Simon forward

until the youth's face was almost touching the Hernystirman's own

fear-stretched features.

"They are taking me back'" the monk hissed, "back to ...

back to . . . that terrible place!" Shockingly, his eyes popped open

and stared blindly into Simon's own, a handsbreadth away. Simon

could not struggle out of the monk's grip, even though Binabik was

now at his side trying to help pull him free.

"You know!" Dochais cried, "you know who it is! You have been

marked! Marked like I was! I saw them as they passedthe white

foxes! They walked in my dream! The white foxes! Their master has

sent them to put ice on our hearts, and take away our souls on their

black, black wagon!"

And then Simon was loose, gasping and sobbing. Binabik and

Hengfisk held the twitching monk until he finally stopped thrashing.

The silence of the black forest returned, surrounding the tiny camp-

fire as the gulfs of night embrace a dying star.

20

The Shadow

of the Wheel

^

HE WAS standing on the open plain at the center of a vast, shallow

bowl of grass, a speck of pale upright life in the midst of an endless

riot of green. Simon had never felt quite so exposed, so naked to the

sky. The fields sloped up and away from him; the horizon on all

sides made a tight seal of grass and stone-gray sky.

After a span that could have been moments or years in such

impersonal, fixed timelessness, the horizon was breached.

With the ponderous creak of a ship of war under heavy wind, a

dark object appeared above the rim that was the outermost limit of

Simon's view. It rose and rose, impossibly tall, until its shadow fell

across Simon at the valley's depththe shadow's impact was so

sudden that it seemed almost to resound as it struck, a deep, rever-

berating hum that shook Simon's bones.

The great bulk of the thing came clear against the sky as it stood

for a long moment poised on the valley's edge. It was a wheel, a

huge black wheel as tall as a tower. Sunk in the twilight of its

shadow, Simon could only gape as it began to turn with excruciating

deliberateness, to slowly roll down the long green slope, spouting

flayed gouges of sod behind it. Simon stood frozen in its awful path

as it ground on, as inexorable as the millstones of Hell.

Now it was over him, rim foremost, a black trunk stretching to

the firmament, raining turf down all round. The ground beneath

Simon's feet pitched forward as the weight of the wheel tipped the

bed of the earth. He stumbled, and as he found his balance the black

rim was upon him. As he stared, mute and horrified, a gray shadow

passed before his eyes, a gray shadow with a flashing core ... a

sparrow, flying madly past, with some bright thing caught up in its

curling grip. He flicked his eyes to follow, and then, as if it had

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR297

somehow caught at his heart in its swift passage, he flung himself

after it, out of reach of the plunging wheel . . .

But even as he dove, and the wall-wide rim smashed down,

Simon's pants leg was snagged by a burning cold nail protruding

from the great wheel's outer edge. The sparrow, only inches away,

fluttered free, spiraling up gray on gray against the slate sky like a

moth, its glinting burden disappearing with it into the twilight. A

great voice spoke.

You have been marked.

The wheel took Simon and tumbled him, shook him like a hound

breaking a rat's neck. Then it rolled on, yanking him high up into

the air. Dangling, he was pulled skyward, the ground rocking and

pitching beneath his head like a pulsing green sea. The wind of the

wheel's passage was all around him as he rose, circling toward the

apex; the blood sang in his ears-

Scrabbling with his hands in the grass and mud that clotted the

broad rim, Simon pulled himself painfully upright; riding the wheel

as though it were the back of some cloud-tall beast. He rose ever

nearer to the arching sky.

He reached the top, and for a moment sat perched at the world's

summit. All the spreading fields of Osten Ard were visible beyond

the rim of the valley. The sunlight lanced through the dim sky to

touch on the battlements of a castle, and onto a beautiful shining

spire, the only thing in the world that seemed as tall as the black

wheel. He blinked, seeing something familiar in its sweeping line,

but even as it began to come clear the wheel ground on, pushing him

over the top, then pulling him swiftly toward the ground so far

below.

He struggled with the nail, ripping at his pants leg to work him-

self loose, but somehow he and the nail became one; he could not

break free. The ground leaped up. The two, Simon and the virgin

green earth, were rushing together with a noise like the homs of the

final day booming through the valley. He struckthe two came

togetherand the wind and the light and the music blew away like a

candle flame.

Suddenly:

298 Tad Williams

Simon was in darkness, deep in earth which parted before

him like water. There were voices around him, slow halting

voices that issued from mouths full of choking dirt.

Who enters our house?

Who comes to disturb our sleep, our long sleep?

They will steal from us! The thieves will take from us our quiet

and our dark beds. They will drag us up again through the

Bright Gate . . .

As the mournful voices cried Simon felt hands clutch at him,

hands as cold and dry as bone, or as wet and soft as burrowing roots,

stretching, twining fingers reaching out to catch him up to empty

breasts ... but they could not stop him. The wheel rolled, rolled,

grinding him downward, ever farther, until the voices died behind

him and he was sliding through gelid, silent darkness.

Darkness . . .

Where are you, boy? Are you dreaming? I can almost touch you. It

was Pryrates' voice that suddenly spoke, and he felt the malevolent

weight of the alchemist's thoughts behind it. / know now who you are

Morgenes' boy, a scullion, a meddler. You have seen things you

should not have seen, kitchen boytrifled with things beyond you.

You know far too much. I will search you out.

Where are you?

And then there was a greater darkness, a shadow beneath the

shadow of the wheel, and deep in that shadow two red fires

bloomed, eyes that must have gazed from a skull horribly full of

flame.

No, mortal, a voice said, and in his head it had the sound of ashes

and earth, and the mute, unvoiced end of things. No, this is not for

you. The eyes flared, full of curiosity and glee. We will take this one,

priest.

Simon felt Pryrates' hold slipping away, the alchemist's power

withering before the dark thing.

Welcome, it said. This is the Storm King's house, here beyond the

Darkest Gate . . .

What ... is . . . your . . . name?

And the eyes fell in, like crumbling embers, and the emptiness

behind them burned colder than ice, hotter than any fire ... and

darker than any shadow ...

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR299

"No!" Simon thought he shouted, but his mouth, too, was full of

earth. "I won't tell youF

Perhaps we will give you a name . . . you must have a name, little

fly, little dust speck . . . so that we will know you when we meet

. . . you must be marked . . .

"No!" He tried to struggle free, but the weight of a thousand years

of earth and stone were upon him- "/ don't want a name! I don't

want a name! 11 don't . . ."

"- . . want a name from you!" Even as his last cry echoed out

through the trees, Binabik was crouching over him, a look of real

concern etched on his face. The weak morning sunlight, sourceless

and directionless, filled the glade.

"A madman, and one near death I have already to nurse."

Binabik said as Simon sat up, "and now you must start shouting in

your sleep as well?" He wanted it to be a joke, but the morning was

too cold and thin to support the attempt. Simon was shivering,

"Oh, Binabik, I ..." He felt a trembling, sickly smile come to

his face, forced out by the simple fact of being in. the light, of being

on top of the ground. "I had a terrible, terrible dream."

"I am not very surprised," the troll said, and squeezed Simon's

shoulder. "A terrible day yesterday would not by chance alone lead

to less-than-restful sleeping." The little man straightened up. "If you

like, be free to find something to eat in my bag- I am at tending the

two monks." He pointed to the dark shapes on the far side of the

campfire. The nearer one, who Simon guessed was Langrian, was

wrapped in a dark green cloak.

"Where is . . ." Simon remembered the name after a few mo-

ments, ". . . Hengfisk?" His head was pounding, and his jaw

throbbed as though he had been cracking nuts with his teeth.

"The unpleasant Rimmersmanwho, in fairness it is necessary to

say, did give his cloak for warming Langrianis off searching in the

wreckage of his home for food and such things. I must be returning

to my wards, Simon, if you are feeling better."

"Oh, certainly. How are they?"

"Langrian, I have pleasure to say, is much improved." Binabik

gave a little nod of satisfaction. "He has been sleeping quietly for

some long timea claim you cannot also be making, hmmm?" The

troll smiled. "Brother Dochais, sadly, is beyond my help, but he is

not sick except in his fearful thoughts. Him I have given something

300 Tad Williams

to help sleep also. Now please forgive, I must look at Brother Lang-

rian's dressings."

Binabik stood and stumped off around the fire pit, stepping over

Qantaqa who lay sleeping near the warm stones, and whose back

Simon had previously taken for another large rock.

The wind lightly fingered the leaves of the oak tree above his head

as Simon rimed through Binabik's bag. He pulled out one small sack

that felt as though it might contain breakfast, but even before he

opened it a clinking noise told him it held the strange bones he had

seen before. A further search turned up smoked, dried meat

wrapped in a rough cloth, but as soon as he had the package open he

realized that the last thing he wanted to do was put food of any kind

into his churning stomach.

"Is there any water, Binabik? Where's your skin?"

"Better, Simon," the troll called from his crouch over Brother

Langrian. "A stream there is just a short walk down this way." He

pointed, then reached down and tossed Simon the skin bag. "Filling

this will be a help for me."

As Simon picked up the skin, he saw his twin bundles lying

nearby. On an impulse, he caught up the rag-wrapped manuscript

and brought it with him as he walked down to the stream.

The streamlet moved sluggishly, and its eddies were clogged with

twigs and leaves. Simon had to clear a space before he could lean

down and bring up handfuls of water to splash his face. He scrubbed

hard with his fingersit felt as though the smoke and blood of the

ruined abbey's ending had worked its way into his every pore and

wrinkle. Afterward he drank several great swallows, then filled

Binabik's bag.

He sat down on the bank, and his mind turned to the dream that

had cloaked his thoughts like a dank mist since he had arisen. Like

Brother Dochais' wild words of the night before, the dream had

raised dreadful shadows in Simon's heart, but the daylight was even

now melting them away like unquiet ghosts, leaving only a residue

of fear. All he remembered was the great black wheel as it had borne

down upon him. All else was gone, leaving black, empty spots in his

mind, doors of forgetfulness he could not open.

Still, he knew that he was caught up in something larger than just

the struggle of royal brothersgreater even than the death of that

good old man Morgenes, or the slaughter of a score of holy men.

301

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

These were all but eddies of some larger, deeper currentor, rather,

small things crushed by the heedless turning of a mighty wheel- His

mind could not grasp what it all might mean, and the more he

thought, the more elusive such ideas became. He only understood

that he had fallen beneath the wheel's broad shadow, and if he were

to survive, he must harden himself to its dreadful revolutions.

Slumped on the bank, the thin fizz of the insects who hovered

over the stream filling the air, Simon unwrapped the pages of

Morgenes' life of Prester John and began to leaf through it. He had

not looked at it in some time, due to long marching and early bed-

time once camp was made. He pulled apart some of the pages where

they had stuck to each other, reading a sentence here, a handful of

words there, not caring so much what it said as indulging in the

comforting memory of his friend. Staring at the script, he remem-

bered the old man's slender, blue-veined hands, nimble and clever as

nest-building birds.

A passage caught his eye. It was on a page Following a crude,

hand-drawn map that the doctor had titled at the bottom; "The

Battle-field at Nearulagh." The sketch itself was of little interest, as

for some reason the old man had not bothered to label any of the

armies or landmarks, nor had he included an explanatory caption.

The subsequent text, however, leaped out at him, an answer of a sort

to thoughts that had been plaguing him since the awful discovery of

the day before.

"Neither War nor Violent Death," Morgenes had written,

"have anything uplifting about them, yet they are the candle to

which Humanity flies again and again, as complacently as the

lowly moth. He who has been upon a battlefield, and who is not

blinded by popular conceptions, will confirm that on this ground

Mankind seems to have created a Hell on Earth out of sheer

impatience, rather than waiting for that original to whichif the

priests are correctmost of us will eventually be ushered.

"Still, it is the field of war that determines those things that

God has forgottenaccidentally or not, what mortal can know?

to order and arrange. Hence, it is often the arbiter of Divine

Will. and Violent Death is its Law Scribe."

302 Tad Williams

Simon smiled, and drank a little water. He remembered very well

Morgenes' habit of comparing things to other things, like people to

bugs, and Death to a wrinkly old archive-priest. Usually these com-

parisons had been beyond Simon, but sometimes, as he strained to

follow the twists and turns of the old man's thoughts, a meaning had

come clear all of a sudden, like a curtain drawn from in front of a

sunny window.

"John Presbyter," the doctor had also written, "was without

doubt one of the greatest warriors of the age, and without that

ability would never have risen to his final, royal state. But it was

not his battling that made him a great king; rather it was his use

of the tools of kingship that battling brought into his hands, his

statecraft and his example to the common people.

"In fact, his greatest strengths on the field of combat were his

worst failings as High King. In the pitch of battle he was a

fearless, laughing killer, a man who destroyed the lives of those

who came against him with the cheerful enjoyment of an

Utanyeat hedge-baron arrow-feathering a buck deer.

"As a king he was sometimes prone to quick action and heed-

lessness, and it was in that way he very nearly lost the Battle of

Elvritshalla Dale, and did lose the good will of the conquered

Rimmersgarders."

Simon frowned as he traced along the passage. He could feel sun-

light slipping down through the trees to heat the back of his neck.

He knew he really should get the water skin back to Binabik . . .

but it had been so long since he had sat quietly by himself, and he

was most curiously surprised to read Morgenes apparently speaking

ill of the golden, indomitable Prester John, a man who figured in so

many songs and stories that only the name of Usires Aedon was

better known in all the world, and that not by a long measure.

"By contrast." the passage continued, "the one man who was

John's match on the field of war was his virtual opposite.

Camaris-sd-Vinitta, last prince of the Nabbanai royal house, and

brother of the current duke, was a man to whom war seemed

only another fleshly distraction. Astride his horse Alarm, and

with the great sword Thorn in his hand, he was probably the most

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR303

deadly man in our worldyet he took no pleasure from battle,

and his great skill was only a burden, in that his mighty reputa-

tion brought many against him who would otherwise have had no

cause, and forced him to kill when he would not.

"It is said in the book of the Aedon that when the priests of

Yuvenis came to arrest Holy Usires he went willingly, but when

they purposed to take also His acolytes Sutrines and Granis,

Usires Aedon would not have it, and slew the priests with a touch

of His hand. He wept at the slaying, and blessed their bodies.

"So it was with Camaris, if so sacrilegious a comparison can be

made. If anyone approached the terrible power and universal

love which Mother Church imputes to Usires, Camaris was that

one, a warrior who killed with no hatred for his enemies, and yet

was the most terrifying fighter of this, or probably any

other . . ."

"Simon! Will you please come quickly! I need water, and I am

needing it now!"

The sound of Binabik's voice, harsh with urgency, made Simon

jump guiltily. He scrambled up the bank toward the camp.

But Camaris was a great fighter! All the songs described him

laughing heartily as he hewed the heads from the wild men of the

Thrithings.

Shem used to sing one, how did it go . . . ?

". . . He gave them the left side

He gave them the right side.

He shouted and he sang

As they ran and showed their backside.

Camaris came a-laughing

Camaris came a-fighting

Camaris came a-riding

Through the Battle of the Thrithings ..."

As he emerged from the brush Simon saw in the bright sunlight

how had the sun gotten so high?that Hengfisk had returned, and

that he and Binabik were crouching over the supine form of Brother

Langrian.

304 Tad Williams

"Here, Binabik." Simon handed the skin bag to the kneeling troll.

"It was a fine long time you were . . ." Binabik began, then

broke off, shaking the water bag. "Half full?" he said, and the look

on his face made Simon blush with shame.

"I had just drunk some when you called," he offered. Hengfisk

turned a reptilian eye on him and scowled.

"Well," Binabik said, returning to Langrian, who looked much

rosier than Simon remembered, " 'Climbed is climbed, fallen is

fallen/ I think our friend here is to be improving." He lifted the bag

and squirted a few drops of water into Langrian's mouth. The un-

conscious monk coughed and sputtered for a moment, then his

throat moved convulsively as he swallowed.

"Do you see?" Binabik asked proudly, "it is the wound on the

head that I believe I am . . ."

Before Binabik could finish his explanation, Langrian's eyes flut-

tered open. Simon heard Hengfisk suck in a sharp breath. Langrian's

gaze wandered blearily over the faces that hovered above him, then

his eyes fell shut again.

"More water, troll," hissed Hengflsk.

"What am I doing here is what I know, Rimmersman," Binabik

replied with icy dignity. "You were already performing your duty

when you pulled him from the ruins. Now I am at performing mine,

and need no suggestions." As he spoke the little man trickled water

past Langrian's cracked lips. After some moments the monk's thirst-

swollen tongue pushed out of his mouth like a bear coming up from

a winter's sleep. Binabik moistened it with the bag, then dampened a

cloth and draped it across Langrian's forehead, which was traced

with healing cuts.

Finally he opened his eyes again, and seemed to focus on

Hengfisk. The Rimmersman took Langrian's hand in his.

"Heh . . . Hen . . ." Langrian croaked. Hengfisk pressed the

damp cloth against the skin.

"Don't speak, Langrian. Rest."

Langrian turned his eyes slowly from Hengfisk to Binabik and

Simon, then back to the monk. "Others . . . ?" he managed to say-

"Rest, now. You must rest."

"This man and I are agreeing at last on something." Binabik

smiled at his patient. "You should take sleep."

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR305

Langrian appeared to want to speak more, but before he could his

eyelids slid down, as if heeding advice, and he slept.

^

Two things happened that afternoon. The first occurred while

Simon, the monk, and the troll were eating a sparse meal. Since

Binabik had not wanted to leave Langrian there was no fresh game;

the trio made do with dried meat and the products of Simon's and

Hengfisk's foraging, berries and a few greenish nuts.

As they sat, chewing silently, each wrapped in his own very differ-

ent thoughtsSimon's an equal mixture of the horrid dream-wheel

and the triumphant battlefield figures of John and Camaris

Brother Dochais suddenly died.

One moment he was sitting quietly, awake but not eatinghe had

refused the berries Simon offered him, staring like a mistrustful ani-

mal until the boy took them awayand a moment later he had

rolled over on his face, quivering at first and then pitching violently.

By the time the others could turn him over his eyes had rolled up,

showing a ghastly white in his dirt-smeared face; a moment later he

had quit breathing, although his body remained as rigid as a spar.

Shaken as he was, Simon was certain that just before the final pas-

sion he had heard Dochais whisper "Storm King." The words

bumed in his ears and troubled his heart, although he did not know

why, unless he had heard them in his dream. Neither Binabik nor

the monk said anything, but Simon was sure they had both heard.

Hengfisk, to Simon's surprise, wept bitterly over the body. He

himself, in some strange way, felt almost relieved, a bizarre emotion

that he could neither understand nor quell. Binabik was as unread-

able as stone.

The second thing happened as Binabik and Hengfisk were argu-

ing, an hour or so later.

". . . And I am agreeing we will help, but you are upon the

wrong ledge if you think to order me." Binabik's anger was tightly

controlled, but his eyes had narrowed to black slashes beneath his

brows.

"But you will only help bury Dochais! Would you leave the others

306

Tad Williams

to be food for wolves?" Hengfisk's anger was not at all controlled,

and his eyes pushed out, wide and staring in his reddening face.

"I tried to help Dochais," the troll snapped. "I failed. We will

bury him, if that is what you wish. But it is not my plan to be

spending three days to bury all of your dead brethren. And there are

worse purposes they could serve than 'food for wolves'and per-

haps did while living, some of them!"

It took a moment for Hengfisk to work out Binabik's tangled

speech, but when he did his color grew even brighter, if such was

possible.

"You . . . you heathen monster! How can you speak ill of unbur-

ied dead, you . . . poisonous dwarf'"

Binabik smiled, a flat, deadly smile. "If your God loves them so,

then he has taken their . . . souls, yes? ... up to Heaven, and to

be lying around will do harm only to their mortal bodies - . ."

Before another word could be spoken, both combatants were star-

tled out of their dispute by a deep growl from Qantaqa, who had

been napping on the far side of the fire pit, beside Langrian. In a

moment it became clear what had startled the gray wolf.

Langrian was talking.

"Someone . . . someone warn the ... the abbot . . . treach-

ery! . . ." The monk's voice was a harsh whisper.

"Brother!" Hengfisk cried, limping quickly to his side. "Save your

strength!"

"Let him speak," Binabik replied. "It might be saving our lives,

Rimmersman."

Before Hengfisk could respond, Langrian's eyes were open. Star-

ing first at Hengfisk, then at his surroundings, the monk shuddered

as though with a chill, despite being wrapped in a heavy cloak.

"Hengflsk. . ." he grated, tt. . .the others...are

they . . . ?"

"All dead," said Binabik plainly.

The Rimmersman shot him a hateful glance. "Usires has taken

them back, Langrian," he said. "Only you were spared."

"I ... I feared it . . ."

"Can you tell us what happened?" The troll leaned forward and

put another damp cloth on the monk's forehead. Simon could see

now for the first time, behind the blood and scars and sickness, that

Brother Langrian was quite young, perhaps not yet twenty years of

307

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

age. "Do not tire yourself too much," Binabik added, "but tell us

what you know."

Langrian closed his eyes again, as if falling back into sleep, but he

was only marshaling his strength. "There were ... a dozen or so

men who came . . . came in, sheltering from ... off the Road."

He licked his lips; Binabik brought the water bag. "Many large . . .

parties are traveling these days. We gave them to eat, and Brother

Scenesefa . . . put them up in Traveler's Hall."

As he drank water and talked, the monk seemed to slowly gain

strength. "They were a strange lot ... didn't come down to the

main hall that night, except the leadera pale-eyed man who bore

... an evil-looking helm . . . and dark armorhe asked . . .

asked if we had heard word of a party of Rimmersmen coming

North . . . from Erchester. ..."

"Rimmersmen?" said Hengfisk, frowning.

Erchester? thought Simon, wracking his brain. Who could it be?

"Abbot Quincines told the man we had heard of no such party

. . . and he seemed . . . satisfied. The abbot seemed troubled, but

of course he did not share his worry with ... we younger broth-

ers. . . .

"The next morning one of the brothers came in from the hill-fields

to report a company of riders from the south ... the strangers

seemed . . . very interested, saying that it was . . . the rest of

their original party come to meet them. Their pale-eyed leader . . .

took his men out to the great courtyard, to greet the new arrivals

or so we thought. . . .

"Just as the new company had crested Vine Hill and been sighted

from the abbeythey looked to be only a ... head or two fewer

than our current guests. . . ."

Here Langrian had to stop for a moment's rest, panting slightly.

Binabik would have given him something to make him sleep, but the

injured monk waved away the troll's offer.

"Not much . . . more to tell. One of the other brothers . . .

saw one of the guests come running out, late, from Traveler's Hall.

He had not finished donning his cloakthey were all cloaked,

'though the morning was warmand beneath it there was the flash

of a sword blade. The brother ran to the abbot, who had feared

something of the like. Quincines went to confront the leader. Mean-

while, we could see the men riding down the hillRimmersmen all,

308 Tad Williams

bearded and braided. The abbot told the leader he and his men must

put up, that Saint Hoderund's would not be the site of some bandit

struggle. The leader pulled his sword out and put it to Quincines*

throat."

"Merciful Aedon," breathed Hengfisk-

"A moment later we heard hoofbeats. Brother Scenesefa suddenly

ran to the courtyard gate and shouted a warning to the approaching

strangers. One of the ... 'guests' . . . put an arrow in his back,

and the leader slit the abbot's throat."

Hengfisk stifled a sob and made the sign of the Tree over his heart,

but Langrian's face was solemn, emotionless; he continued his narra-

tive without pausing.

"Then there was carnage, the strangers leaping onto the brothers

with knife and sword, or pulling bows and arrows from places of

hiding. When the new arrivals came through the gate it was with

their own swords drawn . , , I suppose they heard Scenesefa's

warning, and saw him shot down in the gateway arch.

"I do not know what happened then, for all was madness. Some-

one threw a torch upon the chapel roof, and it caught afire. I ran for

water as people screamed and horses screamed and . . . and some-

thing hit me on the head. That is all."

"So you do not know who was in either of these two warring

bands?" Binabik asked. "Did they fight with each other, or were

they being partners?"

Langrian nodded seriously. "They fought. The ambushers had a

much more difficult time with them than they did with unarmed

monks. That is all I can sayall I know."

"May they bum!" hissed Brother Hengfisk.

"They shall." Langrian sighed. "I think I must sleep again." He

closed his eyes, but his breathing did not change,

Binabik straightened up. "I think I will be walking a short ways,"

he said. Simon nodded. "Ninit, Qantaqa," he called, and the wolf

leaped up, stretched, and followed him. He had vanished into the

woods within moments, leaving Simon with the three monks, two

living, one dead.

The services for Dochais were brief and spare. Hengfisk had found

a winding sheet in the ruins of the abbey. They wrapped it around

Dochais' thin body and lowered him into a hole the three able-

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR309

bodied folk had dug in the abbey's cemetery, while Langrian slept in

the forest with Qantaqa for a guardian. The digging had been hard

workthe fire in the great barn had burned the wooden handles

from the shovels, leaving only the blades to be wielded by hand

straining, sweaty work. By the time Brother Hengfisk had completed

his impassioned prayers, coupling them with promises of divine jus-

ticeseeming to forget in his fervor that Dochais had been far away

from the abbey when the murderers had done their workit was the

darkling tag-end of afternoon. The sun had dropped until there was

nothing left but a bright residue along the crest of Vine Hill, and the

grass of the churchyard was dark and cool. Binabik and Simon left

Hengflsk crouching at the graveside, goggle-eyes tightly shut in

prayer, and went to forage and explore around the abbey lands.

Although the troll was careful to avoid as much as possible of the

scene of the tragedy, its results were so widespread that Simon

quickly began to wish he had returned to the forest camp to wait

with Langrian and Qantaqa. A second hot day had done nothing to

improve the condition of the bodies: in their bloated, swollen pink-

ness Simon saw an unpleasant similarity to the roast pig that

crowned the Lady Day table at home. A part of him was scornful of

his weakheartednesshadn't he already seen violent death, a battle-

fleld-fiill in a few short weeks?but he realized as he walked . . .

trying to keep his eyes ahead, to avoid the sight of other eyes, glazed

and cracked by the sun . . . that death, at least for him, was never

the same, no matter how veteran an observer he had become. Each

one of these ruined sacks of bone and sweetbreads had been a life

once, a beating heart, a voice that complained or laughed or sang.

Someday this will happen to me, he thought as they threaded their

way around the side of the chapel, and who will remember me? He

could find no ready answer, and the sight of the tiny field of grave

markers, their tidiness cruelly lampooned by the sprawled bodies of

slain monks, offered him little comfort.

Binabik had found the charred remnants of the chapel's side door,

areas of sound wood showing through the coal-black surface like

streaks of new-cleaned brass on an old lamp. The troll poked at the

door, knocking loose burned fragments, but the structure held. He

gave it a more vigorous poke with his stick, but still it stuck closed, a

sentry who had died on watch.

"Good," Binabik said. "It is suggesting we may wander inside

310 Tad Williams

without the whole structure crashing upon our heads." He took his

stick and poked it in through a fissure between door and frame, then

used it like a mason's prybar, pushing and levering until, with a little

help from Simon, it sprang open in a shower of black dust.

After working so hard to open a door, it was truly strange to enter

and find the roof gone, the chapel as open to the air as an unlidded

cask. Simon looked up to see the sky framed above him, going red at

the bottom and gray at the top with the onset of evening. Around

the top of the walls the windows were blackened in their frames, the

leading twisted outward, spilling its sooty glass as though a giant

hand had pulled off the roof, reached down through the beams and

poked out each window with a titan finger.

A quick survey turned up nothing of use. The chapel, perhaps

because of its rich draperies and hangings, had burned to the walls.

Crumbled ash sculptures of benches and stairs and an altar stood in

place, and the stone altar steps bore the ghost of a floral wreath, a

perfect, impossibly delicate crown of paper-thin leaves and diapha-

nous gray ash-flowers.

Next, Simon and Binabik made their way across the commons to

the residences, a long low hall of tiny cells. The damage here was

moderateone end had caught fire, but for some reason had burned

out before the conflagration had spread.

"Be looking especially for boots," Binabik said. "It is sandals

these abbey men wear mostly, but some of them may occasionally

need to ride or travel in cold weather. Some that are fitting you are

best, but in necessity settle for too large rather than too small."

They started at opposite ends of the long hall. None of the doors

were locked, but they were distressingly bare little rooms, a Tree on

the wall the only decoration in most. One monk had hung a flower-

ing rowan branch above his hard pallet; its jauntiness in such spare

surroundings cheered Simon immensely, until he remembered the

fate of the room's resident.

On the sixth or seventh, Simon was startled when his pulling open

the cell door was followed by a hissing noise and the blur of some-

thing whisking past his ankle. At first he thought an arrow had been

shot at him, but one look at the tiny, empty cell showed the impossi-

bility of such a thing. A moment later he realized what it was, and

quirked his mouth in a half-smile. One of the monks, no doubt in

direct contravention of abbey rules, had kept a peta cat, no less,

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR311

just like the little gray scattercat he had befriended at the Hayholt.

After two days locked in the cell, waiting for the master who would

not return, it was hungry, angry, and frightened. He went back

down the hall looking for it, but the animal was gone.

Binabik heard him clomping about. "Is all well, Simon?" he

called, out of sight in one of the other cells.

"Yes," Simon yelled back. The light in the tiny windows above his

head was quite gray now. He wondered if he should head back to the

door, finding Binabik on the way, or go back and look some more.

He was interested at least in examining the cell of the monk with the

contraband cat.

A few moments later Simon was reminded about the problems of

keeping animals shut in too long. Holding his nose, he looked

quickly around the cell, and spotted a book, small but nicely bound

in leather. He tiptoed across the suspect floor, hooked it off the low

bed, and stilted out again.

He had just sat down in the next cell to have a look at his prize

when Binabik appeared in the doorway.

"I am having small luck here. You?" the troll asked.

"No boots."

"Well, it is fast becoming evening. I think I should be having a

look around the Traveler's Hall where the murderous strangers were

sleeping, in case there is some object there that will tell us anything.

Wait for me here, hmmm?"

Simon nodded and Binabik left.

The book was, as Simon had expected, a Book ofAedon, although

it was a very expensive and finely-made book for a poor monk to

have in his possession; Simon guessed it was a gift from a rich rela-

tive. The volume itself was unremarkable, although the illumina-

tions were very niceat least as far as Simon could tell in the fading

lightbut there was one thing that caught his attention.

On the first page, where people often wrote their names, or words

of salutation if the book was a gift, there was this phrase, carefully

but shakily written:

Piercing My Hearte there is A Golden Dagger;

That is God

Piercing God's Hearte there is a Golden Needle;

That is me

312 Tad Williams

As Simon sat looking at the words his newfound resolve was

tested; he felt a wave wash through him, a staggering ocean breaker

of remorse and fear, and a feeling of things that, though unseen,

were nonetheless slipping heartbreakingly away.

In the midst of his staring reverie Binabik popped his head

through the door and tossed a pair of boots onto the floor beside him

with a muffled clatter. Simon did not look up.

"Many interesting things there are at Traveler's Hall, your new

boots not least. But dark is coming, and I may take only a moment

more. Meet with me before this hall, soon." And he was gone again.

After long, silent moments in the troll's wake, Simon set the book

downhe had planned to take it, but had changed his mindand

tried the boots on his feet. At other moments he would have been

pleased to find how well they fitted, but now he just left his tattered

shoes on the floor and walked down the hall toward the front en-

trance.

The muted light of evening had descended. Across the commons

stood the Traveler's Hall, a twin to the building he had just left. For

some reason the sight of the door across from him swinging listlessly

to and fro filled him with vague fear. Where was the troll?

Just as he remembered the swinging paddock gate that had been

the first signal that all was not well at the abbey, Simon was startled

by a rough hand grasping at his shoulder, pulling him backward.

"Binabik!" he managed to shout, and then a thick palm was

clamped over his mouth, and he was crushed back against a rock-

hard body.

"Vawer es do kunde?" a voice growled at his ear in the stony

accents of Rimmersgard.

'7m tosdten-grukker!" another voice sneered.

In a blind panic Simon opened his mouth behind the shielding

hand and bit. There was a grunt of pain, and for a moment his

mouth was free.

"Help me! Binabik!" he screeched, then the hand covered him

again, crushingly painful now, and a second later he felt a black

impact behind his ear.

He could still hear the echoes of his cry dissipating as the world

turned to water before his eyes. The door of Traveler's Hall swung,

and Binabik did not come.

21

Cold Comforts

DUKE ISGRIMNUR of Elvritshalla had put a little too much pressure

on the blade. The knife leaped from the wood and nicked his thumb,

freeing a sudden stripe of blood just below the knuckle. He famed a

curse, dropped the piece of heartwood to the ground and stuck his

thumb in his mouth.

Frekke is right, he thought,damn him. I'll never have the knack

of this. I don't even know why I try.

He did know, though: he had convinced old Frekke to show him

the rudiments of carving during his virtual imprisonment at the

Hayholt. Anything, he had reasoned, was preferable to pacing about

the castle's halls and battlements like a chained bear. The old sol-

dier, who had served the Duke's father Isbeom as well, had patiently

shown Isgrimnur how to choose the wood, how to spy out the natu-

ral spirit that lurked inside, and how to release it, chip by chip, from

the prisoning grain. Watching Frekke at workhis eyes nearly shut,

his scarred lip quirked in an unconscious smilethe demons and

fish and lively beasts that climbed into being from beneath his knife

had seemed the inevitable solutions to the questions the world put

forth, questions of randomness and confusion in the shape of a tree

limb, the position of a rock, the vagaries of rain clouds.

Sucking on his wounded thumb, the duke toyed in a disordered

way with such thoughtsfor all Frekke's claims, Isgrimnur found it

damnably hard to think about anything at all while he was carving:

the knife and wood seemed at odds, in pitched battle that might

elude his vigilance at any moment to slide over into tragedy.

Like now, he thought, sucking and tasting blood.

Isgrimnur sheathed his knife and stood up. All around him his

men were hard at work, cleaning a brace of rabbits, tending the fire,

getting camp ready for the evening. He moved toward the blaze,

turned, and stood with his broad backside to the flames. His earlier

314 Tad Williams

thought of rainstorms came back to him as he looked up at the

rapidly-graying sky.

So here it is Maia-month, he mused. And here we are, less than

twenty leagues north of Erchester . . . and where did that storm

come from?

At the time, some three hours gone, Isgrimnur and his band had

been in hot pursuit of the brigands who had waylaid them at the

abbey. The Duke still had no idea who the men had beensome of

them had been countrymen, but none had familiar facesor why

they had done what they had- Their leader had worn a helmet in the

form of a snarling hound's face, but Isgrimnur had never heard of

such an emblem. He might not have even survived to wonder, but

for the black-robed monk who had screamed a warning from the St.

Hoderund's gateway just before toppling with an arrow between his

shoulder blades. The fighting had been fierce, but the monk's death

. . . God's mercy to him, whoever he was . . . had served notice,

and the Duke's men had been ready for the attack. They had lost

only young Hove on the initial charge; Einskaldir had been

wounded, but killed his man anyway, and another beside. The en-

emy had not been looking for a fair fight, Isgrimnur thought sourly.

Faced by Isgrimnur and his guard, fighting men all and itching for

action after months in the castle, the would-be ambushers had fled

across the abbey commons to the stables, where their horses were

apparently saddled and waiting.

The duke and his men, after a quick inspection found none of the

monks alive to explain what had occurred, had resaddled and fol-

lowed. It might have been more politic to stay and bury Hove and

the Hoderundans, but Isgrimnur's blood had been fired. He wanted

to know who, and he wanted to know why.

It was not to be, however. The brigands had gotten a start of some

ten minutes on the Rimmersmen, and their horses were fresh. The

Duke's men had sighted them once, a moving shadow sweeping

down off Vine Hill onto the plain, heading through the low hills

toward the Wealdhelm Road. The sight had filled Isgrimnur's com-

pany with new life, and they had spurred their horses down the

slope into the valleys of the Wealdhelm foothills. Their mounts

seemed to have caught some of their excitement, drawing up

reserves of strength; for a brief while it had seemed that they might

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR315

run the waylayers down, coming on them from behind like a venge-

ful cloud rolling across the plain.

Instead, a strange thing had happened. One moment they had

been rolling along in the sunlight, then the world had grown percep-

tibly darker. When it did not change, when half a mile later the hills

around them were still lifeless and gray, Isgrimnur had looked up to

see a knot of steel-colored clouds swirling in the sky overhead, a fist

of shadow over the sun. A dim, grumbling crack, and suddenly the

sky was spilling raina splatter at first, then torrents.

"Where did this come from?" Einskaldir had shouted across to

him, a hissing mist now pulled like a curtain between them. Is-

grimnur had no idea, but it had troubled him greatlyhe had never

seen a storm come up so fast out of a relatively clear sky. When a

moment later one of the men's horses had slipped on the wet, matted

grass and stumbled, throwing its riderwho, thank Aedon, landed

safelyIsgrimnur raised his voice and bellowed his troops to a halt.

So it was that they had elected to make camp, here only a league

or so from the Wealdhelm road. The duke had briefly considered

going back to the abbey, but the men and horses were tired, and the

blaze that had been roaring from the main buildings when they rode

off suggested there would probably be little to go back for. Wounded

Einskaldir, howeverwho, though Isgrimnur knew better, some-

times seemed to possess no emotions save a general fiercenesshad

ridden right back to the abbey for Hove's body, and to pick up

anything else that might give a clue to the attackers' identities or

motivations. Knowing Einskaldir and his ways, the duke had given

in quickly, stipulating only that he must take Sludig along, who was

a slightly less ardent spirit. Sludig was a fine soldier, but nevertheless

valued his own skin enough to provide some counterweight to

bright-burning Einskaldir.

So here I stand, Isgrimnur thought in tired disgust, baking my

bum in front of the campfire while the young men do the work. Curse

age, curse my aching back, curse Elias, curse these damnable times!

He looked down at the din, then stooped and took up the piece of

wood lying there which he had hoped some miracle would help him

shape into a Tree, to lie against his wife Gutrun's breast when he

returned to her.

And curse carving! He gave it to the flames.

316 Tad Williams

*

He was tossing rabbit bones into the fire, feeling a little better for

having eaten, when there came a sudden roll of hoofbeats. Is-

grimnur dropped his hands to wipe grease on his kirtle, and his

liegemen did the sameit would not do to have a slippery hand on

axe or sword. It sounded like a very small company of riders, two or

three at most; still, no one relaxed until Einskaldir and his white

horse came clear against the twilight. Sludig rode just behind, lead-

ing a third mount across whose pommel were draped . . . nw bod-

ies.

Two bodies, but, as Einskaldir explained in his terse manner, only

one a corpse.

"A boy," Einskaldir grunted, his dark beard already shiny with

rabbit fat. "Found him nosing about. Thought we should bring him

along."

"Why?" Isgrimnur rumbled. "He doesn't look like anything but a

scavenger."

Einskaldir shrugged. Fair-haired Sludig, his companion, grinned

affably: it hadn't been his idea.

"No houses around. We saw no boy at the abbey. Where did he

come from?" Einskaldir cut loose another piece with his knife.

"When we grabbed him, he yelled for someone. 'Bennah,* or 'Bin-

nock,' couldn't say for sure."

Isgrimnur turned away to briefly survey Hove's body, now laid

out on a cloak. He was kin, the cousin of his son Isom's wifenot

close kin, but close enough by the customs of the cold north that

Isgrimnur felt a deep pang of remorse as he stared down at the

young man's snow-pale face, at his thin yellow beard.

From there he turned to the captive, still bound at the wrists, but

lowered from the horse to lie propped against a rock. The boy was

only a year or two younger than Hove, thin but wiry, and the sight

of his freckled face and shock of reddish hair tugged at Isgrimnur's

memory. He could not summon the reminder forth. The youth was

still stunned from the tap Einskaldir had given him, eyes closed and

mouth slack.

Looks like any poor peasant lout, the duke thought, except for

those bootswhich HI wager he found at the abbey. Why in the name

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR317

ofMemur's Fountain did Einskaldir bring him? What am I supposed

to do with him? Kill him? Keep him? Leave him to starve?

"Let's get to finding rocks," the duke said at last. "Hove will need

a cairnthis looks like wolf country to me."

^

Night had come down; the outcroppings of rock that dotted the

desolate plain below Wealdhelm were only clumps of deeper

shadow. The fire had been stoked high, and the men were listening

to Sludig sing a bawdy song. Isgrimnur knew only too well why men

who had been blooded, who had lost one of their ownHove's un-

distinguished pile of stones was one of the shadow-clumps out be-

yond the firelightmight feel the urge to indulge in such foolish-

ness. As he himself had said months ago, standing across the table

from King Elias, there were frightening rumors on the wind. Here

on the open plain, dwarfed but not protected by the looming hills,

things that were travelers' tales in the Hayholt or Elvritshalla,

ghost-fables to enliven a dull evening, were no longer so easy to

brush aside with a laughing remark. So the men sang, and their

voices made an off-key but very human sound in the night wilder-

ness.

And ghost-tales aside, Isgrimnur thought, we were attacked today,

and for no reason I can fathom. They were waiting for us. Waiting!

What in the name of sweet Usires does that mean?/

It could have been that the brigands were merely waiting for the

next group of travelers who might stop at the abbeybut why? If

they were only after robbing and whatnot, why not pillage the abbey

itself, a place likely to have at least a fine reliquary or two? And why

wait for chance travelers at an abbey in the first place, where there

would naturally be witnesses to any act of thievery?

Not that we've got many witnesses left, damn their eyes. One,

maybe if that boy proves to have seen anything.

It just did not make good sense. Waiting to waylay a company of

travelers who, even in these times, might prove to be king's guards-

menwho had, in fact, turned out to be armed, battle-honed north-

erners.

So the possibility had to be entertained that he and his men had

318 Tad Williams

been the targets. Why? And just as importantly, who? Isgrimnur's

enemies, Skali of Kaldskyrke being a prime example, were well

known to him, and none of the bandits had been recognized as

members ofSkali's clan. Besides, Skali was gone back to Kaldskyrke

long ago, and how could he have known that Isgrimnur, sick to

death of inactivity and fearing for the safety of his duchy, would

decide at last to confront Elias and, after an argument, receive his

reluctant royal permission to take his men north?

"We need you here. Uncle," he told me. He knew I had stopped

believing that long ago. Just wanted to keep his eye on me, that's what

I think.

Still, Elias had not resisted anywhere near as strongly as the duke

had anticipated; the argument had seemed to Isgrimnur only a mat-

ter of form, as though Elias had known the confrontation was com-

ing, and had decided to accede already.

Frustrated by the circles his thoughts were following, Isgrimnur

was about to lever himself up and off to his bedroll when Frekke

came to him, the fire at the aged soldier's back making him a gaunt,

shambling shadow.

"A moment, your Lordship."

Isgrimnur suppressed a grin. The old bastard must be drunk. He

only got formal when he was in his cups.

"Frekke?"

"It's that boy, sire, the one Einskaldir brought back. He's awake.

Thought your Lordship might like to chat with him." He swayed a

little, but quickly turned it into a gesture of pulling up his breeches.

"Well, I suppose." The breeze was up. Isgrimnur pulled his kirtle

tighter and started to turn, then stopped. "Frekke?"

"Lordship?"

"I threw another damned carving in the fire."

"I 'spected you would, sire."

As Frekke wheeled around to head back to the beer jug, Is-

grimnur was positive the old man wore a tiny smile-

Well, damn him and his wood, anyway.

The boy was sitting up, chewing the meat from a bone. Einskaldir

sat on a rock beside him looking deceptively relaxedIsgrimnur

had never seen the man relax. The firelight could not reach Ein-

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR319

skaldir's deep-set stare, but the boy, when he looked up, was as

wide-eyed as a deer surprised at a forest pond.

At the duke's approach the boy stopped chewing and regarded

Isgrimnur suspiciously for a moment, mouth half-open. But then,

even by fireglow, Isgrimnur saw something pass across the boy's face

. . . was it relief? Isgrimnur was troubled. He had expected, despite

Einskaldir's suspicionsthe man, after all, was as prickly with mis-

trust as a hedgehogto find a frightened peasant boy, terrified or at

least dully apprehensive. This one looked like a peasant, an ignorant

cotsman's son in tattered clothes, covered in dirt, but there was a

certain alertness to his gaze that made the duke wonder if perhaps

Einskaldir hadn't been right.

"Here now, boy," he said gruffly in the Westerling speech, "what

were you doing poking about the abbey?"

"/ think I'm going to slit his throat now," Einskaldir said in Rim-

merspakk, pleasant tone in horrid contrast to his words. Isgrimnur

scowled, wondering if the man had lost his mind, then realized as

the boy continued to stare blandly up at him that Einskaldir was

only probing to find if the boy spoke their tongue.

Well, if he does, he's one of the coolest wits I've ever seen, Isgrimnur

thought. No, it beggared imagination to think a boy this age in the

camp of armed strangers could have understood Einskaldir's chill-

ing words and not reacted at all.

"He doesn't understand," the duke said to his liegeman in their

Rimmersgard tongue. "But he is a calm one, isn't he?" Einskaldir

grunted an affirmative and scratched his chin through his dark

beard.

"Now, boy," the duke resumed, "I asked you once. Speaki What

brought you to the abbey?"

The youth lowered his eyes and set the bone he had been gnawing

on the ground. Isgrimnur again felt a tug at his memory, but still

could summon nothing.

"I was . . . I was looking for . . . for some new shoes to wear."

The boy gestured to his clean, well-cared-for boots. The duke picked

him out by his accent as an Erkynlander, and something more . . .

but what?

"And you found some, I see." The duke squatted, so that he was

at eye level. "Do you know you can be hanged for stealing from the

unburied dead?"

320 Tad Williams

Finally, a satisfying reaction! The boy's heartfelt flinch at the

threat could not have been studied, Isgrimnur felt sure. Good.

"I'm sorry . . . master. I didn't mean any harm. I was hungry

from walking, and my feet hurt . . ."

"Walking from where?" He had it now. The boy spoke too well to

be a woodsman's brat. He was a priest's boy, or a shopkeeper's son,

or some such. He'd run away, no doubt.

The youth held Isgrimnur's stare for a moment; again the duke

had the feeling the boy was calculating. A runaway from a seminary,

perhaps, or a monastery? What was he hiding?

The boy spoke at last. "I ... I have left my master, sir. My

parents . . . my parents apprenticed me to a chandler. He beat

me."

"What chandler? Where? Quickly!"

"Mo . . . Malachias! In Erchester!"

It makes sense, mostly, the duke decided. Except for two details.

"What are you doing here, then? What brought you to Saint

Hoderund's? And who," Isgrimnur lanced in, now, "is Bennah?"

"Bennah?"

Einskaldir, who had been listening with half-closed eyes, leaned

forward. "He knows. Duke," he said in Rimmerspakk, "he said

'Bennah' or 'Binnock,' that's sure."

"How about 'Binnock,' then?" Isgrimnur dropped a wide hand on

the captive's shoulder, and felt only a twinge of regret when the boy

winced.

"Binnock . . . ? Oh, Binnock's ... my dog sir. Master's, actu-

ally. He ran away, too." And the boy actually smiled, a lopsided

grin that he quickly suppressed. Despite his misgivings the old duke

found himself liking the lad.

"I'm heading for Naglimund, sir," the boy continued quickly. "I

heard the abbey fed travelers like me. When I saw the ... the

bodies, the dead men, I was scaredbut I needed some boots, sir, I

truly did- Those monks were good Aedonites, sirthey wouldn't

have minded, would they?"

"Naglimund?" The duke's eyes narrowed, and he sensed Ein-

skaldir grow a little more taut, if such a thing was possible, at the

boy's side. "Why Naglimund? Why not Stanshire, or Hasu Vale?"

"I have a friend there." Behind Isgrimnur Sludig's voice rose,

careening through a final drunken chorus. The boy made a gesture

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR321

in the direction of the fire circle. "He's a harper, sir. He told me if I

ran away from . . . Malachias, to come to him and he would help

me."

"A harper? At Naglimund?" Isgrimnur stared intently, but the

boy's face, though shadowed, was as innocent as cream. Isgrimnur

suddenly felt disgusted with the whole business. Look at me! Ques-

tioning a chandler's boy as if he had single-handedly led the ambush

at the abbey/ What a damnable day it has been!

Einskaldir was still not satisfied- He bent his face close to the

boy's ear and asked, in his heavily-accented speech, "What is the

Naglimund harper's name?"

The youth turned, alarmed, but seemingly from the sudden prox-

imity of Einskaldir rather than the question, for a moment later he

blithely responded.

"Sangmgol."

"Frayja's Paps!" Isgrimnur cursed, and climbed heavily to his

feet. "I know him. That's enough. I believe you,, boy." Einskaldir

had turned away, pivoting on his rocky seat to watch the men laugh-

ing and arguing at the fire. "You may stay with us, boy, if you like,"

the duke said. "We will be stopping at Naglimund, and thanks to

those whoreson bastards we have Hove's horse going riderless. This

is hard country for a stripling to cross alone, and these days it's near

as much as slitting your own throat to travel out of company. Here."

He walked to one of the horses and pulled a saddle blanket down,

tossing it to the youth. "Bed down wherever you like, as long as it's

close in. Easier for the man standing sentry if we're not strung out

like a flock of straying sheep." He stared at the thistledown hair

starting out in all directions, and the bright eyes. "Einskaldir fed

you. Do you need aught?"

The boy blinkedwhere had he seen him? In the town, probably.

"No," the boy replied, "I was just hoping that . . . that Binnock

will not get lost without me."

"Trust me, boy. If he doesn't find you, he'll find someone else, and

that's a fact."

Einskaldir had already slipped away. Isgrimnur stumped off. The

boy curled himself in the blanket and lay down at the foot of the

rock.

322 Tad Williams

^

/ haven't really seen the stars for a while, Simon thought as he

stared up from his blanket. The bright points seemed to hang like

frozen fireflies. It's just not the same looking up through the trees as it

is out here in the openlike being on a tabletop.

He thought of Sedda's Blanket, and doing so thought of Binabik-

/ hope he's safethen again, it was him who left me to the Rim-

mersmen.

It had been a stroke of luck that his captor had turned out to be

Duke Isgrimnur, but still, there had been moments of real terror,

waking up in the camp surrounded by hard-looking, bearded men.

He supposed that, knowing the ill-will between Binabik's people and

the Rimmersmen, he did not really hold it against the troll for hav-

ing disappearedif he had even known of Simon's abduction. Still,

it hurt to lose a friend that way. He would have to harden himself:

he had begun to depend on the little man to know what was right,

what had to be done, just as he had once listened raptly to Doctor

Morgenes. Well, the lesson was clear: he would be his own man,

keep his own counsel, and make his way.

In truth, he had not wanted to tell Isgrimnur his true destination,

but the duke was sharp, and Simon had felt several times that the

old soldier was balancing him on the blade of a knifeone false step

would have tipped him over.

Besides, that dark one who sat beside me all the time, he looked

like he would kill me just like drowning a kitten if it suited him.

So, he had given the duke all the truth he comfortably could, and

it had worked.

The question, then, was what to do now. Should he stay with the

Rimmersmen? It would seem foolish not to, but still . . . Simon

was not yet totally sure of where the duke stood. Isgrimnur was

going to Naglimund, but what if it was to arrest Josua? Everybody

at the Hayholt was forever talking about how loyal Isgrimnur had

been to old King John, how he held the High King's Ward more

sacred than his own life. Where did he fit in with Elias? Under no

circumstances did Simon intend to tell what part he had played in

Josua's departure from the Hayholt, but things had a way of slipping

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR323

out, sometimes. Simon was dying to hear some news of the castle, of

what had happened after Morgenes' last gambithad Pryrates

lived? Inch? What had Elias told the people had happened?but it

was exactly those kind of questions, no matter how guilefully asked,

that could drop him into boiling water.

He was too wound up to sleep. As he stared up at the scattered

stars, he thought of the bones he had seen Binabik cast that morn-

ing- The wind brushed his face, and suddenly the stars themselves

were bonesa wild array strewn across the dark field of the sky. It

was lonely out here among strangers, under the limitless night. He

longed for his homely bed in the servant's quarters, for the days

when none of these things had happened. His longing was like the

piercing music of Binabik's flute: a cool pain that was nevertheless

the only thing he could cling to in the wide, wild world.

He had dozed a little, but when the noise awakened him, heart

thumping, the stars still burned deep in the blackness. A momentary

panic constricted his throat as a dark shape loomed over him, im-

possibly tall. Where was the moon?

It was only the man on watch, he saw an instant later, stopping

for a moment with his back to Simon's blanket. The sentry had his

own saddle blanket, and had wrapped it high on his shoulders, the

dome of his unhelmeted head poking up through the folds.

The watchman wandered past without looking down. He had an

axe tucked in his broad belt, a wickedly sharp, heavy weapon. He

also carried a spear longer than he was tall; as he paced, the butt end

dragged in the dirt.

Simon pulled the blanket closer, huddling himself against the

sharp wind that was moving across the plain. The sky had changed:

where before it had been clear, the stars picked out in brilliant detail

against its unfathomable blackness, now it was sullied by streamers

of clouds, milky tendrils reaching out like fingers from the north. At

the far side of the sky they had covered the lowest stars like sand

poured over the coals of a fire.

Maybe Sedda will catch her husband tonight, Simon thought sleep-

ily.

The second time he awoke it was to a splash of water in his eyes

and nose. He opened his eyes, gasping, to see the stars had been

324

Tad Williams

snuffed above him as neatly as a top closing on a jewel chest. It was

raining, the clouds now directly overhead. Simon grunted, wiping

water from his face, and turned on his side, pulling the blanket up to

make a hood for his head. He could see the sentry again, a little

farther away now, shielding his face and staring up into the rain.

Simon's eyes were just drifting closed when the man made an odd

grunting noise and dropped his head to look down. Something in the

man's stance, something that suggested that though he stood rock-

still he was nevertheless struggling, made Simon open his eyes wider.

The rain began to sheet down, and thunder growled distantly- Simon

strained to see the sentry through the boiling downpour. The man

was still standing in the same place, but something was moving now

at his feet, something active that had pulled free from the general

blackness. Simon sat up, and the raindrops pounded and splashed on

the ground all about.

A flash of lightning abruptly lit the night, making the rocks glare

forth like painted wooden props from a Usires Play. Everything in

the camp came clearthe steaming remains of the fire, the huddled,

sleeping forms of the Rimmersmenbut what leaped to Simon's eye

in that split instant was the sentry, whose face was stretched in a

hideous, silent mask of absolute terror.

Thunder crashed, and then the sky was smeared with lightning

again. The ground around the sentry was seething, gouting up in

great sprays of dirt. Simon's heart lurched in his breast as the man

fell to his knees. The thunder cannoned again; lightning flared three

times in succession. The earth continued to fountain up, but now

there were hands everywhere, and long thin arms, glinting slickly in

the rain as they crawled up the body of the kneeling man, pulling

him down, face forward into the black soil. The sky-glare caught a

greater surge of movement as a horde of dark things pushed up from

the earth, thin, ragged things with waving arms, staring white eyes,

andhorribly revealed as the lightning leaped across the sky and

the rain hissed downmatted whiskers and tattered clothes. As the

thunder died out Simon shouted, choking on water, then shouted

again.

It was worse than any vision of Hell. The Rimmersmen, startled

awake by Simon's terrified cry, were beset from all sides by hopping,

flailing bodies. The things were boiling up from the ground like rats

indeed, as they scrambled through the camp the night was filled

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR325

with thin, mewling squeals that rang of tunnels and blindness and

cowardly malice.

One of the northerners was on his feet, the creatures swarming

over him. They were none of them as tall as Binabik, but their

numbers were prodigious, and even as the northerner unsheathed his

sword they pulled him down. Simon thought he saw the flash of

sharp things in their hands, rising and falling.

"VaerI Vaer Bukkanf" one of the Rimmersmen shouted from the

other side of the camp. The men were up now, and in the intermit-

tent flashes Simon could see the pale fire of their swords and axes.

Kicking away the blanket, he climbed to his feet, searching desper-

ately for a weapon. The things were everywhere, prancing on their

thin legs like insects, calling out, shrieking thinly when the axe of a

Rimmersman bit. Their cries almost sounded like a language, and

that, in the midst of nightmare, was one of the most horrible things

of all.

Simon ducked behind the rock that had sheltered him, circling

around as he looked frantically for something to protect himself

with. A figure hurtled toward him, tumbling to the ground only a

pace awayone of the northerners, half of his face a wet ruin. Si-

mon bolted forward to pull the axe from his convulsive grasp; not

yet dead, the man gurgled as Simon dragged the weapon free. A

moment later Simon felt a bony clutch at his knee, and whirled to

see a hideous little manlike face behind the grasping claw, eyes star-

ing whitely. He swung the axe down at the face, as hard as he could,

and felt a crunch like a beetle ground underfoot. The stiff fingers fell

away, and Simon leaped free, gagging.

With the light from the sky alternately blooming and dying, it was

nearly impossible to tell what was happening. The swaying figures of

the Rimmersmen stood all around, but there was a far greater num-

ber of hopping, piping demons. It seemed that the best place to . . .

Simon was knocked to the ground without warning, a gripping

paw around his neck. He felt the side of his face go down into the

mud, tasted it, then heaved up against the thing on his back. A

crude blade whickered past his eyes and stuck with a sucking noise

in the earth. Simon clambered to his knees, but another hand

reached around his face, covering his eyes. It stank of mud and foul

water, the fingers squirming like nightcrawlers.

Where is the axe? I've dropped the axe!

326 Tad Williams

He clambered shakily to his feet, legs wide on the slippery ground,

and tried to pry loose the clamping fingers around his windpipe. He

stumbled forward, nearly falling again, unable to dislodge the awful,

strangling thing from his back. The bony hand was cutting off his

air, the sharp knees digging at his ribs; he thought he heard the ropy

thing squealing in triumph. He managed a few more steps before he

dropped to his knees, the din of battle growing fainter behind him.

His ears roared; strength flowed out of his arms and body like meal

from a torn sack.

I'm dying . . . was all he could think. Before his eyes there was

nothing but dull red light.

Then the crushing, scratching grip on his throat was suddenly

gone. Simon fell heavily on his chest and face and lay gasping.

Wheezing, he looked up. Painted against the black sky by a sheet

of crackling lightning was a mad silhouette ... a man on a wolf.

Binabik!

Sucking air into his ragged throat, Simon tried to pull himself

upright, but could get no farther than his elbows before the little

man was at his side. A pace away the body of the earth-creature lay

curled like a singed spider, blind eyes to the sky.

'"Say nothing!" Binabik hissed. "We must go! Quickly!" He helped

Simon to a sitting position, but the boy waved him away, batting at

the little man with baby-weak hands.

"Have to ... have to . . ." Simon wagged a shaking hand to-

ward the chaos that raged around the campsit, some twenty paces

away.

"Ridiculous!" Binabik snapped. "The Rimmersmen can fight their

own battles. My duty is to get you to safety. Now cornel"

"No," Simon said stubbornly. Binabik held his hollowed stick in

his hand; Simon knew what had felled his attacker. "We hahave to

hehelp them."

"They will survive." Binabik was grim. Qantaqa had followed her

master, and now sniffed solicitously at Simon's wound. "You are my

charge."

"What do you . . ." Simon began. Qantaqa growled, a deep,

threatening sound of alarm; Binabik looked up. "Daughter of the

Mountains!" he groaned. Simon followed his gaze.

A clot of the greater darkness had broken off from the swirling

melee and was rapidly moving toward them. It was hard to tell how

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR327

many creatures might be in the bounding tangle of arms and eyes,

but it was more than a few.

"Nihut, Qantaqa!" Binabik shouted; an instant later the wolf

sprang toward them; they squealed in whistling terror as she struck.

"We have no more time to waste, Simon," the troll snapped.

Thunder caromed across the plain as he pulled his knife from his

belt and dragged Simon up. "The duke's men are holding their own,

now, and I have no way to afford your being killed in the last strug-

gling."

In the midst of the earth-burrowers Qantaqa was a gray-furred

engine of death. As her great jaws bit, and she shook and bit again,

thin black bodies hurtled away on all sides to fall in broken heaps.

More were swarming over, and the wolf's buzzing snarl rose above

the storm's rumble.

"But ... but .. ." Simon held back as Binabik moved toward

his mount.

"It was my bound promise to protect you," Binabik said, tugging

Simon along. "That was Doctor Morgenes' wish."

"Doctor . . . !? You know Doctor Morgenes . . . !?"

As Simon stared, mouth working, Binabik stopped and whistled

twice. Qantaqa, with a last ecstatic shiver, flung two of the creatures

aside and bounded toward them.

"Now, run, foolish boy!" Binabik shouted. They ranQantaqa

first, leaping like a hart, her muzzle black with blood, Binabik after.

Simon followed, tripping and staggering across the muddy plain as

the storm shouted unanswerable questions.

22

A Wind

from the North

^

"No, I DON'T want a damned thingi" Guthwulf, Earl of Utanyeat

spat citril juice on the tile floor as the wide-eyed page went scurrying

away. Watching him go, Guthwulf regretted his hasty wordsnot

out of any sympathy for the boy, but because he had suddenly real-

ized that he might indeed want something. He had been nearly an

hour waiting outside the throne room without a drop of anything to

drink, and only Aedon Himself knew how much longer he might sit

here rotting.

He spat again, the pungent citril stinging his tongue and lips, and

cursed as he wiped a line of spittle off his long jaw- Unlike many of

the men in his command, Guthwulf was not accustomed to having a

piece of the bitter southern root always tucked in his cheek, but

during this strange, damp springone that had found him confined

for days at a time in the Hayholt, waiting on the king's biddinghe

had found that any distraction, even that of burning one's palate,

was welcome.

Also, and undoubtedly because of the wet weather, the halls of the

Hayholt seemed to reek of mold, mold and ... no, corruption was

too melodramatic a word. Anyway, the strongly aromatic citril

seemed to help.

Just as Guthwulf had climbed to his feet, deserting the stool to

resume the frustrated pacing that had occupied most of his waiting

time, the throne room door creaked and swung inward. Pryrates'

blunt head appeared in the gap, black eyes flat and shiny as a liz-

ard's.

"Ah, good Utanyeat!" Pryrates showed his teeth. "How long we

have kept you waitingi The king is ready to see you now." The priest

330 Tad Williams

pulled the door farther in, revealing his scarlet robe and a glimpse of

the high hall behind. "Please," he said.

Guthwulf had to pass very close to Pryrates as he entered, sucking

in his chest to minimize the contact. Why was the man standing so

close? Was it to make Guthwulf uncomfortablethere was no love

lost between King's Hand and the king's counseloror was he try-

ing to keep the door as nearly shut as he possibly could? The castle

was cold this spring, and if anyone deserved to keep warm it was

Elias. Perhaps Pryrates was only trying to conserve heat in the spa-

cious throne room.

Well, if that was what he was up to, he had failed utterly. The

moment Guthwulf stepped over the threshold and past the door he

felt the chill descend upon him, turning the skin on his strong arms

into chicken-flesh. Looking past the throne, he saw that several of

the upper windows were open, propped with sticks. The cold north-

ern air that swirled down tugged at the torch flames, making them

dance in their cressets.

"Guthwulf!" Elias boomed, half-rising from his chair of yellowed

bone. The massive dragon skull leered over his shoulder. "I am

ashamed to have kept you waiting. Come here!"

Guthwulf strode forward up the tiled walkway, trying not to

shiver. "You have much on your mind. Majesty. I do not mind

waiting."

Elias sat back in his throne as the Earl of Utanyeat dropped to a

knee before him. The king wore a black shirt trimmed with green

and silver, and his boots and breeks were also black. The iron crown

of Fingil sat high on his pale brow, and in a sheath at his side was

the sword with the strange crossed hilt. He had not been without it

in weeks, but Guthwulf had no idea whence it came. The king had

never mentioned it, and there was something queer and unsettling

about the blade that prevented Guthwulf from asking.

" 'Do not mind waiting,' " Elias smirked. "Go on, sit down." The

king indicated a bench a pace or two back of where the Earl kneeled.

"Since when do you not mind waiting, Wolf? Just because I am

king, do not think I have gone blind and stupid as well."

"I am sure that when you have something for your King's Hand

to do, you will inform me."

Things had changed between Guthwulf and his old friend Elias,

and the Earl of Utanyeat did not like that. Elias had never been

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR331

secretive, but now Guthwulf felt vast, hidden currents moving be-

neath the surface of daily events, currents that the king pretended

did not even exist. Things had changed, and Guthwulf felt sure he

knew who was to blame. He looked past the king's shoulder at

Pryrates, who was watching him fixedly. When their eyes met, the

red-robed priest lifted a hairless eyebrow, as if in mocking question.

Elias rubbed at his temples for a moment. "You will have work

enough and more soon, I promise you. Ah, my head. A crown is

indeed a heavy thing, friend. I sometimes wish I could lay it down

and go on" somewhere, like we once did so often. Free companions of

the road!" The king turned his grim smile from Guthwulf to his

counselor. "Priest, my head aches again. Bring me some wine, will

you?"

"At once, my Lord." Pryrates moved off to the back of the throne

room.

"Where are your pages, Majesty?" Guthwulf asked. The king

looked dreadfully tired, he thought. The whiskers on his unshaven

cheeks stood out, black against his wan skin. "And why, with re-

spect, are you shut up in this freezing cave of a hall? It is colder than

the Devil's black arse in here, and smells of mildew beside. Let me

light a fire in the grate."

"No." Elias waved a broad hand dismissively. "I don't want it

any warmer. I'm warm already. Pryrates says it is just an ague.

Whatever it is, the cool air feels good to me. And there is plenty of

breeze, so no need to fear stagnancy or bad humors."

Pryrates had returned with the king's goblet; Elias drained it with

a swallow and dried his lips with his sleeve.

"Plenty of breeze indeed. Majesty," Guthwulf grinned sourly.

"Well, my king, you . . . and Pryrates . . . know best, and doubt-

less have nothing to leam from a fighting man. Is there some other

way I can serve you?"

"I think perhaps you can, although the task may not be much to

your liking. First, though, tell me: has Earl Fengbald returned?"

Guthwulf nodded. "I spoke with him this morning, sire."

"I have summoned him." Elias held out his cup for more wine,

and Pryrates brought the ewer and poured. "But since you have seen

him, tell me now: is his news good?"

"I'm afraid not, sire. The spy you seek, Morgenes' henchman, is

still at large."

332 Tad Williams

"God's curses!" Elias nibbed at a spot just beside his eyebrow.

"Did he not have the hounds I gave him? And the master-hunts-

man?"

"Yes, Majesty, and he left them still on the hunt, but in fairness to

Fengbald I must say that you have set him a nearly impossible task."

Elias narrowed his eyes, staring, and for a moment Guthwulf felt

he faced a stranger. Then the bumping of ewer against goblet broke

the tension, and Elias relaxed. "Welladay," he said, "you are most

likely right. I shall have to be careful not to take my frustrations out

on Fengbald. He and I ... share a disappointment."

Guthwulf nodded, watching the king. "Yes, sire, I was alarmed to

hear of your daughter's illness. How is Miriamele?"

The king looked briefly to Pryrates, who finished pouring and

backed away. "It is kind of you to ask, Wolf. We do not think she is

in any danger, but Pryrates feels sure that the sea air of Meremund

will be the best remedy for her ailments. It is a pity to put off the

marriage, though." The king stared into his wine cup as though it

wee the mouth of a well down which he had just dropped something

valuable. The wind whistled in the open windows.

After some long moments had passed, the Earl of Utanyeat felt

compelled to speak. "You said that there was some small task I

could do for you, my king?"

Elias looked up. "Ah. Of course. I wish you to go to

Hemysadharc. Since I was forced to raise the taxes to make up for

the cursed, miserable drought, that old hill-gopher Lluth has defied

me. He sent that prancing Eolair to soothe me with honeyed words,

but the time for words is over."

"Over, my Lord?" Guthwulf raised an eyebrow.

"Over," Elias growled. *'I wish you to take a dozen knightsany

more and Lluth would have no choice but resistand hie you to the

Taig to beard the old miser in his den. Tell him to refuse me my

rightful due is to slap my face ... to spit on the very Dragonbone

Chair. But be subtle, say nothing in front of his knights that will

shame him into resistancenevertheless, make it clear that to deny

me further will risk his walls falling in flames about his head. Make

him/ear, Guthwulf."

"I can do that. Lord."

Elias smiled tightly. "Good. And while you're there, keep an eye

open for any sign of Josua's whereabouts. There is no news from

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR333

Naglimund, though my spies have it ringed 'round. It is possible my

treacherous brother might have gone to Lluth. It may even be he

who is fueling Hemystir's obstinance!"

"I will be your Eye as well as your Hand, my King."

"If I may. King Elias?" At the king's elbow, Pryrates lifted a

finger.

"Speak, priest."

"I would also like to suggest that our lord of Utanyeat keep an eye

out for the boy, Morgenes' spy. It would help to supplement

Fengbald's effort. We need that boy, Majestywhat good to slay the

serpent if the hatchlings go free?"

"If I find the young viper," Guthwulf grinned, "I will happily

grind him beneath my heel."

"No!" Elias shouted, startling Guthwulf with his vehemence.

"No! The spy must live, and any of his companions, until we have

them here in the Hayholt, safe. There are questions we must ask

them." Elias, as if embarrassed by his outburst, turned strangely

pleading eyes to his old friend, "You understand-that, surely?"

"Of course. Majesty," Guthwulf answered quickly.

"They need only be brought to us with the breath still quick in

their bodies," said Pryrates, calm as a baker talking of flour. "Then

we shall discover everything."

"Enough." Elias slid farther back on his seat of bone. Guthwulf

was surprised to see drops of sweat beading his forehead, even as the

Earl of Utanyeat was shivering in the chill air. "Go, now, old friend.

Bring me Lluth's full allegiance, or if not, I will send you back to

bring me his head. Go."

"God keep you. Majesty." Guthwulf dropped off the bench onto

one knee, then rose to his feet and backed down the aisle. The

banners above his head swung, wind-whipped; in the fluid shadows

thrown by the nickering torches the clan-animals and heraldic beasts

seemed engaged in an eerie, fitful dance.

Guthwulf met Fengbald in the antechamber hall. The Earl of

Falshire had bathed the grit of the road from his face and hair since

their meeting that morning, and was dressed in a red velvet jerkin

with the silver eagle of his family chased on the breast, its feathers

twining in a fanciful pattem-

"Ho, Guthwulf, have you seen him?" he asked.

334 Tad Williams

The Earl of Utanyeat nodded. "Yes, and you will, too. God curse

it, he is the one who should be taking salt air at Meremund instead

of Miriamele. He looks ... I don't know, he looks damned ill.

And the throne chamber is cold as frost."

"So it's true?" Fengbald asked sullenly. "About the princess? I

was hoping he'd changed his mind."

"Gone west to the sea. Your great day will have to wait a bit, it

looks." Guthwulf smirked. "I'm sure you'll find something to keep

your interest up until the princess returns."

"That's not the problem." The Earl ofFalshire's mouth twisted as

though he tasted something sour. "I just fear he's trying to back out

of his promise. I have heard that nobody knew she was ill until she

was gone."

"You worry too much," Guthwulf said. "It's womanish. Elias

needs an heir. Be grateful that you fit his bill of particulars for a son-

in-law better than 1 do." Guthwulf showed his teeth in a mocking

smile. "I would go to Meremund and get her." He gave a mock

salute and sauntered away, leaving Fengbald standing before the

high oak doors of the throne room.

^

She could tell from far away up the corridor that it was Earl

Pengbald, and that he was in a foul temper. His arm-swinging walk,

like a young boy sent away from the supper table, and the loud,

deliberate banging of his boot heels on the floor stones trumpeted his

mood before him-

She reached forward and tugged at Jael's elbow. When the cow-

eyed girl looked up, already sure she'd done something else wrong,

Rachel made a gesture toward the approaching Earl of Falshire.

"Better move that bucket, girl." She took the scrubbing broom

from Jael's hand. The pail of soapy water stood in the center of the

hallway, directly in the path of the oncoming nobleman.

"Hurry up, you stupid girl!" Rachel hissed, a touch of alarm

tingeing her voice. The moment the words were out Rachel knew

she should not have uttered them. Fengbald was cursing to himself,

his face set in a petulant snarl. Jael, in a frenzy of ill-coordinated

haste, let the bucket slide through her wet fingers. It struck the floor

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR335

with a loud thump, and a gout of sudsy water slopped over the rim

to splatter onto the hallway. Fengbald, upon them now, stepped

squarely in the spreading puddle. He lost his balance for a moment,

throwing his arms up as he slid, then clutched at a tapestry on the

wall for support as Rachel watched in helpless, anticipatory horror.

It was a stroke of luck that the hanging held Fengbald's weight long

enough for him to regain his equilibrium; nonetheless, a moment

later the tapestry itself pulled free at an upper comer and slid gently

down the wall to sag into the soapy pool.

Rachel looked at the Earl of Falshire's reddening face for only a

moment before turning to Jael. "Go, you clumsy cow. Get on with

you. Now!" Jael, with a hopeless glance at Fengbald, turned and ran,

her fat rump wagging pitifully.

"Come back here, you slut!" Fengbald screamed, jaw trembling

with rage. His long black hair, disarranged, hung in his face. "I'll

have my due, my due for ... for this . . . this . . . '"

Rachel, keeping an eye cocked toward the Earl, bent and lifted the

sodden comer of the tapestry out of the water. There was no way

she could re-hang it; she stood holding it, watching it drip as

Fengbald raged.

"Look! Look at my boots! I'll have that filthy bitch's throat slit for

this!" The Earl turned his eye onto Rachel. "How dare you send her

away?"

Rachel cast her eyes down, not hard to do since the young noble-

man stood at least a foot taller than she. "I'm sorry, Lord," she said,

and her honest fear put a convincing tone of respect into her voice.

"She is a stupid girl. Master, and she will be beaten for it, but I am

the Mistress of Chambermaids and I take the blame, you see. I'm

very, very sorry."

Fengbald stared down at her for a moment, and his eyes nar-

rowed. Then, as swiftly as an arrow strikes, he reached out and

slapped Rachel across the face. Her hand flew up to the red mark

spreading across her cheek, spreading as the puddle had across the

flagstones.

"Then give that to the fat slut," Fengbald spat, "and if I run into

her again, you tell her I'll break her neck." He stared at the Mistress

of Chambermaids for a moment, then walked on down the hall,

leaving a trail of heel-and-toe boot prints shimmering wetly on the

flags.

336 Tad Williams

*

And he could do it, too. Rachel thought to herself later as she sat

on her bed holding a wet washrag to her burning cheek. Across the

hall, in the maid's dormitory, Jael was sobbing. Rachel had not had

the heart even to shout at her, but the sight of Rachel's swelling face

had been punishment enough to send the lumpy, soft-hearted girl

into a paroxysm of tears.

Sweet Rhiap and Pelippa. I'd rather be slapped twice than listen to

her blubbering.

Rachel rolled over onto the hard palletshe kept it on a board

because of her always-aching backand pulled the blanket up over

her head to dull the sound ofJael's weeping. Wrapped in the blanket

she could feel her own warm breath wreathing her face.

This must be what it's like to be laundry in the basket, she thought,

and then chided herself for such simplemindedness. You 're getting

old, old woman . . . old and useless. Suddenly she found tears com-

ing, the first she had cried since the news about Simon.

I'm just so tired. Sometimes I think I'm going to drop where I

stand, fall over like a broken broom at the feet of these young mon-

stersstamping around my castle, treating us like we were dirtand

they'd probably just push me out with the dust. So tired . . . if only

...if...

The air beneath the blanket was thick and warm. She had finished

cryingwhat good were tears, anyway? Leave them to her stupid,

flighty girlsand now she felt herself falling into sleep, succumbing

to its heaviness as though drowning in warm. sticky water.

And in her dream Simon was not dead, had not died in the terri-

ble fire that had also taken Morgenes, and several of the guardsmen

who had rushed to put it out. Even Count Breyugar, they said, had

perished in the catastrophe, crushed beneath the collapse of the

flaming roof . . . No, Simon was alive, and healthy. Something

about him was different, but Rachel could not say whatthe look in

his eye, the harder line of his jaw?but that did not matter. It was

Simon, alive, and as she dreamed Rachel's heart was full again. She

saw him, the dead boyher dead boy, really; hadn't she raised him

like a mother until he was taken away?and he was standing in a

place of near-absolute whiteness, staring up at a great, white tree

that stretched into the air like a ladder to the Throne of God. And

though he stood resolutely, his head flung back and his eyes upon

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR337

the tree, Rachel could not help noticing that his hair, that thick

reddish tangle, was badly in need of cutting . . . well, she would

see to that soon, right enough ... the boy needed a firm

hand . . .

When she woke, pulling the smothering blanket aside in a panic to

find more darkness around herthis time the darkness of evening

the weight of loss and grief came sliding back down like a wet tapes-

try. As she sat up on the bed and climbed slowly to her feet the

washrag tumbled free, dry as an autumn leaf. There was no call for

her to be laying about, pining like some fluttery girlchild. There was

work that needed doing, Rachel reminded herself, and no rest this

side of Heaven.

^

The tabor rattled, and the lute player plucked a gentle chord

before beginning the last verse.

". . . And now dost thou come, my lady fair

In Khandery-cloth and silks withal?

Then if thou wouldst rule o'er my heart

Take foot now and follow to Emettin's Hallf"

The musician finished with a flurry of delicate notes, then bowed

as Duke Leobardis applauded.

"Emettin's Hall!" the duke said to Eolair, Count of Nad Mullach,

who followed Leobardis' example with his own dutiful applause.

Secretly, the Hemystirman felt sure that he had heard better. He

was not much taken by the love ballads that were so popular here in

the Nabbanai court.

"I am fond of that song," the duke smiled. His long white hair

and pink cheeks gave him the look of a favorite old great-uncle, the

sort who drank too much stout at the Aedontide feasts and then

tried to teach the children how to whistle. Only the flowing white

robe trimmed in lapis and gold, and the golden circlet on his head

with its mother-of-pearl kingfisher, proclaimed him as different than

ordinary men. "Come, Count Eolair, I thought that music was the

338 Tad Williams

tifeblood of the Taig. Does not Lluth count himself Osten Ard's

greatest patron of harpers, and your Hemystir the natural home of

musicians?" The duke leaned across the arm of his sky-blue chair to

pat Eolair's hand.

"King Lluth does indeed keep his harpers beside him at all

times," Eolair agreed. "Please, Duke, if I seem preoccupied, it is in

no way due to any stinting on your part. Your kindness has been

indeed a thing to remember. No, I must admit I am still bothered

about the matters we discussed earlier."

A look of concern came to the duke's mild blue eyes. "I have told

you, my Eolair, that there is a time for such things. It is very wear-

ing to have to wait, but there you are." Leobardis motioned to the

lute player, who had been waiting patiently on one knee. The musi-

cian rose, bowed, and moved off. His fantastically intricate garment

flounced around him as he joined a group of courtiers similarly

garbed in sumptuously embroidered robes and tunics. The ladies

had supplemented their outfits with exotic hats winged like seabirds,

or crested like the fins of bright fish. The colors in the throne room,

like those of the courtiers' costumes, were muted; tasteful blues,

yellow beiges, pinks, whites, and foam greens- The impression was

that of a palace built from delicate sea-stones, everything smoothed

and softened by the clutch of the ocean.

Beyond the gentlemen and ladies of the court, taking up the whole

southwest wall facing the duke's chair, were the high arched win-

dows that looked out over the active, sun-tipped green sea. The

ocean, which threw itself ceaselessly against the rocky headland on

which the ducal palace perched, was a vibrant, living tapestry.

Watching through the day as the moving light danced on its surface,

or revealed patches of still sea as heavy and translucent as jade,

Eolair frequently wished to sweep the courtiers from the way, send

them tumbling and squeaking from the room so that nothing would

obscure his view.

"Perhaps you are right, Duke Leobardis," Eolair said at last.

"One must stop talking sometime, even when the subject is a vital

one. I suppose, sitting here, I should be taking a lesson from the

ocean. It doesn't need to work hard to get what it wants; eventually

it wears the rocks away, the beaches . . . even the mountains."

Leobardis liked this sort of conversation better. "Ah, yes, the sea

never changes, does it? And yet, it is always changing."

339

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

"That's true, my lord. And it is not always quiet. Sometimes there

are storms."

As the duke cocked his head toward the Hemystirman, unsure

whether this remark meant something more than was immediately

obvious, his son Benigaris strode into the room, nodding briefly to

some of the courtiers who greeted him as he moved toward the

duke's chair.

"The duke my father; Count Eolair," he said, bowing once to

each. Eolair smiled, and put out a hand to clasp Benigaris'.

"It's good to see you," the Hemystirman said. Benigaris was taller

than when he had last seen him, but the duke's son had then been

only seventeen or eighteen. Nearly two decades had passed, and

Eolair was not displeased to see that despite his being a good eight

years the elder, it was Benigaris who had thickened around the

waist, not he. Nonetheless, the duke's son was tall and broad-shoul-

dered, with intent dark eyes beneath thick black brows. He made

quite an imposing figure in his belted tunic and quilted vestan

energetic contrast to his affable father.

"Hea, it has been a long time," Benigaris agreed. "We shall talk at

supper tonight." Eolair did not think he sounded very excited at the

prospect. Benigaris turned to his father. "Sir Fluiren is here to see

you. He is with the chamberlain at the moment."

"Ah, good old Fluiren! There is irony for you, Eolair. One of the

greatest knights Nabban has ever produced."

"Only your brother Camaris was ever called greater," Eolair in-

terrupted, not adverse to resurrecting the memories of a more mar-

tial Nabban.

"Yes, my dear brother." Leobardis smiled a sad smile. "Well, to

think that Fluiren should be coming to see me as an emissary of

Elias!"

"There is a certain irony," Eolair said lightly.

Benigaris curled his lip with impatience. "He's waiting for you. I

think you should see him quickly, as a gesture of respect to the High

King."

"My, my!" Leobardis turned an amused glance toward Eolair.

"Do you hear my son order me?" When the duke turned back to

Benigaris, Eolair thought there might be something in Leobardis'

gaze beside amusementanger? Worry? "Yes, then, tell my old

340

Tad Williams

friend Fluiren I will see him ... let me think . . . yes, in the

Council Hall. Will you join us, Eolair?"

Benigaris leaped in, "Father, I do not think you should invite even

so trusted a friend as the count in to hear secret communications

from the High King!"

"And what need, may I ask, is there for secrets to be kept from

Hernystir?" the duke asked. Anger had crept into his voice.

"Please, Leobardis, I have things I must do anyway. I shall walk

in later to say hello to Fluiren." Eolair rose and bowed.

As he stopped on his way across the throne room to look one

more time on the splendid view, he heard the voices of Leobardis

and his son raised behind him in muffled argument.

Waves make more waves as these Nabbanai say, thought Eolair. It

looks as though Leobardis' balance is more delicate than I thought.

Doubtless that is why he is so unwilling to talk frankly with me about

his troubles with the king. A good thing it is that Leobardis is a

tougher stalk than he appears to be.

He heard the courtiers whispering behind him, and turned to see

several of them looking in his direction. He smiled and nodded. The

women blushed, covering their mouths with their flowing sleeves;

the men nodded gravely and quickly looked away. He knew what

they were thinkinghe was a curiosity, a rustic and untutored west-

erner, even if he was an old friend of the duke's. No matter what he

wore, or how perfectly he spoke, still they would feel the same.

Suddenly, Eolair felt a deep longing for his home in Hemystir. He

had been too long in foreign courts.

The waves rushed against the rocks below, as though the sea

would not be satisfied until its monstrous patience had at last

brought the palace tumbling down into its watery grasp.

Eolair spent the rest of the afternoon strolling the high, airy hall-

ways and meticulous gardens of the Sancellan Mahistrevis. Al-

though it was now the duke's palace and the capitol ofNabban, once

it had been the seat of Man's whole empire in Osten Ard; diminished

in importance now, still its glories were many.

Perched on the rocky knob of the Sancelline Hill, the palace's

western walls overlooked the sea which had always been Nabban's

lifebloodindeed, all of Nabban's noble houses used water birds as

the symbols of their power: the Benidrivine kingfisher of the current

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR341

duke's line, the Prevan osprey and Ingadarine albatross; even the

Heron of Sulis that had once, briefly, flown over the Hayholt in

Erkynland.

East of the palace the city of Nabban itself spread down the penin-

sula's neck, a crowded, swarming city of hills and close quarters,

thinning at last as the peninsula widened out into the meadows and

farms of the Lakeland. From the known world to this peninsular

duchy and bridal-veil of island possessions, Nabban's visits had nar-

rowed, and its rulers had turned in on themselves. But once, not too

long ago, the mantle of the Nabbanai Imperators had covered the

world, from the brackish Wran to the farthest reaches of icy

Rimmersgard; in those days the wrangling of osprey and pelican and

the strivings of heron and gull had carried as their reward a prize

worth any risk.

Eolair walked in the Hall of Fountains, where jets of glimmering

spray arched up to commingle as fine mist beneath the open lattice-

work of the stone roof, and wondered if there was yet the will left in

the Nabbanai to fight, or whether they had simply come to terms

with their own gradual dimunition, so that Ellas' provocations only

served to drive them further into their beautiful, delicate shell.

Where now were the men of greatness like those who had carved

Nabban's empire out of the rough stone of Osten Ardmen like

Tiyagaris or Anitulles . . . ?

Of course, he thought, there was Camarisa man who, had he not

found in himself a stronger call to serve than to be served, might

have held the willing world in the palm of his hand. Camaris had

been a mighty man indeed.

And who are we Hernystirmen to speak? he wondered. Since Hern

the Great, what mighty men have risen up in our western lands?

Tethtain, who took the Hayholt from Sulis? Perhaps. But who else?

Where is Hemystir's Hall of Fountains, where are oar great palaces

and churches?

But of course, that is the difference. He looked out past the stream-

ing fountains to the cathedral spire of the Sancellan Aedonitis, the

palace of the Lector and Mother Church. We of the Hernystiri do not

look at the hill streams and say: how can I bring that to my home? We

build our homes beside the stream. We do not have a faceless God to

glorify with towers taller than the trees of the Circoille. We know that

the gods live in the trees and in the bones of the earth, and in the

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Tad Williams

rivers that splash high as any fountain, racing down from the Grian-

spog mountains.

We never wanted to rule the world. He smiled to himself, remem-

bering the Taig at Hemysadharc, a castle made not of stone but

wood: oak-hearted to match the hearts of his people. Really, now, all

we want is to be left alone. Still, with all their years of conquest,

perhaps these Nabbanfolk have forgotten sometimes you have to fight

for thatt too.

As he left the room of fountains, Eolair of Nad Mullach brushed

past two legion guardsmen coming in.

"Bloody hillman," he heard one of them say, eyeing his garb and

horsetail of black hair.

"Hea, you know," the other replied, "every now and then the

sheepherders need to come and see what a city looks like."

". . . And how is my little niece Miriamele, Count?" the duchess

asked. Eolair was seated at her left hand near the head of the long

table. Fluiren, as a more recent arrival and a distinguished son of

Nabban, had the place of honor on the right of Duke Leobardis.

"She seemed well, my lady.'*

"Did you see much of her while you were at the High King's

court?" The Duchess Nessalanta leaned toward him, raising an ex-

quisitely drawn eyebrow. The duchess was a sternly beautiful older

woman, although how much of that beauty was due to the skilled

manipulations of her hairdressers, seamstresses, and lady's maids,

Eolair had no way of guessing. Nessalanta was exactly the kind of

woman who made Eolairno stranger to the company of the fairer

sexfeel completely out of his depth. She was younger than her

husband the duke, but she was the mother of a man well into his

prime. What here was lasting beauty and what was artifice? Then

again, what did it matter? Nessalanta was a powerful woman, and

only Leobardis himself held greater sway over the affairs of the

nation.

"I was not often in the princess' company, Duchess, but we had

several chances to speak at supper. She was as delightful as ever, but

I'm thinking she was already very homesick for Meremund."

"Hmmm." The duchess popped a comer of her trencher-bread

into her mouth and then delicately licked her fingers. "It was inter-

esting you should mention that, Count Eolair. I have just had news

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR343

from Erkynland that she has returned to the castle at Meremund."

She raised her voice. "Father Dinivan?"

A few seats down a young priest looked up from his meal. Al-

though his scalp was shaved in the monasterial style, the hair that

remained was curly and rather long. "Yes, my lady?" he asked.

"Father Dinivan is His Sacredness the Lector Ranessin's private

secretary," Nessalanta explained. The Hemystirman made an im-

pressed face, and Dinivan laughed.

"I don't think it's accreditable to any great wit or talent on my

pan," he said. "The lector also takes in stray dogs. Escritor Velligis

gets very upset. The Sancellan Aedonitis is not a kennel,' he tells the

lector, but His Sacredness smiles and says: 'Neither is Osten Ard a

nursery, but the Benevolent Lord lets His children remain, for all

their mischief." Dinivan waggled his bushy brows. "It's hard to

argue with the lector."

"Isn't it true," the Duchess said as Eolair laughed, "that when

you saw the king he said his daughter was gone to Meremund?"

"Yes, yes he did," Dinivan said, more serious now. "He said she

had taken ill, and the court physicians recommended sea air."

"I am sorry to hear that." Eolair looked past the duchess to the

duke and old Sir Fluiren, who were conversing quietly amidst the

uproar of supperfor a refined people, he reflected, the Nabbanai

certainly enjoyed loud table talk.

"Well," Nessalanta pronounced, sitting back in her chair as a page

scurried up with a finger basin, "it just proves that you can't force

people to be what they're not. Miriamele has Nabbanai blood, of

course, and our blood is salty as the sea. We are not meant to be

taken away from the coast- People should stay where they belong."

And what, the count wondered to himself, are you trying to tell

me, my gracious lady? To stay in Hemystir and leave your husband

and your duchyalone? To, in effect, go back to my own kind?

Eolair watched Leobardis' and Fluiren's discussion wistfully. He

had been maneuvered, he knew: there was no gracious way he could

ignore the duchess and insinuate himself into their conversation.

Meanwhile, old Fluiren was at work on the duke, transmitting Elias'

blandishments. And threats? No, probably not. Elias would not have

sent the dignified Fluiren for that. He had Guthwulf the King's

Hand ready for use whenever such a tool was called for.

Resigned, he made light talk with the duchess, but his heart was

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Tad Williams

not in it. He was sure now that she knew his mission and was hostile

to it. Benigaris was the apple of her eye, and he had been avoiding

Eolair all evening. Nessalanta was an ambitious woman, and doubt-

less felt the fortunes of Nabban would be better assured if they were

yoked to the power of Erkynlandeven a domineering, tyrannical

Erkynlandinstead of the pagans of Hemystir.

And, Eolair realized suddenly, she has a marriageable daughter

herself, the Lady Antippa. Perhaps her interest in Miriamele's health

is not just that of a kindly aunt's for her niece.

The duke's daughter Antippa was pledged already, he knew, to

one Baron Devasalles, a foppish-looking young nobleman who at

this precise moment was arm wrestling with Benigaris in a pool of

wine at the far end of the table. But maybe Nes&alanta had her eye

on greater things.

If Princess Miriamele will notor cannotmarry . . . Eolair

mused, then perhaps the duchess has eyes for Fengbald to marry her

daughter instead. The Earl of Falshire would be a much finer catch

than any back-row Nabbanai baron. And Duke Leobardis would then

be tied to Erkynland with cords of steel.

So now, the count realized, there was not only Josua's where-

abouts to worry over, but Miriamele's as well. What a tanglel

Just think how old Isgrimnur would see this, with all his complaints

about intriguing! His beard would catch fire!

"Tell me, Father Dinivan," the count said, turning to the priest,

"what does your holy book have to say on the art of politicking?"

"Well," a look of concentration momentarily clouded Dinivan's

homely, intelligent face, "the Book of the Aedon speaks often of the

trials of nations." He thought a moment more. "One of my favorite

passages has always been: 'If your enemy comes to speak bearing a

sword, open your door to him and speak, but keep your own sword at

hand. If he comes to you emptyhanded, greet him the same way. But

if he comes to you bearing gifts, stand on your walls and cast stones

down on him.' *' Dinivan wiped his fingers on his black cassock.

"A wise book, indeed," nodded Eolair.

23

Back into the Heart

THE WIND flung rain into their faces as they ran eastward through

the darkness toward the hidden foothills. The clamor of Isgrimnur's

camp receded, muffled in a blanket of thunder.

Coursing across the wet plain, Simon's panicked exhilaration be-

gan to recede as well; the ecstatic sensation of energy, the feeling

that he could run and run through the night like a deer, was gradu-

ally cooled by the rain and relentless pace. Within half a league his

gallop had slowed to a fast walk; soon even that was an effort.

Where a bony hand had clutched his knee he felt the joint stiffening

like a rusty hinge; bands of pain around his throat throbbed at every

deep breath.

"Morgenes . . . sent you?" he shouted.

"Later, Simon," Binabik gasped. "All told later."

They ran and ran, tripping and splashing over the sodden turf.

"Then . . ." Simon panted, "then what . . . were those

things . . . ?"

"The . . . attacking things?" Even as he ran the troll made an

odd hand-to-mouth gesture. "Bukken'diggers' they are ... also

called."

"What are they?" Simon asked, and nearly supped on a patch of

mud, skidding for a moment flat-footed.

"Bad." He grimaced. "There is no more needs telling now,"

When they could run no longer they walked, trudging on until the

sun edged up behind the wash of clouds, a candle behind a gray

sheet. The Wealdhelm stood before them, thrown up in relief against

the pallid dawn like the bowed backs of monks at prayer.

In the meager shelter of a cluster of rounded granite boulders, set

starkly in the sea of grass as though in imitation of the hills beyond,

Binabik made a sort of camp. After walking around the rocks to find

346 Tad Williams

the spot most sheltered from the shifting rains, he helped Simon

down into a space where two boulders leaned together, forming an

angle in which the boy could recline with some minimal comfort.

Simon fell quickly into limp, exhausted sleep.

Flying raindrops skipped from the tops of the boulders as Binabik

crouched, tucking in the boy's cloakwhich the troll had brought

with their other things all the way from Saint Hoderund'sthen

rooted in his pack for some dried fish to chew, and his knucklebones.

Qantaqa returned from an investigatory tour of her new territory to

curl up on Simon's shins. The troll took the bones out and tossed

them, using his pack bag for a table.

The Shadowed Path. Binabik grinned a bitter grin. Then, Master-

less Ram, and again, The Shadowed Path. He cursed, quietly but

lengthilyonly a fool would ignore such a clear message. Binabik

knew himself to be many things, and foolish was occasionally one of

them, but here, now, there was no room to take such chances.

He pulled his fur hood back up around his face and curled in

beside Qantaqa. To any passing byif they could have seen any-

thing at all in the faint light, and with rain in their facesthe three

companions would have looked like nothing so much as an unusual,

dun-colored lichen on the lee-side of the rocks.

^

"So, what kind of a game have you been playing with me,

Binabik?" Simon asked sullenly. "How do you know of Doctor

Morgenes?" In the few hours he had slept the pale dawn had turned

into a cold, gloomy morning, unredeemed by campfire or breakfast.

The sky, swollen with clouds, hung close overhead like a low ceiling.

"It is no game I am playing, Simon," the troll replied. He had

cleaned and bandaged Simon's neck and leg wounds, and was pa-

tiently seeing to Qantaqa's. Only one of the wolf's injuries was seri-

ous, a deep slash on the inside other foreleg. As Binabik picked grit

from the skin, Qantaqa sniffed at his fingers, trusting as a child.

"I have no regret for not telling you; if I had not felt forced, still

you would not know." He rubbed a fingerful of salve into the cut

and then turned his mount loose. She promptly bent and began

licking and biting at the leg. l<! knew that she would do that," he

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR347

said in mild reproach, then mustered a careful smile. "Like you, she

is not thinking I know my work."

Simon, realizing he had been unconsciously plucking at his own

bandages, sat forward. "Come, Binabik, just tell me. How do you

know of Morgenes? Where do you really come from?"

"I am from exactly where I say," the troll replied indignantly. "I

am a Qanuc. And I am not merely knowing o/Morgenes, once I met

him. He is a good friend of my master. They are . . . colleagues, I

think the learned men say."

"What do you mean?"

Binabik sat back against the rock. Although at the moment there

was no rain to shelter from, the cutting wind alone was reason

enough to stay close to the outcropping. The little man seemed to be

considering his words carefully. He looked tired to Simon, his dark

skin loose and a shade paler than normal.

"First," the troll said at last, "you must be knowing something of

my master. He was named Ookequk. He was the ... Singing Man,

you would call him, of our mountain. When we say Singing Man, we

mean not someone who is just singing, but someone who is remem-

bering the old songs and old wisdom. Like doctor and priest joined

together, it seems to me.

"Ookequk was my master because of certain things the elders

thought they were seeing in me. It was a great honor to be the one to

share in Ookequk's wisdomI went three days without eating food

when I was told, just to make myself of the right pureness." Binabik

smiled. "When I announced this priderully to my new master, he hit

me on my ear. 'You are too young and stupid to be starving yourself

on purpose,' he said to me. ' Tt has presumptuousness. You may

only starve by accident . . .'"

Binabik's grin split open into a laugh; when Simon thought about

it for a moment, he laughed a little, too.

"In any way," he continued, "I will be telling you someday about

my years learning from Ookequkhe was a great, fat troll, Simon;

he weighed more than you, and he was being my height onlybut

now the point must be reached sooner.

"I do not know with exactness where my master first met

Morgenes, but it was long before I came to his cave. They were

friends, though, and my master taught Morgenes the art of making

348 Tad Williams

birds carry messages. They had much talk in letters, my master and

your doctor. They shared many . . . ideas about the world's ways.

"Just two summers gone my parents were killed. Their death

came in the dragon-snow of the mountain we call Little Nose, and

once they were no more, I devoted all my thinkingwell, almost all

to learning from master Ookequk. When he told me this thaw that

I was to be accompanying him on a great journey south, I was filled

with excitement. It was clear-seeming to me that this would be my

test of worthiness.

"What I was not knowing," the troll said, poking up the muddy

grass before him with his walking stickalmost angrily, Simon

thought, but there was no anger to hear in his voice"what I was

not told, was that Ookequk had more important reasons for travel-

ing than the finish of my apprenticeship. He had been receiving

words from Doctor Morgenes . . . and some others ... of things

that disturbed him, and he felt it was time to be returning the visit

Morgenes had made on him long years before, when I first was with

him."

"What 'things*?" Simon asked. "What did Morgenes tell him?"

"If you are not yet knowing," Binabik said serious, "then perhaps

there are still truths you can do without. On that I must think, but

for now let me say what I canwhat I must."

Simon nodded stiffly, rebuked.

"I will not either burden you with all the long story of our south-

ward trip. I was realizing quite early on that my master had not

given me all the truth, either. He was worried, much worried, and

when he cast the bones or read certain signs in the sky and wind he

became even more so. Also, some of our experiences were very bad.

I have traveled by myself, as you know, much of it before becoming

a servant of my master Ookequk, yet never have I seen times so bad

for travelers. An experience much like yours of last night we were

having just below the lake Drorshullvenn, on the Frosttnarch."

"You mean those . . . Bukken?" Simon asked. Even with day-

light around them, the thought of the clasping hands was terrify-

ingly vivid.

"Indeed," Binabik nodded, "and that was . . . is ... being a

bad sign, that they should attack so. It is not in the memory of my

people that the Boghanik, which is our name for them, should as-

349

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

sault a group of armed men. Bold it is, and frighteningly so. Their

usual way is to be preying on animals and solitary travelers."

"What are they?"

"Later, Simon, there is much that you will leam if you have pa-

tience with me. My master did not tell me all, eitherwhich is not

saying, please notice, that I am your masterbut he was very much

upset. In our whole journeying down the Frostmarch I did not see

him sleeping. When I would sleep, still he would be awake, and the

morning would find him up before me. He was not young, either: he

was old before I came to him, and several years I was by him study-

ing.

"One night, when first we had crossed down into the northern

parts of Erkynland, he asked me to be standing watch so that he

could walk the Road of Dreams. We were in a place much like this,"

Binabik gestured around at the bleak plain below the hills, "spring

arrived, but not yet broken through. This would have been, oh,

perhaps around the time of your All Fool's Day or the day before."

"All Fools Eve . . . Simon tried to think back, to remember. The

night that terrible noise awakened the whole castle. The night before

. . . the rains came . . .

"Qantaqa was off hunting, and the old ram One-eyea great, fat,

patient thing he was to carry Ookequk!was sleeping by the fire. We

were alone with just the sky. My master ate of the dream-bark that

came to him from the marshy Wran in the south. He crossed over

into a kind of sleeping. He had not told me why he was doing this,

but I could guess he was searching for answers that he could find no

other way. The Boghanik had frightened him, because there was

wrongness in their actions.

"Soon he was mumbling, as he was usually doing as his heart

walked the Road of Dreams. Much was not understandable, but one

or two things that he said were also said more lately by Brother

Dochais, which is why you may have seen me show surprise."

Simon had to restrain a sour smile. And he had thought that it

had been his own fear which was so obvious, sparked by the Hemys-

tirman's delirious words!

"Suddenly," the troll continued, still poking fixedly with his stick

at the spongy turf, "it seemed to me that something had caught at

himagain, with likeness to Brother Dochais. But my master was

strong, stronger in his heart, I think, than nearly anyone, man or

350 Tad Williams

troll, and he fought. Struggled and struggled, he did, all the after-

noon long and into the evening, as I was standing beside him with

no help to give but to wet his brow." Binabik pulled a handful of

grass, tossing it into the air to bat at it with his staff. "Then, a little

past the middle of the night, he said some words to mequite

calmly, as if he were at drinking with the others elders in the Clan

caveand died.

"It was for me, I am thinking, worse than my parents, because

they were lostjust vanished in a snowslide, gone with no trace. I

buried Ookequk there on a hillside. None of the proper rituals were

correctly done, and that is a shame for me. One-eye would not leave

without his master; for all I can know, he may be there still. I am

hoping so."

The troll was quiet for a while, staring fiercely at the scuffed hide

on the knees of his breeches. His pain was so close to Simon's own

sorrow that the boy could think of no words to say that would make

sense to anyone but himself.

After a while Binabik silently opened his bag and proffered a

handful of nuts. Simon took them, along with the waterskin.

"Then," Binabik began again, almost as if he had not stopped, "a

strange thing happened."

Simon huddled in his cloak and watched the troll's face as he

talked.

"Two days I had spent beside my master's burial place. A nice

enough place it was, lying beneath unblocked sky, but my heart was

sore because I knew he would be more happy up high in the moun-

tains. I was thinking of what I should be doing, whether to continue

on to Morgenes in Erchester, or return to my people and tell them

the Singing Man Ookequk was dead.

"I decided on the afternoon of the second day that I should return

to Qanuc. I had no understanding of the importance of my master's

talk with Doctor MorgenesI am still not understanding much,

sadly to sayand I had other . . . responsibilities.

"As I was calling Qantaqa, and scratching a last time between the

horns of faithful One-eye, a small gray bird fluttered down, landing

on Ookequk's mound. I recognized it as one of my master's messen-

ger birds; it was very tired from carrying a heavy burden, a message

and . . . and another thing. As I approached to capture it, Qantaqa

came crashing up along the underbrush. The bird, it is not surpris-

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR351

ing, was frightened and leaped into the air. I barely caught it. It was

a nearness, Simon, but I caught it.

"It was written by Morgenes, and the subject of the note was you,

my friend. It told to the readerwho should have been my master

that you would be in danger, and traveling alone from the Hayholt

toward Naglimund. It asked my master to be helping youwithout

your knowing, if such was possible. It said a few things more."

Simon was riveted; this was a missing part of his own story.

"What other things?" he asked.

"Things only for my master's eyes." Binabik's tone was kindly,

but firm. "Now, it needs no saying that here was a difference. My

master was asked a favor by his old friend . . . but only I could do

that favor. This was also difficult, but from the moment I read

Morgenes' note, I knew I must fulfill his request. I set out that day

before evening toward Erchester."

The note said I would be traveling alone. Morgenes never thought

he would escape. Simon felt tears coming, and covered the effort of

suppressing them with a question.

"How were you supposed to find me?"

Binabik smiled. "By the use of Qanuc hard work, friend Simon. I

had to pick up your trailthe signs of passing of a young man, no

set destination, things of this kind. Qanuc hard work and a largeness

of luck led me to you."

A memory flared in Simon's heart, gray and fearful even in distant

retrospect. "Did you follow me across the lich-yard? The one out-

side the city walls?" It had not all been dream, he knew. Something

had called his name.

The troll's round face, however, was unreassuringly blank. "No,

Simon," he said carefully, thinking. "I was not discovering your

track until, I think, upon the Old Forest Road. Why?"

"It's not important." Simon rose and stretched, looking around

the damp flatland. He sat again, and reached for the waterskin.

"Well, I guess I understand, now . . . but I have much to think

about. It seems we should continue to Naglimund, I suppose. What

do you think?"

Binabik looked troubled. "I am not sure, Simon. If the Bukken

are active in the Frostmarch, the road to Naglimund-keep will be

too dangerous for a pair of travelers alone. I must admit I am much

worried about what to do now. I am wishing we had your Doctor

352 Tad Williams

Morgenes here to advise us. Are you in so much peril, Simon, that

we could not risk even a message to him somehow? I am not think-

ing he wants me to take you through such terrible dangers."

It took a moment for Simon to realize that the "he" Binabik was

talking about was still Morgenes. A second later the astonishing

realization struck: the troll did not know what had happened.

"Binabik," he began, and even as he spoke he felt he was inflicting

a kind of wound, "he's dead. Doctor Morgenes is dead."

The little man's eyes flared wide for a moment, the white around

the brown visible for the first time. An instant later Binabik's expres-

sion froze in a dispassionate mask.

"Dead?" he said at last, his voice so cold that Simon felt a strange

defensiveness, as though it was somehow his faulthe, who had

cried so many tears over the doctor!

"Yes." Simon considered for a moment, then took a calculated

risk. "He died getting Prince Josua and me out of the castle. King

Ellas killed himwell, he had his man Pryrates do it, anyway."

Binabik stared into Simon's eyes, then looked down. "I had

knowledge of Josua's captivity. In the letter it was mentioned. The

rest is ... tidings that are very bad." He stood, and the wind

plucked at his straight black hair. "Let me walk now, Simon. I must

think what these things are meaning ... I must think . . -"

His face still emotionless, the little man stepped away from the

clutch of rocks. Qantaqa immediately leaped up to follow, and

Binabik started to shoo her off, then shrugged. She circled him in

wide, lazy arcs as he moved slowly away, head bowed and small

hands hidden in his sleeves. Simon thought he looked far too small

for the burdens that he carried.

^

Simon was half-hoping that when the troll returned he might be

carrying a fat wood pigeon or something similar. In this he was

disappointed.

"I am sorry, Simon," the little man said, "but it would have been

of small use anyway. We cannot have a smokeless fire with nothing

around but wet brush, and a smoke-beacon I do not think is good at

the moment. Have some dried fish."

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR353

The fish, itself in short supply, was neither filling nor tasty, but

Simon chewed morosely at his piece: who knew when he would next

get a meal on this miserable adventure?

"I have been thinking, Simon. Your news, with no fault of yours,

is hurtful. So soon after my master's death, to hear of the ending of

the doctor, that good old man . . ." Binabik trailed on, then bent

and began shoving things back into his pack, after first separating

out several articles.

"These are your thingssee, I was saving them for you." He

handed Simon the two familiar cylindrical bundles.

"This other . . ." Simon said, accepting the packages, ". . . not

the arrow, but this . . ." He handed it back to Binabik. "It's writ-

ing by Doctor Morgenes."

"Truthfully?" Binabik skinned back a comer of the rag wrap-

pings. "Things that will help us?"

"I don't think so," Simon said. "It's his life ofPrester John. I read

some of itit's mostly about battles and things."

"Ah. Yes." Binabik passed it back over to Simon, who pushed it

through his belt. "Too bad, that is- We could use his more specific

words at this moment." The troll bent and continued pushing ob-

jects into his pack. "Morgenes and Ookequk my master, they were

belonging together to a very special group." He scooped something

out of his belongings and held it up for Simon to see. It gleamed

faintly in the overcast afternoon light, a pendant of a scroll and quill

pen.

"Morgenes had one of those!" Simon said, leaning close to look.

"Indeed," Binabik nodded. "This was my master's. It is a sigil

belonging to those who join the League of the Scroll. There are, I

was told by him, never more than seven members. Your and my

masters are deadthere can be no more than five left, now." He

snapped his small hand shut on the pendant and dropped it into the

sack.

"League of the Scroll?" Simon wondered. "What is it?"

"A group of learned people who share knowledge, I have heard

my master saying. Perhaps something more, but he would never tell

me." He finished the last of his packing and straightened up. "I am

sorry to be saying this, Simon, but I am afraid we must walk again."

"Again?" Aches he had forgotten suddenly flared in Simon's mus-

cles.

354 Tad Williams

"I am afraid it is needed. As I was telling, 1 have been much in

thought. I have thought these things . . ." He tightened his walking

stick at the join and whistled for Qantaqa.

"Firstly, I am bound for getting you to Naglimund. This has not

been changed, it was unhappily only my resolution that was slip-

ping. The problem is: I do not trust the Frostmarch. You saw the

Bukkenit is likely you would prefer not to see them again. But it is

northward we must travel. I am thinking, then, that we must go

back to Aldheorte."

"But Binabik, how will we be any safer there? What's to keep

those digger-things from coming after us in the forest, where we

probably can't even run?"

"A good question to ask. I spoke to you once of the Oldheartof

its age and . . . and ... I cannot think of a word in your lan-

guage, Simon, but *soul' and 'spirit' may be giving you an idea.

"The Bukken can pass beneath the old forest, but not easily.

There is power in the Aldheorte's roots, power that is not to be

lightly broached by ... such creatures. Also, there is someone

there I must see, someone who must hear the telling of what hap-

pened to my master and yours."

Simon was already tired of hearing his own questions, but asked

anyway. "Who is that?"

"Her name is Geloe. A wise woman she is, one known as a valada

a Rimmersgard word, that. Also, she can perhaps help us to

reach Naglimund, since we will have to be crossing from the forest

side on the east over the Wealdhelm, a route that is not known to

me."

Simon pulled his cloak on, hooking the worn clasp beneath his

chin. "Must we leave today?" he asked. "It's so late in the after-

noon."

"Simon," Binabik said as Qantaqa jogged up, tongue lolling,

"please believe me. Even though there are things that I cannot yet

tell to you, we must be true companions. I need your trust. It is not

only the business of Elias* kingship that is at stake. We have lost,

both of us, people who we were holding dearlyan old man and an

old troll who knew much more than we are knowing. They were

both afraid. Brother Dochais, I am thinking, died of fright. Some-

thing evil is waking, and we are foolish if we spend more time in

open ground."

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR355

"What is waking, Binabik? What evil? Dochais said a nameI

heard him. Just before he died he said . . ."

"You need not ... '" Binabik tried to interrupt, but Simon paid

him no heed. He was growing tired of hints and suggestions.

", . . Storm King," he finished resolutely.

Binabik looked quickly around, as though he expected something

terrible to appear. "I know," he hissed. "I heard, too, but I do not

know much." Thunder tolled beyond the distant horizon; the little

man looked grim, "The Storm King is a name of dread in the dark

north. Simon, a name out of legends to frighten with, to conjure

with. All I have are small words my master was giving me some-

times, but it is enough to make me sick with worry." He shouldered

his bag and started off across the muddy plain, toward the blunt,

crouching line of hills.

"That name," he said, his voice incongruously hushed in the

midst of such flat emptiness, "is of itself a thing to wither crops, to

bring fevers and bad dreaming ..."

". . . Rain and bad weather . . . ?" Simon asked, looking up at

the ugly, lowering sky.

"And other things," Binabik replied, and touched his palm to his

jacket, just above his heart.

The Hounds

of Erkynland

^

SIMON DREAMED that he was walking in the Pine Garden of the

Hayholt, just outside the Dining Hall. Above the gently swaying

trees hung the stone bridge that connected hall and chapel. Al-

though he felt no sensation of coldindeed, he was not aware of his

body at all except as something to move him from one place to

anothergentle flakes of snow were filtering down around him. The

fine, needled edges of the trees were beginning to blur beneath blan-

kets of white and all was quiet: the wind, the snow, Simon himself,

all moved in a world seemingly without sound or swift motion.

The unfelt wind blew more fiercely now, and the trees of the

sheltered garden began to bend before Simon's passage, parting like

ocean waves around a submerged stone. The snow flurried, and he

moved forward into the opening, into a tree-lined hallway of

swirling white. On he went, the trees leaning back before him like

respectful soldiers.

The garden was never this long, was it?

Suddenly Simon felt his eyes drawn upward. At the end of the

snowy path stood a great white pillar, looming far over his head into

the dark skies.

Of course, he thought to himself in dreamy half-logic, it's Green

Angel Tower. He could never walk directly from the garden to the

base of the tower before, but things had changed since he'd been

gone . . . things had changed.

But if it's the tower, he thought, staring upward at the immense

shape, why does it have branches? It's not the tower . . . or at least it

isn't any more . . . it's a treea great white tree . . .

Simon sat upright, staring.

"What is a tree?" asked Binabik, who sat close by, restitching

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR357

Simon's shirt with a bird-bone needle. He finished a moment later,

and handed it back to the youth, who extended a freckled arm from

beneath his sheltering cloak to claim it. "What is a tree, and was

your sleeping good?"

"A dream, that's all," Simon said, muffled for a moment as he

pulled the shirt over his head. "I dreamed that Green Angel Tower

turned into a tree." He looked at Binabik quizzically, but the troll

only shrugged.

"A dream," Binabik agreed.

Simon yawned and stretched. It had not been particularly com-

fortable, sleeping in a protected crevice on the side of a hill, but it

was eminently preferable to spending a night unprotected on the

plain. He had seen the logic of that quickly enough, once they had

gotten moving.

Sunrise had come while he slept, inconspicuous behind the blan-

ket of clouds, just a smear of pinkish gray light across the sky.

Looking back from the hillside perch it was difficult to tell where the

sky left off and the misty plains began. The world seemed a murky

and unformed place this morning.

"I saw fires in the night, while you were sleeping," the troll said,

startling Simon out of his reverie.

"Fires? Where?"

Buiabik pointed with his left hand, southward along the plain.

"Back there. Do not be worrying, I think they are a far way off. It is

quite the possibility they have nothing to do with us."

"I suppose so." Simon squinted into the gray distance. "Do you

think it might be Isgrimnur and his Rimmersgarders?"

"It is doubtful."

Simon turned to look at the little man. "But you said they would

get away! That they'd survive. . . ."

The troll gave him an exasperated look. "If you would wait, you

would hear. I am sure they survived, but they were traveling north,

and I am doubting they would turn back. Those fires were farther

toward south, as though . . ."

". . . As though they were traveling up from Erkynland," Simon

finished.

"Yes!" Binabik said, a little testily. "But it could be they are trad-

ers, or pilgrims . . ." He looked around. "Where has Qantaqa now

gone to?"

358 Tad Williams

Simon grimaced. He knew a dodge when he saw one. "Very well.

It could be anything . . . but you were the one counseling speed

yesterday. Are we to wait so we can see first hand if these are mer-

chants or ... or diggers?" The joke felt more than a little sour.

The last word had not tasted good in his mouth.

"Not being stupid is important," Binabik grunted in disgust.

"Boghanikthe Bukkenlight no fires. They hate things that are

bright. And no, we will not be waiting for these fire builders to reach

us. We are heading back to the forest, as I was telling you." He

gestured back over his head. "On the hill's far side we will be within

sight of it."

The brush crackled behind them, and troll and boy jumped in

surprise. It was only Qantaqa, traversing erratically down the hill-

side, nose held tight to the ground. When she reached their camp-

site, she butted Binabik's arm until he scratched her head. "Qantaqa

has a cheerful mood, hmmm?" The troll smiled, showing his yellow

teeth. "Since we have the advantage of a day with heavy clouds,

which will be covering the smoke of a campfire, I am thinking we

can at least have a decent meal before we again take to our feet. Are

you in favor?"

Simon tried to make his expression a serious one. "I ... suppose

I could eat something ... if I must," he said. "If you really think

it's important . . ."

Binabik stared, trying to decide if Simon actually disapproved of

breakfast, and the boy felt laughter trying to bubble free.

Why am I acting like a mooncalf? he wondered. We're in terrible

danger, and it won't get any better soon.

Binabik's puzzled look was finally too much, and the laughter

burst forth.

Well, he answered himself, a person can't worry all the time.

Simon sighed, contented, and allowed Qantaqa to take the few

remaining bits of squirrel meat from his fingers. He marveled at the

delicacy the wolf could exhibit with those great jaws and gleaming

teeth.

The fire was a small one, since the troll did not believe in unneces-

sary risks. A thin stream of smoke curled sinuously in the wind

sliding along the hillside.

Binabik was reading Morgenes' manuscript, which he had un-

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR359

wrapped with Simon's permission. "It is my hope you understand,"

the troll said without looking up, "that you will not be trying that

with any other wolf beside my friend Qantaqa."

"Of course not. It's amazing how tame she is."

"Not tame." Binabik was emphatic. "She has a bond of honor

with me, and it is including those who are my friends."

"Honor?" Simon asked lazily.

"I am sure you know that term, much as it is bandied about in

southern lands. Honor. Are you thinking such a thing cannot exist

between troll and beast?" Binabik glanced over, then went back to

leafing through the manuscript.

"Oh, I don't think much about anything these days," Simon said

airily, leaning forward to scratch Qantaqa's deep-furred chin. "I'm

just trying to keep my head down and reach Naglimund."

"You are making a gross evasion," Binabik muttered, but did not

pursue the subject. For a while there was no sound on the hillside

but the riming of parchment. The morning sun climbed up through

the sky.

"Here," Binabik said at last, "listen, now. Ah, Daughter of the

Mountains, but I am missing Morgenes more just from reading his

words. Do you know of Nearulagh, Simon?"

"Certainly. Where King John beat the NabbanaL There's a gate at

the castle all covered with carvings of it."

"You are right. So then, here Morgenes is writing of the Battle of

Nearulagh, where John was first meeting the famous Sir Camaris.

May I read to you?"

Simon suppressed a twinge of jealousy. The doctor had not in-

tended that his manuscript be for Simon and no one else, he re-

minded himself.

"*. . . So after Ardrivis'decisiona brave one. some said, arro-

gant said othersto meet this upstart northern king in the flat

plain of the Meadow Thrithing before Lake Myrme, proved a

disaster. Ardrivis pulled the bulk of his troops back into the

Onestrine Pass, a narrow way between the mountain lakes Eadne

and Clodu . . .'"

"What Morgenes speaks of," Binabik explained, "is that Ardrivis,

the Imperator of Nabban, did not believe Prester John could come

360 Tad Williams

against him with great force, so far from Erkynland. But the Per-

druinese islanders, who were always being in the Nabbanai shadow,

made secret treaty with John and helped to supply his forces. King

John cut Ardrivis' legions in ribbons near the Meadow Thrithing, a

thing unsuspected as possible by the proud Nabbanai. Do you see?"

"I think so." Simon was not sure, but he had heard enough bal-

lads about Nearulagh to recognize most of the names. "Read some

more."

"I shall do so. Let me only be finding the part I wanted to read for

you . . ." He scanned down the page. "Ho!"

"'. . . And so, as the sun sank behind Mount Onestris, the last

sun for eight thousand dead and dying men, young Camaris,

whose father Benidrivis-sd Vinitta had taken the Imperator's

Staff from his dying brother Ardrivis only an hour before, led a

charge of five hundred horse, the remainder of the Imperial

Guard, in quest of vengeance . . .' "

"Binabik?" Simon interrupted.

"Yes?"

"Who took what from which?"

Binabik laughed. "Forgive me. It is a net full of names to capture

at once, is it not? Ardrivis was the last Imperator of Nabban, al-

though his empire was no larger, you are seeing, than what is the

duchy of Nabban today. Ardrivis fell out with Prester John, likely

because Ardrivis knew that John had designs on a united Osten Ard,

and that eventually there would have to be conflict. In any way, I

will not bore you with all the fighting, but this was their last battle,

as you know. Ardrivis the Imperator was killed by an arrow, and his

brother Benidrivis became the new Imperator ... for the rest of

that day, only, ending with Nabban's surrendering. Camaris was the

son of Benidrivisand being young, too, perhaps fifteen yearsand

so for that afternoon he was the last prince of Nabban, as songs are

sometimes calling him . . . understood, now?"

"Better. It was all those 'arises' and 'ivises' that left me behind for

a moment." Binabik picked up the parchment and continued read-

ing.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR361

" 'Now, with the coming of Camaris onto the field, the tired

armies of Erkynland were much distraught. The young prince's

troops were not fresh, but Camaris himself was a whirlwind, a

storm of death, and the sword Thorn that his dying uncle had

given him was like a fork of dark lightning. Even at that late

moment, the records say, the forces of Erkynland might have

been routed, but Prester John came onto the field, Bright-Nail

clutched in his gauntleted fist, and cut a path through the Nab-

banai Imperial Guard until he was face to face with the gallant

Camaris.'"

"This is the pan I wanted you especially to hear," Binabik said as

he leafed forward to the next sheet.

"This is very good," Simon said. "Will Prester John cleave him in

twain?"

"Ridiculous!" snorted the troll. "How, then, would they come to

be the fastest and most famous of friends?'cleave him in twain'!"

He resumed.

" 'The ballads say that they fought all day and into the night,

but I doubt greatly that was so. Certainly they fought a long

while, but doubtless the twilight and darkness had nearly arrived

anyway, and it only seemed to some of the tired observers that

these two great men had battled all the day long . . .'"

"What thinking your Morgenes does!" Binabik chortled.

" 'Whatever the truth, they traded blow after blow, clanging

and hammering on each other's armor as the sun sank and the

ravens fed. Neither man could gain an upper hand, even though

Camaris' guard had long since been defeated by John's troop.

Still, none of the Erkynlanders dared to interfere.

'By chance at last, Camaris' horse stepped in a hole, breaking

its leg, and fell with a great scream, trapping the prince beneath

it. John could have ended it there, and few would have blamed

him, but insteadobservers uniformly swearhe helped the

fallen knight of Nabban out from under his steed, gave him back

his sword, and when Camaris proved sound, continued the

fight.'"

362 Tad Williams

"Aedon!" breathed Simon, impressed. He had heard the story, of

course, but it was a different thing entirely to hear it confirmed in

the doctor's wry, confident words.

" 'So they struggled on and on until Prester Johnwho was,

after all, over twenty years Camaris' seniorgrew weary and

stumbled, falling to the ground at the feet of the Prince of Nob-

ban,

'Camaris, moved by the power and honor of his opponent,

forewent slaying him and instead held Thorn at John's gorget

and asked him to promise to leave Nabban in peace. John, who

had not expected his mercy to be repaid in kind, looked around

at the field ofNearulagh, empty but for his own troops, thought

for a moment, and then kicked Camaris-sa-Vinitta in the fork of

his legs.'"

"No!" said Simon, taken aback; Qantaqa raised a sleepy head at

the exclamation. Binabik only grinned and continued to read from

Morgenes' writings.

" 'John then stood in his turn over the sorely wounded

Camaris, and told him: "You have many lessons to learn, but you

are a brave and noble man, I will do your father and family

every courtesy, and take good care of your people. I hope in turn

you will leam the first lesson, the one I have given you today, and

that is this: Honor is a wonderful thing, but it is a means, not an

end. A man who starves with honor does not help his family, a

king who falls on his sword with honor does not save his king-

dom. "

'When Camaris recovered, so awed was he by his new king

that he was John's most faithful follower from that day for-

ward . . .'"

"Why did you read that to me?" Simon said. He felt more than a

little insulted by the glee that Binabik had displayed while reading

about the foul practices of the greatest hero of Simon's country . . .

still, they had been Morgenes' words, and when you thought about

them, they made old King John seem more like a real person, and

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR 363

less like a marble statue of Saint Sutrin catching dust on the cathe-

dral facade.

"It seemed to be interesting," Binabik smiled impishly, "No, that

was not the reason," he explained quickly as Simon frowned, "truly,

I was wanting you to take a point, and I thought Morgenes could do

it with more ease than I.

"You did not want to leave the men ofRimmersgard, and I under-

stand your feelingit was not, perhaps, the most honorable way of

behaving. Neither, however, was it honorable for me to leave my

duties unfulfilled in Yiqanuc, but sometimes we must go against

honoror, it is to say, against what is obviously honorable ... are

you understanding me?"

"Not particularly," Simon's frown turned into a mocking affec-

tionate smile.

"Ah." Binabik gave a philosophical shrug. "Ko muhuhok na mik

aqa nop, we say in Yiqanuc; 'When it falls on your head, then you

are knowing it is a rock,' "

Simon pondered this stoically as Binabik returned his cooking

things to his bag.

Binabik had certainly been right about one thing. As they crested

the hill they could see virtually nothing but the great, dark sweep of

Aldheorte stretching inimitably before thema green and black

ocean frozen a moment before its waves crashed at the feet of the

hills. Oldheart, however, looked like a sea that the land itself might

break against and fail.

Simon could not help sucking in a deep breath of wonderment.

The trees rolled off and away into the distance until the mist swal-

lowed them, as if the forest might somehow pass beyond the very

boundaries of the earth.

Binabik, seeing him staring, said: "Of all times when it is impor-

tant to be listening to me, this will be it. If we lose each other out

there, there may be no finding again."

"I was in the forest before, Binabik."

"The fringes, only, friend Simon. Now we are going deeply in."

"All the way through?"

"Ha! No, that would take monthsa year, who is knowing? But

we are going far past her borders, so we must hope we are permitted

guests."

364 Tad Williams

As Simon stared down he felt his skin tingle. The dark, silent

trees, the shadowy pathways that had never known the sound of a

footfall ... all the stories of a town and castle-dwelling people

were just at the fringes of his imagination, and all too easy to sum-

mon,

But I must go, he told himself. And anyway, I don't think the

forest is evil. It's just old . . . very old. And suspicious of strangers-

or at least it makes me feel that way. But not evil.

"Let's go," he said in his clearest, strongest voice, but as Binabik

started down the hill before him Simon made the sign of the Tree on

his breast, just to be on the safe side of things.

They had made their way down the hill and onto the league of

grassy downs that sloped to Aldheorte's edge when Qantaqa sud-

denly stopped, shaggy head cocked to one side. The sun was high in

the sky now, past noon, and much of the ground-hugging mist had

burned away. As Simon and the troll walked toward the wolf, who

crouched motionless as a gray statue, they looked all around. No

movement broke the land's static undulation on either side.

Qantaqa whined as they approached and tilted her head to the

other side, listening. Binabik gently lowered his shoulder bag to the

ground, stilling the quiet clinking of the bones and stones inside,

then cocked an ear himself.

The troll opened his mouth to say something, his hair hanging

lank in his eyes, but before he spoke Simon heard it too: a thin, faint

noise, rising and falling as though a flight of honking geese were

passing leagues overhead, far above the clouds. But it did not seem

to come from the sky aboverather, it sounded as though it rolled

down the long corridor between the forest and the hills, whether

from north or south Simon could not say.

"What . . . ?" he began to ask. Qantaqa whined again and shook

her head, as though she did not like the sound in her ears. The troll

raised his small, brown hand and listened a moment more, then

shouldered his bag again, beckoning Simon to follow him toward the

murky breakfront of the forest.

"Hounds, I am thinking," he said. The wolf trotted around them

in erratic ovals, moving close and then bounding out again. "I think

they are far away, still, south of the hills . . . upon the Frostmarch.

The sooner we are entering the forest, though, the better . . ."

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR365

"Perhaps," Simon said, making good time as he strode along be-

side the little man, who was going at a near-trot, "but they didn't

sound like any hounds that I've heard. . . ."

"That," Binabik grunted, "is my thought, also . . . and it is also

why we are going quickly as we can."

As he thought about what Binabik had said, Simon felt a cold

hand clutch his innards.

"Stop," he said, and did.

"What are you doing?" the little man hissed. "They are still far

behind, but . . ."

"Call Qantaqa." Simon stood patiently. Binabik stared at him for

a moment, then whistled for the wolf, who was already trotting

back.

"I hope that you will soon explain . . ." the troll began, but

Simon pointed at Qantaqa.

"Ride her. Go on, now, get up. If we need to hurry, I can run

but your legs are too short."

"Simon," Binabik said, anger crinkling his eyes, "I was running

on the slender ridges of Mintahoq when I had only baby-

years . . ."

"But this is flat ground, and downhill. Please, Binabik, you said

we needed to go quickly!"

The troll stared at him for a moment, then turned and clucked at

Qantaqa, who sank to her stomach in the sparse grass. Binabik

threw a leg over her broad back and pulled himself into place using

the thick fur of her hackles for a pommel. He clucked again and the

wolf rose, front feet and then hind, Binabik swaying on her back.

"Ummu, Qantaqa," he snapped; she started forward. Simon

lengthened his pace and began to lope along beside them. They

could hear no sound now beside the noise of their own passage, but

the memory of the distant howling made the back of Simon's neck

prickle, and the dark face of Aldheorte look more and more like the

welcoming smile of a friend. Binabik leaned low over Qantaqa's

neck, and for a long time would not meet Simon's eye.

Side by side they ran down the long slope. At last, as the flat gray

sun was tipping down toward the hills behind them, they reached

the first line of trees, a cluster of slim birchespale serving girls

ushering visitors into the house of their dark old master.

366 Tad Williams

***

Although the downs outside were bright with slanting sunlight,

the companions found themselves passing quickly into twilit gloom

as the trees rose above them. The soft forest floor cushioned their

footfalls, and they ran silently as ghosts through the sparse outer

woods. Columns of light speared down through the branches, and

the dust of their passage rose behind them to hang sparkling be-

tween the shadows.

Simon was tiring rapidly, sweat running down his face and neck

in dirty rivulets.

"Farther we must go," Binabik called to him from the pitching

platform of Qantaqa's back. "Soon enough the way will be too tan-

gled for speed, and the light too dim. Then we will rest."

Simon said nothing but only dug on, his breath burning in his

lungs.

When the boy slowed at last to an unsteady canter, Binabik

slipped down from the wolf's back and ran at his side. The angling

sun was sliding up the tree trunks around them, the forest floor

darkening even as the upper branches took on shining haloes, like

the colored windows of the Hayholt's chapel. At last, as the ground

before them disappeared in darkness, Simon tripped over a half-

buried stone; when Binabik caught him up at the elbow, he held on.

"Sit, now," the troll said. Simon slid to the ground without a

word, feeling the loose soil give slightly beneath him. A moment

later Qantaqa circled back. After sniffing the immediate area, she sat

down and began to lick the perspiration from the back of Simon's

neck; it tickled, but Simon was too exhausted to do much of any-

thing about it.

Binabik crouched on his haunches, examining their stopping

place. They were partway down a small slope, at the bottom of

which snaked a muddy streambed with a dark trickle of water at its

center.

"When you are again breathing," he said, "I think we might be

moving just there." With his finger he indicated a spot slightly uphill

where a great oak stood, its tangle of roots warding off the encroach-

ment of other trees so that there was a stone's throw of clear ground

on all sides of its massive, gnarled trunk. Simon nodded, still labor-

ing for breath. After a while, he dragged himself to his feet and

moved with the little man up the slope to the tree.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR367

"Do you know where we are?" Simon asked as he sank down to

place his back against one of the looping, half-buried roots.

"No," said Binabik cheerfully. "But tomorrow when the sun is up

and I have time for doing certain things . . . then I will. Now help

me find some stones and sticks and we will be having a bit of fire.

And later," Binabik rose from his crouch and began foraging for

deadwood in the fast-fading daylight, "later there will be a pleasant

surprise for you."

Binabik had built a sort of three-sided box of stones around the

fire pit to shield its light, but still it crackled in a most heartening

manner. The red gleam cast odd shadows as Binabik rooted in his

bag. Simon watched a few lonely sparks spiral upward.

They had made themselves a meager dinner of dried fish, hard

cakes, and water. Simon did not feel he had treated his stomach as

well as he would have liked, but it was still better to be lying here

warming the dull ache in his legs than to be running. He could not

remember a time when he had ever run so long or so far without

stopping.

"Ha!" Binabik chortled, lifting his firelight-tinted face from his

bag in triumph. "A surprise I was promising you, Simon, and a

surprise I have!"

"A pleasant surprise, you said. I've had enough of the other kind

to last for my whole life."

Binabik grinned, his round face seeming to stretch back toward

his ears. "Very well, it is for you to decide. Have a try of this." He

handed Simon a small ceramic jar.

"What is it?" Simon held it up to the fire. It felt solid, but the jar

had no markings. "Some troll-thing?"

"Open it."

Simon stuck his finger into the top and found it was sealed with

something that felt like wax. He scraped a hole through, then

brought it up to his nose for a tentative sniff. A moment later he

pushed his finger in, pulled it out, and stuck it in his mouth.

"Jam!" he said, delighted.

"Made from grapes, I am sure," Binabik said, pleased by Simon's

response. "Some I found at the abbey, but the excitement of late had

driven it from my mind."

After eating several dollops, Simon reluctantly passed it to

368 Tad Williams

Binabik, who also found it rather pleasant. Within a short while they

had finished it off, leaving Qantaqa the sticky jar to lick.

Simon curled himself in his cloak beside the warm stones of the

dying fire. "Could you sing a song, Binabik?" he asked, "or tell a

story?"

The troll looked over. "I am thinking not a story, Simon, for we

need to sleep and rise early. Perhaps a short song."

"That would be fine."

"But, after thinking again," Binabik said, tugging his hood up

around his ears, "I would like to be hearing you sing a song. A quiet

singing, of course."

"Me? A song?" Simon pondered. Through a chink in the trees he

thought he could see the faint glimmer of a star. A star . . . "Well,

then," he said, "since you sang your song for me, about Sedda and

the blanket of stars ... I suppose I can sing one that the chamber-

maids taught me when I was a child." He moved around a bit,

making himself more comfortable. "I hope I remember all the

words. It's a funny song."

"In the Oldheart's deep dell,"

Simon began softly,

"Jack Mundwode did yell

To his men of the woods near and far,

He offered a crown, and the forest's reknown

To the one who could catch him a star.

Beornoth stood first time, and he shouted: Til climb

To the top of the highest of trees!

And I'll snatch that star down for the fair golden crown

That will soon belong only to me.'

So he climbed up a birch to the highest high perch

Then he leaped to an old, tall yew.

But as much as he jumped, and he leaped and he bumped

Reach the star. that he never could do.

Next gay Osgal stood, and he promised he would

Loose an arrow up into the sky.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR369

7 will knock that star free so it falls down to me

And the crown will be mine by and by . . .'

Twenty arrows he shot. Not a single one caught

On the star that hung mocking above.

As the arrows fell back Osgal hid behind Jack

Who chuckled and gave him a shove.

Now all the men sought, and they quarreled and fought

And they had not a pinch of success,

Till the fair Hruse rose, and she looked down her nose

At the men as she smoothed out her dress.

'Tis a small enough task for Jack Mundwode to ask,'

She said with a gleam in her eye,

'But if none of you here hold a gold crown that dear

I will seek Mundwode's knot to untie.'

Then she took up a net which she'd bade the men get

And she cast it full into the lake.

So the water did roil, and it almost did spoil

The reflection the bright star did make.

But then after a while she turned 'round with a smile,

Said to Jack: 'Do you see what's about?

It is there in my net, all caught up and quite wet

If you want it, then you pull it out.'

Old Jack laughed and he shouted to all those who crowded

'Here's the woman I must take to wife.

For she's taken my crown, and she's brought my star down

So I might as well give her my life.'

Yes, she's taken the crown, and she's brought the star down

So Jack Mundwode has took her to wife ..."

From the darkness he could hear Binabik laugh, quietly and eas-

ily.

"A song of enjoyment, Simon, Thanks to you."

Soon the hissing of the embers quieted, and the only sound was

the soft breathing of the wind through the endless trees.

370 Tad Williams

**

Before he opened his eyes he was aware of a strange droning

noise, rising and falling close to where he lay. He lifted his head,

feeling sticky with sleep, to see Binabik sitting cross-legged before

the fire. The sun had not been up long; the forest around them was

draped in tendrils of pale mist.

Binabik had carefully placed a circle of feathers around the fire

pit, feathers of many different birds, as though he had scavenged

them from the surrounding woods. Eyes closed, he leaned toward

the small fire and chanted in his native language, the sound that had

pulled Simon to wakefiilness.

". . . Tutusik-Ahyuq-Chuyuq-Qachimak, Tutusik-Ahyuk-Chuyuq-

Qaqimak . . ."On and on he went. The slender ribbon of smoke

that rose from the campfire began to waver, as though in a strong

breeze, but the tiny feathers lay flat on the ground, unmoving. With

his eyes still closed, the troll began to move the palm of his hand in a

flat circle over the fire; the ribbon of smoke bent as though pushed,

and began to stream steadily away across one corner of the pit.

Binabik opened his eyes and looked for a moment at the smoke, then

stopped the circling movement of his small hand. A moment later

the smoke resumed its normai motion.

Simon had been holding his breath. He let it out. "Do you know

where we are now?" he asked. Binabik turned and smiled, pleased.

"Morning greetings. Yes, I think I am knowing to a nicety. We

should be having little troublebut much walkingto get to

Geloe's house . . ."

"House?" Simon asked. "A house in the Aldheorte? What's it

like?"

"Ah," Binabik straightened his legs and rubbed at his calves, "it is

not like any house you . . ." He stopped, and sat staring over

Simon's shoulder, transfixed. The youth whirled in alarm, but there

was nothing to see.

"What is it?"

"Hush . . ." Binabik continued to gaze out. "There. Are you

hearing?"

After a moment, he did hear it: the distant baying they had

marked in their journey across the downs to the forest. Simon felt

his skin crawl.

371

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

"The hounds again . . . !" he said. "But it sounds as though

they're still far away."

"You are not understanding yet." Binabik looked down at the fire

pit, then up at the morning light bleeding down through the tree-

tops. "They have passed us in the night. They have run all night!

And now, unless my ears are playing tricks at me, they have turned

back toward us."

"Whose hounds?" Simon felt his palms go moist with sweat, and

rubbed them on his cloak. "Are they following us? They can't hunt

us in the forest, can they?"

Binabik scattered the feathers with a scuff of his small boot and

began packing his shoulder bag. "I do not know," he said. "I am not

knowing the answer to any of those questions. There is power in the

forest that might confuse hunting houndsordinary hounds. It is

doubtful, however, that any local baron out for sport would be run-

ning his dogs through all the night, and I have not heard of dogs

that could do so."

Binabik called Qantaqa. Simon sat up and hurriedly pulled his

boots on. He felt sore all over, and now he felt sure he would be

running again.

"It's Elias, isn't it?" he said grimly, wincing as he pushed his

blistered foot down into the boot heel.

"Perhaps." Qantaqa trotted up, and Binabik threw a leg over her

back, pulling himself up. "But what is making a doctor's helper so

important to himand where is the king finding hounds that can

run twenty leagues between dusk and sunrise?" Binabik put the pack

on Qantaqa's shoulders before him, and handed Simon his walking

stick. "Do not lose this, please. I wish we had found a horse for your

riding."

The pair started down the slope to the gulley, then up the far side.

"Are they close?" Simon asked. "How far is ... this house?"

"Neither hounds nor house are nearby," Binabik said. "Well, I

shall be running beside you as soon as Qantaqa is tiring. Kikkasut/"

he swore, "how I am wishing for a horse!"

"Me, too," Simon panted.

They trekked on through the morning, eastward into deeper for-

est. As they went up and down the rocky dells the baying behind

them faded for long minutes, then returned seemingly louder than

372 Tad Williams

ever. As good as his word, Binabik jumped down from Qantaqa

when the wolf began to flag and trotted along beside, his short legs

carrying him two steps for Simon's every one, his teeth bared as his

cheeks puffed in and out.

They stopped to drink water and rest as the sun neared midmom-

ing. Simon tore strips from his two packages to bandage his blistered

heels, then handed the bundles to Binabik so he could put them in

the pack: Simon could no longer stand to feel them rattling against

his thigh as he walked and ran. As they sloshed the last musky drops

from the waterbag in their cheeks and tried to regain their straining

breath, the sounds of pursuit came up again. This time the unmis-

takable clamor of the hounds was so much nearer that they immedi-

ately lurched into motion once more.

Within a short while they began to ascend a long rise. The ground

was becoming increasingly rocky as it mounted upward, and even

the types of trees seemed to be changing. Staggering up the hilly

slope, Simon felt a sickening sense of defeat spread through his body

like a poison. Binabik had told him it would be late in the afternoon

at least before they reached this Geloe, yet they were already losing

the race, with the sun not risen to noon above the sheltering trees.

The noise of their pursuers was constant, an excited howling so loud

that Simon could not help wondering, even as he stumbled up the

daunting slope, where they found the breath to run and bark at

once. What kind of hounds were they? Simon's heart beat as fast as a

bird's wings. He and the troll would get to face the hunters soon

enough. The thought made him feel sick.

At last a slender patch of sky could be seen through the standing

trunks on the horizon: the top of the rise. They limped past the final

line of trees. Qantaqa, who ran before them, stopped abruptly and

barked, a sharp, high pitched sound from deep in her throat.

"Simon!" Binabik shouted and threw himself to the ground,

knocking the boy's legs from beneath him so he tumbled down with

a huff of punched-out breath. When the black tunnel of Simon's

vision widened a moment later, he was lying on his elbows looking

down a craggy rock face into a deep canyon. A cluster of fragments

broke loose from the stone beneath his hand and hopped and tum-

bled down the sheer wall to disappear into the green treetops far

below.

The baying was like the brazen flare of war trumpets. Simon and

373

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

the troll edged themselves away from the canyon's edge, a few feet

back down the slope, and stood.

"Look!" Simon hissed, his bleeding hands and chin of no import

now. "Binabik, look!" He pointed back down the long slope they

had just climbed, through the clinging blanket of trees.

Passing in and out of the clearings, far, far less than half a league

behind, was a flurry of low white shapes: the hounds.

Binabik took his stick from Simon and twisted it into halves. He

shook out his darts and handed the knife end to Simon.

"Quickly," he said. "Cut yourself a tree branch, a cudgel. If sell-

ing our lives we must be, let us keep the price high."

The throaty voices of the dogs boiled up the hillside, a rising song

of the closing and the kill.

25

The Secret Lake

HE HACKED and chipped frantically, bending the limb down with

his full weight, the knife slippery in his trembling fingers. It took

Simon many costly seconds to cut loose a branch that would suit

himpathetic defense though it would beand every second

brought the hounds nearer. The limb that he finally snapped off was

as long as his arm, knobbed at one end where another branch had

fallen away.

The troll was rummaging in his backpack, one hand clutching the

heavy fur at Qantaqa's neck.

"Hold her!" he called to Simon, "If she is let go now, she will

attack too soon. They will drag her down and be quickly killing

her." Simon crouched with an arm around the wolf's broad neck.

She was trembling with excitement, heart beating beneath his arm.

Simon felt his own heart speeding in tandemthis was all so unreal!

Just this morning he and Binabik had been sitting calmly beside the

fire. . . .

The cry of the pack intensified; they came surging up the hill like

white termites fleeing a crumbling nest. Qantaqa lunged forward,

dragging Simon to his knees.

"Hinik Aia!" Binabik shouted, and flicked at her nose with his

hollow bone tube, then dropped it as he pulled a length of rope from

the bottom of his bag and began to make a noose. Simon, thinking

he understood, looked over the canyon's edge behind them and

shook his head despairingly. It was much too far to the bottom,

more than twice as far as Binabik's rope could reach down the sheer

rock face. Then he saw something, and felt hope still struggling

inside him.

"Binabik, look!" he pointed. The troll, despite the impossibility of

a climb down, was looping his rope around a stump anchored not a

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR375

yard from the canyon's edge. As he finished he looked up to follow

Simon's pointing finger.

Less than a hundred paces from where they crouched a huge old

hemlock lay tipped downward, its bottom end balanced on the near

lip, the tip lodged halfway down the far canyon wall, caught on a

jutting ledge.

"We can climb across to the far side!" Simon said. But the troll

shook his head.

"If we can climb down it with Qantaqa, then they can be doing it

as well. And it goes to nowhere." He gestured. The ledge where the

tree had caught was no more than a wide shelf in the rock face- "But

it will be some help." He stood up and tugged at the rope, testing the

knot around the stump. "Take Qantaqa down onto it, if you can.

Not far, perhaps ten cubits only. Hold her until I am calling, under-

stood!?"

"But . . ." Simon began, then looked back down the slope. The

white shapes, perhaps a dozen in all, were almost upon them. He

grabbed the balking Qantaqa by the scruiF of the neck and urged her

toward the fallen hemlock.

Enough of the tree had remained on the canyon's edge that there

was space between the twisting roots and the rock rim. It was not

easy to keep balance while clinging to the wolf. She shivered and

pulled back, growling; the noise was almost subsumed in the clamor

of the approaching hounds. He could not coax her up onto the broad

trunk, and turned to Binabik in despair.

"Ummu!" the troll called hoarsely, and a moment later she

jumped up onto the hemlock, still growling. Simon straddled the

trunk as best he could, his club a hindrance in his belt. He slid

backward on his rump, keeping a grip on Qantaqa, until he was well

out from the canyon's rim. Just then the troll cried out, and Qantaqa

whirled toward the sound of his voice. Simon hung on to her neck

with both arms as his knees gripped the rough bark. He was sud-

denly cold, so cold! He lowered his face into her fur, smelled her

thick, wild smell, and whispered a prayer.

"... Elysia, mother of our Ransomer, give mercy, protect

us . . ."

Binabik was standing with a coil of rope in his hand just a step

before the rim. "Hinik, Qantaqa!" he called, and then the hounds

were out of the trees and up the final slope.

376 Tad Williams

Simon could not really see much of them from where he sat hold-

ing the straining wolfonly long, thin white backs and sharp ears.

The beasts moved toward the troll at a gallop, making a noise like

metal chains dragged on a slate floor.

What is Binabik doing? Simon thought, panic making it hard for

him to breathe. Why doesn't he run, why doesn't he use his darts

something?

It was like the recurrence of his worst nightmare, like Morgenes

in names standing between Simon and the deadly hand of Elias. He

couldn't sit and watch Binabik killed before his eyes. As he started

to pull himself forward, the dogs leaped toward the troll.

Simon had only a moment's impression of long, pale snouts, of

empty, pearl-white eyes, and a flare of red curving tongues and red

mouths . . . then Binabik jumped backward, down into the can-

yon.

"No!" Simon shrieked, horrified. The five or six creatures that had

been nearest lunged forward, unable to stop, and tumbled over the

cliff in a squealing tangle of white legs and tails. Helpless, Simon

watched the clot of whinnying dogs bounce against the steep rock

face and plummet down into the trees far below with an explosive

popping of broken branches. He felt another choking scream rise in

his breast . . .

"Now, Simon! Let her go!"

Mouth agape, Simon looked down to see Binabik's feet braced

against the canyon wall, the troll hanging suspended from the rope

about his waist not two dozen feet below the spot where he had

jumped. "Let her go!" he called again, and Simon finally uncurled

his restraining arm from Qantaqa's neck. The remainder of the dogs

were milling at the rim above Binabik's head, sniffing the ground

and staring down, barking savagely at the little man who hung so

frustratingly near.

As Qantaqa made her cautious way back up the hemlock's broad

back, one of the white hounds turned tiny eyes like fogged mirrors

toward the tree and Simon, letting out a great rasping snarl as he

hurried forward; the others quickly followed.

Before the yammering pack reached the hemlock, the gray wolf

negotiated the last steps, reaching the rim with a magnificent leap.

The first dog was on her in a heartbeat, two more right behind. The

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR377

snarling battle song of the wolf rose, a deeper note among the bark-

ing and howling of the hounds.

Simon, frozen for a moment of indecision, began inching forward

toward the edge of the rim. The trunk was so broad that his spread

legs ached, and he considered getting up to his knees to crawl for-

ward, sacrificing his clutch on the tree for speed. For the first time

he turned his gaze straight down. The tops of the trees were a

bumpy green carpet far below. The distance was dizzying, much

farther than the leap from the wall to Green Angel Tower. His head

reeled and he looked away, deciding to keep his knees right where

they were. As he looked up, a white shape bounded from the can-

yon's edge onto the wide hemlock.

The hound growled and drove forward, talons catching at the

bark. Simon had only an instant to pull out his knotted branch

before the beast crossed the dozen or so feet and dove for his throat.

For a moment the branch caught in his belt, but he had pushed it in

narrow-end-down, which saved his life,

As the club came free, the dog was upon him. Yellow teeth

gleamed as it bit at his face. He got the branch up high enough to

strike a glancing blow, turning the dog's lunge so that the teeth

snapped on air an inch from his left ear, spraying him with saliva.

Its paws were on his chest, and the awful carrion-stench of its breath

blew in his face; he was losing his hold. He tried to pull the club

back up, but it caught between the animal's extended front legs. He

leaned back as the long, snarling muzzle once more snaked toward

his face, and tried to twist the branch free. There was a moment of

resistance, then one of the white hound's paws was knocked from his

shoulder and the beast overbalanced. It squealed and tumbled away,

scrabbling for a moment at the bark, then pulling the club from his

hand as it slid from the tree trunk to fall end over end down into the

canyon.

Simon sank forward, catching at the tree with his hands, and

coughed, trying to drive the fetid breath of the thing out of his

nostrils. He was cut short by a low growl. He lifted his head slowly

to see another hound standing on the log just below the roots, milky

eyes glinting like a blind beggar's. It bared its teeth in a frothing,

crimson-tongued grin. Simon hopelessly lifted his empty hands as

the beast padded slowly down the trunk, ropy muscles bunching

beneath the short fur.

378 Tad Williams

The hound turned to nip at its flank, worrying the skin for a

moment, then returned its eerie, vacant gaze to Simon. It took an-

other step, wobbled, took one shaky step more, then folded in place

to slide off the hemlock into oblivion.

"The black dart seemed the safest," Binabik called. The little man

stood a few yards down slope from the tree's ball of dried roots. A

moment later Qantaqa limped up to stand at his side, her muzzle

dripping with dark red blood. Simon stared, slowly realizing that

they had survived.

"Go slowly, now," the troll called. "Here, I will throw the rope. It

would be bad sense to lose you after all we were going

through . . ." The rope arced out and fell slithering across the log

where Simon sat. He took it gratefully, his hands shaking as though

with palsy.

Binabik laboriously turned the dog over with his foot. It was one

he had killed with a dart: the cotton wadding sprouted from the

smooth white fur of the creature's neck like a tiny mushroom.

"See there," the troll said. Simon leaned a little closer. It was not

like any hunting hound he had ever seen; the slender muzzle and

underslung jaw reminded him more of the sharks that fishermen

pulled thrashing from the Kynslagh. The opalescent white eyes, now

staring sightlessly, seemed windows of some inner disease.

"No, look there," Binabik pointed. On the dog's chest, burned

black through the short hairs, was a slender triangle with a narrow

base. It was a branded mark, like the kind that the Thrithings-men

burnt into the flanks of their horses with flame-heated spears.

"That sign is for Stormspike," Binabik said quietly. "It is the

mark of the Norns."

"And they are ... ?"

"A strange people. Their country is north even of Yiqanuc and

Rimmersgard. A great mountain is therevery tall and with a cov-

ering of snow and icecalled Stormspike by the Rinunersmen. The

Noms do not travel in the fields of Osten Ard. Some are saying that

they are Sithi, but I do not know if that is truth."

"How can that be?" Simon asked. "Look at the collar." He leaned

down, gingerly pushing a finger under the white leather to lift it

away from the stiffening flesh of the dead hound.

Binabik smiled sheepishly. "Shame to me! I overlooked the collar,

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR379

white against white as it isme, taught since child-age to hunt in

snow!"

"But look at it," Simon urged. "See the buckle?"

The buckle of the collar was indeed an interesting thing: a piece of

hammered silver in the shape of a coiling dragon.

"That's the dragon of Elias' kennels," Simon said firmly. "I

should knowI used to visit Tobas the houndkeeper often."

Binabik crouched, staring at the carcass. "I believe you. And as

for the mark of Stormspike, it is only necessary to look for seeing

that these dogs are not things raised in your Hayholt." He stood up

and stepped back a pace; Qantaqa moved in to sniff at the body, then

quickly backed away with a rumbling growl.

"A mystery whose solving must wait," the troll said. "Now we

are very lucky to have our lives, with all of our limbs as well. We

should be moving again. I have no wish to meet this hound's mas-

ter."

"Are we close to Geloe?"

"Somewhat we have been driven off our route, but not beyond

repairing. If we leave now, we should still outrun the darkness."

Simon looked down at the long snout and vicious jaw of the

hound, at its powerful body and filming eye. "I hope so," he said.

They could find no way to cross the canyon anywhere, and reluc-

tantly decided to move back down the long slope and look for an-

other, easier descent than the sheer rock face before them. Simon

was almost childishly happy not to have to climb down: his knees

still felt as weak as if he'd had a fever. He had no wish to look down

into the canyon's maw again with nothing beneath him but a long,

long fall. It was one thing to climb the walls and towers of the

Hayholt, with their square comers and mason's cracksa tree trunk

suspended like a frail twig over nothingness was another story en-

tirely-

At the base of the long slope an hour later they turned to their

right hand and began to track around to the northwest. They had

not gone more than five furlongs when a high-pitched, wailing cry

knifed through the afternoon air. They both stopped short; Qantaqa

pricked her ears and growled. The sound came again.

"It sounds like a child screaming," Simon declared, turning his

head to locate the noise's source.

380 Tad Williams

"The forest is often playing such tricks," Binabik began. The

keening noise rose again. Quickly afterward came an angry baying

that they knew all too well.

"Qinkipa's Eyes!" Binabik cursed. "Will they chase us all the way

to Naglimund!?" The baying rose again, and he listened. "It has the

sound of one dog only, however. That is something lucky."

"It sounds like it's coming from down there." Simon pointed to

where the trees grew more densely some distance away. "Let's go

and see."

"Simon!" Binabik's voice was harsh with surprise. "What thing

are you saying? We are fleeing to keep our lives!"

"You said it sounded like only one. We have Qantaqa. Someone is

being attacked. How can we run away?"

"Simon, we do not know if that crying is a trick ... or an ani-

mal it could be."

"What if it isn't?" Simon demanded. "What if that thing has

caught some woodsman's child ... or ... or something?"

"A woodsman's child? This far from the forest's edge?" Binabik

stared at him in frustration for a moment. Simon returned the gaze

defiantly. "Ha!" Binabik said heavily. "So it will be, then, as you are

wishing."

Simon turned and began jogging down toward the thickening

trees.

" 'Afikmok hanno so gyiq,' we say in Yiqanuc!" Binabik called.

" 'If you wish to carry a hungry weasel in your pocket, it is your

choice!" The youth did not look back. Binabik slapped the ground

with his walking stick, then trotted after him.

He caught up to Simon within a hundred paces; within twenty

more he had opened his staff to shake loose his dart bag. He hissed a

command to bring the racing Qantaqa back, then deftly rolled

coarse wool around one of the dark-tipped darts as he ran.

"Couldn't you get poisoned if you tripped and fell?" Simon asked.

Binabik shot him a sour, worried look as he struggled to keep up.

When they came upon the scene at last, its appearance was decep-

tively innocent: a dog crouching before a spreading ash tree, staring

up at a dark shape huddled on a branch overhead. It might have

been one of the Hayholt castle hounds with a treed cat, except that

both dog and quarry were far larger.

They were less than a hundred paces away when the dog turned

381

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

toward them. It skinned back its lips and barked, a vicious, raw bray

of sound. It looked back at the tree for a moment, then straightened

long legs and loped toward them. Binabik slowed and stopped, rais-

ing his hollow tube to his lips; Qantaqa trotted past him. As the

hound closed the gap, the troll puffed out his cheeks and blew. If the

dart struck, the dog gave no sign; instead it sped forward, growling,

and Qantaqa charged to meet it. This hound was even bigger than

the others, as large or even a little larger than Qantaqa herself.

The two animals did not circle, but flung themselves together,

jaws snapping; a moment later they tumbled to the ground snarling,

a heaving, spinning ball of gray and white fur. At Simon's side

Binabik cursed sharply; his leather packet fell from his hand in his

haste to wind another dart. The ivory needles scattered into the

leaves and moss underfoot.

The snarls of the combatants had risen to a higher pitch. The long

white head of the hound lunged in and out: once, twice, thrice, like a

striking viper. The last time it came back with blood on its pale

muzzle.

Simon and the troll were trotting toward them when Binabik

made a strange choking noise.

"Qantaqa!" he cried, and sped forward. Simon saw the flash of

Binabik's bone-handled blade, then a moment later, incredibly, the

troll cast himself onto the writhing, snapping animals and brought

the knife down, raised it, and struck again. Simon, fearing for the

lives of both his companions, snatched the hollow tube from where

Binabik had dropped it and ran forward. He arrived in time to see

the troll brace himself, grab the thick gray fur of Qantaqa's back,

and pull. The two animals slid apart; there was blood on each of

them. Qantaqa slowly stood, favoring a leg- The white hound lay

silent.

Binabik crouched and put an arm around the wolf's neck, press-

ing his forehead to hers. Simon, oddly touched, walked away from

them to the tree.

The first surprise was that there were two figures up in the

branches of the white ash: a wide-eyed youth who held a smaller,

silent figure in his lap. The second surprise was that Simon knew the

larger of the two.

"It's you!" He stared up in astonishment at the grime-streaked

and bloody face. "You! Mal . . . Malachias!"

382 Tad Williams

The boy said nothing, but gazed down with haunted eyes, gently

rocking the small figure in his lap. For a moment the forest copse

was silent and unmoving, as though the afternoon sun above the

trees had been arrested in its progress. Then the blare of a horn

shattered the quiet.

"Quickly!" Simon called up to Malachias. "Down! You must

come down!" Binabik came up behind him with the limping

Qantaqa.

"Huntsman's horn, I am sure," was all he said.

Malachias, as if comprehending at last, began sliding up the long

branch toward the trunk, holding his small companion carefully.

When he reached the crotch, he hesitated a moment, then handed

the limp burden down to Simon. It was a little dark-haired girl, aged

no more than ten years. She was unmoving, eyes closed in her too-

pale face; when Simon took her, he felt something sticky all across

the front of her rough dress. A moment later Malachias lowered

himself down from the branch, falling the last few feet and tumbling,

getting up almost immediately.

"What now?" Simon asked, trying to balance the little girl against

his chest. The hom echoed again somewhere on the canyon rim they

had left behind, and now there rose the excited squalling of more

hounds as well.

"We cannot fight men, and dogs along with them," the troll said,

exhaustion plain on his slack face. "Horses we cannot outrun. We

must hide ourselves."

"How?" Simon demanded. "The dogs will smell us."

Binabik leaned forward and took Qantaqa's injured paw in his

small hand, bending it back and forth. The wolf resisted for a mo-

ment, then sat, panting, as the little man finished his manipulations.

"Painful it is, but not broken," he told Simon, then turned to

speak to the wolf. Malachias lifted his gaze from Simon's burden to

stare. "Chok, Qantaqa my brave friend," the troll said, "ummu chok

Geloe/"

The wolf rumbled deep in her chest, then leaped away at once to

the northwest, away from the rising clamor behind them. Favoring

the bloodied front leg, she was gone from view among the trees in a

matter of moments.

"I am hoping," Binabik explained, "that the confusion of scents

here," he gestured to the tree, and then to the huge hound lying

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR383

nearby, "will distract them, and that the scent they will follow may

be Qantaqa's. I think they cannot catch her, even lamedtoo smart

she is."

Simon looked around. "How about there?" he asked, pointing to a

crevice in the hillside formed by a great rectangle of streaked stone

that had broken loose and fallen back, as though split by a vast

wedge.

"Except that we do not know which direction they will take,"

Binabik said. "If they come down the hillside, that will be luck for

us. If they are descending farther back, they will ride right past the

hole there. Too much risk."

Simon found it hard to think. The din of the approaching hounds

was fearsome. Was Binabik right? Were they to be chased all the way

to Naglimund? Not that they could run much longer, weary and

battered as they were.

"There!" he said, suddenly. Another finger of rock thrust up

through the forest floor some distance away, three times the height

of a man. Trees grew close about its base, surrounding it like young

children helping their grandfather hobble to the supper table.

"If we can climb up that," Simon said, "we will be above even the

ones on horses!"

"Yes," Binabik said, nodding his head. "Right, you are right.

Come, let us climb." He made for the outcropping, the silent

Malachias just behind him. Simon readjusted the little girl against

his body and hurried after.

Binabik scrambled up partway, and clung to the branch of a close-

leaning tree as he turned. "Pass the little one to me."

Simon did, extending his arms to their full reach, then turned to

put a guiding hand on the elbow of Malachias, who was looking for

an initial toehold. The boy shook off Simon's helpful gesture and

climbed carefully upward.

Simon was last. When he got to the first ledge he picked up the

still figure of the little girl and gently slung her over his shoulder,

then made his way up to the rock's rounded top. He lay down with

the others among the leaves and twigs, hidden from the ground by a

screen of branches. His heart thudded from exhaustion and fear. He

had, it seemed, been running and hiding forever.

Even as they squirmed, trying to find comfortable positions for all

384 Tad Williams

four bodies, the yammering of the dogs rose to a hideous pitch; a

moment later the woods below were full of darting white shapes.

Simon left the little girl clutched in Malachias' arms and quietly

pulled himself forward until he could join Binabik at the outcrop-

ping's edge, peering with the troll through a gap in the foliage. The

dogs were everywhere, sniffing, barking; there were at least a score

of them running excitedly back and forth between the tree, the body

of their fellow, and the base of the outcropping. One of them even

seemed to stare directly up at Simon and Binabik, empty white eyes

gleaming, red mouth grinning fiercely. A moment later it trotted

back to join its lathered companions.

The hom sounded nearby. Within a minute a line of horses ap-

peared, picking their way down the densely wooded hillside. Now

the dogs had a fourth corner to their circuit, and ran braying be-

tween the stone-gray legs of the lead horse, who walked on as calmly

as if they were moths. The trailing horses were not quite so san-

guine; one immediately behind shied a little, and its master cut it out

of line, spurring it down the last short slope to bring it to a pacing,

sputtering halt near the outcropping.

This rider was young and clean-shaven, with a strong chin and

curling hair the color of his chestnut horse. He wore a blue and

black surcoat over his silvery armor, with a design of three yellow

flowers set diagonally from shoulder to waist. His expression was

sour.

"Another one dead," he spat. "What do you make of this, Jeg-

ger?" His voice took on a sarcastic tone. "Oh, pardon me, I meant

Master Ingen."

Simon was amazed at how clear the man's words were, as though

he spoke directly to the hidden listeners. He held his breath.

The armored man was staring at something out of their view, and

his profile suddenly seemed very familiar. Simon felt sure he had

seen this man somewhere, most likely at the Hayholt. He was cer-

tainly an Erkynlander, by his accent.

"It is not important what you call me," another voice said, a deep,

smooth, cold voice. "You did not make Ingen Jegger master of this

hunt. You are here as ... courtesy, Heahferth. Because these are

your lands."

Simon realized that the first man was Baron Heahferth, a regular

at Ellas' court and a crony of Earl Fengbald. The second speaker

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR385

rode his gray horse into the gap through which Simon and Binabik

stared. Agitated white dogs twined in and out around the horse's

hooves.

The man called Ingen was dressed all in black, his surcoat,

breeches and shirt all the same bleak, lusterless shade. At first he

looked to be white-bearded; a moment later it was apparent that the

close-cropped whiskers on the hard face were a yellow so light as to

be nearly colorlessas colorless as his eyes, faint pale spots in his

dark face. They might be blue.

Simon stared at the cold face framed in the black coif, at the

powerful, thick-muscled body, and felt a fear different than any he

had felt this whole dangerous day. Who was this man? He looked

like a Rimmersman, his name was a Rimmersgard name, but he

spoke strangely, with slow, strange accents Simon had never heard.

"My lands ended at the forest's edge," Heahferth said, and turned

his balking mount back into place. Half a dozen men in light armor

had filed down into the clearing behind and sat their horses, waiting.

"And where my lands ended," Heahferth continued, "my patience

did, too. This is a farce. Dead dogs scattered about like chaff . . ."

"And two prisoners escaped," Ingen finished heavily.

"Prisoners!" Heahferth scoffed. "A little boy and girl! Do you

think these are the traitors Elias is so anxious to get? Do you think

such a pair," he tipped his head toward the carcass of the great

hound, "did that?"

"The dogs have been chasing something." Ingen Jegger stared

down at the dead mastiff. "Look. Look at the wounds. This was no

bear, no wolf that did this. It is our quarry, and he is still running.

And now, thanks to your stupidity, our prisoners are running, also."

"How dare you?!" Baron Heahferth said, his voice rising. "How

dare you?! With one word I could have you sprouting arrows like a

hedgehog."

Ingen looked slowly up from the body of the hound. "But you will

not," he said quietly. Heahferth's horse shied back, rearing, and

when the baron had mastered him the two men stared at each other

for a moment.

"Oh . . . very well, then," Heahferth said. A different note had

crept into his voice as he looked away from the black-clad man to

stare out across the forest. "What now?"

"The dogs have a scent," Ingen said. "We will do what we must

386 Tad Williams

do. Follow." He raised the horn that swung at his side and winded it

once. The dogs, who had been swarming about at the edge of the

clearing gave throat and sped off in the direction Qantaqa had disap-

peared; Ingen Jegger spurred his tall gray horse after them without a

word. Baron Heahferth, cursing, waved to his men and followed.

Within the course of a hundred heartbeats the woods below the

outcropping were empty and silent once more, but Binabik kept

them all in place for some time before he would let them climb

down.

Once on the ground, he quickly examined the little girl, opening

her eyes with a delicate, stubby finger, leaning close to listen to her

breathing.

"Very bad she is, this one. What is her name, Malachias?"

"Leieth," the boy said staring at the pale face. "My sister."

"Our only hope is to quickly get her to the house of Geloe,"

Binabik said. "And hope also that Qantaqa has led those men

astray, so that we are reaching it alive."

"What are you doing out here, Malachias!?" Simon demanded.

"And how did you get away from Heahferth?" The boy did not

answer, and when Simon asked again he turned his head away.

"Questions for later," Binabik said, standing. "Quickness we need

now. Can you carry this girlchild, Simon?"

They made their way northwest through the dense forest, the

lowering sun lancing through the branches. Simon asked the troll

about the man named Ingen and his odd way of speaking.

"Black Rimmersman, I am thinking," Binabik said. "They are a

rare lot, not often seen except at northernmost settlements where

they some times come to trade. They do not speak the language of

Rimmersgard. It is said they live on the fringes of the lands belong-

ing to the Noms."

"The Noms again," Simon grunted, ducking beneath a branch

that had sprung from Malachias' careless hand. He turned to con-

front the troll. "What is going on?! Why should such people be

concerned with us?"

"Perilous times, friend Simon," Binabik said. "Through perilous

times we are passing."

Several hours went by and the shadows of afternoon grew longer

and longer. The patches of sky that glimmered through the treetops

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR387

turned slowly from blue to shell pink. The three walked on. The

land was mostly level, from time to time sloping away like a shallow

beggar's bowl. In the branches above, squirrels and Jays carried on

their endless arguments; crickets droned in the leaf-tangle at their

feet. Once Simon saw a large gray owl scudding like a phantom

through the twining branches overhead. Later he saw another, so

like the first as to have been its twin.

Binabik watched the sky carefully when they passed through

clearings, and jogged them a little to the east; soon they reached a

small forest stream that gurgled past a thousand tiny breakwaters of

fallen branches. They walked through the thick grasses that lined its

banks for a while; when the bulk of a tree blocked their passage, they

stepped out and made their way past on the backs of the stones

dotting the stream's gentle course.

The streambed became wider as another small waterway entered,

and within moments Binabik raised a hand to bring them to a stop.

They had just rounded a bend in the watercourse; here the stream

suddenly dropped away, rushing in a tiny waterfall down a series of

rock slabs.

They stood on the rim of a great bowl, a sloping expanse of trees

leading down to a wide, dark lake. The sun had dipped out of sight,

and in the insect-humming twilight the water looked purple and

deep. Tree roots twisted down into the water like snakes. There was

an air of stillness about the lake, of quiet secrets whispered only to

the endless trees. At the far side, dim and difficult to see in the

gathering darkness, a tall thatched hut stood over the water in such

a way that at first it seemed to float on air; a moment later Simon

could see that it was raised above the lake's surface on stilts. Buttery

light gleamed in the two small windows.

"The house of Geloe," Binabik said, and they started down into

the tree-lined bowl. With a soundless rush of wings a gray shape tore

loose from the trees above them and glided out to circle low over the

lake two times, then vanish into the darkness beside the cottage. For

a moment Simon thought he saw the owl pass into the cottage, but

his eyelids were heavy from exhaustion and he could not see clearly.

The crickets' nightsong rose about them as the shadows deepened. A

bounding shape came speeding around the lake's rim toward them.

"Qantaqa!" Binabik laughed, and ran down to meet her.

26

In the House

of Geloe

^

THE FIGURE that stood framed in the warm light of the doorway did

not move or speak as the companions mounted the long board-

bridge that slanted from the doorstep to the lake's edge. As Simon

followed Binabik up, carefully cradling the child Leieth, he could

not help wondering why this Geloe woman did not have an en-

tranceway of a more permanent nature, something at least with a

rope handrail. His weary feet were having trouble keeping to the

narrow bridge.

/ suppose she doesn't gel many visitors, for one thing, he thought,

looking out across the rapidly darkening forest.

Binabik pulled up short of the front step and bowed, almost

bumping Simon off into the still waters.

"Valada Geloe," he announced, "Binbines Mintahoqis requests

your aid. I bring travelers."

The figure in the doorway stepped back, leaving the way open.

"Spare me the Nabbanai constructions, Binabik." It was a harshly

musical voice, heavily and strangely accented, but unmistakably a

woman's. "I knew it was you. Qantaqa has been here an hour." At

the shore end of the ramp the wolf pricked her ears forward. "Of

course you are welcome. Do you think I would deny you?"

Binabik entered the house. Simon, a step behind, spoke up.

"Where shall I put the little girl?" He ducked through the door,

getting a quick impression of a high roof and long, fluttering shad-

ows cast by the flames of many candles, then Geloe stepped in front

of him.

She was dressed in a rough robe of dun cloth, clumsily tied with a

belt. Her height was somewhere between Simon's and the troll's, her

face wide and sunbrowned, seamed with wrinkles at both the eyes

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR389

and mouth. Her dark hair was shot all through with gray and cut

short, so that she looked almost like a priest. But it was her eyes that

caught himround, heavy-lidded yellow eyes with large, jet-black

pupils. They were old, knowing eyes, as though they belonged to

some ancient bird of the heights, and there was a power behind them

that fixed him in his tracks. She seemed to measure him completely,

to turn him inside out and shake him like a sack, all in a moment.

When her gaze at last flicked down to the injured girl, he felt

drained like an empty wineskin.

"This child is hurt." It was not a question.

Simon helplessly let her take Leieth from his arms as Binabik

came forward.

"She has been attacked by dogs," the troll said. "Dogs with the

brand ofStormspike."

If he expected a look of surprise or fear, he was disappointed.

Geloe pushed briskly past to a straw pallet on the floor, where she

laid the girl down. "Find food if you are hungry," she said. "I must

work now. Were you followed?"

Binabik was hurriedly telling her of the most recent events, Geloe

all the while undressing the unresponsive body of the child, when

Malachias finally entered. He squatted down near the pallet, hover-

ing as Geloe cleaned Leietb's wounds. When Malachias leaned too

close, blocking her movements, the valada gently touched the boy's

shoulder with a sun-freckled hand. She held the contact, staring at

him for a moment, until Malachias glanced up and flinched. After a

moment he raised his eyes to Geloe's once more, and something

seemed to pass silently between them before Malachias turned away

and sat back against the wall.

Binabik poked up the fire, ingeniously set in a deep well in the

floor. The smokethere was surprisingly littlerose up to the ceil-

ing; Simon imagined there must be a chimney hidden in the shadows

overhead.

The cottage itself, which was really one large room, reminded him

in many ways of Morgenes' study chambers. Many strange objects

were hung on the clay-plastered walls: leafy branches tied in careful

sheaves, bags of dried flowers spilling their petals, and stalks, reeds,

and long, slippery roots that looked as though they had come grudg-

ingly from the lake below. The firelight also flickered across a multi-

390 Tad Williams

tude of tiny animal skulls, limning their bright, polished surfaces

without penetrating the darkness of the eyes.

One entire wall was divided between floor and ceiling by a waist-

high shelf of frame-stretched bark; it, too, was covered with curious

objects: animal pelts and tiny bundles of sticks and bones, beautiful

water-smoothed rocks of every shape and color, and a carefully

stacked aggregation of scrolls, handles facing out like a cord of fire-

wood. It was so cluttered that it took Simon a moment to realize it

was not really a shelf at all, but a writing table; beside the scrolls was

a stack of vellum, and a quill pen in an inkwell made from another

animal skull.

Qantaqa whined softly and nosed against his thigh. Simon

scratched her muzzle. There were cuts on her face and ears, but the

fur had been carefully cleaned of dried blood. He turned from the

table to the wide wall that faced out on the lake with its two small

windows. The sun was gone now, and the candlelight streaming out

made two long, irregular rectangles on the water; Simon could see

his own gangly silhouette in one of them, like the pupil of a bright

eye.

"I have wanned some soup," Binabik said behind him, and of-

fered a wooden bowl. "I have need of it myself," the troll smiled,

"and so do you and everyone else. I hope to never have another day

the like of this."

Simon blew on the hot liquid, then sucked a little past his lips. It

was tangy and a little bitter, like mulled Elysiamansa cider.

"It's good," he said, and sipped a tittle more. "What is it?"

"Better that you are not asking, perhaps," Binabik grinned mis-

chievously. Geloe looked up from the pallet, eyebrows slanting

down to the bridge of her sharp nose, and fixed Binabik with a

penetrating glance.

"Stop that, troll, you'll give the boy stomach pains," she snorted

irritably. "Honeylock, dandelion, and stonegrass is all that's in it,

boy."

Binabik seemed chastened. "Apologies, Valada."

**I like it," Simon said, worried that he had somehow offended

her, even if only as the recipient of Binabik's teasing. "Thank you

for taking us in. My name is Simon."

"Ah," grunted Geloe, then turned back to cleansing the little

girl's injuries. Nonplussed, Simon finished his broth as quietly as he

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR391

could, Binabik took the bowl and refilled it; he finished that one

almost as quickly.

Binabik began combing Qantaqa's thick pelt with his stubby fin-

gers, tossing the burrs and twigs he worked loose into the fire. Geloe

was silently applying dressings to Leieth while Malachias looked on,

lank black hair hanging in his face. Simon found a relatively unclut-

tered place to lean against the cottage wall.

A legion of crickets and other night singers filled the night's hol-

low spaces as Simon slid into exhausted sleep, his heart beating

along in slow time.

It was still night when he awoke. He bobbed his head stupidly,

trying to clear away the sticky residue of a too-short sleep; it took a

moment of peering around the unfamiliar room until he remem-

bered where he was.

Geloe and Binabik were quietly talking, the woman on a high

stool, the troll cross-legged at her feet, like a student. Behind them

on the pallet lay a dark, bumpy shape that Simon at last recognized

as Malachias and Leieth huddled together in sleep.

"It doesn't matter whether you were clever or not, young

Binabik," the woman was saying. "You have been lucky, which is a

better thing."

Simon decided to let them know he was awake. "How is the little

girl?" he asked, yawning.

Geloe turned her hooded stare toward him. "Very bad. Badly

wounded and feverish. The Nomhounds . . . well, it is not good to

be bitten. They eat unclean flesh."

"The valada has done all things that can be done, Simon,"

Binabik said. He had something in his hands: a new pouch that he

was stitching out of skin even as he spoke. Simon wondered where

the troll might find new darts. Oh, for a sword . . . even a knife!

People on adventures always had swords or sharp wits. Or magic.

"Did you tell her . , ." Simon hesitated. "Did you tell her about

Morgenes?"

"I already knew." Geloe stared at him, firelight reddening her

bright eyes. When she spoke, it was with powerful deliberateness.

"You were with him, boy. I know your name, and I felt Morgenes'

mark upon you when I touched you as I took the child." As if to

demonstrate, she held out her own wide, callused hand.

392 Tad Williams

"You knew my name?"

"Where the doctor is concerned, I know many things." Geloe

leaned over and poked up the fire with a long, blackened stick. "A

great man has been lost, a man we can ill afford to lose."

Simon hesitated. Curiosity at last won out over awe. "What do

you mean?" He crawled across the floor to sit near the troll. "That

is, what does we mean?"

" 'We* means all of us," she said. " 'We' means: those who do not

welcome darkness."

"I have told Geloe what happened to us, friend Simon." Binabik

spoke quietly. "There is no secret that I have few explanations."

Geloe made a wry face and pulled her coarse robe tighter around

her body. "And I have none to add . . . yet. It is clear to me now,

however, that the weather signs I have seen here on my isolated

lake, the north-flying geese that should have gone clattering over-

head a fortnight ago, all of the things that have given me pause in

this strange season," she pushed her palms together, as in a gesture

of prayer, "they are realand the change they augur is real, also.

Terribly real." She dropped her hands heavily to her lap and stared

at them.

"Binabik is right," she said at last. Beside her the troll nodded his

head gravely, but Simon thought he saw a satisfied glint in the little

man's eyes, as though he had been paid a great compliment. "This is

far more than the striving of a king and his brother," she continued.

"The contendings of kings can beat down the land, can uproot trees

and bathe the fields in blood," a log collapsed with a pop of sparks,

and Simon jumped, "but the wars of men do not bring dark clouds

from the north, or send the hungry bears back to their dens in Maia-

month."

Geloe stood up and stretched, the wide sleeves of her robe hang-

ing like the wings of a bird. "Tomorrow I will try and find some

answers for you. Now all should sleep while they can, for I fear the

child's fever will return strongly during the night."

She moved to the far wall and began putting small jars back on

the shelves. Simon spread his cloak on the floor near the edge of the

fire well.

"Perhaps you should not sleep so closely," Binabik cautioned. "A

spark leaping out may set you on fire."

Simon looked at him carefully, but the troll did not appear to be

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR393

joking. He pulled his cloak back several feet and lay on top of it,

rolling the hood into a cushion beneath his head, then carefully

pulled the sides up and over himself. Binabik moved away toward

the comer, and after a moment of rustling and thumping made

himself comfortable as well.

The song of the crickets had died out. Simon stared into the shad-

ows that flickered in the rafters, and listened to the gentle hiss of the

wind passing endlessly through the branches of the circling trees and

out across the lake.

No lanterns were burning, and no fire; only the mushroom-pale

light of the moon filtered in through the high windows, painting the

cluttered room with a kind of frost-sheen. Simon stared around him

at the curious, unrecognizable silhouettes that littered the tabletops,

and the blocky, inert shapes of books stacked in crooked piles,

sprouting up from the floor like grave markers in a churchyard. His

eyes were drawn to one particular book that lay spread open, gleam-

ing white like the flesh of a bark-stripped tree. In the middle of the

open page there was a familiar facea man with burning eyes,

whose head wore the branching antlers of a stag.

Simon looked up at the room, then back to the book. He was in

Morgenes* chambers, of course. Ofcoursel Where had he thought he

was?

Even as the realization came to him, as the silhouettes took on the

familiar shapes of the doctor's flasks and racks and retorts, there

was a cautious scraping noise at the door. He started at the unex-

pected sound. Diagonal stripes of moonlight made the wall seem to

lean crazily. The scraping came again.

". . . Simon . . . ?"

The voice was very quiet, as though the speaker did not wish to be

heard, but he recognized it instantly.

"Doctor?!" He leaped to his feet and crossed to the door in a few

steps. Why hadn't the old man knocked? And what was he doing

coming back so late? Perhaps he had been away on some mysterious

journey, and had foolishly locked himself outthat was it, of

course! Lucky that Simon was there to let him in.

He rumbled with the shadowy latch. "What have you been up to,

Doctor Morgenes?" he whispered. "I have been waiting for you for

such a long time!" There was no answer.

394 Tad Williams

Even as he worked the bolt from the slot, he was filled with a

sudden sense of unease. He stopped with the door half-unbarred,

standing on his tiptoes to peer down through a crack between the

boards.

"Doctor?"

In the inner passageway, splashed in the blue light of the hall

lamps, the old man's hooded, cloaked form stood before the door.

His face was shadowed, but there was no mistaking his tattered old

cloak, his slight build, the wisps of white hair that straggled from his

hood, blue-tinted in the lampglow. Why wouldn't he answer? Was

he hurt?

"Are you all right?" Simon asked, swinging the door inward. The

small, bowed figure did not move. "Where have you been? What

have you found out?" He thought he heard the doctor say some-

thing, and bent forward.

"What?"

The words that rose up to him were full of air, painfully harsh.

". . . False . . . messenger ..." was all he understoodthe dry

voice seemed to labor at speechand then the face tilted up, and the

hood fell back.

The head that wore the ragged fringe of white hair was a burnt,

blackened ruin: a knob with cracked, empty pits for eyes, the spindly

neck on which it wobbled a charred stick. Even as Simon staggered

away, an unfreeable scream lodged in his throat, a thin red line

spread across the front of the black, leathery ball; an instant later the

mouth yawned open, a split grin of pink meat.

". . . The . . . false . . . messenger . . ."it said, each word a

rustling gasp. ". . . Beware ..."

And then Simon did scream, until the blood pounded in his ears,

for the bumed thing spoke, beyond a doubt, with the voice of Doc-

tor Morgenes.

His speeding heart took a long time to slow. He sat, breathing

raggedly, and Binabik sat beside him.

"There is nothing of harm here," the troll said, then pressed his

palm against Simon's forehead. "You are chilled."

Geloe strode back from the pallet where she had replaced

Malachias' blanket, kicked free when Simon's cry had startled him

awake.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR395

"You had powerful dreams like this when you lived at the castle,

boy?" she asked, fixing him with a stem eye as if daring him to deny

it.

Simon shivered. Faced with that overwhelming gaze, he felt no

urge to tell anything but the truth. "Not until . . . until the last

few months before . . , before . . ."

"Before Morgenes died," said Geloe flatly, "Binabik, unless the

learning I have has deserted me completely, I cannot believe this is

chance, for him to dream of Morgenes in my house. Not a dream

like that."

Binabik ran a hand through his own sleep-tousled hair. "Valada

Geloe, if you do not know, how can I? Daughter of the Mountains! I

feel that I am listening to noises in the dark-1 cannot make out the

dangers that surround us, but dangers I know they are. Simon

dreams of a warning against 'false messengers' . - . but that is one

only of too many mysterious things. Why the Noms? The Black

Rimmersman? The filthy Bukken?"

Geloe turned to Simon and gently but forcefully pushed him back

onto his cloak. "Try and go back to sleep," she said- "Nothing will

enter the house of the witch woman that can harm you." She turned

to Binabik, "I think, if the dreaming he has described is as coherent

as it seems, he will be of use in our search for answers."

Lying on his back, Simon saw the valada and the troll as black

shapes against the firefly gleam of the embers. The smaller shadow

leaned close to him.

"Simon," Binabik whispered, "are there any other dreamings that

have been left out? That you have not told?"

Simon slowly wagged his head from side to side- There was noth-

ing, nothing but shadows, and he was tired of talking. He could still

taste the fear from the bumed thing in the doorway; he only wanted

to surrender to the sucking pull of oblivion, to sleep, to sleep. . - .

But it did not come so easily. Although he held his eyes tightly

closed, still the images of fire and catastrophe rose before him. Toss-

ing in place, unable to find a position that would encourage his tight

muscles to loosen, he heard the quiet talk of the troll and the witch

woman scratch away like rats in the walls.

Finally even that noise ceased, and the solemn breathing of the

wind rose again in his ears; he opened his eyes. Geloe was sitting

alone before the fire, shoulders up like a bird huddling from the rain,

396 Tad Williams

eyes half-open; he could not tell if she was sleeping or watching the

fire smolder out.

His last waking thought, which rose slowly up from deep inside

him, flickering as it came like a fire beneath the sea, was of a tall hill,

a hill crowned with stones. That had been in a dream, hadn't it? He

should have remembered . . . should have told Binabik.

A fire sprang up in the darkness of the hilltop, and he heard the

creaking of wooden wheels, the wheels of dream.

^

When morning came, it did not bring the sun with it. From the

window of the cottage Simon could see the dark treetops at the far

edge of the bowl, but the lake itself wore a thick cloak of fog. Even

directly below the window the water was hard to see, slowly swirling

mist making all things hazy and insubstantial. Above the top of the

murky treeline the sky was a depthless gray.

Geloe had marched the boy Malachias out with her to gather a

certain healing moss, leaving Binabik behind to tend to Leieth. The

troll seemed faintly encouraged about the child's condition, but

when Simon looked at her pale face and the faint movements of her

small chest he wondered what difference the little man could see

that he could not.

Simon rebuilt the fire from a pile of dead branches that Geloe had

stacked neatly in the corner, then went to help change the girl's

dressings.

As Binabik peeled the sheet back from Leieth's body and lifted

away the bandages Simon winced, but would not let himself turn

away. Her whole torso was blackened by bruises and ugly tooth-

marks. The skin had been torn from under her left arm to her hip, a

ragged slash a foot long. As Binabik finished cleaning the wound

and bound her up again with broad strips of linen, little roses of

blood bloomed through the cloth.

"Does she really have a chance to live?" Simon asked. Binabik

shrugged, his hands engaged in the making of careful knots.

"Geloe thinks she may," he said. "She is a woman of a stem and

direct mind, who places people not above animals in her esteem, but

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR397

that is still esteem most high. She would not struggle against the

impossible, I am thinking."

"Is she really a witch woman like she said?"

Binabik pulled the sheet up over the little girl, leaving only her

thin face exposed. Her mouth was partly open; Simon could see that

she had lost both her front teeth. He felt a sudden, bitter ache of

empathy for the childlost with only her brother in the wild forest,

captured and tormented, frightened. How could the Lord Usires

love such a world?

"A witch woman?" Binabik stood up. Outside, Qantaqa clattered

up the front door bridge: Geloe and Malachias would be close be-

hind. "A wise woman she certainly is, and a being of rare strength.

In your tongue I understand 'witch' to mean a bad person, one who

is of your Devil and does her neighbors harm. That the valada is

certainly not. Her neighbors are the birds and the forest dwellers,

and she tends them like a flock. Still, she was leaving Rimmersgard

many years agomany, many years agoto come here. Possible it

is that the people who once lived around her thought some nonsense

as that . . . perhaps that was the cause of her coming to this lake."

Binabik turned to greet the impatient Qantaqa, scratching

through the deep fur of her back as she wriggled in pleasure, then

took a pot out to the front door and lowered it down into the water.

Returning, he hung it on a hooked chain over the fire.

"You have known Malachias from the castle, you said?"

Simon was watching Qantaqa: the wolf had trotted back down to

the lake and was standing in the shallows, lunging at the water with

her snout. "Is she trying to catch fish?" he asked, laughing.

Binabik smiled patiently and nodded. "And catch them she can

do, too. Malachias?"

"Oh, yes, I knew him there ... a little. I caught him once, spy-

ing on me. He denied it, though. Did he speak to you? Did he tell

you what he and his sister were doing in Aldheorte, how they were

captured?"

Qantaqa had indeed caught a fish, a shining silver thing that flut-

tered wildly but pointlessly as the wolf mounted onto the lake's

edge, streaming with water.

"More luck I would be having trying to teach a rock to sing."

Binabik found a bowl of dried leaves on one of Geloe's shelves and

crumbled a handful into the pot of boiling water. Instantly, the room

398 Tad Williams

was full of warm, minty smells. "Five or six words I have heard

from his mouth since we found them up in that tree. He remembers

you, though. Several times I have seen him at staring at you-1 think

he is not dangerousin fact, I have a real sureness of itbut still,

he is in need of watching."

Before he could speak, Simon heard Qantaqa give a short bark

down below. He looked out the window in time to see the wolf

spring up, her mostly-devoured catch left on the lakeshore, and

bound away up the path; within a moment she had disappeared into

the mist- She soon came trotting back, followed by two dim shapes

that gradually became Geloe and the odd, fox-faced boy Malachias.

The two of them were talking animatedly.

"Qinkipa!" Binabik snorted as he stirred the pot of water. "Now

he is speaking."

As she scraped her boots at the doorway, Geloe leaned her head

inside. "Fog everywhere," she said. "The forest is sleepy today." She

entered shaking out her cloak, followed by Malachias, who again

looked wary. The color was high in his cheeks.

Geloe went promptly to her table and began sorting out the con-

tents of a pair of sacks. Today she was dressed like a man, in thick

wool breeches, a jerkin, and a pair of worn but sturdy boots. She

exuded an air of calm force, like a war captain who had made all

possible preparations, and now waited only for the battle to com-

mence.

"Is the water ready?" she asked.

Binabik leaned over the pot and sniffed. "It is seeming to be," he

said after a moment.

"Good." Geloe untied a small cloth bag from her belt and re-

moved a handful of dark green moss, still shiny with beads of water.

After dumping it unceremoniously into the pot she stirred it with

the stick Binabik had given her.

"Malachias and I have been talking," she said, squinting down

into the steam. "We have spoken of many things." She looked up,

but Malachias only ducked his head, his pink cheeks even reddening

a bit further, and went to sit beside Leieth on the pallet. He took her

hand and stroked her pale, damp forehead.

Geloe shrugged. "Well, we shall speak when Malachias is ready.

For now, we have tasks enough, anyway." She lifted some of the

moss on the end of the stirring stick, poked it with her finger, then

THE DRACONBONE CHAIR399

plucked a bowl from a small wooden table and scooped the whole

sticky mess out of the pot. She carried the steaming bowl over to the

mattress.

While Malachias and the witch woman made poultices of the

moss, Simon walked down to the lakeside. The outside of the witch

woman's cottage looked quite as odd by daylight as the inside

seemed by night; the thatched roof came to a point, like a strange

hat, and the dark wood of the walls was covered all over in black

and blue rune-paintings. As he walked around the house and down

to the shore the letters disappeared and reappeared as the angle of

the sun changed. Mired in the dark shadows beneath the hut, the

twin stilts on which it stood also seemed covered with some kind of

unusual shingles.

Qantaqa had returned to the carcass of her fish, delicately worry-

ing the last bits of meat loose from the slender bones. Simon sat

beside her on a rock, then moved a bit farther away in response to

her warning growl. He threw pebbles out into the swallowing mist,

listening for the splash, until Binabik came down to join him.

"Break your fasting?" the troll asked, handing him a knob of

crusty dark bread liberally smeared with pungent cheese. Simon ate

it quickly, then they sat and watched a few birds picking in the sand

of the lake shore.

"Valada Geloe would like you to join us, to be pan of the thing we

are to be doing this afternoon," Binabik said at last.

"What thing?"

"Searching. Searching answers."

"Searching how? Are we going somewhere?"

Binabik looked at him seriously. "In some way, yesno, do not

be looking so cross! I will explain." He cast a pebble. "There is a

thing that is done sometimes, when ways of finding things out are

closed. A thing that the wise can do. My master Ookequk called it

walking the Road of Dreams."

"But that killed him!"

"No! That is to say . . ." the troll's expression was worried as he

searched for words. "It is to say, yes, he died while on the road. But

a man may die on any road. That is not meaning that anyone who

walks upon it will be dying. People have been crushed by carts in

your Main Row, but hundreds of others walk upon it every day

without harm."

400 Tad Williams

"What exactly is the Road of Dreams?" Simon asked.

'I must first admit," Binabik said with a sad half-smile, "that the

dream-road is more dangerous than Main Row. 1 was taught by my

master that this road is like a mountain path higher than any oth-

ers." The troll lifted his hand in the air above his own head. "From

this road, although the climbing of it has great difficulty, you can see

things that never otherwise would you have seenthings that from

the road of every-day would be invisible."

"And the dream part?"

"I was taught that by dreaming is one way to mount up to this

road, one any person can do." Binabik furrowed his brow. "But

when a person reaches to the road by ordinary night dreaming, he

cannot then be walking along the road: he sees from one spot only,

and then must come back down. SoOokequk told to methis one

does not often know what he is looking at. Sometimes," he gestured

out at the mist that clung to the trees and lake, "it is only fog that he

sees. The wise one, though, can be walking along the road, once he

has mastered the art of climbing to it. He can be walking and look-

ing, seeing things as they are, as they change."

He shrugged. "Explaining is difficult. The dream-road is a place

to go and see things that cannot be seen clearly where we stand

beneath the waking sun. Geloe is a veteran of this journey. I have

been given some experience of it myself, although I am no master."

Simon sat staring quietly out across the water for a while, think-

ing about Binabik's words. The lake's other shore was invisible; he

wondered idly how far away across the water it was. His tired mem-

ories of their arrival the day before were as hazy as the morning air.

Now that I come to think of it, he realized, how far have I come? A

long way, farther than I thought I would ever travel. And still have

many leagues to go, I'm sure. Is it worth the risk to better our chances

of reaching Naglimund alive?

Why had such decisions fallen on him? It really was horribly

unfair. He wondered bitterly why God had picked him out for such

mistreatmentif indeed it was true, as Father Dreosan used to say,

that He kept His eye on everyone.

But there was more to think about than just his anger. Binabik

and the others seemed to be counting on him, and that was some-

thing Simon was not used to. Things were expected of him now.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR401

"I'll do it," he said finally. "But tell me one thing. What really

happened to your master? Why did he die?"

Binabik slowly nodded his head. "I am told that there are two

ways that things can happen on the road . , . things that are dan-

gerous. The first, and it is usually happening only to the unskilled, is

that if one tries to walk the road without proper wisdom, it is possi-

ble to miss the places where the dream-road and the track of earth-

bound life go separate ways." He skewed the palms of his hands.

"The walker then cannot locate the way back. But Ookequk, I am

thinking, was far too wise for that."

Going lost and homeless in those imagined realms touched a re-

sponsive point in Simon, and he sucked in a breath of damp air.

"Then what happened to Ook . . . Ookequk?"

"The other danger, he was teaching me," Binabik said as he stood

up, **was that there are other things beside the wise and the good

that roam upon the Road of Dreams, and other dreamers of a more

dangerous sort. It is my thinking that he met one of these."

Binabik led Simon up the little ramp into the cottage.

Geloe unstoppered a wide pot and stuck two fingers in, bringing

them out covered with a dark green paste even stickier and stranger

smelling than the moss poultice.

"Lean forward," she said, and wiped a gob of it on Simon's fore-

head just above his nose, then did the same for herself and Binabik.

"What is it?" Simon asked. It felt strange on his skin, both hot

and cold.

Geloe settled herself before the sunken fire and gestured for the

boy and troll to join her. "Nightshade, mockfoil, whitewood bark to

give it the proper consistency . . ." She ranged the boy, the troll,

and herself around the fireplace in a triangle, placing the pot on the

floor by her knee.

The sensation on his forehead was most curious, Simon decided as

he watched the valada throw green twigs onto the fire. White

streamers of smoke went writhing upward, turning the space be-

tween them into a misty column through which her sulfurous eyes

glowed, reflecting the firelight.

"Now rub this on both your hands," she said, scooping out an-

other gobbet for each of them, "and a dab on your lipsbut not in

your mouth! Just a dab, there ..."

402 Tad Williams

When all was finished, she had them reach out and join hands.

Malachias, who had not spoken since Simon and the troll had re-

turned, watched from the pallet beside the sleeping child. The

strange boy looked tense, but his mouth was set in a grim line, as

though he willed himself to keep his nervousness hidden. Simon

stretched his arms out on both sides, clasping Binabik's small dry

paw in his own left hand and Geloe's sturdy one in his right.

"Hold tightly," the witch woman said. "There is nothing terrible

that will happen if you let go, but it will be better if you hold on."

She cast her eyes down and began to speak softly, the words inaudi-

ble. Simon stared at her moving lips, at the drooping lids other wide

eyes; again he was struck by how much she resembled a bird, a

proud, steep-soaring bird at that. As he continued to gaze through

the column of smoke, the tingling on his palms, forehead, and lips

began to bother him.

Darkness was suddenly all around, as though a dense cloud had

passed before the sun. In a moment he could see nothing but the

smoke and the red fireglow beneath it, all else had disappeared into

the walls of blackness that loomed up on either side. His eyes were

heavy, and at the same time he felt as though someone had pushed

his face down in snow. He was cold, very cold. He fell backward,

toppling, and the blackness was all around him.

After a timeand Simon had no idea how long it might have

been, only that through it all he could still faintly feel the grip on

both his hands, a very reassuring sensationthe darkness began to

glow with a directionless light, a light that gradually resolved itself

into a field of white. The whiteness was uneven: some parts of it

shone like sunlight on polished steel; other places were almost gray.

A moment later the field of white became a vast, glittering mountain

of ice, a mountain so impossibly tall that its head was hidden in the

swirling clouds lining the dark sky. Smoke belched from crevices in

its glassy sides and streamed upward to join the cloud-halo.

And then, somehow, he was inside the great mountain, flying as

rapidly as a spark through tunnels that led ever inward, dark tunnels

that were nevertheless lined with mirroring ice. Uncountable thou-

sands of shapes made their way through the mists and shadows and

frostgleampale-faced, angular shapes who marched the corridors

in moving thickets of glimmering spears, or tended the strange blue

and yellow fires whose smokes crowned the heights above.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR403

The spark that was Simon still felt two firm hands grasping his

own, or rather felt something else that told him he was not alone, for

certainly a spark could have no hands to hold. He was at last in a

great chamber, a vast hollow in the mountain's center. The roof was

so high above the ice-glazed tiles of the floor that snow flurried

down from its upper reaches, leaping, whirling clouds of snow like

armies of tiny white butterflies. In the center of the immense cham-

ber was a monstrous well, whose mouth flickered with pale blue

light, and which seemed the source of a hideous, heart-squeezing

fear. Some heat must have been floating up from its unguessable

depths, for the air above it was a roiling pillar of fogs, a misty

column gleaming with diffuse colors like a titan icicle catching the

sun's light.

Hanging somehow in the fog above the well, its shape not quite

clear or its dimensions entirely guessable, was an inexplicable some-

thing: a thing made up of many things and many shapes, all colorless

as glass. It seemedas its lineaments appeared here and there in the

swirling mist-pillara creation of angles and sweeping curves, of

subtle, frightening complexity. In some not quite definable way it

seemed an instrument of music. If so, it was an instrument so huge,

alien, and frightening that the spark that was Simon knew he could

never hear its awful music and live.

Facing the well, in an angular seat of rime-crusted black rock, a

figure sat. He could see it clearly, as though suddenly he hovered

directly over the terrible, blue-burning well. It was cloaked in a

white and silver robe of fantastic intricacy. Snowy hair streamed

down over its shoulders to blend almost invisibly with the immacu-

late white garments.

The pale form lifted its head, and the face was a mass of shining

light. A moment later, as it turned away again, he could see that it

was only a beautiful, expressionless sculpture of a woman's face

... a mask of silver.

The dazzling, exotic face turned back toward him. He felt himself

pushed away, brusquely disconnected from the scene like a clinging

kitten being pulled free from the hem of a dress.

A vision swam up before him that was somehow a part of the

wreath of fogs and the grim white figure. At first it was only another

patch of alabaster whiteness; gradually it became an angular shape

crisscrossed with black. The black shapes became lines, the lines

404 Tad Williams

became symbols; at last an open book hung before him. On its

opened page were letters Simon could not read, twisting runes that

wavered and then came clear.

A timeless instant passed, then the runes began to shimmer once

more. They pulled apart and reformed themselves into black silhou-

ettes, three long, slender shapes . . . three swords. One had a hilt

shaped like the Tree of Usires, another a hilt like the right-angle

crossbeams of a roof. The third had a strange double guard, the

cross pieces making, with the hilt, a son of five-pointed star. Some-

where, deep in Simon's self, he recognized this last sword. Some-

where, in a memory black as night, deep as a cave, he had seen such

a blade.

The swords began to disappear, one by one, and when they were

gone only gray and white nothingness was left.

Simon felt himself falling backaway from the mountain, away

from the well chamber, away from the dream itself. A part of him

welcomed this falling away, horrified by the terrible, forbidden

places where his spirit had flown, but another part of him did not

want to let go.

Where were the answers?! His whole life had been caught up.

snagged by the passage of some damnable, remorseless, uncaring

wheel, and deep in the part of himself that was most private, he was

desperately angry. He was frightened, too, trapped in a nightmare

that would not end, but what he felt now was the anger; at that

moment, it was the stronger.

He resisted the pull, fighting with weapons he did not understand

to retain the dream, to wring from it the knowledge he wanted. He

seized the fast-diminishing whiteness and furiously tried to mold it,

to make it into something that would tell him why Morgenes had

died, why Dochais and the monks of Saint Hoderund's had per-

ished, why the little girl Leieth lay close to death in a hut in the

depths of the wild forest. He struggled and he hated. If a spark could

weep, he wept.

Slowly, painfully, the ice mountain formed again from the blank-

ness before him. Where was the truth? He wanted answers! As

Simon's dream-self struggled, the mountain grew taller, grew more

slender, began sprouting branches like an icy tree as it reached into

the heavens. Then the branches fell away, and it was only a smooth

white towera tower that he knew. Flames bumed at its summit. A

405

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

great, booming sound came, like the tolling of a monstrous bell. The

tower wavered. The bell thundered again. This was something of

dreadful importance, he knew, something ghastly, something secret.

He could feel an answer almost within reach. . . .

Little fly! You have come to us, have you?

A horrible, searing black nothingness reached up and engulfed

him, blocking out the tower and the sounding bell. He felt the breath

of life burning away inside his dream-self as infinite coldness closed

around him. He was lost in the screamingly empty void, a tiny speck

at the bottom of a sea of infinite black depths, cut free from life,

breath, thought. Everything had vanished . . . everything except

the horrible, crushing hatred of the thing that gripped him . . .

smothered him.

And then, beyond all hope, he was free.

He was soaring, dizzyingly high above the world of Osten Ard,

clutched in the strong talons of a large gray owl, flying like the

wind's own child. The ice mountain was disappearing behind him,

swallowed up in the immensity of the bone-white- plain. In impossi-

bly swift moments the owl carried him away, over lakes and ice and

mountains, winging toward a dark line on the horizon. Just as it

came clear to him, as the line became a forest, he felt himself begin-

ning to slip from the owl's claws. The bird clutched him tighter, and

dropped earthward in a whistling dive. The ground leaped up, and

the owl spread her wide wings. They flattened out, gliding, and

whirled across the snowfields toward the security of the forest.

And then they were under the eaves, and safe.

Simon groaned and rolled over onto his side. His head was pound-

ing like Ruben the Bear's anvil during tournament time. His tongue

seemed swollen to twice its normal size; the air he breathed tasted of

metal. He pulled himself into a crouch, moving his heavy head as

slowly as possible.

Binabik was lying nearby, his wide face pale; Qantaqa nosed at the

troll's side, whimpering. Across the smoking fireplace dark-haired

Malachias was shaking Geloe, whose mouth hung slack, her lips

gleaming wetly. Simon groaned again as his head throbbed, hanging

down between his shoulders like a bruised fruit. He crawled to

Binabik. The little man was breathing; even as Simon leaned over

him the troll began to cough, gasped for air, and opened his eyes.

406 Tad Williams

"We . . ." he rasped, "we ... are ... all here?"

Simon nodded, looking over to Geloe, still motionless despite

Malachias' attentions. "A moment . . ." he said, and slowly got to

his feet.

He walked gingerly out the hut's front door carrying a small,

empty pot. He was faintly surprised to see that, despite the pall of

fog, it was still full afternoon; the time on the dream-road had

seemed much longer than that. He also had the nagging feeling that

something else had changed outside the cottage, but could not put

his finger on what the difference was. The view seemed slightly off.

He decided it must be some effect of his experience. After filling the

pot with lake water and washing the sticky green paste from his

hands, he returned to the house.

Binabik drank thirstily, then gestured that Simon should take the

container to Geloe. Malachias watched, half-hopeful, half-jealous, as

Simon carefully took the witch woman's jaw in one hand and

splashed a little water into her open mouth. She coughed, then swal-

lowed, and Simon gave her a little more.

As he held her head Simon was suddenly aware that, in some way,

Geloe had saved him while they were all walking in dream. As he

looked down at the woman, who was breathing more regularly now,

he remembered the gray owl who had caught him up when his

dream-self had been at its final gasp, and had borne him away.

Geloe and the troll had not expected quite such a circumstance,

he sensed; in fact, it was Simon who had put them in such danger.

For once, though, he had no feelings of shame over his actions. He

had done what needed doing. He had been fleeing the wheel long

enough.

"How is she?" Binabik asked.

"I think she will be well," Simon replied, looking at the witch

woman carefully. "She saved me, didn't she?"

Binabik stared for a moment, hair hung in sweaty spikes on his

brown forehead. "It is likely that she did," he said finally. "She is a

powerful ally, but even her strength has been by this taxed to the

limit."

"What did it mean?" Simon asked now, releasing Geloe to the

supporting arms of Malachias. "Did you see what I saw? The moun-

tain, and . . . and the lady with the mask, and the book?"

"I wonder if we saw all things the same, Simon," Binabik an-

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR407

swered slowly. "But I am thinking it is important we wait until

Geloe can share her thoughts with us. Perhaps later, when we have

eaten. I am full of terrible hunger."

Simon gave the troll a shaky half-smile, and turned to find

Malachias staring at him. The boy started to turn away, then seemed

to find some internal resolution and held his stare, until it was Si-

mon who began to feel uncomfortable.

"It was as if the whole house was shaking," Malachias said

abruptly, startling Simon more than a little. The boy's voice was

strained, high-pitched and hoarse.

"What do you mean?" Simon asked, fascinated as much by the

fact of Malachias speaking as by what he said.

"The whole cottage- While you three sat and stared at the fire, the

walls began to ... to quiver. Like someone picked it up and set it

down again."

"Most likely it was only the way we were moving while we were

... I mean ... oh, I don't know." Simon gave up in disgust. The

truth was, he didn't really know anything right at this moment. His

brains felt as though they'd been stirred with a stick.

Malachias turned away to give more water to Geloe. Raindrops

suddenly began to patter down onto the windowsill; the gray sky

could hold back its burden of storm no longer.

The witch woman was grim. They had pushed aside the soup

bowls and sat facing each other on the bare floor: Simon, the troll,

and the mistress of the cottage. Malachias, although obviously inter-

ested, remained on the bed beside the little girl.

"I saw evil things moving," Geloe said, and her eyes flashed. "Evil

things that will shake the roots of the world we know." She had

recovered her strength, and something else: she was solemn, and

grave as a king in judgment. "I almost wish we had not taken the

dream-pathbut that is an idle wish, from the part of me that wants

just to be left alone. I see darker days coming, and I fear to be drawn

in by events so ill-omened."

"What do you mean?" Simon asked. "What was all that? Did you

see the mountain, too?"

"Stormspike." Binabik's voice was strangely flat. Geloe looked

over at him, nodded, then turned back to Simon.

"True. It was Sturmrspeik we saw, as they call it in Rimmersgard,

408 Tad Williams

where it is a legend, as far as Rimmersmen are concerned. Storm-

spike. The mountain of the Noms."

"We Qanuc," Binabik said, "know Stormspike to be real. But still,

the Noms have not been intruding on the affairs of Osten Ard since

time beyond time. Why now? It looked to me as if, as if . . ."

"As if they were preparing for war," Geloe finished for him- "You

are right, if the dream is to be trusted. Whether it was true-seeing, of

course, would take a better-trained eye than even mine. But you said

the hounds that pursue you wear the brand of Stormspike; that is

real evidence in the waking world. I think we can trust this part of

the dream, or at least I think we ought to."

"Preparing for war?" Simon was already confused. "Against who?

And who was the woman in the silver mask?"

Geloe looked very tired. "The mask? Not a woman. A creature

out of legend, you could say, or a creature out of time beyond time,

as Binabik put it. That was Utufc'ku, the Queen of the Noms."

Simon felt a chill sweep over him. The wind outside sang a cold

and lonely song. "But what are these Noms? Binabik said they were

Sithi."

"The old wisdom says that they were part of the Sithi once,"

Geloe responded. "But they are a lost tribe, or renegades. They

never came to Asu'a with the rest of their folk, but disappeared into

the unmapped north, the icy lands beyond Rimmersgard and its

mountains. They chose to separate themselves from the doings of

Osten Ard, although that seems to be changing."

For a moment Simon saw a flicker of deep unease cross the witch

woman's sour, practical face.

And these Noms are helping Elias chase me? he thought, feeling

panic rise again. Why am I sunk in this nightmare?

Then, as if his fright had opened a door in his mind, he remem-

bered something. Unpleasant shapes climbed up from the hidden

places in his heart, and he struggled to catch his breath.

"Those . . . those pale people. The Noms. I've seen them be-

fore!"

"WhatI?" Geloe and the troll spoke at the same time, leaning

forward. Simon, startled by their intensity, backed away.

"When?" Geloe snapped.

"It happened ... I think it happened: it may have been a dream

... on the night I ran away from the Hayholt. I was in the lich-

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR409

yard, and I thought I heard something calling my namea woman's

voice. I was so frightened that I ran away, out of the lich-yard and

toward Thisterborg." There was a stirring on the pallet: Malachias

nervously shifting position. Simon ignored him and continued-

"There was a fire on top of Thisterborg, up among the Anger

Stones. Do you know them?"

"I do," Geloe's response was matter of fact, but Simon sensed

some weight behind the words he did not understand.

"Well, I was cold and frightened, so I climbed up. I'm sorry, but I

was so sure that this was a dream. Perhaps it is."

"Perhaps. Go on."

"There were men on the top. They were soldiers, I could tell

because they wore armor." Simon felt a thin sweat break on his

palms, and nibbed them together. "One of them was King Elias. I

was frightened even more, then, so I hid. Then . . . then there was

a horrible creaking noise, and a black wagon came up the far side of

the hill." It was coming back, all coming back ... or, at least, it

seemed like all ... but there were still empty shadows. "Those

pale-skinned peoplethe Noms, that's what they werewere with

it, several of them, dressed in black robes."

There was a long pause while Simon struggled to remember. Rain

drummed on the cottage roof.

"And?" the valada asked at last, gently.

"Elysia Mother-of-God!" Simon swore, and tears started in his

eyes. "I can't remember! They gave him something, something from

the wagon. Other things happened, too, but it feels like it's all under

a blanket in my head. I can touch it, but I can't tell what it is! They

gave him something! I thought it was a dream!" He buried his face

in his hands, trying to squeeze the painful thoughts from his

whirling head.

Binabik awkwardly patted Simon's knee. "This is perhaps answer-

ing our other question. I, too, pondered over why the Noms should

be readying for battle. I wondered if they would be fighting against

Elias the High King, as some age-old grievance against mankind.

Now, it has the appearance to me that they are helping him. Some

kind of bargain has been struck. Possibly it was that which Simon

saw. But how? How could Elias ever make such compact with the

secretive Noms?"

"Pryrates." As soon as Simon said it, he was sure it was true.

410 Tad Williams

"Morgenes said that Pryrates opened doors, and that terrible things

came through. Pryrates was on that hill, too."

Valada Geloe nodded her head. "It makes a kind of sense. A

question that must be answered, but one that I am sure is beyond

our powers, iswhat was the bargaining-tally? What could these

two, Pryrates and the king, have to offer to the Noms for their aid?"

They shared a long silence.

"What did the book say?" Simon asked abruptly. "On the dream-

road. Did you see the book, too?"

Binabik thumped the heel of his hand against his chest. "It was

there. The runes I saw were of Rimmersgard: 'Du Svardenvyrd.' In

your speech it means: The Spell of the Swords.' "

"Or Weird of the Swords," Geloe added. "It is a famous book in

the circles of the wise, but it has been long lost. I have never seen it.

It is said to have been written by Nisses, a priest who was a coun-

selor to King Hjeldin the Mad."

"The one Hjeldin's tower is named after?" Simon "sked her.

"Yes. That is where Hjeldin and Nisses both died."

Simon considered. "I saw three swords, too."

Binabik looked to Geloe. "Only shapes was I seeing," the troll

said slowly. "I thought they might have the look of swords."

The witch woman had not been sure, either. Simon described the

silhouettes, but they meant nothing to her or to Binabik.

"So," the little man said at last, "we have learned what from the

dream-roadthat the Noms are giving aid to Elias? This we

guessed. That a strange book is playing some part . . . perhaps?

This is a new thing. We were given a dream-glimpse of Stormspike,

and the halls of the mountain's queen. We may have learned things

that we do not understand yetstill, I am thinking, one thing has

changed not at all: we must take ourselves to Naglimund. Valada,

your house will be protection for a while, but if Josua lives he has

need to know of these things."

Binabik was interrupted from an unexpected quarter. "Simon,"

Malachias said, "you said someone called you in the lien-yard. It

was my voice you heard. I was the one calling you."

Simon could only gape.

Geloe smiled. "At last, one our mysteries begins to speak! Go on,

child. Tell them what you must."

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR411

Malachias blushed furiously. "I ... my name is not Malachias.

It is ... Marya."

"But Marya is a girl's name," Simon began, then broke off at the

sight of Geloe's widening grin. "A girl ...?'* he said lamely. He

stared at the strange boy's face, and suddenly saw it for what it was.

"A girl," he grunted, feeling impossibly stupid.

The witch woman chuckled. "It was obvious, I must sayor it

should have been. She had the advantage of traveling with a troll

and a boy, and the cloak of confusing, dangerous events, but I told

her the deception could not last."

"Especially not all the way to Naglimund, and that is where I

must go." Marya nibbed her eyes wearily. "I have an important

message to bear to Prince Josua from his niece, Miriamele. Please do

not ask me what it is, for I may not tell you."

"What of your sister?" Binabik asked, "She will not be able to

travel for a long time." He, too, squinted at the surprising Marya, as

if trying to discover how he had been fooled. It did seem obvious,

now.

"She is not my sister," Marya said sadly. "Leieth was the prin-

cess' handmaiden. We were very close. She was frightened to stay in

the castle without me, and was desperate to come along." She

looked down at the sleeping child. "I should never have brought her.

I tried to pull her up into the tree before the dogs caught us. If I had

only been stronger . . ."

"It is not clear," Geloe broke in, "whether the little girl will ever

be able to travel. She has not moved far from the brink of death. I

am sorry to say it, but it is the truth. You must leave her with me."

Marya started to protest, but Geloe would not listen. Simon was

disturbed to see what he thought was a glimmer of relief in the girl's

dark eyes. It angered him to think she would leave the wounded

child behind, no matter how important the message.

"So," Binabik said finally, "where is it we are now? We still must

reach Naglimund, and we are blocked by leagues of forest and the

steep slopes ofWealdhelm. Not mentioning those who will be in our

pursuit."

Geloe thought carefully. "It seems clear to me," she said, "that

you must get through the forest to Da'ai Chikiza. That is an old

Sithi place, long-deserted, of course. There you can find the Stile,

which is an old road through the hills from a time when the Sithi

412 Tad Williams

regularly traveled between there and Asu'athe Hayholt. It is un-

used now, except by animals, but it will be the easiest, safest place to

cross. I can give you a map in the morning. Yes, Da'ai

Chikiza ..." A deep light kindled in her yellow eyes, and she

nodded her head slowly, as if lost in thought. A moment later she

blinked, and became her brisk self once more. "Now you should

sleep. We should all sleep. The day's doings have left me limp as a

willow branch."

Simon didn't think so. He thought the witch woman looked

strong as an oak treebut he supposed even an oak could suffer in a

storm.

Later, as he lay curled in his cloak, the warm bulk of Qantaqa's

somewhat intrusive presence against his legs, he tried to push away

thoughts of the terrible mountain. Such things were too vast, too

murky. Instead, he wondered what Marya must think of him. A

boy, Geloe had called him, a boy who did not know what a girl

looked like. But that was not fairwhen had there been time to

think about it?

Why had she been spying in the Hayholt? For the princess, per-

haps? And if it had been Marya who called to him in the lien-yard,

why? How had she known his name, why had she bothered to leam

it? He didn't remember ever seeing her at the castleor at least not

as a girl.

When he at last floated off into sleep, like a tiny boat pushed out

onto a black ocean, he felt as though he pursued a receding light, a

patch of brightness just out of reach. Outside the windows, rain

covered the dark mirror of Geloe's lake.

27

The Gossamer Towers

HE TRIED to ignore the hand on his shoulder, but could not. Open-

ing his eyes, he found the room still quite dark, two angular sittings

of stars the only indication of where the windows stood.

"Let me sleep," he moaned. "It's too early!"

"Get up, boy!" came the harsh whisper. It was Geloe, her robe

loosely drawn about her. "There is no time to waste."

Blinking his dry and painful eyes, Simon looked past the kneeling

woman to see Binabik quietly repacking his bag. "What's going on?"

he asked, but the troll seemed too busy to talk.

"I have been outside," Geloe said. "The lake has been discovered

I assume by the men who were hunting you."

Simon sat up quickly and reached for his boots. It all seemed so

unreal in the near-darkness; nevertheless, he could feel his heart

beating swiftly. "Usires!" he cursed quietly. "What shall we do? Will

they attack us?"

"I do not know," Geloe answered as she left him to go and wake

Malachiasno, Marya, Simon reminded himself. "There are two

camps, one at the lake's far end by the inlet stream, one not far from

here. Either they know whose house this is and are trying to decide

what to do, or they do not yet know the cottage is here at all. They

may have arrived after we put the candles out."

A sudden question occurred to him. "How do you know they're

out at the far end?" He peered through the window. The lake was

again shrouded in fog, and there was no sign of campfires. "It's so

dark," he finished, and turned back to Geloe. She was certainly not

dressed to be out prowling in the woods. Her feet were bare!

But even as he looked at her, at the hastily donned robe and the

wet beads of mist clinging to her face and hair, he remembered the

great wings of the owl who had flown before them to this lake. He

414 Tad Williams

could still feel the strong talons that had carried him away when the

hateful thing on the Road of Dreams had been crushing out his life.

"I don't suppose it's important, is it?" he finished at last. "It's

only important that we know they're out there." Despite the faint

moonlight, he saw the witch woman grin.

"Right you are, Simon-boy," she said softly, then went to help

Binabik fill two more bags, one each for Simon and Marya.

"Listen," Geloe said as Simon, now dressed, came over. "It is

obvious you must get out now, before dawn," she squinted out at the

stars for a moment, "which will not be long in coming. The question

is, how?"

"All we can hope," Binabik grunted, "is to slip away and try and

pass them in the forest, moving with great quietness. We with cer-

tainty cannot fly." He grinned, somewhat sourly. Marya, bundling

into a cloak the valada had given her, stared at the troll's smile in

puzzlement.

"No," said Geloe seriously, "but I also doubt you could slip by

those terrible hounds. You may not fly, but you can float away. I

have a boat tied beneath the house. It is not big, but it will hold you

allQantaqa too, if she does not frolic around." She affectionately

ruffled the ears of the wolf, who reclined by her squatting master.

"And of what good is that?" Binabik asked. "Shall we paddle out

to the center of the lake, then in the morning dare them to swim and

get us?" He finished the last bag and pushed one toward Simon, one

toward the girl.

"There is an inlet stream," Geloe said. "It is small and not very

fast-flowing, not even as strong as the one you followed on your way

here- With four paddles you can easily make your way out of the

lake and up it some ways." Her faint frown was more contemplative

than worried. "Unfortunately, it also passes by one of the two

camps. Well, that is not to be helped. You must simply paddle qui-

etly. Perhaps it will even help in your escape. Such a thickheaded

man as your Baron Heahferthbelieve me, I have had my dealings

with him and his like!would not credit that his quarry might slide

by so near."

"Heahferth is not giving me worry," Binabik replied. "It is that

one who is truly leading the huntthe Black Rimmersman, Ingen

Jegger."

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR415

"He probably doesn't even sleep," added Simon. He didn't like

the memory of that one at all.

Geloe made a wry face. "Never fear, then. Or at least, do not let

fear overwhelm you. Some useful distraction or other may occur

. . . one never knows." She stood up. "Come, boy," she said to

Simon, "you are good-sized. Help me untie the boat and move it

silently to the front door bridge."

"Can you see it?" Geloe hissed, pointing at a dark shape bobbing

on the ebony lake near the far comer of the elevated house. Simon,

already knee-deep in the water, nodded his head. "Go quietly,

then," she saidsomewhat unnecessarily, Simon thought.

As he waded around the side, head-high to the cottage's stilted

floorboards. Simon decided that he had not been mistaken last after-

noon, when he had felt that somehow things around the hut had

changed. That tree there, roots halfway into the water: he had seen

it the first day they had arrived, but thenhe was sure, by Usires!

it had been on the cottage's other side, near the door plank. How

could a tree move?

He found the boat's tie rope with his fingers and slid them up until

he encountered the place where it was tied to a sort of hoop hanging

down from the bottom of the cottage. As he bent down at a back-

aching angle to try and work the knot loose, he wrinkled his nose

against the strange reek. Was it the lake, or the underside of the

house itself that smelled so? Beside the odor of damp wood and

mold, there was also a kind of odd, animal scentwarm and musky,

but not unpleasant.

Even as he squinted into the darkness the shadows lightened a bit;

he could even see the knot! His pleasure at that, and the rapid unty-

ing that followed, was dashed by the cold realization that dawn

would be coming soon: the fading darkness was his friend. After

pulling the tie line loose, he began wading back, towing the boat

quietly behind him. He could just discern the dim shape of Geloe

standing huddled beside the long plank that sloped from the hut's

entrance; he headed toward her as quickly as he could . . . until he

tripped.

With a splash and a muffled cry, he half-fell down onto one knee,

then drew himself upright. What had caught at him? It felt like a

log. He tried to step over the obstruction, but merely succeeded in

416 Tad Williams

putting his bare foot down directly on top of it, and had to stifle the

urge to cry out again. Although it lay unmoving and solid, still it

had the scaly feel of one of the pikefish from the Hayholt's moat, or

one of the stuffed cockindrills Morgenes had kept perched on his

shelves. As the ripples quieted, and he heard Geloe's quiet but wary

voice asking if he had hurt himself, he looked down.

Although the water was very nearly opaque in the darkness, Si-

mon was sure he could see the outlines of some strange type of log,

or rather a vast branch of some kind, for he could see that the thing

he had tripped over, lying close beneath the surface of the water,

joined two other scaly branches. Together they seemed connected to

the base of one of the two pillars on which the cottage stood sus-

pended over the lake.

And as he stepped carefully over it, sliding silently through the

water toward the shadow that was Geloe, he suddenly realized that

what the tree rootsor branches, or whatever they werewhat they

truly looked like was . . . some kind of monstrous foot. A claw,

actually, the claw of a bird. What a funny idea! A house did not have

bird's feet, anymore than a house got up and . . . walked.

Simon was very quiet as Geloe tied the boat up to the base of the

plank.

Everything and everybody was packed into the tiny boat: Binabik

perched .n th^ pointed brow, Marya in the middle, Simon seated in

the stem with a restless Qantaqa between his knees. The wolf was

obviously very uncomfortable; she had whined and resisted when

Binabik ordered her into the little craft. He had finally needed to

smack her lightly on the snout. The discomfort on the little man's

face showed clearly even in the predawn darkness.

The moon had swung far into the blue-black vault of the lighten-

ing western sky. Geloe, after handing them the paddles, straightened

up.

"Once you have gotten safely out of the lake and a bit upstream, I

think you should probably carry the boat overland through the for-

est to the Aelfwent. It is not a very heavy craft, and you don't need

to carry it far. The river is flowing the proper direction, and should

get you to Da'ai Chikiza."

Binabik reached out with his paddle and pushed the boat away

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR417

from the plank. Geloe stood ankle-deep at the lake's edge as they

spun gently out from the shore.

"Remember," she whispered, "edge those paddles into the water

as you reach the inlet stream. Silence! That is your protection."

Simon raised his palm. "Farewell, Valada Geloe."

"Farewell, young pilgrim." Her voice was already growing faint,

with less than three cubits between them. "Good luck to you all.

Fear not! I will take good care of the little girl." They slid quietly

away, until the witch woman was only a shadow beside the house's

near stilt.

The prow of the little boat cut through the water like a barber's

blade through silk. At Binabik's gesture they lowered their heads,

and the troll silently guided the craft toward the center of the misty

lake. As Simon huddled into the thick fur ofQantaqa's back, feeling

the pulse of her nervous breath, he watched tiny rings form on the

lake's surface beside the boat; at first he thought it might be fish, up

early to break their fast on mayflies and mosquitos. Then he felt a

tiny drop of moisture splash on the back of his neck, and another. It

was raining again.

As they neared the middle, cutting through swarms of hyacinths

that lay scattered on the water before them as though cast in the

path of a returning hero, the sky began to brighten. Dawn did not

announce its arrival: it would be hours before the sun cut through

the clouds and became visible in the sky. Rather, it was as if a layer

of darkness had been stripped away from the heavens, the first of

many veils. The line of trees that had been a blot of obscurity on the

horizon became a thatch of distinguishable treetops profiled against

the slate-gray sky. The water was black glass around them, but now

some details of the shoreline could be seen, the faint, pale tree roots

like the twisted legs of beggars, the dim silver shine of a granite

outcroppingall standing around the secret lake like a court gallery

waiting for the players to arrive, all slowly metamorphosing from

gray night shapes to the vivid objects of day.

Qantaqa hunched, surprised, as Marya suddenly leaned forward

to peer over the gunwale of the boat. She started to say something,

checked herself, and instead pointed a finger out across the bow and

slightly to the right.

Simon squinted, then saw it: an anomalous shape in the orderless

but somehow symmetrical forest fringe, a square, blocky shape that

418 Tad Williams

was a different color from the dark branches around ita striped

blue tent.

Now they could see several more, a crowd of three or four just

behind the first. Simon scowled, then smiled disdainfully. How typi-

cal of the Baron Heahferthfrom what he had heard in his days at

the castle, anywayto carry such luxuries out into the wild forest.

Just beyond the scatter of small tents the lakeshore dipped back

for several ells, then reappeared again, leaving a dark space in the

middle as though a bite had been taken from the shoreline. Tree

branches hung low over the water there; it was impossible to see if it

was truly the river inlet, but Simon felt sure that it was.

Right where Geloe said! he thought. Sharp, sharp eyes she's got

but then, that's not much of a surprise, is it?

He pointed to the dark break in the lake's rim, and Binabik nod-

ded; he had seen it, too.

As they neared the silent camp, Binabik had to paddle a bit

harder to keep them scudding along at a good pace; Simon guessed

that they must be starting to feel the push of the feeder stream. He

delicately lifted his paddle to lower it over the side. Binabik, catch-

ing the movement from the comer of his eye, turned and shook his

head, silently mouthing "not yet"; Simon stopped the small paddle

just above the rain-puckered water.

As they slid past the tents, not thirty ells from the shore, Simon

saw a dark shape moving among the walls of azure cloth. His throat

tightened. It was a sentry: he could see the dull sheen of metal

beneath the cloak. He might even be facing in their direction, but it

was difficult to tell, for he had the hood of his cloak up around his

head.

Within instants the others had also seen the man. Binabik slowly

lifted his paddle from the water and they all leaned forward, hoping

to show as little profile as possible. Even if the soldier chanced to

look out onto the lake, perhaps his eye would pass over them, or see

only a log bobbing on the waterbut that was really too much to

hope for, Simon felt sure. He could not imagine the man failing to

spot them if he turned, close as they were.

Even as the progress of the little craft slowed, the dark gap in the

shoreline came up before them. It was the inlet stream: Simon could

see the water rippling faintly where it passed over the rounded back

of a stone some few yards up the channel. It had also nearly stopped

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR419

their forward motion; as a matter of fact, the nose of the boat was

beginning to come around, rebuffed by the mild current. They would

have to put paddles in the water soon, or be pushed into the bank

just below the blue tents.

Then, finished with whatever had caught his attention at the far

side of the camp, the sentry turned around to gaze out across the

lake.

Within an instant, even before the mounting fear could truly take

hold of them, a dark shape dropped from the trees over the camp

and skimmed swiftly toward the sentry. It sailed through the

branches like a huge gray leaf and fetched up against his neck, but

this leaf had talons; when he felt them at his throat the armored man

gave a shout of horror and dropped his spear, beating at whatever

had clutched him. The gray shape fluttered up, wings churning, and

hung over his head just beyond his reach. He shouted again, clutch-

ing his neck, and fumbled in the dirt for his spear.

"Now!" Binabik hissed. "Paddle!" He and Marya and Simon

drove the wooden blades into the water, pulling desperately. For the

first few strokes they seemed somehow snagged, water splashing

purposelessly as the boat rocked. Then they began to ease forward,

and within moments were pushing against the stronger current of

the stream, sliding in beneath the overarching branches.

Simon looked back to see the sentry, head bare, leaping up and

down trying to swat the hovering creature. A few of the other men

sat up from their bedrolls, beginning to laugh as they watched their

comrade, who had dropped his spear and was now throwing rocks at

this daft, dangerous bird. The owl dodged the missiles with ease; as

Simon lowered the curtain of leafy branches down behind the boat it

gave a flirt of its wide white tail and circled up into the shadowed

trees.

As they strained forward against the difficult currentsurpris-

ingly difficult, since on the surface it did not appear to be moving at

allSimon gave a quiet chortle of triumph.

For a long time they paddled hard against the river's flow. Even

had they not felt the need for silence they would have been hard-

pressed to make any conversation, the paddling was such strenuous

work. At last, close to an hour later, they found a small backwater

420 Tad Williams

hedged in by a secretive screen of reeds where they could stop and

rest.

The sun was now well up, a glowing blur behind a pearly, sky-

wide canopy of clouds. A film of mist still clung to the forest and

river, so that their surroundings seemed the landscape of a dream.

Somewhere up ahead the stream was passing through or over some

obstacle; the quiet purr of moving water was augmented by the

chimelike tones of the watercourse leaping and splashing back upon

itself.

Simon, panting, watched the girl Marya as she leaned on the

gunwale, her cheek resting on her forearm. It was hard to under-

stand how he had ever mistaken her for a boy. What he had seen as

foxlike, as a sharpness of feature unusual in a boy, he now saw as

delicacy. She was flushed with exertion; Simon stared at her ruddy

cheek, and his eye moved down the white length of her extended

neck, to the gentle but well-defined protrusion of her collarbone

where the boy's shirt she wore gaped open at the throat.

She's not well-padded . . . not like Hepzibah, he mused. Huh/ Vd

like to see Hepzibah pass as a boy! Still, she's pretty in a kind of thin

way. Her hair's so very black.

Marya's eyes fluttered closed. She continued to breathe deeply.

Simon absently stroked Qantaqa's wide head.

"Well made, is she not?" Binabik asked cheerfully. Simon gaped

at him, startled.

"What?"

Binabik frowned. "I am sorry. Perhaps you are calling them 'him*

in Erkynland? 'It,' possibly? Still, you must agree that Geloe has

done a job of great craft."

"Binabik," Simon said, his blush beginning to fade, "I don't have

any idea what you are talking about."

The little man pounded the gunwale softly with the flat of his

hand. "What a nice work Geloe has accomplished with bark and

wood. And so light! We shall not have much trouble, I am thinking,

to carry this overland to the Aelfwent."

"The boat . . ." Simon said, nodding like a village idiot. "The

boat. Yes, it is well made."

Marya sat up. "Are we going to try and cross to the other river

now?" she asked. As she turned again to look out across the thin

strip of forest visible through the reeds, Simon noticed the dark

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR421

circles under her eyes, her strained look. In a way, he was still upset

with her for being relieved when Geloe volunteered to keep the

child, but he was glad to see that this servant girl seemed concerned,

that she wasn't just the kind of girl who laughed and teased all the

time-

Well of course she's not, he thought a moment later. As a matter of

fact, I don't think I've seen her smile yet. Not that things haven't been

frighteningbut you don't see me always frowning and moping.

"That might perhaps be a good idea," Binabik said, responding to

Marya's question. "I believe that the noise which is sounding ahead

is a gathering of rocks in the stream. If that is being the case. we

would anyway have little choice but to carry the boat around. Per-

haps Simon would go find out."

"How many years old are you?" Simon asked Marya. Binabik,

surprised, turned around and stared. Marya quirked her lips and

looked at Simon for a long moment.

"I am . . ." she began, then paused. "I will have sixteen years in

Octander."

"Fifteen, then," said Simon, a little smugly.

"And you?" the girl challenged.

Simon bristled. "Fifteen!"

Binabik coughed. "Well and good that shipmates should have ac-

quaintance of each other, but . . . perhaps later. Simon, could you

go to see if those are indeed rocks ahead?"

He was about to agree, then suddenly did not want to. Was he an

errand boy? A child, to run and find out things for the grown-ups?

Who had made the decision to go and rescue this stupid girl from a

tree, anyway?

"As long as we need to cross to the whatever-ifs-called, why

bother?" he said. "Let's just do it."

The troll stared, then at length nodded his head. "Very well. I

think it will do my friend Qantaqa good to be stretching her legs,

besides." He turned to Marya. "Wolves are not sailors, you know."

Now for a few moments Marya stared at Binabik as if he were

odder than Simon. Then she burst into ringing laughter.

"That's very true!" she said, and laughed again.

The canoe was indeed feathery light, but they still had difficulty

carrying it through the clinging branches and creepers. To keep it at

422 Tad Williams

a height where both Binabik and the girl could help bear the load

they had to hold the upside-down boat in such a way that the sharp

angle of the stem kept thumping against Simon's breastbone. He

couldn't see his feet as he walked, either, with the result that time

and again he was tripped up in the undergrowth. Rain showered

down through the overhanging net of boughs and leaves; with his

hands occupied, Simon could not even wipe away the drops that ran

into his eyes. He was not in the best of all possible moods.

"How far is it, Binabik?" he asked at last. "My chest is being

battered to pieces by this by-Usires damnable boat."

"Not far, I am hoping," the troll called, his voice echoing

strangely from beneath the stretched-bark shell. "Geloe said that the

inlet stream and the Aelfwent run side by side for a long distance,

being only a quarter of a league or so apart. Soon we should reach

it."

"Soon it had better be," Simon said grimly. In front of him Marya

made a noise that he was sure was a sound of disgustdisgust with

him, probably. He scowled horribly, red hair stringy and wet on his

forehead.

At last they heard another sound above the soft drumming of

raindrops on leaves, a breathy rush that made Simon think of a

room full of murmuring people. Qantaqa leaped ahead, clattering

through the underbrush.

"Hah!" Binabik grunted, laying his end of the boat down. "You

see? We have found if T'si SuhyaseiF

"I thought it was named Aelfwent." Marya rubbed the place

where the boat had rested on her shoulder. "Or is that what trolls

always say when they find a river?"

Binabik smiled. "No. That is a Sithi name. It is a Sithi river, in a

way, since they used to be boating upon it when Da'ai Chikiza was

their city. You should be knowing that. Aelfwent means 'Sithi river'

in the old tongue of Erkynland."

"Then what does . . . what you said mean?" Marya asked.

"T'si Suhyasei?" Binabik thought. "Hard it is to say, exactly. It

means something like: 'her blood is cool.* "

"Her?" Simon asked, digging mud from his boots with a stick.

"What's 'her' this time?"

"The forest," Binabik replied. "Come now. You can be washing

that mud off in the water."

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR423

They carried the boat down the bank, pushing it through a thicket

of cattails only with a great deal of stem snapping, until the river

was before thema wide, healthy expanse of water, far bigger than

the inlet stream, and with what looked like a far stronger current.

They had to lower the boat down into the gully carved by the river's

passage; Simon, the tallest, wound up standing knee-deep in the

shallows to receive the boathis boots were indeed washed clean.

He held the bobbing craft as Marya and the troll first levered a

doubtful Qantaqa over the edgewithout much help from the wolf

herselfthen followed after. Simon climbed in last, taking his place

in the stem.

"Your positioning, Simon," Binabik told him gravely, "requires

great responsibility. We shall find little need to paddle with a current

of such vigor, but you must steer, and you must call out when there

are rocks ahead so we can all help push away from them."

"I can do it," he said quickly. Binabik nodded and let go of the

long branch he had been clutching; they eased off from the bank and

out onto the surging Aelfwent.

It was a little difficult at first, Simon found. Some of the rocks that

they needed to avoid were not even visible above the water's glassy

surface; rather, they lay just below, only recognizable by the shiny

humps made by the water above them. The first one that Simon did

not see made a horrible noise scraping along the taut hull, giving

them all a moment's scare, but the little boat bounded away from

the submerged stone like a sheep fleeing the shears. Soon Simon had

the feel of it; in spots the craft seemed almost to skim the top of the

water, weightless as a leaf on the river's undulating back.

As they hit a stretch of smoother water, the clamor of the rocks

falling away behind them, Simon felt his heart swell within his chest.

The playful hands of the river tugged his trailing paddle. A memory

of climbing on the Hayholt's broad battlements came to him

breathless with his own power, with the sight of the ordered fields

lying so far below. He remembered, too, crouching in the bell cham-

ber of Green Angel Tower, looking down on the huddling houses of

Erchester, staring out over the broad world with the wind in his

face. Now, in the stem of the little boat, he was again both of the

world and above it, far above it, sailing like the spring wind gusting

through the treetops. He lifted the paddle in the air before him . . .

it was now a sword.

424 Tad Williams

"Usires was a sailor," he abruptly sang, the words coming back to

him in a rush. It was a tune someone had sung to him when he was

very young.

'"Usires was a sailor

He went upon the ocean

He took the Word of God

And he went sailing to Nabban-o!"

Binabik and Marya turned to look at him; Simon grinned.

"Tiyagaris was a soldier

He went upon the ocean

He took the Word of Justice

And went sailing to Nabban-o!

King John he was a ruler

He went upon the ocean

He took the word ofAedon

And went sailing to Nabban-o! ..."

He trailed off.

"Why do you stop?" Binabik asked. Marya still stared, a specula-

tive look in her eye.

"That's all I know," Simon said, lowering his paddle back into the

boat's rippling wake. "I don't even know where it's from. I think

one of the chambermaids used to sing it when I was small."

Binabik smiled. "A good song for river travel, I am thinking,

although some of the details have not much historical correctness.

Are you sure you can remember no more?"

"That's it." His failure to recall troubled him little. Just a short

hour on the river had redeemed his mood entirely. He had been on a

fisherman's boat in the bay, and had enjoyed it ... but that was

nothing to this, to the forest rushing by, and the feeling of the deli-

cate boat beneath him, as sensitive and responsive as a colt.

"I have no sailing songs to sing," the troll said, pleased by Simon's

change of mood. "In high Qanuc the rivers are ice, and used only for

the sliding games of trollings. I could be singing perhaps of mighty

Chukku, and his adventures . . ."

"I know a river song," said Marya, running a slender white hand

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR425

through her thatch of black hair. "The streets of Meremund are full

of sailor's songs."

"Meremund?" Simon asked. "How did a castle girl ever get to

Meremund?"

Marya curled her lip at him. "And where do you think the prin-

cess and all her court lived before we came to the Hayholtthe

wilds of Nascadu?" She snorted. "Meremund, of course. It is the

most beautiful city in the world, where the ocean and the great river

Gleniwent meet. You wouldn't know, you haven't been there.'* She

grinned wickedly. "Castle boy."

"Then sing!" Binabik said, waving his hand before him. "The

river waits to hear. The forest, too!"

"I hope I remember," she said, sneaking a glance at Simon, who

haughtily returned ither remark had barely touched the buoyancy

of his mood. "It's a river rider song," she continued, then cleared

her throat and begantentatively at first, then more confidentlyto

sing in a sweet, throaty voice.

". . , Now those who sail the Big Pond

Will tell you of its mystery

They'll brag of all those battles

And all that bloody history

But talk to any river-dog

Who sails upon the Gleniwent

He'll say God made the oceans

But the River's what he really meant

Oh, the Ocean is a question

But the River is an answer

With her rollicking and frolicking

As fine as any dancer

So let Hell take the shirkers

For this old boat won't carry 'em

And if we lose some crew or two

We'll drink to 'em at Meremund . . .

Now some men go away to sea

And they're never seen again

426Tad Williams

But every night we river-dogs

Are found down at the inn

And some may say we drink a bit

And punch it up a mite

But if the river is your lady

That's just how you rest at night

Oh, the Ocean is a question

But the River is an answer

With her rollicking and frolicking

As fine as any dancer

So let Hell take the shirkers

For this old boat won't carry 'em

And if we lose some crew or two

We'll drink to 'em at Meremund . . .

In Meremund! In Meremund!

We'll drink to 'em in Meremund

If we don't spy 'em floating by

It'll save the penny to bury 'em . . . !"

By the time Marya had gotten to the chorus the second time

around, Simon and Binabik knew the words well enough to join in.

Qantaqa flattened her ears as they hooted and shouted down the

swift-racing Aelfwent.

"Oh the Ocean is a question, but the River is an answer . . ."

Simon was singing at the top of his lungs when the nose of the boat

dipped down into a trough and bounced up: they were among the

rocks again. By the time they had negotiated the roiling waters and

were out into the clear, they were all too breathless for singing.

Simon, however, was still grinning, and as the gray clouds above the

forest roof opened, showering down more rain, he tilted his chin up

and caught the drops on his tongue.

"Raining, now," Binabik said, eyebrows arched beneath the hair

plastered to his forehead. "I am thinking we shall get wet."

The brief instant of silence was pierced by the troll's high-pitched,

gusting laugh.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR427

**

When the light filtering down through the canopy of trees began

to dim, they steered the boat to the side and made camp. After

building a fire, using his sack of yellow dust to kindle the damp

wood, Binabik produced a parcel of fresh vegetables and fruits from

one of the packs Geloe had provided. Qantaqa, left to her own de-

vices, went slinking off into the tall brush, returning some time later

with her fur soaking wet and a few streaks of blood adorning her

muzzle. Simon looked at Marya, who was meditatively sucking on a

peach pit, to see what her reaction would be to this evidence of the

brutal side of the wolf's nature, but if the girl noticed she showed no

signs of unease.

She must have worked in the princess' kitchens, he guessed. Still, if

I had one of Morgenes' stuffed lizards to slip in her cloak, then she'd

jump, I'll wager.

Thinking about her working in castle kitchens set him to wonder-

ing just what it was she had done in the princess' serviceand now

that he thought of it, what had she been doing spying on him? But

when he tried to ask her questions about the princess, she only

shook her head, saying that she could not say anything about her

mistress or her services until the message had been delivered at

Naglimund.

"I am hoping you will forgive my asking," Binabik said as he

packed away the few supper things and took his walking stick apart,

producing at last his flute, "but what is your plan ifJosua is not at

Naglimund, for receiving your message?"

Marya looked disturbed by this, but still would not say anything

more. Simon was tempted to ask Binabik about their plans, about

Da'ai Chikiza and the Stile, but the troll was already tootling ab-

sently on his flute. Night pulled a blanket of darkness over all the

great Aldheorte but their tiny fire. Simon and Marya sat listening as

the troll set his music to swooping and echoing in the rainy treetops.

They were on the river soon after sunup the next day. The

rhythms of the moving water now seemed as familiar as a child's

rhyme: the long idle stretches in which it seemed that their boat was

a rock upon which they sat while the vast sea of trees marched by on

either side, then the dangerous excitement of the fast-running rapids

that shook the frail craft as though it were a hooked and wriggling

428 Tad Williams

fish. The rain let up in mid-moming, and in its place the sun sprin-

kled down through the overhanging branches, dotting the river and

forest floor with puddles of light.

The welcome respite from the weatherunusually wintry for late

Maia, Simon couldn't help noticing, remembering the icy mountain

of their shared dreamkept their spirits high. As they floated along

through the tunnel of leaning trees, broken here and there by majes-

tic sheets of sunlight that streamed down through gaps in the tan-

gled branches to turn the river briefly into a mirror of polished,

golden glass, they entertained each other with talk. Simon, reluc-

tantly at first, told of the people he had known at the castleRa-

chel, Tobas the dogkeeper, who daubed his nose black with lamp

grease to more easily pass as family among his charges, Peter

Gilded-Bowl, giant Ruben and the rest. Binabik spoke more of his

journeying, of his youthful travels to the brackish Wran-country and

the dismal, exotic wastelands east of his Mintahoq home. Even

Marya, despite her initial reticence and the large area of unap-

proachable topics, made Simon and the troll smile with her imita-

tions of river-sailor and ocean-mariner arguments, and her observa-

tions about some of the dubious nobility that surrounded the

Princess Miriamele at Meremund and the Hayholt.

Only once did the conversation of the second day's boating turn

to the darker subjects that shadowed all the companions' thoughts.

"Binabik," Simon asked, as they took their midday meal in a

sunlit patch of forest-meadow, "do you really think we've left those

men behind? Might there be others looking for us, too?"

The troll flicked an apple pip from his chin. "I do not know

anything with sureness, friend Simonas I have already been say-

ing. Sure I am that we slipped by, that there was no immediate

pursuit, but since I cannot be knowing why exactly they seek us, I

cannot know whether they can find us. Do they know we are bound

for Naglimund? That is not a difficult thing to be supposing. But,

three things are in our favor."

"What things?" Marya asked, a slight frown on her face.

"First, it is easier to hide than find in a forest." He held up a

stubby finger. "Second, we are taking a back route to Naglimund

that is not well-known for hundreds of years." Another finger.

"Last, to find out our route, those men will have to hear it from

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR429

Geloe," his third finger straightened, "and that is a thing that will

not, I think, happen."

Simon had been secretly worrying about just this. "Won't they

hurt her? Those were men with swords and spears, Binabik. Owls

won't scare them off forever if they think we're with her."

A grave nod. The troll tented his short fingers. *T am not being

unconcerned, Simon- Daughter of the Mountains, I am not! But you

know little of Geloe. To think of her only as a village wise woman is

to be making a mistake, a mistake Heahferth's men may regret if

they do not treat her with respect. A long time Valada Geloe has

walked Osten Ard: she has been many years in the forest, and many,

many years before that among the Rimmersgarders. Even preceding

that, she was coming up from the south into Nabban, and her travels

before no one knows. She is one who can be trusted for taking care

of herselffar more than I, or even, as was proved with such sad-

ness, that good man Morgenes." He reached for another apple, the

last in the bag. "But that is enough of such worrying. The river is

waiting, and our hearts must be light, so we can Taster travel."

Later in the afternoon, as the shadows of the trees began to blend

together into one large blotch of shade stretched across the river,

Simon learned more of the mysteries of the Aelfwent.

He was digging through his pack, searching for a bit of rag to

wrap around his hands, to protect them from the blisters raised by

the coarse paddle. He found something that felt like what he was

searching for and pulled it out. It was the White Arrow, still bound

in the tattered hem of his shirt. It was surprising to suddenly have it

in his hand again, to feel its delicacy laying in his palm like a feather

that might be swept away in the first errant breeze. He carefully

unwrapped the shielding cloth.

"Look here," he said to Marya, reaching past Qantaqa to show it

nestled on its blanket of rag. "It's a Sithi White Arrow. I saved the

life of a Sitha-man and he gave it to me." He reconsidered briefly.

"Shot it at me, actually."

It was a beautiful thing; in the dimming light it was almost lumi-

nous, like the shimmering breast of a swan. Marya looked at it for a

moment, then touched it with a raised finger.

"It's pretty," she said, but in her tone there was none of the

admiration Simon had hoped to hear.

430 Tad Williams

"Of course it's pretty! It's sacred. It means a debt owed. Ask

Binabik, he'll tell you."

"Simon is correct," the troll called back from the prow. "That

was happening just before we met."

Marya continued to regard the arrow calmly, as though her mind

flew elsewhere. "It's a lovely thing," she said, only slightly more

conviction in her voice than the time before. "You're very lucky,

Simon."

He didn't know why, but that made him furious. Didn't she real-

ize what he had been through? Lich-yards, trapped Sithi, the

hounds, the enmity of a High King!? Who was she, to answer like

one of the chambermaids absentmindedly soothing him when he had

skinned a knee?

"Of course," he said, holding the arrow up before him so it caught

a beam of near-horizontal sunlight, the riverbank a moving tapestry

behind it, "of course, for all the luck it's brought me so farat-

tacked, bitten, hungry, chasedI might as well have never got it."

He stared at it crossly, running his eyes over the carvings that might

have been the story of his life since he had left the Hayholt, compli-

cated but meaningless.

"I really might as well throw it away," he said casually. He never

would, of course, but it was strangely satisfying to pretend that he

might. "I mean to say, what good has it brought me ... ?"

Binabik's warning cry came in midsentence, but by the time Si-

mon could sort things out it was too late. The boat struck the hidden

rock almost directly; the craft lurched, stem breaching the water

with a sucking splash. The arrow flew from Simon's hand to go

spinning through the air and into the water churning around the

rocks. As the boat's rear smacked down, Simon turned to look for it;

a moment later they skidded off another submerged stone and he

was falling, the boat tipping, falling. . . .

The water was shockingly cold. For an instant it was as though he

had fallen through some hole in the world into absolute night. Then

he was gasping, breaking the surface, whirling crazily in the turbu-

lent water. He struck a rock, spun away and went under again,

terrifying water pushing the air from his nose and mouth. Strug-

gling, he got his head to the top again and tensed as the swirling

current battered him against one hard object after another. He felt

wind on his face for a moment and sucked in, coughing; he felt some

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR431

of the praise-Usires air making its way into his burning lungs. Then,

suddenly, the rocks were past and he was floating free, kicking to

keep his head above the plane of the river. To his surprise, the boat

was behind him now, just sliding around the last of the hump-

backed stones. Binabik and Marya were paddling hard, eyes round

with fear, but Simon saw the distance gradually growing wider. He

was slipping downstream, and as he pivoted his head wildly to either

side he saw the riverbanks were shockingly far away. He gasped in

another great clout of air.

"Simon!" Binabik yelled, "Swim back to us! We cannot row fast

enough!"

Floundering, he tried to turn about and struggle back to them, but

the river pulled him with a thousand invisible fingers. He splashed,

trying to form his hands into the paddle shapes RachelMorgenes?

had once shown him as they held him suspended in the shallows

of the Kynslagh, but the effort seemed laughable against the all-

pervading power of the current. He was tiring fast; he could not find

his legs anymore, felt nothing but a cold emptiness when he tried to

make them kick. The water splashed up into his eyes, prisming the

reaching tree branches as he slipped back under the surface.

Something smacked down beside his hand, and he beat his arms

against the cold water to climb back up one last time. It was Marya's

paddle. With her longer reach she had pushed up to Binabik's place

in the prow and stretched out, extending the flat piece of wood to

within inches of his grasp. Qantaqa was standing beside her, bark-

ing, straining forward almost in mimicry of the girl; the canoe, with

so much weight forward, was leaning dangerously.

Simon sent a thought back to where his legs had been, told them

to kick if they could hear him, and threw out his hand. He barely

felt the paddle as he curled his numb fingers about it, but it was

there, just where he needed it to be.

After they had hauled him over the sidea nearly impossible task

in itself, since he weighed more than any of them except the wolf

and after he had coughed out or thrown up great quantities of river

water, he lay panting and shivering, curled in a ball at the bottom of

the boat while the girl and the troll searched for a spot to make

landing.

He recovered enough strength to crawl out of the boat by himself

on shaking legs. As he fell on his knees, spreading grateful palms on

432 Tad Williams

the soft forest floor, Bmabik reached down and plucked something

loose from the sodden, ragged mess that was Simon's shirt

"See what was caught up in your clothes," Bmabik said, an odd

look on his face It was the White Arrow "Let us make a fire for

you, poor Simon Perhaps you have had a lessona cruel lesson, but

a senous oneabout speaking ill of Sithi gifts while sailing on a

Sithi nver "

Denied even the strength to be embarrassed as Binabik helped

him shed his clothes and wrapped him in his cloak, Simon fell asleep

in front of the blessed fire His dreams were unsurprisingly dark, full

of things that clutched and smothered

Clouds hovered low the following morning Simon felt very sick

After chewing and swallowing a couple of strips of dried meat

against the protestations of his queasy stomachhe clambered gin-

gerly into the boat, letting Marya take the stem this time while he

huddled in the middle, Qantaqa's warm bulk pressed against him

He slept on and off throughout the long day on the nver The sliding

green blur that was the forest made him dizzy, and his head felt hot

and much too large, like a potato swelling on the coals Both

Bmabik and Marya checked the progress of his fever solicitously

When he woke from the sludgy doze he had fallen into while his two

companions ate lunch, and found them bending over him, Marya's

cool palm on his forehead, his confused thought was What a strange

mother and father I have!

They halted for the night just as twilight began creeping through

the trees Simon, swaddled m his cloak like an infant, sat close to the

fire, unwrapping his arms only long enough to dnnk some soup the

troll had prepared, a broth of dried beef, turnips and onions

"We must be getting up with the first footsteps of the sun tomor-

row," Binabik said, proffering the stem end of a turnip to the wolf,

who sniffed it with benign indifference "Close we are to Da'ai

Chikiza, but it would be senseless to come upon it at night when it

could not be properly seen In any way, we will have a long climbing

up the Stile from there, and may as well undertake it when the day is

warm "

Simon watched bleanly as the troll pulled Morgenes' manuscript

from one of the packs and unwrapped it, squatting close to the

flickering campfire and tilting the pages to read, he looked like a

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR433

little monk at prayer over his Book of the Aedon. The wind rustled

through the trees overhead, knocking loose water drops that had

clung to the leaves, remnants of the afternoon's shower. Mixed m

with the dull rush of the waters below was the insistent piping of the

tiny nver frogs.

It took Simon a while to realize that the soft pressure against his

shoulder was not just another strange message from his sick, dis-

comforted body- He laboriously turned his chin past the collar of his

heavy wool cloak, freeing a hand to shoo Qantaqa off, only to see

Marya's dark head resting on his upper arm, mouth slightly open,

breath easing m and out with the rhythms of sleep.

Bmabik looked over. "It was a hard day of working, today," he

smiled. "Much paddling. If it is not paining you, let her stay there a

bit." He turned back to the manuscnpt.

Marya stirred against him and murmured something. Simon

tugged the cloak that Geloe had loaned her up higher; as it touched

her cheek she half-muttered something, reached up a hand and pat-

ted clumsily at Simon's chest, then squirmed a little nearer.

The sound of her even breathing so close to his ear threaded its

way in among the noises of nver and night forest. Simon shivered,

and felt his eyes becoming heavy, so heavy . . . but his heart was

beating swiftly, and it was the sound of his restless blood that led

him down a path toward warm darkness.

In the gray, diffuse light of a rainy dawn, with eyes still sticky

with sleep and bodies queerly unresponsive from their too-early

start, they saw the first bridge

Simon was in the stem again Despite the disonentation of board-

ing the boat and joining the river in near-darkness, he felt better

than he had the day before, still light-headed, but much more fit. As

they rounded a bend in the nver, which leaped along happily, care-

less of the hour, he saw a strange shape arched across the water

ahead. Wiping his eyes free for a moment of the misty drizzle that

seemed not so much to fall as to hang in the air, he squinted.

"Binabik," he asked, leaning forward, "is that a ..."

"A bndge it is, yes," the troll replied cheerily. "The Gate of

Cranes, I think it must be "

The nver bore them ever closer, and they shipped water with their

paddles to slow down The bndge stretched up from the choking

434

Tad Williams

undergrowth of the river bank to extend in a slender arc into the

trees on the other side. Carved in pale, translucent green stone, it

seemed delicate as a span of frozen sea foam. Once covered with

intricate carvings, now much of its surface was obscured by moss

and twining ivy; the spots that showed through had been worn

down, the whorls and curves and hard angles softened, rounded by

wind and rain. Perched at its apex, directly over their heads as the

little boat slid underneath, a cream-green, translucent stone bird

spread its water-worn wings.

They passed through the faint shadow in moments, and were out

the other side. The forest suddenly seemed to breathe antiquity, as

though they had slid through an open door into the past.

"Long ago have the river roads been swallowed up by Oldheart,"

Binabik said quietly as they all turned to watch the bridge dwindling

behind them. "Perhaps even the other works of the Sithi will be

fading someday."

"How could people cross over a river on such a thing?" Marya

wondered. "It looked so ... so fragile."

"More fragile than it was once, that is certain," Binabik said with

a wistful backward glance. "But the Sithi never built . . . never

build ... for beauty alone. Their works have strength. Does not

the tallest tower in Osten Ard, the work of their hands, still stand in

your Hayholt?"

Marya nodded, thinking. Simon trailed his fingers in the cold

water.

They passed eleven more bridges, or "gates" as Binabik called

them, since they had for a thousand years or more marked the river

entrance to Da'ai Chikiza. Each gate was named for an animal, the

troll explained, and corresponded to a phase of the moon. One by

one, they drifted beneath Foxes, Roosters, Hares and Doves, each

one slightly diiferent in shape, made of pearly moonstone or bright

lapis, but all unmistakably the work of the same sublime and rever-

ent hands.

By the time the sun had climbed behind the clouds to its mid-

moming station they were just slipping beneath the Gate of Nightin-

gales. On the far side of this span, on whose proud carvings flecks of

gold still glimmered, the river began to turn, bearing west one more

time toward the unseen eastern flank of the Wealdhelm Hills. There

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR435

were no surface-roiling rocks here; the current moved swiftly and

evenly. Simon was in the midst of asking Marya a question when

Binabik raised his hand.

As they rounded a bend it was before them; a forest of impossibly

graceful towers, set like a jeweled puzzle within the larger forest of

trees. The Sithi city, flanking the river on either side, seemed to grow

out of the very soil. It seemed the forest's own dream realized in

subtle stone, a hundred shades of green and white and pale summer-

sky blue. It was an immense thicket of needle-thin stone, of gossa-

mer walkways like bridges of spiderweb, of filagreed tower tops and

minarets reaching up into the high treetops to catch sun on their

faces like icy flowers. The world's past lay open before them, breath-

taking and heartrending. It was the most beautiful thing Simon had

ever seen.

But as they floated into the city, the river winding around the

slender columns, it became apparent that the forest was reclaiming

Da'ai Chikiza. The tiled towers, intricate with cracks, were netted in

ivy and the twining branches of trees. In many places, where once

there had been walls and doors of wood or some other perishable

substance, the stone outlines now stood precariously unsupported,

like the bleached skeletons of incredible sea creatures. Everywhere

the vegetation was thrusting in, clinging to the delicate walls,

smothering the whisper-thin spires in uncaring leaves.

In a way, Simon decided, it only made it more beautiful, as

though the forest, restless and unfulfilled, had grown a city from out

of itself.

Binabik's quiet voice broke the silence, solemn as the moment; the

echoes quickly vanished in the choking greenery.

" 'Tree of the Singing Wind,' they named it: Da'ai Chikiza. Once,

can you imagine, it was full of music and life. All the windows

burned with lamps, and there were bright boats at sail upon the

river." The troll tilted his head back to stare as they passed beneath

a last stone bridge, narrow as a feather quill, clothed in images of

graceful antlered deer. "Tree of the Singing Wind," he repeated,

distant as a man lost in memory.

Simon wordlessly steered their little craft over to a bank of stone

steps that ended in a platform, nearly flush with the surface of the

wide river. They climbed out, tying the boat to a root that had

pushed through the cracked white stone. When they had mounted

436 Tad Williams

up they stopped, staring silently at the vine-draped walls and mossy

corridors. The very air of the ruined city was charged with quiet

resonance, like a tuned but unplucked string. Even Qantaqa stood

seemingly abashed, tail held low as she sniffed the air. Then her ears

straightened, and she whined.

The hiss was almost imperceptible. A line of shadow leaped past

Simon's face and struck one of the attenuated walkways with a

sharp crack. Sparkling chips of green stone exploded in all direc-

tions. Simon whirled to look back.

Standing not a hundred ells away, separated from the companions

only by the rolling expanse of river, stood a black-garbed figure

holding a bow as long as he was tall. A dozen or so others garbed in

blue and black surcoats were scrambling up a pathway to stand

beside him. One of them carried a torch.

The black figure lifted a hand to his mouth, showing for an instant

a flash of pale beard.

"You have nowhere to go!" Ingen Jegger's voice came faint above

the sounds of the river. "Surrender in the King's name!"

"The boat!" Binabik cried, but even as they moved to the steps

black-clad Ingen reached out some slender thing toward the torch-

bearer; fire blossomed at one end. A moment later he had nocked it

on his bowstring. As the companions reached the bottom step, a bolt

of fire leaped across the river, exploding into the side of the boat.

The quivering arrow ignited the bark almost instantly, and the troll

had time only to pull one of the packs from the craft before the

flames forced him back. Momentarily hidden behind the leaping fire,

Simon and Marya darted up the stairs, Binabik close behind. At the

top Qantaqa was running from side to side, uttering hoarse barks of

dismay.

"Run now!" Binabik snapped. On the far side of the river two

more bowmen stepped up to Ingen's side. As Simon strained toward

the cover of the nearest tower he heard the awful hum of another

arrow, and saw it skid across the tiles twenty cubits before him. Two

more clattered against the tower wall that seemed so achingly far

ahead. He heard a cry of pain, and Marya's terrified call.

"Simon!"

He whirled to see Binabik tumble to the ground, a tiny bundle at

the girl's feet. Somewhere, a wolf was howling.

28

Drums of Ice

THE MORNING sun of the twenty-fourth day of Maia-month beamed

down on Hemysadharc, turning the golden disc atop the highest of

the Taig's roofs into a circlet of brilliant flame. The sky was blue as

an enamel plate, as though Brynioch of the Skies had chased the

clouds away with his heavenly hazel stick, leaving them to lurk

sullenly around the upper peaks of the looming Grianspog.

The sudden return of spring should have gladdened Maegwin's

heart. All over Hemystir the untimely rains and cruel frosts had

drawn a shroud over both the land and her father Lluth's people.

Flowers had frozen in the ground, unborn. Apples had dropped

small and sour from the gnarled branches in the orchards. The sheep

and cows, put out to graze in sodden fields, came back with rolling,

frightened eyes, unnerved by hailstones and gusting winds.

A blackbird, insolently waiting until the last moment, hopped up

from Maegwin's path into the denuded branches of a cherry tree

where he trilled disputatiously. Maegwin paid him no heed, but

hitched up her long dress and hurried toward her father's hall.

She ignored the voice calling her name at first, unwilling to be

hindered in her errand. Finally, reluctantly, she turned to see her

half brother Gwythinn running toward her. She stopped and waited

for him, arms folded.

Gwythinn's white tunic was disordered, and his golden neck

torque had ridden halfway around to the back, as though he were a

child instead of a young man of warrior age. He caught up and stood

panting; she gave a snort of dismay and set to straightening out his

garments. The prince smirked, but waited patiently while she pulled

the torque around to lie against his collarbone. His long brown mane

of hair had largely pulled free of the red cloth holding it in a careless

horse tail. As she reached around to tie it, their faces were eye-to-

438 Tad Williams

eye, although Gwythiirn was by no means a short man. Maegwin

scowled.

"Bagba's Herd, Gwythinn, look at you! You must do better. You

will be king someday!"

"And what has being king to do with how my hair is worn?

Besides, I was handsome enough when I started out, but I had to

run like the very wind to catch you, you with those long legs."

Maegwin flushed as she turned away. Her height was something

about which, try as she might, she could not be matter-of-fact.

"Well, you*ve caught me up now. Are you going to the hall?"

"I certainly am." A sterner expression ran across Gwythinn's face

like quicksilver, and he tugged at his long mustache. "I have things I

must say to our father."

"As do I," Maegwin nodded, walking now. Their strides and

heights so evenly matched, their sorrel-colored hair so alike it might

have been spun from one wheel, any outsider would have guessed

they were twins, instead of Maegwin five years older and from a

different mother.

"Our best brood sow, Aeghonwye, died evening last. Another one,

Gwythinn! What is happening? Is it another plague, like at Aba-

ingeat?"

"If it is a plague," her brother said grimly, fingering the leather-

wrapped hilt of his sword, "I know who brought it here. That man is

a sickness on legs." He slapped the pommel and spat. "I only pray

that he speaks out of turn today. Brynioch! Would I love to cross

blades with that one!"

Maegwin narrowed her eyes. "Don't be a fool," she said crossly,

"Guthwulf has killed a hundred men. And, strange as it may seem,

he is a guest at the Taig."

"A guest who insults my father!" Gwythinn snarled, pulling his

elbow from Maegwin's gentle, prisoning grasp. "A guest who brings

threats from a High King drowning in his own poor kingshipa

king who struts and bullies and spends golden corns like they were

pebbles, then turns to Hernystir and demands we help mm!"

Gwythinn's voice was rising, and his sister darted a glance around,

worried who might hear. There was no one in sight but the pale

shapes of the door guards a hundred paces away. "Where was King

Elias when we lost the road to Naarved and Elvritshalla? When

bandits and the gods know what else descended on the Frostmarch

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR439

Road?" Face flushed again, the prince looked up to find Maegwin no

longer at his side. He turned to see her standing, arms folded, ten

steps behind.

"Have you finished, Gwythinn?" she asked. He nodded, but his

mouth was tight. "Good, then. The difference between our father

and yourself, fellow, is more than only thirty-some years. In those

years he has learned when to speak, and when to keep his thoughts

inside. That is why, thanks to him, someday you stand to be King

Gwythinn, and not just the Duke of Hemystir-Duchy."

Gwythinn stared for a long moment. "I know," he said at last,

"you would have me be like Eclair, and bow and scrape to the dogs

of Erkynland. I know you think Eolair is the sun and moonre-

garding not what he thinks of you, king's daughter though you be

but I am not such a man. We are Hemystiri! We crawl for no one!"

Maegwin glared, stung by the jab over her feelings for the Count

of Nad Mullachabout whom Gwythinn was exactly right: the at-

tention he showed her was only that due to a king's gawky, unmar-

ried daughter. But the tears she dreaded did not come; instead, as

she looked at Gwythinn, his handsome face twisted by frustration,

by pride, and not least by genuine love of his people and land, she

saw again the little brother she had once carried on her shoulder

and whom she herself had, from time to time, teased into tears.

"Why are we fighting, Gwythinn?" she asked wearily. "What has

brought this shadow down on our house?"

Her brother lowered his gaze to his boot tops, embarrassed, then

extended his hand. "Friends and allies," he said. "Come, let us go in

and see Father before the Earl of Utanyeat comes slinking in to bid

fond farewells."

The windows of the Taig's great hall were thrown open; the sun-

light streaming through was full of sparkling dust from the rushes

spread across the floor. The thick wall timbers, hewed from the oak

trees of the Circoille, were fitted so carefully that not a gleam of light

showed between them. Up among the roofbeams hung a thousand

painted carvings of the gods of the Hemystiri, of heroes and mon-

sters, all twisting slowly in the rafters as reflected light shone

warmly on their polished wooden features.

At the hall's far end, sun splashing in on either side. King Lluth

ubh-Llythinn sat in his huge oaken chair, beneath the carved stag's

440 Tad Williams

head that strained upward from the chair's back, antlers of real horn

fixed to its wooden skull. The king was eating a bowl of porridge and

honey with a bone spoon while Inahwen, his young wife, sat on a

lower chair at his side, putting a tracery of delicate stitching onto

the hem of one of Lluth's robes.

As the sentries banged their spear points twice upon their shields

to signal Gwythinn's arrivallesser nobility such as Count Eolair

received only a single beat, while the king himself received three,

and Maegwin not a oneLluth looked up and smiled, placing his

bowl down on the arm of his chair and wiping his gray mustache on

his sleeve. Inahwen saw the gesture and gave Maegwin a despairing

woman-to-woman look that Lluth's daughter resented more than a

little. Maegwin had never really gotten used to Gwythinn's mother

Fiathna taking the place of her own (Maegwin's mother Penemhwye

had died when Maegwin was four), but at least Fiathna had been

Lluth's age, not a mere girl like Inahwen! Still, this young, golden-

haired woman was good-hearted, although perhaps a little slow of

wit. It was not really Inahwen's fault she was a third wife,

"Gwythinn!" Lluth half-rose, brushing crumbs from the lap of his

belted yellow robe. "Are we not lucky to have the sun today?" The

king swept a hand window-ward, as pleased as a child who has

learned a trick, "It is a certain thing that we need a little, eh? And

perhaps it will help to put our guests from Erkynland," he made a

wry face, his mobile, clever features shifting into a look of bemuse-

ment, eyebrows arching above the thick, crooked nose broken in his

boyhood, "to put them in a more agreeable mood. Do you think?"

"No, I do not think that, father," Gwythinn said, approaching as

the king settled back into his antler-crested seat. "And I hope the

answer you give them today, if I may presume, will send them away

in an even fouler one." He pulled up a stool and sat at the king's feet

just below the raised platform, sending a harper scuttling. "One of

Guthwulf's soldiers picked a fight with old Craobhan last evening. I

had a hard time preventing Craobhan from feathering the bastard's

back with an arrow."

Lluth looked troubled for a moment, then the look was gone,

hidden behind the smiling mask that Maegwin knew so well.

Ah, father, she thought even you are finding it a bit hard to keep

the music playing while these creatures bay all around the Taig. She

walked quietly forward and sat on the platform by Gwythinn's stool.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR441

"Well, the king grinned ruefully, "sure it is that King Elias could

have chosen his diplomats with a bit more care. But today in an

hour they are gone, and peace descends again on Hernysadharc."

Lluth snapped his fingers and a serving boy sprang forward to take

his dish of porridge away. Inahwen watched critically as it went by.

"There," she said reproachfully. "You didn't finish again. What

am I to do with your father?" she added, this time directing her gaze

to Maegwin, smiling fondly as though Maegwin, too, was a soldier

in the constant battle to make Lluth finish his meals.

Maegwin, still at a loss as to how to deal with a mother a year

younger than herself, hastily broke the silence. "Aeghonwye died,

Father. Our best, and the tenth sow this month. And some of the

others have gotten very thin."

The king frowned. "This cursed weather. If Elias could but keep

this spring sun overhead, I'd give him any tax he asked." He reached

down to pat Maegwin's arm, but was not quite able to reach. "All

we can do is pile more rushes in the barns to keep out the chill.

Failing that, we are in the godly hands of Brynioch and Mircha."

There was another metallic clash of spear on shield, and the door-

speaker appeared, hands nervously clasped.

"Your Highness," he called, "the Earl of Utanyeat requests an

audience."

Lluth smiled. "Our guests have decided to say farewell before

they take to their horses. Of course! Please, bring Earl Guthwulf in

immediately."

But their guest, followed by several of his armored but unsworded

men, was already moving past the ancient servant.

Guthwulf dropped slowly to his knee five paces before the plat-

form. "Your majesty ... ah, and the prince, as well. I am fortu-

nate." There was no hint of mockery in his voice, but his green eyes

held an unsubtle fire. "And Princess Maegwin,"a smile"the

Rose of Hernysadharc."

Maegwin struggled to maintain her composure. "Sir, there was

only one Rose of Hernysadharc," she said, "and since she was the

mother of your King Elias, I am surprised it should slip your mind."

Guthwulf nodded gravely. "Of course, lady, I sought only to pay

a compliment, but I must take exception to your calling Elias my

king. Is he not yours, too, under the High Ward?"

442 Tad Williams

Gwythinn shifted on his stool, turning to see what his father's

reaction would be; his scabbard scraped on the wooden platform.

"Of course, of course," Lluth waved his hand slowly, as if beneath

deep water. "We have been through all this, and I see no need to

belabor it. I recognize the debt of my house to King John. We have

always honored it, in peace or war."

"Yes." The Earl of Utanyeat stood, dusting the knees of his

breeches. "But what about your house's debt to King Elias? He has

shown great tolerance . . ."

Inahwen stood up, and the robe she had been sewing slid to the

floor. "You must excuse me," she said breathlessly, plucking the

garment up, "there are things in the household I should attend to."

The king waved his permission and she walked quickly but carefully

between the waiting men and slid out the half-opened door of the

hall, as lithely as a doe.

Lluth breathed a quiet sigh; Maegwin looked at him, seeing the

always-surprising lines of age that wreathed her father's face.

He is tired, and she, Inahwen, is frightened. Maegwin thought. /

wonder what I am? Angry? I'm not sureexhausted, really.

As the king stared at Elias' messenger, the room seemed to

darken. For a moment Maegwin feared that clouds had covered the

sun, that the winter was returning; then she realized it was only her

own apprehension, her sudden feeling that something more than her

father's peace of mind hung in the balance here.

"Guthwulf," the king began, and his voice sounded bowed as

though beneath a great weight, "do not think to provoke me today

. . . but neither think that you can cow me. The king has shown no

tolerance for the troubles of the Hemystiri at all. We have weathered

a bitter drought, and now the rains for which we thanked all the

gods a thousand times have themselves become a curse. What pen-

alty that Elias can threaten me with can exceed that of seeing my

people frightened, our cattle starving? I can pay no greater tithe."

The Earl of Utanyeat stood silently for a moment, and the blank-

ness of his expression slowly hardened into something that to

Maegwin looked unsettlingly like jubilation.

"No greater penalty?" the Earl said, savoring each word as

though it felt good on his tongue. "No greater tithe?" He spat a wad

of citril juice on the ground before the king's chair. Several of

Lluth's men-at-arms actually cried out in horror; the harper who

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR443

had been quietly playing in the comer dropped his instrument with a

discordant crash.

"Dog!" Gwythinn leaped up, his stool clattering away. In a flash-

ing moment his sword was out and at Guthwulf's throat. The earl

only stared, his chin tipped ever so slightly back.

"Gwythinn!" Lluth barked, "Sheathe, damn you, sheathe!'*

Guthwulf's lip curled. "Let him. Go ahead, pup, kill the High

King's Hand unarmed!" There was a clanking by the door as some

of his men, their astonishment thawing, started to move forward.

Guthwulf's hand shot up. "No! Even if this whelp should slit my

weasand from ear to ear, no one shall strike back! You walk out and

ride to Erkynland. King Elias will be ... most interested." His

men, confused, stood in place like armored scarecrows.

"Let him go, Gwythinn," Lluth said, cold anger in his voice. The

prince, face flushed, glared at the Erkynlander for a long moment,

then dropped his blade back to his side. Guthwulf passed a finger

over the tiny cut on throat and gazed coolly at his own blood.

Maegwin realized she had been holding her breath; at the sight of

the crimson smear on the Earl's fingertip, she let it whistle out again.

"You will live to tell Elias yourself, Utanyeat." Only a slight

tremor disturbed the evenness of the king's tone. "I hope you will

tell him as well the mortal insult you have paid to the House of

Hem, an insult that would have gained your death had you not been

Elias' emissary and King's Hand. Go."

Guthwulf turned and walked to where his men stood, wild-eyed.

When he reached them he pivoted on one heel, facing Lluth across

the expanse of the great hall.

"Remember that you could think of no greater tithe you could

pay," he said, "if someday you hear fire in the beams of the Taig,

and your children crying." He strode heavily through the door.

Maegwin, her hands shaking, bent and picked up a piece of the

shattered harp, and wound its curling string around her hand. She

raised her head to look at her father and brother; what she saw there

made her turn back again to the shard of wood in her palm, and the

string pulled tight against her white skin.

^

444 Tad Williams

Breathing a soft Wrannaman curse, Tiamak stared disconsolately

at the empty cage of reeds. It was his third trap, and there had not

been a crab yet. The fishhead that had baited it was, of course, gone

without trace. Glaring down into the muddy water, he had a sudden

nervous premonition that the crabs were somehow a step ahead of

himwere perhaps even now waiting for him to drop the cage down

lardered with another pop-eyed head. He could picture a whole tribe

of them scuttling over with expressions of glee to poke the bait out

through the bars with a stick or some other such tool recently

granted to crab-kind by some beneficent crustacean deity.

Did the crabs worship him as a soft-shelled providing angel, he

wondered, or did they look up at him with the cynical indifference of

a gang of ne'er-do-wells taking the measure of a drunkard before

relieving him of his purse?

He felt sure it was the latter. He rebaited the carefully woven cage

and, with a soft sigh, let it splash down into the water, uncoiling its

rope behind as it sank.

The sun was just slipping below the horizon, washing the long sky

above the marsh in shades of orange and persimmon-red. As Tiamak

poled his flatboat through the Wran's waterwaysdistinguishable in

places from the land only by the lesser height of the vegetationhe

had a sinking feeling that today's ill luck was only the beginning of a

long rising tide. He had broken his best bowl that morning, the one

that he had spent two days writing Roahog the Potter's ancestor-list

to pay for; in the afternoon he had shattered a pen nib and spattered

a great gobbet of berry-juice ink across his manuscript, ruining an

almost completed page. And now, unless the crabs had decided to

hold some kind of festival in the cramped confines of his last trap,

there was going to be precious little to eat tonight. He was growing

so very tired of root soup and rice biscuits.

As he silently approached the last float, a latticework ball of

reeds, he offered an unspoken prayer to He Who Always Steps on

Sand that even now the little bottom-walkers were pushing and

shoving their way into the cage below. Because of his unusual educa-

tion, which included a year living on Perdruinunheard of for a

WrannamanTiamak did not really believe in He Who Steps on

Sand anymore, but he still held a fondness for him, such as might be

felt for a senile grandfather who often tumbled down from the

house, but once brought nuts and carved toys. Besides, it never hurt

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR445

to pray, even if one did not believe in the object of prayer. It helped

to compose the mind, and, at the very least, it impressed others.

The trap came up slowly, and for a moment Tiamak's heart sped a

little in his thin brown chest, as if seeking to drown out the expec-

tant noises of his stomach. But the sensation of resistance was short-

lived, probably some clinging root which had held and then slipped

away, and the cage suddenly popped up and bobbed on the water's

cloudy surface. Something was moving inside; he lifted the cage up,

interposing it between himself and the sunset-glaring sky, squinting.

Two tiny, stalked eyes goggled back at him, eyes that wobbled atop

a crab that would disappear in his palm if he folded his fingers over

it.

Tiamak snorted. He could imagine what had happened here: the

older, rowdier crab-brothers goading the littlest into assaying the

trap; the youngling, caught inside, weeping while his crude brothers

laughed and waved their claws- Then the giant shadow of Tiamak,

the cage suddenly tugged upward, the crab-brothers staring abash-

ediy at each other, wondering how they would .explain Baby's ab-

sence to Mother.

Still, Tiamak thought, considering the hollowish feeling in his

middle, if this was all he had to show for today ... it was small,

but it would go nicely in the soup-

He squinted into the cage again, then upended it, shaking the

prisoner out onto his palm. Why delude himself? This was a run-on-

the-sandbar day, and that was that.

The crablet made a plopping noise as he dropped it back into the

water. He did not even bother to resink the trap.

As he climbed the long ladder from his moored boat to the little

house perched in the banyan tree, Tiamak vowed to be content with

soup and a biscuit. Gluttony was an obstacle, he reminded himself,

an impediment between the soul and the realms of truth. As he

reeled the ladder up onto the porch he thought of She Who Birthed

Mankind, who had not even had a nice bowl of root soup, but had

subsisted entirely on rocks and dirt and swamp water until they

combined in her stomach and she whelped a litter of clay men, the

first humans.

There, that made root soup a real bargain, didn't it? Besides, he

had much work to do anywayrepair or rewrite the blotched manu-

446 Tad Williams

script page, for one thing. Among his tribesmen he was thought of

as merely strange, but somewhere out in the world there would be

people who would read his revision of Sovran Remedys of the

Wranna Healers and realize that there were minds of true learning in

the marshes. But ay! a crab would have gone down smartlythat

and a jug of fem beer.

As Tiamak washed his hands in the water bowl he had put out

before leaving, crouching because there was no room to sit between

his obsessively scraped and polished writing board and his water jug,

he heard a scratching sound on the roof. He listened carefully as he

wiped his hands dry on his waistcloth. It came again: a dry rustle,

like his broken pen being rubbed across the thatching.

It took him only a moment to slide out the window and climb

hand over hand onto the sloping roof. Grasping one of the banyan's

long, curving limbs he made his way up to where a little bark-roofed

box sat atop the roof peak, an infant house carried on its mother's

back. He ducked his head into the box's open end.

It was there, right enough: a gray sparrow, pecking briskly at the

seeds that were scattered across the floor. Tiamak reached in a gen-

tle hand to enfold it; then, as carefully as he could, he climbed down

the roof and slid in through the window.

He put the sparrow in the crab cage he kept hanging from the

roofbeam for just such occasions, and quickly made a fire. When the

flames began to lick up from the stone hearth, he removed the bird

from the cage, his eyes smarting as the smoke began to coil toward

the hole in the ceiling.

The sparrow had lost a feather or two from its tail, and held one

wing out a bit from its side as though it had come through some

scrapes on its way down from Erkynland. He knew it had come

from Erkynland because it was the only sparrow he had ever raised.

His other birds were marsh doves, but Morgenes insisted on spar-

rows for some reasonfunny old man, he was.

After he had set a pot of water on the flames, Tiamak did what he

could for the awkward silver wing, then put down more seeds and a

hollow curl of bark full of water. He was tempted to wait until he

had eaten to read the message, to hold off the pleasure of faraway

news as long as possible, but on a day like this one had been, such

patience was too much to expect of himself. He mashed some rice

flour up in the mortar, added some pepper and water, then spread

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR447

the mixture out and rolled it into a cake which he set on the fire

stone to bake.

The slip of parchment that had been wrapped around the spar-

row's leg was ragged at the edges, and the printed characters were

smeared, as though the bird had gotten more than a little wet, but he

was used to such things and soon sorted it out. The notation signify-

ing the date when it had been written surprised him: the gray spar-

row had taken nearly a month to reach the Wran. The message

surprised him even more, but it was not the kind of surprise he had

been hoping for.

It was with a feeling of cold weight in his stomach superceding

any hunger that he went to the window, looking out past the tangled

banyan branches to the fast-blooming stars. He stared into the

northern sky, and for a moment could almost believe he felt a cold

wind knifing in, driving a wedge of chill through the warm air of the

Wran. He was a long time at the window before he noticed the smell

of his supper burning.

^

Count Eolair sat back in the deep-cushioned chair and looked up

at the high ceiling. It was covered in religious paintings, painstaking

renditions of Usires healing the washerwoman, Sutrin martyred in

the arena of the Imperator Crexis, and other such subjects. The

colors seemed to be fading somewhat, and many of the pictures were

obscured by dust, as though draped in a fine veil. Still, it was an

impressive sight, for all that this was one of the smaller antecham-

bers of the Sancellan Aedonitis.

A millionweight of sandstone, marble, and gold, Eolair thought,

and all for a monument to something no one has ever seen.

Unbidden, a wave of homesickness washed over him, as had often

happened in this last week. What he would not give to be back in his

humble hall in Nad Mullach, surrounded by nieces and nephews

and the small monuments of his own people and gods, or at the Taig

in Hernysadharc, where a bit of his secret heart always lingered,

instead of surrounded here by the land-devouring stone of Nabban!

But the scent of war was on the wind, and he could not lock himself

away when his king had asked his help. Still, he was weary oftravel-

448 Tad Williams

ing. The grass of Hemystir would feel fine beneath his horse's

hooves again.

"Count Eolair! Forgive me, please, for keeping you waiting." Fa-

ther Dinivan, the lector's young secretary, stood in the far doorway

wiping his hands on his black robe. "Today has been a full one

already, and we have not reached the forenoon. Still," he laughed,

"that is a terribly poor excuse. Please, come into my chambers!"

Eolair followed him out of the antechamber, his boots silent on

the old, thick carpets.

"There," said Dinivan, grinning and warming his hands before

the fire, "is that better? It is a scandal, but we cannot keep the

Lord's greatest house warm. The ceilings are too high. And it has

been such a cold springi"

The count smiled. "Truth to tell, I had not much noticed it. In

Hemystir we sleep with our windows open, except in direst winter.

We are a people who live out-of-doors."

Dinivan wagged his eyebrows. "And we Nabbanai are soft south-

erners, eh?"

"I did not say that!" Eolair laughed. "One thing you southerners

are, you are masters of clever speech."

Dinivan sat down in a hard-backed chair. "Ah, but his Sacredness

the lectorwho is an Erkynlandish man originally, as you well

knowthe lector can talk circles around any of us. He is a wise and

subtle man."

"That I know. And it is about him I would speak. Father."

"Call me Dinivan, please. Ah, it is ever the fate of a great man's

secretaryto be sought out for one's proximity rather than one's

personality." He made a mock-downcast face.

Eolair again found himself liking this priest very much. "Such

indeed is your doom, Dinivan. Now hear, please. I suppose you

know why my master has sent me here?"

"I would have to be a clod indeed not to know. These are times

that set tongues wagging like the tails of excited dogs. Your master

reaches out to Leobardis, that they can make some sort of common

cause."

"Indeed." Eolair stepped away from the fire to draw up a chair

near Dinivan's. "We are delicately balanced: my Lluth, your Lector

Ranessin, Elias the High King, Duke Leobardis . . ."

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR449

"And Prince Josua, if he lives," Dinivan said, and his face was

worried. "Yes, a delicate balance. And you know that the lector can

do nothing to upset that balance."

Eolair nodded slowly. "I know."

"So why have you come to me?" Dinivan asked kindly.

"I am not quite sure. Only this I would tell you: it seems there is

some struggle brewing, as often happens, but I myself fear it is

deeper. You might think me a madman, but I forebode that an age is

ending, and I fear what the coming one may bring."

The lector's secretary stared. For a moment his plain face seemed

far older, as though he reflected on sorrows long carried.

"I will say only that I share your fears. Count Eolair," he said at

last. "But I cannot speak for the lector, except to say as I did before:

he is a wise and subtle man." He stroked the Tree at his breast. "For

your heartsease, though, I can say this: Duke Leobardis has not yet

made up his mind where he will lend his support. Although the

High King alternately flatters and threatens him, still Leobardis re-

sists."

"Well, this is good news," said Eolair, and smiled warily. "When I

saw the duke this morning he was very distant, as though he feared

to be seen listening to me too closely."

"He has many things to weigh, as does my own master," Dinivan

replied. "But know this, tooand it is a deep secret. Just this morn-

ing I took Baron Devasalles in to see Lector Ranessin. The baron is

about to set forth on an embassy that will mean much to both Le-

obardis and my master, and will have much to do with which way

Nabban throws her might in any conflict. I can tell you no more

than that, but I hope it is something."

"It is more than a little," Eolair said. "I thank you for your trust,

Dinivan."

Somewhere in the Sancellan Aedonitis a bell rang, deep and low.

"The Clavean Bell calls out the noon hour," Father Dinivan said.

"Come, let us find us something to eat and a jug of beer, and talk

about more pleasant things." A smile chased across his features,

making him young again. "Did you know I traveled once in Hemy-

stir? Your country is beautiful, Eolair."

"Although somewhat lacking in stone buildings," the count re-

plied, patting the wall of Dinivan's chamber.

450 Tad Williams

"And that is one of its beauties," the priest laughed, leading him

out the door.

^

The old man's beard was white, and long enough that he tucked it

into his belt when he walkedwhich, until this morning, he had

been doing for several days. His hair was no darker than his beard.

Even his hooded jacket and leggings were made from the thick pelt

of a white wolf. The creature's skin had been carefully flayed; the

forelegs crossed on his chest, and its jawless head, nailed to a cap of

iron, sat upon his own brow. Had it not been for the bits of red

crystal in the wolf's empty sockets, and the old man's fierce blue

eyes beneath them, he would have been nothing but another patch of

white in the snow-covered forest that lay between Drorshull Lake

and the hills.

The moaning of the wind in the treetops increased, and a spatter

of snow dropped from the branches of the tall pine tree onto the

man crouching below. He shook himself impatiently, like an animal,

and a fine mist rose around him, momentarily breaking the weak

sunlight into a fog of tiny rainbows. The wind continued its keening

song, and the old man in white reached to his side, grasping some-

thing that at first appeared to be only another lump of whitea

snow-covered stone or tree stump. He held it up, brushing the pow-

dery whiteness from its top and sides, then lifted away the cloth

cover Just far enough to peer inside.

He whispered into the opening and waited, then knitted his brows

for an instant as if annoyed or troubled. Setting the object down, he

stood up and unbuckled the belt of bleached reindeer hide from

around his waist. After first pulling the hood back from his lean,

weather-hardened face, he stripped off the wolfskin coat. The sleeve-

less shin he wore beneath was the same color as the jacket, the skin

of his sinewy arms not much darker, but starting on his right wrist

just above the fur gauntlet the head of a snake was drawn in bright

inks, scribed in blue and black and blood-red directly on the skin.

The body of the snake curved round and round the old man's right

arm in a spiral, disappearing into the shoulder of his shirt to reap-

pear writhing sinuously about his left arm and terminate in a cur-

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR451

licued tail at the wrist. This fierce splash of color leaped out against

the dull winter forest and the man's white garb and skin; from a

short distance it appeared that some flying serpent, halved in midair,

was suffering its death agonies two cubits above the frozen earth.

The old man paid no attention to the gooseflesh on his arms until

he had finished draping his jacket over the bundle, tucking the loose

folds in beneath it. Then he pulled a leather bag from a pouch in his

undershirt, squeezed from it a quantity of yellow grease, and briskly

rubbed it over his exposed skin, causing the serpent to gleam as

though newly-arrived from some humid southern jungle. The task

over, he crouched back again on his heels to wait. He was hungry,

but he had finished the last of his traveling rations the night before.

That was of no importance, anyway, because soon the ones he

waited for would come, and then there would be food.

Chin tilted down, cobalt eyes smoldering beneath his icy brows,

Jarnauga watched the southern approaches. He was an old, old man,

and the rigors of time and weather had made him hard and spare. In

a way he looked forward to the hour that was^ coming soon, when

Death called for him and took him to her dark, quiet hall. Silence

and solitude held no terror; they had been the warp and weft of his

long life. He wanted only to finish the task that had been set before

him, to hand on a torch that others might use in the darkness ahead;

then he would let life and body go as easily as he shrugged the snow

from his bare shoulders.

Thinking of the solemn halls that waited at the final turn of his

road, he remembered his beloved Tungoldyr, left behind him a fort-

night ago. As he had stood upon his doorstep that last day, the little

town where he had spent most of his four and a half score of years

had stretched before him, as empty as the legendary Huelheim that

awaited him when his work was done. All of Tungoldyr's other

inhabitants had fled months before; only Jarnauga remained in the

village called Moon Door, perched among the high Himilfell Moun-

tains, but still in the shadow of distant Sturmrspeikthe Storm-

spike. The winter had hardened into a cold that even the Rim-

mersmen of Tungoldyr had never known before, and the nighttime

songs of the winds had changed into something that had the sound

of howling and weeping in it, until men went mad and were found

laughing in the morning, their families dead around them.

452

Tad Williams

Only Jamauga had remained in his small house as the ice mists

became thick as wool in the mountain passes and the narrow streets

of the town, Tungoldyr's sloping roofs seeming to float like the ships

of ghost warriors sailing the clouds. No one but Jamauga had been

around to see the nickering lights of Stormspike bum brighter and

brighter, to hear the sounds of vast, harsh music that wound in and

out through the din of thunder, playing across the mountains and

valleys of this northernmost province of Rimmersgard.

But now even hehis time come around at last, as made known

to him by certain signs and messageshad left Tungoldyr to the

creeping darkness and cold. Jamauga knew that no matter what

happened, he would never again see the sun on the wooden houses,

or listen to the singing of the mountain rills as they splashed past his

front door, down to the swelling Gratuvask. Neither would he stand

on his porch in the clear, dark spring nights and see the lights in the

skythe shimmering northern lights that had been there since his

boyhood, not the guttering, sickly flares now playing about the dark

face of Stormspike. Such things were gone, now. His road ahead was

plain, but there was little joy in it.

But not everything was clear, even now. There was still the nag-

ging dream to be dealt with, the dream of the black book and the

three swords. It had dogged his sleep for a fortnight, but its meaning

was still hidden from him.

His thoughts were interrupted by a blotch of movement on the

southern approach, far away along the rim of the trees dotting the

Wealdhelm's western skirts. He squinted briefly, then slowly nodded

his head and rose to his feet.

As he was pulling his coat back on, the wind changed direction; a

moment later a dim mutter of thunder rolled down from the north.

It came again, a low growl like a beast struggling awake from sleep-

On its heels, but from the opposite direction, the sound of hooves

grew from a murmur to a noise that rivaled the thunder.

As Jamauga picked up his cage of birds and walked out to meet

the riders, the sounds grew togetherthunder tolling in the north,

the muffled din of approaching horsemen to the southuntil they

filled the white forest with their cold rumble, like music made on

drums of ice.

29

Hunters and Hunted

THE HOLLOW roar of the river filled his ears. For a heartbeat it

seemed to Simon that the water was the only moving thingthat

the archers on the far side, Marya, he himself, all had been frozen

into immobility by the impact of the arrow that quivered in

Binabik's back. Then another shaft spat past the white-faced girl,

splintering noisily against a broken cornice of shining stone, and all

was frantic movement once more.

Only half-aware of the insectlike scuttling of the archers across

the water, Simon covered the distance back to the girl and troll in

three steps. He bent to look, a strange, isolated part of his mind

noticing how the boy's leggings Marya wore had tattered holes at

the knee, and an arrow snicked through his shirt beneath his arm.

At first he thought it had missed him completely; a moment later he

felt a flare of pain sizzle along his rib cage.

More darts skimmed past, hitting low on the tiles before them and

skipping like stones on a lake. Simon quickly kneeled and scooped

the silent troll into his arms, feeling the horrible, stiff arrow quiver

between his fingers. He turned, putting his back between the little

man and the archersBinabik was so pale! He was dead, he must

be!then stood. The pain in his ribs burned him again, and he

staggered, Marya catching at his elbow.

"Loken's Blood!" screamed the black-garbed Ingen, his far-off

voice a faint murmur in Simon's ear. "You're killing them, you idi-

ots! I said to keep them there! Where is Baron Heahferth?!"

Qantaqa had run down to Join them; Marya tried to wave the wolf

away as she and Simon lumbered up the stairs into Da'ai Chikiza.

One last feathered shaft cracked into the step behind them, then the

air was still again.

"Heahferth is here, Rimmersman!" a voice shouted amid the

454 Tad Williams

clamor of armored men. Simon looked back from the top step. His

heart sank.

A dozen men in battle array were rushing past Ingen and his

bowmen, heading straight for the Gate of Stags, the bridge Simon

and his companions had passed beneath just before coming ashore.

The baron himself rode behind them on his red horse, a long spear

held above his head. They couldn't have outrun even the foot

soldiers for longthe baron's horse would catch them in three

breaths.

"Simon! Run!" Marya jerked his arm, pulling him forward at a

stumble. "We must hide in the city!" But Simon knew that was

hopeless, too. By the time they reached the first concealment the

soldiers would be upon them.

"Heahferth!" Ingen Jegger's voice cried out behind them, a flat,

small sound above the river's drone. "You can't! Don't be a fool,

Erkynlander, your horse . . . !"

The rest was lost in water sounds; if Heahferth heard he did not

seem to care. In a moment the clangor of his soldiers' feet upon the

bridge was matched by the pounding of hoofbeats on stone.

Even as the din of pursuit mounted, Simon caught the toe of his

boot on an uprooted tile and pitched forward.

A spear in the back ... he thought to himself in midfall, and:

How did all this happen? Then he was tumbling painfully onto his

shoulder, rolling to protect the cradled body of the troll.

He lay on his back staring up at the patches of sky gleaming

through the dark dome of trees, Binabik's not unsubstantial weight

perched on his chest. Marya was pulling at his shirt, trying to get

him upright. He wanted to tell her it was not important now, no

longer worth the bother, but as he sat up on one elbow, propping the

troll's body with his other arm, he saw a strange thing happening

below.

In the middle of the long, arching bridge, Baron Heahferth and

his men had stopped movingno, that was not quite correct, they

were swaying in placethe men-at-arms clinging to the bridge's low

walls, the baron perched atop his horse, his features not quite distin-

guishable from this distance, but his pose that of a man who is

startled out of sleep. A moment later, for no reason Simon could

discern, the horse reared and plunged forward; the men followed,

running faster than before. Immediately aftera flicker behind the

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR455

movementSimon heard a great crack, as though a giant hand had

snapped off a tree trunk for a toothpick. The bridge seemed to come

unstuck in the middle.

Before the shocked, fascinated eyes of Simon and Marya, the slen-

der Gate of Stags plunged downward, middle first, stones crumbling

loose in great angular shards to crash foaming into the water below.

For a few pulsebeats it seemed that Heahferth and his soldiers would

reach the far side; then, rippling like a shook-out blanket, the arc of

stone folded in on itself, sending a writhing mass of arms, legs. pale

faces, and a thrashing horse toppling down amidst the ragged blocks

of milky chalcedony, to disappear in gouts of green water and white

froth. A few moments later the head of the baron's horse appeared

several ells downstream, neck straining upward, then it slid back

into the swirling river.

Simon slowly tilted his head around to the base of the bridge. The

two archers were on their knees, staring into the torrent; the black-

hooded figure of Ingen stood behind them, staring across at the

companions. It felt like his pale eyes were only inches away. . . .

"Get up!" Marya shouted, pulling at Simon's hair. He freed his

gaze from Ingen Jegger's with an almost palpable snap of separation,

like a cord fraying through. He climbed to his feet, balancing his

small burden, and they turned and fled into the echoes and tall

shadows of D'ai Chikiza.

Simon's arms were aching after a hundred steps, and it felt as

though a knife was sliding in and out of his side; he fought to stay

even with the girl as they followed the bounding wolf through the

ruins of the Sithi city. It was like running through a cave of trees

and icicles, a forest of vertical shimmer and dark, mossy corruption.

Shattered tile was everywhere, and massive tangles of spiderwebs

strung across beautiful, crumbling arches. Simon felt as though he

had been swallowed by some incredible ogre with innards of quartz

and jade and mother-of-pearl. The river sounds became muted be-

hind them; the rasp of their own hard breathing vied with the scrape

of their running feet.

At last, it seemed they were reaching the outskirts of the city: the

tall trees, hemlock and cedar and towering pine, were closer to-

gether, and the tiled flooring that had been everywhere underfoot

now dwindled to pathways coiling at the feet of the forest giants.

456 Tad Williams

Simon stopped running. His eyesight was blackening at the edges.

He stood in place and felt the earth reel about him. Marya took his

hand and led him a few limping steps to an ivy-choked mound of

stone that Simon, his sight slowly returning, recognized as a well.

He set Binabik's body down gently on the pack that Marya had been

carrying, propping the little man's side against the rough cloth, then

leaned on the well's rim to suck air into his needy lungs. His side

continued to throb.

Marya squatted next to Binabik, pushing away Qantaqa's nose as

the wolf prodded at her silent master. Qantaqa took a step back,

making a whimpering sound of incomprehension, then lay down

with her muzzle on her paws. Simon felt hot tears spring to his eyes.

"He's not dead."

Simon stared at Marya, then at Binabik's colorless face. "What?"

he asked. "What do you mean?"

"He's not dead," she repeated without looking up. Simon kneeled

beside her. She was right: the troll's chest was moving almost imper-

ceptibly. A frothy bubble of blood on his lower lip pulsed in time.

"Usires Aedon." Simon wiped his hand across his dripping fore-

head. "We have to take the arrow out."

Marya looked at him sharply. "Are you mad? If we do, the life

will run out of him! He'll have no chance at all!"

"No." Simon shook his head. "The doctor told me, I'm sure he

did, but I don't know if I can get it out, anyway. Help me to take on"

his jacket."

When they had pried cautiously at the jacket for a moment, they

realized there was no possible way to remove it without pulling on

the arrow. Simon cursed. He needed something to cut the jacket

away, something sharp. He pulled the salvaged pack over by a strap

and began to rummage through it. Even in his sorrow and pain he

was gratified to discover the White Arrow, still wrapped in its

shroud of rags. He pulled it out and began loosening the knot that

held the strips of cloth.

"What are you doing?" Marya demanded. "Haven't we had

enough arrows?"

"I need something sharp to cut with," he grunted. "It's a pity

we've lost part of Binabik's staff . . . it's the part that's got a knife

in it."

"Is that what you're doing?" Marya reached into her shirt and

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR457

pulled out a small knife in a leather sheath, hung on a throng around

her neck. "Geloe told me I should have it," she explained, un-

sheathing it and passing it over. "It's not much good against ar-

chers."

"And bowmen aren't much good at keeping bridges from falling,

praise God." Simon began to saw away at the oiled hide.

"Do you think that's all that happened?" Marya said after a

while.

"What do you mean?" Simon panted. It was hard work, but he

had cut upward from the bottom of the jacket and past the arrow,

revealing a sticky mass of congealed blood. He pulled the knife blade

up toward the collar.

"That the bridge just . . . fell." Marya looked up at the light

filtering down through the twining greenery. "Maybe the Sithi were

angry about what was happening in their city."

"Pfah." Simon clenched his teeth and split the last piece of hide.

"The Sithi who are alive don't live here anymore, and if the Sithi

don't die, like the doctor told me, then there aren't any spirits to

make bridges fall." He spread the wings of the split jacket and

winced. The troll's back was covered in drying blood. "You heard

the Rimmersman shouting at Heahferth: he didn't want him to take

his horse on the bridge. Now let me think, damn you!"

Marya raised her hand as though to strike him; Simon looked up,

and their eyes locked. For the first time he saw that the girl, too, had

been crying. "I gave you my knife!" she said.

Simon shook his head, confused, "It's just that . . . that devil

Ingen may have already found another place to cross. He's got two

archers, at least, and who knows what's become of the hounds . . .

and . . . and this little man is my friend." He turned back to the

bloodied troll.

Marya was silent for a moment. "I know," she said at last.

The arrow had entered at an angle, striking a good hand's length

from the center of the spine. By carefully tilting the small body,

Simon was able to slide his hand underneath. His fingers quickly

found the sharp iron arrowhead protruding from just below

Binabik's arm, near the front of his ribs.

"Blazes! It's gone right through him!" Simon thought frantically.

"A moment ... a moment . . ."

"Break the point off," Marya suggested, her voice now calm.

458 Tad Williams

"Then you can pull it through more easilyif you're sure you

should."

"Of course!" Simon was elated, and a bit dizzy. "Of course."

It took him no little time to cut through the arrow beneath its

head; the little knife had been considerably dulled. When he fin-

ished, Marya helped him tilt Binabik into the position where the

arrow was most flexible. Then, with a silent prayer to the Aedon

under his tongue, he eased the arrow out through the wound made

by its entry as fresh blood welled around it. He stared at the hateful

object for a moment, then threw it away. Qantaqa raised her massive

head to watch its flight, gave a rumbling moan, and slumped back

down.

They wrapped Binabik in the rags from the White Arrow, along

with strips cut from his ruined jacket, then Simon picked up the still

faintly-breathing troll and cradled him.

"Geloe said climb the Stile. I don't know where that is, but we'd

best continue on to the hills," he said. Marya nodded.

The glimpses of sun through the treetops told them it was near

noontime as they left the overgrown well. They passed quickly

through the fringes of the decaying city, and within an hour found

the land beginning to slope upward beneath their weary feet. The

troll was again becoming a difficult burden. Simon was too proud to

say anything, but he was sweating profusely, and his back and arms

had begun to ache fully as much as his wounded side. Marya sug-

gested that he cut leg holes in the pack so that it could be used to

carry Binabik. After some consideration, Simon discarded the idea.

For one thing, it would mean too much jouncing for the helpless,

unconscious troll; also, they would have to leave some of the pack's

contents behind, and most of that was food.

When the gently rising land began to change into steep, brushy

slopes of sedge and thistle, Simon at last waved Marya to a stop. He

set the little man down and stood for a moment, hands on hips, sides

puffing in and out as he got back his breath.

"We ... we must ... I must . . . rest ..." he huffed.

Marya looked up at his flushed face with sympathy.

"You can't carry him all the way to the top of the hills, Simon,"

she said gently. "It looks to get steeper ahead. You'll need your

hands to climb with."

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR459

"He's ... my friend," Simon said stubbornly. "I can ... do

it."

"No, you can't." Marya shook her head. "If we can't use the pack

to carry him, then we must . . ." Her shoulders slumped, and she

slid down to sit on a rock. "I don't know what we must, but we

must," she finished.

Simon sagged down beside her. Qantaqa had disappeared up the

slope, bounding nimbly along where it would take the boy and girl

long minutes to follow.

Suddenly, an idea came to Simon. "Qantaqa!" he called, rising to

his feet and spilling the pack out on the grassy ground before him.

"Qantaqa! Come here!"

Working feverishly, the unspoken thought of Ingen Jegger a hov-

ering shadow, Simon and Marya wrapped Binabik up neck to toe in

the girl's cloak, then balanced the troll stomach down on Qantaqa's

back, tying him in place with the last shredded strips of clothing

from out of the pack. Simon remembered the position from his in-

voluntary ride to Duke Isgrimnur's camp, but-he knew that if the

thick cloak was between Binabik's ribs and the wolf's back, the little

man would at least be able to breathe. Simon knew it was not a good

situation for a wounded, probably dying, troll, but what else could

be done? Marya was right; he would need his hands going up the

hill.

Once Qantaqa's initial skittishness wore off, she stood passively as

the boy and girl worked, turning occasionally to try and sniff

Binabik's face where it bobbed at her side. When they finished and

started up the slope, the wolf picked her way carefully, as if aware of

the importance to her silent burden of a smooth ride.

Now they made better time, scrambling over stones and ancient

logs molting their bark in peeling strips. The bright, cloud-blurred

ball of sun that peered down through the branches had rolled far

toward its western mooring. Scrabbling along, the wolf's gray and

white tail floating before his sweat-smarting eyes like a plume of

smoke, Simon wondered where the darkness would find themand

what might find them in that darkness.

The going had become very steep, and both Simon and Marya

were beribboned with scratchmarks from the clutching under-

growth, when they at last stumbled across a clear, horizontal crease

460

Tad Williams

in the side of the hill. They sat down gratefully in the dusty track.

Qantaqa looked as though he would not mind exploring farther up

the narrow, grass-clotted trail, but instead she slumped down beside

them, tongue lolling. Simon untied the troll from the makeshift har-

ness. The little man's condition seemed unchanged, his breathing

still terribly shallow. Simon dribbled water into his mouth from the

waterskin, then passed it to Marya. When she had finished, Simon

cupped his hands, which she filled, and held them out for Qantaqa

to drink. Afterward he took several long swallows from the bag

himself.

"Do you think this is the Stile?" Marya asked as she ran her

hands through her damp black hair. Simon smiled weakly. Wasn't

that like a girl, to be arranging her hair in the midst of the forest!

She was very flushed, and he saw that it brought out the freckles

across the bridge of her nose.

"It looks more like a deer path or some such," he said at last,

turning his attention to where the track wandered away along the

flank of the hill. "I think the Stile is a Sithi thing, Geloe said. But I

think we might follow this for a while."

She's not really thin, so much, he thought. It's more what they call

delicate. He remembered how she reached up and snapped off the

overhanging branches, and her coarse river chanteys. No, maybe

"delicate" wasn't quite it, either.

"Let's be off, then," Marya broke into his ruminations. "I'm hun-

gry, but I'd rather not be out in the open here when the sun goes

down." She stood up and began collecting the cloth strips to re-

mount Binabik on his steed, who was using her last moments of

unencumbered freedom to scratch behind one ear.

"I like you, Marya," Simon blurted out, and then wanted to turn

away, to run, to do something; instead he bravely stayed where he

was, and a moment later the girl looked up at him, smilingand she

was the one who looked embarrassed!

"I'm glad," was all she said, and then moved away up the deer

track a few steps to let Simon, hands suddenly clumsy, bind Binabik

into place. Suddenly, as he finished tying the last loop beneath the

shaggy belly of the hugely patient wolf, he looked at the troll's

bloodless face, as slack and still as deathand was angry with him-

self.

What a mooncalf! he thought savagely. One of your closest friends

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR461

is dying, you're lost in the middle of nowhere, being chased by armed

men and maybe worseand here you stand moping over a skinny

servant girl! Idiot!

He did not say anything to Marya as he caught up with her, but

the expression on his face must have told her something. She gave

him a pensive look and they fell into stride with no further conversa-

tion.

The sun had dipped down behind the ridged backs of the hills

when the deer path began to widen. Within a quarter of a league it

became a broad, flat path that might have once been used for wagon

travel, although it had long since given over sovereignty to the

creeping wilderness. Other smaller tracks wound alongside, distin-

guishable mainly as flaws in the smooth cover of brush and trees.

They came to a place where these lesser pathways joined with theirs,

and within a hundred ells found themselves walking again on an-

cient stone tiles. Soon after, they reached the Stile.

The wide, cobbled roadway cut across the track they had been

following, switching back and forth up the hill in a steep traverse.

Tall grasses pushed up between the cracked gray and white tiling,

and in places large trees had grown right through the road surface,

shouldering the stones up and outward as the trees gained size, so

that each was now surrounded by a small slagheap of uprooted

stones.

"And this will take us to Naglimund," Simon said, half to himself.

They were the first words either had spoken for a long time.

Marya was about to reply when something on the hilltop caught

her eye. She stared, but whatever had made the flash of light was

gone.

"Simon, I think I saw something bright up there." She pointed to

the crest of the hill, a good league above them.

"What was it?" he asked, but she only shrugged. "Armor, per-

haps, if the sun would reflect this late in the day," he answered

himself, "or the walls of Naglimund, or, or who knows . . . ?" He

looked up, narrowing his eyes.

"We can't leave the road," he said finally. "Not until we get far-

ther, not while there's light. I would never forgive myself if we

didn't get Binabik to Naglimund, especially if he ... if ..."

"I know, Simon, but I don't think we can make it all the way over

462 Tad Williams

the top tonight." Marya kicked a stone, sending it rolling into the

tall grass beside the paving tiles. She winced. "I have more blisters

on one foot than I've had in my whole life before this. And it can't

be good for Binabik to bounce on the wolf's back all night," she met

his eyes, 'yhe's even going to live. You've done everything anybody

could do, Simon. It's not your fault."

"I know!" Simon replied angrily. "Let's walk. We can talk about it

while we're moving."

They trudged on. It did not take long for the wisdom of Marya's

words to become uncomfortably obvious. Simon, too, was so

scratched and blistered and scuffed that he wanted to lie down and

weepa different Simon, the Simon that had lived his castle-boy life

in the labyrinthine Hayholt, would have lain downhe would have

sat on a stone and demanded dinner and sleep. He was somewhat

different, now: he still hurt, but there were other things that were

more important. Still, there was no good to be done by crippling

them all.

At last even Qantaqa began to favor one of her legs. Simon was

finally ready to give in when Marya spotted another light on the

spine of the hill. This one was no sun reflection: blue twilight was

settling over the slopes.

Torches!" Simon groaned. "Usires! Why now, when we're almost

there?!"

"That's probably why. That Ingen monster must have headed for

the top of the Stile to wait for us. We must get away from the roadi"

Hearts stone-heavy, they quickly made their way off the Stile's

paving and down into a gulley that ran along the width of the hill-

They scurried on, stumbling frequently in the fading light, until they

found a little clearing no wider than Simon was tall, protected by a

stockade of young hemlocks. As he looked up one last time before

ducking into the cover of the high brush, Simon thought he saw the

gleaming eyes of several more torches winking on the hilltop.

"May those bastards bum in Hell!" he snarled breathlessly,

crouching to untie Binabik's limp form from Qantaqa's back.

"Aedon! Usires AedonI How I wish I had a sword, or a bow!"

"Should you take Binabik off?" Marya whispered. "What if we

have to run again?"

"Then I'll carry him. Besides, if it comes to running, we might as

well give up now. I don't think I could run fifty steps, could you?"

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR463

Marya ruefully shook her head.

They took turns swigging at the waterskin while Simon massaged

Binabik's wrists and ankles, trying to get some blood back into the

trolTs chill extremities. The little man was breathing better now, but

Simon did not feel confident that would last long: a thin film of

Moody saliva bulged in and out of his mouth with each breath, and

when Simon skinned back the little man's eyelids, as he had once

seen Doctor Morgenes do with a fainting chambermaid, the whites

of the trolPs eyes seemed quite gray.

As Marya fished about in the pack for something to eat, Simon

tried to lift one of Qantaqa's paws to see why she was limping. The

wolf stopped panting long enough to bare her teeth and snarl at him

in a very convincing manner. When he tried to pursue the investiga-

tion, she snapped at his hand, jaws clashing hard not an inch from

his probing fingers. Simon had almost forgotten she was a wolf, and

had grown used to handling her as though she were one of Tobas'

hounds. He was suddenly grateful she had chastened him so mildly.

He left her alone to tongue-wash her ragged pads.

The light dwindled, pinpoint stars blooming in the thickening

darkness overhead. Simon was chewing a piece of hard biscuit

Marya had found for him, and wishing he had an apple, or anything

with juice to it, when a thin, clamoring noise began to untangle itself

from the song of the evening's first crickets. Simon and Marya

looked at each other, then, for the confirmation that they did not

really need, to Qantaqa. The wolf's ears were swung forward, her

eyes alert.

There was no need to name the creatures that made that faraway

baying noise. Both of them were far too familiar with the sounds of

hunting hounds at full cry.

"What should . . . ?" Marya started to ask, but Simon shook his

head. He banged his fist in frustration against the trunk of a tree,

and absently watched blood rise on the back of his pale knuckles. In

a few minutes they would be in full darkness.

"There's nothing we can do," he hissed. "If we run, we will only

make more of a track for them to follow.'* He wanted to lash out

again, to break something. Stupid, stupid, stupid, this whole bloody

adventureand to what end?

As he sat fuming, Marya pushed in close against his side, lifting

his arm and draping it around her shoulder.

464 Tad Williams

"I'm cold," was all she said. He wearily leaned his head against

hers, tears of frustration and fear welling in his eyes as he listened to

the noises from the hillside above. Now he thought he could hear

men's voices shouting back and forth above the din of the hounds.

What he would give for a sword! Unskilled as he was, he could at

least cause them some pain before they took him.

Gently, he lifted Marya's head from his shoulder and bent for-

ward. As he had remembered, Binabik's skin bag was nestled at the

bottom of the pack. He pulled it out and ran his fingers through it,

searching by touch alone in the obscurity of the clearing.

"What are you doing?" Marya whispered.

Simon found what he was seeking and closed his hand on it. Some

of the noises were now coming from the hillside north of them, too,

almost at their level of the slope. The trap was closing.

"Hold Qantaqa." He got up and crawled a short distance, scour-

ing the brush until he found a good-sized broken branch, a thick one

longer than his arm. He brought it back and upended Binabik's bag

of powder on it, then laid it down carefully. "I'm making a torch,"

he said, pulling out the troll's flints.

"Won't that just lead them to us?" the girl asked, a note of de-

tached curiosity in her voice.

"I won't light it until I have to," he replied, "but at least we'll

have something . . . something to fight with."

Her face was in shadow, but he could sense her eyes on him. She

knew exactly how much good such a gesture would do them. He

hopedand the hope was very strongthat she would understand

why it was a necessary gesture.

The ferocious uproar of the dogs was horribly close now. Simon

could hear the sounds of the bushes being beaten down, and the loud

cries of the hunters. The sound of branches snapping grew louder,

just above them on the hillside and approaching rapidlytoo loud a

noise for dogs, Simon thought, heart fluttering as he smacked flint

against stone. It must be men on horseback. The powder sparked

but did not catch. The underbrush was crackling as though a wagon

was tumbling through it end over end.

Catch, damn you, catch!

Something smashed through the thicket just above their hiding

place. Marya's hand clutched his arm hard enough to cause pain.

"Simon!" she cried, and then the powder sputtered and flared; a

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR465

wavering orange flower blossomed at the tip of the branch. Simon

leaped up, swinging it out at the end of his arm, the flames rippling.

Something crashed out of the trees. Qantaqa pulled free of Marya's

grasp, howling.

Nightmare! That was all Simon could think as he lifted the torch;

the light reached out, illuminating the thing that stood, startled up-

right before him.

It was a giant.

In the horrifying, static instant that followed, Simon's mind strug-

gled to absorb what his eyes sawthe thing that towered above him,

swaying in the torch glare. At first he thought it some kind of bear,

for it was covered all over in pale, shaggy fur. But no, its legs were

too long, its arms and black-skinned hands too human. The top of

its hairy head was three cubits above Simon's as it leaned forward at

the waist, eyes squinting in its leathery, manlike face.

The baying was everywhere, like the music of a ghastly choir of

demons. The beast lashed out a long, taloned arm, tearing the flesh

of Simon's shoulder, rocking him backward so that he stumbled and

almost dropped the torch. The darting light of its flames briefly

illuminated Marya, eyes wide with horror as she clutched Binabik's

limp form, trying to drag him back out of the way- The giant opened

its mouth and thunderedthat was the only possible word for the

echoing rumble that came outand lunged at Simon again. He

leaped away, catching his foot on something and toppling over, but

before the thing could move toward him, its chest-rattling growl

turned into a howl of pain. It fell forward, half-slumping to the

ground.

Qantaqa had caught it behind a shaggy knee, a gray shadow dash-

ing back to leap again at the giant's legs. The beast snarled and

swiped at the wolf, missing her once. The second time its broad

hand caught her; she tumbled over and over into the brush.

The giant turned back to Simon, but even as he hopelessly raised

the torch before him, and saw its pulsing light reflected in the giant's

glossy black eyes, a boiling mass of shapes came through the under-

growth, howling like the wind in a thousand high turrets. They

seethed around the giant like an angry oceandogs everywhere,

leaping and biting at the huge creature as it raged in its thunder-

storm voice. It windmilled its arms and broken bodies flew away;

466 Tad Williams

one knocked Simon to the ground, his torch skittering, but five more

leaped in to fill the place of each one dislodged.

Even as Simon crawled to the torch, his mind a jumble of insane,

feverish pictures, light suddenly bloomed everywhere. The vast

shape of the beast reeled around the clearing, roaring, and then men

came, and there were horses rearing and people shouting. A dark

shape leaped over Simon, knocking his torch away once more. The

horse slid to a halt just beyond, the rider standing atop his mount

with a long spear flicking in and out of the torchlight. A moment

later the spear was a great black nail standing out from the breast of

the besieged giant, who gave a last shuddering roar and slipped

down beneath the convulsing blanket of hounds.

The horseman dismounted. Men with torches ran past him to pull

the dogs off; the light revealed the horseman's profile, and Simon

climbed to one knee.

"Josua!" he said, then pitched forward. His last sight was the

prince's spare face limned in the yellow light of torch flames, eyes

widening in surprise.

Time came and went in fitful moments of waking and darkness.

He was on a horse before a silent man who smelled of leather and

sweat. The man's arm was a stiff band around Simon's middle as

they swayed up the Stile. The horse's hooves clopped on stone, and

he found he was watching the swinging tail of the horse before him.

There were torches everywhere.

He was looking for Marya, for Binabik, for everyone else . . .

where were they all?

Some kind of tunnel was all around now, stone walls echoing with

the rippling sound of heartbeats. No, hoof beats. The tunnel seemed

to go on forever.

A great wooden door set in the stone loomed before them. It

swung open slowly, torchlight flooding out like water through a

burst dam, and the shapes of many men were in the spreading light

of the entrance.

And now they came down a long slope in the open air, the horses

single file, a glimmering snake of torches winding down the path

ahead as far as he could see. All around them was a field of bare

earth, planted with nothing but naked bars of iron.

Below them, the walls were lined with more torches, the sentries

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

467

staring up at the procession descending from the hills. The stone

walls were before them, now level, now slowly rising up past their

heads as they followed the trail downward. The night sky was dark

as the inside of a barrel, but salted with stars. Head bobbing, Simon

found himself sliding back down into sleepor the dark sky, it was

hard to tell which.

Naglimund, he thought, as the light of the torches splashed on his

face, and the men shouted and sang on the walls above. Then he was

falling away from the light, and darkness covered him like a drift of

ebony dust.

PART THREE

\

^

Simon Snowlock

30

A Thousand Nails

SOMEBODY was breaking down the door with axeshacking, chop

ping, splintering away the shielding timber.

"Doctor!" Simon shouted, sitting up, "it's the soldiers! The

soldiers have come!"

But he was not in Morgenes' chambers. He was wrapped in sweat-

drenched sheets, on a small bed in a small, neat room. The sound of

blades splitting wood continued; a moment later the door swung

inward, and the din rose in volume. An unfamiliar face peered

around the edge, pale and long of chin, topped with a sparse crest of

hair that gleamed as coppery red as Simon's own in the framing

sunlight. His one visible eye was blue. The other was covered by a

black patch.

"Ah!" the stranger said, "you're awake, then. Good." He was an

Erkynlander by his accent, with a touch of the northern heaviness-

He closed the door behind him, cutting off some of the noise of the

work outside. He wore a long gray priestly cassock that hung limply

on his slight frame.

"I'm Father Strangyeard." He settled into a high-backed chair

beside Simon; other than the bed and a low table covered with

parchment and odds and ends, it was the only furniture in the room.

When he was comfortable, the stranger leaned forward and patted

Simon's hand.

"How are you feeling? Better, I hope?"

"Yes . . . yes, I suppose so," Simon looked around. "Where am

I?"

"Naglimund, but you knew that, of course." Father Strangyeard

smiled. "More specifically, you are in my room ... my bed, too."

He lifted a hand. "I hope you found it comfortable. It is not very

well-appointedbut, goodness, how foolish of me! You have been

472 Tad Williams

sleeping in the forest, haven't you?" The priest gave another quick,

hesitant smile. "It must be better than the forest, hmmm?"

Simon swung his feet to the cold floor, relieved to find that he was

wearing breeches, a little unsettled to see that they weren't his own.

"Where are my friends?" A dark thought came up like a cloud.

"Binabik ... is he dead?"

Strangyeard pursed his lips, as though Simon had uttered a mild

blasphemy. "Dead? Praise Usires, noalthough he is not well, not

well at all."

"May I see him?" Simon slid down to the flags to look for his

boots. "Where is he? And how is Marya?"

"Marya?" the priest's expression was puzzled as he watched Si-

mon crawl about the floor. "Ah. Your other companion is fine. You

will eventually see her as well, I do not doubt."

The boots were under the writing table. As Simon pulled them on

Father Strangyeard reached around and lifted a clean white blouse

from the back of the chair.

"Here," he said. "My, you are in a hurry. Would you like to see

your friend first, or have something to eat?"

Simon was already tying the front of the shirt closed. "Binabik

and Marya, then eat food," he grunted, concentrating. "And

Qantaqa, too."

"Hard as times have been of late," the father said in a tone of

reproof, "we never eat wolves at Naglimund. I assume you are

counting her as a friend."

Looking up, Simon saw that the one-eyed man was making a joke.

"Yes," Simon said, feeling suddenly shy. "A friend."

"Then let us go," the priest said, standing. "I was told to make

sure you were well provided for, so the sooner I get food into you,

the better I will have fulfilled my commission." He opened the door,

admitting another flood of sunshine and noise.

Simon blinked in the strong light, looking up at the high walls of

the keep and the vast purple and brown expanse of the Wealdhelm

looming above, dwarfing the gray-clad sentries. A congregation of

angular stone buildings bulked large at the keep's center, arranged

without any of the Hayholt's eccentric beauty, its contrast of styles

and eras. The dark smoke-streaked cubes of sandstone, the small

lightless windows and heavy doors, looked as if they had been con-

structed for one purpose only: to keep something out.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR473

Just a stone's throw away, in the midst of the swarming commons

yard, a crew of shirtless men were splitting a stack of logs, adding to

a pile of timbers already as high as their heads.

"So that's what that chopping was," Simon said, watching the

axes flash and fall. "What are they doing?"

Father Strangyeard turned to follow his glance. "Ah. Ah. Build-

ing a pyre, they are. Going to bum the Hunethe giant."

"The giant?" It came back in a rush: the snarling, leathery face,

the arms of impossible length lashing out at him. "It isn't dead?"

"Oh, quite dead, yes." Strangyeard began walking toward the

main buildings. Simon fell in behind, sneaking a last look back at the

growing stack of spars. "You see, Simon, some of Josua's men

wanted to make a show of it, you understand, cut its head off, mount

it on the gate, that sort of thing. The prince said no. He said that it

was an evil thing, but it was no animal. They wear clothes of a sort,

did you know? Carry clubs, as well, cudgels really- Well, Josua said

he'd mount no enemy's head for sport. Said bum it." Strangyeard

tugged at his ear. "So, they're going to bum it." -

Tonight?" Simon had to stretch to keep up with the priest's long

strides.

"Just as soon as the pyre is finished. Prince Josua doesn't want

any more made of it than has to be. I'm sure he'd just as lief bury it

in the hills, but the people want to see it dead.'* Father Strangyeard

quickly sketched the sign of the Tree on his breast. "It's the third

one come down from the north this month, you see. One of the

others killed the bishop's brother. It's all been most unnatural."

Binabik was in a small room off the chapel, which stood in the

center courtyard of the main keep buildings. He looked very pale,

and smaller than Simon expected, as though some of the substance

had drained from him, but his smile was cheerful.

"Friend Simon," he said, sitting up carefully. His small brown

torso was swathed in bandages to the collarbone. Simon resisted the

urge to pick the little man up and hug him, not wanting to open the

healing wounds. Instead he sat on the edge of the pallet and clasped

one of Binabik's warm hands.

"I thought you were lost," Simon said, tongue thick in his mouth.

"As I did, when the arrow struck at me," the troll said with a

rueful shake of the head. "But apparently nothing of a serious na-

474 Tad Williams

ture was pierced. I have been given good care, and but for a soreness

of movement I am nearly new." He turned to the priest. "I walked

upon the yard today."

"Good, very good." Father Strangyeard smiled absently, fiddling

with the string that held his eye patch in place. "Well, I must be

going. I'm sure there are many things you companions wish to dis-

cuss." He sidled for the door. "Simon, please use my room as long as

you like. I am sharing Brother Eglaf's room for the nonce. He

makes terrible noises when he sleeps, but he is a good man to take

me in."

Simon thanked him. After a last wish for Binabik's continued

return to strength, he went out.

"He is a man of very good mind, Simon," Binabik said as they

listened to the priest's footsteps fade down the corridor. "Master of

the castle archives, he is. We have already had fine conversing."

"He's a little strange, isn't he? Sort of ... distracted?"

Binabik laughed, then winced and coughed. Simon leaned for-

ward, apprehensive, but the troll waved him back. "A moment,

only," he said. When he had his breath back, he continued. "Some

types of men, Simon, whose minds are very full of thoughts, they are

forgetting to speak and act like normal men."

Simon nodded, looking around at the room. It was much like

Strangyeard's: spare, small, with whitewashed walls. Instead of the

piles of books and parchment, the writing table bore only a copy of

the Book of the Aedon, a red ribbon like a slender tongue keeping

the place where the last reader had stopped.

'Do you know where Marya is?" he asked.

"No." Binabik looked extremely serious. Simon wondered why.

"I expect she gave her message to Josua. Perhaps he sent her back to

wherever the princess is, for relaying of a return answer."

"No!" Simon did not like that idea at all. "How could all that

have happened so fast?"

"So fast?" Binabik smiled. "This is the morning of the second day

we have been in Naglimund."

Simon was astonished. "How can that be?! I just woke upl"

Binabik shook his head, sliding back down into the sheets as he

did so. "Not so. You slept through most of yesterday, waking only to

take some water, then sleeping again. I would suppose it was the last

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR475

part of the trip weakening you, on top of your fever from when we

rode the river."

"Usires!" He felt as though his body had betrayed him. "And

Marya's been sent away?"

Binabik raised a placating hand from beneath the sheets. "I have

no such knowledge. That was a guess, only. Just as likely she is here

somewhereperhaps staying with some of the womenfolk, or in the

quarter of servants. She is, for all said, a servant."

Simon glowered. Binabik gently took back the hand the boy had

tugged free in his agitation. "Be of patience, Simon-friend," the troll

said. "You have done a hero's work to be reaching so far. Who

knows what may happen next?"

"You are right ... I suppose . . ." He took a deep breath.

"And you have saved my life," Binabik pointed out.

"Is that important?" Simon distractedly patted the small hand

and stood up. "You have saved mine as well, several times. Friends

are friends."

Binabik smiled, but his eyes showed weariness. "Friends are

friends," he agreed. "Speaking of those things, I must sleep again

now. There will be important doings in the days ahead. Will you

look on Qantaqa, and how she is being kept? Strangyeard was sup-

posed to be fetching her to me, but I am afraid it has slipped from

his busy head like down from a"he plumped his"a pillow."

"Certainly," Simon said, pulling open the door. "Do you know

where she is?"

"Strangyeard said ... the stables . . ." Binabik responded,

yawning. Simon let himself out.

As he emerged into the central courtyard, stopping to watch the

people passing by, courtiers and servants and clerics, none of them

paying him the slightest attention, he was struck by a twofold reve-

lation.

First of all, he had no idea where the stables might be. Second, he

was very, very hungry. Father Strangyeard had said something

about being sworn to see him provided for, but the priest had wan-

dered off. He was a daft old bird!

Suddenly he saw a familiar face across the courtyard. He had

already taken several steps before he remembered the name that

went with it.

"Sangfugol!" he called, and the harper stopped, looking around to

476 Tad Williams

find who had called him. He saw Simon running toward him and

shaded his eyes, continuing to look puzzled even as the youth slid to

a stop before him.

"Yes?" he said. He was dressed in a rich doublet of lavender, and

his dark hair hung gracefully from beneath a matching feathered

cap. Even in his clean clothes, Simon felt shabby standing before the

politely-smiling musician. "Do you have some message for me?"

"I'm Simon. You probably don't remember . . . you spoke to me

at the funeral feast at the Hayholt."

Sangfugol stared at him a moment longer, frowning slightly, then

his face lightened. "Simon! Aha, of course! The well-spoken bottle

boy. I am truly sorry, I didn't recognize you at all. You have grown

a great deal."

"I have?"

The harper grinned. "I should say! You certainly didn't have this

fuzz on your face when I saw you last." He reached out and cupped

Simon's chin. "Or at least I don't remember any."

"Fuzz?" Wonderingly, Simon reached his hand up and felt his

cheek. It did seem furry ... but soft, like the hair on the back of

his arms.

Sangfugol quirked his lips and laughed. "How could you not

know? When I first got my mannish beard, I was at my mother's

glass every day to see how it was coming in." He raised a hand to his

clean-shaven jaw. "Now I am cutting it off with curses every mom-

ing, to keep my face soft for the ladies."

Simon felt himself blushing. He must seem such a rustic! "1 have

been away from looking glasses for a while."

"Hmmm." Sangfugol looked him up and down. "Taller too, if my

memory serves. What brings you to Naglimund? Not that I can't

guess. There are many here who have fled the Hayholt, my master

Prince Josua not the least of them."

"I know," Simon said. He felt the need to say something that

would bring him back to some kind of parity with the well-dressed

young man. "I helped him escape."

The harper raised an eyebrow. "True? Well, this sounds an inter-

esting tale, indeed! Have you eaten yet? Or would you like to find

some wine? I know the hour is early, but truth to tell, I have not yet

been to bed ... to sleep."

477

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

"Food would be splendid," Simon said, "but first I must do some-

thing. Can you show me where the stables are?"

Sangfugol smiled. "What now, young hero? Will you ride down to

Erchester to bring Pryrates' head to us in a sack?" Simon blushed

again but this time with no little pleasure. "Come," the harper said,

"stables, then food."

The bent, sour-faced man pitchforking hay seemed suspicious

when Simon asked after Qantaqa's whereabouts.

"Here, what do you want with him?" the man asked, then shook

his head. "Fair vicious he is. Not right to put him in here. I

shouldn't have to, but that's what the prince said. Almost took my

hand off, that beast did."

"Well, then," Simon said, "you should be glad to be rid of her.

Take me to her."

"That's a devil-beast, I tell you," the man said. They followed his

limping progress all the way through the dark stables and out the

back door to a muddy yard nestled in the shadow of the wall.

"Bring the cows here for slaughter, sometimes," the man said,

pointing to a square pit. "Don't know why the prince brought this

one back alive for poor old Lucuman to mind. Should have put a

spear right in the evil bastard, like that giant."

Simon gave the bent man a look of disgust, then strode forward to

the edge of the pit. A rope staked to the ground at the edge trailed

down into the hole. It was knotted around the neck of the wolf, who

lay on her side at the pit's muddy bottom.

Simon was shocked. "What have you done to her!?" he shouted,

turning on the stablekeeper. Sangfugol, treading the soggy yard

more carefully, came up behind.

The old man's suspicion turned to peevishness. "Didn't do noth-

ing," he said resentfully, "Proper devil he ishowled and howled

like a fiend. Tried to bite me, too."

"So would I," Simon snapped. "As a matter of fact, I still might.

Bring her out of there."

"How, then?" the man asked disquieted. "Just pull on the rope?

He's too big by half."

"She, you idiot." Simon was full of rage to see the wolfhis

companion of uncounted mileslying in a dark, runny hole. He

leaned over.

478 Tad Williams

"Qantaqa," he called. "Ho, Qantaqa!" She flicked her ears, as

though to dislodge a fly, but did not open her eyes. Simon looked

around the yard until he saw what he needed: the chopping block, a

scarred log stump as big as a man's chest. He wrestled it to the pit

while the stableman and the harper looked on in puzzlement.

"Watch now," he called down to the wolf, then rolled the stump

over the edge; it thumped into the soft earth only a cubit from the

wolf's hind legs. She lifted her head briefly to look, than lay back.

Simon again peered over the edge of the pit, trying to coax

Qantaqa up, but she paid him no heed.

"Be careful, for pity's sake," Sangfugol said.

"He's lucky that beast's a-resting now," the other man said,

sagely chewing on his thumbnail. "Should of heard him afore, howl-

ing and all."

Simon swung his feet over the rim of the hole and slid down,

landing in the squelching, slippery mud below.

"What are you doing?!" Sangfugol cried. "Are you mad?"

Simon crouched beside the wolf, and slowly reached his hand

forward. She growled at him, but he held his fingers out. Her muddy

nose snuffled briefly, then she carefully extended her long tongue

and licked the back of his hand. Simon applied himself to scratching

her ears, then felt her for cuts or broken bones. None were apparent.

He turned and sat the chopping log upright, digging it into the mud

beside the pit wall, then went back to Qantaqa. He put his arms

around the width of her trunk and coerced her into standing up-

right.

"He's mad, isn't he?" the sour-faced man half-whispered to

Sangfugol.

"Close your mouth," Simon growled, looking at his clean boots

and clothing already smeared with mud. "Grab the rope and pull

when I say pull. Sangfugol, cut his head off if he dallies."

"Here, now," the man said reproachfully, but clutched the rope.

The harper took up a position behind him to help. Simon urged

Qantaqa toward the stump, at last persuading her to put her forelegs

up on it. Simon lowered his shoulder to her wide, fur-fringed hind-

quarters.

"Ready? Haul away!" he cried. The rope went taut. Qantaqa

fought it at first, pulling away from the straining men, dropping her

considerable weight back on Simon, whose feet were slipping in the

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR479

ooze. Just as he thought he could feel himself sliding under, to be

crushed to death in a mud pit beneath a large wolf, Qantaqa relented

and went with the tug of the rope. Simon did slide, then, but had

the satisfaction of seeing the wolf scramble kicking over the side of

the pit. There was a whoop of surprise and consternation from the

stablekeeper and Sangfugol as her yellow-eyed head breached the

rim.

Simon used the block himself to climb out. The stable man was

cowering in terror before the wolf, who regarded him balefully.

Sangfugol, looking more than a little alarmed himself, was cau-

tiously sliding away from her on his rump, for the moment uncaring

of the damage to his fine garments.

Simon laughed and helped the harper to his feet. "Come with

me," he said. "We will deliver Qantaqa to her friend and master,

who you should meet anywaythen perhaps that food we talked

of?"

Sangfugol slowly nodded his head. "Now that I have seen Simon,

Companion of Wolves, some of the other things are easier to credit.

Let us go, by all means."

Qantaqa nudged the prostrate stablekeeper one last time, eliciting

a whimper of fright. Simon untied her rope from the stake and they

set out across the stable, leaving four pairs of muddy footprints

behind them.

While Binabik and Qantaqa had their reunion, moderated by Si-

mon in order to protect the still-weak troll from his mount's danger-

ous exuberance, Sangfugol slipped off to the kitchens. He returned a

short while later with a jar of beer, a goodly quantity of mutton,

cheese and bread wrapped in a cloth; he was alsoSimon was sur-

prised to seestill wearing the same mud-spattered clothes.

"The south battlement, where we're going, is quite dusty," the

harper explained. "I'm damned if I'm going to ruin another dou-

blet."

As they headed for the keep's main gate, and the steep staircase

up to the battlements, Simon commented on the great number of

people who milled about the commons yard, and the tents and lean-

tos that dotted the open spaces.

"Come for refuge, many of them," Sangfugol said. "Most are off

the Frostmarch and out of the Greenwade river valley. Some also

480 Tad Williams

from Utanyeat who've found Earl Guthwulf's hand a little too

heavy, but mostly they're folk who've been driven from their land by

weather or bandits. Or other thingslike the Hunen." He gestured

to the completed pyre as they passed. The woodsmen had gone

away; the stack of lumber stood mute and significant as a ruined

church.

Atop the battlements they settled down on rough-hewn stone. The

sun had scaled high into the sky, beating down past the few remain-

ing clouds. Simon wished he had a hat.

"Either you or someone else has brought good weather with

them." Sangfugol opened his doublet to the warmth. "It has been

the strangest Maia weather of my memorysnow flurries on the

Frostmarch, cold rains down into Utanyeat . . . hail! We had hail a

fortnight ago, icestones big as bird's eggs." He began to unwrap the

food as Simon took in the view. Perched as they were atop the high

walls of the inner keep, Naglimund was spread at their feet like a

blanket.

The castle hunched in a steep-sided hollow in the Wealdhelm Hills

like something held in an upturned palm. Below the western battle-

ments, across from where they sat, lay the castle's broad outer wall;

beyond that the crooked streets of Naglimund town sloped down to

the outwall of the city. Outside the wall lay a nearly limitless ex-

panse of rocky grazing land and low hills.

On the far side, between the eastern battlements and the stark

violet wall of the Wealdhelm, was a long, twisting trail down from

the crest of the hills. Dotting the slopes on either side of the pathway

were a thousand points of blackly gleaming sunlight.

"What are those?" Simon pointed. Sangfugol squinted his eyes,

chewing.

"The nails, you mean?"

"What nails? Those long spikes on the hillside are what I'm ask-

ing about."

The harper nodded. "The nails. What do you think Naglimund

means, anyway? You Hayholt-folk have forgotten your Erkyn-

landish. 'Nail-fort'that's what it means. Duke Aeswides put them

there when he built Naglimund."

"When was that? And what are they for?" Staring, Simon let the

wind take his bread crumbs and swirl them out over the outer bai-

ley.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR481

"Sometime before the Rimmersmen came south, that's all I

know," Sangfugol answered. "But he got the steel from Rimmers-

gard, all those bars. The Dvemings made them," he added signifi-

cantly, but the name meant nothing to Simon.

"Why, though? It's like an iron garden."

"To keep the Sithi out," Sangfugol declared. "Aeswides was terri-

fied of them, because this was really their land. One of their great

cities, I forget the name, was on the far side of the hills here."

"Da'ai Chikiza," Simon said quietly, staring at the thicket of tar-

nished metal.

"That's right," the harper agreed. "And the Sithi can't stand iron,

it's said. Makes them quite ill, even kills them. So Aeswides sur-

rounded his castle with those steel 'nails'used to be they were all

around the front of the keep as well, but with the Sithi gone they just

got in the way: made it hard to bring wagons in on market day,

things of that sort. So when King John gave this place to Josuato

keep him and his brother apart as much as possible, I suspectmy

master took them all down except the ones there on the slopes. I

think they amuse him. He likes old things very much, the prince my

master."

As they shared the jug of beer, Simon related to the harp player a

pared-down version of what had happened to him since they had last

met, leaving out some of the more inexplicable things since he had

no answer to the questions the harper would surely raise. Sangfugol

was impressed, but he was most strongly affected by the tale of

Josua's rescue and Morgenes' martyrdom.

"Ah, that villain Elias," he said at last, and Simon was surprised

by the look of real anger that clouded the harper's face like a storm.

"King John should have strangled that monster at birth, or barring

that, at least made him general of the armies and let him harry the

Thrithings-menanything but putting him on the Dragonbone

Chair to be a plague to us all!"

"But he is there," Simon said, chewing. "Do you think he will

attack us here in Naglimund?"

"Only God and the Devil know," Sangfugol grinned sourly, "and

the Devil's hedging his bets. He may not know yet that Josua is here,

although that certainly won't last long. This keep is a strong, strong

place. We have long-dead Aeswides to thank for that, anyway. All

482 Tad Williams

the same, strong or no, I can't imagine Elias standing by for long

while Josua builds power here in the north."

"But I thought Prince Josua didn't want to be king," Simon said.

"And he doesn't. But Elias is not the type to understand that.

Ambitious men never believe others aren't the same. He's also got

Pryrates whispering words of snaky advice in his ear."

"But haven't Josua and the king been enemies for years? Since

long before Pryrates came?"

Sangfugol nodded. "There has been no shortage of trouble be-

tween them. They loved each other once, were closer than most

brothersor so I'm told by Josua's older retainers. But they fell out,

and then Hylissa died."

"Hylissa?" Simon asked.

"Elias' Nabbanai wife. Josua was bringing her to Elias, who was

still a prince, at war then for his father in the Thrithings. Their party

was waylaid by Thrithings raiders. Josua lost his hand trying to

defend Hylissa, but to no availthe raiders were too many."

Simon let out a long breath, "So that's how it happened!"

"It was the death of any love between them ... or so people

say."

After thinking for a while on Sangfugol's words, Simon stood and

stretched; the sore spot on his ribs gave him a warning twinge. "So

what will Prince Josua do now?" he asked.

The harper scratched at his arm and stared down at the commons

yard. "I can't even guess," Sangfugol said. "Prince Josua is cautious,

and slow to action; anyway, they don't usually call me in to discuss

strategy." He smiled. "There is talk that important emissaries are

arriving, and that sometime within a sennight Josua will call a for-

mal Raed."

"A what?"

"Raed. It's an old Erkynlandish term for council, more or less.

People in these parts tend to cling to the older ways. Out in the

country, away from the castle, most of them still use the old speech.

A Hayholt man like yourself would probably need a local inter-

preter."

Simon would not be distracted by talk of rustic foibles. "A coun-

cil, you saida ... a Raed? Would that be a council of ...

war?"

483

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

"These days," the musician replied, and his face was again som-

ber, "any council at Naglimund will be a council of war."

They walked along the battlements.

"I'm surprised," Sangfugol said, "that with all the services you

have rendered to my master he has not yet called you for an audi-

ence."

"I've only just got out of bed this morning," Simon said. "Besides,

he may not even have known it was me ... in a dark clearing,

with a dying giant and all."

"I suppose you're right," the harper said, clinging to his hat,

which was doing its best to take to the gusting winds.

Still. Simon thought, if Marya took him the message from the

princess, I should hope she would mention her companions. I never

would have thought she was the kind of girl to just forget us.

He had to be fair, though: what girl suddenly saved from the

damp and dangerous wilderness would not prefer to spend her time

with the gentlefolk of the castle instead of a stringy scullion?

"You haven't by any chance seen the girl Marya who came with

us?" he asked.

Sangfugol shook his head. "People are coming in at the gates

every day. And not just the ones fleeing the outlying farms and

villages, either. The outriders for Prince Gwythinn of Hemystir

came in last night, horses in a lather. The prince's party should be

here this evening. Lord Ethelferth of Tinsett has been here for a

week with two hundred men. Baron Ordmaer brought a hundred

Utersall men just after. Other lords are coming in with their musters

from all around. The hunt is afoot, Simonthough the Aedon only

knows who's hunting who."

They had reached the northeastern turret. Sangfugol tipped a sa-

lute to the young soldier who was walking sentry. Beyond his gray-

cloaked shoulder rose the bulk of the Wealdhelm, the massive hills

seeming close enough to reach out and touch.

"Busy as he is," the harper said suddenly, "it doesn't seem right

that he shouldn't have seen you yet. Do you mind if I put in a word

for you? I'm to attend him at dinner tonight."

"I would certainly like to see him, yes. I was . . . very frightened

for his safety. And my master gave a great deal so that Josua could

return here, to his home."

484 Tad Williams

Simon was surprised to notice a faint touch of bitterness in his

own voice. He hadn't meant it to sound that way, but still, he had

gone through a t here, and it had been him and no other who had

found Josua, trussed and hanging like a pheasant over a cotsman's

doorway.

The tone of the remark had not escaped Sangfugol, either; the

look he turned on Simon was compounded of sympathy and amuse-

ment.

"I understand. I would advise, however, that you do not put it to

my prince in quite that manner. He is a proud, difficult man, Simon,

but I am sure he hasn't forgotten you. Things have been, as you

know, rather difficult of late in these parts, almost as harrowing as

your own journey."

Simon lifted his chin and stared out at the hills, at the strange

shimmer of the wind-ruffled trees. "I know," he said. "If he can see

me, it will be an honor. If he cannot . . . well, that is what will be."

The harper grinned lazily, playful eyes drooping at the comers.

"A proud and fair speech. Come now, let me show you the Nails of

Naglimund."

It was truly an astonishing sight in broad daylight. The field of

shining poles, starting within a few ells of the ditch below the east-

ern wall of the castle, slanted up the slope and away for perhaps a

quarter of a league, right up to the feet of the hills. They were

arranged in symmetrical rows, as though a legion of spearmen had

been buried there, leaving only their weapons protruding above the

dark soil to show how conscientiously they stood their guard. The

road that meandered down from a gaping cavern in the hill's west-

ern face wound back and forth between the rows as sinuously as the

track of a serpent, stopping at last before the Naglimund's heavy

eastern gate.

"And whatever-was-his-name did all this because he was fright-

ened of the Sithi?" Simon asked, bewildered by the strange, silvery-

dark crop that stretched before him. "Why not just put them at the

top of the wall?"

"Duke Aeswides was his name. He was Nabban's governor here,

and he was breaking precedent to place his castle on Sithi lands. As

to why not on the walls, well, I suppose he feared they could find

some way to get over a single wallor beneath, perhaps. This way

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR485

they would need to go through them. You have not seen the half,

Simonthese things used to sprout on every side!" Sangfugol swung

his arm in an encompassing gesture.

"What did the Sithi do?" Simon asked. "Did they try and at-

tack?"

Sangfugol frowned. "Not as I've ever heard. You should really ask

old Father Strangyeard about that. He the archivist and historian of

the place."

Simon smiled. "I've met him."

"Interesting old scuffer, isn't he? He told me once that when Aes-

wides built this place, the Sithi called it ... called it ... damn! I

should know these old stories, being a balladeer. Anyway, the name

they had for it meant something like Trap that Catches the Hunter'

... as if Aeswides had just walled himself in or some such: that he

had made his own trap."

"And did he? What happened to him?"

Sangfugol shook his head, and nearly lost his hat again. "Damn

me if I know. Probably got old and died here. I-don't think the Sithi

paid much attention to him."

It took them an hour to complete the circuit. They had long ago

emptied the jar of beer Sangfugol had brought to wash down their

meal, but the harper had prudently brought a skin of wine as well,

thus saving them from a dry hike. They were laughing; the older

man was teaching Simon a bawdy song about a Nabbanai noble-

woman when they reached the main gate and the winding stairs

back down to the ground. As they emerged from the gatehouse they

found themselves in a milling crowd of workmen and soldiers; most

of the latter were off duty, to judge by the disarray of their dress.

Everyone was shouting and shoving; Simon quickly found himself

crushed between a fat man and a bearded guardsman.

"What's happening?" he called to Sangfugol, who had been pulled

a short distance away by the movement of the crowd.

"I'm not sure," the other called back. "Perhaps Gwythinn of

Hemysadharc has arrived."

The fat man turned his red face up to Simon. "Naow, it ain't," he

said cheerfully. His breath stank of beer and onions. "It's that giant,

the one what the prince has killed." He pointed toward the pyre,

which still stood naked at the edge of the commons.

486 Tad Williams

"But I don't see the giant," Simon said.

"They're just a-fetching him," the man said. "I just came with the

others, to make sure of seeing. My sister's son was one of the beaters

what helped catch the devil-beast!" he added proudly.

Now another wave of sound passed through the crowd: somebody

up front could see something, and the word was hurrying back to

those who could not. Necks were craned, and children were lifted to

the shoulders of patient, dirty-faced mothers.

Simon looked around. Sangfugol had disappeared. He stood up on

tiptoe, and found that only a few in the throng were as tall as he.

Beyond the pyre he saw the bright silks of a tent or awning, and

before it the flashing colors of some of the castle's courtiers, sitting

on stools and talking, waving their sleeves as they gestured, like a

branch full of brilliant birds. He scanned the faces for a glimpse of

Maryaperhaps she had already found a noble lady to attach her-

self to: surely it was not safe for her to go back to the princess at the

Hayholt, or wherever she was. None of the faces was hers, however,

and before he could look for her elsewhere in the assemblage a line

of armored men appeared in one of the archways of the inner wall.

Now the crowd was murmuring in earnest, for the first half-dozen

soldiers were followed by a team of horses pulling a high wooden

cart. Simon felt a moment of hollowness in his stomach but dis-

missed it: was he to go all queasy every time a wagon creaked by?

As the wheels ground to a halt, and the soldiers gathered around

to unload the pale thing humped high on the bed of the cart, Simon

caught a glimpse of crow-black hair and white skin over where the

nobles stood, beyond the stacked timbers; when he looked closer,

hoping it was Marya, the laughing courtiers had closed in again and

there was nothing to see.

It took eight straining guardsmen to lift the pole on which the

giant's body hung like a deer from the king's hunting preserve, and

even so they still had to slide it from the wagon to the ground before

they could get their shoulders comfortably under the bar. The crea-

ture had been trussed at knees and elbows; huge hands wagged in

the air as its back bumped along the ground. The crowd, which had

pushed forward eagerly, now began to fall back with exclamations of

fear and disgust.

The thing looked more manlike now, Simon thought, than when it

had loomed upright before him in the forest of the Stile. With the

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR487

skin of its dark face gone slack in death, the menacing snarl erased,

it wore the puzzled expression of a man given unfathomable news.

As Strangyeard had said, it wore a garment of rough cloth around

its waist. A belt of some reddish stones hung dragging in the dust of

the commons.

The fat man beside Simon, who had been exhorting the soldiers to

march faster, turned a merry eye his way.

"Do you know what he was a-wearing 'round his neck?" he

shouted. Simon, hemmed in on both sides, shrugged. "Skulls!" the

man said, as pleased as if he had given them to the dead giant

himself. "Wearing 'em as a necklace, he was. Giving *em an

Aedonite burial, the prince iseven though it's anyone's guess

whose they be." He turned back to the spectacle again.

Several other soldiers had climbed to the top of the pyre, and were

helping the bearers move the massive creature into place. When they

had wrestled it into place, lying on its back at the summit, they

supped the pole out from between its crossed arms and legs and

scrambled down in a group. As the last man leaped down to the

ground, the great body slipped forward a little way, and the sudden

movement made a woman scream. Several children began to cry. A

gray-cloaked officer shouted an order; one of the soldiers leaned

forward and thrust a torch deep into the bundles of straw that had

been laid around the edges. The flames, strangely colorless in the

late afternoon sun, began to bend around the straw, reaching up-

ward toward more substantial food. Wisps of smoke twined around

the form of the giant, and some current of air bent his shaggy fur

like dry summer grass.

There! He had seen her again, beyond the pyre! Trying to push

forward, he received a sharp elbow to the ribs from someone fighting

to retain their choice viewpoint. He stopped, frustrated, and stared

at the spot where he thought he had spotted her.

Then he saw, and he realized it was not Marya. This black-haired

woman, wrapped in a somber, exquisitely-sewn green cloak, was

perhaps twenty years older. She was certainly beautiful, though,

with ivory skin and wide, uptilted eyes.

As Simon stared, she in turn watched the burning giant, whose

hair was beginning to curl and blacken as the fire climbed the

488 Tad Williams

mound of pine logs The smoke rose like a curtain, obscuring her

from Simon's view, he wondered who she was, and whyas the

Naglimunders all around shouted and waved their fists at the pillar

of smokeshe looked into the blaze with such sad, angry eyes

31

The Councils

of the Prince

^

ALTHOUGH HE had been quite hungry while walking the castle

walls with Sangfugol, when Father Strangyeard came by to take him

to the kitchensbelatedly fulfilling his earlier promiseSimon

found that his appetite had fled The stench of the afternoon's burn-

ing was still in his nostrils; he could almost feel the clinging smoke

as he walked behind the castle archivist

As they walked back across the misty commons, after Simon had

picked ineffectually at a plate of bread and sausages thumped down

before him by a stem kitchen woman, Strangyeard did his best to

make conversation.

"Perhaps you're just .. just tired, lad. Yes, that's what it will

be. Appetite should be back in no time. Young people always have

an appetite "

"I'm sure you're right. Father," Simon said. He was tired, and it

was easier sometimes to agree with people than to explain Besides,

he was not entirely sure himself what was making him feel so limp,

so washed-out.

They walked on a while through the twilit inner ward "Oh," the

pnest said at last, "I was meaning to ask youI hope you don't

think it's grasping of me ."

"Yes?"

"Well, Bmbines .Binabik, that is, he told metold me of

a certain manuscript A manuscript penned by Doctor Morgenes of

Erchester? Such a great man, such a tragic loss to the community of

learning. ." Strangyeard shook his head sorrowfully, then

seemed to forget what he had been asking, for he walked several

more steps in gloomy contemplation Simon at last felt compelled to

break the silence

490 Tad Williams

"Doctor Morgenes' book?" he prompted.

"Oh! Oh, yes ... well, what I wished to ask wasand I'm sure

it is too great a favorBinbines said it was saved, the manuscript,

that it came with you in your pack."

Simon hid a smile. The man took forever! "I don't know where

the pack is."

"Oh, it's under my bedyour bed, that is, for now. As long as

you want, actually. I saw the prince's man put it there. I haven't

touched it, I assure you!" he hastened to add.

"Do you want to read it?" Simon was touched by the old man's

eamestness. "By all means. I am too tired to look at it. Besides, I am

sure the doctor would prefer it to be examined by a man of learning

which is certainly not me."

"Truly?" Strangyeard seemed dazzled, fidgeting nervously with

his eye patch. He looked as though he might pull it off and throw it

into the air with a whoop of glee. "Oh," the priest breathed, com-

posing himself, "that would be splendid."

Simon felt uncomfortable: the archivist had, after all, moved out

of his own room so that Simon, a stranger, could use it. It was

embarrassing that he should be so grateful.

Ah, he decided, but it's not me he's grateful to, I don't think, so

much as it is the chance to read Morgenes' work on King John. This is

a man who loves books the way Rachel loves soap and water.

They had almost reached the low block of rooms along the south-

ern wall when a shape appeareda man, unrecognizable in the fog

and fast-diminishing light. He made a faint clinking noise as he

stepped in front of them.

"I'm searching for the priest Strangyeard," the man said, his voice

more than a little slurred. He seemed to waver, and the clinking

noise came again.

"He is I," Strangyeard said, a little more highly-pitched than

usual, "umm . . . that is, I am he. What is your business?"

"I seek a certain young man," the other said, and took a few steps

closer. "Is this him?"

Simon tensed his muscles, but could not help noticing that the

approaching figure was not very big. Also, there was something

about his walk . . .

"Yes." Simon and Strangyeard spoke together, then the priest fell

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR491

silent, plucking distractedly at his headstrap as Simon continued.

"I'm the one. What do you want?"

"The prince wants to speak with you," the small figure said, clos-

ing to within a few feet, peering up at Simon. He jingled faintly.

"Towser!" Simon said happily. "Towser! What are you doing

herel?" He reached out and clamped his hands on the old man's

shoulders.

"Who are you, then?" the jester said, startled. "Do I know you?**

"I don't knowI'm Simon! Doctor Morgenes' apprentice! From

the Hayholt!"

"Hmmm," the jester said doubtfully. Up close he smelled of wine.

"I suppose so ... it's dim to me, lad, dim. Towser is getting old,

like old King Tethtain: 'head snow-capped and weathered like distant

Minari-mount,'" he squinted, "and I'm not so sharp with faces as

once I was. Are you the one I'm to take to Prince Josua?"

"I suppose." Simon's mood had lifted. "Sangfugol must have spo-

ken to him." He turned to Father Strangyeard. "I must go with him.

I haven't moved that packdidn't even know ifwas there."

The archivist mumbled an acknowledgment and scuttled off in

quest of his prize. Simon took the elbow of the old jester as they

turned back across the commons yard.

"Whoosh!" said Towser, shivering; the bells on his jacket tinkled

again. "Sun was high today, but the wind is bitter tonight. Bad

weather for old bonescan't think why Josua sent me." He stag-

gered a bit, leaning for a moment on Simon's arm. 'That's not true,

really," he continued. "He likes to give me things to do. He's not

much for my jesting and tricks, you see, but I don't think he likes to

see me idle."

They walked on for a while without speaking.

"How did you get to Naglimund?" Simon asked at last.

"Last wagon caravan up the Wealdhelm Road. Elias has closed it

now, the dog. Rough traveling it was, toohad to fight off bandits

north of Flett. Everything's falling apart, boy. Everything's going

sour."

The guards at the front of the residence hall scrutinized them

carefully in the flickering torchlight, then knocked for the door to be

unbolted. Simon and the jester padded down the cold, flagstoned

corridor until they reached another heavy-beamed door and another

pair of guards.

492 Tad Williams

"Here you are, boy," Towser said. "I'm off to bed, had a late night

last night. It's good to see a familiar face. Come by soon and have a

noggin with me, tell me what you're been up toyes?" He turned

and shuffled off down the hallway, the patchwork of his motley

glimmering faintly until he was swallowed by shadows.

Simon stepped up between the impassive guards and rapped on

the door.

"Who goes there?" a boy's voice asked.

"Simon of Hayholt, to see the prince."

The door swung silently in to reveal a solemn-faced child of about

ten years dressed in the costume of a page. When he stepped out of

the way, Simon moved past him into a curtained antechamber-

"Come through," a muffled voice called. After some searching he

found the entrance, hidden by a curtain.

It was an austere room, scarcely better furnished than Father

Strangyeard's. Prince Josua, in gown and nightcap, sat at a table

holding a scroll open with his elbow. He did not look up as Simon

entered, but waved toward another chair.

"Please, sit down," he said, arresting Simon halfway into a deep

bow. "I will be a moment, only."

As Simon sat in the hard, unpadded chair, he saw a movement at

the back of the room. A hand pulled the curtain there aside, re-

vealing a sliver of lamplight beyond. A face appeared, dark-eyed,

framed in thick black hairthe woman he had seen in the court-

yard, watching the burning. She was looking intently at the prince,

but when she looked up her stare met Simon's and held it, angry

eyes like a cornered cat. The curtain dropped back into place.

Worried, for a moment he considered saying something to Josua.

A spy? An assassin? Then he realized why this woman was in the

prince's bedchamber, and he felt very foolish.

Josua looked up to the blushing Simon, allowing the scroll to curl

on the table before him. "Now, forgive me." He rose, and pulled his

chair nearer. "I have been thoughtless. I hope you will understand

that I meant no slight to one who helped me escape my imprison-

ment."

"No ... no need to apologize, your Highness," Simon stam-

mered.

Josua spread the fingers of his left hand, a pained expression on

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR493

his face. Simon remembered what Sangfugol had said, and wondered

what it must be like to lose a hand.

"Please. 'Josua' in this roomPrince Josua if you must. When I

studied with the Usirean brothers in Nabban they called me 'aco-

lyte,' or 'boy.' I do not think I have come so far since then."

"Yes, sir."

Josua's eyes nicked away, back to his writing table; in the moment

of silence Simon looked him over carefully. In truth, he did not look

a great deal more princely than when Simon had seen him in his

shackles in Morgenes* chambers. He looked tired, worn by care as

surely as a rock is worn by weather. In his nightclothes, high pale

brow furrowed in thought, he looked more like a companion archi-

vist to Father Strangyeard than a prince of Erkynland or a son of

Prester John.

Josua got up and walked back to his scroll.

"The writings of old Dendinis," he tapped it against his leather-

capped right wrist, "Aeswides' military architect. Do you know,

Naglimund has never been broken by siege? When Fingil of

Rimmersgard rolled down from the north, he had to detach two

thousand men to keep this castle bottled up, to protect his flank."

He tapped again. "Dendinis built well."

There was a pause. At length Simon awkwardly filled it. "It is a

mighty keep. Prince Josua."

The prince tossed the scroll back onto the table, pursing his Ups

like a miser counting out his taxes. "Yes . . . but even a mighty

keep can be starved out. Our supply lines are almost impossibly

long, and where can we expect to find help?" Josua looked at Simon

as if he expected some answer, but the youth could only goggle,

without a thought of what to say. "Perhaps Isgrimnur will bring

back cheering news . . ." the prince continued, "and perhaps not.

Word is spreading up from the south that my brother is assembling a

great force of troops." Josua stared at the floor, then looked up

suddenly, eyes bright and intent. "Again, forgive me. I find I am

awash in dark thoughts lately, and my words run ahead of my good

sense. It is one thing to read of great battles, you know, it is another

to try and plan them. Do you know how many things there are to

think of? Mustering the local troops, bringing the people and their

stock into the castle, foraging, shoring up the walls . . . and all

494 Tad Williams

these things useless if no one will fight at Elias' back. If we stand

alone, we will stand a long time . . . but we will fall at last."

Simon was disconcerted. It was nattering to have Josua speak so

openly with him, but there was also something frightening about a

prince so full of foreboding, a prince who was willing to speak to a

boy as though to his war council. "Well," Simon said at last, "well

. . . surely everything will turn out as God wills it." He hated him-

self for such stupidity even as the words were out of his mouth.

Josua only laughed, a sour chuckle. "Ah, caught up by a mere

lad, like Usires on the famous thombush- You are right, Simon.

While we breathe there's hope, and I have you to thank for that."

"Only in part, Prince Josua." Did that sound ungrateful, he won-

dered?

The wintry look returned to the prince's stem face. "I heard

about the doctor. A cruel blow to us all, but even cruder to you, I'm

sure. We will miss his wisdomhis goodness, too, but his wisdom

more. I hope that others can take up some of the slack." Josua

pulled up the chair again and leaned forward. "There will be a

council, and I think it must be soon. Gwythinn, Lluth of Hemystir's

son, will be here tonight. There are already others who have been

waiting several days. Many plans hinge on what we decide here,

many lives." Josua nodded his head slowly, musing.

"Is ... is Duke Isgrimnur alive, Prince?" Simon asked. "I ...

I spent a night with his men on the journey here, but . . . but I left

them."

"He and his men were here days ago, stopping before continuing

toward Elvritshalla. That is why I cannot waitthey might be

weeks." He looked away again.

"Can you wield a sword, Simon?" he asked suddenly. "Have you

been trained?"

"Not really, sir."

"Then go to the captain of the guards and have him find someone

to work with you. We will need every arm, I think, especially strong

young ones."

"Of course. Prince Josua," Simon said. The prince stood up and

walked to his table, turning his back as though the audience was

over. Simon sat frozen in his chair, wanting to ask another question,

not sure of the propriety. At last he stood up, too, and backed slowly

toward the curtained doorway. Josua continued to stare at Dendinis'

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR495

scroll. Simon was a step from going out when he stopped, squared

his shoulders, and asked the question he had been balancing.

"Prince Josua, sire," he began, and the tall man looked back over

his shoulder.

"Yes?"

*'Did ... did the girl Marya ... the girl who brought you the

message from your niece Miriamele . . ."He took a breath. "Do

you know where she is?"

Josua raised an eyebrow. "Even in our darkest days, we cannot

keep our minds from them, can we?" The prince shook his head.

'Tm afraid I cannot help you there, young man. Good night."

Simon bobbed his head and backed out through the curtain.

As he walked back from his unsettling audience with the prince,

Simon wondered what would become of them all. It had seemed

such a victory to reach Naglimund. For weeks he had thought of no

other goal, followed no other star. Tom away from his home, it had

been something to pursue to keep the larger questions at bay. Now

what had seemed a paradise of safety compared to the wild journey

was suddenly yet another trap. Josua had as much as said it: if they

were not overrun, they would be starved.

As soon as he reached Strangyeard's tiny room he crawled into

bed, but he heard the sentries call out the hour twice more before he

fell asleep.

A groggy Simon answered the rap at the door, opening it to dis-

cover a gray morning, a large wolf, and a troll.

"I am startled to be finding you abedl" Binabik grinned wickedly.

"A few days out of the wilderness only and civilization has sunk its

claws of laziness into you!"

"I am not," Simon frowned, "in bed. Not any longer. But why

aren*t you?"

"In bed?" Binabik asked, stumping slowly into the room and

nudging the door closed with his hip. "I am betteror better

enough. Things there are to do." He squinted around the room as

Simon sank back onto the edge of the pallet and contemplated his

own unshod feet. "Do you know where is the pack we saved?" the

troll asked at last.

"Urrrh," Simon grunted, then waved his hand at the floor. "It was

496 Tad Williams

under the bed, but I think Father Strangyeard took it to get

Morgenes' book."

"Likely it is still there," Binabik said, lowering himself gingerly to

his hands and knees. "The priest seems to me a man forgetful of

people, but who is putting things back in their place when he is

finished with them." He scrabbled under the bed. "Aha! Here I have

found it!"

"Isn't that bad, with your wound?" Simon asked, feeling guilty he

had not offered to do it himself. Binabik backed out and stood up,

very carefully, Simon noticed.

"Trolls have fast healing," he said, and smiled broadly, but Simon

was still worried.

"I don't think you should be up and around yet," he said as

Binabik rifled through the pack. "That's no way to get better."

"A fine trollmother you would make," Binabik said without look-

ing up. "Will you be chewing my meat for me, too? Qinkipa! Where

are those bones!?"

Simon got down on his knees to try and find his boots, but it was

difficult with the wolf padding up and down in the narrow chamber.

"Can't Qantaqa wait outside?" he asked as her broad flank

bumped him again.

"Both of your friends will be happy to leave if we are bringing you

inconvenience, Simon," the troll said primly. "Aia! Here they have

been hiding!"

Outdone, the boy stared at the troll. Binabik was brave, clever,

kind, had been wounded at Simon's sideand even without these

things was anyway too little to hit. Simon made a noise of disgust

and frustration and crawled over.

"What do you need those bones for?" He peered over Binabik's

shoulder. "Is my arrow still there?"

"The arrow, yes," his friend replied. "The bones? Because these

are days of decision, and I would be a fool to avoid any wise advis-

ing."

"The prince summoned me last night."

"I know." Binabik shook the bones out of their sack and weighed

them in his hand. "I was speaking with him this morning. The

Hemystiri have arrived. There will be council tonight."

"He told you that?" Simon was more than a little disappointed to

find that he had not been Josua's only confidante, but a little relieved

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR497

as well to find the responsibility shared. "Are you going to go

there?"

"As the only man of my people ever to enter the walls of Nag-

limund? As the apprentice of Ookequk, Singing Man of the

Mintahoq trolls? Of course I will go. So also will you."

"Me?!" He felt caught off balance. "Why me? What in the name

of the good God would I do at a ... military council? I'm no

soldier. I'm not even a grown man!"

"Certain it is you are not hurrying to be one." Binabik made a

mocking face. "But even you cannot fight maturity away forever.

Besides, your years have no meaning in this. You have seen and

heard things that may be important, and Prince Josua would want

you there."

"Would want? Did he ask for me?"

The troll blew the hanging hair off his forehead impatiently. "Not

with exactness . . . but he asked me, and I will take you. Josua

does not know all you have seen."

"God's Blood, Binabik!"

"Please do not be swearing Aedonite oaths at me. Just because

you are having a beard . . . almost . . . does not make you a man

to be cursing. Now please let me have some silence to throw the

bones, then I have more news to tell."

Simon sat back, worried and upset. What if they asked him ques-

tions? Was he going to be called to speak in front of barons and

dukes and generals and all? He, a runaway scullion?

Binabik was crooning softly to himself, gently shaking the bones

like a trooper dicing in a tavern. They clicked and then tumbled free

onto the slate floor. He examined their position, then scooped them

up and tossed them twice more. He pursed his lips and stared in-

tently at the last roll for some time.

'"Clouds in the Pass . . ." he said at last, musing, "'Wingless Bird

. . . Black Crevice." He rubbed his lips with the back of his sleeve,

then thumped the heel of his hand once on his chest. "What am I to

be making from such a tale?"

"Does it mean something?" Simon asked. "What are the words

you just said?"

"They are the names for certain fallingscertain patterns. Three

times we throw, and each throw means different."

"I don't ... I ... can you explain?" Simon said, then almost

498 Tad Williams

fell forward as Qantaqa bulled past him to put her head on Binabik's

squat thigh.

"Here," the troll said, "first: Clouds in the Pass. Meaning where

we stand now it is hard to see far, but beyond is something very

different than what is behind."

"I could have told you that."

"Silence, trolling. Do you wish to remain foolish forever? Now,

the one that is second was Wingless Bird. The second is something of

advantage, but here it seems our helplessness might be itself useful,

or so I am reading the bones today. Last, what thing it is we should

be aware of . . ."

"Or fear?"

"Or fear," Binabik agreed calmly. "Black 0-ewethat is a

strange one, one I never have gotten for myself. It could mean

treachery."

Simon took a breath, remembering. "Like 'false messenger'?"

"True. But it is having other meanings, unusual meanings. My

master taught me that it could also be things coming from other

places, breaking through from other sides . . . thus, perhaps some-

thing about the mysteries we have found ... the Noms, your

dreams ... do you see?"

"A little." He stood up and stretched, then began looking for his

shirt. "What about the other news?"

It took the troll, who was meditatively stroking Qantaqa's back, a

moment to look up.

"Ah," he said at last, and reached into his jacket. "I have some-

thing for your reading." He pulled out a flattened roll of parchment

and handed it up. Simon felt his bare skin tingle.

It was written in crisp but delicate script, a smattering of words in

the midst of the unrolled sheet.

For Simon

Here are thanks for your bravery on our journey. May the Good

Lord always give you luck, friend.

It was signed with the single letter "M."

"From her," he said slowly. He didn't know if he was disap-

pointed or delighted. "It is from Marya, isn't it? Is this all she sent?

Did you see her?"

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR499

Binabik nodded his head. He looked sad. "I saw her, but it was

only of a moment. She said also that we would perhaps see her more,

but there were things that must be done first."

"What things? She makes me angry ... no, I don't mean that.

Is she here at Naglimund?"

"She gave me the message, did she not?" Binabik got unsteadily to

his feet, but for the moment Simon was too consumed to pay much

attention. She had written! She had not forgotten! But she certainly

had not written much, and she hadn't come to see him, to talk, to do

anything. . . .

Usires save me, is this being in love? he suddenly wondered. It was

nothing like the ballads he had heard sungthis was more irritating

than uplifting. He had thought he was in love with Hepzibah. He

had certainly thought about her a great deal, but it had mostly been

about the way she looked, she walked. With Marya, he certainly

remembered how she looked, but just as much he wondered what

she thought.

What she thinks! He was disgusted with himself. / don't even

know where she comes from, let alone anything about how she thinks/

I don't know the simplest thing about her . . . and if she likes me,

it's certainly not something she bothered to write in this letter.

And that was only the truth, he knew.

But she said I was brave. She called me friend.

He looked up from the parchment to see Binabik staring at him.

The troll's expression was morose, but Simon was not sure why.

"Binabik," he began, but then could think of no question whose

answer would clear his muddy thoughts. "Well," he said at last, "do

you know where the captain of the guard is? I have to get a sword."

The air was damp, and heavy gray skies hung over them as they

walked to the outer ward. A pressing crowd of people streamed

through the city gate, some bearing vegetables and flax and other

things to sell, many pulling rickety carts that seemed to be heaped

with the pitiful entirety of their worldly possessions. Simon's com-

panions, the diminutive troll and the huge, yellow-eyed wolf, made

no small impression on these newcomers: some pointed and cried

out anxious questions in rustic dialect, others shrank back, making

the protective sign of the Tree on their rough-suited breasts. On all

faces there were signs of fearfear of the different, fear of the bad

500 Tad Williams

days that had come to Erkynland. Simon felt torn between wishing

he could help them and wishing he did not have to see their homely,

fretful faces.

Binabik left him at the guardhouse, part of the gate building of the

outer ward, then went on to visit with Father Strangyeard in the

castle library. Simon quickly found himself before the captain of the

guard, a drawn, harried looking young man who was several days

unshaven. He was bareheaded, his conical helm filled full of tally

stones with which he was counting the muster of the outland militias

trickling into the castle. He had been told to expect Simon, who was

duly nattered the prince had remembered him, and handed the

youth over to the ministrations of a beariike North Erkynlandish

guardsman named Haestan.

"Ha'n't got y'r growth yet, have ye?" Haestan growled, tugging

his curly brown beard as he eyed Simon's lanky frame. "A bowman,

then, tha's the story. Get ye a sword we will, but f won't be big

enough t'do much. Bow's the thing."

Together they walked around the outer wall to the armory, a long

narrow room behind the ringing smithy. As the arms warden led

them down rows of battered armor and tarnished swords, Simon

was saddened to see the dregs of the castle armaments, slim protec-

tion against the shining legions that Elias would no doubt put into

the field.

"No* much left," Haestan observed. "Warn't half enough in first

place. Hope th'outland levies bring somewhat beside pitchfork and

plowshare."

The limping warden at last found a scabbarded sword that the

guardsman deemed to be of proper slenderness for Simon's size. It

was crusty with dried oil, and the warden was hard put to mask his

frown of distaste. "Polish it," he said, " 'twill be a fine piece."

Further search turned up a longbow that lacked only a string, but

was otherwise in good enough shape, and a leather quiver.

"Thrithings work," Haestan said, pointing out the round-eyed

deer and rabbits etched on the dark hide. "Make fine quivers,

Thrithings-men do." Simon had a feeling the guardsman felt a little

guilty over the unprepossessing sword-

Back at the guardhouse his new tutor wheedled a bowstring and

half a dozen arrows from the quartermaster, then showed Simon

how to clean and care for his new weapons.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

501

"Sharp it away, lad, sharp it away," the burly guardsman said,

making the blade skitter across the whetstone, "lest otherways ye'll

be a girl afore ye're a man." Somehow, against logic, he found a

gleam of true steel beneath the tamish and grit.

Simon had hoped to start immediately with sword wielding, or at

least some target shooting, but instead Haestan produced a pair of

cloth-padded wooden poles and took Simon out the city gate to the

hillside above the town. Simon quickly learned how little like real

soldier-sparring his play with Jeremias Chandler's-boy had been.

"Spear work'd be more use," Haestan said as Simon sat on the

turf, wheezing over a buffet to the stomach. "As 'tis, though, we've

none t'spare. That's why arrows be y'r game, boy. Still, s'nice t'know

some swording for close work. That's when ye'll thank old Haestan

a hundredfold."

"Why ... not ... bow . . . ?" Simon panted.

"Tmorrow, boy, for bow'n'arrows ... or day after." Haestan

laughed and extended a broad paw. "Get on y'r feet. Jolliness' just

started for th'day."

Weary, sore, threshed like wheat until he thought he could feel the

chaff trickling from his ears, Simon ate beans and bread at the

guards' afternoon meal while Haestan continued the verbal part of

his education, most of which Simon missed due to a low and contin-

uous ringing in his ears. He was dismissed at last with a warning to

be out sharp early the next morning. He stumbled back to

Strangyeard's empty room and fell asleep without even pulling off

his boots.

Rain spattered in through the open window, and thunder mur-

mured in the distance. Simon woke to find Binabik waiting for him

as he had that morning, as though the long, bruising afternoon had

not occurred. That illusion was quickly dispelled when he sat up-

right: every single muscle was stiff. He felt as though he were a

hundred years old.

It took more than a little work for Binabik to convince him to get

off the bed. "Simon, this is no evening of sport for your attending or

declining. These are things on which our lives will hang balanced."

He had returned to his back. "I believe you . . . but if I get up,

I'll die."

"Enough." The little man got hold of a wrist, braced his heels

502 Tad Williams

against the floor, wincing as he slowly tugged Simon back into a

sitting position. There was a deep groan and a thump as one of

Simon's booted feet hit the floor, then a long interval of silence

before the second joined it.

Long minutes later he was limping out the door at Binabik's side,

into the gathering winds and chill rain.

"Will we have to sit through supper as well?" Simon asked. For

once in his life he actually felt too sore to eat.

'That I do not think. Josua is a strange one in that way; he is not

for eating and drinking much with his court. He has a desire for

solitariness. So, I am thinking, all have eaten before. That is indeed

how I am reconciling Qantaqa to staying in the room." He smiled

and patted Simon's shoulder. Simon winced. "All that we will feast

on this night will be worrying and arguing. Bad for digestion of troll,

man, or wolf."

While the storm blustered loudly outside, the great hall of Nag-

limund was dry, warmed by three huge open hearths, lit by the

flames of countless candles. The slanting beams of the roof disap-

peared in darkness high above, and the walls were thick with somber

religious tapestries.

Scores of tables had been pushed together into the shape of a vast

horseshoe; Josua's tall, narrow wooden chair stood at the apex of the

arc, inscribed with the Swan of Naglimund. Already half a hundred

men had installed themselves at different points along the rim of the

shoe, talking avidly among themselvestall men, dressed in the

furred robes and gawdy trinkets of petty nobility for the most part,

but some wearing the rough gear of soldiers. Several looked up as

the pair walked past, viewing them with appraising eyes before turn-

ing back to their discussions.

Binabik elbowed Simon's hip. "They are thinking perhaps that we

are the hired tumblers." He laughed, but Simon did not think he

looked truly amused.

"Who are all these people?" Simon whispered as they sat down at

the far end of the one of the horseshoe's arms. A page set wine

before them and added hot water before shrinking back into the long

shadows of the wall.

"Lords of Erkynland loyal to Naglimund and Josuaor at least

undecided as yet in their loyalties. The stout one in red and white is

Ordmaer, baron of Utersall. He speaks with Grimstede, Ethelferth,

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR503

and some other lords." The troll hefted his bronze goblet and drank.

"Hmmm. Our prince is not being profligate with his wine, or per-

haps it is that he wishes appreciation for the fine local water."

Binabik's mischievous smile reappeared; Simon slid back in his

chair, fearing a similar reappearance of the small, sharp elbow, but

the small man only looked past him up the table.

Simon took a long swallow of his wine. It was watery; he won-

dered whether it was the seneschal or the prince himself who was

tight with a fithing piece. Still, it was better than nothing, and might

serve to ease his aching limbs. When he finished, the page scurried

forward and filled it again.

More men trickled in, some animatedly conferring, others coolly

surveying those who had already arrived. A very, very old man in

sumptuous religious robes entered on the arm of a husky young

priest and began to set up various shiny articles near the head of the

table; the look on his face was one of definite bad temper. The

younger man helped him into a chair and then leaned down and

whispered something into his ear. The elder made a reply of seem-

ingly dubious civility; the priest, with a long-suffering glance at the

roofbeams, strode from the room.

"Is that the lector?" Simon asked in hushed tones.

Bilbabil shook his head. "It seems very doubtful to me that the

head of your whole Aedonite church would be here in the den of an

outlaw prince. Likely that is Anodis, the bishop of Naglimund."

As Binabik spoke, a last clutch of men came in, and the troll

broke off to watch. Some, with hair in slender braids down their

backs, wore the belted white tunics of the Hemystiri. Their apparent

leader, an intense, muscular young man with long dark mustaches,

was talking to a southerner of some kind, an exceedingly well-

dressed fellow who appeared only slightly older. This one, hair care-

fully curled, robed in delicate shades of heather and blue, was so

neatly turned out that Simon felt sure even Sangfugol would be

impressed. Some of the old soldiers around the table were openly

grinning at the foppishness of his rig.

"And these?" Simon asked. "The ones in white, with the gold

'round their necksHemystirmen, yes?"

"Correct. Prince Gwythinn that is, and his embassy. The other,

my guessing is, would be Baron Davasalles of Nabban. He has a

504 Tad Williams

reputation as a sharp wit, if a bit full of fondness for costume. A

brave fighter, too, I was told."

"How do you know all this, Binabik?" Simon asked, turning his

attention from the newcomers back to his friend. "Do you listen at

keyholes?"

The troll drew himself up haughtily. "I do not live always on

mountaintops, you know. Also, I have found Strangyeard and other

resources here, while you have been at keeping your bed warm."

"What!?" Simon's voice came out louder than he had intended it

to; he realized he was at least a little drunk. The man seated beside

him turned with a curious glance; Simon leaned forward to continue

his defense in a quieter tone.

"I have been . . ." he began, then chairs began creaking all over

the hall as their occupants suddenly stood. Simon looked up to see

the slender figure of Prince Josua, dressed in his customary gray,

enter at the hall's far end. His expression was calm but unsmiling.

The only indication of his rank was the silver circlet on his brow.

Josua nodded to the assembly and then seated himself; the others

quickly followed suit. As the pages came forward to pour wine, the

old bishop at Josua's left handHemystir's Gwythinn sat at his

rightrose.

"Please, now," the bishop sounded sour, as a man who does a

favor he knows will have no good result, "bow down your heads as

we ask the blessing of Usires Aedon on this table and its delibera-

tion." So saying, he lifted a beautiful Tree of wrought gold and blue

stones and held it before him.

"He who was of our world, but is not wholly of our flesh, hear us

now.

"He who was a man, but whose Father was no man, but rather the

breathing God, give us comfort.

"Watch over this table, and those who take seat here, and put

Your hand on the shoulder of him who is lost and searching."

The old man took a breath and glared around the table. Simon,

straining to watch with his chin sunk on his breast, thought he

looked as though he would like to take his jeweled Tree and brain

the lot of them.

"Also," the bishop finished in a rush, "forgive those assembled for

any damnable, prideful foolishness that might be spoken here. We

are Your children."

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR505

The old man teetered and dropped into his chair; there was a

murmur of low conversation around the table.

"Would you guess, Simon, that the bishop is not happy to be

here?" Binabik whispered.

Josua rose. "Thank you, Bishop Anodis for your . . . heartfelt

prayers. And thanks to all who come to this hall." He looked about

the high, firelit chamber, left hand on the table, the other hidden in

the folds of his cloak. "These are grave times," he intoned, moving

his glance from one face to the other. Simon felt the warmth of the

room well up in his, and wondered if the prince would say anything

about his rescue. He blinked, opening his eyes in time to see Josua's

gaze slide quickly over him and return to the center of the room,

"Grave and troubling times. The High King in the Hayholtand

yes, he is my brother, of course, but for our purposes here he is the

kingseems to have turned his back on our hardships. Taxes have

been raised to the point of cruel punishment, even as the land has

suffered beneath fierce drought in Erkynland and Hemystir and ter-

rible storms in the north. At the same time that'the Hayholt reaches

out to take more than it ever did under King John's reign, Elias has

pulled back the troops that once kept the roads open and safe, and

which helped to garrison the emptier lands of the Frostmarch and

the Wealdhelm."

"Too true!" shouted Baron Ordmaer, and clanged a flagon on the

table. "God bless you but that's true. Prince Josua!" He turned and

waggled his fist for the benefit of the others. There was a chorus of

agreement, but there were also others. Bishop Anodis among them,

who shook their heads to hear such rash words so early on.

"And thus," Josua said loudly, quieting the assembly, "thus we

are faced with a problem. What are we to do? That is why I have

called you here and, I presume, why you have come. To decide what

we may do. To keep those chains," he lifted his left arm and showed

the manacle still clasped there, "off of our necks, that the king

would put on us."

There was a handful of appreciative cries. The buzz of whispered

speech rose as well. Josua was waving his enshackled arm for silence

when there came a flash of red in the doorway. A woman swept into

the room, long silk dress like a torch flame. It was she whom Simon

had seen in Josua's chambers, dark-eyed, imperious. Within mo-

ments she had reached the prince's chair, the eyes of the men follow-

506 Tad Williams

ing her with undisguised interest. Josua seemed uncomfortable: as

she bent down to whisper something in his ear, he kept his gaze fixed

on his wine cup.

"Who is that woman?" Simon hissed, and was not the only one

asking, to judge by the rush of whispers.

"Her name ifVorzheva. Daughter of a clan lord of the Thrithings,

she is, as well as being the prince's . . . what? Woman, I suppose.

They say she is of great beauty."

"She is." Simon continued to stare for a moment, then turned

back to the troll. " 'They say'! What do you mean, 'they say'? She's

right there, isn't she?"

"Ah, but I am having trouble judging." He smiled. "It is that I do

not like the look of tall women."

The Lady Vorzheva had apparently finished giving her message.

She listened to Josua's reply, then a moment later glided swiftly

from the hall, leaving only a final scarlet shimmer in the dark of the

doorway.

The prince looked up, and behind his placid face Simon thought

he detected something that looked like . . . embarrassment?

"Now," Josua began, "we were . . . ? Yes, Baron Devasalles?"

The dandy from Nabban stood up. "You were saying, your High-

ness, that we should be considering Elias only as king. But that is

obviously not true."

"What do you mean?" asked the lord of Naglimund, above a

disapproving rumble from his liegemen.

"Your pardon, prince, but what I mean is this: if he were only

king we would not be here, or at least Duke Leobardis would not

have sent me. You are the only other son of Prester John. Why else

would we travel so far? Otherwise, those who had complaints with

the Hayholt would travel to the Sancellan Mahistrevis, or to the

Taig in Hemysadharc. But you are his brother, yes? The king's

brother?"

A chilly smile flickered across Josua's mouth. "Yes, Baron, I am.

And I understand your meaning."

"Thank you. Highness." Devasalles made a small bow. "Now the

question remains. What do you want. Prince Josua? Revenge? The

throne? Or merely an accommodation with a grasping king, one that

will leave you unmolested here at the Naglimund?"

Now there was a full-blown growl from the Erkynlanders present,

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR507

and a few rose, brows beetling and mustaches quivering. But before

any of them could seize the moment, young Gwythinn of Hemystir

leaped to his feet, leaning across the table toward Baron Davasalles

like a horse straining at the bit.

"The gentleman from Nabban wants a word, eh? Well, then,

here's mine. Fight! Elias has insulted my father's blood and throne,

and has sent the King's Hand to our Taig with threats and harsh

words, like a man punishing children. We do not need to weigh the

this and that of itwe are ready to fight!"

Several people cheered the Hemystirman's bold words, but Si-

mon, looking fuzzily about the room as he finished the last drops of

another cup of wine, saw even more looking worried, talking quietly

with their tablemates. Beside him Binabik was frowning, mirroring

the expression that shadowed the face of the prince.

"Hear mel" Josua cried. "Nabban, in the person of Leobardis'

emissary, has asked hard but fair questions, and I will answer

them." He turned his cold stare to Devasalles. "I have no wish to be

king, Baron. My brother knew that, yet still he captured me, killed a

score of my men, and held me in his dungeons." He brandished the

arm shackle again. "For that, yes, I do wish revengebut if Elias

was ruling well and fairly, I would sacrifice the revenge for the good

of Osten Ard, and especially my Erkynland. As to accommodation

... I do not know if that is possible. Elias has grown dangerous

and difficult; some say that he crosses over into madness at times."

"Who says?" Devasalles asked. "Lords who chafe under his ad-

mittedly heavy hand? We speak of a possible war that will tear our

nations like rotted cloth. It would be a shame if it started over

rumors."

Josua leaned back and summoned a page, whispering a message to

him. The boy virtually flew out of the hall.

A muscular, bearded man in white furs and silver chains stood.

"If the baron remembers me not, I will remind him," he said, plainly

uncomfortable. "Ethelferth, Lord of Tinsett am I, and I wish to say

only this; if my prince says the king has lost his wits, well, that word

is good enough for me." He furrowed his brow and sat.

Josua stood up, slender, gray-clad body uncoiling like a rope-

"Thanks to you, Lord Ethelferth, for your good words. But, "he cast

his eyes around the assembly, which quieted to watch him, "no one

need take my word for anything, or the words of other of my

508 Tad Williams

liegemen. Instead I bring to you one whose firsthand knowledge of

Elias's ways you will, I am sure, find easy to trust." He waved his

left hand toward the near door of the hall, the one through which

the page had disappeared. The boy had reentered; behind him in the

doorway were two figures. One was the Lady Vorzheva. The other,

dressed in sky blue, stepped past Vorzheva into the pool of light

around the wall sconce.

"My lords," Josua said, "the Princess Miriameledaughter of the

High King."

And Simon, gaping, stared at the short, cropped strands of golden

hair that showed beneath the veil and crown, shed of their dark

disguise . . . and staring at the oh-so-famuiar face, felt a great tum-

bling inside him. He almost stood, as the others were doing, but his

knees went watery and dropped him back into his chair. How?

Why? This was her secrether rotten, treacherous secret!

"Marya," he murmured, and as she sat in the chair Gwythinn

surrendered to her, acknowledging his gesture with a precise, gra-

cious nod of her head, and as everyone else sat down again, talking

aloud in their wonder, Simon finally lurched to his feet.

"You," he said to Binabik, grabbing the little man's shoulder, "did

... did you know?!"

The troll seemed about to say something, then grimaced instead

and shrugged. Simon looked up across the sea of heads to find

Marya . . . Miriamele . . . staring at him with wide, sad eyes.

"Damn!" he hissed, then turned and hurried from the room, his

eyes pooling with snamefiil tears.

32

Northern Tidings

"WELL, LAD," Towser said, pushing another flagon across the table-

top, "you couldn't be rightertrouble they are. Always will be."

Simon squinted at the old jester, who suddenly seemed the reposi-

tory of all knowledge. "They write letters to a fellow," he said, and

took a generous swallow, "lying letters." He set the cup back down

on the wood and watched the wine wash from side to side, threaten-

ing to overtop the rim.

Towser leaned back against the wall of his boxlike room. He was

in his linen undershirt, and had not shaved for a day or two. 'They

do write those letters,** he said, nodding his white-bristled chin

gravely. "Sometimes they lie about you to the other ladies."

Simon frowned, thinking about it. She had probably done just

that, telling the other highborn noble folk about the stupid scullion

who had ridden with her on a boat down the Aelfwent. It was proba-

bly a merry tale all through the Naglimund.

He took another swig and felt the sour taste come back up, filling

his mouth with bile. He set the cup down.

Towser was struggling to his feet. "Look, look," the old man said,

going to a wooden chest and rummaging about inside. "Damnation,

1 know it's here somewhere."

"I should have realized!" Simon berated himself. "She wrote me a

note. How could a serving girl have . . . have known how to spell

better than me?!"

"Here's that God-be-cursed lute string!" Towser continued to

rummage.

"But Towser, she wrote me a notesaid God bless me! Called me

*friend.'"

"What? Well, that's fine, lad, fine. That's the kind of girl you

want, not some stuck up fancy-lady who'll look down on you, like

that other. Ah! Here!"

510 Tad Williams

"Hah?" Simon had lost the thread. He was virtually positive he

had only been talking of one girlthe arch-traitoress, the identity-

shifting Marya . . . Miriamele . . . well, it didn't matter very

much, did it?"

But she fell asleep on my shoulder. Fuzzily, drunkenly, he remem-

bered warm breath on his cheek, and felt a corresponding ache of

loss.

"Look at this, lad." Towser was standing over him, swaying, hold-

ing out something white. Simon stared, puzzled.

"What is it?"

"A scarf. For cold weather. Do you see these?" The old man

pointed a bent forefinger at a series of characters woven onto the

white in dark blue thread. The shape of the runes reminded Simon

of something that touched off a throb of cold inside him even

through the fog of wine.

"What are they?" he asked, his voice a little clearer than before.

"Rimmersgard runes," the old jester said, smiling absently. "They

read *Cruinh'my true name. A girl wove those, wove the scarf-

For me. When I was with my dear King John at Elvritshalla." Un-

expectedly, he began to cry, feeling his way back to the table to

slump down in the hard chair. Within a few moments the sobbing

was over, and water stood in his red-rimmed eyes like puddles after

a sunshower. Simon said nothing.

"I should have married that one," Towser said at last. "But she

would not leave her landwouldn't come back to the Hayholt.

Frightened of foreign ways, she was, frightened to leave her family.

She died years ago, poor girl." He sniffled loudly. "And how could I

have ever left my good John?"

"What do you mean?" Simon asked. He couldn't remember where

he'd seen the Rimmersgard runes lately, or at least he did not want

to put out the effort to recall. Easier just to sit here in the candlelight

and let the old man talk. "When were th . . . when were you in

Rimmersgard?" he prompted.

"Oh, lad, years and years and years." Towser wiped his eyes with-

out embarrassment and blew his nose into a capacious kerchief. "It

was after the Battle of Naarved. In the year after it was over, that

was when I met the girl who made this."

"What was the Battle of Naarved?" Simon reached out to pour

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR511

himself more wine, then thought better of it. What, he wondered,

was going on in the great hall at this moment?

"Naarved?" Towser goggled. "You don't know Naarved? Where

John beat old King Jormgrun, and became High King over the

north?"

"I suppose I do know some of it," Simon said uncomfortably-

What a lot there was to know in the world! "It was a famous bat-

tle?"

"Of course!" Towser's eyes were bright- "John laid siege to Naar-

ved all through the winter. Jormgrun and his men never thought

that southerners, Erkynlanders, could survive the cruel Rimmere-

gard snows. They were sure that John would have to call off the

siege and retreat south. But John did iti Not only did they break

Naarved, but in the final storming John went over the wall of the

inner keep himself and got the porticullis openheld off ten men

until he could cut the guy rope. Then he broke Jormgrun's shield

and cut him down before his own heathen altar!"

"Really? And you were there?" Simon had heard this story, more

or less, but it was exciting to hear it from a firsthand witness.

"As good as. I was in John's camp; he took me everywhere with

him, my good old king."

"How did Isgrimnur get to be duke?"

"Ah." Towser's hand, which had been wringing the white scarf,

went in search of the wine jug and found it. "It was his father

Isbeom who was the first duke, you see. He was the first of the

pagan Rimmersgard nobles to become enlightenedto receive the

grace of Usires Adeon. His house was made by John the first house

of Rimmersgard. So Isbeom's son Isgrimnur is duke now, and a

more pious Aedonite you'd have a hard time finding."

"What happened to King Jorg-whatever-was-his-name*s sons?

Didn't any of them want to become Aedonites?"

"Oh," Towser waved his hand dismissively, "I think they all died

in the fighting."

"Hmmm." Simon sat back, pushing the confusing business of reli-

gion and paganism out of his mind to try and visualize the great

battle. "Did King John have Bright-Nail then?" he asked.

"Yes . . . yes, he did." Towser said. "God's Tree, he was a beau-

tiful man to watch in battle. Bright-Nail, it shone so brightly and

moved so quicklyjust a blur of steel it wasthat sometimes John

512 Tad Williams

looked like he was surrounded by beautifiil, holy silver light." The

old jester sighed.

"So who was the girl?" Simon asked.

Towser stared. "What girl?"

"The one who made the scarf for you."

"Oh!" Towser frowned, wrinkling. "Sigmar." He thought for sev-

eral long moments. "Well, you see, we did not leave for almost a

year. It's hard work administering a conquered country, you know,

hard work. Harder than fighting the damned war, it sometimes

seemed to me. She was a girl who cleaned the hall where the king

stayedwhere I stayed, too. She had hair the color of goldno,

lighter, it was almost white. I lured her in to me, just like taming a

wild colt: a kind word here, a bit of extra food for her family there-

Ah, she was a pretty one!"

"Did you want to marry her then?"

"I think I did. It's been many a long year, boy. I wanted to take

her with me, that's sure as sure. But she wouldn't go."

Neither spoke for a while- The storm winds moaned outside the

thick castle walls, like hounds forgotten by their master. Candle wax

dripped and sizzled.

"If you could go back," Simon said at last, '"if you could be there

again . . ." he struggled with the difficult idea, "would you . . .

would you let her get away a second time?"

There was no reply at first. Just when Simon was about to reach

up and give a gentle shake, the old man stirred and cleared his

throat.

"I don't know," Towser said slowly. "It seems as though God

made happen what He meant to happen, but we must have choices,

eh, boy? Without choices there's no good. I don't knowI don't

think I want to unwrap the past that much. Better the way it is,

choices right or wrong."

"But choices are so much easier afterward," Simon said, clamber-

ing to his feet. Towser stared fixedly into the wavering candleflame.

"I mean, at the moment you have to decide on things, you never

know enough. It's only later that you see everything."

He suddenly felt more tired than drunken, caught and tugged at

by a wave of fatigue. He gave thanks for the wine, then said good

night to the old jester and walked out into the deserted courtyard

and the slanting rain.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR513

**

Simon stood and knocked mud off his boots, watching Haestan

stump away across the damp, wind-lashed hillside. The cookfires of

the town below bled their smokes upward into the steely sky. Un-

wrapping the cloth padding from his sword, he watched the white

blades of sunlight that thrust down through the clouds on the north-

western horizon, shafts that might signify either the presence of a

brighter, better place beyond the storm, or only the impersonal play

of light, caring nothing for the world or its problems. Simon stared

upward, rolling the batting in his hands, but his mood remained

unchanged. He felt lonely. Standing amid the swaying grasses he

might as well have been a stone or the stump of a tree.

Binabik had come by that morning, the sound of his rap at the

door eventually cutting through Simon's wine-weighted sleep. He

had ignored the rapping and the troll's faint words until both

stopped, and he could roll back over and doze a little longer. He had

no wish to see the little man quite yet, and had been grateful for the

impersonal door between them.

Haestan had laughed callously at the greenish tinge Simon wore

to the guard barracks, and after promising to take him out sometime

soon for some real drinking, proceeded to sweat the vapors out of

him. Although at first Simon was convinced that his life was being

drained from him at the same time, after an hour or so he thought

he could feel his blood once more begin to flow through his veins.

Haestan worked him even harder than the day before, with cloth-

shrouded sword and padded buckler, but Simon was grateful for the

distraction: it was a luxury to submerge himself in the relentless,

pounding rhythm of sword on shield, of swipe and dodge and

counter-swipe.

Now, with the wind knifing though his sweat-sodden shirt, he

picked up his gear and started back up the slope to the main gate.

Trudging across the rain-puddled inner courtyard, dodging the

squad of guards in thick wool cloaks on their way out to relieve the

sentries, it seemed to him that all the color had been bled out of

Naglimund. The unhealthy trees, the gray capes of Josua's guards-

men, the priests' somber vestments, every object in his view could

have been hewn from stone; even the hurrying pages were only stat-

ues that had been given some sort of transitory life, but would even-

tually grind down into immobility again.

514

Tad Williams

As Simon toyed with, even enjoyed, these gloomy sentiments, his

attention was attracted by a gleam of color that suddenly appeared

across a long open courtyard, colors whose brightness leaped out

like a trumpet call on a quiet evening.

The extravagant silks belonged to three young women who had

swung out from an archway to skitter headlong, laughing, across the

open court. One wore red and gold, another a yellow like a field of

mown hay; the third had a long, shiny dress of dove-gray and blue.

It took him only a fraction of an instant to recognize the last as

Miriamele.

He was already walking toward the retreating threesome before

he knew what he was up to; a moment later he began to trot as they

disappeared under the long, columned walkway, the sound of their

talk floating back to him like a provocative scent to a chained mas-

tiff. Within thirty long paces he had caught up.

"Miriamele!" he said, and it came out of his mouth very loudly,

making him stop short in surprise and embarrassment. "Princess?"

he lamely tacked on as she turned. Recognition was pushed off her

face by another emotion that followed quickly behind, one that

looked to him terrify ingly like pity.

"Simon?" she questioned, but there was no corresponding doubt

in her eyes. They stood, three or four ells between them, facing each

other as though across a canyon. For a moment they only stared,

each waiting for the other's voice to cross the distance with the

proper reply. At last Miriamele said something short and quiet to

her two companions, whose faces Simon took no notice of, except to

register what he was sure was disapproval in their expressions; the

pair backed away, then turned and walked a short distance ahead.

tt! . . . I feel strange not calling you Marya . . . Princess." Si-

mon looked down at the mud splattered on his boottops, his grass-

stained pants, and instead of the shame he would have expected felt

a kind of strange, fierce pride. Perhaps he was a bumpkin; at least he

was an honest bumpkin.

The princess looked him over quickly, saving his face for last.

"I'm sorry, Simon. I didn't lie to you because I wanted to, but

because I had to." She unknotted her fingers to make a brief gesture

of helplessness. "I'm sorry."

"No ... no need to be sorry. It just . . . just . . ." he

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR515

searched for words, keeping his own hands resolutely clamped

around his scabbard, "it just makes things strange, I suppose."

Now he was looking her over. He decided that the beautiful dress

which, he noticed, was striped in green, perhaps in stubborn loy-

alty to her fatherboth added to the Marya he remembered, and

took something away as well. She looked good, he had to admit: her

fine, sharp features were now set, like a valuable stone, in a sub-

stance that showed them off properly. At the same time there was

something missing, something funny and earthy and careless in the

Marya who had shared his river journey and the terrifying night on

the Stile. There was not much to remind him of it in her subdued

face, but a hint still lurked in the close-shorn strands of hair that

showed at the neck of her cowl.

"Did you have your hair dyed black?" he asked at last.

She smiled shyly. "Yes. I decided a long time before I ran away

from the Hayholt what I needed to do. I cut my hair offit was very

long," she added proudly, "then I had a woman in Erchester make it

into a wig. Leieth brought it to me. I hid my cufhair beneath it,

which was dyed black so I could watch the men around my father

unrecognized, hear things I wouldn't otherwise hear . . . find out

what was going on."

Simon, despite his discomfort, was full of admiration for the girl's

cunning. "But why were you spying on me? I wasn't important."

The princess continued to twine and untwine her fingers. "I really

wasn't spying on you, not the first time. I was listening to an argu-

ment my father had with my uncle in the chapel. The other times

. . . well, I did follow you. I had seen you in the castle, on your

own, no one telling you what to do, where to be, who to smile at and

talk to ... I was envious."

"No one telling me what to do!" Simon grinned in spite of him-

self. "You never met Rachel the Dragon then, girl!" He caught him-

self. "Princess, I mean."

Miriamele, who had been smiling, too, again looked uncomfort-

able. Simon felt a surge of the anger that had bumed in him all

night. Who was she to be uncomfortable around him? Wasn't he the

one who had plucked her out of a tree? Didn't she rest her head on

his shoulder?

Yes, but that's a large part of the problem, isn 't it? he thought.

"I have to go." He hoisted the scabbard as though to show her

516 Tad Williams

some detail of its tooling. "I've been swording it all day. I'm sure

your lady friends are waiting for you." He started to turn, then

stopped and bent his knee to her. Her expression became, if any-

thing, more discomforted, more sad than before.

"Princess," he said, and walked away. He did not look back to see

if she watched him go. He held his head up, and his back was very

straight.

Binabik, wearing what looked like his good clothes, a white deer-

skin jacket and a necklace of bird skulls, met him on his way back to

the room. Simon greeted him coolly; he was secretly surprised to

find that where there had been a vast store of anger only hours

before, there now existed only a strange emptiness of spirit.

The troll waited as he scraped more mud from his boots at the

doorstep, then followed him into the room while he changed into the

other shirt Strangyeard had kindly left for him.

"I am sure you are now angry, Simon," Binabik began. "I am

wanting you to understand that I did not know about the princess

until Josua told me it the night before the last."

The priest's shirt was long, even on Simon's lank frame; he tucked

it into his breeches. "Why didn't you tell me?" he asked, pleased

with the light-headed, casual way he felt. There was no reason he

should let the little man's bad faith trouble him; he had been on his

own before.

"It was because a promise was made." Binabik looked very un-

happy. "I was agreeing before I knew to what. But it was only one

day you did not know and I didwould there have been much

difference made? She should have been telling you and me her own

self, that is my thinking."

There was truth to what the little man said, but Simon did not like

to hear Miriamele criticized, even though he himself blamed her for

vaster but more subtle crimes.

"It isn't important now," was all he said.

Binabik pulled a poorly-formed smile. "I am hoping that is so.

For now, the important thing is certainly the Raed. Your story

should be told, and I am thinking tonight will be the night. With

your departure you did not miss much, mostly Baron Devasalles

looking for assurances from Prince Josua, should the Nabbanai be

committing themselves to his side. But tonight . . ."

517

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

"I don't want to go." He rolled up the sleeves, which hung half-

way down over his hands. "I'm going to go see Towser, or maybe

Sangfugol." He fussed with a cuff. "Is the princess going to be

there?"

The troll looked concerned. "Who can say? But you are needed,

Simon. The Duke and his Rimmersgarders are here. They have ar-

rived less than an hour gone, cursing and dirty and with their horses

blowing froth. There will be discussion of important things tonight.'*

Simon stared at the floor. It would be simpler just to find the

harper and drink; it did seem to take one's mind off these kind of

problems. Doubtless there would be some of his new guardsmen

acquaintances who might be good company, too. They could all go

down to Naglimund-town, which he hadn't really seen yet. It would

be so much easier than sitting in that great room, that heavy room,

with the weight of decisions and danger upon them all. Let others do

the discussing, the worryinghe was only a scullion, and had been

out of his depth for too long. Wasn't that best? Wasn't it?

"I'll go,'* he said finally, "but only if I can decide whether I want

to talk or not."

"Agreed!" said Binabik, and offered a smile, but Simon was not in

the mood to dole one out in return. He pulled on his cloak, clean

now, but bearing the unmended scars of the road and the forest, and

let Binabik lead him away toward the great hall.

^

"This is it!" shouted Duke Isgrimnur ofElvritshalla. "What more

proof does anyone need! He will have all our lands soon enough!"

Isgrimnur, like his men, had not even taken time yet to shed his

traveling clothes. Water drizzled from his sodden cloak, pooling on

the stone floor. "To think that I once dandled such an unnatural

monster on my lap!" He clutched his chest apoplectically, looking to

his men for support. All but the expressionless, slit-eyed Einskaldir

nodded their heads in bleak commiseration.

"Duke!" Josua called out, raising his hand, "Isgrimnur, please, sit

down. You have been shouting since the moment you crashed

through the door, and I still do not understand what . . ."

"What your brother the king has done!?" Isgrimnur purpled, and

518 Tad Williams

looked as though he might grab the prince and throw him over a

broad knee. "He has stolen my land! He has given it to traitors, and

they have imprisoned my son! What more would you have him do to

be proved a demon?"

The assembled lords and generals, who had leaped to their feet

when the Rimmersmen came tumbling and shouting into the room,

began to drop back into the hard wooden chairs, muttering angrily,

steel sliding back into a dozen scabbards with a tuneful hiss.

"Must I ask your man to talk for you, good Isgrimnur?" Josua

asked. "Or will you be able to tell us what has happened?"

The old duke glared up the table at the prince for a moment, then

slowly lifted his hand and drew it across his face, as though to wipe

away the sweat. For a dangerous moment, Simon felt sure that Is-

grimnur would cry: the duke's red face crumpled into a mask of

helpless despair, his eyes those of a stunned animal. He took a step

backward and lowered himself into his seat. "He has given my land

to Skali Sharp-nose," he said at last, and as the bluster left Is-

grimnur's voice the hollowness rang clear. "I have nothing else, and

nowhere to go but here." He shook his head.

Ethelferth of Tinsett stood up, his broad face full of sympathy.

"Tell us what happened. Duke Isgrimnur," he said. "Here we all

share one grief or another, but we also share a long history of com-

radeship. We will be each other's sword and shield."

The duke looked over to him gratefully. 'Thank you. Lord

Ethelferth. You are a good comrade, and a good northern man." He

turned back to the others. "Forgive me. This is disgraceful, the way

I'm going on. It's also no damnable way to give news. Let me tell

you of some things you should know about." Isgrimnur picked up a

stray wine flagon and drained it. Several of the other men, anticipat-

ing a long story, called for their cups to be refilled.

"Much that has happened you will know, I am sure, since Josua

and many others here were aware already: I told Elias I would not

stay at his bidding in the Hayholt any longer, now while blizzards

killed my people and buried our towns, and while my young son

must rule the Rimmersmen in my stead. The king had resisted me

and resisted me for months, but finally said yes. I took my men and

started north.

"The first thing was that we were ambushed at Saint Hoderund's;

before we walked into the trap, the ambushers killed the keepers of

519

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

that holy place." Isgrimnur reached up and patted the wooden tree

swinging against his chest. "We fought them and they fled, escaping

when we were slowed by a freakish rainstorm."

"I had not heard this," Devasalles of Nabban said, fixing Is-

grimnur with a contemplative look. "Who ambushed you at the

abbey?"

"I do not know," the Rimmersman replied, disgusted. "Not a

single prisoner could we take, although we sent a fair lot of them

down the cold road to Hell. Some of them looked like Rimmers-

garders. At the time I was sure they were mercenariesnow I am

not so quick to think I know. One of my relatives fell to them.

"Secondly, while camped not far north of the Knock, we were set

upon by filthy Bukken, a great hive of them, and on open ground, no

less. A whole armed camp they attacked! We fought them off, too,

but not without great losses . . . Ham, Thrinin, Ute of Sae-

gard . . ."

"Bukken?" It was hard to tell if Devasalles' arched eyebrow was a

sign of surprise or contempt. "Are you telling me that your men

were attacked by the little people of legend, Duke Isgrimnur?"

"A legend in the south, maybe," Einskaldir sneered from his seat,

"a legend in the soft courts of Nabban; in the north we know them

as real, and keep our axes sharp."

Baron Devasalles bristled, but before he would launch an angry

reply, Simon felt a movement at his side, and a voice rang out.

"Misunderstanding and ignorance both north and south are hav-

ing in plenty," Binabik said, standing on his chair with one hand on

Simon's shoulder. "The Bukken, the diggers, are not extending then-

holes much past the northern borders of Erkynland, but what is

good fortune for those farther south should not be mistaken for

universal truth."

Devasalles openly gaped in amazement, and he was not the only

one. "And is this one of the Bukken themselves, come as emissary to

Erkynland? Now I have seen everything under the sun, and die

happy!"

"If I am the strangest thing you see before a year is out . . ."

Binabik began, when he was interrupted by Einskaldir, leaping out

of his seat to stand beside the startled Isgrimnur.

"It is worse than a Bukka!" he snarled. "It is a troll& hell-

520 Tad Williams

wight!" He tried to push past the duke's restraining arm. "What is

this stealer-of-babies doing here?"

"More good than you, you hulking and bearded idiot!" Binabik

snapped back; the assembly collapsed into general shouting and con-

fusion. Simon grabbed the troll's waist, as the little man had leaned

so far forward he threatened to tumble onto the wine-stained table.

At last Josua's voice could be heard above the clamor, calling an-

grily for order,

"Aedon's Blood, I will not have thisi Are you men or children?!

Isgrimnur, Binabik of Yiqanuc is here by my invitation. If your man

does not respect the rules of my hall, he may try the hospitality of a

tower cell! I wish an apology!" The prince tilted forward like a

stooping hawk, and Simon, clutching Binabik's jacket, was struck by

the resemblance to the dead High King. Here was Josua as he

should be!

Isgrimnur bowed his head. "I apologize for my liegeman, Josua.

He is hotheaded, and not broken to courteous company." The Rim-

mersman turned a fierce look on Einskaldir who sat down again,

muttering silently in his beard, eyes cast to the floor. "Our people

and the trolls are age-old enemies," the duke explained.

'The trolls of Yiqanuc are no one's enemy," Binabik replied,

more than a little haughtily. "It is the Rimmersmen who are so

frightened by our great size and strength that they attack wherever

they see useven in the hall of Prince Josua."

"Enough." Josua waved his hand in disgust. "This is no place for

the unstoppering of old bottles. Binabik, you will have your say.

Isgrunnur, you have a story yet to finish."

Devasalles cleared his throat. "One thing only let me say, Prince."

He turned to Isgrimnur. "Faced with the little man from . .

Yiqanuc? ... I find your story of Bukken easier to credit. Forgive

my doubting words, good Duke."

Isgrimnur's frown softened at the edges. "Say nothing of it,

Baron," he grumbled. "I have forgotten it, as I'm sure you've forgot-

ten Einskaldir's foolish speech."

The duke paused for a moment to marshall his scattered thoughts.

"Well, as I was saying, that was the strangeness of it all. Even in

the Frostmarch and the northern wastes the Bukken are scarce

and we are thankful to God it is so. For them to attack an armed

force of our size is simply unheard of. The Bukken are small," his

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR521

gaze lit briefly on Binabik, and slid off onto Simon. Arrested, the

duke frowned again, staring. "Small . . . they are small ... but

fierce, and dangerous when they attack in numbers." Shaking his

head, as if to banish Simon's disturbing familiarity, Isgrimnur

turned his attention back to the others gathered around the long,

looping table.

"After escaping the hole dwellers, and making our way here to

Naglimund, we quickly resupplied and headed north again. I was

anxious to see my home again, and my son and wife.

"The upper Wealdhelm Road and the Frostmarch Road are not

good places these days. Those of you whose lands are north of here

know what I mean without any more talk needed. We were happy to

see the lights of Vestvennby below us the night of the sixth day out.

"The next morning we were met before the gate by Storfot, Thane

of Vestvennbywhat you would call a baron, I supposeand a half-

hundred of his housecarls. But had he come to welcome his duke?

"Embarrassedand well he should be, the treacherous doghe

tells me that Elias has called me the traitor, and given my lands over

to Skali Sharp-nose. Storfot says that Skali wants me to surrender

myself, and he, Storfot, will take me to Elvritshalla where my son

Isom is already being held ... and that Skali will be fair and

merciful. Fair! Skali of Kaldskryke, who slew his own brother in a

drunken brawl! Would grant me mercy under my own roof!

"If my men hadn't held me back . . . if they hadn't . . ."Duke

Isgrimnur had to stop for a moment, twisting his beard in fretful

anger. "Well," he resumed, "you may guess I was all for disembow-

eling Storfot on the instant. Better to die with a sword in my guts, I

thought, then to bow to a pig like Skali. But, as Einskaldir pointed

out, best of all will be to take back my hall and make Skali eat steel."

Isgrimnur shared a brief, sour grin with his earl, then turned back

to the assembly and slapped his empty scabbard. "So, that I promise.

If I have to crawl on my old, fat belly all the way to Elvritshalla, I

swear by Dror's Hamm ... by Usires Aedon, I meanyour par-

don, Bishop AnodisI will be there to put my good sword Kvamir

a yard into his guts."

Gwythinn, prince of Hemystir, who had been unusually silent,

now pounded a fist on the table. His cheeks were flushed, but not,

Simon thought, just by wine, although the young Westerner had

been drinking that in plenty. "Good!" the prince said. "But see,

522 Tad Williams

Isgrimnur, see: it is not this Skali who is your greatest enemyno, it

is the king himself!"

A rumble went around the table, but this time it seemed mostly

one of approval. The idea of having one's lands taken away and

handed to a blood rival struck a deep and threatening spot in almost

everyone.

"The Hemystinnan speaks rightly!" shouted fat Ordmaer, heav-

ing his bulk up from his seat. "It is obvious that Elias only kept you

at the Hayholt so long in order for Skali to work his treachery. Elias

is the enemy behind it all."

"As he has worked through his only-too-wilhng tools, Guthwulf

and Fengbald and the others, to trample on the rights of most of you

here!" Gwythinn had the bit in his teeth now, and he was pulling

hard. "It is Elias who is reaching out to crush us all, until there is no

resistance to the reign of misfortune, until the rest of us are taxed

into poverty, or ground beneath the heels of Elias' knights. The

High King is the enemy, and we must act!"

Gwythinn turned to Josua, overlooking the proceedings like a

gray statue. "It is for you, Prince, to show us the lead. Your brother

doubtless has plans for us all, as he has shown so clearly with you

and Isgrimnuri Is he not our true, and most dangerous enemy?!"

*Wo/ He is not!"

The startling voice cracked like a drover's whip through Nag-

limund's great hall. Simon, with every other soul in the room,

whirled to see who had spoken. It was not the prince, who stood as

baffled as everyone else.

For a moment it seemed that the old man had materialized out of

the insubstantial air, so suddenly did he step forward from the shad-

ows into the glow of the wall sconce. He was tall, and almost impos-

sibly spare; the torchlight cast deep shadows in the hollows of his

cheeks, and beneath the bony ridge of his brow. He wore a cloak of

wolfskin, and his long white beard was tucked into his belt; to Simon

he looked like some wild spirit of the winter forest.

"Who are you, old man?" Josua called. Two of his guards stepped

forward to stand at either side of the prince's chair. "And how do

you come to be in our councils?"

"He is one of Ellas' spies!" hissed one of the northern lords, and

others echoed him.

Isgrimnur stood. "He is here because / brought him, Josua," the

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR523

duke growled. "He was waiting for us on our road to Vestvennby

knew where we were bound, and knew before we did that we would

return here. He said that one way or another he was coming to

speak to you."

"And that it would only be better for everyone if I arrived as soon

as was possible," the old man finished, fixing his luminous blue eyes

on the prince. "I have things of importance to tell youto tell you

all." He turned his disturbing gaze along the length of the table, and

the whispering ceased in its wake. "You may listen or not, that is

your choice . . . that is always the choice in matters like these."

"These are children's riddles, man," mocked Devasalles. "Who-

ever are you, and what do you know of the things we debate? In

Nabban," he smiled up at Josua, "we would send this old fool to the

Vilderivan Brothers, whose purview is the care of lunatics."

"We are not speaking of southern matters here, Baron," the old

man said, with a smile cold as a row of icicles, "though soon the

south, too, will feel chill fingers at its throat."

"Enough!" Josua cried. "Speak now, or I shall have you put in

chains as a spy indeed. Who are you, and what is your business with

us?!"

The old man nodded stiffly. "Your pardon. I am long out of prac-

tice with the ways of courts. Jarnauga is my name, late of

Tungoldyr."

"Jamauga!" Binabik said, climbing back onto his chair to peer at

the new arrival. "Amazing! Jamauga! Ho, I am Binabik! I was for

long apprenticing with Ookequk!"

The old man pinned the troll with his bright, steely eyes. "Yes. We

shall talk, and soon. But first I have business in this hall, with these

men." He stood straight, facing the prince's chair.

"King Elias is the enemy, I heard the young Hemystinnan say,

and I heard others echo him. You are all like mice, who speak in

hushed tones of the terrible cat, and dream in the walls of doing

away with him someday. Not a one of you realizes that it is not the

cat who is the problem, but the master who brought him in to kill

mice."

Josua leaned forward, displaying reluctant interest. "Are you say-

ing that Elias himself is someone's pawn? Who? That devil Pryrates,

I suppose?"

"Pryrates presumes to deviltry," the old man sneered, "but he is a

524 Tad Williams

child. I speak of one to whom the lives of kings are flitting moments

. . . one who will take away far more than your lands."

The men began to talk among themselves. "Has this mad monk

broken in upon us to lecture us on the works of the Devil?" one of

the barons cried. "It is no secret to us that the Arch-fiend uses men

for his purposes."

"I do not speak of your Aedonite master-demon," Jamauga said,

then turned his gaze back to the prince's tall chair. "I speak of the

true master-demon of Osten Ard, who is as real as this stone," he

squatted and slapped a palm on the floor, "and as much a part of

our land."

"Blasphemy!" someone shouted. "Throw him out!"

"No, let him speak!"

"Speak up, old man!"

Jamauga raised his hands. "I am not some mad, half-frozen holy

man come to save your imperiled souls." He pinched his mouth in a

bleak smile. "I come to you as one of the League of the Scroll, one

who has lived his life besideand spent that life watchingthe

deadly mountain called Stormspike. We of the League of the Scroll,

as the troll can confirm for you, have for long kept vigil while others

slept. Now I come to fulfill a vow made long-ago . . . and to tell

you things you will wish you had never heard."

A nervous silence fell over the hall as the old man walked across

the room and pushed open the door that led to the courtyard. The

howl of the wind, that had been only a dim moan, was loud in

everyone's ears.

"Yuven-mouth!" Jarnauga said. "It is only weeks till Midsummer!

Listen; can a king, even the High King, do this?/" A swirl of rain

blew past him like smoke. "There are fur-clad Hunen, giants,

a-hunting men in the Wealdhelm. Bukken crawl from the cold earth

to attack armed soldiers on the Frostmarch, and the forge fires of

Stormspike in the north bum all night long. I myself have watched

the glow against the sky, and heard the icy hammers falling! How do

you think Elias has caused all this? Do you not see that there is a

black, fell winter coming down on you out of all season, beyond all

your power of understanding?"

Isgrimnur stood again, round face pale, eyes squinting. "What

then, man, what? Are you saying, Udun One-Eye help me, that we

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR525

are fighting . . . the White Foxes out of old legends?" Behind him

was a chorus of whispered questions and shocked mumblings.

Jamauga stared at the duke, and his seamed face softened with an

expression that might have been pity, or sorrow. "Ah, Duke Is-

grimnur, bad as the White Foxeswho some know as the Noms

bad as they would be, it would be a boon to us if it were the whole

case. But I tell you that Utuk'ku, the queen of the Noms herself,

mistress of the dreadful mountain Sturmrspeik, is no more the guid-

ing hand than is Elias."

"Hold, man, just hold your tongue a moment." Devasalles leaped

up angrily, robes billowing. "Prince Josua, forgive me, but it is bad

enough this madman walks in and disrupts the council, stealing

away the floor with no explanation of who or what he is, but now, as

emissary for Duke Leobardis, I must waste my time listening to

northern bogey tales? This is insufferable!"

As the hubbub of argument rose again, Simon felt a strange, excit-

ing chill. To think that he and Binabik had been in the center of it

all, in the middle of a tale that would boggle anything Shem Horse-

groom could devise! But as he thought of the story he might tell

beside the fire one day, he remembered the muzzles of the Nom

hounds, and the pale faces in the dark mountain of his dreams, and

again, not for the first time or the last, wished desperately that he

was back in the Hayholt kitchen, that nothing had changed, that

nothing would ever change. . . .

Old Bishop Anodis, who had been watching the new arrival with

the keen, fierce gaze of a gull confronting a newcomer to his favorite

scavenging ground, arose.

"I must say, and I feel no shame in admitting it, that I have

thought very little of this . . . this Raed. Elias has perhaps made

mistakes, but His Holiness the Lector Ranessin has offered to medi-

ate, to try and find a way to bring peace between Aedonites, includ-

ing, of course, their honorable pagan allies," he nodded perfuncto-

rily in the direction of Gwythinn and his men, "but all I have heard

is talk of war, and the spilling of Aedonite blood in revenge for petty

insults."

"Petty insults?!" Isgrimnur fumed. "You call the theft of my

duchy a petty insult, Bishop? Let you come home to find your

church a ... a damned Hyrka stable, or a nest of trolls, and see if

you find it a 'petty insult'!"

526 Tad Williams

"Nest of trolls?!" said Binabik, rising.

"And this only proves my point," Anodis snapped, wielding the

Tree in his knotted hand as though it were a knife to hold off ban-

dits. "See, you shout at a churchman when he seeks to correct your

foolish ways." He drew himself up. "And now," he waved the Tree

at Jamauga, "now this . . . this . . . bearded hermit comes to tell

tales of witches and demons, and drive a wedge larger still between

the only sons of the High King! Who does that benefit, eh? Who does

this Jamauga serve, eh?" Red and shaking, the bishop collapsed into

his chair, taking the flagon of water his acolyte brought and drinking

thirstily.

Simon reached up and pulled on Binabik*s arm until his friend sat

down.

"I am still wanting an explanation for *nest of trolls,' " he growled

under his breath, but at Simon's frown he pursed his lips and was

silent.

Prince Josua sat staring for some time at Jamauga, who bore the

prince's eye as calmly as a cat.

**I have heard of the League of the Scroll," Josua said at last. "It

was not my understanding that its adherents tried to influence the

ways of rulers and states."

**I have not heard of this so-called League," Devasalles said, "and

I think it is time this strange old man told us who sends him, and

what it is that endangers usif it is not the High King as many here

seem to think it is."

"For once I agree with the Nabbanman," Gwythinn of Hemystir

called out. "Let Jarnauga tell us all, that we may decide whether to

believe him or drive him from the hall."

In the highest chair Prince Josua nodded. The old Rimmersman

looked around at the expectant features, then raised his hands in a

strange gesture, touching fingers to thumbs as though to hold a

slender thread before his eyes.

"Good," he said. "Good. Thus we are on the first steps of the

road, the only road that might possibly lead us out of the mountain's

black shadow." He spread his arms, as though drawing the invisible

thread out to great length, then opened his hands wide.

"The story of the League is only a small story," he began, "but it

fits inside a larger story." Again he walked to the door, which a page

had closed to keep the warmth in the high-raftered hall. Jamauga

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR527

touched the heavy frame. "We can close this door, but that does not

make the snow and hail go away. In the same manner, you can call

me madthat will not make he who menaces you go away, either.

He has waited five centuries to take back what he feels is his, and his

hand is colder and stronger than any of you can understand. His is

the larger story, inside which the tale of the League is nestled like an

old arrowhead stuck in a great tree, over which the bark has grown

thick until the arrow itself is hidden.

"The winter that is upon us now, the winter that has dethroned

summer from its rightful place, is his. It is the symbol of his power

as he reaches out and begins to shape things to his will."

Jamauga stared fiercely, and for a stretching moment there was

no sound but the wind's lonely singing beyond the walls.

"Who?" Josua asked at last. "What is the name of this thing, old

man?"

"I thought you might know. Prince," Jamauga replied. "You are

a man who has learned many things.

"Your enemy ... our enemy . . . died five hundred years ago;

the place where his first life ended lies beneath the foundations of the

castle where your life began. He is Ineluki ... the Storm King,"

33

From the Ashes

J

ofAsu^a

^

''STORIES within stories," Jamauga intoned, shucking off his wolf-

skin cloak. The firelight revealed the twining snakes that banded the

skin of his long arms. occasioning fresh whispers. "I cannot tell you

the story of the League of the Scroll without you first understanding

the fall of Asu'a. The end of King Eahlstan Fiskeme, he who con-

structed the League as a wall against darkness, cannot be separated

from the end of Ineluki, whose darkness is now upon us. Thus, the

stories are woven together, one strand upon the other. If you pull a

single thread away it is just thata single thread. I defy any man to

read a tapestry from a solitary strand."

As he spoke Jamauga ran slender fingers through his knotted

beard, smoothing it and arranging its great length as though it were

a kind of tapestry itself, and might lend some sense to his story.

"Long before men came to Osten Ard," he said, "the Sithi were

here- There is no man or woman who knows when they came, but

they did, traveling out of the east, out of the rising sun, until they

settled at last in this land.

"In Erkynland, on the site where the Hayholt now stands, they

made their greatest work of hands, the castle Asu'a. They delved

deep into the earth, laying its foundations into the very bones of

Osten Ard, then built walls of ivory and pearl and opal stretching up

higher than the trees, and towers that stood against the sky like the

masts of ships, towers from which all of Osten Ard could be seen,

and from which the sharp-eyed Sithi could watch the great ocean

bounding the western shore.

"For countless years they lived alone in Osten Ard, building their

fragile cities on the mountain slopes and in the deeps of the forest,

delicate hill-cities like icy flowers, and forest settlements like earth-

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR529

bound boats with many sails. But Asu'a was the greatest, and the

long-lived kings of the Sithi ruled there.

"When men first came, it was as simple herders and fishermen,

wandering over some long-vanished land bridge in the northern

wastes, fleeing some fearful thing behind them in the west, perhaps,

or merely looking for new grazing lands. The Sithi paid them no

more mind than they did the deer or the wild cattle, even when the

swift generations multiplied, and Man began to build himself stone

cities, and forge bronze tools and weapons. As long as they did not

take what was the Sithi's, and stayed on the lands the Erf-king had

allowed them, there was peace between the peoples.

"Even the empire of Nabban in the south, glorious in its arts and

its arms, that put all mortal men of Osten Ard beneath its long

shadow, caused no concern to the Sithi, or their king, lyu'unigato."

Here Jamauga looked about for something to drink, and as a page

filled a flagon for him the listeners exchanged looks and puzzled

murmurs.

"Doctor Morgenes told me about this," Simon whispered to

Binabik. The troll smiled and nodded, but appeared distracted by

thoughts of his own.

"There is no need, I'm sure," Jamauga resumed, his voice raised

to recapture the attention of the muttering throng, "to speak about

the changes that came with the first Rimmersmen. There will be old

wounds enough that shall be opened without dwelling on what hap-

pened when they found their way across the water, out of the west.

"But what must be spoken of is the march of King Fingil down

out of the north, and the fall of Asu'a. Five long centuries have

covered much of the story with the debris of time and ignorance, but

when Eahlstan the Fisher King chartered our League two hundred

years ago, it was to find and preserve such knowledge. Thus, there

are things I will now tell you that most of you have never heard.

"At the Battle of the Knock, and Ach Samrath Plain, and in the

Utanwashat one place and another Fingil and his armies tri-

umphed, and drew the noose tight around Asu'a. The Sithi lost their

last human allies at the Summerfield, Ach Samrath, and with the

Hemystiri routed there were none among the Sithi who could stand

against northern iron."

"Routed by treachery!" said Prince Gwythinn, red-faced and

trembling. "Naught but treachery could drive Sinnach from the field

530 Tad Williams

the corruption of the Thrithings-men, stabbing the Heraystiri in

the back in hopes of some crumbs from Fingil's bloody table!"

"Gwythinn!" Josua barked. "You have heard Jamauga: these are

old wounds. There is not even a Thrithings-man present. Would you

leap across the table and strike Duke Isgrimnur, since he is a Rim-

mersman?"

"Let him try," growled Einskaldir.

Gwythinn shook his head, abashed. "You are right, Josua.

Jaraauga, my apologies." The old man nodded, and Lluth's son

turned to Isgrimnur. "And of course, good Duke, we are here the

thickest of allies."

"No offense was taken, young sir," Isgrimnur smiled, but beside

him Einskaldir caught Gwythinn's eyes and two stared hard at each

other.

"So it was," Jamauga continued, as if there had been no interrup-

tion, "that in Asu'a, even though its walls were bound with old and

powerful magics, home and heart of the Sithi race though it was,

still there was a sense that things were at their ending, that the

upstart mortals would throw down the house of their elders, and

that the Sithi would pass from Osten Ard forever.

"lyu'unigato the king dressed himself all in mourning white, and

with his queen Amerasu spent the long days of Fingil's siegewhich

quickly became months, then years, for even cold steel could not

throw down the work of the Sithi overnightlistening to melan-

choly music, and the poetry of the Sithi's brighter days in Osten

Ard. From the outside, in the camps of the besieging northerners,

Asu'a still seemed a place of great power, wrapped tight in glamour

and sorceries . . . but inside the gleaming husk the heart was rot-

ting away.

"There was one among the Sithi, though, who wished it other-

wise, and was not content to spend his last days keening over lost

peace and ravaged innocence. He was lyu'unigato's son, and his

name was . . . Ineluki."

Without saying a word, but not without a good deal of noise,

Bishop Anodis was gathering his things together. He waved his

hand for his young acolyte, who helped him to his feet.

"Your pardon, Jamauga," Josua said. "Bishop Anodis, why are

you leaving us? As you can hear, there are dreadful things moving

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR531

against us. We look for your wisdom and the strength of Mother

Church to guide us."

Anodis looked up crossly. "And I should sit here, in the midst of

a war council I never approved of, and listen to this . . . this wild

man speaking the names of heathen demons? Look at you all

hanging on his words as though they were every one from the Book

of the Aedon."

"Those of whom I speak were born long before your holy book,

Bishop," said Jamauga mildly, but there was a fierce, combative tilt

to his head.

"It is fantasy," Anodis grunted. "You think me a sour old man,

but I tell you that such children's tales shall lead you into perdition.

The greater sadness, though, is that you may drag all our land down

with you."

He sketched the sign of the Tree before him like a shield, then

tottered out on the arm of the young priest-

"Fantasy or no, demons or Sithi," Josua said, rising from his chair

to survey the assembly, "this is my hall, and I have asked this man

to tell us what he knows. There will be no further interruptions." He

cast his eye about the shadowed room, then sat down, satisfied.

"Well you should attend now," Jamauga said, "for this is the

meat of what I bring you. I speak of Ineluki, son of lyu'unigato the

Eri-king.

"Ineluki, whose name means 'here is bright speech* in the Sithi

tongue, was the younger of the king's two sons. Together with his

older brother Hakatri he had fought the worm Hidohebhi the Black,

mother of the red worm Shurakai that Prester John slew, and

mother as well of Igjarjuk, the white dragon of the north."

"Your pardon, Jamauga?" One of Gwytbinn's companions stood.

'This is strange to us, but perhaps not all unfamiliar. We Hemystiri

know stories of a black dragon, the mother of all worms, but in them

she was called Drochnathair."

Jamauga nodded, as a master at a pupil. "That was her name

among the first men in the west, long before Hem built the Taig at

Hemysadharc. Thus do bits and pieces of older truth survive in the

stories children hear in their beds, or soldiers and hunters share

around a campfire. But Hidohebhi was her Sithi name, and she was

more powerful than either of her children. In the killing of her,

which itself became a long and famous story, Ineluki's brother

532 Tad Williams

Hakatri was horribly wounded, burned by the worm's terrible fires.

There was no cure for his injuries or their unending pain in all of

Osten Ard, but neither did he die. At last the king had him put in a

boat with his most trusted servant, and they passed away over the

ocean toward the West, where the Sithi hoped there was a land

beyond the setting sun, a place without pain, where Hakatri might

be whole again.

"Thus Ineluki, despite the great deed of slaying Hidohebhi, be-

came his father's heir under the shadow of Hakatri's fall. Blaming

himself, perhaps, he spent long years in the pursuit of knowledge

that likely should have been barred to man and Sithi alike. At first

he may have thought that he could make his brother well, bring him

back from the uncharted west . . . but as with all such quests, soon

the search became its own reason and reward, and Ineluki, he whose

beauty had once been the silent music of the palace of Asu'a, became

more and more a stranger to his people, a searcher in dark places.

'"So it was that when the men of the north rose up, pillaging and

slaying, to encircle Asu'a at last in a ring of poisonous iron, Ineluki

was the one who set his mind to defeating the trap.

"In the deep caverns below Asu'a, lit by cunning mirrors, grew

the witchwood gardens, the place where the Sithi tended the trees

whose strange wood they used as the southern men used bronze, and

as the northerners used iron. The witchwood trees, whose roots,

some say, reached down into the very center of the earth, were

tended by gardeners as sacred as priests. Every day they spoke the

old spells and performed the unchanging rituals that made the

witchwood thrive, as the king and his court in the palace above sank

more and more into despair and forgetfulness.

"But Ineluki had not forgotten the gardens, nor had he forgotten

the dark books he had read, and the shadowy paths he had walked

in search of wisdom. In his chambers, where none of the others

came anymore, he began a task that he thought would be the saving

of Asu'a and the Sithi.

"Somehow, causing himself great pain, he procured black iron,

which he gave to the witchwood trees as a monk waters his vines.

Many of the trees, no less sensitive than the Sithi themselves, sick-

ened and died, but one survived.

"Ineluki wove this tree 'round with spells, with words older per-

haps than the Sithi, and charms that reached down farther even than

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR533

the witchwood's roots. The tree grew strong again, and this time

poisonous iron ran through it like blood. The caretakers of the sa-

cred garden, seeing their charges blighted, fled. They told lyu'uni-

gato the king, and he was concerned, but seeing as he did the end of

all things, would not stop his son. What use was witchwood now,

with bright-eyed men all around, and deadly iron in their hands?

*The growing of the tree sickened Ineluki, even as it did the

gardens themselves, but his will was stronger than any illness. He

persevered, until at last it was time to reap the sought-for harvest.

He took his dreadful planting, the witchwood all shot through with

baleful iron, and went up into the forges of Asu'a.

"Haggard, sick to madness, yet full of grim resolve, he watched

the master smiths of Asu'a flee before him and did not care. By

himself he heated the forge fires hotter than they had ever been;

alone he chanted the Words of Making, all the while wielding the

Hammer That Shapes, which none but the High Smith had ever held

before.

"Alone in the red-lit depths of the forge he made a sword, a

terrible gray sword whose very substance seemed to breathe dismay.

Such hideous, unholy magics did Ineluki call up during its forging

that the very air of Asu'a seemed to crackle with heat, and the walls

swayed as though struck by giant fists.

"He took the new-forged sword, then, into his father's great hall,

thinking to show his people the thing that would save them. Instead,

so terrible was his aspect, and so distressing was the gray sword,

shining with an almost unbearable light, that the Sithi ran in horror

from the hall, leaving only Ineluki and his father lyu'unigato."

In the deepening hush that surrounded Jamauga's words, a quiet

so profound that even the fire seemed to have stopped sputtering, as

though it, too, held its breath, Simon felt the hairs on his neck and

arms stand upright, and a strange dizziness creep though him.

A . . . sword! A gray sword! I can see it so clearly! What does it

mean? Why does the thought stick in my head? He scratched hard at

his scalp with both hands, as though in his pain he might shake the

answer loose.

"When the Eri-king at last saw what his son had made, he must

have felt his heart turn to ice in his chest, for the blade Ineluki held

534 Tad Williams

was no mere weapon, but a blasphemy against the earth that had

yielded both iron and witchwood. It was a hole in the tapestry of

creation, and life leaked away through it.

" 'Such a thing should not be,' he told his son. 'Better that we

should go into the forgetful void, better that the mortals gnaw on

our bonesbetter even that we had never lived at all than such a

thing should ever be made, let alone used.'

"But Ineluki was maddened with the power of the thing, and

horribly tangled in the spells that created it. 'It is the one weapon

that will save us!' he told his father. 'Otherwise these creatures, these

insects, will swarm over the face of the land, destroying as they go,

obliterating beauty they cannot even see or comprehend. It is worth

any price to prevent thati*

" 'No,' said lyu'unigato, 'No. Some prices are too great. Look at

you! Even now it has worn your mind and heart away. I am your

king, as well as your sire, and I command you to destroy it, before it

devours you utterly.'

"But to hear his father demand such a thing, the unmaking of

what he had nearly died a-forgingand only done, as he thought, to

save his people from final darknessdrove Ineluki past all caring. In

that moment he lifted the sword and struck his father down, killing

the king of the Sithi.

"Never before had such a thing been done, and when Ineluki saw

lyu'unigato lying before him he wept and wept, not only for his

father, but also for himself, and his people. At last he lifted the gray

sword up before his eyes. 'From sorrow have you come,' he said,

*and sorrow you have brought with you. Sorrow shall be your

name.' Thus he named the blade Jingizu, which is the word in Sithi-

tongue."

Sorrowa sword named Sorrow . . . Simon heard it in his mind

as an echo, bouncing back and forth through his thoughts until it

seemed it would drown out Jamauga's words, the storm outside,

everything. Why did it sound so terribly familiar? Sorrow . . .

Jingizu . . . Sorrow . . .

"But the story does not end there," the northerner said, his voice

gaining strength even as its spell flung a pall of unease over the

listening company. "Ineluki, more maddened than ever by what he

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR535

had done, nevertheless took up his father's crown of white

birchwood and proclaimed himself king. So stunned were his family

and folk by the murder that they had no stomach to resist him.

Some actually welcomed the change in secret, five in particular who,

like Ineluki, had been angered by the idea of passive surrender to the

surrounding mortals.

"Ineluki, with Sorrow in his hand, was a force unbridled. With his

five servantswhom the terrified and superstitious northerners

named the Red Hand for their number and fire-colored cloaks

Ineluki took the battle outside the walls of Asu'a, for the first time in

almost three years of siege. Only the sheer numbers, the iron-wield-

ing thousands of FingiTs horde, prevented the night-terror that In-

eluki had become from breaking the siege. As it was, if the other

Sithi had rallied behind them it could be that Sithi kings would still

walk the battlements of the Hayholt.

"But Ineluki's people had no will left to fight. Frightened of then-

new king, horrified by his murder of lyu'unigato, they instead took

advantage of the mayhem caused by Ineluki and his Red Hand to

flee Asu'a, led by Amerasu the queen and Shima'onari, son of In-

eluki's dragon-doomed brother Hakatri. They escaped into the dark

but protective ways of Aldheorte forest, hiding from the blood-mad

mortals and their own king.

"Thus it was that Ineluki found himself left with little more than

his five warriors in the guttering skeleton of Asu'a. Even bis power-

ful magics had proved too little at the end to withstand the sheer

numbers ofFingiTs army. The northern shamans spoke their weirds,

and the last protective magics fell away from the age-old walls. With

pitch and straw and torches the Rimmersmen set the delicate build-

ings to burning. As the smoke and licking flames rose, the northern-

ers routed out the last of the Sithithose who had been too weak or

timid to flee, or who had felt too much loyalty to their immemorial

home. In those fires Fingil's Rimmersmen did terrible deeds; the

remaining Sithi had little strength left to resist. Their world had

come to an end. The cruel murders, the heartless tortures and rav-

ishings of unresisting victims, the laughing destruction of a thousand

exquisite and irreplaceable thingswith all these Fingil Redhand's

army put his crimson stamp on our history, and left a stain that can

never be removed. Doubtless those who had fled to the forest heard

the screams and shuddered, and wept to their ancestors for justice-

536 Tad Williams

"In this last, most fatal hour Ineluki took his Red Hand and

climbed to the summit of the tallest tower. He had decided, it seems

clear, that what the Sithi could no longer inhabit would never be the

home of men.

"That day he spoke words more terrible than any he had spoken

before, more baleful by far than even those which had helped bind

the substance of Sorrow. As his voice boomed out above the confla-

gration, Rimmersmen fell screaming in the courtyard, faces blacken-

ing and with blood running from their eyes and ears. The chanting

rose to an intolerable pitch, and then became a vast scream of agony.

A huge flash of light turned the sky white, followed a moment later

by a darkness so complete that even Fingil, in his tent a mile away,

thought he had been struck blind.

"But, in some way, Ineluki had failed. Asu'a still stood, and still

burned, although now much of FingiPs army lay waning and dying

on the ground at the tower's base. In the tower top itself, strangely

untouched by smoke or flame, the wind sifted six piles of gray ash,

scattering them slowly across the floor."

Sorrow . . . Simon's head was whirling, and he had difficulty

drawing breath. The torchlight seemed to be flickering wildly. The

hillside. I heard the wagon wheels . . . they brought Sorrow/ I re-

member it was like the Devil in a box . . . the heart of all sorrow.

"So Ineluki died. One of FingiTs lieutenants, as he breathed his

last breath minutes later, swore that he had seen a great form billow-

ing out of the tower, crimson as coals in a fire, writhing like smoke,

grasping at the sky like a huge red hand ..."

"Nooooo!" Simon shouted, leaping up. A hand reached up to re-

strain him, then another, but he shook them off as though they were

cobwebs. "They brought the gray sword, the horrible sword! And

then I saw him! I saw Ineluki! He was ... he was . . . '

The room was wobbling back and forth, and staring facesIs-

grimnur, Binabik, the old man Jamaugaloomed up before him

like fish leaping in a pond. He wanted to say more, to tell them all

about the hillside and the white demons, but a black curtain was

being pulled before his eyes, and something was roaring in his

ears. . . .

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR537

*

Simon ran in dark places, and his only companions were words in

the emptiness.

Mooncalf! Come to us! There is a place here prepared for you!

A boy! A mortal child! What did it see, what did it see?

Freeze his eyes and carry him down into shade. Cover him with

clinging, stinging frost.

A shape loomed before him, an antler-headed shadow massive as

a hill. It wore a crown of pale stones, and its eyes were red fires. Red

was its hand, too, and when it clutched and lifted him the fingers

burned like fiery brands. White faces flickered up all around, waver-

ing in the darkness like candle flames.

The wheel is turning, mortal, turning, turning . . . Who are you

to stop it?

A fly he is, a little fly . . .

The crimson fingers squeezed, and the fiery eyes glowed with dark

and infinite humor. Simon screamed and screamed, but was an-

swered only by pitiless laughter.

He awoke from a strange swirl of chanting voices and clutching

hands to find his dream mirrored in the circle of faces that bent over

him, pale in the torchlight as a fairy ring of mushrooms. Beyond the

blurry faces the walls seemed lined with points of glinting light,

mounting up into the darkness above.

"He's waking up," a voice said, and suddenly the glimmering

points came clear as rows of pots hanging on racks. He was lying on

the floor of a pantry.

"Doesn't look good," said a deep voice nervously. "I'd best get

him some more water."

"I'm sure he'll be fine if you want to go back inside," the first

voice replied, and Simon felt himself squinting and goggling until

the face that went with it was no longer a blur. It was Maryano, it

was Miriamele, kneeling beside him; he couldn't help noticing how

the hem of her dress lay crumpled beneath her on the dirty stone

floor.

"No, no," the other said: Duke Isgrimnur, pulling nervously at

his beard.

"What . . . happened?" Had he fallen and struck his head? He

538

Tad Williams

reached up to fell gingerly around, but the soreness was general, and

there was no lump.

"Keeled over, you did, boy," Isgrimnur grunted. "Shouting about

- . . about things you saw. I carried you out here, fair busted a gut

doing it, too."

"And then stood there staring at you lying on the floor," said

Miriamele, her voice stem. "It's a good thing I was coming in." She

looked up at the Rimmersman. "You fight in battles, don't you?

What do you do when somebody's woundedstare at them?"

"That's different," the Duke said defensively- "Bandage 'em if

they're bleeding. Carry 'em back on their shields if they're dead."

"Well, that's clever," Miriamele snapped, but Simon saw a secret

smile tug at her lips. "And if they're not bleeding or dead, I suppose

you just step over them? Never mind." Isgrimnur closed his mouth

and tugged at his beard.

The princess continued to wipe Simon's forehead with her damp-

ened handkerchief. He couldn't imagine what good it was doing, but

for the moment he was content to just he back and be tended to. He

knew that soon enough he would have to explain himself to some-

body.

"I ... I knew I recognized you, boy." Isgrimnur said at last.

"You were the lad at Saint Hoderund's, am I right? And that troll

... I thought I saw . . ."

The pantry door opened wider. "Ah! Simon! I hope you are feel-

ing more of yourself now."

"Binabik," Simon said, straining to sit up. Miriamele gently but

firmly leaned on his chest, forcing him back down. "I did see it, I

did! That was what I couldn't remember! The hillside, and the fire,

and . . . and . . ."

"I know, friend Simon, I was understanding many things when

you stood upnot all things, however. There is still much unex-

plained in this fiddle."

"They must think I'm a madman," Simon groaned, pushing the

princess' hand away, but nevertheless enjoying the moment of con-

tact. What was she thinking? Now she was looking at him like a

grown girl looked at a troublesome younger brother. Damn girls and

women both!

"No, Simon," Binabik said, crouching down beside Miriamele to

look him over carefully. "I have been telling many stories, our ad-

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR539

venturing together not least among them. Jamauga has confirmed

much that my master was hinting at. He also received one of

Morgenes' last messages. No, you are not thought mad, although I

think still many are doubting the real danger. Baron Devasalles

especially, I am thinking."

"Ummm," Isgrimnur scuffed a boot on the floor. "If the lad's

hale, I think I'd better go back in. Simon, was it? Yes, well . . . you

and I, we'll talk more." The duke maneuvered his considerable bulk

out of the narrow pantry and clumped off down the hall.

"And I will be going in, too," Miriamele said, briskly chasing the

worst of the dust from her dress. "There are things that should not

be decided before I have been heard, whatever my uncle thinks."

Simon wanted to thank her, but could think of nothing to say

while lying on his back that would not make him feel more ridicu-

lous than he presently did. By the time he decided to throw over bis

pride, the princess had gone in a swirl of silks.

"And if you are recovered to sufficiency, Simon," Binabik said,

extending a small, blunt hand, "then there are things we must hear

in the council hall, for I am thinking Naglimund has never seen a

Read quite the like of this one."

"First of all, young one," Jamauga said, "while I believe all that

you have told us, you must know that it was not Ineluki you saw on

that hillside." The fires had burned down to dreaming coals, but not

a soul had left the hall. "If you had seen the Storm King, in the form

he must now wear, it would have left you a blasted, mindless shell

lying beside the Anger Stones. No, what you sawbeside the pale

Norns and Elias and his liegemenwas one of the Red Hand. Even

so, it seems miraculous to me that you came away from such a

night-vision whole in heart and mind."

"But . . . but . . ." As he began to remember what the old man

had been saying just before the wall of forgetfulness had crumbled,

spilling the memories of that horrible nightStoning Night, the

doctor had called itSimon was again puzzled and confused. "But I

thought you said Ineluki and his ... Red Hand . . . were dead?"

"Dead, yes; their earthly forms burnt away utterly in the last

scorching moments. But something survived: there was someone or

something that was able to recreate the sword Sorrow. Somehow

and it did not need your experience to tell me, for this is indeed why

540

Tad Williams

the League of the Book was madeIneluki and his Red Hand sur-

vived: as living dreams or thoughts, perhaps, shades held together

only by hate, and by the terrible runes of Ineluki's last casting. But

somehow the darkness that was Ineluki's mind at the very ending

did not die-

"King Ealhstan Fiskeme came three centuries later to the

Hayholt, the castle that stood upon the bones of Asu'a. Ealhstan

was wise, and a seeker after knowledge, and he found things in the

ruins beneath the Hayholt that made him aware that Ineluki had not

been completely unmade. He formed the League of which I am a

memberand we are dwindling fast now, with the loss of Morgenes

and Ooqequkso that old knowledge would not be lost. Not only

knowledge of the Sithi's dark lord, but other things, too, for those

were evil times in the north of Osten Ard. Over the years it was

discovered, or rather guessed at, that somehow Ineluki, or his spirit

or shade or living will, had become manifest again among the only

ones who might welcome him."

"The Noms!" Binabik said, as if suddenly a bank of fog had been

swept away before him.

'The Noras," Jaraauga agreed. "I doubt that at first even the

White Foxes knew what he had become, but soon his influence in

Sturmrspeik was doubtless too great for anyone to say him nay. His

Red Hand, too, has come back with him, although in no form seen

before on this earth."

"And we had thought that the Loken worshiped by the Black

Rimmersmen was only our own fire god, from heathen days," said

Isgrimnur, wondering. "If I had known how far they had strayed

from the path of light . . ." He brushed his fingers against the Tree

that hung upon his neck. "Usires!" he breathed softly.

Prince Josua, who had been listening silently for a long while,

leaned forward. "Buy why, if it is indeed this demon out of the past

who is our truest enemy, does he not show himself? Why does he

play at cat's-paw with my brother Elias?"

"Now we are coming to the place where my long years of study

atop Tungoldyr cannot be helpful," Jarnauga shrugged. "I watched,

and I listened, and I watched, for that was what I was there to do

but what goes on in the mind of such as the Storm King is more

than I can guess at."

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

541

Ethelferth of Tinsett stood and cleared his throat. Josua nodded

for him to speak.

"If all this is true . . . and my head is a-swimming with it all, I

tell you ... then maybe . . . / can guess at the last." He looked

around, as though expecting to be shouted down for his presump-

tuousness, but seeing in the faces around him only worry and confu-

sion, he cleared his throat again and went on. "The Rimmersman,"

he tilted his head toward old Jarnauga, "said that it was our own

Ealhstan Fiskeme who was first a-noticing that this Storm King had

come back. That was three hundred years after Fingil took the

Hayholtor whatever was its name then. It's been nigh two hun-

dred year since. It sounds to me as though this . . . demon, I sup-

pose, has taken a long time to get strong again.

"Now," he continued, "we all know, we men that've held land in

the midst of greedy neighbors," he snuck a sly look over at

Ordmaer, but the fat baron had gone quite pale some time before,

and seemed insensible to innuendo, "that the best way to keep your-

self safe, and purchase yourself time to grow strong, is to have your

neighbors fight each other. Seems to me that's what's going on here.

This Rimmersgard demon gives Elias a present, then gets him

a-fighting with his barons and dukes and such." Ethelferth looked

around, hitched his tunic and sat down.

"It's not a 'Rimmersgard demon,'" Einskaldir growled. "We're

shriven Aedonite men."

Josua ignored the northerner's comment. "There is truth to what

you say. Lord Ethelferth, but I think those who know Elias will

agree that he also has designs of his own."

"He didn't need any Sithi demon to steal my land," Isgrimnur

said bitterly.

"Nevertheless," Josua continued, "I find Jarnauga, and Binabik of

Yiqanuc . . . and young Simon, who was Doctor Morgenes' ap-

prentice ... all too uncomfortably trustworthy. I wish I could say

I did not believe these tales, I am not sure yet what I believe, but

neither can I discount them." He turned to Jarnauga again, who was

prodding at the nearest fire with an iron poker. "If these dire warn-

ings you bring are true, then tell me one thing: what does Ineluki

want?"

The old man stared into the fire, then poked it again vigorously.

"As I said. Prince Josua, my task was to be the League's eyes. Both

542

Tad Williams

Morgenes* and young Binabik's master knew more than I of what

might lurk in the mind of the Master of Stormspike." He raised a

hand as if to ward off more questions. "If I had to guess, it would be

to say this: think of the hatred that kept hieluki alive in the void,

that brought him back from the fires of his own death . , ."

"What Ineluki wants then," Josua's voice fell heavily in the dark,

breathing hall, "is revenge?"

Jarnauga only stared into the embers.

**There is much to think on," the master of Naglimund said, "and

no decisions to be lightly made." He stood up, tall and pale, slender

face a mask before his hidden thoughts. "We shall return here to-

morrow sunset." He went out, with a gray-cloaked guard on either

side.

In the hall men turned to look at each other, then rose, clustering

in small silent groups. Simon saw Miriamele, who had never had her

chance to speak, go out between Einskaldir and the limping Duke

Isgrimnur.

"Come, Simon," Binabik said, tugging at his sleeve. "I think I will

be letting Qantaqa run, now the rains have gentled some. Of such

things we must take advantage. At this point I have still not been

robbed of my liking for thinking as I walk with wind in my face

. . . and there is much that I should be thinking."

"Binabik," Simon said at last, the shocking wearying day sitting

heavily upon him. "Do you remember the dream I had ... we all

had ... in Geloe's house? Stormspike . . . and that book?"

"Yes," said the little man gravely. "That is one of the things I am

worrying with. The words, the words you saw, they catch at me. I

am fearing there is a dreadfully important riddle in them."

"Du . . . Du Swar . . ." Simon struggled with his muddled

memories. "Du . . ."

"Du Svardenvyrd, it was," Binabik sighed. "The Weird of the

Swords.

The hot air beat painfully on Pryrates' hairless and unprotected

face, but he would allow no discomfort to show on his features. As

he strode across the foundry floor, robes flapping, he was gratified to

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR543

see the workmen, themselves masked and heavily cloaked, stare and

flinch at his passing. Buoyant in the pulsing forge light, he chuckled

as he briefly fancied himself an arch-demon striding the tiles of Hell,

petty underdevils scattering before him.

A moment later the mood fell away, and he scowled. Something

had happened to that little wretch of a wizard's boyPryrates knew

it. He had felt it as clearly as if someone had jabbed him with some

sharp thing. There was some strange, tenuous bond still between

them from Stoning Night; it bit at him, and gnawed at his concen-

tration. That night's business had been too important, too dangerous

to bear any kind of interference. Now the boy was thinking of that

night again, probably telling all he knew to Lluth, or Josua, or some-

one. Something serious needed to be done about that nasty, prying

boy.

He stopped before the great crucible and drew himself up, arms

folded upon his chest. He stood that way for no little while, already

angry, growing angrier at the wait. At last one of the foundrymen

hurried up and clumsily bent a thick-breeched knee before him.

"How can we serve you. Master Pryrates?" the man said, voice

muffled by the damp cloth wrapped across his lower face.

The priest stared silently long enough to change the man's par-

tially-revealed expression from discomfort to real fear.

"Where is your overseer?" he hissed.

"There, Father." The man pointed to one of the dark openings in

the foundry-cavern wall. "One of the crank wheels be gone on the

winch . . . your Eminence."

Which was gratuitous, since he was still officially no more than a

priest, but the sound of it was not mhannonious-

"Well . . . ?" Pryrates asked. The man did not respond, and

Pryrates kicked him hard on his leather-clad shin. "Get him, then!"

he shrilled.

With a head-wagging bow the man limped off, moving like a tod-

dling child in the padded clothes. Pryrates was aware of the beads of

sweat forming on his brow, and of the mmace-spewed air that

seemed to bake his lungs from the inside, but nevertheless a brief

grin stretched his spare features. He had felt worse things: God . . .

or Whoever . . . knew he had faced worse.

At last the overseer came, huge and deliberate. His height, when

544 Tad Williams

he finally shambled to a halt and stood looming over Pryrates, was

almost enough in itself to be regarded as an insult.

"I suppose you know why I've come?" the priest said, black eyes

glittering, mouth taut with displeasure.

"About the engines," the other replied, voice quiet but childishly

petulant.

"Yes about the siege engines!" Pryrates snapped. *Take off that

damned mask, Inch, so I can see you when I speak to you."

The overseer reached up a bristle-haired paw and peeled back the

cloth. His ruined face, rippled with bum scars around the empty

right eye socket, reinforced the priest's sensation that he stood m

one of the anterooms of the Great Inferno.

"The engines are not finished," Inch said stubbornly. "Lost three

men when the big one collapsed Drorsday-last. Slow going."

"I know they're not finished. Get more men. Aedon knows there

are enough slagging about the Hayholt. We'll put some of the nobles

to work, let them get a few blisters on their fine hands. But the king

wants them finished. Now. He's going into the field in ten days. Ten

days, damn youl"

Inch's one eyebrow slowly rose, like a drawbridge. "Naglimund.

He's going to Naglimund, isn't he?" There was a hungry light in his

eye.

"That's not for such as you to worry about, you scarred ape,"

Pryrates said contemptuously. "Just have them finished! You know

why you were given this loftier placebut we can take it

back. . . ."

Pryrates could feel Inch's stare on him as he walked away, could

feel the man's stonelike presence in the smoky, nickering light. He

wondered again whether it had been wise to let the brute live, and if

not, whether he should rectify the error.

The priest had reached one of the broad stairheads, with hallways

leading left and right, and the next flight of steps ahead, when a dark

figure abruptly slid from the shadows.

"Pryrates?"

The priest, whose nerves were such that he might not have cried

out if struck with an axe, nevertheless felt his heart quicken.

"Your majesty," he said evenly.

Elias, in unintended mockery of the foundrymen below, wore his

THE DRAOONBONE CHAIR545

black cloak-hood pulled close around his face. He went that way

always these days, at least when he left his chambersjust as he

always wore the scabbarded sword. The gaining of that blade had

brought the king power such as few mortals had ever had, but it had

not come without a price. The red priest was wise enough to know

that the reckoning of such bargains was a very subtle science.

"I ... I cannot sleep, Pryrates."

"Understandable, my king. There are many burdens on your

shoulders."

"You help me ... with many. Have you been seeing to the siege

engines?"

Pryrates nodded, then realized the hooded Elias might not see it

in the dark stairwell. "Yes, sire. I would like to roast Inch, that pig

of an overseer, over one of his own fires. But we will have them, sire,

somehow."

The king was silent for a long while, stroking the hilt of the

sword. "Naglimund must be crushed," Elias said at last. "Josua

defies me."

"He is no longer your brother, sire, he is only your enemy,"

Pryrates said.

"No, no . . ." Elias said slowly, thinking deeply. "He is my

brother. That is why he cannot be allowed to defy me. That seems

obvious to me. Is it not obvious, Pryrates?"

"Of course, your Majesty."

The king pulled his cloak tighter around him, as though to keep

out a cold wind, but the air that billowed up from below was thick

with the heat of the forges.

"Have you found my daughter yet, Pryrates?" Elias asked sud-

denly, looking up. The priest could faintly see the eye-gleam and

shadow of the king's face in the cavern of his hood.

"As I told you, sire, if she is not gone to Nabban, to her mother's

family thereand our spies do not think sothen she is at Nag-

limund with Josua."

"Miriamele." The exhaled name drifted down the stone stairwell.

"I must have her back. I must!" The king extended an open hand,

slowly closing it into a fist before him. "She is the one piece of good

flesh I shall save from the broken shell of my brother's house. The

rest I shall tread into dust."

546 Tad Williams

"You have the strength now, my king," Pryrates said. "And you

have powerful friends."

"Yes." The High King nodded slowly. "Yes, that is true. And

what of the huntsman Ingen Jegger? He has not found my daughter,

but neither has he returned. Where is he?"

"He still hunts the wizard's boy, Majesty. It has become some-

thing of a . . . grudge," Pryrates waved his hand, as though trying

to banish the uncomfortable memory of the Black Rimmersman.

"A great deal of effort, it seems to me, has been spent trying to

find this boy who you say knows a few of our secrets." The king

frowned and spoke harshly. "I wish as much trouble had been ex-

pended on my own flesh and blood. I am not pleased." For a mo-

ment his shadowed eyes glinted angrily. He turned to go, then

stopped.

"Pryrates?" The king's voice had changed again.

"Yes, sire?"

"Do you think I shall sleep better . . . when Naghmund is

thrown down, and I have my daughter back?"

"I am sure, my king."

"Good. I shall enjoy it even more, knowing that."

Elias slipped away, up the shadowed corridor. Pryrates did not

move, but listened as the king's retreating footsteps blended with the

hammers of Erkynland, whose clangor sounded monotonously in

the deeps below.

34

Forgotten Swords

VORZHEVA was angry. The brush trembled in her hand, and the red

line trailed onto her chin.

"See what I have done!" she said, irritation thickening her heavy

Thrithings accent. "You are cruel to rush me." She blotted her

mouth with a kerchief and began again.

"By the Aedon, woman, there are more important matters afoot

than your lip-painting." Josua stood up and resumed his pacing.

"Do not speak so to me, sir! And do not walk like that behind

me . . ." she waved her hand, searching for words, ". . . to and

fro, to and fro. If you must throw me out into the corridor like a

camp follower, at least I will first make myself ready."

The prince picked up a fire iron, then stooped to poke at the coals.

"You are not being 'thrown into the corridor,* my lady."

"If I am your lady," Vorzheva scowled, "then why may I not

stay? You are ashamed of me."

"Because we will speak of things that are not your concern. If you

have not noticed, we are preparing for war, I'm sorry if that incon-

veniences you." He grunted and stood, laying the poker carefully

back against the hearth. "Go speak with the other ladies. Be glad

you do not have to carry my burdens."

Vorzheva spun to face him. "The other ladies hate me!" she said,

eyes narrowed, a lock of black hair dangling loose across her cheek.

"I hear them whispering about Prince Josua's slut from the grass-

lands. And / hate themthe northern cows! In my father's march-

land they would be whipped for such . . . such . . ." she struggled

with the still unfamiliar tongue, ". . . such disrespect!" She took a

breath to still her trembling.

"Why are you so cold to me, sir?" she asked at last. "And why did

you bring me here, to this cold country?"

The prince looked up, and for a moment his stern face softened.

548

Tad Williams

"I sometimes wonder." He slowly shook his head. "Please, if you

despise the company of the other court ladies, then go and have the

harper sing for you. Please. I will not have an argument tonight."

"Nor any night," Vorzheva snapped. "You do not seem to want

me at allbut old things, yes, yes, those you are interested in! You

and your old books!"

Josua's patience was wearing thin. *The events we will speak of

tonight are old, yes, but their importance is to our current struggle.

Damnation, woman, I am a prince of the realm, and cannot evade

my responsibilities!"

"You do better at that than you think, Prince Josua," she replied

frostily, throwing her cape about her shoulders.

When she reached the doorway, she turned. "I hate the way you

think only of the pastold books, old battles, old history . . ." her

lip curled, "old loves."

The door swung closed behind her.

^

"Thanks to you, Prince, for admitting us to your chambers,"

Binabik said. His round face was troubled. "I would not have been

making such a request had I not thought this important."

"Of course, Binabik," the prince said. "I, too, prefer to talk in

more quiet surroundings."

The troll and old Jamauga had pulled up hard wooden stools to

sit beside Josua at his table. Father Strangyeard, who had accompa-

nied them, was walking quietly around the room looking at the

tapestries. In all his years at Naglimund it was the first time he had

been in the prince's private chambers.

"I am still reeling from the things I heard last night," Josua said,

then gestured at the sheets of parchment Binabik had strewn before

him. "Now you say there is even more I must know?" The prince

gave a small, rueful smile. "God must be chastising me, taking my

nightmare of having to command a castle at siege and then compli-

cating it with all this."

Jamauga leaned forward. "As long as you remember. Prince

Josua, that it is no nightmare we speak of, but a dark reality. We

cannot any of us afford the luxury of thinking this a fantasy."

549

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

"Father Strangyeard and I have been at days of searching in the

castle archives," Binabik said, "since first I came, trying to find the

meaning of the Weird of the Swords."

"The dream, you mean, that you told me of?" Josua asked, idly

thumbing through the pages of writing on the table. 'The one that

you and the boy had in the witch woman's house?"

"And not them alone," Jamauga declared, his eyes sharp as chips

of blue ice. **The nights before I left Tungoldyr I, too, dreamt of a

great book. Du Svardenvyrd was written upon it in letters of fire."

"I have heard of the priest Nisses' book, of course," the prince

said, nodding, "when I was a young student with the Usirean broth-

ers. It was infamous, but it no longer exists. Surely you are not going

to tell me you have found a copy here in our library?"

"Not for the lack of our searching," Binabik replied. "If it had

been anywhere but perhaps the Sancellan Aedonitis, here it would

be. Strangyeard has been assembling a library of great wonder."

"Very kind," the archivist said, facing the wall as though studying

a tapestry so that his unseemly blush of pleasure would not imperil

his reputation as a levelheaded historian.

"In fact, for all of Strangyeard's and my hunting, it was Jamauga

who has been partway to solving our problem," Binabik continued.

The old man leaned forward and tapped a skinny finger on the

parchment. "It was a stroke of good fortune which I hope bodes well

for us all. Morgenes had sent once to ask me questions about Nisses

who was, of course, a Rimmersman like myselfto help fill in

some empty spots in his written life of your father. King John. I was

of little help, I'm afraid. I told him what I knew. But I remembered

his asking."

"And," Binabik said, excited, "another stroke of luckiness: the

one thing young Simon saved from the destruction of Morgenes'

chambers was . . . this book!" He grabbed a sheaf in his stubby

brown hand and waved it. " "The Life and Reign of King John

Presbyter, by Morgenes Ercestres'Doctor Morgenes of Erchester.

In another way still, the doctor is with us here!"

"We owe him more than we can say," Jamauga pronounced sol-

emnly. "He saw the dark days coming, and made many preparations

some we still do not know of."

"But the most important to this current moment," the troll burst

in, "is this; his life of Prester John. Look!" He thrust the papers into

550

Tad Williams

Josua's hand. The prince leafed through them, then looked up, smil-

ing faintly.

"Reading Nisses' tangled and archaic language puts me in mind

of my student days, prowling the archives of the Sancellan

Aedonitis." He shook his head regretfully. "This is fascinating, of

course, and I pray that I have the time some day to read Morgenes'

full work, but I still do not understand." He held up the page he had

been reading. "Here is a description of the forging of the blade

Sorrow, but I see no information that Jamauga has not already

given to us. What help will this be?"

Binabik, with Josua's permission, took back the manuscript. "We

must be looking closer. Prince Josua," he said. "Morgenes quotes

from Nissesand the fact that he actually read at least some of Du

Svardenvyrd only confirms for me Morgenes' resourcefulnesshe

quotes Nisses as speaking of two other 'Great Swords.' Two more

besides Sorrow. Here, let me read what Morgenes tells us are Nisses'

own words."

Binabik cleared his throat and began.

"The first Great Sword came, in its form original, from out of

the Sky one thousand years agone.

"Usires Aedon. Whom we of Mother Church call the Son and

Avatar of God, had hung for nine days and nights, nailed by His

Hands and Feet to the Execution Tree in the square before the

Temple of Yuvenis in Nabban. This Yuvenis was the heathen god

of Justice, and the Nabbanai imperator was wont to hang such

ayverse criminals as his courts convicted from the mighty

branches of Yuvenis' Tree. So hung Usires of the Lake, guilty of

sacrilege and rebellion for proclaiming the Single God. Heels

above Head like a carcase of Beef.

"There came, that Ninth night, a great Roaring and a streak

of fire, and a hurtling Bolt from the Heavens flew down from the

sky and smote the Temple into a thousand shards, killing all the

heathen judges and priests within. When the reek and fumes

were dispersed, the Body of Usires Aedon was gone, and a great

shout went up that God had restored Him to Heaven and pun-

ished His enemies, although others said that Usires'patient disci-

ples had cut down His body and escayped in the Confusion.

These naysayers were quickly made silent, and the Word of the

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR551

miracle spread throughout all the quarters of the City. Thus

began the downfall of the pagan gods of Nabban.

"In the smoaking rubble of the Temple there now lay a great

and steaming Stone. It was proclaimed by the Aedonites that

here was the heathen altar, melted by the vengeful Fires of the

One God.

"I, Nisses, believe instead that this was a flaming Star of the

heavens fallen to Earth, as happens on Occasion.

"Now, from this molten wrack was taken a great piece, and

the Imperator's swordwrights found it Workable, and the sky-

metal was hammered into a great Blade. In mind of the scourg-

ing branches which hadflaid Usires' Back, the star-swordas I

suppose it to bewas named THORN, and a mighty power there

was in it . . ."

"Thus," Binabik said, "the sword Thorn, being passed down

through the line of Nabbanai rulers, came at last to . . ."

"To Sir Camaris, my father's most beloved friend." Josua finished.

"The stories of Camaris' sword Thorn are many, but I had not

known before today where it came from ... if Nisses is to be be-

lieved. This passage has somewhat the smack of heresy."

"Those of his assertions which can be measured against truth

measure well, your Highness," Jamauga said, stroking his beard.

"Still," said Josua, "what does it mean? Camaris' sword was lost

when he drowned."

"Allow me to share more of Nisses' writing," Binabik replied-

"Here, where he is speaking of the third part of our puzzle."

"The second of the Great Swords came from the Sea, traveling

across the salt ocean from the West to Osten Ard.

"For some years the Sea-Raiders had come seasonally to this

land from the far, cold Country they called Ijsgard, only to re-

turn across the waves when their pillaging was done.

"Then it was, some Tragedy or dire Happening in their native

place caused the men of Ijsgard to abandon that land and bring

their families in boats to Osten Ard, to settle in Rimmersgard in

the North, the land of my Own far more recent birth.

"When they had landed, their King Elvrit gave thanks to

Udun and their other Heathenish gods, and commanded that the

552 Tad Williams

iron keel of his Dragon-boat should be made into a sword to

protect his People in their new land.

"Thus it went that the keel was given to the Dvemings, a

Secretive and crafty race, and they separated out the Pure and

Significant metal by means unknown, and smithied a long and

shining blade.

"But in the haggling over the payment King Elvrit and the

master of the Dvemings fell out, and the king did slay the smith

and took the sword unpayed-for, which was the cause of much

later Woe.

"In thought of their coming to this New country, Elvrit named

the sword MINNEYAR, which means 'Year of Memory.'"

The troll finished, and walked to the table to drink from the wa-

ter-ewer there.

"So, Binabik ofYiqanuc, two powerful swords," Josua said. "Per-

haps this dreadful year has softened my mind, but I cannot think

what significance they have to us."

"Three swords," Jamauga offered, "counting Ineluki's Jingizu

what we call Sorrow. Three great swords."

"You must read this last part of Nisses' book that Morgenes cited,

Prince Josua," Strangyeard said, joining them at last. He picked up

the parchments that Binabik had laid on the table. "Here, please.

This bit of rhyme from the end of the madman's writings."

"When frost doth grow on Cloves' bell . . ."

Josua read aloud,

"And Shadows walk upon the road

When water blackens in the Well

Three Swords must come again.

"When Sukken from the Earth do creep

And Hunen from the heights descend

When Nightmare throttles peaceful Sleep

Three Swords must come again.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR553

"To turn the stride of treading Fate

To clear the fogging Mists of Time

If Early shall resist Too Late

Three Swords must come again ..."

"I think ... I think I understand," the prince said, with mount-

ing interest. 'This almost appears to be a prophecy of our own day

as if Nisses somehow knew that Ineluki would someday return."

**Yes," Jamauga said, combing his beard with his fingers as he

looked over Josua's shoulder, "and apparently, if things are to be

made right, Three swords must come again.'"

"Our understanding, Prince," Binabik said, "is that if somehow

the Storm King can be defeated, it is by our finding the three

swords."

*The three swords of which Nisses speaks?" Josua asked.

"So it would seem."

"But, if what the boy Simon saw is correct. Sorrow is already in

the bands of my brother." The prince frowned, his pale brow

creased with the lines of his thought. "If it were a simple thing to go

and take it from him in the Hayholt, we would not be cowering here

in Naglimund."

"We shall worry about Sorrow last. Prince," Jamauga said. "We

must move now to secure the other two. I am named for my eyes

and my trained sight, but even / cannot see the future. Perhaps a

way will come for us to take Sorrow from Elias. or perhaps he will

make some mistake. No, it is Thorn and Minneyar we must now

find."

Josua leaned back in his chair, crossing one ankle over the other

and pressing his fingers on his lidded eyes. "This is like a children's

story!" he exclaimed. "How are mere men to survive such times?

Chill winter in Yuven-month ... the risen Storm King who is a

dead Sithi prince . . . and now a desperate search for long-forgot-

ten swordsmadness! Folly!" He opened his eyes and sat up. "But

what can we do? I believe it all ... so I must be mad, too."

The prince stood up and began to pace. The others watched him,

grateful that despite the slenderness of their hope they had at least

convinced Josua of the grim, strange truth.

"Father Strangyeard," he said at last, "would you go and find

554 Tad Williams

Duke Isgrimnur? I sent my pages and all others away so we would

have privacy."

"Certainly," the archivist said, and hurried from the room, robes

flapping on his lanky frame.

"No matter what happens," Josua said, "I will have much to

explain at tonight's Read. I would have Isgrimnur beside me. The

barons know him as a practical man, where I am still somewhat

suspect for my years in Nabban and my odd ways." The prince

smiled wearily. "If these mad things are true, then our task is more

complex than even it was. If the Duke of Elvritshalla will stand

behind me, then I think the barons will tooalthough I do not think

I will share this latest bit of information, even if it does represent a

thin shard of hope. I mistrust the ability of some of the lords to keep

such amazing things a secret."

The prince sighed. "It was bad enough to have Elias alone for an

enemy." He stood, staring at the blazing hearth. His eyes glinted, as

if full of some reflecting moisture. "My poor brother."

Binabik looked up, startled by the prince's tone.

"My poor brother," Josua said again. "He must be riding the

nightmare now in earnestthe Storm King! The White Foxes! I

cannot think he knew what he was doing."

"Somebody had knowledge of what they did, Prince," the troll

declared. "Stormspike's master and his minions do not, I am think-

ing, go dancing house to house like peddlers, a-selling of then-

wares."

"Oh, I doubt not that Pryrates reached out to them somehow,"

Josua said. "I know him and his unholy thirst for forbidden knowl-

edge from the old days, in the seminary of the Usirean brothers." He

shook his head sorrowfully. "But Elias, although brave as a bear,

was always mistrustful of secrets in old books, and scornful of schol-

arship. He also feared talk of spirits or the demonic. He became

worse after . . . after his wife died. I wonder what he thought

worth the terror he must reap for this bargain. I wonder if he now

regrets itwhat terrible allies! Poor, foolish Elias. ..."

It was raining again, and when Strangyeard came back with the

duke, they were both soaked from their trip across the long court-

yard. Isgrimnur stood in the doorway of Josua's chambers stamping

like a nervous horse.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

555

"I was just seeing to my wife," he explained. "She and the other

women left ahead of Skali's arrival, and went to Thane Tonnrud, her

uncle. She has brought half a dozen of my men and a score of

women and children. She's got the frostbite in her fingers, poor

Outrun."

"I am sorry to call you away from her, Isgrimnur, especially if she

is injured," the prince apologized, rising and clasping the old duke's

hand.

"Ah, there's not much I can do. She has our girls to help her." He

frowned, but there was pride in his voice. "She's a strong woman.

She made strong sons for me."

"And we shall bring help to Isom, your eldest, never fear." Josua

led Isgrimnur to the table and handed him Morgenes' manuscript.

"It may be, though, that we shall be fighting more than one battle.'*

When the duke had read of the Weird of the Swords, and asked

some few questions, he read the pages again.

"This bit of rhyme, then?" he asked at last. "You think that's the

key to the whole thing?"

"If you mean the sort of key that locks a door," Jamauga said,

**yes, we hope so. For that is what we must do, it seems: find the

swords of Nisses* prophecy, swords that will keep the Storm King at

bay."

"But your boy claimed Elias has the Sithi oneand in fact I saw

him wearing an unfamiliar sword when he told me I could leave for

Elvritshalla. A great, strange-looking thing it was."

"This we know, Duke," Binabik chimed in. "It is the other two

we must first find."

Isgrimnur squinted suspiciously at the troll. "And what do you

want from me, little man?"

"Only your help, in any way you can render it," Josua said, reach-

ing out to pat the Rimmersman's shoulder. "And Binabik of

Yiqanuc is here for the same reasons."

"Have you heard aught of the fate ofAfinneyar, Elvrit's sword?"

Jamauga asked. "I confess I should know, since it is the purpose of

our League to gather such wisdom, but Minneyar has gone out of

the tales we know."

"I know this from my grandmother, who was a storyteller,'* Is-

grimnur said, chewing his mustache as he remembered. "It went

through Elvrit's line to Fingil Redhand, and from Fingil to his son

556 Tad Williams

Hjeldin, and then when Hjeldin fell from the towerwith Nisses

dead on the floor behind himHjeldin's lieutenant Ikferdig took it,

along with Fingil's crown of the Rimmersmen, and the mastery of

the Hayholt."

"Ikferdig died in the Hayholt," Strangyeard said shyly, warming

his hands at the hearth. " The Burned King,' he is called in my

books."

"Dead by the dragon-fire of red Shurakai," Jamauga said.

"Roasted in his throne room like a coney."

"So . . ." Binabik said thoughtfully, while gentle Strangyeard

shivered at Jamauga's words, "Minneyar is either within the walls

of the Hayholt somewhere ... or it has been unmade by the red

dragon's fiery breathing."

Josua stood up and walked to the fireplace, where he stood staring

into the wavering flames. Strangyeard inched away so as not to

crowd his prince.

"Two confounding and unhappy alternatives," Josua said, and

grimaced, turning to Father Strangyeard. "You have brought me no

good news today, you wise men." At this, the archivist looked mo-

rose. "First you tell me our only hope is to find this trio of legendary

blades, and now you say that two of them are in the stronghold of

my enemy brotherif they exist at all." The prince sighed in dis-

may- "What of the third? Does Pryrates use it to cut his beef at

table?"

"Thorn," Binabik said, climbing up to perch on the table's edge.

"The sword of the great knight who was Camaris."

"Made from the star-stone which destroyed the temple ofYuvenis

in old Nabban," Jamauga said. "But surely it went into the sea with

great Camaris, when he was swept overboard in the Bay of Firan-

nos."

"You see!" spat Josua. "Two held by my brother, and the third in

the even tighter grip of the jealous ocean. We are cursed before we

begin."

"It no doubt would have also seemed an impossible chance that

Morgenes' work would have survived the destruction of him and his

chambers," Jamauga said, and his voice was stem, "and then would

come safely through danger and despair to us here, so we could read

Misses' prophecy. But it did survive. And it did reach us. There is

always hope."

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR557

"Excuse me. Prince, but there seems only one thing to do,"

Binabik said, nodding sagely atop the table. "It is back to the

archives and searching again, until we find the answer to the riddle

of Thorn and the other blades. And we must be finding it soon."

"Soon indeed," said Jamauga, "for we are wasting diamond-pre-

cious time."

"By all means," said Josua, pulling his chair over by the hearth

and slumping down into it, "by all means make haste, but I deeply

fear that our time has already run out."

^

"Damn and damn and damn," Simon said, hurling yet one more

rock from the battlement into the teeth of the wind. Nagumund

seemed to stand in a great expanse of soapy gray nothingness, a

mountain sprouting from a sea of swirling rain. "Damn," he added,

as he bent to search for another on the wet stone wall.

Sangfugol looked over, his fine cap a limp, sodden mass on his

head. "Simon," he said crossly, "you cannot have it both ways. First

you curse them all for dragging you along behind them like a ped-

dler's sack, then you blaspheme and hurl stones because you are not

invited to the afternoon's deliberations."

"I know," Simon said, sending another projectile down from the

castle walls. "I don't know what I want. I don't know anything."

The harper scowled. "What I would like to know is: what are we

doing up here? Are there not better places to feel miserable and left

out? It is cold as a well digger's privy parts on these battlements."

He allowed his teeth to chatter for a moment, hoping to inspire pity.

"Why are we up here?"

"Because it clears a man's head, a little wind and rain," Towser

called, making his way back along the battlement toward his two

companions. "There is no better cure for a night of drinking." The

little old man winked at Simon, who guessed that Towser would

have gone down long ago, but for the enjoyable sight of Sangfugol

shivering in his beautiful gray velvet robe.

"Well," the harper growled, miserable as a soaked cat, "you drink

like a man in his youth, Towseror in his second childhoodthus,

558 Tad Williams

I suppose it is no surprise to see you prance on the walls for fun, just

like a rascally boy."

"Ah, Sangfugol," Towser said with a wrinkly smile, watching an-

other of Simon's missiles send up a gout of water from the rain-

pocked pond that eddied where the commons yard had been, "you

are too . . . Ho!" Towser pointed. "Is that not Duke Isgrimnur? 1

had heard he was returned. Ho. Duke!" The jester shouted and

waved at the stout figure. Isgrimnur, squinting against the slanting

raindrops, looked up. "Duke Isgrimnur! It's Towser!"

"Is that who it is?" the Duke cried. "Damn me, it is, you old

whoresoni"

"Come up, come up!" Towser said. "Come and tell me what is the

news!"

"I shouldn't be amazed," Sangfugol said sardonically as the duke

ankled across the submerged commons toward the curling staircase

in the wall. "The only person beside an old madman who would

come up of his free will would be a Rimmersman. It's probably even

too warm for him, since it's not actually sleeting or snowing."

Isgrimnur had a tired smile and a nod for Simon and the harper,

then turned and clasped the jester's veined hand and gave him a

comradely smack on the shoulder. He was so much taller and bulk-

ier than Towser that he looked like a mother bear cuffing her cub.

While the duke and the jester exchanged tidings, Simon threw

stones and listened, and Sangfugol stood with a look of patient,

hopeless suffering. Soon, unsurprisingly, the Rimmersman's talk

came around from mutual friends and homely things to darker top-

ics. As Isgrimnur spoke of the gathering threat of war, and the

shadow m the north, Simon felt the cold that the chill winds had

strangelyhelped dispel for a while come shouldering back. When

the duke began to speak in hushed tones of the Ruler of the North,

then sheared off, saying some things were too fear-fraught to speak

of openly, the cold seemed to slide further into Simon's being. He

stared out into the murky distance, at the dark fist of storm that

hovered beyond the rain on the northern horizon, and felt himself

slipping back into his journey on the dream-road . . .

. . . The naked thrust of the stone mountain, its halo of indigo

and yellow flames. The silver-masked queen in her icy throne, and the

chanting voices in the rocky fastness . . . Black thoughts pressed

down on him, crushing him like the rim of a broad wheel. It would

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR559

be so easy, he was sure, to go forward into the darkness, into the

warmth beyond the storm's chill . . .

. . . It's so close . . . so close . . .

"Simon!" a voice said in his ear. A hand grasped his elbow. He

looked down, startled, to see the edge of the battlement inches from

his foot, and the wind-lashed water of the courtyard directly below.

"What are you doing?" Sangfugol asked, giving his arm a shake.

"If you went over this wall, you would have more than broken

bones."

"I was . . ." Simon said, feeling a dark mist still clouding his

thoughts, a mist that was slow to clear, "I . . ."

"Thorn?" Towser said loudly, responding to something Isgrimnur

had said. Simon turned to see the little jester tugging at the Rim-

mersman's cloak like an importunate child. "Thorn, did you say?

Well, then, why did you not come to me immediately? Why not

come to old Towser? I know all there is to know, if anybody does!"

The old man turned to Simon and the harper. "Why, who was

with our John longer than anyone? Who? I was, of course. Joked

and tumbled and played for him sixty years. And the great Camaris,

too. I saw him come to the court." He turned back around to face

the duke, and there was a light in his eyes that Simon had not seen

before. "I am the man you want," Towser said proudly. "Quick!

Take me to Prince Josua."

The bandy-legged old jester almost seemed to dance, so light were

his steps as he led the somewhat dumbfounded Rimmersman toward

the stairs.

"Thank God and His angels," said Sangfugol, watching them go.

"I suggest we go immediately to pour something inside usa wet-

ness within to make up for the wetness without."

He led Simon, who was still shaking his head, down from the

rainy battlements into the echoing, torch-lit stairwell, out of the

northern winds for a little while and into the warmth.

^

"We understand your place in these events, good Towser," Josua

said impatiently. The prince, perhaps to ward off the all-pervasive

560

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chill, had wrapped a woolen scarf tightly around his throat. The tip

of his slender nose was pink.

"I'm just setting the place, so to speak, your Highness," Towser

said complacently. "If I might have a cup of wine to help ease the

talk, I will get to the main course directly."

"Isgrimnur," Josua groaned, "would you be good enough to find

our venerable jester something to drink, or I fear we shall be here

until Aedontide waiting for the rest of the story."

The duke of Elvritshalla went to the cedar cabinet beside Josua's

table and found a ewer of red Perdruin wine. "Here," he said, hand-

ing a filled flagon to Towser, who sipped and smiled.

It's not the wine he's wanting, the Rimmersman thought, it's the

attention. These are grim enough days for the young and useful, let

alone for an old trickster whose master is two years dead.

He stared at the jester's seamed face, and for a moment thought

he saw the child's countenance trapped beneath, as behind a thin

curtain.

God grant me a quick honorable death, Isgrimnur prayed, and

never let me be one of those old fools who sits by the campfire telling

the young men that things will never be as good as they once were.

Still, he thought as he moved back to his chair, listening to the

lupine howling of the winds outside, still, it may be true this time.

Maybe we have seen the better days. Maybe there is nothing left now

but a losing battle against creeping darkness.

"You see," Towser was saying, "Camaris' sword Thorn didn't go

with him into the ocean. He had given it over for safekeeping to his

squire, Colmund of Rodstanby."

"Gave away his sword?" Josua said, puzzled. "That accords with

none of the stores I have ever heard of Camaris-sa-Vinitta."

"Ah, but you did not know him that last year ... and how

could you, since you had only just come into the world?" Towser

took another swig and stared meditatively up at the ceiling. "Sir

Camaris grew strange and fell after your mother Queen Ebekah

died- He was her special protector, you know, and he worshiped the

very tiles she trod uponas if she were Elysia the Mother of God

herself. I always thought he blamed himself for her death, as though

he could somehow have cured her ill-health by force of arms, or by

the purity of his heart . . . poor idiot."

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR561

Seeing Josua's impatience, Isgrimnur leaned forward. "So he gave

the star-sword Thorn to his squire?"

"Yes, yes," said the old man testily, not liking to be rushed.

"When Camaris was lost in the sea off Harcha-island, Colmund took

it for his own. He went back and reclaimed his family's lands at

Rodstanby in the Frostmarch, and became the baron of a good-sized

province. Thorn was a famous weapon through all the world, and

when his enemies saw itfor it was unmistakable, all shiny black

but for the silver hilt, a beautiful, perilous thingthey would none

of them face him. He seldom even had to draw it from its scabbard."

"So it is then at Rodstanby?" Binabik said excitedly from the

comer. "That is near within two days' ride from where we are now

sitting!"

"No, no, no," growled Towser, waving his flagon for Isgrimnur to

fill again. "If you would only wait, troll, I will tell you all."

Before Binabik or the prince or anyone else could respond,

Jamauga stood up from his crouch by the fire and leaned toward the

little jester. "Towser," he said, and his voice was as hard and cold as

ice in the roof thatches, "we cannot wait on your pace- There is a

grave darkness spreading from the north, a cold and fatal shadow.

We must have the sword, do you understand?" He brought his sharp

face even closer to Towser's and the little man's tufted eyebrows

shot upward in alarm. "We must find Thorn, for soon the Storm

King himself will be knocking at our door. Do you understand?"

Towser gaped as Jamauga dropped back into his long-limbed

squat beside the hearth.

Well, Isgrimnur mused, ;/ we wanted the latest news shouted all

over Naglimund, now we'll have it done. Still, it does look as though

he's put a bit of a burr under Towser's saddle.

It took a few moments for the jester to be able to tear his startled,

fascinated eyes from the glare-eyed northerner. When he turned, he

no longer looked to be enjoying his status quite as much.

"Colmund," he began, "Sir Colmund heard traveler's tales of the

dragon Igjarjuk's legendary hoard, in the heights of the mountain

Urmsheim. It was a treasure said to be richer than any other in the

wide world."

"Only a flatlander would be thinking of searching out a mountain

dragonand for gold!" Binabik said disgustedly. "My people have

562 Tad Williams

long lived near Urmsheim, and we are living long because we are not

going there."

"But you see," old Towser said, "the dragon has been only a story

for generations. No one has seen it, no one has heard of it ...

except for snow-maddened wanderers. And Colmund had the sword

Thorn, a magic sword to lead him on a quest for a magic dragon's

hoardi"

"But what idiocy!" Josua said. "Did he not have everything he

wanted? A powerful barony? The sword of a hero? Why should he

go rabbiting off after such a madman's vision?"

"Damn me, Josua," Isgrimnur swore, '^vhy do men do any of the

things they do? Why did they hang Our Lord Usires topsides-down

from the Tree? Why should Elias imprison his brother and make

bargains with demons when he is already High King of all Osten

Ard?"

"There are indeed things in men and women that make them

reach for what is beyond their grasp," Jamauga said from his hearth

comer. "Sometimes the things they seek lie beyond the bounds of

understanding."

Binabik jumped lightly to the floor. "Too much talk is this of

things we can never know," he said. "Our question still is: where is

the sword? Where is Thorn?9'

"Lost in the north, I'm sure," Towser said. "I have never heard

that Sir Colmund came back from his quest. One traveler's tale was

that he had made himself a king of the Hunen, and lives there still in

a fortress of ice."

"It sounds as though his story has been muddied and mixed with

old memories of Ineluki," Jamauga said thoughtfully.

"He made it as far as the monastery of Saint Skendi at

Vestvennby," Father Strangyeard piped up unexpectedly from the

back of the room. He had gone out quickly and come back without

anyone's noticing; he wore a faint flush of pleasure high on his thin

cheeks. "Towser's words sparked a memory. I thought I had some of

the monastic books of Skendi's order, salvaged from its burning

during the Frostmarch wars. Here is the household ledger for the

Founding-year 1131. See, it lists the outfitting ofColmund's party."

He passed it proudly to Josua, who held it up to the firelight.

"Dried meat and fruits," Josua read, straining to make out the

faded words. "Wool cloaks, two horses . . ." He looked up. "It says

563

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

here a party of a 'dozen and one*thirteen." He passed the book on

to Binabik, who took it back to pore over with Jamauga by the fire.

"Then they must have run into bad luck," Towser said, refilling

his flagon. "The stories I heard said he set out from Rodstanby with

over two dozen of his hand-picked best."

Isgrimnur was staring after the troll. He's certainly clever enough,

the Rimmersman thought, although I don't trust him or his kind

much. And what's his hold on that boy? I'm not sure I like that either,

although I think the stories they both tell are largely true.

"What good is all this to us now?" he said aloud. "If the sword is

lost, it is lost, and we must simply make the best of our defenses

here."

"Duke Isgrimnur," Binabik said, "you are not understanding,

perhaps; there is no choice for us. If indeed the Storm King is our

greater enemyas I think we are all agreeing, nowthen the only

thing for hope, it seems, is that we acquire the three swords. Two are

for now denied from us. That leaves Thorn, and we must find itif

finding is possible."

"Don't instruct me, little man," Isgrimnur growled, but Josua

waved his hand wearily to forestall their argument.

"Quiet now," the prince said. "Please let me think. My brain is

fevered with so many madnesses heaped one atop the other. I need

some moments of quiet."

Strangyeard, Jamauga, and Binabik pored over the monastery

ledger and Morgenes' manuscript, talking in whispers; Towser fin-

ished his wine, Isgrimnur sipping moodily beside him. Josua sat

staring into the fire. The prince's weary features looked like parch-

ment pulled over bone; the Duke ofElvritshalla could hardly bear to

look at him.

His father looked no worse in his last dying days, Isgrimnur

brooded. Has he the strength to lead us through a siege, as it looks to

come to soon? Has he even the strength himself to survive? He has ever

been a thinker, a worrier . . . although, in fairness, he is no slouch

with sword and shield. Without thinking he got up and stumped over

to the prince's side, laying an ursine paw on Josua's shoulder.

The prince looked up. "Can you spare me a good man, old friend?

Do you have one who knows the northeast country?"

Isgrimnur looked thoughtful. "I have two or three. Frekke,

though, is too old for a journey such as I imagine you are thinking

564 Tad Williams

of. Einskaldir would not leave my side unless I pushed him out the

gate of Naglimund at spear-point. Besides, I have a mind we will

need his fierceness here, when the fighting grows hot and bloody. He

is a badger: fierce-blooded, and best when he is backed into a hole."

The duke mused. "Of the rest, I would give you Sludig. He is young

and fit, but he is also clever. Yes, Sludig will be the man for you."

"Good." Josua nodded his head slowly. "I have some three or

four I will send, but a small party is better than a large."

"For what, exactly?" Isgrimnur looked around the room, at its

sparse solidity, and wondered again whether they were chasing

phantoms, whether the wintry weather had somehow chilled their

better judgement.

"To search for Camaris' sword, Uncle Bear-skin," the prince said

with a ghost of a smile. "It is doubtless madness, and we have noth-

ing better to go on than old stories and a few faded words in old

books, but it is not a chance we can afford to ignore. It is storm-

fraught winter in the summer month of Yuven. None of our doubts

can change that." He looked around the room, mouth pursed in

thought.

"Binabik of Yiqanuc," he called at last, and the troll hurried over.

"Will you lead a party on the trail ofThom? You know the northern

mountains better than anyone here except perhaps Jarnauga, who I

hope will go, too."

"I would be full of honor, Prince," Binabik said, and dropped to

one knee- Even Isgrimnur was forced to grin.

"I am honored, too. Prince Josua," Jarnauga said, rising, "but I

think it is not to be. Here at Naglimund I will best serve. My legs are

old, but my eyes are still keen. I will help Strangyeard in the

archives, for there are many questions still to answer, many riddles

behind the story of the Storm King, and the whereabouts of FingiTs

sword Minneyar. And there may yet be other ways I can serve, as

well."

"Your Highness," Binabik asked, "if there is a place unfilled, may

I have your permission to take young Simon? Morgenes was asking

as his last wish that the boy be watched over by my master. With

Ookequk's death I am master now, and would not be shirking this

watching-over,"

Josua looked skeptical. "And you would look after him by taking

him on a mad expedition into the unmapped north?"

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR565

Binabik raised an eyebrow. "Unmapped by big people, perhaps. It

is the commons yard of my Qanuc-folk. Also, is it more safe to leave

him shut up in a castle set for warring with the High King?"

The prince brought his long hand up to his face, as though his

head pained him. "You are right, I suppose. If these slender threads

of hope come to naught, there will be no safe places for those who

have sided with the Lord of Naglimund. If the boy wishes to go, you

may take him." He brought his hand down and clasped Binabik's

shoulder. "Very well, little manlittle but brave. Go back to your

books, and I shall send you three good Erkynlanders and Is"

grimnur's man Sludig in the morning."

"My thanks, Prince Josua," Binabik nodded. "But I think it is at

night tomorrow we should be leaving. We will be a small party, and

our best hope is in not attracting evil attention."

"So be it," said Josua, rising and lifting his hand as though in

benediction. "Who knows if this is some fool's errand or the rescue

of us all? You should be going out amid trumpets and applause.

Instead necessity must override honor, and stealth must be the

watchword. Know that our thoughts are with you."

Isgrimnur hesitated, then leaned forward and clasped Binabik's

small hand. "Damned strange this is," he said, "but God be with

you. If Sludig should get contentious, be forgiving. He is high-spir-

ited, but his heart is good and his loyalty strong."

"Thank you, Duke," the troll said seriously. "May your god be

blessing us indeed. We go into unknown places."

"As do all mortals," Josua added. "Sooner or later."

^

"What! You told the prince and everyone I would go where?"

Simon balled his fists in anger. "What right did you have to do

that?!"

"Simon-friend," Binabik calmly responded. "You are under no

order to go. I was only asking Josua's permission for your being on

this search, and it was granted. The choosing is for you."

"S'bloody Tree! What else can I do now? If I say no, everyone will

think I'm a coward!"

"Simon." The little man put on a look of patience. "First, please

566 Tad Williams

do not be using your new-learned soldier curses on me. We Qanuc

are a courteous folk. For second, it is not good worrying so on

other's opinions. Anyway, staying at Naglimund will certainly not

be for cowards."

Simon hissed a great frosty cloud of breath and hugged himself.

He stared up at the murky sky, at the dull blur of sun secreted

behind the clouds.

Why are people always making decisions for me without asking

first? Am I a child?

He stood for some moments, red-faced from more than the chill,

until Binabik reached out a small, gentle hand.

"My friend, I am sorrowful this was not the honor I was hoping it

to bean honor of dreadful, dreadful danger, of course, but an

honor. I have explained of what importance we think this quest, of

how the fate of Naglimund and all the north may hang on its accom-

plishing. And, of course, that all may be perishing without fame or

song in the white northern waste." He patted Simon's knuckles sol-

emnly, then reached into the pocket of his fur-lined jacket. "Here,"

he said, and put something hard and cold into Simon's fingers.

Momentarily distracted, he opened his hand to look. It was a ring,

a plain, thin circlet of some golden metal. On it was inscribed a

simple design: a long oval with a tipped triangle at one end.

"The fish sign of the League of the Scroll," Binabik said.

"Morgenes tied this thing to the sparrow's leg, along with the note

of which I was speaking before. The end of the note told this was for

you."

Simon held it up, trying to catch a gleam of the dull sunlight. "I

never saw Morgenes wear it," he said, a little surprised that it star-

tled up no memories. "Do all the League members have one? Be-

sides, how could I be worthy to wear it? I can hardly read. My

spelling isn't very good, either."

Binabik smiled. "My master did not have such a ring, or at least I

never was seeing it. As for the other: Morgenes was wanting you to

have it, and that is permission enough, I have sureness."

"Binabik/* Simon said, squinting, "it has writing on the inside."

He held it up for the troll to inspect. "I can't read it."

The troll narrowed his eyes. "It is writing in some Sithi tongue,"

he said, turning the ring to peruse its inner rim, "hard to read for

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR567

being very small, and in a style I do not know." He studied it a

moment longer.

" 'Dragon,' that character means," Binabik read at last. "And this

one means, I believe, 'death' . . . 'Death and the Dragon'? . . .

'Death of the Dragon'?" He looked up at Simon, grinned and

shrugged. "What it might be meaning, I have no idea. My knowl-

edge is not deep enough. Some conceit of your doctor's, is my guess-

ingor perhaps a family motto. Perhaps Jarnauga could read it

with more ease."

It slid easily on the third finger of Simon's right hand, as though it

had been made for him. Morgenes had been so smalll How could he

have worn this?

"Do you think it's a magic ring?" he asked suddenly, narrowing

his eyes as though he might detect spells swarming around the

golden circle like minuscule bees.

"If so," Binabik said, mock-somberly, "Morgenes included no

grammarye for explaining its using." He shook his head. "I think it

is not a likelihood. A keepsake, from a man who was caring for

you."

"Why are you giving it to me now?" Simon asked, feeling a cer-

tain sorrowful tightness behind his eyes that he was determined to

resist.

"Because I must be leaving tomorrow night to go north. If you

decide for remaining here, we might not have opportunity to meet

again."

"Binabiki" The tightening increased. He felt like a small child

pushed back and forth between bullying elders.

"The truth it is, only." The troll's round face was entirely serious

now. He raised his hand to forestall more protests and questions.

"Now you must be deciding, my good friend. I go into the snow and

ice country, on an errand that may be foolishness, and which may

claim the lives of the fools who are following it. Those who remain

are facing the anger of a king's army. An evil choosing, I fear."

Binabik nodded his head gravely. "But, Simon, whichever it is for

you, going north or staying to fight for Naglimundand princess

we will be the best of comrades still, yes?"

He stood on tiptoe to clap Simon on the upper arm, then turned

and walked away across the courtyard toward the archives.

568 Tad Williams

**

Simon found her standing alone, tossing pebbles into the castle

well. She wore a heavy traveling cloak and hood against the cold.

"Hello, Princess," he said. She looked up and smiled, sadly. For

some reason she seemed much older today, like a grown woman.

"Welcome, Simon." Her breath made a halo of mist about her

head.

He began to bend his knee in a bow, but she was no longer look-

ing. Another stone rattled down the well. He considered sitting

down, which seemed the natural thing to do, but the only place to sit

was the edge of the well, which would either put him uncomfortably

close to the princess or leave him facing in the wrong direction. He

decided to remain on his feet. "And how have you been?" he said at

last. She sighed.

"My uncle treats me as though I am made of eggshells and cob-

webslike I would shatter if I lifted anything, or if anyone bumped

into me."

"I'm sure ... I'm sure that he is only worried for your safety,

after the dangerous journey you had to get here."

"The dangerous journey we had, but nobody's following you

around to make sure you don't skin your knee. They're even teach-

ing you how to fight with a sword!"

"Miri . . . Princess!" Simon was more than a little shocked.

"You don't want to fight with swords, do you?!"

She looked up at him, and their eyes met. For an instant her stare

burned like the noonday sun with some inexplicable longing; a mo-

ment later she wearily dropped her gaze again.

"No," she said, "I suppose not. But, oh, I do wish to do some-

thing!"

Surprised, he heard the real pain in her voice, and in that moment

remembered her as she had been on the flight up the Stile, uncom-

plaining and strong, as good a companion as could be wished.

"What . . . what do you want to do?"

She looked up again, pleased by the serious tone of his question.

"Well," she began, "it's no secret that Josua is having trouble con-

vincing Devasalles that his master Duke Leobardis should support

the prince against my father. Josua could send me to Nabban!"

"Send you . . . to Nabban?"

"Of course, you idiot." She frowned. "On my mother's side I am

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR569

of the Ingadarine House, a very noble family of Nabban. My aunt is

married to Leobardis! Who better to go and convince the dukel?"

She clapped her gloved hands for emphasis.

"Oh , . ." Simon was unsure of what to say. "Perhaps Josua

thinks that it would be ... would be ... I don't know." He con-

sidered. "I mean to say, should the High King's daughter be the one

to ... to arrange alliances against him?"

"And who knows the High King's ways better?" Now she was

angry.

"Do you . . ." He hesitated, but his curiosity won out. "How do

you feel toward your father?"

"Do I hate him?" Her tone was bitter. "I hate what he has be-

come. I hate what the men around him have put him up to. If he

would suddenly find goodness in his heart, and see the error of his

ways . . . well, then I would love him again."

A whole procession of stones went down the well as Simon stood

uncomfortably by.

"I'm sorry, Simon," she said at last. "I have become very bad at

talking with people. My old nurse would be shocked at how much I

have forgotten, running around in the forest. How are you, and what

have you been doing?"

"Binabik has asked me to go with him on a mission for Josua," he

said, bringing the subject up more abruptly than he had meant to.

"To the north," he added significantly.

Instead of showing the expressions of worry and fear he had ex-

pected, the princess* face seemed to light up from within; although

she smiled at him, she did not truly seem to see him. "Oh, Simon,"

she said, "how brave. How fine. Can you . . . when do you leave?"

"Tomorrow night," he said, dimly aware that somehow, by some

mysterious process, asked to go had become going. "But I haven't

decided yet," he said feebly. "I thought I might be more needed

here, at Naglimundto wield a spear on the walls." He tacked on

the last just in case there was any possibility she thought he might be

staying behind to work in the kitchens, or something like.

"Oh, but Simon," Miriamele said, reaching up suddenly to take

his cold hand in her leather-gloved fingers. "If my uncle needs you

to do it, you must! We have so little hope left, from all I have heard."

She reached up to her neck and quickly unfastened the sky-blue

scarf she wore, a slender gauzy strip; she handed it to him. 'Take

570 Tad Williams

this and bear it for me," she said. Simon felt the blood come roaring

up into his cheeks, and struggled to keep his lips from stretching

into a shocked, mooncalfish grin.

"Thank you . . . Princess," he said at last.

'*If you wear it," she said, standing up, "it will be almost as

though I were there myself." She did a funny little dance step, and

laughed.

Simon was trying without success to understand what exactly had

happened, and how it had happened so fast. "It will be, princess," he

said. "Like you were there."

Something in the way he said it tripped up her sudden mood: her

expression turned sober, even sad. She smiled again, a slower, more

rueful smile, then quickly stepped forward, startling Simon so that

he almost raised a hand to ward her off. She brushed his cheek with

her cool lips.

"I know you will be brave, Simon. Come back safely. I shall pray

for you."

Immediately she was gone, running across the courtyard like a

little girl, her dark cape a smoky swirl as she disappeared into the

twilit archway. Simon stood holding her scarf. He thought of it, and

her smile when she kissed his cheek, and he felt something smolder

into flame inside of him. It seemed, in some way he did not fully

understand, that a single torch had been lit against the vast gray

chill looming in the north. It was only a single point of brightness in

a dreadful storm . . . but even a lone fire could bring a traveler

home safe.

He rolled the soft cloth into a ball and slipped it into his shirt.

^

"I am glad you have come so quickly," Lady Vorzheva said. The

brilliance of her yellow dress seemed reflected in her dark eyes.

"My lady honors me," the monk replied, his eyes straying about

the room.

Vorzheva laughed harshly. "You are the only one who thinks it

honorable to visit me. But no matter. You understand what it is you

must do?"

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR571

"I am sure that I have it correctly. It is a matter difficult in

execution, but easily grasped in concept." He bowed his head.

"Good. Then wait no longer, for the more wait, the less chance of

success- Also more chance for tongues to wag." She whirled away to

the back chamber in a rush of silks.

"Uh ... my lady?" The man blew on his fingers. The prince's

chambers were cold, the fire unlit. "There is the matter of ...

payment?"

"I thought you did this as honor for me, sir?" Vorzheva called

from the back room.

"Welladay, madam, I am but a poor man. What you ask will take

resources." He blew on his fingers again, then thrust his hands deep

into his robe.

She came back bearing a purse of shiny cloth. "That I know.

Here. It is in gold, as I promisedhalf now, half when I receive

proof that your task is completed." She handed him the purse, then

drew back. "You stink of wine! Is that the sort of man you are,

trusted with this grave task?"

"It is the sacramental wine, my lady. Sometimes on my difficult

road it is the only thing to drink. You must understand." He favored

her with a diffident smile, then made the sign of the Tree over the

gold before stowing it in the pocket of his robe. "We do what we

must to serve God's will."

Vorzheva nodded slowly. "That I can understand. Do not fail me,

sir. You serve a great purpose, and not just for me."

"I understand. Lady." He bowed, then turned and left. Vorzheva

stood and stared at the parchments strewn on the prince's table and

let out a deep breath. The thing was done.

Twilight of the day after he spoke to the princess found Simon in

the chambers of Prince Josua, preparing to say farewell. In a sort of

daze, as though he had just awakened, he stood listening as the

prince had his final words with Binabik. The boy and the troll had

spent the whole of the dark day preparing their kit, obtaining a new

fur-lined cloak and helmet for Simon, along with a light mail shirt to

wear beneath his outer clothing. The coat of thin ringlets, Haestan

572 Tad Williams

had pointed out, would not save him from a direct sword blow or an

arrow to the heart, but would stand him in good stead in the case of

some less than deadly assault.

Simon found the weight of it reassuring, but Haestan warned him

that at the end of a long day's journey he might not feel so cheerful

about it.

"Y'r soldier carries many burdens, boy," the big man told him,

"an' sometimes keepin' alive's th'hardest one."

Haestan himself had been one of the three Erkynlanders to step

forward when the captains had called for men. Like his two com-

panions, Ethelbeam, a scarred, bushy-mustached veteran nearly as

big as Haestan, and Grimmric, a slender, hawkish man with bad

teeth and watchful eyes, he had spent so long preparing for siege

that any sort of action was welcome, even something as dangerous

and mysterious as this quest looked to be. When Haestan found out

Simon was going too, he was even more adamant in his desire to join

them.

"T'send such a boy's madness," he growled, *' 'special when he's

not finished learning t'swing sword or shoot arrow. I'd best go an'

keep at teachin' 'im."

Duke Isgrimnur's man Sludig was also there, a young Rim-

mersman attired like the Erkynlanders in furs and conical helmet. In

place of the longsword the others carried, blond-bearded Sludig had

two notch-bladed hand axes thrust in his belt. He grinned cheerfully

at Simon, anticipating his question.

"Sometimes one gets stuck in a skull or rib cage," the Rimmers-

garder said. He spoke the Westerling tongue nimbly, with almost as

little accent as the duke. "It is nice to have another to use until you

get the first one out."

Nodding, Simon tried to smile back.

"Well met again, Simon." Sludig extended a callused hand.

"Again?"

"We met once before, at Hoderund's abbey," Sludig laughed. "But

you spent the journey arse-end-up across Einskaldir's saddle. I hope

that is not the only way you know how to ride."

Simon blushed, clasped the northerner's hand, then turned away.

"We have turned up little to help you on your way," Jamauga was

regretfully telling Binabik. "The Skendian monks left scant word

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR573

about Colmund's expedition besides the transactions of its outfitting.

They probably thought him a madman."

"Most likely they had it correctly," the troll observed. He was

burnishing the bone-handled knife he had carved to replace the

missing piece of his staff.

"We did find one thing," said Strangyeard. The priest's hair stood

up in wild tufts, and his eye patch sat a little off-center, as though he

had come straight from spending an entire night poring over his

books . . . which he had. "The abbey's book-keeper wrote: *the

Baron does not know how long his journeying to the Rhymer's Tree

shall last . . .'"

"It is unfamiliar," Jamauga said, "in fact, it is probably some-

thing the monk misheard, or got third hand . . . but it is a name.

Perhaps it will make more sense when you reach the mountain Unn-

sheim."

"Perhaps," said Josua thoughtfully, "it is a town along the way, a

village at the mountain's foot?"

"Perhaps," Binabik answered doubtfully, "but from what I am

knowing of those places, there is nothing lying between the ruins of

the Skendi monastery and the mountainsnothing there is but ice,

trees, and rocks, of course. Plenty of those things there are."

As final farewells were spoken, Simon heard Sangfugol's voice

drift out from the room in back, where he was singing for the Lady

Vorzheva.

". . . And shall I go a-wandering

Out in the winter's chill?

Or shall I come now home again?

Whate'er thou sayest, I will ..."

Simon picked up his quiver and looked for the third or fourth

time to make sure the White Arrow was still there. Bewildered, as

though caught in some slow and clinging dream, he realized that he

was setting off on a journey once moreand again he was not quite

sure why. His time at Naglimund had been so brief. Now it was

over, at least for a long while. As he touched the blue scarf tied

loosely at his throat he realized he might not see any of the others in

this room again, anybody at Naglimund . . . Sangfugol, old

Towser, or Miriamele. He thought he felt his heart trip for a mo-

574 Tad Williams

ment, the beat stuttering like a drunkard, and was reaching for

something to lean on when he felt a strong hand clasp his elbow.

"There you be, lad." It was Haestan. "Bad enow that ye've no

leamin' with the sword an' bow, now we're goin' t'put you t'horse-

back."

"Horseback?" Simon said. "I'll like that."

"No y'won't," Haestan smirked. "Not for month or two."

Josua said a few words to each one of them, and then there were

warm, solemn handclasps all around. A short while later they were

in the dark, cold courtyard where Qantaqa and seven, stamping,

steaming horses awaited them, five for riding and a pair for carrying

heavy gear. If there was a moon, it was hidden like a sleeping cat in

the blanket of clouds.

"Good it is that we have this darkness," Binabik said, swinging up

into the new saddle on Qantaqa's gray back. The men, seeing the

troll's steed for the first time, exchanged wondering looks as Binabik

clicked his tongue and the wolf sprang out before them. A group of

soldiers quietly raised the oiled porticullis, and they were out under

the broad sky, the field of shadowy nails spread around them as they

made for the close-looming hills.

"Good-bye, everyone," Simon said quietly. They started up the

sloping path.

High above on the Stile, at the crest of the hill overlooking Nag-

limund, a black shape was watching.

Even with his keen eyes, Ingen Jegger could make out little more

in the moonless murk than that someone had left the castle by the

eastern gate. That, however, was more than enough to raise his

interest.

He stood, rubbing his hands, and considered calling one of his

men to go down with him and get a better look. Instead he lifted his

fist to his mouth and hooted like a snow owl. Seconds later a huge

shape appeared from the scrub growth and leaped onto the Stile

beside him. It was a hound, bigger even than the one killed by the

troll's tame wolf, shining white in the moonlight, its eyes twin pearl

slots in a long, grinning face. It growled, a deep, cavernous rumble,

and swiveled its head from side to side, nostrils wrinkling.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR575

"Yes, Niku'a, yes," Ingen hissed quietly. "It is time to hunt once

more."

A moment later the Stile was empty. The leaves rattled ever so

gently beside the ancient tiles, but no wind was blowing.

35

The Raven

and the Cauldron

^

MAEGWIN winced as the clanging began again, the doleful clatter

that signified so muchand none of it good. One of the other girls, a

small, fair-skinned beauty that Maegwin had assessed at first glance

as a quitter, let go of the bar they were all pushing to cover her ears.

The heavy piece of fencing meant to hold the gate closed nearly

tumbled free, but Maegwin and the two other girls clung on grimly.

"Bagba's Herd, Cifgha," she snarled at the one who had let loose,

"are you mad?! If this had fallen, someone might have been crushed,

or at least broken a foot!"

"I'm sorry, I am, my lady," the girl said, cheeks flushed, "it's just

that loud noise ... it frightens me!" She stepped back to take her

place again, and they all pushed, trying to get the massive oak bar

over the top and into the notch that would hold the paddock closed.

Inside the restraining fence a close-packed congregation of red cattle

grunted, as unsettled as the young women by the continual din.

With a scrape and thump the log fell down into place, and they all

turned, panting, to slump with their backs against the gate.

"Merciful are the gods," Maegwin groaned, "my spine is break-

ing!"

"It's not right," Cifgha opined, staring ruefully at the bleeding

scratches on her palms. "It's men's work!"

The metallic clamor stopped, and for a moment the very silence

seemed to sing. Lluth's daughter sighed and took in a deep breath of

frosty air.

"No, little Cifgha," she said, '"what the men are doing now is

men's work, and whatever is left to do is women's workunless you

want to carry a sword and spear."

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR577

"Cifgha?" one of the other girls said, laughing. "She won't even

kill a spider."

"I always call Tuilleth to do it," Cifgha said, proud of her fastidi-

ousness, "and he always comes to me."

Maegwin made a sour face- "Well, we had better get used to deal-

ing with our own spiders. There will not be many menfolk around in

the days to come, and those who remain will have much else to do."

"It's different for you. Princess," Cifgha said. "You're big and

strong."

Maegwin stared hard at her but did not answer.

"You don't think the fighting will go on all summer, do you?"

asked another girl, as if speaking of a particularly dreary chore.

Maegwin turned to look at them all, at their sweat-dampened faces

and their eyes already roaming, looking for something more interest-

ing to talk about. For a moment she wanted to shout, to frighten

them into realizing that this was not a tournament, not a game of

some sort, but deadly serious.

But why nib their faces in the mud now? she thought, relenting.

Soon enough we will all of us get more than we need of it.

"I don't know if it will last that long, Gwelan,** she said, and

shook her head. "I hope not. I truly hope not."

As she made her way down from the paddocks toward the great

hall, the two men again started to beat the huge bronze cauldron

that hung upside down in its frame of oaken poles before the Taig*s

front doors. As she trotted past, the noise of the men furiously

ringing the cauldron with iron-tipped cudgels was so loud that she

had to cover her ears with her hands. She wondered again how her

father and his advisors could think, let alone plan life-and-death

strategy with this awful ruckus just outside the hall. Still, ifRhynn's

Cauldron was not rung, it would take days to warn each of the

outlying towns one by one, especially those that clung to the slopes

of the Grianspog. This way those villages and manor halls within

earshot of the cauldron would send riders to those beyond. The lord

of the Taig had rung the cauldron in times of danger since long

before the days when Hem the Hunter and Oinduth his mighty

spear had made of their land a great kingdom. Children who had

never heard it sounded still recognized it instantly, so many stories

of Rhynn's Cauldron were told.

578 Tad Williams

The Taig's high windows today were shuttered against the chill

wind and mists. Maegwin found her father and his counselors in

earnest discussion before the fireplace.

"My daughter," Lluth said, standing. He expended visible effort

to produce a smile for her.

"I took some women and got the last of the cattle into the big

paddock," Maegwin reported. "I don't think it's right to squeeze

them ail so tightly. The cows are miserable."

Lluth waved a dismissive hand. "Better we lose some few now

than have to try and round them up if we must fall back to the hills

in a hurry."

At the far end of the hall the door opened, and the sentries banged

their swords against their shields once, as though to echo the pierc-

ing noise of the Summons of the Cauldron. "I do thank you,

Maegwin," the king said, turning from her to greet the new arrival.

"Eolair!" he called out as the count strode forward, still dressed in

travel-stained clothes. "You are swift in returning from the healers.

Good. How are your men?"

The Count of Nad Mullach approached, dropped briefly to one

knee, then stood again at Lluth's impatient gesture- "Five are able-

bodied; the two wounded do not look well. The other four I shall

call Skali to account for personally." He saw Lluth's daughter at last

and smiled his broad smile, but his brow remained knitted in a

weary, troubled study. "My Lady Maegwin," he said, and bowed

again, kissing her long-fingered hand, which, she was embarrassed to

notice, was smudged with dirt from the paddock fence.

"I heard you were back, Count," she said. "I only wish it were in

happier circumstances."

"It's a terrible shame about your brave Mullachi, Eolair," the

king said, returning to sit with old Craobhan and his other trusted

men. "But thanks be to Brynioch and Murhagh One-arm that you

stumbled on to that scout party. If not, Skali and his bastard north-

erners would have been on us unawares. After the skirmish with

your men gets back to him, he'll make a much more cautious ap-

proach, I'm surehe may even change his mind altogether."

"I wish that were true, my king," Eolair said, shaking his head

sadly. Maegwin's heart softened to see how bravely he bore his wea-

riness; she silently cursed her childish emotions. "But," he contin-

579

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

ued, "I fear it is not. For Skali to make such a treacherous attack so

far from his home he must feel sure the odds are leaning his way."

"Why, though, why?" Lluth protested. "We have been at peace

with the Rimmersmen for years!"

"I think, sire, that has little to do with it." Eolair was respectful

but unafraid to correct his king. "If old Isgrimnur still rules in

Elvritshalla, you would be right to wonder, but Skali is Elias' crea-

ture entirely, I think. Rumor in Nabban said Elias will go into the

field against Josua any day. He knows we have refused Guthwulf's

ultimatum, and he fears to have the Hemystiri unencumbered at his

back when he moves against Naglimund."

"But Gwythinn is still there!" said Maegwin, frightened.

"And with half a hundred of our best men, worse luck," old

Craobhan growled from beside the fireplace.

Eolair turned to give Maegwin a kind look, the condescending

sort, she felt sure. "Your brother is doubtless safer behind the thick

stone walls of Josua's castle then he would be here in Hemysadharc.

Also, if he hears of our plight and can ride out,- his fifty men will be

at Skali's back, to our advantage."

King Lluth rubbed his eyes as though to wring out the dismay

and worry of the last day. "I do not know, Eolair, I do not know. I

have a bad feeling about this all. It takes no soothsayer to see an ill-

omened year, which this has been from its first instant."

"I'm still here, father," Maegwin said, and went forward to kneel

beside him. "I will stay with you." The king patted her hand.

Eolair smiled and nodded at the girl's words to her father, but his

mind was obviously on his two dying men, and on the vast force of

Rimmersmen moving down the Frostmarch into the Inniscrich, a

great wave of sharp, sentient iron.

"Those who stay will perhaps not thank us," he said beneath his

breath.

Outside the brazen voice of the cauldron sang out across

Hemysadharc, shouting ceaselessly to the hills beyond: Beware . . .

Beware . . . Beware . . .

^

580 Tad Williams

Baron Devasalles and his small Nabbanai contingent had some-

how contrived to make their row of chambers in Naglimund's drafty

east wing into a little bit of their southern home. Although the

freakish weather was too cold to allow the wide-open windows and

doors so prevalent in balmy Nabban, they had covered the stone

walls with bright green and sky-blue tapestries and filled every avail-

able surface with candles and guttering oil lamps so that the shut-

tered rooms bloomed with light.

It's brighter in here at noon than it is outside, Isgrimnur decided.

But it's like old Jamauga saidthey won't be able to make every-

thing else go away so easy as they have the wintry dark, not by half.

The duke's nostrils twitched like those of a frightened horse.

Devasalles had set out pots of scented oils everywhere, some afloat

with lighted wicks like white worms, filling the chamber with the

thick smells of island spices.

/ wonder if it's the smell of everyone's fear he doesn 't like, or that of

good honest iron? Isgrimnur grunted in distaste and slid his chair

over by the hallway door.

Devasalles had been surprised to find the duke and Prince Josua

at his door, unannounced and unexpected, but had quickly invited

them in, throwing aside some of the multicolored robes that draped

the hard chairs so his guests could seat themselves.

"I'm sorry to disturb you, Baron," Josua said, leaning forward to

rest his elbows on his knees, "but I wished to speak to you alone

before we conclude the Raed tonight."

"Of course, my prince, of course," Devasalles nodded encourag-

ingly. Isgrimnur, disdainfully observing the man's shining hair and

the glinting baubles he wore at neck and wrist, wondered how he

could be the deadly swordsman his reputation declared him.

Looks like he might catch a hilt on his own necklaces and hang

himself.

Josua hurriedly explained the events of the last two days, which

were the real reason the Raed had not continued. Devasalles, who,

like the rest of the assembled lords, had doubted but accepted the

prince's claim of illness, raised his eyebrow but said nothing.

"I could not talk openly; I still cannot," Josua amplified. "In the

mad crush, the muster of local forces, the comings and goings, it

would be only too easy for someone of bad faith or one of Elias' spies

to take the news of our fears and plans to the High King."

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR581

"But our fears are known to all," Devasalles said, "and we have

made no plansyet."

"By the time I am ready to speak of these things to all the lords, I

will have made the gates securebut you see. Baron, you do not yet

know all the story."

With that the prince proceeded to tell Devasalles all the latest

discoveries, of the three swords and the prophetic poem in the mad

priest's book, and how these things matched with the dreams of

many.

"But if you will tell all your liegemen this soon enough, why tell

me now?" Devasalles asked. By the doorway Isgrimnur snorted; he,

too, had wondered this same thing.

"Because I need your lord Leobardis, and I need him now!" Josua

said. "I need Nabban!" He stood and began a circuit of the room,

facing the walls as though he studied their hangings, but his gaze

was focused on a point somewhere leagues beyond the stone and

woven cloth.

"I have needed your duke's pledge from the beginning, but I need

him more now than ever I did. Elias has given Rimmersgard, for all

practical purposes, to Skali and his Kaldskryke Raven-clan. Thus he

has put a knife against King Lluth's back; the Hemystiri will be able

to send me many fewer men, forced as they will be to keep a quan-

tity back to defend their lands. Already Gwythinn, who a week ago

was chafing to be at Elias, is anxious to return and help his father

defend Hemysadharc and its outlands."

Josua whirled to stare Devasalles in the eyes. The prince's face

was a mask of cold pride, but his hand twisted at his short-front,

something neither Isgrimnur or the baron failed to notice. "If Duke

Leobardis ever hopes to be more than a lackey to Elias, he must

throw in his lot with me now."

"But why do you tell this to me?" Devasalles asked. He looked

honestly puzzled. "I know all of this last, and the other thingsthe

swords and the book and allmake no difference."

"Damn it, man, they do!" Josua snapped back, his voice rising

almost to a shout. "Without Leobardis, and with Hernystir under

the northern threat, my brother will have us as snug as if we were

nailed in a barrel, and also he is dealing with demonsand who can

know what dread advantage that means?! We have made some small,

feeble attempt to counter those forces, but what good will come of it

582 Tad Williams

even if it succeeds, against all likelihoodif all the freeholds have

been already thrown down?! Neither your duke nor anyone else will

ever answer King Elias with anything but 'yes, master,' from now

on!"

The baron shook his head again, and his necklaces chinked gently.

"I am confused, my lord. Can it be that you do not know? I sent a

message to the Sancellan Mahistrevis in Nabban by my fastest rider

the night before yesterday, telling Leobardis I believed you would

fight, and that he should move to put his men into the field in your

support."

"What?" Isgrimnur leaped up, his astonishment echoing the

prince's. They both stood swaying over Devasalles, their expressions

those of men ambushed by night.

"Why have you not told me?" Josua demanded.

"But my prince, I did tell you," Devasalles sputtered, **or at least,

since I was advised you might not be disturbed, I sent a message to

your chambers with my seal on it. Surely you read it?"

"Blessed Usires and his Mother!" Josua smacked his open left

hand against his thigh. "I have only myself to blame, for it sits even

now on my bedside table. Deomoth brought it to me, but I was

waiting for a quieter moment. I suppose I forgot. Still it is no harm

done, and your news is excellent."

"You say Leobardis will ride?" Isgrimnur asked suspiciously.

"How are you so sure? You seemed to have more than a few doubts

yourself."

"Duke Isgrimnur," Devasalles* tone was frosty, "surely you real-

ize I was only fulfilling my duty. In truth, Duke Leobardis has long

been in sympathy with Prince Josua. Likewise, he has feared Elias is

becoming overbold. The troops have been on alert for weeks."

*Then why send you?" Josua asked. "What did he think to dis-

cover that he did not have already from me, through my messen-

gers?"

"He sought nothing new," Devasalles said, "although there has

been far more learned here than I think any of us bargained for. No,

he sent my embassy more to make a show for certain others in

Nabban."

"There is resistance among his liegemen?" Josua asked, eyes

bright.

"Of course, but that is not unusual . . . nor is it the source of my

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR583

mission. It was to undermine resistance from a closer source." Here,

although the smallish chamber was obviously empty but for the

three of them, Devasalles darted a look on all sides-

"It is his wife and son who resist most strongly his making com-

mon cause with you," Devasalles said at last.

"You mean the eldest, Benigaris?"

"Yes, else he or one of Leobardis' younger sons should have been

here in my stead." The baron shrugged. "Benigaris sees much he

likes in Elias' rule, and the Duchess Nessalanta . . ." The Nab-

banai emissary shrugged again.

"She, too, favors the High King's chances," Josua smiled bitterly.

"Nessalanta is a clever woman. Too bad that now she will be forced,

willy-nilly, to support her husband's choice of allies. She might well

be correct in her misgivings."

"Josua!" Isgrimnur was shocked.

"I only jest, old friend," the prince said, but his expression belied

him. "So the duke will go into the field then, good Devasalles?"

"As soon as possible, Prince Josua. With ttie cream of Nabban's

knights in his train."

"And a strong dollop of pikemen and archers as well, I hope.

Well, Aedon's grace on us all. Baron."

He and Isgrimnur said their farewells and went out into the dark

corridor, the bright colors of the baron's chamber left behind them

like a dream abandoned at the lip of awakening.

"One person I know will be very glad of this news, Isgrimnur."

The duke raised a questioning eyebrow.

"My niece. Miriamele was very upset when she thought Leobardis

might not come over. Nessalanta is her aunt, after all. She'll be glad

of this news, indeed."

"Let us go tell her," Isgrimnur proposed, taking Josua's elbow

and guiding him out toward the courtyard. "She may be with the

other court ladies. I'm tired of looking at whiskery soldiers. I may be

an old man, but I still like to look on a lady or two from time to

time."

"So be it." Josua smiled, the first unforced example Isgrimnur had

seen in several days. "Then we'll go by and visit your wife, and you

may tell her about your undiminished love of the ladies."

"Prince Josua," the old duke said carefully, "you'll never be too

584 Tad Williams

damn old or exalted that I can't knuckle your ears, just you see if I

can't."

"Not today, Uncle," Josua smirked. "I'll need 'em to appreciate

just what Outrun has to say to you."

^

The wind soughing in off the water carried the smell of cypress.

Tiamak, wiping beads of sweat from his brow, gave silent thanks to

He Who Always Steps on Sand for the unexpected breeze. Coming

back from checking his trap line he had felt the storm-charged air

descend on the Wran: hot, angry air that came and would not go

away, like a marsh crocodile circling a leaking skiff.

Again Tiamak wiped his forehead dry, and reached for the bowl

ofyellowroot tea steeping on the firestone. As he sipped, not without

some pain to his cracked lips, he worried over what he should do.

It was Morgenes' strange message that disturbed him. For days its

ominous words had rattled in his head like pebbles in a dry gourd as

he poled his boat through the byways of the Wran, or made his way

to market in Kwanitupul, the trading village that crouched along

the outlet stream from lake Eadne. He made the three-day flatboat

trip to Kwanitupul once every new moon, putting his unusual

schooling to good advantage at the marketing stalls, helping the

smaller Wrannamen merchants to bargain with the Nabbanai and

Perdruinese traders who worked the Wran's coastal villages. The

taxing journey to Kwanitupul was a necessity, if only to earn a few

coins and perhaps a bag of rice. The rice he used to supplement that

occasional crab too stupid or too cocksure to avoid his traps. There

were not many crabs so obliging, however, which was the reason

Tiamak's usual table fare was fish and roots.

As he crouched in his tiny, banyan-perched cabin, anxiously turn-

ing over Morgenes' message for the hundredth time, he thought

back to the bustling, hilly streets of Ansis Pelippe, Perdruin's capi-

tal, where he and the old doctor had first met.

As much as the clamor and spectacle of the vast trading port, a

hundred, no, many hundreds of times the size of Kwanitipula fact

that his fellow Wrannamen would never believe, provincial, sand-

scuffing louts that they wereit was the smells Tiamak remembered

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR585

most strongly, the million shifting scents: the dank salt smell of the

wharves, spiced with the tang of the fishing boats; the cook fires in

the street where bearded island men offered skewers of bubbling,

charred mutton; the musk of sweating, champing horses whose

proud riders, merchants and soldiers cantered boldly down the mid-

dle of the cobbled streets, letting the pedestrians scatter where they

might; and of course, the swirling odors of saffron and quickweed, of

cinnamon and mantinges, that eddied through the Spice District like

fleeting, exotic solicitations.

Just the memories made him so hungry he almost wanted to weep,

but Tiamak steeled himself. There was work to be done, and he

could not be distracted by such fleshly obsessions. Morgenes needed

him, somehow, and Tiamak had to be ready.

In fact, it had been food that had brought him to Morgenes'

attention, all those years ago in Perdruin, The doctor, on some kind

of apothecarical search through the trading districts of Ansis Pel-

lipe, had bumped into and almost knocked over the Wrannaman

youth, so intently was young Tiamak eyeing an array of marchpane

on a baker's table. The doctor was amused and intrigued by the

marsh lad so far from home, whose apologies to the older man were

so full of carefully -learned Nabbanai idiom. When Morgenes learned

that the boy was in Perdruin's capitol to study with the Usirean

Brothers, and was the first of his village to leave the swampy Wran,

he bought him a large square of marchpane and a cup of milk. From

that moment on Morgenes was as a god to the astounded Tiamak.

The smudged sheet of parchment before him, even though itself a

copy of the original message that had fallen to pieces from handling,

was nevertheless becoming hard to read. He had stared at it so many

times, however, that it no longer mattered. He had even placed it

back into its original ciphers and retranslated it, just to make sure he

had not missed some subtle but important detail.

"The time of the Conqueror Star is surely upon us . . ." the doc-

tor had written, in the course of warning Tiamak this would likely

be his last letter for a long while. Tiamak's help would be needed.

Morgenes assured him, ". . . if certain dreadful things whichit is

saidare hinted at in the infamous lost book of the priest

Nisses ..." were to be avoided.

The first time he had gone to Kwanitupul after receiving

586 Tad Williams

Morgenes' sparrow-borne message, Tiamak asked Middastri, a Per-

druinese merchant with whom he sometimes drank a bowl of beer,

what dreadful things were happening in Erchester, the city where

Morgenes lived in Erkynland. Middastri said he had heard of strife

between the High King Elias and Lluth of Hemystir, and of course

everyone had been talking about the falling out between Elias and

his brother Prince Josua for months, but beyond that the merchant

could think of nothing special. Tiamak, who from Morgenes' mes-

sage had feared danger of a vaster and more immediate sort, had felt

a little better. Still, the import of the doctor's message tugged at him.

"The infamous lost book ..." How had Morgenes known the

secret? Tiamak had not told anyone; he had wanted to surprise the

doctor with it on a visit he had planned to make next spring, his first

time ever north of Perdruin. Now it appeared Morgenes already

knew something of his prizebut why didn't he say so? Why should

he instead hint and riddle and suggest, like a crab carefully poking

the fish head out of one of Tiamak's traps?

The Wrannaman set down his bowl of tea and moved across the

low-ceilinged room, hardly rising from his bent-kneed crouch. The

hot, sour wind began to blow a little more strongly, rocking the

house on its tall stilts, lifting the thatch with a serpentine hiss. He

searched in his wooden chest for the leaf-wrapped thing, carefully

hidden below the stack of parchment that was his own rewriting of

Sovran Remedys of the Wranna Healers, what Tiamak secretly liked

to think of as his "great work." Finding it at last he brought it out

and unwrapped it, not for the first time in the last fortnight.

As it lay beside his transcription of Morgenes' message, he was

taken by the contrast. Morgenes' words were painstakingly copied in

black root-ink on cheap parchment, beaten so thin a candle flame

held a handsbreadth away might puff it into flame. The other, the

prize, was scribed on a sheet of tight-stretched skin or hide. The

reddish brown words trailed crazily across the page, as though the

writer had been a-horseback, or sitting at the table during an earth

tremor.

This last was the jewel of Tiamak's collectionindeed, if he was

right about what it was, would be the crowning gem of anyone's

collection. He had found it in a great pile of other used parchments a

trader in Kwanitupul was selling for scribing practice. The trader

had not known who the chest of papers had belonged to, only that

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR587

he had gotten it as part of a blind lot of household goods in Nabban.

Fearing that his good fortune might evaporate, Tiamak had stifled

the urge to question further and bought it on the spotalong with a

sheaf of other parchmentsfor one shiny Nabbanai quinis-piece.

He stared at it againalthough he had read this more times even

that Morgenes' message, if such was possibleand especially at the

top of the parchment, not so much torn as gnawed, whose disfigure-

ment ended with the letters ". . . ARDENVYRD."

Was not Nisses' famous, vanished volumesome even called it

imaginarynamed Du Svardenvyrd? How had Morgenes known?

Tiamak had not yet told anyone of his lucky find.

Beneath the title the northern runes, smeared in some places,

flaking away into rust-colored powder in others, were nevertheless

quite readable, written in the archaic Nabbanai of five centuries

gone.

*'. . . Bringe from Nuanni's Rocke Garden

The Man who tho' Blinded canne See '

Discover the Blayde that delivers The Rose

At thefoote of the Rimmer's greate Tree

Find the Call whose lowde Claime

Speakes the Call-bearer's name

In a Shippe on the Shallowest Sea

When Blayde, Call, and Man

Come to Prince's right Hande

Then the Prisoned shall once more go Free . . ."

Below the strange poem a single name was printed in large, awk-

ward runes "NISSES."

Although Tiamak stared and stared, inspiration still remained

anguishingly distant. At last, sighing, he rolled the ancient scroll

back in its jacket of preservative leaves and tucked it into his

burrwood chest.

What, then, did Morgenes want him to do? Bring this thing to the

doctor himself at the Hayholt? Or should he instead send it to an-

other wise one, like the witch woman Geloe, fat Ookequk up in

Yiqanuc, or the fellow in Nabban? Perhaps the wisest plan was

merely to wait for Doctor Morgenes' further word, instead of hurry-

ing off foolishly without full understanding. After all, from what

588 Tad Williams

Midda-stn had told him, whatever Morgenes feared must still be a

long way off; there was certainly time to wait until he knew what it

was that the doctor wanted.

Time and patience, he counseled himself, time and patience . . .

Outside his window the cypress branches groaned, suffering be-

neath the wind's rough handling.

The chamber door flew open. Sangfugol and the lady Vorzheva

leaped up guiltily, as if they had been caught in some impropriety,

although the length of the chamber separated them. As they looked

up, wide-eyed, the minstrel's lute, which had been propped against

his chair, tilted and fell over at his feet. He hurriedly caught it up

and held it against his breast as though it were an injured child.

"Damn you, Vorzheva, what have you done!?" Josua demanded.

Duke Isgrimnur stood behind mm in the doorway wearing a worried

look.

"Be calm, Josua," he urged, tugging at the prince's gray Jerkin.

"When I have the truth from this . . . this woman," Josua spat.

"Until then, stay out of this, old friend."

Color was returning fast to Vorzheva's cheeks.

"What is your meaning?" she said. "You knock in doors like a

bull, and shout questions. What is your meaning?"

"Do not seek to gull me. I have Just come from speaking to the

gate-captain; I am sure he wishes I had never found him, so angry I

was. He told me that Miriamele went out yesterday forenoon with

my permissionwhich was no permission, but instead my seal at-

tached to a false document!"

"And why do you shout at me?" the lady asked haughtily.

Sangfugol began to sidle toward the chamber door, still clutching his

wounded instrument.

"That you know full well," Josua growled, the flush finally begin-

ning to fade from his pale features, "and stay where you are, harper,

for I am not done with you. You have been much in my lady's

confidence of late."

"At your command. Prince Josua," Sangfugol said haltingly, "to

ease her loneliness. But of the Princess Miriamele I swear I know

nothing!"

Josua moved forward into the chamber, swinging the heavy door

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR589

shut behind him without a look back. Isgrimnur, nimble despite his

years and girth, skipped out of its way.

"Good Vorzheva, do not treat me as though ? were one of the

wagon boys you grew up with. All I have heard from you is how the

poor princess is sad, the poor princess is missing her family. Now

Miriamele is gone out of the gate with some villain, and some other

confederate has used my seal ring to give her safe passage! I am no

fool!"

The dark-haired woman returned his stare for a moment, then her

lip began to tremble. Angry tears started in her eyes as she sat back

down, long skirts rustling.

"Very well. Prince Josua," she said, "cut my head off if you like. I

have helped the poor girl to go away to her family in Nabban. If you

were not so heartless, you would have sent her yourself, with armed

men to escort. Instead, all she has for company is a kind monk." She

pulled a kerchief from the bosom of her dress and dabbed her eyes.

"Still, she is happier that way, than to be cooped up here like a bird

in a cage."

"Tears ofElysia!" Josua swore, throwing his hand in the air. "You

foolish woman! Miriamele wanted only to play at being an emissary

she thought to find glory by bringing her Nabbanai relatives into

this struggle on my side."

"Perhaps it is not fair to say 'glory,' Josua," Isgrimnur cautioned.

"I think the princess honestly means to help."

"And what is wrong with that?!" asked Vorzheva defiantly. "You

need the help of Nabban, do you not? Or are you too proud?"

"God help me, the Nabbanai are with us already! Do you under-

stand? I have just seen Baron Devasalles an hour gone. But now the

High King's daughter is out needlessly wandering the land some-

where, with all of her father's troops about to go into the field, and

his spies swarming everywhere like maggot-flies."

Josua waved his arms in frustration, then slumped into his chair,

long legs stretched before him.

"It is too much for me, Isgrimnur," he said wearily. "And you

wonder why I do not declare myself a rival for Elias' throne? I

cannot even keep a young girl safely under my roof."

Isgrimnur smiled dolefully. "Her father didn't have much luck in

keeping her either, as I recall."

590 Tad Williams

"Still." The prince brought his hand up to knead his brow.

"Usires, my very head throbs with it all."

"Now, Josua," the duke said, casting a look at the others to warn

them to keep silence, "all is not lost. We must simply put a troop of

good men out to beat the bushes for Miriamele and this monk, this

. . . Cedric or whatever ..."

"Cadrach," said Josua tonelessly.

"Yes, then, Cadrach. Well, a young girl and a holy friar cannot

move that quickly afoot. We shall simply put some men to horse and

get after them."

"Unless the Lady Vorzheva here has hidden horses for them as

well," Josua said sourly. He sat up. "You haven't, have you?l"

Vorzheva could not meet his gaze.

"Merciful Aedon!" Josua swore. "That is the final trick! I shall

send you back to your barbarian father in a sack, you wildcat!"

"Prince Josua?" It was the harper. When he got no response he

cleared his throat and tried again. "My prince?"

"What?" Josua said irritably. "Yes, you may go. I will have words

with you later. Go."

"No sir ... that is, did you say the monk's name was . . .

Cadrach?"

"Yes, so the gate-captain said. He spoke with the man a bit. Why,

do you know him, or know his haunts?"

"Well, no, Prince Josua, but I think the boy Simon met him. He

told me much of his adventures, and the name sounds quite familiar.

Oh, sir, if it is him, the princess may be in some danger."

"What do you mean?" Josua leaned forward.

"The Cadrach Simon told me of was a rogue and a cutpurse, sir.

That one also went in the guise of a monk, but he was no Aedonite

man, that's sure."

"It cannot be!" Vorzheva said. The kohl around her eyes had run

onto her cheeks. "I have met this man, and he quoted me from the

Book of Aedon. He is a good, kind man. Brother Cadrach."

"Even a demon can quote the Book," Isgrimnur said, shaking his

head sorrowfully.

The prince had sprung to his feet, and was moving to the door.

"We must put men out at once, Isgrimnur," he said, then stopped

and turned back, taking Vorzheva by the arm. "Come, lady," he

said brusquely. "You will not undo your damage, but you may at

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR591

least come along and tell us all you know, where you have hid the

horses and all such." He pulled her to her feet.

"But I cannot go out!" she said, shocked. "Look, I have been

weepingi My face, it is terrible."

"For the hurt you have done to me, and maybe to my foolish niece

as well, it is a small enough penalty. Come!"

He hurried her before him out of the chamber, Isgrimnur follow-

ing. Their arguing voices echoed down the stone corridor.

Sangfugol, left behind, looked sorrowfully down at his lute. There

was a long crack twisting the length of its curved, ashwood back,

and one of the strings hung loose in a useless curl.

"Scant music but sour will be made tonight," he said.

^

It was still an hour before dawn when Lluth came to her bedside.

She had not been able to sleep all night, stretched, tight inside with

worry for him, but as he bent over to touch her arm she pretended

sleep, wanting to spare him the only thing left from which she could

spare him: the knowledge of her own great fear.

"Maegwin," he said softly. Her eyes shut fast, she fought the urge

to reach up and hug him tight. Full-armored but for his helmet, as

she knew from the sound of his walk and the scent of polishing oil,

he might have trouble straightening up again if she pulled him down

so close. Even the parting she could stand, bitter though it was. The

thought of him showing his weariness and his age this night of all

nights, she could not.

"Is that you. Father?" she said at last.

"It is."

"And are you going now?"

"I must. The sun will be up soon, and we hope to reach the edge

of the Combwood by midmommg."

She sat up. The fire had burned out, and even with her eyes open

she could not see much. Faintly, through the walls, she could hear

the sound of her stepmother Inahwen sobbing. Maegwin felt a

twinge of anger at such a display made of grief.

"Brynioch's Shield over you, father," she said, reaching out a

592 Tad Williams

blind hand to find his battered face. "I wish I was a son, to fight at

your side."

She felt his lips curl beneath her fingers. "Ah, Maegwin, you were

ever a fierce one. Have you not duty enough here? It will not be easy

being mistress of the Taig while I am gone."

"You forget your wife."

Lluth smiled again in the dark. "I do not. You are strong,

Maegwin, stronger than she. You must lend her some of your

strength."

"She usually gets what she wants."

The king's voice was gentle, but he caught her wrist in a firm

hand. "Don't, daughter. Along with Gwythinn, you are the three I

love most in all the world. Help her."

Maegwin hated to cry. She pulled her hand from her father's

grasp and rubbed her eyes fiercely. "I will," she said. "Forgive me."

"No forgiveness necessary," he answered, then took her hand

once more and squeezed. "Farewell, daughter, until I come back

again. There are cruel ravens in our fields, and we have work to do

chasing them out again."

She was up and out of bed then, and threw her arms around him.

A moment later the door opened and closed, and she heard his steps

going slowly up the hall, the clink of spurs like sad music.

Later, when she cried, it was with the blankets over her head so

that no one would hear.

36

Fresh Wounds

and Old Scars

THE HORSES were more than a little afraid of Qantaqa, so Binabik

rode the great gray wolf well ahead of Simon and the others, carry-

ing a hooded lamp to show the way in the blanketing darkness. As

the tiny caravan made its way along the skirt of the hills the shud-

dering light bobbed before them like a corpse-candle.

The moon cowered within its nest of clouds, and their progress

was slow and cautious. Between the gentle, jogging rhythm of the

horse beneath him, and the feel of its warm, broad back, Simon

nearly fell asleep several times, only to be startled awake by thin,

scrabbling fingers at his face: the branches of close-hovering trees.

There was little talk. From time to time one of the men whispered a

word of encouragement to his mount, or Binabik called back softly

to warn of some upcoming obstacle; but for those sounds, and the

muffled percussion of hoofbeats, they might have been a gray pil-

grimage of lost souls.

When the moonlight finally began to seep through a rent in the

cloud ceiling, not long before dawn, they stopped to make camp.

Vaporous breath caught the moon's glow, making it seem they ex-

haled silver-blue clouds as they tied up their mounts and the two

packhorses. They lit no fire. Ethelbeam took first watch; the others.

wrapped in their heavy cloaks, curled up on the damp ground to

snatch what sleep they could.

Simon awoke to a morning sky like thin gruel, and nose and ears

that seemed to have magically turned to ice in the night. As he

crouched by the small fire chewing the bread and hard cheese

Binabik had doled out, Sludig sat down beside him. The young Rim-

mersman's cheeks were polished red by the brisk wind.

"This is like our early spring weather, back in my home," he

594

Tad Williams

grinned, skewering a heel of bread on the long blade of his knife and

holding it over the flame. "It makes a man of you quick, you will

see."

"I hope there are other ways of becoming a man besides freezing

to death," Simon grunted, rubbing his hands together.

"You can kill a bear with a spear," Sludig said. "We do that,

also."

Simon could not tell whether he was joking.

Binabik, who had just sent Qantaqa off to hunt, came over and sat

down cross-legged. "Well, the two of you, are you ready to be at

hard riding today?" he said. Simon did not respond, since his mouth

was full of bread; when a moment later Sludig had not answered

either, Simon looked up. The Rimmersman was staring straight into

the fire, his mouth in a set, straight line. The silence was uncomfort-

able.

Simon swallowed. "I suppose so, Binabik," he said quickly. "Do

we have far to go?"

Binabik smiled blithely, as though the Rimmersman's silence were

perfectly natural. "We will be going as far as we shall wish. Today it

seems good to ride long, since the skies are clear. Sooner than we are

wishing we may be found by rain and snow."

"Do we know where we're headed?"

"In part, friend Simon." Binabik took a length of twig from the

outskirts of the firepit and began to scratch lines in the moist earth.

"Here is standing Naglimund," he said, drawing a rough circle. He

then made a line of scallop shapes starting at the circle's right flank

and extending up for some distance. "That, the Wealdhelm. This

cross is being us here." He made a mark not far past the circle. Then

in quick succession he drew a large oval near the far end of the

mountains, a few smaller circles scattered around its rim, and what

seemed to be another line of hills out beyond.

"So, then," he said, hankering down close over his furrowed

patch of ground. "Soon it is we shall be approaching this lake," he

indicated the large elliptical shape, "which is called Drorshull."

Sludig, who seemingly against his will had leaned over to look,

straightened up. "Drorshullvennthe Lake ofDror's Hammer." He

frowned and tilted forward once more, making a dot with his finger

along the lake's western rim. "There is Vestvennbythe thaneland

of that traitor, Storfot I would like very much to pass through there

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR595

by night." He wiped the breadcrumbs from the blade of his dagger

and held it up to catch the weak firelight.

"We will not, however, be going to there," Binabik said sternly,

"and for you revenge must wait. We are passing to the other side,

past Hullnir to Haethstad, nearby where is the Abbey of Saint

Skendi, then most likely up across the plain of the north, toward the

mountains. No stopping before for cutting of throats." He pushed

his stick up beyond the lake toward the row of rounded shapes.

"That is because you trolls do not understand honor," Sludig said

bitterly, staring at Binabik from beneath his thick blond eyebrows.

"Sludig," Simon said pleadingly, but Binabik did not respond to

the man's baiting.

"We are having a task to perform," the troll responded calmly.

"Isgrimnur, your duke, wishes it, and his will is not served with

faithfulness by creeping off at nighttimes to slit the throat of Storfot.

That is not a troll's lack of honor, Sludig."

The Rimmersman looked hard at him for a moment, then shook

his head. "You are right." There was, to Simon's surprise, no sullen-

ness remaining in his voice. "I am angry, and my words were poorly

chosen." He got up and walked away toward where Grimmric and

Haestan stood reburdening the horses; as he went he flexed his sup-

ple, muscular shoulders as though to loosen knots. Simon and the

troll stared after him for a moment.

"He apologized," Simon said.

"All Rimmersmen are not being that cold one Einskaldir," his

friend replied. "But, also, all trolls are not either being Binabik.**

It was a very long day's ride, up along the flank of the hills under

the cover of the trees. When they finally stopped for their evening

meal, Simon knew for certain the truth of Haestan's earlier warn-

ings: although his horse walked slowly, and their march had been

over mild terrain, his legs and crotch felt as though he had spent the

day attached to some dreadful torture device. Haestan, not without

a grin, kindly explained to him that after a night's stiffening the

worst would be yet to come; he then offered him as much of the

wineskin as he cared to drink. When Simon eventually curled up

that evening between the humped and mossy roots of a nearly leaf-

less oak tree he was feeling a little better, although the wine made

him think he heard voices singing strange songs on the wind.

596 Tad Williams

When he woke up in the morning it was to discover that not only

was everything Haestan had claimed true tenfold, but snow was

swirling down as well, covering Wealdhelm Hills and travelers alike

in a cold, clinging white coverlet Even shivering in the weak Yuven

daylight he could still hear the wind-voices What they were saying

was clear they mocked calendars, and fleered at travelers who

thought they could walk with impunity into winter's new kingdom

^

The Princess Minamele stared with horror at the scene spread

before her What had been since the beginning of the morning's nde

a not of colors and black smoke on the horizon now lay clear as she

and Cadrach stood on the hillside overlooking the Inmscnch. It was

a tapestry of death, woven in flesh and metal and shredded earth

"Merciful Elysia," she gasped, reining in her shying horse, "what

has happened here! Is this my father's work9"

The small round man squinted, mouth working for a moment in

what the princess took for silent prayer "Most of the dead are

Hemystm, my lady," he said at last, "and I'm guessing the others

are Rimmersmen, from the look of them " He frowned on the scene

below as a group of startled ravens all leaped up at once like a clutch

of flies, circled, then settled again "It appears the battle, or the

retreating part of it, has moved away west"

Minamele found her eyes filling with frightened tears, and

reached up a fist to scour them away "The survivors must be falling

back to Hemysadharc, to the Taig Why has this happened^ Has

everyone gone mad?"

"Everyone was mad already, my lady," Cadrach said with a

strange, sorrowful smile. "It is merely that the tunes have brought it

out m them "

They had ndden swiftly for the first day and a half, pushing the

Lady Vorzheva's horses to their gasping limit until they reached and

crossed the Greenwade River at its upper fork, some twenty-five

leagues southwest of Nagumund They then slowed their pace, giv-

ing the horses a chance to rest in case they should again need to nde

m haste

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR597

Minamele rode well m the manly style, which was appropriate to

the garments she wore, the breeches and jerkin m which she had

disguised herself in her escape from the Hayholt Her shorn hair was

again black-dyed, although little of it showed beneath the traveling

hood worn as much against the cold as against discovery; Brother

Cadrach nding beside her m his travel-stained gray habit was no

more likely than she to attract notice. In any case, there were few

other travelers on the nver road m such discouraging weather, and

in the midst of such perilous times. The princess had begun to feel

quite confident that their escape was safely effected.

Since the middle of the day before they had ndden along the dike

road above the wide, swollen nver with the braying of distant trum-

pets in their ears, shnll brazen voices that outstripped even the

moan of the ram-laden wind- At first it was frightening, raising the

specter of some vengeful troop of her uncle's or her father's at their

heels, but soon it became apparent that she and Cadrach were ap-

proaching the source of the clamor, rather than the reverse. Then,

this morning, they had seen the first signature of battle: lonely trails

of black smoke inking the now-calm sky.

"Isn't there anything we can do?" Minamele asked, dismounted

and standing beside her gently blowing horse. But for the birds the

scene below them was as motionless as if carved m gray and red

stone.

"And what might we do, my lady9" Cadrach asked, still a-saddle.

He took a swig from his wineskin

"I don't know You're a pnest! Mustn't you say a mansa for their

SOU1S'?"

"For whose souls, princess? Those of my pagan countrymen, or

those of the good Aedomtes from Rimmersgard who have come

down to pay this call on them?" His bitter words seemed to hang

like smoke.

Minamele turned to stare at the little man, whose eyes now

seemed quite unlike those of the jocular companion of the last few

days When he told stories or sang his Hernystiri nding and drink-

ing songs, he fairly glittered with cheer Now he looked like a man

savonng the doubtful victory of a dire prophecy fulfilled.

"All Hernystm are not pagans!" she said, angry with his strange

mood "You yourself are an Aedonite monk!"

598 Tad Williams

"Should I go down, then, and ask who is pagan and who is not?"

He waved a plump hand at the unmoving spectacle of carnage. "No,

my lady, the only work still to be done here will be done by scaven-

gers." He prodded his horse with his heels and rode ahead a short

distance.

Miriamele stood and stared, pressing her cheek against the horse's

neck. "Surely no religious man could stand by and see such a scene

unmoved," she called after him, "even that red monster PryratesF

Cadrach hunched at the mention of the king's counselor as if struck

in the back, then rode a few more paces before stopping to sit for a

while in silence.

"Come, lady," he said at last over his shoulder. "We must get

down from this hillside, where we are in such plain view. Not all

scavengers are feathered, and some go on two legs."

Dry-eyed now, the princess shrugged wordlessly and clambered

back into the saddle, following the monk down the forested slope

that ran beside the bloodied Inniscrich.

^

As he slept that night in their camp on the hillside above the flat,

white, treeless expanse of Drorshull lake, Simon dreamed again of

the wheel.

Once more he found himself snagged helplessly, tossed about like

a child's doll of rags, lifted aloft on the wheel's vast rim. Cold winds

buffeted him, and shards of ice scored his face as he was drawn up

into freezing blackness.

At the summit of the ponderous revolution, wind-ripped and

bleeding, he saw a gleam in the darkness, a luminous vertical stripe

that reached from the impenetrable blackness above to the equally

murky depths below. It was a white tree, whose broad trunk and

thin branches glowed as though stuffed with stars. He tried to pull

himself free from the wheel's grip, to leap out toward the beckoning

whiteness, but it seemed he was held fast. With one great, final effort

he tore loose and jumped.

He plunged downward through a universe of glowing leaves, as

though he flew among the lamps of the stars; he cried out for blessed

599

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

Usires to save him, for God's help, but no hands caught at him as he

plummeted through the cold firmament. . . .

Hullnir, at the slowly-freezing lake's eastern rim, was a town

empty of even ghosts. Half-buried beneath the drifting snows, its

houses unroofed by wind and hail, it lay like the carcass of a starved

elk beneath dark, indifferent skies.

"Have Skali and his ravens so soon wrung the life from all the

northland?" Sludig asked, his eyes wide.

"As like they all fled th'late frost," Grimmric said, pulling his

cloak tight beneath his narrow chin. "Too cold here, too far away

from th'few roads open."

"It is probable Haethstad will be the same," Binabik said, urging

Qantaqa back up the slope. "Good it is that we had no plan to find

supplies on our way."

Here at the lake's far end the hills began to fade, and a great arm

of the northern Aldheorte reached out to cloak their last, low slopes.

It was different than the southern part of the forest Simon had seen,

and not only because of the snow that now carpeted the forest floor,

stealing away the very sound of their passage. Here the trees were

straight and tall, dark green pines and spruce that stood like pillars

beneath their white mantles, separating wide, shadowy corridors.

The riders moved as through pale catacombs, snow sifting down

from above like the ash of ages.

^

"There is someone there, Brother Cadrach!" Miriamele hissed.

She pointed. "There! Can't you see the gleamit's metal!"

Cadrach lowered the wineskin and stared. His mouth was stained

purplish red at the comers. He scowled and squinted, as if to satisfy

a whim of hers. A moment later the frown deepened.

"By the Good God, you are right. Princess," he whispered, draw-

ing back on his reins. "There is something there, sure enough." He

handed the traces to her and slipped down onto the thick green

grass, then, with a gestured admonition to silence, he crept forward;

using a broad tree trunk to shield his almost equally stout form, he

moved to within a hundred paces of the glimmering object, craning

600 Tad Williams

his neck around to peer at it like a child playing hide-and-seek. After

a moment he turned back and beckoned. Miriamele rode forward,

bringing Cadrach's horse beside her own.

It was a man who lay half-propped against the sprawling base of

an oak tree, clad in armor that still shone in a few spots, despite the

fearful battering it had taken. Lying in the grass at his side was the

hilt of a shattered sword, and a broken pole and green pennant

which bore the blazoned White Stag of Hemystir.

"Elysia Mother of Godt" Miriamele said as she hurried forward.

"Is he stiU alive?"

Cadrach quickly tied the horses up to one of the oak's arching

roots and then moved to her side. "It doesn't look likely."

"But he is!" the princess said, "Listen ... he is breathing!"

The monk kneeled down to look at the man whose breath indeed

sounded haltingly within the chamber of his half-open helmet.

Cadrach tilted up the mask beneath the winged crest to expose a

mustached face almost hidden by runnels of dried blood.

"Hounds of Heaven," Cadrach sighed, "it is Arthpreasthe

Count of Cuimhne."

"You know him?" Miriamele said, searching in her saddlebag for

the waterskin. She found it, and moistened a piece of cloth.

"Know of him, really," Cadrach said, and gestured at the two

birds stitched on the knight's tattered surcoat. "He's the liege-lord

of Cuimhne, near Nan Mullacb, he is. His sign is the twin meadow-

larks."

Miriamele dabbed at Arthpreas' face while the monk gingerly

explored the bloodied rents in his armor. The knight's eyes fluttered.

"He's awakening!" the princess said, breathing in sharply.

"Cadrach, I think he will live!"

"Not long. Lady," the small man said quietly. "There is a wound

here in his belly as wide as my hand- Let me give him the last words,

and he can die in peace."

The count groaned and a little blood ran over the rim of his lip.

Miriamele tenderly wiped it from his chin. His eyes trembled open.

"E gundhain sluith, ma connalbehn . . ." the knight muttered in

Hemystiri. He coughed weakly, and more blood bubbled onto his

lips. "There's a good . . . lad. Did they . . . take the Stag?"

"What does he mean?" Miriamele whispered. Cadrach pointed to

the torn banner on the grass beneath the count's arm.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR601

"You rescued it. Count Arthpreas," she said, holding her face

close to his. "It's safe. What happened?"

"Skali's Raven-warriors . . . they were everywhere." A long

cough, and the knight's eyes opened wider. "Ah, my brave boys

. . . dead, all dead . . . hacked up like, like . . ." Arthpreas gave

a painful, dry sob. His eyes stared up at the sky, moving slowly as if

tracing the movements of clouds.

"And where is the king?" he said at last. "Where is our brave old

king? The goirach northerners were all around him, Brynioch rot

them, Brynioch na ferth ub . . . ub strocinh ..."

"The king?" Miriamele whispered. "He must mean Lluth."

The count's eyes suddenly lit on Cadrach, and for a moment were

kindled as though by an inner spark. "Padreic?" he said, and lifted a

shaking, bloodied hand to lay it on the monk's wrist. Cadrach

flinched and made as though to draw away, but his eyes seemed

caught, lit by a strange gleam. "Is it you, Padreic feir? Have you

. . . come back . . . ?"

The knight stiffened then, and gave vent to a long, racking cough

which brought the red flow up like an underground spring, A mo-

ment later his eyes rolled up beneath his dark lashes.

"Dead," Cadrach said after a moment, a harsh note in his voice.

"Usires save him, and God comfort his soul." He made the sign of

the tree over Arthpreas' unmoving breast and stood up.

"He called you Padreic," Miriamele said, staring abstractedly at

the cloth she held, now entirely crimson.

"He mistook me," the monk said. "A dying man looking for an

old friend. Come. We have no shovels for digging a grave. Let us at

least find stones to cover him. He was ... I am told he was a good

man."

As Cadrach walked away across the clearing, Miriamele carefully

pulled the armored gauntlet from Arthpreas' hand, then wrapped it

in the torn green banner.

"Please come and help me, my lady," Cadrach called. "We cannot

afford to be spending much time here."

"I will come," she said, slipping the bundle into her saddlebag.

"This much time we can afford."

^

602 Tad Williams

Simon and his companions made their way slowly around the

long circumference of the lake, along a peninsula of tall trees and

drifting snow. On their left lay the frozen mirror of Drorshull; the

white shoulders of the upper Wealdhelm loomed on the right. The

song of the wind was loud enough to drown all conversation softer

than a full shout. As Simon rode, watching Haestan's wide, dark

back jounce along before mm, it seemed they were all solitary is-

lands in a cold sea; in constant sight of each other, but separated by

untrafficked expanses. He found his thoughts turning inward, lulled

by the monotonous pacing of his horse.

Strangely, in his mind's inlooking eye, the NagUmund they had

just left seemed as insubstantial as a distant memory of childhood.

Even the faces of Miriamele and Josua were hard to recapture, as

though he tried to summon the features of strangers whose impor-

tance had not been discovered until long after they were gone. In-

stead, he found vivid memories of the Hayholt . . . of long summer

evenings in the commons yard, itchy with mown grass and insects,

or of breezy spring afternoons climbing on the walls, when the

heady scent of the rose hedges in the courtyard pulled at him like

warm hands. Remembering the slightly damp odor of the walls

around his tiny cot, pushed into a comer in the servant's quarters,

he felt himself a king in exile, as though he had lost a palace to some

foreign usurperas, in a way, he had.

The others seemed just as enfolded in their own thoughts; but for

Grimmric's whistlinga thin trill of music that only occasionally

rose above the wind, but seemed nevertheless constantthe trip

around Drorshull Lake was made in silence.

Several times, when he could make her out through the fluttering

snowflakes, he thought he saw Qantaqa stop and tilt her head as

though to listen. When they finally made camp that night, with the

main body of the lake now lying behind them to the southwest, he

asked Binabik about it.

"Does she hear something, Binabik? Is there something ahead of

us?"

The troll shook his head, extending his now unmittened hands

closer to the small fire. "Perhaps, but things that are before us, even

in such weather, Qantaqa smells themit is into the wind that we

are walking. More likely it is she hears a sound from behind or to

either side."

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR603

Simon thought about that for a moment. Certainly nothing had

followed them from barren Hullnir, devoid even of birds.

"Someone is behind us?" he said.

"I am doubting. Who? And for what reason?"

Nevertheless, Sludig, bringing up the rear of the column, had also

noticed the wolf's seeming uneasiness. Although he still was not

entirely comfortable with Binabik, and certainly was not ready to

trust Qantaqahe rolled his sleeping cloak at the far side of camp

when he slepthe did not doubt the gray wolf's keen senses. As the

others sat eating hard bread and dried venison, he had taken out his

whetstone to sharpen his hand axes.

"Here between the Dimmerskogthe forest north of usand

Drorshullven," Sludig said frowning, "it has always been wild coun-

try, even when Isgrimnur or his father ruled in Elvritshalla and

winter knew its place. These days, who knows what walks the white

waste, or the Trollfells beyond?" He scraped rhythmically.

'Trolls, for one thing," said Binabik sardonically, "but I can be

assuring you there is scant fear of troll-folk descending upon us in

the night for killing and plunder."

Sludig grinned sourly and continued sharpening his axe.

"Th'Rimmersman speaks sense," Haestan said, giving Binabik a

displeased look. "An' tis not trolls I'm fearin' myself."

"Are we near to your country, Binabik?" Simon asked. "To

Yiqanuc?"

"We will be approaching with more closeness when we reach the

mountains, but the place of my birth is in actuality, I think, east of

where it is we are heading."

"You think?"

"Do not be forgetting, we are still not sure with exactness where

we go. The Rhymer's Tree'a tree of rhymes? I know the moun-

tain called Urmsheim, where it is supposed this Colmund went, is

standing somewhere to the north, between Rimmersgard and

Yiqanuc, but a big mountain it is." The troll shrugged. "Is the tree

on it? Before it? Or somewhere else all together? I cannot know at

this time."

Simon and the others stared glumly into the fire. It was one thing

to undertake a perilous mission for your sovereign, it was another

thing to search blindly in the white wilderness.

The flames hissed as they bit at the damp wood. Qantaqa rose

604 Tad Williams

from where she stretched on the naked snow and cocked her head-

She walked purposefully to the edge of the clearing they had chosen.

in a grove of pines on the low hillside. After a suspensefiu interval

she walked back and lay down again. No one said a word, but a

moment of tension had passed, leaving their hearts a little lighter

once more.

When they had all finished eating, more logs were fed onto the

blaze, which popped and steamed in cheerful spite of the flurrying

snow. As Binabik and Haestan talked quietly, and Simon used

Ethelbearn's whetstone on his own sword, a thin melody rose up.

Simon turned to see Grimmric whistling, Ups pursed, eyes fixed on

the wavering flames. When he looked up and saw Simon staring at

him, the wiry Erkynlander gave him a snaggle-toothed smile.

"Put me fmind of somethin*," he said. "N'old winter song, it

was."

"What then?" Ethelbearn asked. "Sing it, man. No harm in quiet

song."

"Yes, go ahead," Simon seconded.

Grimmric looked over to Haestan and the troll, as if fearing an

objection from that quarter, but they were still enmeshed in their

discussion. "Well, then," he said. "Suppose there's no harm in*t."

He cleared his throat and looked down, as if embarrassed by the

sudden attention. "S'just a song my old father'd sing when we'd go

out of a Decander afternoon t'cut wood." He cleared his throat. "A

winter song," he added, then cleared his throat again and sang, in a

scratchy but not untuneful voice.

"Ice is a-growin' in th' thatch

And snow is upon th' sill.

Someone's a-knockin' at th' door

Out in th1 winter's chill.

Sing you hey-a-ho, an' who can it be?

Fire is a-bumin' in th' grate

Shadows is on th' wall.

Pretty Arda, she answers up

Inside her latchlocked halt

Sing you hey-a-ho, an' who can it be?

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR605

Comes then a voice from winter-dark,

'Open up your door.

Let me in for to share your fire

An' to warm my hands before.'

Sing you hey-a-ho, an' who can it be?

Arda, chaste an' chary maid

She answers. 'Tell me, sir-o,

Who can you be. who walks abroad

When nought outside should stir-o?'

Sing you hey-a-ho, an' who can it be?

'A holy man.' th' voice replies,

'Who has not food nor shelter.'

Th' words all spoke so piteous

If she were ice, 'twould melt her.

Sing you hey-a-ho, an' who can it be?

'Then I will let you in, good Father,

Old bones will soon be warmer.

A maid can trust a man o' God

That he will never harm her'.

Sing you hey-a-ho, an' who can it be?

Open th' door an' who stands there?

A man who's nothin' holy.

Old One-Eye with his cloak an' staff.

An' his wide-brim hat pulled lowly.

"I lied, I lied, t'get inside,'

Old One-Eye grins and dances,

"Th'frost's my home, but I love t'roam

An' a maid is worth th' chances' ..."

"Holy Usires, are you mad?!" Sludig leaped up, startling every-

body. His eyes wide with horror, he made the sign of the Tree

broadly before him, as though to fend off a charging beast. "Are you

mad?" he asked again, staring at the dumbfounded Grimmric.

The Erkynlander looked around at his other companions, shrug-

606 Tad Williams

ging helplessly. "What's wrong with this Rimmersman, troll?" he

asked.

Binabik squinted up at Sludig, who was still standing. "What is

the wrongness, Sludig? We are none of us understanding."

The northerner looked around at the uncomprehending faces.

"Are you all without your senses?" he asked. "Do you not know of

who you are singing?"

"Old One-Eye?" Grimmric said, eyebrow cocked in puzzlement.

"S'just a song, northman. Learned it from m'father."

"That is Udun One-Eye you sing ofUdun Rimmer, the black

old god of my people. We worshiped him in Rimmersgard when we

were sunk in our heathen ignorance. Do not call up Udun Skyfather

when you walk in his country, or he will cometo your grief."

"Udun the Rimer . . ." Binabik said wonderingly.

"If you don't believe in him any more," Simon asked, "why are

you afraid to speak of him?"

Sludig stared, his mouth still taut with worry. "I did not say I did

not believe in him . . . Aedon forgive me ... I said we Rhn-

mersmen no longer worship him." After a moment he lowered him-

self back to the ground. "I am sure you think me foolish. Better that

than we call down jealous old gods on ourselves. We are in his

country now."

"S'just a song," Grimmric said defensively. "I wasna callin' down

anythin'. S*just a bloody song."

"Binabik, is that why we call it 'UdensdayT* Simon began, then

broke off when he saw the troll was not listening. Instead, the little

man wore a broad, cheerful grin, as though he had just swallowed a

draught of some pleasing liquor.

"That is it, certainly!" the little man said, and turned to pale,

stem-faced Sludig. "You have thought of it, my friend."

"What are you talking about?" the blond-bearded northman

asked with some irritation. "I do not understand you."

"What we are looking for. The place where Colmund was going:

The Rhymer's Tree. Except we were at thinking 'rhyme' like poetry,

but you have now said it. 'Udun Rimmer'Udun the Rimer. 'Rime'

meaning 'frost.* It is a Rimer's Tree we are searching for."

Sludig retained his blank look for a moment, then slowly nodded

his head. "Blessed Elysia, trollthe Uduntree. Why did I not think

of it? The Uduntree!"

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR607

"You know the place Binabik is talking about?" Simon was slowly

catching on.

"Of course. It is an old, old legend of oursa tree entirely of ice.

The old tales say that Udun made it grow so he could climb to the

sky and make himself king over all the gods."

"But what good is legend t'us?" Simon heard Haestan ask, but

even as the words came to his ears he felt a strange, heavy chill

folding around him like a blanket of sleet. The icy, white tree . . .

he saw it again: the white trunk stretching up into the darkness, the

impenetrable white tower, a great, looming pale stripe against the

blackness ... it stood squarely in the track of his life, and some-

how he knew there was no path around it ... no way around the

slender, white fingerbeckoning, warning, waiting.

The white tree.

"Because the legend tells where it is, too," a voice said, echoing as

if down a long corridor. "Even if there is no such thing, we know

that Sir Colmund must have gone where the legend pointsthe

northern face of Urmsheim."

"Sludig is correct," someone said . . . Binabik said. "We are

needing only to go where Colmund was going with Thornnothing

else is having importance." The troll's voice seemed very far away.

"I think I ... I have to go to sleep," Simon said, his tongue

thick. He got up and stumbled away from the fire, practically unno-

ticed by the others, who were talking animatedly of riding distances

and mountain travel. He curled up in his thick cloak and felt the

snowy world revolve dizzyingly around him. He shut his eyes and,

though he still felt every pitch and yaw, at the same time he began

sliding heavily, helplessly down into dream-thick sleep.

All the next day they continued along the forested bight of snow

between the lake and the settling hills, hoping to make Haethstad at

the lake's northeastern tip by late afternoon. If its inhabitants had

not fled the harsh winter and headed west, the companions decided,

Sludig could go down by himself and restock some of their stores.

Even if it lay deserted, they could perhaps take shelter in an aban-

doned hall for the night and dry out their things before the long trip

across the waste. Thus, it was with some anticipation they traveled,

making good time along the lakeshore.

Haethstad, a village of some two dozen longhouses, stood on a

608 Tad Williams

promontory of land scarcely wider than the town itself; seen from

the hillside above, the village seemed to sprout from the frozen lake.

The cheering effect of their first glimpse lasted only about halfway

down the sloping road into the vale. It became increasingly obvious

that although the buildings stood, they were no more than burned-

out shells.

"Damn my eyes," Sludig said angrily, "this is not just a village

abandoned, troll. They were driven out."

"If they were lucky enow t'get out at all," Haestan muttered.

"I think I must be agreeing with you. Sludig," Binabik said. "Still

we must go and look there, to see how recent this burning is."

As they rode down to the bottom of the glen, Simon stared at the

scorched remains ofHaethstad, and could not help remembering the

calcined skeleton of Saint Hoderund's abbey.

The priest at the Hayholt always used to say fire purifies, he

thought. If that's true, then why does fire, does burning, frighten

everyone? Well, by the Aedon, I suppose no one wants to be purified

that thoroughly.

"Oh, no," Haestan said. Simon almost ran into him as the big

guardsman reined up. "Oh, the good God," he added.

Simon peered around him to see a line of dark shapes filing out of

the trees near the village, moving slowly into the snowy road not a

hundred ells before themmen on horseback. Simon counted them

as they made their way out into the open . . . seven, eight, nine.

They were all armored. The leader wore a black iron helm shaped

like a hound's head, showing the profile of the snarling muzzle as he

turned to give orders. The nine started forward.

"That onethe dog-headed one." Sludig pulled his axes out and

pointed at the approaching men. "He is the one who led the ambush

on us at Hoderund's. He is the one I owe for young Hove, and the

monks at the abbey!"

"Never'll we take 'em," Haestan said calmly. *They*ll carve us up

nine men t'six, and two of us a troll and boy."

Binabik said nothing, but calmly unscrewed his walking stick,

which had been thrust beneath the cinch strap of Qantaqa's saddle.

As he reassembled it, a matter of instants only, he said: *'We must

run."

Sludig was already spurring his horse forward, but Haestan and

Ethelbeam reached him within a couple of paces and caught at his

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR609

elbows. The Rimmersman, who had not even donned his helmet,

tried to shake them off; he had a distant look in his blue eyes.

"God damn't, man," Haestan said, "come onl At least we've got

chance in 'mong th' trees!"

The leader of the approaching riders shouted something, and the

others kicked their horses into a trot. White mist flurried up from

the horses' hooves as though they ran on sea foam.

*"I\im *im!" Haestan shouted to Ethelbeam, grabbing the reins of

Sludig's horse as he himself wheeled about; Ethelbeam gave a smart

smack with his sword hilt to the flank of the Rimmersman's mount

and they spun away from the oncoming riders, who were bowling

along at full gallop now behind them, waving axes and swords. Si-

mon was trembling so that he feared he might fall from his saddle.

"Binabik, where?" he shouted, his voice cracking.

"The trees," Binabik called back, as Qantaqa jumped forward.

"Death it would be to climb back up the road. Ride, Simon, and stay

to me nearly!"

Now the horses of his companions were rearing and kicking on all

sides as they headed off the wide path, away from the blackened

ruins of Haethstad. Simon managed to slide his bow from where it

hung over his shoulder, then leaned his head down over his horse's

neck and dug in the spurs. With a bone-jarring surge they were

suddenly leaping over the snow and into the ever-thickening forest.

Simon saw Binabik's small back, and the bobbing gray of

Qantaqa's hindquarters as the trees loomed up dizzyingly on all

sides. Shouts echoed from behind, and he looked back to see his

other four companions in a close knot, with the dark mass of their

pursuers beyond, fanning out through the forest. He heard a sound

like the tearing of parchment, and for a brief moment saw an arrow

quivering in a tree trunk just before him.

The muffled drumfire of hoofbeats was everywhere, filling his ears

even as he clung for his life to the pitching saddle. A whistling black

thread was suddenly drawn out and snapped before his face, and

then another: the pursuers were outflanking them, loosing their ar-

rows almost broadside. Simon heard himself scream something at

the plunging shapes flashing along beyond the nearer trees, and sev-

eral more of the hissing darts snapped past. Clinging to his pommel,

he reached the hand that held the bow back to draw an arrow from

his jouncing quiver, but when he brought it forward he saw it flash

610 Tad Williams

pale against his horse's shoulder. It was the White Arrowwhat

should he do?

In a split instant that seemed much longer he pushed it back over

his shoulder into the quiver, pulling out another. A mocking voice

somewhere in his head laughed to see him picking and choosing

arrows at such a moment. He almost lost bow and arrow both as hie

horse lurched around a snow-spattered tree that seemed to leap up

in their path. A moment later he heard a shout of pain and the

terrified, terrifying scream of a falling horse. He darted a look over

his shoulder to see only three of his companions behind him, and

farther behind every momenta thrashing tangle of arms and kick-

ing horselegs and roiling snow. The pursuers went over and around

the downed rider, undeterred.

Who was it? was his brief, flickering thought.

"Up the hill, the hilll" Binabik shouted hoarsely from somewhere

to Simon's right. He saw the flag of Qantaqa's tail as the wolf leaped

up an incline into heavier trees, a thick clot of pines that stood like

uncaring sentinels as the shouting chaos slashed past them. Simon

yanked hard on his right-hand rein, having no idea if the horse

would pay him any heed at all; a moment later they canted to the

side and bolted up the slope behind the bounding wolf. The other

three companions rushed past him, pulling up their steaming horses

within the sparse shelter of a crown of staff-straight trunks.

Sludig still wore no helmet, and the thin one was surely Grimm-

ric, but the other man, bulky and helmeted, had gone a short way up

the slope; before Simon could turn to see who it was he heard a

hoarse shout of triumph. The riders were upon them.

After a frozen moment he nocked his arrow and lifted the bow,

but the whooping attackers were moving in and out among the trees

so quickly that his shot flew harmlessly over the head of the nearest

man and disappeared. Simon let fly a second arrow, and thought he

saw it strike the leg of one of the armored riders. Somebody shouted

in pain. Sludig, with an answering howl, spurred his white horse

forward, pulling his helm down over his head. Two of the attackers

peeled off from the pack and angled toward him. Simon saw him

duck the sword swipe of the first and, turning, crash his axe-blade

into the man's ribs as he swept past, bright blood rilling from the

gash in the man's armor. As he turned from the first man the second

nearly caught him; Sludig had time only to deflect the man's swing

611

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

with his other axe, but still took a clanging blow to the helmet.

Simon saw the Rimmersman wobble and almost fall as the attacker

wheeled around.

Before they came together again Simon heard an ear-piercing

screech and pivoted to see another horse and rider stagger toward

him, a troll-less Qantaqa teeth-clinging to the man's unarmored leg,

scrabbling with her claws at the shrilling horse's side. Simon pulled

his sword from the scabbard, but as the rider struck helplessly at the

wolf his reeling steed plunged into Simon's own mount. Simon's

blade spiraled away, then he, too, was briefly without weight or

tether. A long instant later the air was thumped from him as though

by a giant's fist. He skidded to a face-down halt a short way from

where his horse struggled with the other in a panicked, whinnying

knot. Through a biting mask of snow, Simon saw Qantaqa pull her-

self out from beneath the two horses and sprint away. The man,

caught shrieking beneath, could not escape.

Climbing painfully to his feet, spitting icy grit, Simon snatched at

his bow and quiver lying nearby. He heard the sounds of combat

move away up the hill and turned to follow on foot.

Somebody laughed.

Not twenty paces below him, seated astride a motionless gray

horse, was the man in the black armor who wore the head of a

ravening hound. A stark, pyramidal shape was blazoned in white on

his black jerkin.

"There you are, boy," Dog-face said, deep voice tolling inside his

helmet. "I have been looking for you."

Simon turned and dug up the snowy hill, stumbling, sinking into

the knee-high drifts. The man in black laughed happily and fol-

lowed.

Picking himself up yet again, tasting his own blood from his torn

nose and lip, Simon stopped at last, backed against a leaning spruce.

He grabbed at an arrow and let the quiver drop, then nocked it and

pulled back the bowstring. The man in black stopped, still half a

dozen ells below, tilting his helmeted head to one side as if imitating

the hound he resembled.

"Now kill me, boy, if you can," he mocked. "Shoot!" He spurred

his horse up the hill toward where Simon stood shivering.

There was a hiss and a sharp, fleshy slap. Suddenly the gray horse

was rearing up, up, mane-flinging head thrown back, an arrow shud-

612 Tad Williams

dering in its breast. The dog-faced rider was thrown down hard into

the snow; he lay as if boneless, even as his twitching horse fell to its

knees and rolled heavily onto him. Simon stared with fascination. A

moment later he was staring with even more surprise at the bow he

still held in his outstretched arm. The arrow had not left the string.

"H-Haestan . . . ?" he said, turning to look up the slope. Three

figures stood there, in a gap between the trees.

They were none of them Haestan. They were none of them men.

They had bright, feline eyes, and their mouths were set in hard lines.

The Sitha who had shot the arrow nocked another and lowered it

until its delicately quivering head came to a halt pointed at Simon's

eyes.

"re/m t'sf. Sudhoda'ya', "he said, his small, newly-formed smile

as cold as marble. "Blood ... as you say ... for blood."

37

Jiriki's Hunt

SIMON STARED helplessly at the black arrowhead, at the trio of thin

faces. His jaw trembled.

"Ske'i! Ske'i!" a voice cried, "Stopi"

Two of the Sithi turned to look up the hill to their right, but the

one coolly holding the bent bow never wavered.

"Ske'i, ras-Zida'ya!" the small figure shouted, and then, leaping

forward, fell into a snow-chunung roll to stop at last in a flurry of

gleaming powder a few paces from Simon,

Binabik got slowly to his knees, coated in snow as though he had

been floured by a hurrying baker,

"W-What?" Simon forced his numb lip to shape words, but the

troll signaled him to silence with an urgent flutter of his squat fin-

gers.

"Shhhh. Slowly be putting down the bow you are holding

slowly!" As the boy followed this direction, Binabik spouted another

rush of words in the unfamiliar language, waving his hands implor-

ingly at the unblinking Sithi.

"What . . . where are the others . . ." Simon whispered, but

Binabik silenced him again, this time with a small but violent head-

shake.

"No time is there, no time ... for your life we are fighting."

The troll raised his own hands in the air, and Simon, having

dropped the bow, did the same, turning his palms outward. "You

have not, I am hoping, lost the White Arrow?"

"I ... I don't know."

"Daughter of the Mountains, I must hope not. Slowly drop your

quiver. There." He sputtered out a little bit more of what Simon

took to be Sithi-tongue, then kicked at the quiver so that the arrows

scattered across the broken snow like dark jackstraws ... all but

614 Tad Williams

one. Only its triangular tip, pearl-blue like a liquid drop of sky,

stood out against the surrounding whiteness.

"Oh, praise to the High Places," Binabik sighed. "Staj'a Ame

inef" he called to the Sithi, who watched like cats whose avian

quarry has chosen to turn and sing instead of fly away. "The White

Arrow! You cannot be in ignorance of this! Im sheyis tsi-keo'su d'a

Yana o Lingit!"

"This is ... rare," the Sitha with the bow said, lowering it

slightly. His accent was odd, but his command of the Western

Speech very good. He blinked. "To be taught the Rules of Song by a

troll." His cold smile returned briefly. "You may spare us your ex-

hortations . . . and your crude translations. Pick up your arrow

and bring it here to me." He hissed a few words to the other two as

Binabik bent to the quiver. They looked back once more at Simon

and the troll, then dashed up the hill with startling speed, seeming to

barely dimple the snow as they went, so quick and light were their

steps. The one remaining behind kept his arrow trained in Simon's

general direction as Binabik went trudging forward.

"Hand it toward me," the Sitha directed. "Feathers first, troll.

Now, step back toward your companion."

He eased up on the bow to examine the slender white object,

allowing the arrow to slide forward until the string was almost slack

and he could hold the nocked arrow and bowstave in one hand.

Simon was aware for the first time of the shallow rasp of his own

rapid breathing. He lowered his shaking hands a bit as Binabik

crunched to halt nearby.

"It was given to this young man for a service he was rendering,"

Binabik said defiantly. The Sitha looked up at him and cocked a

slanting eyebrow.

He seemed, at Simon's first glance, much like the first one of his

kindred Simon had seenthe same high-boned cheeks and strange,

birdlike movements. He was dressed in pants and jacket of shim-

mery white cloth, dotted at shoulders, sleeves and waist with slender

dark green scales. His hair, almost black, but also with a strange

greenish tinge, he wore in two complicated braids, one falling before

each ear. Boots, belt, and quiver were of soft milk-hued leather.

Simon realized that it was only the Sitha's position unslope, and

silhouetted against the drab sky, that allowed him to be clearly seen:

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR615

if the Fair One were to stand against the snow, in a copse of trees, he

would be as invisible as the wind.

"Isi-isi'ye!" the Sitha muttered feelingly, and turned to hold the

arrow to the shrouded sun. Lowering it, he stared wonderingly at

Simon for a moment, then narrowed his eyes.

"Where did you find this, Sudhoda'ya?" he asked harshly. "How

did one such as you come by such a thing?"

"It was given to me!" Simon said, color coming back into his

cheeks and strength to his voice. He knew what he knew. "I saved

one of your people. He shot it at a tree, then ran away."

The Sitha again looked him over carefully, and seemed about to

say something more. Instead, he turned his attention up the hillside.

A bird whistled a long, complex call, or so Simon thought at first,

until he saw the small movements of the white-clad Sitha's Ups. He

waited, still as a statue, until there came an answering trill.

"Go now, before me," he said, swinging around to gesture with

his bow at the troll and boy. They walked with difficulty up the steep

slope, their captor moving lightly behind them, slowly turning the

White Arrow over and over in his slender fingers.

Within the space of a few hundred heartbeats they reached the

rounded top of the knoll and started down the other side. There,

four Sithi crouched around a tree-rimmed, snow-blanketed gully,

the two Simon had already seen, recognizable only by the bluish tint

to their braided hair, and another pair whose tresses were smoky

grayalthough, like the others, their golden faces were unwrinkled.

At the gully's bottom, beneath the menacing quadrangle of Sithi

arrows, sat Haestan, Grimmric, and Sludig. They were each one

bloodied, and wore the hopelessly defiant expressions of cornered

animals.

"Bones of Saint Ealhstan!" Haestan swore when he saw the new

arrivals. "Ah, God, boy, 'was hopin' y'got away." He shook his

head. "Still, better than bein' a dead'un, I suppose."

"Do you see, troll?" Sludig said bitterly, his bearded face smeared

with red. "Do you see what we have called on ourselves? Demons!

We should never have mocked . . . that dark one."

The Sitha who held the Arrow, seemingly the leader, said a few

words in his language to the others and gestured for Simon's com-

panions to climb from the pit.

"Demons they are not," Binabik said as he and Simon braced

616 Tad Williams

their legs to help the others scramble up, a difficult task on the

shifting snow. "They are Sithi, and they will do us no harm. It is,

after all is said, their own White Arrow that is compelling them."

The Sithi's leader gave the troll a sour look but said nothing.

Grimmric came gasping up onto level ground. "Sith - . . Sithi?" he

said, struggling for breath. A cut just below his scalp had painted his

forehead with a solid swath of crimson. "Now we've gone walkin'

into old, old stories, an' that's sure. Sithi-folk! May Usires th' Aedon

protect us all." He made the sign of the Tree and wearily turned to

help the staggering Sludig.

"What happened?" Simon asked. 'How did you . . . what hap-

pened to . . . ?"

"The ones who pursued us are dead," Sludig said, sagging back

against a tree trunk. His byrnie was slashed in several places, and his

helmet, which dangled from his hand, was scraped and dented like

an old pot. "We did for some ourselves. The rest," he napped a limp

hand at the Sithi guards, "fell with bodies full of arrows."

"They'd shot us too, sure, if the troll hadna spoken in their

tongue," Haestan said. He smiled faintly at Binabik. "We didna

think bad of ye when y'ran, Prayin' for ye, we were."

"I went for finding Simon. He is my charge," Binabik said simply.

"But . . ." Simon looked around, hoping against hope, but saw

no other prisoner. "Then . . . then that was Ethelbeam who fell.

Before we reached the first hill."

Haestan nodded slowly. " Twas."

"Damn their souls!" Grimmric swore. "Th'were Rimmersmen,

those murd'rin' bastards!"

"Skali's," Sludig said, eyes hard. The Sithi began making gestures

for them to get up. "Two of them wore the Kaldskryke raven," he

continued, rising. "Oh, how I am praying to catch him with nothing

between us but our axes."

"You are waiting with a host of many others," Binabik said.

"Wait!" Simon said, feeling terribly hollow: this was not right. He

turned to the leader of the Sithi company. "You have been looking at

my arrow. You know my story is true. You cannot take us anywhere,

or do anything, until we see what has happened to our companion."

The Sitha looked at him appraisingly. "I do not know your story

is true, manchild, but we will find out soon enough. Sooner than you

might wish. As to the other . . ." He took a moment to survey

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR617

Simon's ragged party. "Very well. We shall allow you to see to your

other man." He spoke to his comrades, and they followed the men

down the hill. The quiet company passed the arrow-plumed corpses

of two of their attackers, eyes wide and mouths agape. Snow was

already sifting back over their still forms, covering the scarlet stains.

They found Ethelbeam a hundred ells from the lake road. The

broken shaft of an ashwood arrow stood out from the side of his

neck below his beard, and his splayed, twisted posture told that his

horse had rolled over him in its death throes.

"He wasna long a-dyin'," Haestan said, tears standing in his eyes.

"Aedon be praised, 'twas quick."

They dug a hole for him as best they could, hacking at the hard

ground with swords and axes; the Sithi stood by, unconcerned as

geese. The companions wrapped Ethelbeam in his thick cloak and

lowered him into the shallow grave. When he was covered over,

Simon pushed the dead man's sword into the earth as a marker.

"Take his helmet," Haestan said to Sludig, and-Grimmric nod-

ded.

"He'd not want it t*go unused," the other Erkynlander agreed.

Sludig hung his own ruined helm on the pommel of Ethelbeam's

sword before taking the one held out to him. "We will avenge you,

man," the Rimmersgarder said. "Blood for blood."

Silence settled over them. Snow filtered down through the trees as

they stood regarding the patch of naked ground. Soon it would all be

white again.

"Come," the Sitha chief said at last. "We have waited for you long

enough. There is someone who will want to see this arrow."

Simon was last to move. / scarcely had time to know you,

Ethelbeam, he thought. But you had a good loud laugh. I will re-

member that

They turned and headed back into the cold hills.

^

The spider hung motionless, like a dull brown gem in an intricate

necklace. The web was complete, now, the last strands laid deli-

cately in place; it stretched from one side of the ceiling comer to the

618 Tad Williams

other, quivering gently in the rising air as though strummed by

invisible hands.

For a moment Isgrimnur lost the thread of talk, important talk

though it was. His eyes had drifted from the worried faces huddled

near the fireplace in the great hall, roving up to the darkened comer,

and to the tiny builder at rest.

There's sense, he told himself. You build something and then you

stay there. That's the way it's meant to be. Not this running here,

running there, never see your blood-family or your home roofs for a

year at a time.

He thought of his wife: sharp-eyed, red-cheeked Outrun. She had

not offered him a solitary word of rebuke, but he knew it angered

her that he had been gone so long from Elvritshalla, that he had left

their oldest son, the pride of her heart, to rule a great duchy . . .

and to fail. Not that Isom or anyone else in Rimmersgard could

have stopped Skali and his followers, not with the High King behind

him. Still, it had been young Isom who had been master while his

father was gone, and it was Isom who would be remembered as the

one who had seen the Kaldskryke clan, traditional enemies of the

Elvritshallamen, strut into the Longhouse as masters.

And I was looking forward to coming home this time, the old duke

thought sadly. It would have been nice to tend to my horses and cows,

and settle a few local disputes, and watch my children raise their own

children. Instead, all the land is being torn up again like leaky

thatch. God save me, I had enough of fighting when I was younger

. . . for all my talk.

Fighting was, after all, mostly for young men, whose grip on life

was light and careless. And to give the old men something to talk

about, to remember when they sat warm in their halls with winter

moaning outside.

A damned old dog like me is just about ready to lie down and sleep

by the fire.

He plucked at his beard, and watched the spider scramble toward

the darkened roof comer, where an unwary fly had made an unex-

pected stop.

We thought John had forged a peace that would last a thousand

years. Instead, it has not survived his death by two summers. You

build and you build some more, laying strand over strand like that

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR619

little fellow up there, only to have a wind come along and blow every-

thing to pieces.

". . . and so I have near-crippled two horses to bring these tid-

ings as fast as I could. Lord," the young man finished as Isgrimnur

turned his ear back to the urgent discussion.

"You have done magnificently, Deomoth," Josua said, "Please

rise."

His face still damp from his ride, the lank-haired soldier stood,

wrapping himself more tightly in the thick blanket the prince had

given him. He looked much as he had that other time, when, garbed

in the costume of the holy monk for the Saint Tunath's Day festivi-

ties, he had brought the prince news of his father's death.

The prince laid his hand upon Deomoth's shoulder. "I am glad to

have you back. I feared for your safety, and cursed myself for having

to send you on such a dangerous errand." He turned to the others.

"So. You have heard Deornoth's report. Elias has at last gone into

the field. He is bound for Naglimund with . . . Deomoth? You

said . . . ?"

"Some thousand knights and more, and near ten thousand foot,"

the soldier said unhappily. "That averages the different reports in a

way that seems most reliable."

"I'm sure," Josua waved his hand. "And we have perhaps a fort-

night at most until he is at our walls."

"I should think so, sire," Deomoth nodded.

"And what of my master?" Devasalles asked.

"Well, Baron," the soldier began, then clenched his teeth until a

fit of shivering had passed, "Nad Mullach was in a mad uproar

understandably, of course, with what is happening to the west . . ."

he broke off to look over to Prince Gwythinn, who sat a short way

off from the rest, staring miserably at the ceiling.

"Go on," said Josua calmly, "we will hear it all."

Deomoth turned his gaze away from the Hemystirman. "So, as I

said, good information was hard to come by. However, according to

several of the rivermen up from Abaingeat on the coast, your Duke

Leobardis has set sail from Nabban, and is even now on the high

seas, probably to make landfall near Crannhyr."

"With how many men?" Isgrimnur rumbled.

Deomoth shrugged. "Different people say different things. Three

hundred horse, perhaps, two thousand or so foot."

620 Tad Williams

"That sounds correct. Prince Josua," Devasalles said, lips pursed

contemplatively. "Many of the liege-lords doubtless would not go

along, frightened as they are of crossing the High King, and the

Perdruinese will stay neutral, as they usually do. Count Streawe

knows he will do better helping both sides, and saving his ships to

haul goods."

"So we may still hope for Leobardis' strong help, although I

might have wished it stronger still." Josua looked around the circle

of men.

"Even if these Nabbanai should beat Elias to the gate," Baron

Ordmaer said, fear poorly hidden on his plump features, "still Elias

will have three times our numbers."

"But we have the walls, sir," Josua replied, his narrow face stem.

"We are in a strong, strong place." He turned back to Deomoth, and

his expression softened. "Give us the last of your news, my faithful

friend, and then you must sleep. I fear for your health, and I will

need you strong in the days ahead."

Deomoth mustered a faint smile. "Yes, sire. The ridings that are

left are not happy ones either, I fear. The Hemystiri have been

driven from the field at Inniscrich." He started to glance at the place

where Gwythinn sat, but instead dropped his eyes. "They say King

Lluth has been wounded, and his armies have fallen back into the

Orianspog Mountains, the better to harry Skali and his men,"

Josua looked gravely over to the Hemystiri prince. "So. It is at

least better than you feared, Gwythinn. Your fattier yet lives, and

continues the fight."

The young man turned. His eyes were red. "Yes! They continue

the fight, while I sit here inside stone walls, drinking ale and eating

bread and cheese like a fat townsman. My father may be dying! How

can I stay here?"

"And do you think you can beat Skali with your half-hundred

men, lad?" Isgrimnur asked, not unkindly. "Or would you seek a

quick, glorious death, rather than wait to see what is the best pol-

icy?"

"I am not so foolish as that," Gwythinn replied coldly. "And,

Bagba's Herd, Isgrimnur, who are you to be saying such to me?

What of that 'foot of steel' you are saving for Skali's guts?'"

"Different," Isgrimnur muttered, embarrassed. "I did not speak

of storming Elvritshalla with my dozen knights."

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR621

"And all I mean to do is steal around the flank of Skali's ravens,

and go to my people in the mountains."

Unable to meet Prince Gwythinn's bright, demanding stare, Is-

grimnur let his eyes slide back up to the roof corner, where the

brown spider was industriously wrapping something in clinging silk.

"Gwythinn," Josua said soothingly, "I ask only that you wait

until we can speak more. One or two days will make little differ-

ence."

The young Hernystirman stood up, his chair scraping against the

stone flags. "Wait! That is all that you do is wait, Josua! Wait for the

local muster, wait for Leobardis and his army, wait for - , - wait

for Elias to climb the walls and put Naglimund to the torch! I am

tired of waiting!" He raised an unsteady hand to forestall Josua's

protests. "Do not forget, Josua, I am a prince, too! I came to you out

of the friendship of our fathers. And now my father is wounded, and

harried by northern devils. If he dies unsuccored, and I am become

king, will you order me then? Will you still think to hold me back?

Brynioch! I cannot understand such craven reluctance!"

Before he reached the door he turned. "I will tell my men to

prepare for our departure tomorrow at sunset. If you think of some

reason why I should not go, one that has escaped me, you know

where I may be found!"

As the prince flung the door shut behind him, Josua rose to his

feet.

"I think there are many here who . . ." he paused and shook his

head wearily, "who feel the need of some food and drinkyou not

least, Deornoth- But I ask you to remain a short moment while these

others go ahead, so I may ask you of some private matters." He

waved Devasalles and the rest off to the dining hall, and watched

them snuffle out, talking quietly among themselves. "Isgrimnur," he

called, and the duke stopped in the doorway to look back inquir-

ingly. "You stay also, please."

When Isgrimnur had settled himself in a chair again, Josua looked

expectantly to Deornoth.

"And have you other news for me?" the prince asked. The soldier

frowned.

"If I had aught else of good tiding, my prince, I would have told

you first, before the others arrived. I could find no trace of your

niece or the monk who accompanies her, but for one peasant farmer

622

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near the Greenwade fork who saw a pair of their description fording

the river there some days ago, heading south."

"Which is no more than what we knew they would do, as the

Lady Vorzheva told us. But by now they are well into the Inniscrich,

and the Blessed Usires alone knows what may happen, or where

they will go next. Our only luck is that I am sure my brother Elias

will march his army up the skirt of the hills, since in this wet season

the Wealdhelm Road is the only safe place for the heavy wagons."

He stared at the wavering flames of the fire. "Well, then," he said at

last, "my thanks, Deomoth. If all my liegemen were such as you

then I could laugh at the High King's threat."

*The men are a good lot, sire," the young knight said loyally.

"Go on, now." The prince extended his hand to pat Deomoth's

knee. "Get some food, and then some sleep. You will not be needed

for duty until tomorrow."

"Yes, sire." The young Erkynlander threw off his blanket and

stood, his back straight as a gatepost as he walked from the room-

After he was gone, Josua and Isgrimnur sat in silence.

"Miriamele gone God knows where, and Leobardis racing Elias to

our gates." The prince shook his head and kneaded his temples with

his hand. "Lluth wounded, the Hemystiri in retreat, and Elias* tool

Skali master from the Vestivegg to the Grianspog. And atop all else,

demons out of legend walking the mortal earth." He showed the

duke a grim smile. "The net grows tighter. Uncle."

Isgrimnur tangled his fingers in his beard. "The web is swaying in

the wind, Josua. A strong wind."

He left the remark unexplained, and silence crept back into the

high hall.

^

The man in the hound mask cursed weakly and spat another

gobbet of blood onto the snow. Any lesser man, he knew, would now

be dead, lying in the snow with his legs crushed and ha ribs col-

lapsed, but the thought was only faintly gratifying. All the years of

ritual training and hardening toil that had saved his life when the

dying horse rolled over him would be for naught unless he could

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR623

reach somewhere sheltered and dry. Another hour or two of expo-

sure would finish the work his dying steed had begun.

The damnable Sithiand their unexpected involvement was noth-

ing short of astonishinghad led their human captives within a few

feet of where he had lain hidden, buried under a half-foot of snow.

He had summoned all his reserves of strength and courage to stay

pretematurally still while the Fair Folk had scanned the area. They

must have concluded he had crawled away somewhere to die

which, of course, he had hoped they wouldand a few moments

later they had continued on their way-

Now he huddled shivering where he had dug out from beneath

the obscuring white blanket, summoning his strength for the next

move. His only hope was to somehow get back to Haethstad, where

a pair of his own men should now be waiting. He damned himself a

hundred times for ever trusting those louts of Skali'sdrunken pil-

lagers and woman-beaters that they were, unfit to polish his boots. If

only he had not been forced to send his own off on another mission.

He shook his head in an attempt to clear it of the swirling, jiggling

specks of light that floated against the gradually darkening sky, then

pursed his cracked lips. The hoot of a snow owl issued incongru-

ously from the snarling hound muzzle. While he waited he tried

once more, impossibly, to standeven to crawl. It was no use:

something was gravely wrong with both legs. Ignoring the scalding

pain from his cracked ribs, he used his hands to drag himself a little

farther toward the trees, then had to stop, laid flat out and panting.

A moment later he felt hot wind, and lifted his head. The black

muzzle of his helmet was doubled, as though in some queer mirror,

by a grinning white snout only inches away.

"Niku'a," he gasped, in a language quite unlike his native Black

Rimmerspakk. "Come here, Udun damn you! Come!"

The great hound took another step closer, until he loomed over

his injured master.

"Now . . . hold," the man said, reaching up strong hands to

clasp the white leather collar. "And pull!"

A moment later he groaned in agony as the dog did pull, but he

hung on, teeth clenched and eyes bulging behind the unchanging

canine features of the helmet. The hammering, tearing pain almost

pushed him over into insensibility as the hound drew him bumping

across the snow, but he did not relax his grip until he had reached

624 Tad Williams

the cover of the trees. Only then did he at last let go, let everything

go. He slid down into darkness, and brief surcease to pain.

When he awoke the gray of the sky had gone several shades

darker, and the wind had swept a powdery layer of snow across him

like a blanket. The great hound Niku'a still waited, unconcerned

and unshivering despite his short fur, as though lounging before a

blazing hearth. The man on the ground was not surprised: he well

knew the icy black kennels of Stunnrspeik, and knew how these

beasts were raised. Looking at Niku'a's red mouth and curving

teeth, and the tiny white eyes like drops of some milky poison, he

was again grateful that it was he who followed the hounds, and not

the other way around.

He pulled off the helmetnot without effort, since the fall had

changed its shapeand pitched it into the snow at his side. With his

knife he cut his black cloak into long strips; soon after he began

laboriously sawing down some of the slenderest young trees. It was

horrible work on his agonized ribs, but he did his best to ignore the

flashing pain and go on. He had two excellent reasons to survive: his

duty to tell his masters of the unexpected attack by the Sithi, and his

own heightened desire for revenge on this ragtag lot who had

thwarted mm too many times.

The moon's blue-white eye was peering curiously through the

treetops when he at last finished cutting. He used the strips of his

cloak to bind a number of the shorter staves tightly to each leg as

splints; then, sitting with his legs stiffly before him like a child play-

ing noughts and crosses in the dirt, he bound short crosspieces to the

tops of the two long staves remaining. Clutching them carefully he

grabbed again at NikuVs collar, letting the long, corpse-white dog

drag him up onto his feet where he swayed precariously until he

could get the new-made crutches under his arms.

He took a few steps, swiveling awkwardly on his unbending legs.

It would do well enough, he decided, wincing at the sickening pain

not that he had any choice.

He looked at the snariing-mouthed helmet lying in the snow,

thinking of the effort it would take to reach it, and the now-useless

weight of the thing. Then he leaned down, gasping, and picked it up

anyway. It had been given him in the sacred caverns of Stunnrspeik,

by Herself, when She named him Her sacred hunterhe, a mortall

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR625

He could no more leave it lying in the snow than he could leave his

own beating heart. He remembered that impossible, heady moment,

the blue lights flickering in the Chamber of the Breathing Harp,

when he had knelt before the throne, before the serene shimmer of

Her silver mask.

His excruciating pain lulled for a moment by the wine of memory,

Niku'a silently padding at his heels, Ingen Jegger moved haltingly

down the long, tree-covered hill, and began to think carefully about

revenge.

^

Simon and his companions, now lessened by one, did not have

much stomach for talk, nor did their captors encourage any. They

trudged silently and slowly through the snow-carpeted foothills as

gray afternoon edged into evening.

Somehow the Sithi seemed to know exactly where they wanted to

go, although to Simon the pine-spotted slopes were featureless, one

spot indistinguishable from another. The leader's amber eyes were

always moving in his masklike face, but he never seemed to be

searching for anything; rather he gave the impression that he read

the subtle language of the terrain as knowledgeably as Father

Strangyeard surveyed his bookshelves.

The only time the Sitha leader displayed any reaction was early in

their march, when Qantaqa came trotting down an incline and fell in

at Binabik's side, nose twitching as she sniffed his hand, tail ner-

vously tucked. The Sitha raised a half-curious eyebrow, then looked

around to catch the glances of his fellows, whose narrow eyes had

narrowed further. He made no sign that Simon could distinguish,

but the wolf was allowed to pace along unhindered.

Daylight was fading when the strange walking-party turned north

at last, and within a short time they were slowly circling the base of

a steep slope whose snowy flanks were studded with jutting, naked

stone- Simon, shock and numbness worn off enough to make him all

too aware of his achingly cold feet, gave silent thanks as the chief of

their captors waved them to a halt.

"Here," he said, gesturing to a large outcropping that thrust up

high above their heads. "At the bottom." He pointed again, this

626 Tad Williams

time to a wide, waist-high fissure in the face of the stone. Before any

of them could say a word, two of the Sithi guards slipped nimbly

past them and slid themselves headfirst into the opening. In a mo-

ment they had vanished.

"You," he said to Simon. "Go after."

There were angry mutters from Haestan and the other two

soldiers, but Simon, despite his unusual situation, felt strangely con-

fident. Kneeling, he poked his head through the opening.

It was a slender, shining tunnel, an ice-lined tube that twisted

steeply up and away from him, seemingly hollowed from the very

stone of the mountain. He decided that the Sitha who had gone

before him must have climbed up beyond the next bend. There was

no sign of them, and no one could hide in this glass-smooth, narrow

passage, barely wide enough to allow him to raise his arms.

He ducked back out into the chill open air.

"How can I go through it? It's almost straight up, and it's covered

in ice. 1*11 just slide back down."

"Look above your head," the chief Sitha replied. "You will under-

stand."

Simon reentered the tunnel, pushing in a little farther so that his

shoulders and upper body were inside too, and he could turn on his

back to look up. The ice of the tunnel ceiling, if one could call

something half an arm's length away a ceiling, was scored with a

regular series of horizontal cuts that extended the visible length of

the passage. Each was a few inches deep, and wide enough to hold

both hands comfortably side by side. He realized after some thought

that he was intended to pull himself up with his hands and feet,

bracing his back against the floor of the tunnel.

Viewing the prospect with some dismay, since he had no idea how

long the tunnel might be, or what else might conceivably be sharing

it with him, he considered backing out of the narrow passageway

once more. After a moment he changed his mind. The Sithi had

shinnied up before him as quickly as squirrels, and for some reason

he felt the urge to show them that, if not as nimble as they, he was

still bold enough to follow without coaxing.

The climb was difficult, but not impossibly so. The tunnel turned

often enough that he could make frequent stops to rest, bracing his

feet against the bends in the passage. As he slowly grabbed, pulled

and braced, time after muscle-cramping time, the advantage of such

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR627

an entrance tunnelif this was, as it seemed, an entrancebecame

obvious; it was difficult going to clamber up, and would be near-

impossible for any animal but a two-legged one; anyone who needed

to get out could slide down it as swiftly as a snake.

He was just considering stopping for another rest when he heard

voices speaking the liquid Sithi language just beyond his head. A

moment later strong hands reached down, grasping him by the har-

ness-straps of his chain mail and pulling him upward. He popped

out of the tunnel with a gasp of surprise and tumbled onto a warm

stone floor puddled with snowmelt. The two Sithi who had dragged

him out crouched by the passage mouth, faces obscure in the near-

darkness. The only light in the roomwhich was not really a room

so much as a rock cavern carefully swept clean of debriscame

from a door-sized crevice in the opposite wall. Through this gap

spilled a yellow gleam, painting a bright swath on the cavern floor.

As Simon pulled himself to his knees he felt a slender, restraining

hand laid on his shoulder. The dark-haired Sitha beside him pointed

up at the low ceiling, then made a waving motton and gestured at

the tunnel mouth.

"Wait," he said calmly, his speech not as fluent as his leader's.

"We must wait."

Haestan was next up, grumbling and cursing. The two Sithi had

to worry his bulky form out of the opening like a cork from a wine

jug. Binabik appeared on his heelsthe nimble troll had easily

caught up with the Erkynlanderfollowed within a short while by

Sludig and Grimmric. The three remaining Sithi clambered lithely

up behind them.

No sooner had the last of the Fair Ones issued from the tunnel

than the party went forward again, passing through the rock door-

way and into a short passage beyond where they could at last stand

upright. Lamps of some kind of milky golden crystal or glass had

been set into niches in the wall, and their flickering light was enough

to mask the glow of the door at the far end until they were almost

upon it. One of the Sithi stepped to this gap in the stone, which

unlike the last was shrouded with a hanging of dark cloth, and

called out- An instant later two more of their kindred pushed past

the cloth. Each of them held a short sword made of what looked to

be some dark metal. They stood silently alert, betraying no surprise

or curiosity, as the leader of the captors spoke.

628 Tad Williams

"We will bind your hands." As he said this the other Sithi pro-

duced coiled lengths of shiny black cord from beneath their cloth-

ing.

Sludig stepped back a pace, bumping into one of the guards, who

made a quiet hissing noise but offered no violence.

"No," the Rimmersman said, his voice dangerously tight, "I will

not let them. No man will bind me against my will,"

"Nor me," Haestan said.

"Don't be foolish," Simon said, and stepped forward, offering his

own crossed wrists. "We will probably get out of this with our skins,

but not if you start a fight."

'*Simon is speaking rightly," Binabik said, "I, too, will let them tie

me. You are not having sense if you do otherwise. Simon's White

Arrow is genuine. It is being the reason they did not kill us, and why

they brought us here."

"But how can we . . .*' Sludig began.

"Also," Binabik cut him off, "what would you plan for doing?

Even if these folk here you fought and overcame, and the others who

most likely wait beyond, what then? Should you slide downward

through the tunnel you would no doubt be crashing onto Qantaqa.

who waits at the bottom. I think such a startling thing would give

you little chance to tell her you were no enemy."

Sludig looked down at the troll for a moment, plainly thinking of

the possibilities attendant on being mistaken by a frightened

Qantaqa. At last he called up a weak smile.

"Again you win, troll." He put his hands forward.

The black cords were cool and scaly like snakeskin, but flexible as

oiled leather thongs. Simon found that a couple of loops held his

hands as immobile as if they had been caught in an ogre's fist. When

the Sithi had finished with the others, the group was led forward

once more, through the cloth-covered door and into a dazzling wash

of light.

It seemed, when Simon tried to remember it later, as though they

had stepped through the clouds and into a brilliant, shining land

some nearer neighbor to the sun- After the bleak snows and the

featureless tunnels, the difference was like the wild carousal of the

Ninth Day festival after the eight gray days that preceded.

Light, and its handmaiden color, was everywhere. The room was

a rock chamber less than twice a man's height but very wide. Tree

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR629

roots twined graspingly down the walls. In one comer, thirty paces

away, a glinting stream of water ran down a grooved stone to arch,

splashing, into a pond cupped in a natural basin of stone. The deli-

cate chime of its fall wound in and out of the strange, subtle music

that filled the air.

Lamps like the ones that lined the stone hallway were everywhere,

casting, according to their making, beams of yellow, ivory, pale

chalky blue or rose, painting the stone grotto with a hundred differ-

ent hues where they ran against each other. In the center of the

floor, not far from the edge of the rippling pool, a fire was animal-

ediy ablaze, the smoke vanishing into a crevice above.

"Elysia, Mother of the Holy Aedon," Sludig said, awed.

"Never know there was a rabbit hole here," Grimmric shook his

head, "an' they got a palace."

Perhaps a dozen Sithi, all male as far as Simon could tell on brief

inspection, were ranged about the chamber. Several of them sat

calmly before another pair seated on a high stone. One held a long

flutelike instrument and the other was singing;-the music was so

strange to Simon that it took him a few moments before he could

separate voice from flute, and the continuing melody of the waterfall

from either. Still, the exquisite, quavering song they played tugged

achingly at his heart even as it lifted the short hairs on the back of

his neck. Despite the unfamiliarity there was something in it that

made him want to sink down on the spot, never to move again while

such gentle music lasted.

Those not gathered around the musicians were talking quietly, or

merely lying on their backs staring upward, as if they could gaze out

through the solid stone of the hillside and into the night sky beyond.

Most turned briefly to survey the captives at the chamber's entrance,

but in the manner, Simon felt, that a man listening to a good story

might lift his head to watch a cat walk past.

He and his companions, who had been quite unprepared for this,

stood gaping. The leader of their guards crossed the room toward

the far wall where two more figures sat facing each other over a table

that was a tall, flattened knob of shiny white stone. Both stared

intently at something on the tabletop, lit by another of the strange

lamps set in a niche in the rock face close by. The warder stopped

and stood quietly a short distance away, as though waiting to be

recognized.

630 Tad Williams

The Sitha who sat with his back to the companions was dressed in

a beautiful high-collared jacket of leaf-green, with pants and high

boots of the same shade. His long, braided hair was of a red even

more fiery than Simon's, and his hands, as he moved something

across the tabletop, glittered with rings. Across from him, watching

the movements of his hand intently, sat one wrapped in a loose

white robe rucked up around his braceleted forearms, his hair a pale

shade of heather or blue. A crow's feather, shiny black, hung down

before one ear. Even as Simon watched, the white-gowned Sitha

flashed his teeth and spoke to his companion, then reached out to

slide some object forward. Simon's stare grew more intense; he

blinked.

It was the very Sitha-man he had rescued from the cotsman's

trap. He was positive.

"That's him!" he whispered excitedly to Binabik. "The one whose

arrow it is!"

Even as he spoke, their warder approached the table, and the one

Simon recognized looked up. The warder quickly said something,

but the white-robed one only flicked a glance over toward the pris-

oners and waved a dismissive hand, returning his attention to what

Simon had at last decided was either some kind of map or gaming

board. His red-haired companion never turned, and a moment later

their captor came back.

"You must wait until Lord Jiriki has finished." He brought his

expressionless gaze to bear on Simon. "Since the arrow is yours, you

may go unbound. The others may not."

Simon, only a stone's throw from the one who had made the debt-

pledge but still being ignored, was tempted to push forward and

confront the white-robed SithaJereekee, if that was his name.

Binabik, who felt his tension, bumped him in warning.

"If the others must remain tied, then so will I," Simon said at last.

For the first time he thought he saw something unexpected slide

across his captor's face: a look of discomfort-

"It is a White Arrow," the guard leader said. "You should not be

prisoned unless it is proven you have come by it through foul means,

but I cannot free your companions."

"Then I will stay tied," Simon said firmly.

The other stared at him for a moment, then shuttered his eyes in a

slow, reptilian blink, reopening them to smile unhappily.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR631

"So it must be," he said. "I do not like binding a bearer of the

Staj'a Ame, but I see little choice. On my heart it will be, right or

wrong." Then, strangely, he bobbed his head in an almost respectful

manner, fixing his luminous eyes on Simon's. "My mother named

me An'nai," he said.

Caught off balance, Simon let a long moment pass until he felt

Binabik's boot grinding on his toe. "Oh!" he said, "I am ... my

mother named me Simon . . . Seoman, actually." Then, seeing the

Sitha nod, satisfied, he hurriedly added: "and these are my compan-

ionsBinabik of Yiqanuc, Haestan and Griromric of Erkynland,

and Sludig of Rimmersgard."

Perhaps, Simon thought, since the Sitha had seemed to place such

importance on the sharing of his name, this forced introduction

would help protect his companions.

An'nai bobbed his head again and glided off, once more taking up

a position near the stone table. His fellow guards, after lending sur-

prisingly gentle help to the bound companions so that they could sit

down, dispersed around the cavern.

Simon and the others talked quietly for a long while, hushed by

the strange twining music more than their situation.

"Still," said Sludig at last, after complaining bitterly about the

treatment they had received, "at least we are alive. Few who encoun-

ter demons are so lucky."

"Y'r a top, Simon-lad!" Haestan laughed. "A spinnin' top! Got

the Fair Folk bowin' and scrapin'. Let's be sure t'ask for bag o' gold

'fore we go on our way."

"Bowing and scraping!" Simon smirked in unhappy self-mockery.

"Am I free? Am I unbound? Am I eating supper?"

"True." Haestan shook his head sadly. "A bit'd go down nice.

And a jar or so."

"I am thinking we will receive nothing until Jiriki sees us,"

Binabik said, "but if he is indeed the person that Simon rescued, we

may yet be eating well."

"Do you think he's important?" Simon asked. "An'nai called him

'Lord Jiriki.'"

"If there is not more than one living of that name . . ." Binabik

began, but was interrupted by An'nai's return. He was accompanied

by the selfsame Jiriki, who clutched in his hand the White Arrow.

"Please," Jiriki called two of the other Sithi over, "untie them

632 Tad Williams

now." He turned and said something rapid in his flowing tongue.

The musical words somehow had the sound of a reproach. An'nai

accepted Jiriki's admonishment expressionlessly, if such it was, only

lowering his eyes.

Simon, carefully watching, was certain that minus that effects of

hanging in a trap, and the bruises and gashes of the cotsman's at-

tack, this was the same Sitha.

Jiriki waved a hand and An'nai walked away. Because of his con-

fident movements, and the deference that those around him showed,

Simon had at first taken him to be older, or at least of an age with

the other Sithi. Now, despite the strange timelessness of their golden

faces, Simon suddenly felt that the Lord Jiriki was, by Sithi stan-

dards anyway, still young.

As the newly freed prisoners rubbed feeling back into their wrists,

Jiriki held up the arrow. "Forgive the wait. An'nai misjudged, be-

cause he knows how seriously I take the playing of shent." His eyes

moved from the companions to the arrow and back again. "I never

thought to meet you again, Seoman," he said with a birdlike chin

tilt, and a smile that never quite reached his eyes. "But a debt is a

debt . . . and the Staj'aAme is even more. You have changed since

our first meeting. Then you looked more like one of the forest ani-

mals than like your human kindred. You seemed lost, in many

ways." His gaze burned brightly.

"You've changed, too," Simon said.

A shadow of pain crossed Jiriki's angular face. "Three nights and

two days I spent hanging in that mortal's trap. Soon I would have

died, even if the woodsman had not comefrom shame, that is."

His expression changed, as if he had shut his hurt beneath a lid.

"Come," he said, "we must give you food. It is unfortunate, but we

cannot feed you as well as I would like. We bring little with us to

our," he gestured around the chamber while searching for the

proper word, "hunting lodge." Although he was far more fluent

with the Westerling speech than Simon would ever have dreamed at

their first meeting, still there was something halting yet precise in his

manner that indicated how alien that tongue was to him.

"You are here to ... hunt?" Simon asked as they were led for-

ward to sit before the fire. "What is it you hunt? The hills seem so

barren now."

"Ah, but the game we seek is more plentiful than ever," Jiriki

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

633

said, walking past them and toward a row of objects draped with a

shimmering cloth, set along one wall of the cavern.

The green-clad, red-haired one stood up from the gaming table,

where Jiriki's place had been taken by An'nai, and spoke in tones

both questioning and perhaps angry, all in the Sithi-speech.

"Only showing our visitors the fruits of our hunt. Uncle Khen-

draja'aro," Jiriki said cheerfully, but again Simon felt something

missing from the Sitha's smile.

Jiriki crouched gracefully beside the row of covered objects,

alighting like a sea bird. With a flourish he pulled the shroud away,

revealing a row of half a dozen large, white-haired heads, dead fea-

tures frozen in expressions of snarling hatred.

"Chukku's Stones!" Binabik swore as the others gasped.

It took Simon a shocked instant to recognize the leathery-skinned

faces for what they were.

"Giantsl" he said at last. "Hunen!"

"Yes,** Prince Jiriki said, then turned. There was a flash of danger

in his voice. "And you, trespassing mortals . . . what do you hunt

in my father's hills?"

38

Songs of the Eldest

DEORNOTH WOKE in chill darkness, sweating. The wind hissed and

wailed outside, clawing at the shuttered windows like a flight of the

lonely dead. His heart leaped as he saw the dark shape looming over

him, silhouetted by the embers in the fireplace.

"Captain!" It was one of the men, voice a panicked whisper.

"There's someone comin' down on th' gate! Armed men!"

"God's Tree!" he cursed, struggling into his boots. Shrugging his

mailshirt over his head, he snatched up his scabbard and helmet and

followed the soldier out.

Pour more men were huddled on the top platform of the gate-

house, hunkered down behind the rampart. The wind pushed him

staggering, and he quickly dropped into a crouch.

"There, Captain!" It was the one who had awakened him.

"Comin' up th' road through th' town." He leaned past Deomoth to

point.

The moonlight, shining through the streaming clouds, silvered the

shabby thatching of Naglimund-town's huddled roofs. There was

indeed movement on the road, a small company of horsemen, per-

haps a dozen in number.

The men on the gatehouse watched the riders* slow approach.

One of the soldiers groaned quietly. Deomoth, too, felt the ache of

waiting. It was better when the horns were shrilling, and the field

was full of shouting.

It is this waiting that has unmanned us all, Deomoth thought.

Once we have been blooded again, our Naglimunders will do proudly.

"There must be more, a-hidin'l" one of the soldiers breathed.

"What should we do?" Even with the crying of the wind, his voice

seemed loud. How could the approaching riders not hear?

"Nothing," Deomoth said firmly. "Wait."

The waiting seemed to last days. As the horsemen drew nearer,

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR635

the moon picked out shining spearpoints and the gleam of helmets.

The silent riders reined in before the massive gate, and sat as if

listening.

One of the gatemen stood, drawing his bow and sighting on the

breast of the leading rider. Even as Deomoth leaped toward him,

seeing the straining lines on the guardsman's face, his desperate eye,

there came a loud pounding from below. Deomoth caught the bow

arm and forced it up; the arrow spat forth and out into the windy

darkness over the town.

"By the good God, open your doorl^ a man shouted, and once

more a spear-butt was thumped against the timbers. It was a Rim-

mersman's voice, with an edge almost, Deomoth thought, of mad-

ness. "Are you all asleep?! Let us in! I am Isom, Isgrunnur's son,

escaped from the hand of our enemies."

^

"Look! See how the clouds break! Don't you think that is a hope-

ful sign, Velligis?"

As he spoke. Duke Leobardis swung his pointing hand in a broad

arc to the cabin's open window, nearly smacking his mailed arm

against the head of his sweating squire in the process. The squire

ducked, swallowing a silent oath as he juggled the duke's greaves,

and turned to cuff a young page who had not gotten out of his way

fast enough. The page, who had been trying to make himself as

unobtrusive as possible in the ship's crowded cabin, renewed his

desperate efforts to shrink out of sight entirely.

"Perhaps we are, in some way, the thin end of the wedge that will

put an end to this madness." Leobardis clanked to the window, his

squire scrambling along the floor behind him, struggling to hold a

half-fastened greave in place. The gravid sky did indeed show long,

rippled streaks of blue, as if Crannhyr's dark and bulky cliffs, loom-

ing over the bay where Leobardis' flagship Emettin 's Jewel rolled at

close anchor, caught and tore at the lowering clouds.

Velligis, a great round man in golden escritorial robes, stumped to

the window to stand at the duke's side.

"How, my lord, can throwing oil on the fire help to extinguish it?

It is, if you will pardon my forwardness, folly to think so."

636 Tad Williams

The hammering of the muster-drum echoed across the water. Le-

obardis brushed lank white hair out of his eyes. "I know how the

lector feels," he said, "and I know he directs you, beloved Escritor,

to try and persuade me out of this. His Sacredness' love of peace

. . . well, it is admirable, but it will not come about by talking."

VeUigis opened a small brass casket and shook out a sugar-sweet,

which he delicately placed on his tongue. "This is perilously close to

sacrilege. Duke Leobardis. Is prayer 'talking'? Is the intercession of

His Sacredness the Lector Ranessin somehow of less validity than

the force of your armies? If that is so, then our faith in the word of

Usires, and of his first acolyte Sutrines, is a mockery." The escritor

sighed heavily, and sucked.

The duke's cheeks pinkened; he waved the squire away, bending

creakily to fasten the last buckle himself, then waved for his surcoat

of rich blue with the Benidrivine kingfisher gold-blazoned on the

chest.

"God bless me, VeUigis," he said testily, "but I haven't the mind

for arguing with you today. I have been pushed too far by the High

King Elias, and now I must do what is needed."

"But you do not go into battle by yourself," the large man said,

speaking with some heat for the first time. "You lead hundreds, nay,

thousands of menof soulsand their well-being is in your care.

The seeds of catastrophe are fluttering in the wind, and Mother

Church has a responsibility to see they do not find fertile soil."

Leobardis shook his head sadly as the small page shyly lifted his

golden helmet, with its crest of blue-dyed horsehair.

"Fertile soil is everywhere these days, VeUigis, and catastrophe is

already growingif you'U forgive my theft of your poetic words.

The thing is, we must try and nip it while it is budding. Come." He

patted the escritor's fleshy arm. "It is time to go down to the land-

ing-boat. Walk with me."

"Certainly, my good Duke, certainly." VeUigis turned slightly to

the side to ease through the narrow doorway. "You will forgive me if

I do not accompany you ashore just yet. I have been somewhat

unsteady on my legs of late. I am getting old, I fear."

"Ah, but your rhetoric has not lost its vigor," Leobardis replied as

they moved slowly across the deck. A small figure wrapped in a dark

robe crossed his path, pausing to nod briefly, hands folded on its

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR637

breast. The escritor frowned, but Duke Leobardis returned the nod

with a smile.

"Nin Reisu has been with Emettin's Jewel a long time," he said,

"and she is the finest of seawatchers. I forgive her the formalities

Niskies are strange folk anyway, VeUigis, as you would know if you

were a sailing man. Come, my boat is this way."

The harbor wind made of Leobardis' cloak a saU, billowing blue

against the uncertain sky.

Leobardis saw his youngest son VareUan waiting at landfall, look-

ing too smaU to fill out his gleaming armor. His thin face peered

anxiously from the hoUow of his helmet whUe he surveyed the gath-

ering Nabbanai forces, as if his father might hold him responsible for

any slipshod formations among the milling, swearing soldiers. Sev-

eral of them pushed past him as unconcernedly as if he were the

drummer boy, cursing cheerfuUy at a pair of horses who, frightened

by the confusion, had leaped off the gangplank into the shallow

water, taking their handler with them. VareUan backed away from

the splashing, whinnying chaos, his forehead wrinkled in a frown

that did not go away even when he saw the duke step from the

grounded boat and wade the last few paces to the rocky shore of

Hemystir's south coast.

"My lord," he said, and hesitated; Leobardis guessed he was won-

dering whether to climb down from his horse and bend a knee. The

duke had to restrain a scowl. He blamed Nessalanta for the boy's

timidity, since she had hung on to him as a drunkard to his jug,

unwilling to admit that the last of her children was grown. Of

course, he perhaps owned some responsibility himself. He should

never have poked fun at the boy's half-formed interest in the priest-

hood. Still, that had been years ago, and there was no turning the

boy's path now; he would be a soldier if it killed him-

"So, VareUan," he said, and looked around. "WeU then, my son, it

looks as though all is in good order."

Although the evidence of his eyes told him his father was either

mad or overkind, the young man flashed a grateful smUe. "We shaU

be unshipped in two hours, I would say. WU1 we march tonight?"

"After a week at sea? The men would kiU us both and find a new

ducal family. Although I suppose they would have to dispatch Beni-

638 Tad Williams

garis, too, if they wanted to finish the line. Speaking of your brother,

why is he not here?"

He spoke lightly, but he found the absence of his eldest child

irritating. After weeks of bitter argument over whether Nabban

should cling to neutrality, and a stormy reaction to the duke's deci-

sion to support Josua, Benigaris had turned his coat and announced

his desire to ride with his father and the armies. Benigaris could not

give up an opportunity to lead the Legions of the Kingfisher in

battle, the duke felt sure, even if it meant giving up a chance to rest

his hocks for a short while on the throne of the Sancellan Mahis-

trevis.

He realized he was woolgathering. "No, no, Varellan, we must

give the men a night in Crannhyr, although merrymaking may prove

scarce with Lluth's war gone so poorly to the north. Where did you

say Benigaris was?"

Varellan colored. "I didn't, my lord. I'm sorry. He rode up to the

town with his friend Count Aspitis Preves."

Leobardis ignored his son's discomfort. "By the Tree, I would not

have thought it too much to expect my son and heir to meet me.

Well, so, let us go and see how things are with our other com-

manders." He snapped his fingers and the squire brought the duke's

horse up, harness bells jingling.

They found Mylin-sa-Ingadaris underneath his house's white and

red albatross banner. The old man, who had been Leobardis' cordial

enemy for years, hailed the duke over. He and Varellan sat watching

as Mylin oversaw the final unloading of his two carracks, then joined

the old earl in his striped tent for a flagon of sweet Ingadarine wine.

After talking marching squares and fewteringand putting up

with Varellan's half-successful attempts to join inLeobardis

thanked Earl Mylin for his hospitality and went out, youngest son

trailing behind. Taking the reins back from their squires, they con-

tinued on through the bustling encampment, paying brief courtesy

visits to the camps of some of the other nobles.

The pair had just turned about to ride back up the strand when

the duke caught sight of a familiar figure on a big-chested roan

charger, sauntering down the road from town with another rider at

his side.

Benigaris' silver armor, his most cherished possession, was so

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR639

thick with engravings and costly tracings of ilenite inlay that light

declined to reflect from it properly, making it appear almost gray.

Corseted by his breastplate, which corrected the overabundancy of

his figure, Benigaris looked every inch a brave and doughty knight.

Young Aspitis beside him also wore armor of beautiful workman-

ship: the family osprey crest had been inlaid on his breastplate in

mother of pearl. He wore no surcoat that might cover it up, but

went, like Benigaris, plated all over like a gleaming crab.

Benigaris said something to his companion; Aspitis Preves

laughed, then rode away. Benigaris came down the road, crunching

across the gravelly beach toward his father and younger brother.

"That was Count Aspitis, was it not?" Leobardis asked, trying to

keep the bitterness he felt in the back of his throat from his voice.

"Is the Prevan House now become our enemy, that he cannot come

and salute his duke?"

Benigaris leaned over in his saddle and patted his horse's neck.

Leobardis could not see if he looked up through his thick, dark

brows. "I told Aspitis that you and I would speak privately, Father.

He would have come, but I sent him away. He went out of respect

for you." He turned to Varellan, who looked aswim in his bright

armor, and gave the boy a brief nod.

Feeling slightly overbalanced, the duke changed the subject.

"What took you to town, my son?"

"News, sire- I thought Aspitis, since he has been here before,

might help me to gather useful tidings.'*

"You were gone a long time." Leobardis could not summon the

strength to be angry. "What did you find, Benigarisanything?"

"Nothing we had not already heard from the Abaingeat boats.

Lluth is wounded and has fallen back to the mountains. Skali con-

trols Hemysadharc, but has not the armies to extend himself any

farther, not until the Hemystirmen in the Grianspog have been sub-

dued. So the coast is yet free, and all the ground this side of the Ach

SamrathNad Mullach, Cuimhne, all the river lands up to Innis-

crich."

Leobardis rubbed his head, squinting at the glaring streak the sun

made on the surface of the ocean. "Perhaps we could best serve

Prince Josua if we were to break this nearer siege. If we were to

bring our two thousand men against Skali Sharp-nose's back,

640 Tad Williams

Uuth's armies would be freed upwhat's left of themand Elias'

back would be naked as he lays siege to the Naglimund."

He weighed the plan and liked it. It seemed to him something his

brother Camaris might have done: swift, forceful, a stroke like a

snapping whip. Camaris had always approached warfare like the

pure weapon he was, as straightforward and unhesitating as a shin-

ing hammer.

Benigaris was shaking his head, something like real alarm on his

face. "Oh, no, sirel Nol Why, if we were to do that, all Skali would

have to do is melt into the Circoille, or climb up into the same

Grianspog mountains. Thea we would be pegged down like a

stretched hide, waiting for the Rimmersmen to come out. Mean-

while Elias would reduce Naglimund and be free to turn on us. We

would be cracked like a hazelnut between the High King and the

Raven." He shook his head emphatically, as if the idea frightened

him.

Leobardis turned away from the dazzling sun. "I suppose you

make good sense, Benigaris . . . although I seem to remember you

arguing differently not long ago."

*That was until you made your decision to put the army in the

field, my lord." Benigaris lifted his helmet and rolled it in his hands

for a moment before hanging it back on his pommel. "Now that we

are committed, I am a Nascadu lion."

Leobardis took a deep breath. The tang of war was in the air, and

it was a scent that filled him with unease and regret. Still, the sun-

dering of Osten Ard after the long years of John's peacethe High

King's Wardseemed to have brought his headstrong son back to

his side. It was something for which to be grateful, however insignifi-

cant in the tide of greater events. The Duke of Nabban offered a

silent prayer of thanks to his confusing but ultimately beneficent

God.

^

"Praise Usires Aedon for bringing you back to us!" Isgrimnur

said, and felt tears coming again. He leaned over the bed and gave

Isom's shoulder a rough, joyful shake, earning a sharp glance from

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR641

Outrun, who had not left her grown son's side since he had come in

the night before.

Isom, no stranger to his mother's stem ways, grinned weakly up

at Isgrimnur. He had the duke's blue eyes and broad features, but

much of the sheen of youth seemed to have vanished since his father

had seen him last: he was drawn, shadowed. Something seemed to

have been drained from him, for all his stock-shouldered bulk.

It's just hardship and worry that's been at him, the duke decided.

He's a strong boy. Look at him. how he puts up with his mother's

fussing. He'll be a fine manno. He is a fine man. When he's duke

after me ... after we send Skali shouting down to Hell . . .

"Isom!" A new voice sent the errant thought fluttering away. "It

is a miracle to have you back among us." Prince Josua leaned for-

ward and clasped Isorn's hand with his own left hand. Outrun nod-

ded approvingly. She did not rise to curtsy to the prince, mother-

hood apparently overriding manners on this occasion. Josua did not

seem to mind.

"The devil it's a miracle," Isgrimnur said gruffly, and frowned to

keep his swelling heart from causing him any embarrassment. "He

got 'em out through wits and courage, and that's Ood's truth."

"Isgrimnur . . ." Outrun warned him. Josua laughed.

"Oh course. Let me say then, Isom, that your courage and wit

were miraculous."

Isom sat higher in the bed, readjusting the bandaged leg that lay,

pillowed atop the coverlet like the relic of a saint. "That's far too

kind, Your Highness. Had not some ofSkali's Kaldskryke-men been

without the stomach for torture of their fellows, we would be there

stillas ice-stiffened corpses."

"Isom!" his mother said, annoyed. "Do not speak of such things.

It flies in the face of God's mercy."

"But it's true. Mother. Skali's own Ravens gave us the knives that

permitted our escape." He turned to Josua. "There are dark things

afoot in Elvritshallaover all of Rimmersgard, Prince Josua! You

must believe me! Skali is not alone. The town was full of Black

Rimmersmen out of the lands around Stormspike. It was them that

Sharp-nose left to guard us. It was those Ood-cursed monsters who

tortured our menfor nothing! We had nothing to hide from them!

They did it for pleasure, if such a thing can be imagined. Nights we

642 Tad Williams

went to sleep hearing the cries of our fellows, wondering who they

would take next."

He moaned softly and lifted his hand from Gutrun's restraining

grasp to rub at his temples, as if to scour the memory. "Even Skali's

own men found it sickening. I think they are beginning to wonder

what their thane has gotten them into."

"We believe you," Josua said gently; the look he lifted to standing

Isgrimnur was etched with worry.

"But there were others, tooones who came by night, hooded in

black. Even our guards did not see their faces!" Although Isom*s

voice remained quiet, his eyes were round in the remembering.

'They did not even move like menthe Aedon be my witness! They

were out of the cold wastes beyond the mountains. We could feel the

chill of them as they passed our prisoni We were more frightened of

being near to them than of all the Black Rimmersmen's hot irons."

Isom shook his head and lay back on the pillow. "I am sorry, Father

. . . Prince Josua. I am very tired."

"He is a strong man, Isgrimnur," the prince said as they walked

up the puddled corridor. The roof here was leaking, as so many were

in NagUmund after a winter of hard weather, and a spring and

summer of the same.

"I only wish I had not left him alone to face that whoreson Skali.

Be-damned!" Skidding on the wet stone, Isgrimnur cursed his age

and clumsiness.

"He did all that could be done, Uncle. You should be proud of

him."

"I am."

They walked on for a while before Josua spoke. "I must confess,

having Isorn here makes it easier for me to ask of you . . . what I

must ask."

Isgrimnur tugged at his beard. "And what is that?"

"A boon. One that I would not beg if . . ." He hesitated. "No.

Let us go to my chamber. This is a thing that should be discussed in

solitude," He hooked his right arm through the duke's elbow, the

leather-capped stump on his wrist a mute reproach in advance of

any rejection.

Isgrimnur tugged at his beard again until it hurt. He had a feeling

643

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

he would not like what he was about to hear. "By the Tree, let's get

a jug of wine to take with us, Josua. I sorely need it."

"For the love ofUsires! By the crimson mallet ofDror! The bones

of Saint Eahlstan and Saint Skendi! Are you mad?! Why should I

leave Naglimund?" Isgrimnur trembled in surprise and anger.

"I would not ask it if there was any other way, Isgrimnur." The

prince spoke patiently, but even through the mist of his rage the

duke could see the anguish Josua felt. "I have lain awake two nights

without sleep, trying to think of another way. I cannot. Somebody

must find the Princess Miriamele."

Isgrimnur took a long swallow of wine, feeling some dribble down

his beard, but not caring. "Why?" he said at last, and set the jar

down with a table-rattling thump. "And why me. God damn it all?

Why me?"

The prince was all strained patience. "She must be found because

she is vitally important ... as well as my only niece. What if I die,

Isgrimnur? What if we hold off Elias, break the siege, but I stop an

arrow, or tumble from the castle wall? Who will the people rally

behindnot just the barons and the warlords, but the common peo-

ple, those who came nocking into my walls for protection? It will be

hard enough to fight Elias with me at your headstrange and fickle

as I am thoughtbut what if I die?"

Isgrimnur stared at the floor. "There is Lluth. And Leobardis."

Josua shook his head harshly. "King Lluth is wounded, maybe

dying. Leobardis is the Duke of Nabbanat war with Erkynland

within the memory of some. The Sancellan itself is a reminder of a

time when Nabban ruled all. Even you, Uncle, good and much-

respected man as you are, could not hold a force together that would

stand against Elias. He is a son ofPrester John! He was raised to the

Dragonbone Chair by John himself. For all his wicked deeds, it will

take someone from the family to unseat him . . . and you know it!"

Isgrimnur's long silence was his answer.

"But why me?" he said at last.

"Because Miriamele would not come back for anyone else I could

send. Deornoth? He is as brave and as loyal as a hunting hawk, but

he would have to carry the princess back to Naglimund in a sack.

Beside myself, you are the only one who could ever bring her un-

resisting, and she must come willingly, for it would be disaster if you

644 Tad Williams

were found out. Soon enough Elias may discover she is gone, and

then he will set the south afire to find her."

Josua walked to his desk and absently ruffled a stack of parch-

ments. "Think carefully, Isgrimnur. Forget for a moment that it is

yourself we speak of. Who else has traveled as far, and has as many

friends in strange places? Who else, if you will forgive me, has seen

the wrong end of so many dark alleys in Ansis Pelippe and Nab-

ban?"

Isgrimnur grinned sourly, in spite of himself. "But still it makes

no sense, Josua. How can I leave my men, with Elias coming against

us? And how could I hope to perform such a secret thing, well

known as I am?"

"For the first, that is why it seems to me a sign from God that

Isom has come. Einskaldir, we both would agree, has not the re-

straint to command. Isorn does. Anyway, Uncle, he deserves the

chance to make good. Elvritshalla's fall has battered his young

pride."

"It's battered pride that makes a boy a man," the duke growled.

"Go on."

"As to the second, well, you are well-known, but you have been

seldom south of Erkynland in twenty years. In any case, we shall

disguise you."

"Disguise?" Isgrimnur pawed distractedly at the braids of his

beard as Josua walked to his chamber door and called out. The duke

had a strange, heavy feeling around his heart. He had been dreading

the fighting, not so much for himself as for his people, his wife . . .

now his son was here, too, giving him another stone of worry to

carry. But to leave, even riding into danger as great as he left behind

... it seemed unsupportably like cowardice, like treason.

But I was sworn to Josua's fathermy dear old Johnhow can I

not do what his son asks? And his arguments make all too much be-

damned sense.

"Here," the prince said, stepping away from the door to allow

someone in. It was Father Strangyeard, his pink, eye-patched face

creased in a shy smile, tall frame stooped over his burden: a bundle

of dark cloth.

"I hope it fits," he said. "They seldom do; I don't know why, just

another gentle reminder, another of the Master's little burdens." He

trailed off, then seemed to find the thread again. "Eglaf was most

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR645

kind to lend it. He is about your size, I think, although not quite so

tall."

"Eglaf?" Isgrimnur said, mystified. "Who is Eglaf? Josua, what is

this nonsense?"

"Brother Eglaf, of course," Strangyeard explained.

"Your disguise, Isgrimnur," Josua amplified. The castle archivist

shook out the bundle, revealing a woolen set of black priestly vest-

ments. "You are a devout man, Uncle," the prince said. "I am sure

you will be able to carry it off." The duke could have sworn Josua

was resisting a smile.

"What? Priest's robes?" Isgrimnur was beginning to see the out-

lines of the thing, and he was not pleased.

"How better to pass unnoticed in Nabban, where Mother Church

is queen, and priests of every stripe nearly outnumber the rest of the

citizens?" Josua was smiling.

Isgrimnur was furious. "Josua, I feared for your wits before, but

now I know you have lost them completely' This is the maddest

scheme I have ever seeni And on top of everything else, who ever

heard of an Aedonite priest with a beard?" He snorted scornfully.

The princewith a warning glance to Father Strangyeard, who

put the robes down on a chair and backed toward the doorwalked

to his table and lifted a cloth, revealing ... a basin of hot water,

and a gleaming, fresh-stropped razor.

Isgrimnur's eruptive bellow rattled the very crockery in the castle

kitchen below.

^

"Speak, mortal men. Do you come to our hills as spies?"

A chilly silence followed Prince Jiriki's words. From the comer of

his eye Simon watched Haestan reach backward, feeling along the

wall for something to use as a weapon; Sludig and Grimmric glared

at the Sithi who surrounded them, certain that any moment they

would be set upon.

"No, Prince Jiriki," Binabik said hastily. "Surely you are seeing

we had no expectations of finding your people here. We are from

Naglimund, Prince Josua's sending, on an errand of terrible import.

We are seeking . . ."

646 Tad Williams

The troll hesitated, as though afraid to say too much. Finally,

with a shrug, he continued.

"We got to the dragon-mountain for searching Camaris-sa-Vuiit-

ta's sword Thorn."

Jirild narrowed his eyes, and behind him the green-clad one he

had called his uncle let out a thin whistle of breath.

"What would you do with such a thing?" Khendraja'aro de-

manded.

Binabik would not answer this, but stared unhappily at the cavern

floor. The very air seemed to thicken as the moments passed.

"It's to save us from Ineluki the Storm King!" Simon blurted out.

None of the Sithi moved a muscle except to blink. No one said a

word.

"Speak more," Jiriki said at last.

"If we must," Binabik said. "It is part of a story near as long as

your Ua'kiza Tumefai nei-R'i'anisthe Song of the Fall of

Tumet'ai. We will try for telling you what we can."

The troll hurriedly explained the main facts. It seemed to Simon

that he deliberately omitted many things; once or twice in the telling

Binabik looked up and caught his eye, seemingly warning him to

silence.

Binabik told the silent Sithi of Naglimund's preparations and the

crimes of the High King he explained the words of Jamauga, and

the book of Nisses, reciting the rhyme that led them on toward

Urmsheun.

The finish of the story left the troll facing Jiriki's bland stare, the

uncle's more skeptical expression, and a silence so complete that the

ringing echo of the waterfall seemed to swell until it filled the whole

world with noise. What a place of madness and dreams this was, and

what a mad story they were suddenly living in! Simon felt his heart

racing, but not from fear alone.

"This is hard to credit, son of my sister," Khendraja'aro said at

last, spreading his beringed hands in an unfamiliar gesture.

"It is. Uncle. But I think this is not the time to speak of it."

"But the other one the boy spoke of . . ." Khendraja'aro began,

his yellow eyes troubled, his voice full of building anger. 'The black

one below Nakktga ..."

"Not now." There was an edge to the Sithi prince's voice. He

turned to the five outsiders. "Apologies are called for. It is not good

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR647

that we should discuss such things while you still have not eaten,

You are our guests." Simon felt a wave of relief at these words and

swayed a little, his knees suddenly weak.

Noticing this, Jiriki waved them toward the fire. "Sit down. We

must be forgiven for our suspicion. Understand, although I owe you

blood debt, Seomanyou are my Hikka Sta'jayour race has done

ours little kindness."

"I must be disagreeing with you in a part, Prince Jiriki," Binabik

replied, seating himself on a flat rock near the fire. "Of all Sithi, your

family should be knowing that we Qanuc have never brought you

any harm."

Jiriki looked down on the little man, and his taut features relaxed

into an expression almost of fondness. "You have caught me in un-

graciousness, Binbiniqegabenik. After only the Western men, whom

we knew best, we once loved the Qanuc well."

Binabik lifted his head, a look of astonishment on his round face.

"How are you knowing my full name? I have not given mention of

it, and my companions have not been either."

Jiriki laughed, a hissing sound, but strangely cheering, with not a

him of insincerity. In that moment Simon felt a fierce, sudden liking

for him.

"Ah, troll," the prince said, "someone as traveled as you are

should not be surprised that your name is known. How many Qanuc

beside your master and yourself are ever seen south of the moun-

tains?"

"You are knowing my master? He is dead now." Binabik pulled

off his gloves and flexed his fingers. Simon and the others were

finding seats of their own.

"He knew us," Jiriki said. "Did he not teach you to speak our

language? You said the troll spoke to you, An'nai?"

"He did, my prince. Mostly correctly."

Binabik flushed, pleased but embarrassed. "Ookequk was teaching

me some, but he never told me where he had been learning it. I had

the thought perhaps his master had given it to him."

"Sit now, sit," said Jiriki, gesturing for Haestan, Sludig and

Grimmric to follow Simon and Binabik's example. They came like

dogs who fear a beating and found themselves places near the fire.

Several of the other Sithi approached bearing salvers of intricately

carved and polished wood, high-laden with all manner of things:

648 Tad Williams

butter and dark brown bread, a wheel of pungent, salty cheese, small

red and yellow fruits that Simon had never seen before. There were

also several bowls of quite recognizable berries, and even a pile of

slow-dripping honeycombs. When Simon reached and took two of

the sticky combs, Jiriki laughed again, a quiet sibilance like a jay in a

distant tree.

"Everywhere is winter," he said, "but in the sheltered fastnesses

ofJao e-Tinukai'i, the bees do not know it. Take all you like."

Captors-tumed-hosts now served the companions an unfamiliar

but potent wine, filling their wooden goblets from stone ewers. Si-

mon wondered if some prayer might be said before starting, but the

Sithi had already begun to eat. Haestan, Sludig, and Grimmric were

looking around miserably, wanting to begin but still full of fear and

distrust. They watched intently as Binabik broke bread and took a

mouthful of buttered crust- Some moments later, when he was not

only still alive but eating merrily, the men felt safe to attack the Sithi

fare, which they did with the vigor of reprieved prisoners.

Dabbing honey from his chin, Simon paused to watch the Sithi.

The Fair Folk ate slowly, sometimes staring at a berry between their

fingers for long instants before lifting it to their mouths. There was

little speech, but when one of them made some remark in their

liquid tongue, or gave voice to a brief trill of song, all the others

listened. Most often there was no response, but if one of them had

some answer they all listened to that, too. There was much quiet

laughter, but no shouting and no arguing, and Simon never heard

anyone interrupt while another was speaking.

An'nai had moved over to sit near Simon and Binabik. One of the

Sithi made a solemn statement that drew a laugh from the others-

Simon asked An'nai to explain the joke.

The white-jacketed Sitha looked slightly uncomfortable.

"Ki'ushapo said that your friends eat as though they fear their food

might run away." He gestured to Haestan, who was pushing food

into his mouth with both hands.

Simon was not sure what An'nai meantsurely they had seen

hungry people before?but he smiled anyway.

As the meal wore on, and a seemingly inexhaustible river of wine

replenished the wooden goblets, the Rimmersman and the two

Erkymandish guardsmen began to enjoy themselves. At one point

Sludig stood, tumbler sloshing in his hand, and proposed a hearty

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR649

toast to his new Sithi friends- Jiriki smiled and nodded, but Khen-

draja'aro stiffened; when Sludig swung into an old northern drinking

song, the prince's uncle slipped quietly off to the corner of the broad

cavern to stare into the rippling, lamplit pond.

The other Sithi at table laughed as Sludig sang the choruses in his

braying voice, and swayed to his tipsy rhythm, whispering occasion-

ally among themselves. Sludig and Haestan and Grimmric seemed

quite happy now, and even Binabik was grinning as he sucked on a

pear rindbut Simon, remembering the enthralling music he had

heard the Sithi play, felt a glow of shame for his companion, as

though the Rimmersman were a festival bear dancing for crumbs in

Main Row.

After watching for some while he got up, wiping his hands on his

shirtfront. Binabik rose, too, and after asking Jiriki's permission

went down the covered passageway to have a look after Qantaqa.

The three soldiers were all laughing uproariously among themselves,

telling, Simon had no doubt, drunken soldier jokes. He walked to

one of the wall niches to examine the strange lamps. Abruptly he

was reminded of the glowing crystal Morgenes had given him

could it have been Sithi-work?and felt a cold, lonely tug at his

heart. He lifted one of the lamps and saw a faint shadow of the bones

in his hand, as though the flesh was only muddied water. Stare as he

might, he could not fathom how the flame had been introduced to

the inside of the translucent crystal.

Sensing someone watching, he turned. Jiriki was staring, cat-eyes

agleam on the far side of the fire circle. Simon started, surprised; the

prince nodded.

Haestan, the wine gone to his shaggy head, had challenged one of

the Sithithe one An'nai had named Ki'ushapoto wrist-wrestle.

Ki'ushapo, yellow-braided, dressed in black and gray, was receiving

drunken advice from Grimmric. It was clear why the skinny guards-

man thought his aid well-directed: the Sitha was a head shorter than

Haestan, and looked to be barely more than half his weight. As the

Sitha, with a bemused expression, leaned forward across the smooth

stone to clasp Haestan's broad hand, Jiriki stood up and edged past

them, making his graceful way across the chamber toward Simon.

It was still difficult, Simon thought, to reconcile this confident,

clever being with the maddened creature he had found in the

cotsman's wire. Still, when Jiriki turned his head a certain way, or

650 Tad Williams

flexed his long-jointed fingers, it was possible to see again the wild-

ness that had frightened and fascinated. And whenever the firelight

caught the prince's gold-flecked amber eyes, they shone ancient as

jewels from the black soil of the forest.

"Come, Seoman," the Sitha said, "I will show you something."

He slid his hand under the youth's elbow and steered him toward

the pool where Khendraja'aro sat trailing his fingers in the water. As

they passed the fire, Simon saw that the wrist-wrestling contest was

at full heat. The opponents were locked in struggle, neither with an

advantage yet, but Haestan's bearded face was clenched in a lock-

toothed grin of strain. The slender Sitha, by contrast, showed little

effect from the standoff, except his gray-clad arm quivering with the

tension of their striving. Simon did not think this boded well for

Haestan's chances. Sludig, watching the small frustrate the large, sat

open-mouthed.

Jiriki fluted something to his uncle as they approached, but Khen-

draja'aro did not respond: his ageless face seemed closed, shut like a

door. Simon followed the prince past him along the cavern wall. A

moment later, before his astonished eyes, Jiriki disappeared.

He had only stepped into another tunnel, one that hooked around

behind the stone sluice of the little waterfall. Simon went in after

him; the tunnel curled upward in rough stone steps, lit by a row of

lamps.

"Follow me, please," Jiriki said, and began to climb.

It seemed they mounted far up into the hill, spiraling around and

around for some time. At last they passed the last lamp, and traveled

a careful way in near-darkness, until finally Simon became aware of

the gleam of stars before him. A moment later the passageway wid-

ened into a small cave, one end of which was open to the night sky.

He followed Jiriki to the cavern's edge, which was a waist-high lip

of stone. The rock face of the hill dropped away below: ten bare

cubits down to the tops of the tall evergreens, fifty more to the snow-

matted ground. The night was clear, the stars shining fiercely

against the blackness, and the forest was all around, like a vast

secret.

After they had stood some while, Jiriki said: "I owe you a life,

manchild. Do not fear I will forget."

Simon said nothing, afraid to speak in case he should break the

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR651

spell that allowed him to stand in the very midst of the forest night,

a spy in God's dark garden. An owl called.

There passed another interval of silence, then the Sitha lightly

touched Simon's arm and pointed out above the silent ocean of trees.

"There. To the north, beneath Lu'yasa's Staff . . ." He indicated

a line of three stars in the lowest part of the velvety sky. "Can you

see the outline of the mountains?*'

Simon stared. He thought there might be a faint luminescence on

the murky horizon, the barest hint of some great white shape so far

away as to seem out of reach of the same moonlight that glowed on

trees and snow beneath them- "I think so," he said quietly.

'That is where you go. The peak men call Urmsheim is in that

range, although you would need a clearer night to see it well." He

sighed. "Your friend Binabik tonight spoke of lost Tumet'aL Once it

could be seen from here, away there in the east," he pointed into

darkness, "from this very perch, but that was in my great-grandfa-

ther's day. In dayUght the Sem^nz/'t'n . . . the Tower of the Walk-

ing Dawn . . . would catch the rising sun in its roofe of crystal and

gold. They say it was like a beautiful torch burning on the morning

horizon . , ."

He broke off, turning his eyes finally to Simon, the rest of his face

obscured by nightshadow.

"'Himet'ai is long buried," he said, and shrugged. "Nothing lasts,

not even the Sithi . . . not even time itself."

"How . . . how old arc you?"

Jiriki smiled, teeth glinting in the moonlight. "Older than you,

Seoman. Let us go down now. You have seen and survived many

things today, and no doubt you need sleep."

When they got back to the firelit cavern, the three guardsmen

were wrapped in their cloaks, snoring lustily. Binabik had returned,

and sat listening as several Sithi sang a slow, mournful song that

droned like a beehive and ran like a river, and seemed to fill the cave

like the thick scent of some rare, dying flower.

Curled in his own cloak, watching the firelight flicker on the

stones above him, Simon was lulled to sleep by the strange music of

Jiriki's tribe.

39

High King's Hand

SIMON AWAKENED to find the cavern light changed. The fire still

burned, thin yellow flames among the white ashes, but the lamps

had been extinguished. Daylight filtered down through crevices in

the ceiling that had been invisible the night before, transforming the

stone chamber into a pillared hall of light and shadow.

His three soldier companions still slept, tangled in their cloaks

snoring, sprawled like battle casualties. The cavern was otherwise

empty but for Binabik, who sat cross-legged before the fire tootling

absently on his walking-stick flute.

Simon sat up groggily. "Where are the Sithi?"

Binabik did not turn, but piped a few more notes. "Greetings,

good friend," he said at last. "Was your sleep satisfying?"

"I suppose," Simon grunted, rolling back over to stare at the dust

flecks shimmering near the cavern's roof. "Where did the Sithi go?"

"Out for hunting, as it were. Come and raise yourself. I need your

assistance."

Simon groaned, but dragged himself up into a sitting position-

"Hunting for giants?" he asked a short while later through a

mouthful of fruit. Haestan's snores were becoming so loud that

Binabik had put his flute down in disgust.

"Hunting whatever is threatening to their borders, I suppose."

The troll stared at something before him on the stone cavern floor.

"Kikkasut! This is making no good sense. I am not liking it one least

bit."

"What doesn't make sense?" Simon lazily surveyed the rock

chamber. "Is this a Sithi house?"

Binabik looked over, frowning. "I suppose it is good you have

regained your ability for the asking of many questions at once. No,

this is not a Sithi house, as such. It is, I am thinking, what Jiriki

called it: a hunting lodge, a place for their hunters to stay while

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR653

roaming afield. As for your other question, it is these bones that are

nonsensicalor rather, too much sense they make."

The knucklebones lay in a heap before Binabik's knees. Simon

looked them over. "What does that mean?"

"I will tell you. Perhaps it would be good your using this time to

wash the dirt and blood and juice of berries from your face." The

troll flashed a sour yellow grin, pointing to the pool in the comer.

"There is suitable for washing."

He waited until Simon had ducked his head once in the bitingly

cold water.

"Aaah!" the youth said, shivering. "Coldl"

"You may be seeing," Binabik resumed, unperturbed by Simon's

complaints, "that I have been at throwing my bones this morning.

What they are saying is this; The Shadowed Path, Unwrapped Dart,

and Black Crevice. Much confusion and worry this is causing me."

"Why?" Simon splashed more water on his face and rubbed it off

with his jerkin sleeve, which was itself none too clean.

"Because I was casting the bones before we left Naglimund,"

Binabik said crossly, "and the same figures I was getting! Exactly!"

"But why should that be bad?" Something bright lying at the

pool's edge caught his eye. He picked it up carefully, and discovered

it was a round looking glass set in a splendidly carved wooden

frame. The rim of the dark glass was etched with unfamiliar charac-

ters.

"Bad it often is when things are always the same," Binabik an-

swered, "but with the bones it is more than that. The bones to me

are guides to wisdom, yes?"

"Mmm-hmmh." Simon polished the mirror on his shirtfront.

"Well, what if you were opening your Book of the Aedon to dis-

cover that all its pages suddenly were having only one versethe

same verse, over then over?"

"Do you mean a Book I had already seen? That hadn't been like

that before? I suppose it would be magic."

"Well, then," Binabik said, mollified, "there you are seeing my

problem. There are hundreds of ways the bones can find themselves.

To be the same cast six times in runningI can only think it bad.

Much as I have studied, still I am not liking the word *magic'but

some force there is gripping the bones, as a powerful wind is pushing

all flags the same way . . . Simon? Are you listening?"

654 Tad Williams

Staring fixedly at the mirror, Simon was astonished to find an

unfamiliar face looking back. The stranger had an elongated, large-

boned face, blue-shadowed eyes, and a growth of red-gold whiskers

on chin, cheeks and upper lip. Simon was further amazed to realize

thatof course!he was only seeing himself, thinned and weath-

ered by his travels, the first growth of man's beard darkening his

jaws. What kind of face was this, he suddenly wondered? He still

had not a man's features, worn and stem, but he fancied that he had

sloughed off some of his mooncalflshness. Nonetheless, he found

something disappointing in the long-chinned, shock-haired youth

who stared back at him.

Is this what I looked like to Miriamele? Like a farmer's sona

ploughboy?

And even as he thought of the princess, it seemed that he saw a

flash of her features in the glass, almost growing out of his own. For

a dizzy instant they were meshed together, like two cloudy souls in

one body; an instant later it was Miriamele alone whose face he saw

or Malachias, rather, for her hair was short and black, and she

wore boy's clothes. A colorless sky lay beyond her, spotted with

dark thunderheads. There was another, too, who stood just behind,

a round-faced man in a gray hood. Simon had seen him before, he

was sure, so surewho was he?

"Simon!" Binabik's voice splashed him like the cold pool-water,

just as the elusive name flitted within reach. Startled, he juggled the

mirror for a moment. When he clutched it tight again, no face was

there but his own.

"Are you turning sick?" the troll asked, worried by the slack,

puzzled expression Simon turned toward him.

"No ... I don't think so ..."

"Then if you are washed, come to help me. We shall go to speak-

ing of the auguries later, when your attention is not so delicate."

Binabik stood, dropping the knucklebones back into their leather

sack.

Binabik went first down the ice chute, warning Simon to keep his

toes pointed and his hands close to his head. The headlong seconds

rushing down the tunnel were like a dream of falling from a high

place, and when he thumped down into the soft snow beneath the

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR655

tunnel mouth, bright, chill daylight in his eyes, he was content to sit

for a moment and enjoy the feel of his heart's rapid beating.

A moment later he was bowled over by a surprising clout on the

back, followed by the smothering descent of a mountain of muscle

and fur.

"QantaqaT he heard Binabik shout, laughing. "If it is your

friends who are receiving such treatment, I am glad I am no en-

emy!"

Simon pushed the wolf away, gasping, only to face a renewed,

rough-tongued assault on his face. At last, with Binabik's aid, he

rolled free. Qantaqa sprang to her feet whining excitedly, circling

the youth and troll once, then sprang away into the snowy wood.

"Now," Binabik said, brushing show from his black hair, '^we

must be finding where the Sithi have been putting up our horses."

"Not far, Qanuc-man."

Simon jumped. He turned to see a line of Sithi file silently out of

the trees, Jiriki's green-jacketed uncle at its head. "And why do you

seek them?"

Binabik smiled. "Certainly not for escaping you, good Khen-

draja'aro. Your hospitality is too lavish for us to hurry away from it.

No, there are certain things only I wish to make sure we still have,

things I was obtaining with some trouble at Naglimund that we will

need on the roads ahead."

Khendraja'aro looked down on the troll expressionlessly for a

moment, then signaled to two of the other Sithi. "Sijandi, Ki'ushapo

show them."

The yellow-haired pair walked a few steps along the hillside, away

from the tunnel-mouth, then stopped, waiting for Simon and the

troll to follow. When Simon looked back he saw Khendraja'aro still

watching, an unreadable expression in his bright, narrowed eyes.

They found the horses put up a few furlongs away, in a small

cavern hidden by a pair of snow-laden pine trees. The cave was snug

and dry; all six horses were contentedly chewing away at a pile of

sweet-smelling hay.

"Where did all this come from?" Simon asked, surprised.

"We often bring our own horses," Ki'ushapo replied, speaking the

Western tongue carefully. "Does it surprise you to find we have a

stable for them?"

As Binabik rooted around in one of the saddlebags, Simon ex-

656 Tad Williams

plored the cavern, noting the light spilling through a crevice high in

the wall, and a stone trough filled with clean water. Propped against

the far side was a pile of helmets, axes and swords. Simon recog-

nized one of the blades as his own, from the armory of Naglimund.

"These are ours, Binabik!" he said. "How did they get here?"

Ki'ushapo spoke slowly, as though to a child. "We put them here

after we took them from you and your companions. Here they are

safe and dry."

Simon looked at the Sitha suspiciously. "But I thought that you

couldn't touch ironthat it was poison to you!" He stopped short,

fearful that he had ventured onto forbidden ground, but Ki'ushapo

only exchanged a glance with his silent companion before replying.

"So, you have heard tales of the Days of Black Iron," he said.

"Yes, it was once thus, but those of us who survived those days have

learned much. We know now what waters to drink, and from which

certain springs, so that we can handle mortal iron for a little time

without harm. Why did you think we allowed you to keep your coat

of mail? But, of course, we have no liking for it, and do not use it

... or even touch it when there is no need." He looked over to

Binabik, who was still rummaging intently in the traveling bags.

"We shall leave you to finish your search," the Sitha said. "You will

find nothing missingat least nothing you had when you came into

our hands."

Binabik looked up. "Of course," he said. "I am only in worry over

things that may have been lost during the fighting of yesterday."

"Of course," Ki'ushapo replied. He and the quiet Sijandi went out

beneath the branches of the entrance.

"Ah!" Binabik said at last, holding up a sack that clinked like a

purse full of gold Imperators. "A worry eased, this is." He dropped

it back in the saddle bag.

"What is it?" Simon asked, irritated to be asking another ques-

tion.

Binabik grinned wickedly. "More Qanuc tricks, ones that will be

found very useful soon- Come, we should be returning. If the others

wake up, stiff with drink and alone, they may have fright and be

doing something foolish."

Qantaqa found them on their short journey back, her mouth and

nose daubed with the blood of some luckless animal. She bounded

several times around them, then stopped, hackles lifting as she

657

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

sniffed at the air. She lowered her head and sniffed again, then went

loping ahead.

Jiriki and An'nai had joined Khendraja'aro. The prince had shed

his white robe for a jacket of tan and blue. He held a tall bow,

unstrung, and wore a quiver full of brown-fletched arrows.

Qantaqa circled the Sithi, growling and sniffing, but her tail

waved in the air behind her as though she greeted old acquaintances.

She lunged forward toward the blithe Fair Folk, then dodged back,

rumbling deep in her throat and shaking her head as though snap-

ping the neck of a rabbit. When Binabik and Simon joined the circle,

she came forward long enough to touch Binabik's hand with her

black nose, then danced away again and resumed her nervous cir-

cling.

"Did you find all your possessions in good order?" Jiriki asked.

Binabik nodded. "Yes, with certainty. Thanks to you for seeing to

our horses."

Jiriki negligently waved his slender hand. "And what now to do?"

he asked.

"I am thinking we should be on our road soon," the troll re-

sponded, shading his eyes to look at the gray-blue sky.

"Surely not this day," Jiriki said. "Rest this afternoon, and eat

with us again. We still have much to speak of, and you can leave

tomorrow by dawn light."

"You . . . and your uncle . . . show much kindness to us,

Prince Jiriki. And honor." Binabik bowed.

"We are not a kind race, Binbiniqegabenik, not as we once were,

but we are a courteous one. Come."

After a splendid lunch of bread, sweet milk, and a wonderfully

odd, tangy soup made from nuts and snowflowers, the long after-

noon was spent by Sithi and men alike in quiet talk and singing and

long naps.

Simon slept shallowly, and dreamed of Miriamele standing atop

the ocean as though it were a floor of uneven green marble, beckon-

ing him to come to her. In his dream he saw furious black clouds on

the horizon, and called out, trying to give warning. The princess did

not hear over the gathering wind, only smiled and beckoned- He

knew he could not stand on the waves, and dove in to swim toward

658 Tad Williams

her, but he felt the cold waters, pulling him down, tugging him

under. . . .

When he fought free of the dream at last, it was to awaken in

dying afternoon. The pillars of light had dimmed, and leaned as

though drunken. Some of the Sitha were setting the crystal lamps in

their wall niches, but even watching the process gave Simon no

better understanding of what lit them: after being put in place they

simply, slowly, began to glow with gentle, suffusive light.

Simon joined his companions at the stone circle around the fire.

They were alone: the Sithi, although hospitable and even friendly,

nevertheless seemed to prefer their own company, sitting in small

knots around the cavem-

"Boy," Haestan said, reaching up to clap his shoulder, "we feared

ye'd sleep all th* day."

"I would sleep too, if I ate as much bread as he," Sludig said,

cleaning his nails with a sliver of wood.

"All here were agreeing on an early leave-taking tomorrow,"

Binabik said, and Grimmric and Haestan nodded- "There is no cer-

tainty this mildness of weather will continue long, and it is far we

must still go."

"Mild weather?" said Simon, frowning at the stiflhess in his legs

as he sat down. "It's snowing like mad."

Binabik chuckled deep in his throat. "Ho, friend Simon, talk to a

snow-dweller if you are wanting to know cold weather. This is like

our Qanuc spring, when we play naked in the snows of Mintahoq.

When we are reaching the mountains, then, I am sorry to say, you

will be feeling real coldness."

He doesn 't look very sorry at all, Simon thought. "So when do we

start out?"

"First light in the east," Sludig said. "The sooner," he added

significantly, looking around the cavern at their unusual hosts, "the

better."

Binabik eyed him, then turned back to Simon. "So we shall be at

putting things in order tonight."

Jiriki had appeared as though from thin air to join them at the

fireside. "Ah," he said, "I wish to speak to you about just these

matters."

"Surely there is no problem had with our leaving?" Binabik asked,

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR659

his cheerful expression not entirely masking a certain anxiousness.

Haestan and Grimmric looked worried, Sludig ever-so-faintly re-

sentful.

"I think not," the Sitha replied. "But there are certain things I

wish to send with you." He reached a long-fingered hand into his

robe with a fluid gesture, producing Simon's White Arrow.

"This is yours, Seoman," he said.

"What? But it ... it belongs to you. Prince Jiriki."

The Sitha lifted his head for a moment, as though listening to

some distant call, then lowered his gaze once more. "No, Seoman, it

is not mine until I earn it backa life for a life." He held it up

between his two hands, like a length of string, so that the slanting

light from above burnished the minute and complicated designs

along its length.

"I know you cannot read these writings," Jiriki said slowly, "but I

will tell you that they are Words of Making, scribed on the arrow by

Vindaomeyo the Fletcher himselfdeep, deep in the past, before we

of the First People were torn apart into the Three Tribes. It is as

much a part of my family as if it were made with my own bone and

sinewand as much a part of me. I did not give it lightlyfew

mortals have ever held a Sta'ja Ameand I certainly could not take

it back until I had paid the debt it signifies." So saying, he handed it

to Simon, whose fingers trembled as they touched the arrow's

smooth barrel.

"I ... I didn't understand . . ." he stammered, feeling as if he

were the one suddenly under obligation. He shrugged, unable to say

more.

"So," Jiriki said. turning to Binabik and the others. "My destiny,

as you mortals might have it, seems strangely bound with this

manchild. You will not then find it too surprising when I tell you

what else I would send along with you on your unusual and proba-

bly fruitless errand."

After a moment, Binabik asked "And what is that being, Prince?"

Jiriki smiled, a feline, self-satisfied smile. "Myself," he answered.

"I will go with you."

660 Tad Williams

The young pikeman stood long seconds, unsure of whether to

interrupt the prince's thoughts. Josua was staring out into the mid-

dle distance, knuckles white as he clutched the parapet of Nag-

limund's western wall.

At last the prince seemed to notice the foreign presence. He

turned, revealing a face so unnaturally pale that the soldier took a

half step back.

"Y'r Highness . . . ?" he asked, finding it hard to look into

Josua's eyes. The prince's stare, the soldier thought, was like that of

the wounded fox he'd once seen the hounds take, and tear before it

was dead.

"Send me Deornoth," the prince said, and forced himself to smile,

which the young soldier thought the most horrible thing of all.

"And send me the old man Jamaugathe Rimmersman. Do you

know him?"

"I think so, Y'r Highness. With th'one-eyed father in book-

room."

"Good man." Josua's face tilted toward the sky, watching the

mass of inky clouds as though they were a book of prophecy. The

pikeman hesitated, unsure of whether he was dismissed, then turned

to sidle off.

"You, man," the prince said, stopping him in midstep.

"Y'r Highness?"

"What is your name?" He might have been asking the sky.

"Ostrael, Highness . . . Ostrael Firsfram's son. Lord ... out

Runchester."

The prince looked over briefly, then his gaze flicked back to the

darkening horizon as though irresistibly drawn. "When were you

last home in Runchester, my good man?"

"Elysiamansa 'fore last, Prince Josua, but I send *em half my

gettin's. Lord."

The prince pulled his high collar closer, and nodded his head as

though at great wisdom. "Very well, then . . . Ostrael Firsfram's

son. Go and send Deomoth and Jarnauga. Go now."

Long before this day the young pikeman had been told that the

prince was half-mad. As he clomped down the gatehouse stairs in

his heavy boots, he thought of Josua's face, remembering with a

shiver the bright, ecstatic eyes of painted martyrs in his family's

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR661

Book of the Aedonand not only the singing martyrs, but also the

weary sadness ofUsires Himself, led in chains to the Execution Tree.

"And the scouts are certain, Highness?" Deomoth asked care-

fully. He did not want to give offense, but he sensed a wildness in the

prince today that he did not understand.

"God's Tree, Deornoth, of course they are certain! You know

them bothdependable men. The High King is at the Greenwade

Ford, less than ten leagues away. He'll be before the walls by tomor-

row morning. With considerable strength."

"So Leobardis is too slow." Deornoth squinted his eyes, looking

not south where Elias' armies crept inexorably nearer, but west,

where somewhere beyond the late-moming mist the Legions of the

Kingfisher were laboring across the Inniscrich and the southern

Frostmarch.

"Barring a miracle," the prince said. "Go to, Deornoth. Tell Sir

Eadgram to hold all in readiness. I want every spear sharp, every

bow right-strung, and not a drop of wine in the gatehouse ... or in

the gatekeepers. Understood?"

"Of course, Highness," Deornoth nodded. He felt a quickening of

his breath, a slightly sickening thrill of anticipation in his stomach.

By the Merciful God, they would give the High King a taste of

Naglimund honorhe knew they would!

Someone cleared his throat wamingly. It was Jamauga, scaling

the stairs up to the broad walkway as effortlessly as a man half his

age. He wore one of Strangyeard's loose black robes, and had tucked

the end of his long beard under the belt.

"I answer your summons. Prince Josua," he said, stiffly courte-

ous-

"Thank you, Jamauga," Josua replied. "Go on, Deomoth. I will

talk with you at supper."

"Yes, Highness." Deomoth bowed, helmet in hand, then was gone

down the stairway two steps at a time.

Josua waited some moments after he was gone to speak.

"Look there, old man, look," he said at last, sweeping his arm out

over the clutter of Naglimund-town and the meadows and farmland

beyond, the greens and yellows dark-painted by the glowering sky.

"The rats are coming to gnaw at our walls. We will not see this

untroubled view for a long time, if ever."

662 Tad Williams

"Elias' approach is the talk of the castle, Josua."

"As it should be." The prince, as if he had drunk his fill of the

sights before him, turned his back to the parapet and fixed the

bright-eyed old man with his own intent stare, "Did you see Is-

grimnur off?"

"Yes. He was not pleased to be leaving in secret, and before

dawn."

"Well, what else could be done? After we put about the story of

his mission to Perdruin, it would have been difficult if anyone had

seen him go in priest's robesand as beardless as when he was a boy

in Elvritshalla." The prince forced a grim, clench-jawed smile. "God

knows, Jamauga, though I made sport of his disguising himself, it is

a knife in my guts to have pulled that good man from his family and

sent him out to try and recover my own failing."

"You are master here, Josua; sometimes being master means less

of some kinds of freedom than that given to the meanest serf."

The prince tucked his right arm into his cloak. "Did he take

Kvalnir?"

Jarnauga grinned. "Sheathed beneath his outer robe. May your

God save the one who tries to rob that fat old monk."

The prince's tired smile widened for a moment. "Even God Him-

self won't be able to help them, in the mood Isgrimnur's in." The

smile did not outlast the moment. "Now, Jamauga, walk with me

here on the battlements. I need your good eyes and wise words."

"I can indeed look farther than most, Josuaso my father taught

me, and my mother. That is why I am named "Iron-eyes" in our

Rimmerspakk: I was taught to see through veils of deception as

black iron cuts spells. But as to the other, I can promise no wisdom

worthy of the name at this late hour."

The prince made a dismissive gesture. "You have helped us al-

ready, I suspect, to see much we would not have. Tell me of this

League of the Scroll. Did they send you to Tungoldyr to spy on

Stormspike?"

The old man fell in at Josua's side, his sleeves fluttering like black

pennants. "No, Prince, that is not the League's way. My father, too,

was a Scrollbearer." He lifted a golden chain out of the neck of his

vestments, showing Josua a carved quill and scroll that hung upon

it. "He raised me to take up his place, and I would have done no less

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR663

to please him. The League does not compel; it asks only that one

does what one can do."

Josua walked silently, thinking. "If only a land could be so ruled,"

he said at last. "If only men would do what they should." He turned

his thoughtful, gray-eyed stare to the old Rimmersman. "But things

are not always so easythe wrong and right not always so apparent.

Surely this League of yours must have its high priest, or its prince?

Was that Morgenes?"

Jamauga quirked his lips. "There are indeed times when it would

benefit us to have a leader, a strong hand. Our woeful unprepared-

ness for these events shows that." Jamauga shook his head. "And

we would have granted such leadership to Doctor Morgenes in an

instant if he had askedhe was a man of incredible wisdom, Josua; I

hope that you appreciated him when you knew him. But he would

not have it. He wanted only to search, and to read, and to ask

questions. Still, thank whatever powers that we had him as long as

we did. His foresight is, at this moment, our only shield."

Josua stopped, leaning with his elbows on the parapet. "So this

League of yours has never had a leader?"

"Not since King Eahlstan Fiskemeyour Saint Eahlstan

brought it together . . ." He paused, remembering. "There almost

was one, and within my time. He was a young Hemystirman, an-

other of Morgenes' discoveries. He had nearly Morgenes' skill, al-

though less caution, so that he studied things Morgenes would not.

He had ambitions, and argued that we should make ourselves more

of a force for good. He might have one day been the leader you

speak of, Josua: a man of great wisdom and strength. . . ."

When the old man did not continue, Josua looked over to see

Jamauga's eyes fixed on the western horizon. "What happened?" the

prince asked. "Is he dead?"

"No," Jamauga answered slowly, eyes still drawn out across the

rolling plain, "no, I do not think so. He ... changed. Something

frightened him, or hurt him, or ... or something. He left us long

ago."

"So you do have failures," Josua said, starting to walk again. The

old man did not follow.

"Oh, certainly," he said, lifting his hand as if to shade his brow,

staring out into the dim distance. "Pryrates was one of ours once,

too."

664 Tad Williams

Before the prince could reply to this he was interrupted.

"Josua!" someone cried from the courtyard. The lines around the

prince's mouth tightened.

"Lady Vorzheva," he said, turning to look down to where she

stood indignantly in a dress of gleaming red, hair aswirl in the wind

like black smoke. Towser skulked uncomfortably at her side. "What

would you of me?" the prince demanded. "You should be in the

keep. As a matter of fact, I order you to the keep."

"I have been there," she called crossly. Lifting the hem of her

dress she ankled toward the stairway, talking as she went. "And I

will soon go back, do you not worry. But first, I must one time more

see the sunor would you rather keep me in a black cell?"

Despite his exasperation, Josua was hard-pressed to keep his face

entirely stem. "Heaven knows that there are windows in the keep,

Lady." He lowered his frown to Towser. "Can you not at least keep

her off the walls, Towser? Soon we are at siege."

The little man shrugged and limped up the stairs after Vorzheva.

"Show me the armies of your terrible brother," she said, a little

breathless as she reached the prince's side.

"If his armies were here, you would not be," Josua said irritably.

'There is nothing to see, yet. Now please go down."

"Josua?" Jarnauga was still squinting into the cloudy west. "I

think there is perhaps something to see."

"What?!" In an instant, the prince was beside the old Rim-

mersman, his body pitched awkwardly against the parapet as he

strained to find what the man saw. "Is it Elias? So soon? I see

nothing!" He slapped his palm on the stone in frustration.

"I doubt it is the High King, coming from so westerly a direc-

tion," Jarnauga said. "Do not be surprised you do not see them. As I

told you, I was trained to look where others could not. Nevertheless,

they are there: many horses and mentoo far away still to guess

how manycoming toward us. There." He pointed.

"Praise Usires!" Josua said, excited. "You must be right! It can

only be Leobardis!" He straightened up, suddenly full of life, even as

his face clouded with worry. "This is delicate," he said, half to

himself. "The Nabbanai must not come too close, else they will be

useless to us, caught between Elias and the walls of Naglimund.

Then we shall have to bring them in, where they will be just more

mouths to feed." He strode for the stairs. "If they stay too far, we

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR665

will not be able to protect them when Elias turns on them. We must

send riders!" He went down the stairs at a bound, shouting for

Deomoth and Eadgram, the Lord Constable of Naglimund.

"Oh, Towser," Vorzheva said, her cheeks flushed with the wind

and the pace of events, "we shall be saved after all! Everything will

be better."

"Just as well with me, my lady," the jester responded. "I've been

through this all before with my master John, you know . . . and

I'm not anxious to do it again."

Soldiers were cursing and shouting now in the castle courtyard

below. Josua stood on the rim of the well, his slender sword in his

hand, calling instructions. The sound of metal on metal, as spear

buns clanged on shields, and helmets and swords were hurriedly

taken from the comers where they had been laid, rose past the walls

like an invocation.

^

Count Aspitis Preves exchanged a few terse words with Benigaris,

then pulled his horse up beside the duke's, matching him stride for

stride through the high, dewy grass. The dawn sun was a shining

smudge above the gray horizon.

"Young Aspitis!" Leobardis said heartily. "What news?" If he and

his son were to be on better terms, he must try to show kindness to

Benigaris' intimateseven to Aspitis, whom he considered one of

the Prevan House's less impressive products.

"The scouts have just rejoined us, my lord Duke." The Count, a

handsome, slender youth, was quite pale. "We are less than five

leagues from the walls of Naglimund, my lord."

"Good! With luck we shall be there in early afternoon!"

"But Elias is ahead of us." Aspitis looked over to the duke's son,

who shook his head and cursed beneath his breath.

"He has already laid the siege in strength?" Leobardis asked, sur-

prised. "How? Has he learned to make his armies fly?"

"Well, no, lord, it is not Elias," Aspitis hurried to amend himself,

"it is a large force riding beneath the flag of the Boar and Spears

Earl Guthwulf of Utanyeat's banner. They have a half a league or so

on us, and will keep us from the gates."

666 Tad Williams

The duke shook his head, relieved. "How many does Guthwulf

have?"

"Perhaps a hundred horse, my lord, but the High King cannot be

too far behind."

"Well, little should we care," Leobardis said, reining up at the

edge of one of the many small streams that crisscrossed the meadow-

lands east of Greenwade. "Let the High King's Hand and his troop

languish there. We are more use to Josua at a short distance, where

we can harry the besiegers, and keep the lines of supply open." With

a splash he rode down into the ford. Benigaris and the count spurred

after him.

"But father," Benigaris said, catching up, "think now! Our scouts

say Guthwulf has moved ahead of the king's army, and with only a

hundred knights." Aspitis Preves nodded confirmation, and Beni-

garis drew his dark brows together in a frown of eamestness. "We

have thrice that, and if we send fast riders ahead we can muster

Josua's forces, too. We could smash Guthwulf against Naglimund's

walls as between hammer and anvil." He grinned, and clapped his

father's armored shoulder. "Think how that would sit with King

Eliasmake him think twice, wouldn't it?"

Leobardis rode silently for a long minute. He looked back at the

rippling banners of his legions stretching back several furlongs

across the meadows. The sun had, for a moment, found a thinner

spot in the overcast, bringing color to the wind-bowed grass. It re-

minded him of the Lakelands east of his palace.

"Call the trumpeter," he said, and Aspitis turned and shouted an

order.

"Hea! I'll send riders ahead to Naglimund, father," Benigaris

said, smiling almost with relief. The duke could see how much his

son longed for glory, but it would be Nabban's glory, too.

"Pick your fastest riders, my son," he called as Benigaris rode

back through the lines. "For we shall move more swiftly than any-

one dreams we can'" He raised his voice to a great shout, turning

heads all through the field. "The legions shall ride! For Nabban and

Mother Church! Let our enemies beware!"

Benigaris returned shortly to pronounce the messengers dis-

patched. Duke Leobardis let the trumpets ring out, then sound

again, and the great army set out at speed. Their hoofbeats sounded,

rolling like rapid drumbeats in the meadow-dells as they passed out

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR667

of the Inniscrich. The sun rose in the muddy morning sky, and the

banners streamed blue and gold. The Kingfisher flew to Naglimund.

^

Josua was still pulling on his unadorned, bright-polished helm as

he went through the gate at the head of two-score mounted knights.

The harper Sangfugol ran alongside, holding something up to him;

the prince reined in and slowed his horse to a walk.

"What, man?" he asked impatiently, scanning the misty horizon.

The harper struggled for breath. "It is ... your father's banner,

Prince Josua," he said, passing it up. "Brought ... out of the

Hayholt. You carry no standard but Naglimund's gray Swanwhat

better one for yourself could you wish?"

The prince stared at the red and white pennant, half-unfolded in

his lap. The firedrake's eye glared sternly, as if some interloper

threatened the sacred Tree about which it had-enwrapped itself.

Deomoth and Isom, with a few of the other knights nearby, smiled

expectantly.

"No," said Josua, handing it back. His look was cold. "I am not

my father. And I am no king."

He turned, wrapping the reins around his right arm, and lifted his

hand.

"Forward!" he shouted. "We go to meet friends and allies!"

He and his troop rode down through the sloping streets of the

town. A few flowers, thrown by well-wishers from atop the castle

walls, fluttered into the churned, muddy roadway behind them.

^

"What do you see there, Rimmersman?" Towser demanded,

frowning. "Why are you mumbling so?"

Josua's small force was now only a colorful blur, fast disappearing

in the distance.

"There is a troop of mounted men coming along the nm of the

hills to the south," Jarnauga said. "It looks from here not a large

army, but they are still distant." He closed his eyes for a moment as

668 Tad Williams

if trying to remember something, then reopened them, staring into

the distance.

Towser reflexively made the sign of the Tree; the old Rim-

mersman's eyes were so bright and shone so fiercely, like lamps of

sapphire!

"A boar's head on crossed spears," Jarnauga hissed, "whose is

it?"

"Guthwulf," Towser said, confused. The Rimmersman might

have been watching phantoms, for all the horizon revealed to the old

jester. "Earl of Utanyeatthe King's Hand." Farther down the wall

the Lady Vorzheva stared wistfully after the prince's vanishing

horsemen.

"He comes from the south, then, ahead of Elias' full army. It

looks as though Leobardis has seen him: the Nabbanai have turned

toward the southern hills, as though to engage him."

"How many . . . how many men?" Towser asked, feeling ever

more muddled. "How can you see such a thing, now? I see nothing,

and my sight's the one thing that hasn't . . ."

"A hundred knights, perhaps fewer," Jamauga interrupted.

"That's what is troubling: why are they so few . . . ?"

^

"Merciful God! What is the duke up to?" Josua swore, rising in

his stirrups to gain better vantage. "He has turned east and is gallop-

ing full tilt toward the southern hills! Has he lost his wits?!"

"My lord, look!" Deornoth shouted across to him. "Look there,

on the skins of Bullback Hill!"

"By the love of the Aedon, it's the king's army! What is Leobardis

doing? Does he think to attack Elias unsupported?" Josua slapped

his horses neck and spurred forward.

"It looks a small force only, Prince Josua," called Deornoth. "An

advance party, perhaps."

"Why didn't he send riders?" the prince asked plaintively. "Look,

they will try and push them toward Naglimund, to trap them

against the wall. Why in God's name did Leobardis not send riders

to me?I" He sighed and turned to Isom, who had pushed his father's

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR669

bear-helm back from his brow to better scan the horizon. "Now we

will have our mettle tested after all, friend."

The inevitability of fighting seemed to have drawn serenity over

Josua like a mantle. His eyes were calm, and he wore an odd half-

smile. Isom grinned over at Deornoth, who was loosening his shield

from his saddle pommel, then looked back to the prince.

"Let them test it, Lord," said the duke's son.

"Ride on!" the prince shouted. "The despoiler of Utanyeat is be-

fore us! Ride!" So crying, he spurred his piebald charger into a

gallop, making the sod spun beneath the horse's hooves.

"For Naglimund!" Deornoth shouted, lifting his sword high. "For

Naglimund and our prince!"

^

"Guthwulf is standing fast!" Jamauga said. "He holds on the

hillside, even as the Nabbanai come against him. Josua has turned to

meet them."

"They are fighting?" Vorzheva asked, frightened. "What is hap-

pening to the prince?"

"He has not reached the battlethere!" Jamauga was striding

down the wall toward the southwestern turret. "Guthwulf *s knights

take the first charge of the Nabbanai! It is all confusion!" He

squinted and knuckled his eyes.

"What?! What?!" Towser put a finger in his mouth, staring and

gnawing. "Do not go silent on me, Rimmersman!"

"It is hard to make out what happens from this far," said

Jamauga, unnecessarily, for neither of his two companions, nor any-

one else on the castle walls could see anything but a faint smear of

movement in the shadow of misty Bullback Hill. "The prince bears

down on the fighting, and Leobardis' and Guthwulf's knights are

scattered along the hillslopes. Now . . . now . . ." He trailed off,

concentrating.

"Ah!" said Towser in disgust, slapping his skinny thigh. "By Saint

Muirfath and the Archangel, this is worse than anything I can think

of. I might as well read this in ... in a book! Damn you, man

speak!"

670 Tad Williams

^

Deomoth found it all unfolding before him as in a dreamthe

murky shimmer of armor, the shouting and the muffled crash of

blade on shield. As the prince's troop bore down on the combatants,

he saw the faces of the Nabbanai knights come slowly up, and the

Erkylanders' too, an eddy of surprise rippling out through the battle

at their approach. For a timeless instant he felt himself a fleck of

shining foam, prisoned at the crest of a hanging wave. A moment

later, with a shocking roar and clash of arms, the battle was all

around them, as Josua's knights came full against the flank of

Guthwulf's Boar and Spears.

Abruptly there was someone before him, a blank, helmeted face

above the rolling eyes and red mouth of a war-charger. Deomoth

felt a blow to his shoulder that rocked him in his saddle; the knight's

lance struck his shield and slid away. He saw the man's dark surcoat

before him for an instant, and swung his sword with both hands,

feeling a shivering impact as it caromed past the shield and struck

the knight's chest, toppling him from his steed down into the mud

and bloodied grass.

For a moment he was clear; he looked around, trying to find

Josua's banner, and felt a distant throb in his shoulder. The prince

and Isom Isgrimnur's son were fighting back to back in the midst of

a swirling surge of Guthwulf's knights. Josua's swift hand darted

out, and Naidel pierced the visor of one of the black-crested horse-

men. The man's hands flew to his metal-clad face, covered in an

instant with red, then he was yanked down out of sight as his

reinless horse reared.

Deomoth saw Leobardis, the duke of Nabban, sitting his horse at

the farthest southeastern edge of the battle beneath his billowing

kingfisher flag. Two knights held their balking horses close by, and

Deornoth guessed the large one in the chasework armor to be his

son, Benigaris. Damn the man! Duke Leobardis was old, but what

was Benigaris doing on the fringe of things?! This was war!

A shape loomed before him, and Deomoth spurred left to dodge a

downrushing battleaxe. The rider blew past, untuming, but was fol-

lowed by another. For a while all was swept from his head but the

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR671

dance of stroke on stroke as he traded blows with the Utanyeater;

the clangor of the field seemed to subside to a dull rush, like the

sound of falling water. At last he found an opening in the man's

guard and crashed a swordstroke against his helm, crumpling it in at

the visor-hinge. The knight toppled sideways and off, his foot caught

in the stirrup so that he hung like a butchered hog in a pantry. His

maddened horse dragged him away.

Earl Guthwulf, black-mantled and black-helmeted, was now only

a stone's throw away, dealing blows left and right with his great

broadsword, holding off two blue-coated Nabbanai horsemen as if

they were boys. Deomoth leaned down in his saddle to spur toward

himwhat glory, to trade blows with the Monster of Utanyeat!

when a toppling horse beside him spun his own mount around.

Pausing, still as muddled as if he dreamed, he found he had been

driven down the hill toward the outer edge of the battle. The blue

and gold banner of Leobardis was before him; the duke, white hair

streaming from beneath his helm, stood high in the stirrups shouting

exhortations at his men, then pulled his visor down over his bright

eyes, preparing to spur forward into the fray.

The dream turned to nightmare as Deomoth watched. The one

whom he took for Benigaris, moving so slowly that Deomoth almost

felt he could reach out a hand and stop him, pulled back his long

blade and carefully, deliberately, pushed it into the back of the

duke's neck under the helm. In the milling crowd, with the battle

crashing all around them, it seemed that no one but Deomoth saw

this terrible act. Leobardis arched his back as the blade was with-

drawn, scarlet-streaked, and brought trembling, gauntleted hands up

to his throat, holding them there for a moment as if trying to speak

through some all-swaying grief. A moment later the duke sagged

forward in his saddle, leaning into his horse's white neck and smear-

ing the mane with his unprisoned blood before rolling off his saddle

to the ground.

Benigaris looked down for a moment, as if contemplating a bird

tumbled from its nest, then tugged his horn to his lips. For a mo-

ment, with shouting chaos on every side, Deomoth thought he saw a

gleam in the black slot of Benigaris' helmet, as if the duke's son

caught his eye across the heads of all the fighting men between them.

The horn sounded, long and harsh, and many heads turned.

"Tambana Leobardis eis!" Benigaris bellowed, his voice a dread-

672 Tad Williams

fill thing, ragged and sorrowful. "The Duke is downl My father is

killed! Fall back!"

He sounded the horn again, and even as Deomoth stared in unbe-

lieving horror there came another hom call from the hillside above

them. A line of armored horsemen sprang out of the shadowed con-

cealment of the trees.

^

"Lights of the North!" Jarnauga groaned, sending Towser into

another paroxysm of frustration.

'Tell us! How goes the battle!?"

"I fear it is lost," the Rimmersman said, his voice a hollow echo.

"Someone has fallen."

"Oh!" Vorzheva gasped, tears standing in her eyes. "Josua! It is

not Josua?!"

"I cannot tell. I think it may be Leobardis. But now another force

of men comes down the hillside, out of the trees. Red-coated, on

their banner ... an eagle?"

"Falshire," Towser groaned, and pulling off his belled hat flung it

clattering onto the stone. "Mother of God, it is Earl Fengbald! Oh,

Usires Aedon, save our prince! The whoreson bastards!"

"They ride down on Josua like a hammer," Jamauga said. "And

the Nabbanai are confused, I think. They . . . they . . ."

^

"Fall back!" Benigaris shouted, and Aspitis Proves at his side

plucked the banner from the stunned arms of Leobardis' squire,

riding the young man down beneath his horse's hooves.

"They are too many!" Aspitis cried. "Retreat! The duke is dead!"

Deomoth pulled his horse around and plunged back through the

melee toward Josua.

"A trap!" he shouted. Fengbald's knights were thundering down

the hillside, lances agleam. "It is a trap, Josua!"

He cut his way through two ofGuthwulf's Boars who would have

blocked his path, taking hard blows on his shield and helm, running

the second man straight through the throat and almost losing his

673

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

sword as it stuck in the spine. He saw a rill of blood run past his

visor, and did not know if it was some other's or his own.

The prince was calling back his knights, Isom's hom blaring

above the screaming and clashing of arms.

"Benigaris has killed the duke!" Deomoth cried. Josua looked up,

startled, as the blood-stained figure bore down on him. "Benigaris

has stabbed him in the back! We are trapped!"

For a brief instant the prince hesitated, lifting his hand as though

to raise his visor and look around. Fengbald and his Eagles had

pitched toward the Naglimunders* flank, trying to cut them off from

their retreat.

A moment later the prince raised his rein-wrapped shield arm.

"Your hom, Isom!" he shouted. "We must cut our way out! Back!

Back to NagUmund! We are betrayed!"

With a blast of the hom and a great cry of anger, the prince's

knights surged forward, directly into Fengbald's wide-strung crim-

son line. Deomoth goaded his horse forward, trying to reach the

front, and watched as Josua's whirling blade snaked through the

guard of the first Eagle, striking serpentlike beneath the man's arm,

in and out. A moment later Deomoth found a host of red-surcoats

before him. He swung his blade, and cursed; although he did not

know it, beneath his helm his cheeks were wet with tears.

Fengbald's men, startled by the ferocity of their attackers,

wheeled slowly about, and in that instant the Naglimunders broke

through. Behind them the Nabbanai legions were in full retreat,

flying brokenly back toward the Inniscrich. Guthwulf did not pur-

sue them, but rather sent his troops to join Fengbald in pursuit of

Josua's fleeing knights.

Deomoth hugged his charger's neck. He could hear its breath

rasping as they galloped full out, back across the meadows and fal-

low farmland. The sound of pursuit gradually fell away as the walls

of Naglimund rose ahead.

The gate was raised, a black, open mouth. Staring at it, his head

throbbing like a beaten drum. Deomoth suddenly wanted very

much to be swallowedto go sliding down into deep, lightless obliv-

ion, and never come out again.

40

The Green Tent

"No, PRINCE JOSUA. We cannot allow you to do such a foolish

thing." Isom sat down heavily, favoring his leg.

"Cannot?" The prince lifted his gaze from the floor to the Rim-

mersman. "Are you my keepers? Am I a child-regent or an idiot,

that I should be told what to do?"

"My prince," Deomoth said, resting a hand on Isom's knee to

urge him to silence, "you are master here, of course. Do we not

follow you? Have we not all sworn our allegiance?" Heads around

the room nodded somberly. "But you ask much of us, you must

know that. After such treachery as has been done to us, do you

really think you can trust the king at all?"

"I know him as none of you do," Josua, as if bumed by some

inner fire, leaped up from his chair and paced to his table. "He

wants me dead, certainly, but not this way. Not so dishonorably. If

he swears safe conductand if we avoid obvious stupiditythen I

will return unharmed. He still wants to act the High King, and the

High King does not slay his brother unarmed beneath a flag of

truce."

"Then why did he throw you in th'cell you told of?" asked

Ethelferth of Tinsett, scowling. "Are you thinkin' that's proof of

honor?"

"No," Josua replied, "but I don't think that was Elias' idea. I see

no other hand but Pryrates' thereat least until after the deed was

done. Elias has become a monsterGod help me, for he was my

brother once in more than bloodbut he still has a queer sense of

honor, I think."

Deomoth hissed air. "Such as he showed to Leobardis?"

"The honor of a wolf, who slays the weak and flees the strong,"

Isom sneered.

"I think not." Josua's patient grimace was stretched tighter.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR675

"Benigaris' patricide has the feeling of a grudge, to me. I suspect

that Elias . . ."

"Prince Josua, with your pardon ..." Jamauga interrupted,

raising eyebrows around the room. "Do you not think you are

stretching to find excuses for your brother? These are useful con-

cerns that your liegemen have. Just because Elias asks for parley

does not mean you are bound to go to him. No one will question

your honor if you do not."

"Aedon save me, man, I care not a whit for what anyone thinks of

my honor!" the prince snapped. "I know my brother, and I know

him in ways none of you can understandand don't tell me he has

changed, Jamauga," he glared, forestalling the old man's words,

"for no one knows that better than I do. But nevertheless I will go,

and I need not explain any more. I wish you all to leave me, now. I

have other matters to think on."

Turning from the table, he waved them from the room.

"Has he gone mad, Deomoth?" Isom asked, his wide face heavy

with apprehension. "How can he walk into the king's bloody hands

this way?"

"Stubbornness, Isomoh, who am I to say? Perhaps he does

know what he speaks of." Deornoth shook his head. "Is that

damned thing still there?"

"The tent? Yes. Just out of bowshot from the wallsalso well out

of range of Elias' encampment, as well."

Deomoth walked slowly, allowing the young Rimmersman to set

the pace his wounded leg demanded. "God save us, Isom, I have

never seen him like this, and I have served him since I was old

enough to draw a sword. It is as if he seeks to prove Gwythmn

wrong, who called him 'reluctant.' " Deomoth signed. "Welladay, if

there is no stopping him, we must then do our best to protect him.

The king's herald said two guards, no more?"

"And for the king the same."

Deomoth nodded, thinking. "If this arm of mine," he indicated

the white linen sling, "is movable by the day past tomorrow, then no

force on earth will keep me from being one of those guards."

"And I shall be the other," Isom said.

"I think better you should be inside the walls with a score or so

mounted men. Let us speak to the Lord Constable Eadgram. If there

676 Tad Williams

is an ambushif even a sparrow is seen to fly from the king's camp

toward that tentyou can be there in a few heartbeats."

Isom nodded. "I suppose. Perhaps we can talk to the wise man

Jamauga, ask him to give Josua some charm to protect him."

"What he needs, and it hurts me to say it, is a spell to protect him

against his own rashness." Deomoth stepped over a large puddle.

"Anyway, no charm is proof against a dagger in the back."

^

Lluth's lips were in constant, silent movement, as though offering

an endless series of explanations. His mumbling had supped over

into soundlessness the day before; Maegwin cursed herself for not

having taken note of his last words, but she had been sure he would

find voice again, as he had many times before since his wounding.

This time, she could sense, he would not.

The king's eyes were closed, but his wax-pale face worked cease-

lessly through changing expressions of fear and sorrow. Touching

his burning forehead, feeling the muscles flexing weakly in the unful-

filled rhythms of speech, she again felt as though she must cry, as

though the tears welling inside her, unshed, would eventually force

their way out through her very skin. But she had not wept since the

night her father had led the army out into the Inniscrichnot even

when they had brought him back in a litter, maddened by pain, the

yards of cloth bandaging his stomach soggy with dark blood- If she

had not cried then, she never would again. Tears were for children

and idiots.

A hand touched her shoulder. "Maegwin. Princess." It was Eo-

lair, his clever face folded in grief as neatly as a summer robe stored

for the winter. "I must speak to you outside."

"Go away, Count," she said, looking back to the rough bed of

logs and straw. "My father is dying."

"I share your grief, Lady." His touch was heavier, like an animal

nosing blindly in the dark. "Believe me, I do. But the living must

live, the gods know, and your people have need of you this mo-

ment." As if he felt his words too cold, too proud, he gave her arm a

brief squeeze and let go. "Please. Lluth ubh-Llythinn would not

want it any other way."

THE DRAQONBONE CHAIR677

Maegwin bit back a bitter rejoinder. He was right, of course. She

stood, her knees aching from the stone cavern floor, and followed

him past her silent stepmother Inahwen, who sat at the foot of the

bed staring at the guttering torches on the wall.

Look at us, Maegwin thought, wonderingly. It took the Hemystiri

a thousand, thousand years to crawl out of the caves into the sunlight.

She ducked her head to pass beneath the low spot of the cavern

ceiling, squinting her eyes against the gritty torchsmoke. And yet, it

has taken less than a month to drive us back in again. We are becom-

ing animals. The gods have turned their backs on us.

She lifted her head up again as she emerged into daylight behind

Eolair. The clutter of the daytime camp was all around her; care-

fully-watched children playing on the muddy ground, court women

many in the tatters of their best clothingon their knees prepar-

ing squirrel and hare for the stew pot and grinding grain on flat

stones. The trees growing close all around on the rock-studded slope

of the mountain bent grudgingly to the wind.

The men were nearly all gone; those not dead on the Inniscrich or

having their wounds tended in the honeycomb of caves were out

hunting, or guarding the lower slopes against any move by Skali's

army to finally crush Hemystir's battered resistance.

All we have left are memories, she thought, looking down at her

own stained and ragged skirt, and the hiding holes of the Grianspog.

We are treed like a fox. When Elias the master comes to take the prey

from his hound Skali, we are finished.

"What is it you want, Count Eolair?" she asked.

"It is not what I am wanting, Maegwin," he said, shaking his

head. "It's Skali. Some of the sentries came back to say he's been

down at the bottom of the Moir Brach all morning, shouting for

your father."

"Let the pig shout," Maegwin scowled. "Why doesn't one of the

men put an arrow into his dirty hide?"

"He's not near in bowshot, princess. And he has half a hundred

men with him. No, I think we should go down and listen to him

from cover, of course, out of sight."

"Of course," she said scornfully. "Why should we care what

Sharp-nose has to say? Come to demand surrender again, I don't

doubt."

"Possibly.'' Count Eolair lowered his eyes, thinking, and

678 Tad Williams

Maegwin felt a rush of sorrow for him, that he should have to bear

up under her ill will. "But I think there is something else here. Lady.

He has been there an hour and more, the men say."

"Very well," she said, wanting to get away from Lluth's dark bed,

and hating herself for the wish. "Let me put on my shoes and I will

come with you."

It took the better part of an hour to climb down the forested

mountain side. The ground was wet and the air was chilly;

Maegwin's breath rushed out in little clouds as she picked her way

down the gullies after Eolair. The gray cold had driven the birds out

of the Circoille, or numbed them into silence. No sound accompa-

nied their passing but the shivering murmur of wind-raked

branches.

Watching the Count of Nad Mullach making his nimble way

through the undergrowth, so like a child with his slender back and

shiny tail of hair, with his movements so quick and unthinking,

Maegwin was again filled with a dull, hopeless love for him. It

seemed such a ridiculous way for her to feeltall, gawky child of a

dying manthat it turned into a kind of anger. When Eolair turned

back to help her over a jutting stone, she frowned as if he had offered

her insult instead of his hand.

The men huddled in the copse of trees overlooking the long ridge

called Moir Brach looked up in startlement at the approach of Eo-

lair and Maegwin, but quickly lowered their bows again and beck-

oned the pair forward. Peering through the bracken down the finger

of stone for which the ridge was named, she saw a milling crowd of

antlike shapes at the bottom, some three furlongs away.

"He just stopped speaking a moment ago," one of the sentries

whispereda young boy, eyes wide with nervousness. "He'll start

again. Princess, you'll see."

As if in planned confirmation, one of the figures strode out from

the throng of men in helmets and capes who surrounded a wagon

and team of horses. The figure raised his hands to his mouth and

stood facing slightly to the north of the watchers' hiding-place.

". . . the last time . . ." his voice drifted up, muffled by dis-

tance. "I offer you . . . hostages . . . return for . . ."

Maegwin strained to make out the words. Information?

". . . about the wizard's boy, and . . . princess."

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR679

Eolair snapped a glance over to Maegwin, who sat stock-still.

What did they want with her?

"If you do not tell ... where . . . princess is ... we will

. . . these hostages."

The man who spokeand Maegwin was sure in her heart it was

Skali himself, just from the wide-legged stance, and the sour, mock-

ing tone that even distance could not wholly obscurewaved an

arm, and a struggling figure in a rag of light blue was taken from the

wagon and brought to where he stood. Maegwin stared, feeling an

ugly pressure on her heart. She was sure that light blue dress be-

longed to Cifgha . . . little Cifgha, pretty and stupid.

". . . If you do not tell us ... you know ... the princess

Miriamele, things . . . poorly for these . . ." Skali gestured and

the kicking, thinly crying girlwho might not really be Cifgha,

Maegwin tried to tell herselfwas thrown back onto the wagon,

amidst other pale captives, lying in a row on the wagon bed like

fingers.

So, it was the princess Miriamele they sought, she marveledthe

High King's daughter! Had she run away? Been stolen?

"Can't we do anything?" she whispered to Eolair. "And who is

*the wizard's boy'?"

The count shook his head roughly, frustration in every line of his

face. "What could we do, princess? Skali'd like nothing more than to

have us come down. He has ten times the men we havel"

Long minutes passed in silence as Maegwin watched, fury tugging

at her emotions like a demanding child. She was thinking of what

else to say to Eolair and these othershow she'd tell them that if

none of the men wanted to go with her, she'd go down to the Taig

herself and rescue Skali's captives ... or, more likely, die bravely

in the attemptwhen the thickset figure below, helmet off now,

showing the tiny yellow smudge that was his hair and beard, walked

back out to the base of the Moir Brach.

"Very well!" he roared. ". . . And Loken curse . . . stiff backs!

We ... and take these with . . ." The little figure pointed at the

wagon. "But . . . leave you a gift!" Something was untied from

one of the horses, a dark bundle, and dumped at Skali Sharp-nose's

feet. "Just in case - . . waiting for help! . . . Little use against

. . . Kaldskryke!"

A moment later he mounted his horse, and with the harsh rasp of

680 Tad Williams

a horn he and his Rimmersmen clattered off up the valley toward

Hemysadharc, the wagon bumping along behind them.

They waited an hour before making their way cautiously down

the bank, moving as watchfully as a doe crossing a clearing. Reach-

ing the bottom of the Moir Brach, they scuttled to the black-

wrapped bundle Skali had left behind.

When it was opened the men cried out in horror and wept, great

racking sobs of helpless grief ... but Maegwin did not shed a tear,

even when she saw what Skali and his butchers had done to her

brother Gwythinn before he died. When Eolair put an arm around

her shoulders to help her away from the blood-soaked blanket she

shook him off angrily, then turned and slapped hard at his cheek. He

did not protect himself, but only stared at her. The tears that filled

his eyes, she knew, were not from the blowand in that moment it

made her hate him all the more.

But her own eyes remained dry.

^

Flakes of snow filled the airconfusing vision, weighting gar-

ments, chilling fingers and ears to a painful tinglebut Jiriki and his

three Sithi companions seemed not to mind it much. As Simon and

the others plodded along on their horses, the Sithi walked jauntily

ahead, often stopping to wait for the riders to catch up, patient as

well-fed cats, an indecipherable serenity behind their luminous eyes.

Walking all day from sunrise to twilight, Jiriki and his fellows never-

theless seemed as lightfooted around the camp that night as they

had at dawn.

Simon hesitantly approached An'nai while the others hunted

deadwood for the evening's fire.

"May I ask you some questions?" he asked.

The Sitha lifted his imperturbable stare. "Ask."

"Why was Prince Jiriki's uncle angry that he decided to come

with us? And why did he bring you three along?"

An'nai brought a spidery hand up to his mouth as though to cover

a smile, although no smile had been present. A moment later he

lowered it again, revealing the same impassive expression.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR681

"What passes between the prince and S'hue Khendraja'aro is not

mine to hold, so I cannot share it, either." He nodded once, gravely.

"As to the other, perhaps he can best answer it himself . . . yes,

Jiriki?"

Simon looked up, startled, to find the prince standing behind him,

thin Ups taut in a smile.

"Why did I bring these?" Jiriki asked, making a sweeping gesture

from An'nai to the other two Sithi, returning from a search around

the thickly-forested perimeter of the camping-place. "Ki'ushapo and

Sijandi I brought because someone must look after the horses."

"Look after the horses?"

Jiriki raised an eyebrow, then snapped his fingers- "Troll," he

called over his shoulder, "if this manchild is your student, then you

are a poor teacher indeed! Yes, Seoman, the horsesor did you

expect to see them climb the mountains beside you?"

Simon was flummoxed. "But . . . climb? The horses? I didn't

think about ... I mean to say, couldn't we just leave them. Let

them go?" It did not seem fair; he had never felt.much more than a

dangling tassel on his journeyexcept, of course, for the White

Arrowand now the Sitha was holding him accountable for the

horses!

"Let them go?" Jiriki's voice was harsh, almost angry, but his face

was bland. "Leave them to perish, you mean? Once they have been

ridden far beyond where they would themselves go, we should free

them to struggle back across the snowy wastes or die?"

Simon was about to protest, to point out that it wasn't his respon-

sibility, but decided it was not worth arguing.

"No," he said instead. "No, we should not leave them alone to

die."

"Beside," Sludig said, walking by with an armload of wood, "how

then would we get back across the wastes ourselves?"

"Exactly," said Jiriki, his smile stretching; he was pleased. "So I

bring Ki'ushapo and Sijandi. They will tend the horses and prepare

things for my ... for our return." He brought the tips of his two

index fingers together, as if to indicate some kind of completion.

"Now, An'nai," he continued, "is a more complex matter. His rea-

son for being here is more like mine." He looked down at the other

Sitha.

"Honor," An'nai said, eyes downcast, staring at his own inter-

682 Tad Williams

laced fingers. "I bound the Hikka Sta'jathe Arrow-Bearer. I did

not show proper respect for a ... sacred guest. Thus, I come to

atone."

"A small debt," Jiriki said softly, "when compared with my great

one, but An'nai will do what he must."

Simon wondered if An'nai had decided on his own, or if Jiriki had

somehow forced him to join them. It was hard to know anything

about these Sithi, how they thought, what they wanted. They were

so damnably different, so slow and so subtle!

"Come now," Binabik announced. A tiny streamer of flame wa-

vered before him, and he fanned it with his hands. "Now we are

starting a fire, and I am sure you will all be interested in a little food

and wine, for the warming of inner spaces."

In the next few days' riding they left the northern Aldheorte be-

hind, coming down off the last decrement of the Wealdhelm hills

onto the flat, snow-swept waste.

There was always cold, now, every long night, every dreary white

daybitter, biting cold. The snow flew continuously into Simon's

face, stinging his eyes, burning and cracking his lips. His face red-

dened painfully, as if he had gone too long in the sun, and he coutd

hardly hold the reins of his horse for shivering. It was like being

thrown out of doors forever, a punishment that had gone on too

long. Still, there was nothing he could do to remedy the situation but

offer silent prayers to Usires each day for the strength to last until

camp was made.

At least, he reflected sadly, his ears stinging even beneath the

hooded cloak, at least Binabik is having a good time.

The troll was, indeed, in his very elementriding ahead, urging

his companions on, laughing from time to time for sheer pleasure as

he and Qantaqa leaped along the mounting drifts. Long evenings

around the fire, while the other mortal companions shivered and

oiled their sleet-saturated gloves and boots. Binabik detailed the dif-

ferent types of snow, and the various signals portending avalanches,

all to prepare them for the mountains that loomed implacably on the

horizon before them, stern and judgmental as gods in their crowns

of white snow.

Every day the great range before them seemed larger without ever

seeming a foot closer, no matter how far they rode. After a week in

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR683

the warmthless, featureless wastes, Simon began to long for the ill-

rumored Dimmerskog forest, or even the wind-lashed heights of the

mountains themselvesanything but this endless, bone-chilling

plain of snow.

They passed the ruins of Saint Skendi's abbey on the sixth day. It

was nearly covered in snowdrifts: only the spire of the chapel pro-

truded more than a short distance above the surface, an iron Tree

encircled by the coils of some serpentine beast crowning its rotting

roof. Rising up through the frost-laden mist before them, it might

have been a ship near-sunken in a sea of purest white.

"Whatever secrets it may be holdingwhatever it knows of

Colmund or the sword Thornit is holding them too tightly for

us," Binabik said as their horses trudged past the drowning abbey.

Sludig made a Tree on his forehead and heart, his eyes troubled, but

the Sithi circled slowly, staring as though they had never seen any-

thing quite so interesting.

As the travelers huddled around the campfire that night, Sludig

demanded to know why Jiriki and his comrades had spent so much

time examining the lost monastery.

"Because," the prince said, "we found it pleasing."

"What does that mean?" Sludig asked in irritated puzzlement,

looking to Haestan and Grimmric as if they might know what the

Sitha meant.

"It is better not to speak of these things, perhaps," said An'nai,

making a flattening gesture with his spread fingers. "We are compan-

ions at this fire."

Jiriki looked solemnly into the fire for a moment, then his face

split in an odd, mischievous grin. Simon marveled; sometimes it was

hard to think of Jiriki as being any older than himself, so young and

reckless did his behavior occasionally seem. But Simon also remem-

bered the cavern overlooking the forest. Youth and great age mixed

confusedly together; that was what Jiriki was like.

"We stare at things that interest us," Jiriki said, "just as mortals

do. It is only the reasons that are different, and ours you would

probably not understand." His wide smile seemed completely

friendly, but now Simon detected a discordant note, something out

of place.

684 Tad Williams

"The question, northman," Jiriki continued, "is why should our

staring offend you so?"

For a moment silence descended over the fire circle as Sludig

stared hard at the Sithi prince. The flames popped and sputtered on

the damp wood, and the wind hooted, making the horses shift ner-

vously.

Sludig lowered his eyes. "You may look at what you please, of

course," he said, smiling sadly; his blond beard was flecked with

melting snow. "It is only that it reminded me of Saegardof the

Skipphawen. It was as if you mocked something dear to me."

"Skipphawen?" Haestan rumbled, sunk in his furs. "Never heard

oft. Is't a church?"

"Boats . . ." Grimmric said, screwing up his narrow face in re-

membrance. "There's boats there."

Sludig nodded, face serious. "You would say Ship-haven. It is

where the longships of Rinunersgard lie."

"But Rimmersmen dunna' sail!" Haestan was surprised. "In all

Osten Ard, no other race be so landbound!"

"Ah, but we did." Sludig's face glowed with reflected firelight.

"Before we came across the seawhen we lived in Ijsgard, in the

lost Westour fathers burned men and buried ships. At least, that is

what our tales say."

"Burned men . . . ?" Simon wondered.

"The dead," Sludig explained. "Our fathers built death-ships of

new ashwood and put the dead to flame on the water, sending then-

souls up with the smoke. But our great longships, those that carried

us on the world's oceans and riversthe ships that were our lives as

surely as a cotsman's acre or a shepherd's flockthose we buried in

the ground when they were too old to be seaworthy, so that their

souls would go into the trees, and make them grow straight and tall

to become new ships."

"But that was across th'ocean y'saidlong ago," Grimmric

pointed out. "Saegard is here is't not? In Osten Ard?"

The Sithi around the fire were silent and unmoving, watching

intently as Sludig answered.

"It is. That is where the keel of Elvrit's boat first touched land,

and where he said; 'We have come across the black ocean to a new

home.'"

Sludig looked around the circle. "They buried the great longsbips

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR685

there. 'Never will we go back across that dragon-haunted sea,' Elvrit

said. All along the valley floor of Saegard at the mountains' feet lie

the mounds of the last ships. On the headland at the water's edge,

beneath the biggest howe, they buried Elvrit's ship Sotfengsel, leav-

ing only its tall mast thrusting up from the earth like a tree with no

branchesit was that I saw in my mind when I saw the abbey."

He shook his head, eyes bright with memories. "Mistletoe grows

on Sotfengsel's mast. Every year, on the day of Elvrit's death, the

white berries of the mistletoe are gathered by young maidens of

Saegard, and taken to the church . . ."

Sludig trailed off. The fire hissed.

"What you do not tell," Jiriki said after a while, "is how your

Rimmersgard people came to this land only to drive others from it."

Simon breathed in sharply. He had sensed something like this

beneath the prince's placid surface.

Sludig replied with surprising mildness, perhaps still thinking of

the pious maidens of Saegard. "I cannot undo what my ancestors

have done."

"There is truth to that," Jiriki said, "but neither will we Zida'ya

we Sithimake the same mistake our kin made before us." He

turned his fierce stare on Binabik, who met it solemnly. "Some

things should be made clear between us all, Binbiniqegabenik. I

spoke only truth when I gave my reasons for accompanying you:

some interest that I have in where you go, and a frail, unusual bond

between the manchild and myself. Do not for a moment believe that

I share your fears or struggles. As far as I am concerned, you and

your High King may grind each other to dust."

"With respectfulness, Prince Jiriki," Binabik said, "you are not

examining the full truth. If it was only the struggling of mortal kings

and princes that concerned us, we would all of us be defending

Naglimund. You know that we five, at least, are having other goals."

"Then know this," Jiriki said stiffly. "Though the years that have

passed since we were sundered from the Hikeda'yathose you call

the Nomsare as numerous as snowflakes, still we are one blood.

How could we take the side of upstart men against our kin? Why

should we, when once we walked together beneath the sun, coming

out of the ultimate East? What allegiance could we possibly owe to

mortals, who have destroyed us as eagerly as they destroy all else

. . . even themselves?

686 Tad Williams

None of the humans but Binabik could meet his cold gaze. Jiriki

lifted a long finger before him. "And the one you whisperingly call

the Storm King ... he whose name was Ineluki . . ." He smiled

bitterly as the companions stirred and shivered- "Ah, even his name

is fearsomel He was the best of us oncebeautiful to see, wise far

beyond the understanding of mortals, bright-burning as a flame!if

he is now a thing of dark horror, cold and hateful, whose is the

fault? If now, bodiless and vengeful, he schemes to brush mankind

from the face of his land like dust from a pagewhy should we not

rejoice? It was not Ineluki who drove us into exile, so that we must

hide among Aldheorte's dark trees like deer, wary always of discov-

ery. We strode Osten Ard in the sunlight before men came, and the

works of our bands were beautiful beneath the stars. What have

mortals ever brought to us but suffering?!**

No one could make reply, but in the stillness after Jiriki's words a

plaintive, quiet sound arose. It hovered in the darkness, full of un-

known words, a melody of spectral beauty.

When he had finished singing, An'nai looked to his silent prince

and his Sithi companions, then to those who faced them across the

dancing flames.

"It is a song of ours that mortals once sang," he murmured. "The

western men loved it of old, and gave it words in their tongue. I will

... I will try to give it words in yours."

He looked up into the sky as he thought. The wind was slowing,

and as the snow flurries died the stars shone through, cold and

remote.

"Moss grows on the stones of Sent Q/hisd."

An'nai sang at last, the clicks and liquid vowels of Sithi speech

muted.

"The shadows are lingering, still as I/listening

The trees have embraced Da'ai Chikiza's bright towers

The shadows all whispering, dark on the leaves.

Long grass is waving above Enki-e-Sha'osaye

The shadows are growing, upon the sward lengthening

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR687

The grave ofNenais'u wears a mantle of flowers

The shadowed brook silent, and no one there grieves.

Where are they gone?

Now the woods are all silence.

Where are they gone?

The song vanished away.

Why will they come no more

Dancing at twilight?

Their lamps the stars' messengers

At ending of day . . .

As An'nai's voice rose, caressing the mournful words, Simon felt a

longing such as he had never felta homesickness for a home he

had never known, a sense of loss over something that had never

belonged to him. No one spoke as An'nai sang. No one could have.

"Sea beats above the dark streets of Jhind-T'senei

The shadows are hiding, in deep grottoes slumbering

Blue ice freezes Tumet'ai, entombs its sweet bowers

The shadows have stained all the pattern Time weaves.

Where are they gone?

Now the woods are all silence.

Where are they gone?

The song vanished away.

Why will they come no more

Dancing at twilight?

Their lamps the stars' messengers

At ending of day ..."

The song ended. The fire was a solitary bright spot in a wasteland of

shadows.

^

The green tent stood by itself in the damp emptiness of the plain

before the walls of Naglimund. Its sides heaved and rippled in the

688 Tad Williams

wind, as though it alone, of all the other things that might move

unseen in that vastly open place, was breathingly alive.

Gritting his teeth against a superstitious shiver, although the

dank, knifelike wind was reason enough to let them go a-chattering,

Deomoth looked over to Josua, riding slightly ahead.

Look at him, he thought. It's as though he saw his brother already

just as if his eyes could see right through the green silk and the

black dragon crest, right into Ellas' heart.

Gazing back to the third and last member of their party, De-

omoth felt his heavy heart sink further. The young soldier whom

Josua had insisted on bringingOrstrael, his name waslooked

ready to faint from pure fright. His blunt, square features, their sun-

reddening faded now by the sunless weeks of spring, were screwed

tight in barely-suppressed terror.

Th 'Aedon save us if he's got to be any use. Why on earth did Josua

pick him?

As they slowly approached, the tent flap parted. Deornoth tensed,

ready to grab for his bow. He had an instant to curse himself to

allowing his prince to do such a foolish, foolish thing as this, but the

green-cloaked soldier who emerged only looked up at them incuri-

ously, then stepped to the side of the door, holding the flap open.

Deomoth signed respectfully for Josua to wait and spurred his

horse into a quick circuit of the green tent. It was large, a dozen

paces or more on each side, and the guy ropes thrummed with the

wind-buffeted weight of it, but the flattened grass all around was

empty of ambushers.

"Very well, Ostrael," he said, returning, "you will stand here, next

to this man," he indicated the other soldier, "with at least one of

your shoulders visible in the doorway at all times, yes?"

Taking the young pikeman's sickly smile for an affirmative, De-

ornoth turned to the king's guard. The man's bearded face was fa-

miliar; doubtless he had seen him at the Hayholt. "If you, too,

would stand near the doorway, it would be better for all concerned."

The guard showed him a curled lip, but edged a step nearer the

entrance.

Josua had already dismounted and moved to the door, but De-

omoth stepped quickly through ahead of him with one hand resting

lightly on his sword hilt.

"There is scarcely need for such caution, Deomoth," a soft but

689

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

penetrating voice said, "that is your name, is it not? After all, we are

all gentlemen here."

Deomoth blinked as Josua stepped in behind him. It was bitingly

cold inside, and dark. The walls glowed faintly, letting in only a

green fraction of the light outside, as though the tent's occupants

floated inside a huge but imperfectly-cut emerald.

A pale face loomed before him, the black eyes pinpoint holes into

nothingness. Pryrates' scarlet robe was rusty brown in the green

murk, the color of dried blood. "And Josua!" he said, horrible levity

in his voice. "We meet again. Who would ever have thought so many

things would have happened since our last conversation . . . ?"

"Shut your mouth, priestor whatever you are," the prince

snapped back. There was such cold strength in his voice that even

Pryrates blinked in surprise, like a startled lizard. "Where is my

brother?"

"I am here, Josua," a voice said, a deep, cracked whisper that

seemed to echo the wind.

A figure sat in a high-backed chair in the comer of the tent, a low

table resting nearby, another chair before itthe only furniture in

the huge, shadowy tent. Josua moved closer. Deornoth pulled his

cloak tighter, and followed, more from an urge not to be left with

Pryrates than any hurry to see the king.

The prince took the chair facing his brother. Elias, sat, strangely

stiff, his eyes bright as gems in his hawkish face, his black hair and

pale brow bound by the iron crown of the Hayholt. Propped be-

tween his legs was a sword, scabbarded in black leather. The High

King's powerful hands rested on the pommel, above the strange

double hilt. Although he stared for a moment, Deomoth's eyes did

not want to rest on the sword; it gave him a queasy, unwell feeling,

like glancing down from some great height. Instead he looked back

up to the king, but this was scarcely better: in the freezing cold of

the tent, the air so chill that a mist of breath hung before Deomoth's

own eyes, Elias wore only a sleeveless jerkin, his white arms bare to

his heavy bracelets, the sinews pulsing beneath the skin as though

they had a life of their own.

"So, brother," the king said, baring his teeth in a smile, "you are

looking well."

"As you are not," Josua said flatly, but Deomoth could see the

worried pinch of his eyes. Something was terribly wrong here; any-

690 Tad Williams

one could sense it. "You called for the parley, Elias. What do you

want?"

The king narrowed his eyes, masking them in green shadow, and

waited a long while before he replied. "My daughter. I want my

daughter. There is another, too ... a boybut he is less impor-

tant. No, it is Miriamele I chiefly want. If you hand her over to me, I

will give my word of safe conduct to all children and womenfolk in

Naghmund. Otherwise, all who hide behind its walls and thwart me

. . . will die."

He said this last with such casual lack of malice that Deomoth

was startled by the hungry look that flitted nakedly across his face.

"I do not have her, Elias," Josua replied slowly.

"Where is she?"

"I do not know."

"Liar!" The king's voice was so full of anger that Deomoth al-

most drew his sword, expecting Elias to leap from his chair. Instead,

the king remained nearly motionless, only gesturing for Pryrates to

refill his goblet from a ewer full of some black fluid.

"Do not think me a bad host for not offering you any," Elias said

after he had taken a long swallow; he smiled grimly. "I fear this

liquor would not agree with you." He handed the cup to Pryrates,

who took it gingerly between his fingertips and lowered it to the

table. "Now," Elias resumed, his tone almost reasonable, "can we

not spare ourselves this useless byplay? I want my daughter, and I

will have her." His tone turned grotesquely plaintive. "Does not a

father have a right to the daughter he loved and raised?"

Josua took a deep breath. "What rights you have are between you

and her. I do not have her, and I would not give her unwilling to

you if I did." He continued hastily, before the king could respond.

"Come, Elias, pleaseyou were my brother once, in all things. Our

father loved us both, you more than me, but he loved this land more.

Can you not see what you are doing? Not just with this struggle

Aedon knows this land has seen war a-plenty. But there is something

else here. Pryrates knows what I speak of. He it was that guided

your first steps down the path, I do not doubt!"

Deomoth saw Pryrates turn, spewing a surprised cloud of breath

at the prince's words.

"Please, Elias," Josua said, his stem face full of woe. "Turn back

only from the course you have chosen, send that cursed sword back

691

THE DRACONBONE CHAIR

to those unholy ones who would poison you and Osten Ard . . .

and I will lay my life in your hands. I will open Naglimund's gates

to you as a maiden unshuts her window for a lover! I will turn every

stone in heaven and earth to find Miriamele! Throw away the sword,

Elias! Throw it away! Not by accident was it named Sorrow!"

The king stared at Josua as if stunned. Pryrates, muttering,

rushed forward, but Deomoth leaped and caught him. The priest

squirmed beneath his restraining arm like a snake, and his touch was

horrible, but Deomoth held fast.

"Do not move!" he hissed in Pryrates' ear. "Though you blast me

with a spell, still I will cut the life from you before I die!" He

prodded the side of the scarlet robe with his drawn dagger, just far

enough to touch cloaked flesh. "You have no place in thisneither

do I! This is between brothers."

Pryrates became quiet. Josua was leaning forward, staring at the

High King. Elias looked on, as though he had trouble seeing what

was before him.

"She is beautiful, my Miriamele," he half-whispered. "In her I

sometimes see her mother Hylissapoor, dead girl!" The king's

face, frozen a moment before in malice, collapsed into confusion.

"How could Josua have let it happen? How could he? She was so

young. ..."

Groping, his white hand reached out. Josua held his own out too

late. Instead of catching it, the king's long, cold fingers alighted on

the leather-bound stump of the prince's right wrist. His eyes flared

into life, and his face stiffened into a mask of rage.

"Go to your hiding-hole, traitor!" he snarled as Josua snatched

his arm away. "Liar! Liar! I will shake it down around your ears!"

Such hatred beat out from the king that Deomoth staggered back,

letting Pryrates wriggle free.

"/ will ruin you so completely," Elias thundered, squirming in his

chair as Josua walked to the tent door, "that God All-powerful will

search a thousand years and never find even your soul!"

The young soldier Ostrael was so terrified by the faces of Deomoth

and the prince that he wept silently all the wind-wracked way back to

Naglimund's brooding walls.

Cold Fire and

Grudging Stone

^

THE DREAM gradually receded, melting like mist, a terrifying dream

in which he was surrounded by choking green sea. There was no up

or down, only sourceless light all around, and a host of slicing shad-

ows, sharks, each one with the lifeless black eyes of Pryrates.

As the sea slid away, Deomoth broke surface, nailing up out of

sleep into bleary half-wakefulness. The walls of the guard barracks

were spotted with cold moonlight, and the steady breathing of the

other men was like the wind pushing through dry leaves.

Even as his heart fluttered swiftly in his breast he felt sleep reach-

ing out again to reclaim his exhausted soul, soothing him with feath-

ery fingers, whispering voicelessly in his ear. He began to slide back,

the tidal pull of dream gentler than before. This time it carried him

toward a brighter place, a place of morning damp and gentle noon-

time sun: his father's freeholding in Hewenshire, where he had

grown up working in the fields beside his sisters and older brother.

A pan of him had not left the barracksit was before dawn, he

knew, the ninth day of Yuvenbut another part had fallen back into

the past. Again he smelled the musk of turned earth, and heard the

patient creaking of the plow traces and the measured chirp of cart

wheels as the ox pulled the wagon down the road toward market.

The creaking became louder, even as the pungent, muddy smell of

the furrows began to fade. The plow was coming closer; the wain

sounded to be just behind. Were the ox-drivers asleep? Had someone

let the oxen wander trampling into the fields? He felt a childish

horror.

My Da'll be right madwas't me? Was I s'posed to watch 'em? He

knew how his father would look, the puckered, rage-mottled face

that would hear no excuse, the face, young Deomoth had always

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR693

thought, of God sending a sinner down to Hell. Mother Elysia. Da's

goin' t' get th' strop to me, sure, . . .

He sat upright on his pallet, breathing hard. His heart was stum-

bling as badly as after the shark-dream, but it began to slow as he

looked around the barracks.

How long have you been dead. Father? he wondered, wiping the

swiftly-cooling sweat from his forehead with his wrist. Why do you

haunt me still? Have not the years and prayers . . . ?

Deomoth suddenly felt a cold finger of fear trace his spine. He

was awake now, was he not? Then why hadn't the remorseless

creaking noise disappeared with his half-dream?

He was on his feet in a moment, shouting, dead father's ghost

blown out like a candle-

"Up, men, up! To arms! The siege is begun!"

Struggling into his mailcoat he went down the line of cots, kicking

wakefulness into the groggy and wine-addled, calling instructions to

those whom his first cry had brought suddenly to life. There were

shouts of alarm from the gatehouse above, and the ragged bleat of a

trumpet.

His helmet sat askew on his head, and his shield thumped his side

as he trotted out the door struggling with his sword belt. Poking his

head into the other barracks room he saw the denizens already up

and swiftly arming themselves.

"Ho, Naglimunders!" he called, waving a fist while he held the

belt closed with the other. "Now the test. God love us, now the

test!"

He smiled at the ragged shout that answered him and headed for

the stairs, straightening his helmet.

The top of the Greater Gatehouse, in the western curtain wall,

looked strangely misshapen by the light of the half-moon overhead:

the hoardings had been finished only days before, wooden walls and

roof that would protect the defenders from arrows. Already the top

of the gatehouse was swarming with partially-dressed guards, flitting

forms weirdly banded by the moonbeams that bled past the hoard-

ing-walls.

Torches bloomed along the wall as archers and pikemen took

their positions. Another trumpet squalled, like a rooster who had

despaired of dawn's arrival, summoning more soldiers out to the

courtyard below.

694 Tad Williams

The shrill protest of wooden wheels grew louder. Deomoth stared

out across the denuded, down-sloping plain before the town wall,

looking for the source of the noseknowing what it would be, but

still unprepared for the actual sight.

"God's Bloody Tree!" he swore, and heard the man beside him

repeat the oath.

Moving toward them as slowly as hobbled giants, taking form out

of the predawn shadows, were six great siege towers, their wooden

summits fully as high as Naglimund's mighty curtain wall. Hung all

over in dark hides, they slouched forward like tree-tall, square-

headed bears; the grunts and cries of the hidden men who pushed

them, and the screech of the wheels, big as houses, seemed the voices

of monsters unseen since the Eldest Days.

Deomoth felt a not-unpleasant rush of fear. The King had come

at last, and now his army was at their door. By the Good God,

people would sing of this someday, whatever happened!

"Save your arrows, fools'" he shouted, as a few of the defenders

launched wild shots into the darkness, the missiles falling far short

of their still-distant targets. "Wait, wait, wait' Soon enough they will

be closer than you'll like!"

Elias's army, in response to the flowering of fire on Naglimund's

walls, let their drums thunder out through the darkness, a great

rolling rumble that gradually resolved into a plodding two-part

tread, as of titan footsteps. The defenders blew horns from every

towera faint and tinny sound against the crash of the drums, but

one that nonetheless betokened life and resistance.

Deomoth felt a touch at his shoulder and looked up to see two

armored shapes beside him: bear-helmed Isom, and glowering Eink-

skaldir in a cap of steel unadorned but for a metal beak that hooked

down over the nose. The dark-bearded Rimmersman's eyes burned

like the torchlight as he laid a firm hand on his master Isgrimnur's

son, moving Isom carefully but forcibly out of the way so he could

stride to the parapet. Staring out into the dimness, Einskaldir

growled doglike under his breath.

"There," he snarled, pointing to the bases of the siege towers, "at

the big bears* feet. The stone-chuckers and the ram," He indicated

other large engines moving in the wake of the towers. Several were

catapults, long, strong arms cocked back like the heads of startled

snakes. Others seemed merely hide-covered boxes, their workings

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR695

hidden by their armor, designed to come safely like hard-shelled

crabs through the arrows and stones to the wall, where they would

perform whatever tasks they had been assigned.

"Where is the prince?" Deomoth asked, unable to tear his eyes

from the crawling engines.

"Coming," Isom replied, standing on his toes to try to look over

Einskaldir. "He has been with Jarnauga and the archive-master

since you returned from the parley. I hope they are preparing some

wondrous device to give us strength, or to sap the king's. S'truth,

Deomoth, look at them all." He pointed at the dark, swarming

shapes of the king's army, numerous as ants behind the slow-rolling

towers. "They are so damnably many."

"Aedon's wounds," Einskaldir snarled, and turned a red eye back

on Isom. "Let them come. We will eat them and spit them out."

"There," said Deomoth, and hoped he had made a smile come to

his face, as he intended. "With God, the prince, and Einskaldir,

what have we to fear?"

The king's army came onto the flatlands in the trail of siege en-

gines, swarming over the mist-soaked meadows like flies on a green

appleskin. Tents seemed to push up everywhere from the moist earth

like angular mushrooms.

Dawn came quietly as the besiegers moved into place. The hidden

sun peeled away only a single layer of night's darkness, leaving the

world suspended in directionless gray light.

The great siege towers, which had stood in place for a long hour,

like dozing sentries, suddenly moved forward again. Soldiers dodged

in and out among the mighty wheels, heaving on the guy ropes as

the massive engines rolled laboriously uphill. At last they came

within range; the archers on the walls let fly, shouting with terrified

joy when the arrows went hissing out, as though they let go the tight

tethers on their hearts with the bowstrings. After the first wobbly

barrage they began to find the range; many of the king's men

dropped dead in their tracks, or lay wounded as the remorseless

wheels of their own engines ground them screaming into the turf.

But for every one who fell, arrow-pierced, another of the helmeted

and blue-jacketed engineers leaped forward to take up his guy rope-

The siege towers rumbled on toward the walls, undeterred.

Now the king's archers on the ground were close enough to return

696 Tad Williams

fire. Arrows flickered back and forth between the walls and the earth

below like maddened bees. As the engines rattled and creaked to-

ward the curtain wall the sun broke through for a short moment;

already the battlements were red-sprinkled in places, as if with a

gentle rain.

"Deomoth!" The soldier's white face, dirt-streaked, shone within

his helmet like a full moon. "Grimstede bids you come, and soon!

They have brought ladders against the wall below Dendinis' Tower!"

"STree!" Deomoth clenched his teeth in frustration and turned to

look for Isorn. The Rimmersman had taken a bow from a wounded

guardsman and was helping to keep clear the last few ells of ground

between the nearest siege tower and the wall, skewering any soldier

fool enough to come out from the stalled tower's protective skirts

and try and take up the loose guy ropes fluttering in the wind.

"Isorn!" Deomoth shouted, "while we keep the towers at bay,

they bring ladders to the southwest wall!"

"Go then!" Isgrimnur's son did not look up from his arrow tip. "I

will join you when I may!"

"But where is Einskaldir?!" From the comer of his eye he saw the

messenger jigging up and down in fearful impatience.

"God knows!"

Cursing again under his breath, Deomoth lowered his head and

ran clumsily along behind Sir Grimstede's messenger. He gathered

half a dozen guardsmen as he went, tired men who had slumped

down for a moment in the lee of the battlement to catch their breath.

Summoned, they shook their heads regretfully, but donned their

helms and followed; Deomoth was weU-trusted; many called him

the Prince's Right Hand.

But Josua had poor luck with his first right hand, Deomoth

thought sourly as he hunched along the walkway, sweating despite

the cold gray air. / hope he keeps this one longer. And where is the

prince, anyway? Of all times he should be seen . . .

Rounding the great bulk of Dendinis1 Tower, he was shocked to

see Sir Grimstede's men falling back, and the swarming red-and-

blue colors of Baron Godwig's Cellodshiremen pouring over the

battlement onto the curtain wall.

"For Josua!" he shouted, leaping forward. The men behind him

echoed his cry. They came against the besiegers with a tinny crash of

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR697

sword on sword, and for a moment pushed the Shiremen back. One

toppled from the walls, shrieking, windmilling his arms as though

the chill wind might bear him up. Grimstede's men took heart and

pushed forward. While the enemy was engaged again, Deomoth

pulled a pike from the stiff grasp of a sprawled corpse, suffering a

hard blow to his body from a stray spear butt, and pushed the first of

the tall ladders away from the wall. A moment later two of his

guardsmen had joined him, and together they levered the ladder out;

it went shivering into open space as the besiegers on it clung and

cursed, their mouths gaping like black empty holes. For a moment it

stood free, halfway between earth and heaven and perpendicular to

both; then the ladder overbalanced backward toward the ground

below, shedding soldiers like fruit from a shaken branch.

Soon all but a pair of the red-and-blue lay in their blood on the

walkway. The defenders pushed the remaining three ladders away,

and Grimstede had his men roll up one of the large stones they had

not had time to move at the assault's beginning. They tipped it over

the low spot on the wall so that it went crashing down on the top-

pled ladders, splintering them like kindling and killing one of the

laddermen who sat where he had tumbled, staring idiotically as the

great stone rolled down upon him.

One of the defending guardsmena bearded young fellow who

had diced with Deomoth oncelay dead, his neck broken by the

edge of a shield. Four of Sir Grimstede's men had also fallen, crum-

pled like wind-toppled scarecrows among seven men of Cellodshirc

who had also not survived the failed assault.

Deomoth was feeling the blow of his stomach, and stood panting

as gap-toothed Grimstede limped over to stand beside him, a ragged,

bloody hole in the calf of his boot.

" Tis seven here, an' half-dozen more toombled off th' ladder,"

the knight said, staring down with satisfaction on the writhing bod-

ies and wreckage below. "All down th' wall it's th' same. Losin' far

more than we, King Elias is, far more."

Deomoth felt ill, and his wounded shoulder throbbed as though a

nail had been driven into it.

"The king has ... far more than we do," he replied. "- . - He

can . . . toss them away like apple peelings." Now he knew he

would be sick, and moved toward the edge of the wall.

698 Tad Williams

"Apple peelings . . ." he said again, and leaned over the parapet,

too pained to feel shame.

^

"Read it again, please," Jamauga said quietly, staring at his knit-

ted fingers.

Father Strangyeard looked up, his weary mouth open to form a

question. Instead, a bone-jarring thump from outside brought a look

of panic to the one-eyed priest's face, and he quickly traced a Tree

on the breast on his black robe.

"Stones'" he said, his voice shrill. "They are ... they are throw-

ing stones over the wall! Shouldn't we ... isn't there . . . ?"

"The men fighting atop the walls are in danger too," the old

Rimmersgarder said, his face stem. "We are here because we best

serve here. Our comrades search for one sword in the white north,

against lethal odds. Another is in the hands of our enemy already,

even as he besieges our walls. What little hope there is of discovering

what happened to Fingil's blade Minneyar lies with us." His expres-

sion softened as he regarded the worried Strangyeard. "The few

stones that reach the inner keep must come over the high wall be-

hind this room. We are at little risk. Now please, read that passage

again. There is something in it I cannot quite touch, but that seems

important."

The tall priest stared down at the page for some moments, and as

the room fell into silence a wave of cries and exhortations, muffled

by distance, stole through the window like a mist. Strangyeard's

mouth twitched.

"Read," suggested Jamauga.

The priest cleared his throat.

"'. . , And so John went down into the tunnels beneath the

Hayholtsteaming vents and sweating passageways alive with

the breath ofShurakai. Unarmed but for a spear and shield, his

very boot-leather smoking as he neared the firedrake's den, he

was, there is little doubt, as frightened as he ever would be in his

long life . . .' "

699

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

**

Strangyeard broke off. "What use is this, Jamauga?" Something

thudded into the soil a short distance away with a sound like the fall

of a giant's hammer. Strangyeard stoically ignored it. "Do ... do

you want me to go on? Through all King John's battle with the

dragon?"

"No." Jamauga waved a gnarled hand. "Go to the ending pas-

sage."

The priest carefully turned a few leaves.

" '. . , Thus it was that he came out again, into the light, be-

yond any hope of return. Those few who had remained at the

cave mouththis itself an indication of great bravery, for who

could know what might happen at the door of an angered drag-

on's tunnel?swore great oaths of joy and astonishment; joy,

when they saw John of Warinsten come up alive from the worm 's

den, and astonishment at the massive claw, crimson-scaled and

hook-taloned, that he bore upon his bloody shoulder. As they

went shouting down the road before him, leading his horse trium-

phantly through the gates of Erchester, the people came gaping to

their windows and into the streets. Some say that those who had

loudest prophesied John's horrible death, and the dire conse-

quences to themselves of the young knight's actions, were now

most audible in their acclaim of his great deed. As word spread,

the rows were quickly lined with clamoring citizens who threw

flowers before John as he rode, Bright-Nail lifted high before him

like a torch-flame, through the city that was now his own . . .' "

Sighing, Strangyeard gently put the manuscript pages back into

the cedar box he had found to house them. "A lovely and frighten-

ing story, I would say, Jamauga, and Morgenes, hmmmm, yes, he

puts things wonderfullybut what use to us?no disrespect, you

understand."

Jamauga squinted at his own prominent knuckles, and frowned.

"I do not know. Something, there is something there. Doctor

Morgenes, whether he wished to or no, put something there. Sky

and clouds and stones! I can almost touch it! I feel blind!"

Another wash of noise came through the window: loud, worried

700 Tad Williams

shouts and the weighty chink of armor as a troop of guards jogged

past in the commons outside.

"I do not think we have long to ponder, Jamauga," Strangyeard

said finally.

"Nor do I," said the old man, and rubbed his eyes.

^

All through the afternoon the tide of King Ellas' army dashed

itself against Naglimund's stony cliffs. The weak sunlight struck

glinting shards of reflection from polished metal as wave after wave

of mailed and helmeted soldiers swarmed up the ladders, only to be

repelled by the castle's defenders. Here and there the king's forces

found a momentary breach in the ring of stem men and grudging

stone, but they were always pushed back. Fat Ordmaer, baron of

Uttersall, held one such gap alone for long minutes, battling hand to

hand with the scaling-soldiers mounting the ladders from below,

slaying four of them and keeping the rest at bay until help arrived,

although he got his own deathwound in the fighting.

It was Prince Josua himself who brought up a troop of guards,

securing the length of wall and destroying the ladder. Josua's sword

Naidel was a ray of sunlight flickering through leaves, snicking

swiftly in and out, making dead men from living while his attackers

swung clumsy broadswords or inadequate daggers.

The prince cried when Ordmaer's body was found. There had

been no love lost between the baron and himself, but Ordmaer's

death had been a heroic one, and in the pulse of battle his fall

suddenly seemed to Josua representative of all the othersall the

pikemen and archers and foot-soldiers on both sides, dying in their

own blood beneath cold, cloudy skies. The prince ordered that the

baron's great, limp bulk be carried down to the castle chapel. His

guardsmen, cursing silently, complied.

As the reddening sun crawled toward the western horizon. King

Ellas' army seemed to sag, to let up: their attempts to push the siege

engines against the curtain wall in the hissing face of arrow-fire grew

half-hearted, and the sealers began to abandon their ladders at the

first resistance from the heights above. It was hard for Erkynlander

to kill Erkynlander, even at the High King's command. It was

701

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

harder still when those brother Erkynlanders fought like denned

badgers.

As sunset came on a mournful horn blast floated across the field

from the lines of tents, and Elias' forces began to fall back, dragging

the wounded and also many of the dead, leaving the hide-covered

siege towers and miner's frames where they stood awaiting the next

morning's assault. As the hom sounded again the drums beat

loudly, as though to remind the defenders that the king's great

army, like the green ocean, could send waves forever. Eventually,

the drums seemed to say, even the stubbomest stone would crumble.

The siege towers, standing like solitary obelisks before the walls,

were another obvious reminder of Elias' intent to return. The damp

hides hung upon them permitted no mere flaming arrow to do dam-

age, but Eadgram the Lord Constable had been pondering all day.

After seeking some advice from Jamauga and Strangyeard, he had

at last devised a plan.

Silently, even as the last of the king's men limped down the slope

toward their encampment, Eadgram bade his men load oil-filled

winesacks onto the throwing arms of Naglimund's two small sling-

stones. Then the arms were released, and oilsacks whistled across

the open distance beyond the wall to splatter over the towers' leather

mantling. This done, it was a simple matter to send a few fiery pitch-

tipped arrows streaking through the blue twilight; within moments

the four huge towers had become billowing torches.

There was nothing the king's men could do to quell the blaze. The

defenders on the walls clapped their hands together and stamped

and shouted, weary but heartened, as orange light danced on the

battlements.

When King Elias rode out from the camp, wrapped in his great

black cloak like a man of shadows, Naglimund's defenders jeered.

When he lifted his strange gray sword, and shouted like a madman

for rain to fall and quench the fiery towers, they laughed uneasily. It

was only after a while, as the king rode back and forth, crow-black

cape flapping in the cold wind, that they began to understand from

the horrible anger in Elias' echoing voice that he truly expected rain

to come at his summoning, and that he was outraged it had not. The

laughter faded into a fearful silence. Naglimund's defenders, one by

one, left off their celebrating and climbed down from the walls to

702 Tad Williams

tend their wounds. The siege, after all, had barely begun. There was

no respite in view, and no rest this side of Heaven.

"I've been having strange dreams again, Binabik."

Simon had ridden his horse up alongside Quantaqa, some yards

ahead of the rest of the company. It was clear but terribly cold, this

their sixth day riding across the White Waste.

"Dreams of what sort?"

Simon readjusted the mask the troll had made him, a strip of hide

with a slit cut in it, to mask the fierce glare of the snow. "Of Green

Angel Tower ... or some tower. Last night I dreamed that it was

running with blood."

Binabik squinted behind his own mask, then pointed to a faint

band of gray running along the horizon at the base of the mountains.

"That, I am sure, is the edge of the Dimmerskogor the Qilakitsoq,

as my folk properly name it: the Shadow-wood. We should be upon

it with another day or so."

Staring at the dreary strip, Simon felt his frustrations boiling up.

"I don't care about the damnable forest," he snapped, "and I'm

sick to death of ice and snow, ice and snow! We shall freeze and die

in this awful wilderness! What about the dreams I'm having?!"

The troll bobbed along for a moment as Qantaqa had her way

over a series of small drifts. Through the song of the wind Haestan

could be heard shouting something to someone.

"I am already full of sorrow." Binabik spoke measuredly, as if

matching his speech to the cadence of their progress. "Awake I lay

two nights in Naglimund, worrying what harm I would do in bring-

ing you along for this journey. I have to knowledge of what your

dreams mean, and the only way for finding it would be to walk the

Road of Dreams."

"As we did at Geloe's house?"

"But I am having no faith in my unaided powers for thatnot

here, not now. It is possible your dreams could give us aid, but still I

do not find it wise to walk the dream-road now. Here we are all,

then, and this is what our fate will be. I can only say I have been

doing what seemed best."

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR703

Simon thought about this and grunted.

Here we all are. Binabik is right; here we all are, too far in to turn

back.

"Is Inelu . . ." he made the sign of the Tree with fingers trem-

bling from more than chill, ". . . is the Storm King ... the

Devil?" he asked at last.

Binabik frowned deeply.

"The Devil? The Enemy of your God? Why are you asking that?

You have heard Jamauga's wordsyou know what Ineluki is."

"I suppose." He shivered. "It's just that ... I see him in my

dreams. I think it's him, anyway. Red eyes, that's all I see, really,

and everything else black . . . like bumed-up logs with the hot

places still showing through." He felt ill just remembering.

The troll shrugged, hands caught up in the wolf's neck ruff. "He

is not your Devil, friend Simon. He is evil, though, or at least I am

thinking that the things he wants will be evil for the rest of us. That

is evil enough."

"And ... the dragon?" Simon said hesitantly a moment later.

Binabik turned his head sharply, presenting his strange, slitted gaze.

"Dragon?"

'The one who lives on the mountain. The one whose name I can't

say."

Binabik laughed explosively, his breath a cloud. "Igjaijuk is its

name! Daughter of the Mountains, you are having many worries,

young friend! Devils! Dragons'" He caught one of his own tears on

the finger of his glove and held up. "Look!" he chuckled. "As if

there was need of making more ice."

"But there was a dragon!" Simon answered hotly. "Everyone said

so!"

"Long ago, Simon. It is an ill-omened place, but that is being as

much for its isolation as anything else, is my guessing. Qanuc leg-

ends tell a great ice-worm lived there once, and my people do not go

there, but now I think it to be more likely a haunt of snow leopards

and such creatures. Not that there will not be things of danger. The

Hunen, as we are well-knowing, range far afield these days."

"So then, truly I have little to fear? The most terrible things have

been running through my head at night."

"I was not saying you had little to fear, Simon. We must never be

704 Tad Williams

forgetting that we have enemies; some, it would seem, are very pow-

erful indeed."

Another frigid night in the Waste; another campfire in the dark

emptiness of the surrounding snowfields. Simon would have liked

nothing better in the entire world than to be curled up in a bed at

Naglimund, covered in blankets, even if the bloodiest battle in the

history of Osten Ard raged just outside his door. He was sure that if

just now someone offered him a warm, dry place to sleep, he would

lie or kill or take Usires' name in vain to get it. He was positive, as

he sat wrapped in his saddle blanket trying to keep his teeth from

chattering, that he could feel his very eyelashes freezing on his lids.

Wolves were yipping and wailing in the unending darkness beyond

the faint firelight, carrying on long and mournfully intricate conver-

sations. Two nights before, when the companions had first begun to

hear their singing, Qantaqa spent the entire evening pacing ner-

vously around the campfire circle. She had since grown used to the

night cries of her fellows, and only responded with an occasional

uneasy whimper.

"Why dunna she talk b-b-back at 'em?" Haestan asked worriedly.

A plainsman of the Erkynlandish north, he had no more love for

wolves than did Sludig, although he had grown almost fond of

Binabik's mount. "Why dunna she tell *em t'go p-plague someone

else?"

"Like men, not all tribes ofQantaqa's kind are at peace," Binabik

replied, setting no one's mind at ease.

Tonight the great she-wolf was doing her stalwart best to ignore

the howlingpretending sleep, but giving herself away as her

pricked ears swiveled toward the louder cries. The wolfsong, Simon

decided as he huddled deeper in his blanket, was about the loneliest

sound he had ever heard.

Why am I here? he wondered. Why are any of us here? Searching

through this horrible snow for some sword no one has even thought

about in years. Meanwhile, the Princess and all the rest of them are

back at the castle waiting for the king to attack! Stupid! Binabik grew

up in the mountains, in the snowGrimmric and Haestan and

Sludig are soldiersthe Aedon alone knows what the Sithi want. So

why am I here? It's stupid!

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR705

The howling quieted. A long forefinger touched Simon's hand,

making him jump.

"Do you listen to the wolves, Seoman?" Jiriki asked.

"It's hard n-not to."

"They sing such fierce songs." The Sitha shook his head. "They

are like your mortal kind. They sing of where they have been, and

what they have seen and scented. They tell each other where the elk

are running, and who has taken whom to mate, but mostly they are

merely crying 7 am! Here I am!'" Jiriki smiled, veiling his eyes as

he watched the dying fire.

"And th-thafs what you think we ... we m-m-mortals are say-

ing?"

"With words and without them," the prince responded. "You

must try to see things with our eyes: to the Zida'ya, your folk often

seem as children. You see that the long-lived Sithi do not sleep, that

we stay awake throughout the long night of history. You men, like

children, wish to remain at the fire with your elders, to hear the

songs and stories and watch the dancing." He gestured around, as

though the darkness was peopled with invisible revelers.

"But you cannot, Simon," he continued kindly. "You may not. It

is given to your folk to sleep the final sleep, just as it is given to our

kind to walk and sing beneath the stars the night long. Perhaps there

is even a richness in your sleeping dreams that we Zida'ya do not

understand."

The stars hanging in the black-crystal sky seemed to slide away,

to sink deeper into the vast night. Simon thought of the Sithi, and of

a life that did not end, and could not make himself understand what

it might be like. Chilled to the boneeven, it seemed, to his soul

he leaned close to the fire, pulling off his damp mittens to warm his

hands.

"But the Sithi can d-die, c-c-can't they?" he asked cautiously,

cursing his frozen stuttering speech.

Jiriki leaned close, his eyes narrowing, and for a frightening mo-

ment Simon thought the Sitha was going to strike him for his temer-

ity. Instead, Jiriki took Simon's trembling hand and tilted it.

"Your ring," he said, staring at the fish-shaped curlicue, "I had

not seen it before. Who gave you this?"

"My ... my master, I su . . . suppose he was," Simon stam-

mered. "Doctor Morgenes of the Hayholt. He sent it after me, to B-

706 Tad Williams

B-Binabik." The cool, strong clutch of the Sithi prince's hand was

unsettling, but he dared not pull away.

"So you are one of your kind who knows the Secret?" Jiriki asked,

watching him intently. The depth of his golden eyes, rust-tinged by

the fire's reflection, was frightening.

"S-Secret? N-N-No! No, I don't know any secret!"

Jiriki stared at him for a moment, holding him still with his eyes

as surely as if he had grasped Simon's head in both hands.

"Then why should he give you the ring?" Jiriki asked, mostly to

himself, shaking his head as he released Simon's hand. "And I my-

self gave you a White Arrow! The Ancestors have made for us a

strange road indeed." He turned back to stare at the wavering fire,

and would not answer Simon's questions.

Secrets, Simon thought angrily, more secrets! Binabik has them.

Morgenes had them, the Sithi are full of them! I don't want to know

about any other secrets! Why have I been picked out for this punish-

ment? Why is everyone forever forcing their horrible secrets on me?!

He cried silently for a while, hugging his knees and shivering,

wishing for impossible things.

They reached the eastern outskirts of the Dimmerskog on the

afternoon of the next day. Although the forest was covered in a

thick blanket of white snow, it nevertheless seemed, as Binabik had

named it, a place of shadows. The company did not pass beneath its

eaves, and might have chosen not to even had their path lain that

way, so thick with foreboding was the wood's atmosphere. The trees,

despite their sizeand some of them were huge indeedseemed

dwarfish and twisted, as though they squirmed bitterly beneath their

burden of needled branches and snow. The open spaces between the

contorted trunks seemed to bend away crazily like tunnels dug by

some huge and drunken mole, leading at last to dangerous, secretive

depths.

Passing in near silence, his horse's hooves crunching softly in the

snow, Simon imagined following the gaping pathways into the bark-

pillared, white-roofed halls of Dimmerskog, coming at last towho

could guess? Perhaps to the dark, malicious heart of the forest, a

place where the trees breathed together and passed endless rumors

with the scaly rub of branch on branch, or the malicious exhalation

of wind through twigs and frozen leaves.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR707

They camped that night in the open again, even though the Dim-

merskog crouched only a short distance away like a sleeping animal.

None of them wanted to spend a night beneath the forest's branches

especially Sludig, who had been raised on stories of the ghastly

things that stalked the wood's pale corridors. The Sithi did not seem

to care, but Jiriki spent part of the evening oiling his dark

witchwood sword. Again the company huddled around a naked fire,

and the east wind razored past them all the long evening, sending

great powdery spouts of snow whirling all around, and sporting

among the Dimmerskog's upper reaches. When they lay down that

night to sleep it was to the sound of the forest creaking, and the

wind-ridden branches sawing one against the other.

Two more days of slow riding brought them around the forest and

across the last stretch of open, icy land to the foothills of the moun-

tains. The landscape was bleak, and the daylight glared off the snow-

crust until Simon's head throbbed from squinting, but the weather

seemed a little warmer. The snow still fell, but the harrying wind did

not drive past cloak and coat as it did out of the'mountains' broad

lee.

"Look!" Sludig cried, pointing away up the sloping apron of the

foothills.

At first Simon saw nothing but the ubiquitous snowcapped rocks

and trees. Then, as his eye slid along the line of low hills to the east,

he saw movement. Two strangely-shaped figuresor was it four,

oddly commingled?were silhouetted on the ridgetop a furlong

away.

"Wolves?" he asked nervously.

Binabik rode Qantaqa out from the party until they stood clear,

then cupped his gloved hands in his mouth. "Yah aqonik mij-ayah

nu tutusiq, henimaatuq?" he called. His words echoed briefly and

then died amid the shrouded hills. "In truth there should be no

shouting," he whispered to a puzzled Simon. "Higher up it might be

the causing of snowslides."

"But who are you . . . ?"

"Sshhh." Binabik waved his hand. A moment later the two shapes

moved down the ridge a short way toward the companions. Now

Simon could see that the pair were small men, each astride a shaggy,

twist-horned ram. Trolls!

708 Tad Williams

One of them called out. Binabik, after listening intently, turned

with a smile to his comrades.

"They wish for knowing where we go, and if that is not being a

flesh-eating Rimmersman is our midst, and is he a prisoner?"

"The devil take them!" Sludig growled. Binabik's smile widened,

and he turned back to the ridge.

"Binbiniqegabenik ea sikka!" he shouted. "Uc sikkan mo-hinaq

da Yijafjuk!"

The two round fur-hooded heads regarded them blankly for a

moment, like sunbamed owls. A moment later one rapped his chest

with his hand, and the other waved his mittened arm in a wide circle

as they turned their mounts and rode off up the ridge in a cloud of

powdery snow.

"What was all that?" Sludig asked, nettled.

Binabik's grin seemed strained. "I told them we were to go to

Urmsheim," he explained. "One gave the sign to ward off evil, the

other was using a charm against madmen."

After making their way up into the hills, the company made camp

in a rocky dale gouged into the hem of Urmsheim's mantle.

"Here it is we should leave the horses, and those things we need

not be carrying," Binabik said as he surveyed the sheltered site.

Jiriki strode to the mouth of the dale and leaned backward, star-

ing up toward Urmsheim's craggy, snowcapped head, pink-tinged

on its westerly face by the setting sun. The wind billowed his cloak

and blew his hair up around his face like wisps of lavender clouds.

"It has been long since I have seen this place," he said.

"Have you climbed this mountain before?" Simon asked, strug-

gling with his horse's cinch buckle.

"I have never seen the peak's far side," the Sitha answered. "This

will be something new for meto see the easternmost realm of the

Hikeda'ya."

"The Morns?"

"Everything north of the mountains was ceded to them long ago,

at the time of the Parting." Jiriki strode back up the gulley.

"Ki'ushapo, you and Sijandi must prepare a shelter for the horses-

See, there is some scrub growing here, under the leaning rocks, that

may be a boon if you run short of hay." He lapsed over into the Sithi

tongue, and An'nai and the other two began to set up a campsite

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR709

more permanent than any the company had enjoyed since leaving

the hunting lodge.

"Here, Simon, see what I have brought!" Binabik called.

The youth made his way past the three soldiers, who were split-

ting the small trees they had felled into firewood. The troll was

squatting on the ground pulling oilskin-wrapped bundles from his

saddlebag.

"The blacksmith at Naglimund thought me as mad as I am

small," Binabik smiled as Simon approached, "but he made for me

the things I was wanting."

Unlaced, the pouches disgorged all kinds of strange objects

spike-covered metal plates with straps and buckles, odd hammers

with pointy heads, and harnesses that looked as though they might

be made to fit very small horses.

"What are all these things?"

"For the wooing and winning of mountains," Binabik smirked.

"Even the Qanuc, with all our nimblefootedness, do not go climbing

to the highest reaches unprepared. See, these are for wearing on

boots," he indicated the spiked plates, "and these are ice-axesvery

useful they are. Sludig will have seen them, no doubt."

"And the harnesses?"

"So we may be roping ourselves together. Thus, if the sleet is

blowing, or we are on dragon-snow or too-thin ice, when one falls

the others can then be bearing up his weight. If there had been the

time, I would have made preparation of a harness for Qantaqa, too-

She will be upset at staying behind, and we will have a sad parting."

The troll hummed a quiet tune as he oiled and polished.

Simon stared silently at Binabik's tools. Somehow he had thought

climbing the mountain would be something like climbing the stairs

of Green Angel Towersteeply uphill, but essentially no more than

a difficult hike. This talk of people falling, and thin ice ...

"Ho, Simon-lad!" It was Grimmric. "Come make y'rself useful.

Pick up some of th' chippings. We'll have one last good blaze 'fore

we go ('killing ourselves up-mountain."

The white tower again loomed in his dreams that night. He clung

desperately to its blood-slickened sides as wolves howled below him,

and a dark, red-eyed shape rang the baleful bells above.

710 Tad Williams

^

The innkeeper looked up, mouth open to speak, then stopped. He

blinked and swallowed, like a frog.

The stranger was a monk, robed and hooded in black, his garb

spattered in places with the mud of the road. What was arresting

was his size; he was fairly tall but broad as an ale barrel, wide

enough that the tavern roomnot the brightest to begin withhad

perceptibly darkened when he pushed through the doorway.

"I ... I'm sorry. Father." The innkeeper smiled ingratiatingly.

Here was a man of the Aedonite God who looked as though he

could squeeze the sin right out of you if he chose. "What were you

asking?"

"I said I've been to every inn on every street in the wharf district,

and I've had no luck. My back aches. Give me a mug of your best."

He stumped over to a table and lowered his bulk onto a creaking

bench. "This damnable Abaingeat has more inns than it has roads."

His accent, the innkeeper noted, was a Rimmersman's. That ex-

plained the raw, pink look of his face: the innkeeper had heard it

said that the men of Rimmersgard had such thick beards they had to

shave thrice dailythose few who didn't just let them grow.

"We are a harbor town, Father," he said, setting a healthy flagon

down before the scowling, rumpled monk. "And with the things that

are going on these days" he shrugged and made a face, "well,

there are plenty of strangers wanting rooms."

The monk wiped foam from his upper lip and frowned. "I know.

A damnable shame. Poor Lluth . . ."

The innkeeper looked around nervously, but the Erkynlandish

guardsmen in the comer were paying no attention. "You said you

have had no luck, Father," he said, changing the subject. "Might I

be asking what you're seeking?"

"A monk," the big man growled, "a brother monk, that isand a

young boy. I have scoured the wharf from top to bottom."

The tavemmaster smiled, polishing a metal flagon with his apron.

"And you came here last? Begging your pardon. Father, but I think

your God's seen fit to test you."

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR711

The big man grunted, then looked up from his ale- "What do you

mean?"

"They were here, they wereif it's the same two."

His satisfied smile froze on his face as the monk lurched up from

the bench. His reddened face was inches from the innkeeper's own.

"When?"

"T-two, three d-days agoI'm not sure . . ."

"Are you really not sure," the monk asked menacingly, "or do

you just want money?" He patted his robe. The innkeeper did not

know if it was a purse or a knife this strange man of God was patting

for; he had never much trusted Usires' followers anyway, and living

in Hemystir's most cosmopolitan town had not improved his opin-

ion of them.

"Oh, no. Father, truly! They . . . they were in a few days past.

Asked after a boat going down-coast to Perdruin- The monk was a

short fellow, bald? The lad thin-faced, black hair? They were here."

"What did you tell 'em?"

"To go see Old Gealsgiath down by the Eirgid. Ramhthat's the

tavern with the oar painted on the front door, down near land's

end!"

He broke off in alarm as the monk's huge hands folded over his

shoulders. The innkeeper, a reasonably strong man, felt himself

clasped as securely as a child. A moment later he was reeling from a

rib-crushing hug, and could only stand wheezing as the monk

pressed a gold Imperator into his hand.

"Merciful Usires bless your inn, Hernystirman!" the big man bel-

lowed, turning heads clear out in the street. "This is the first piece of

luck I have had since I began this God-cursed search!" He crashed

out through the doorway like a man leaving a burning house.

The innkeeper took a painful breath, and clutched the coin, still

warm from the monk's great paw.

"Mad as a mooncalf, these Aedonites," he told himself.

"Touched."

^

She stood at the railing and watched Abaingeat sliding away,

drawing back into the fog. The wind ruffled her close-cropped black

hair.

712 Tad Williams

"Brother Cadrach!" she called. "Come here. Is there anything so

glorious?" She gestured at the growing strip of green ocean that

separated them from the misty shoreline. Gulls wheeled and

screeched above the boat's foaming wake.

The monk waved a limp hand from where he crouched beside a

clutch of lashed-down barrels. "You enjoy yourself . . . Malachias.

I have never been much of a seafarer. God knows, I do not think this

voyage will change that." He wiped sprayor sweatfrom his fore-

head. Cadrach had not touched a drop of wine since they had set

foot on shipboard.

Miriamele looked up to see a pair of Hemystiri sailors watching

her curiously from the foredeck. She dipped her head and walked

over to seat herself next to the monk.

"Why did you come with me?" she asked after a while. "That is

something I still do not understand."

The monk did not look up. "I came because the lady paid me."

Miriamele pulled her hood forward. "There is nothing like the

ocean to remind you of what is important," she said quietly, and

smiled. Cadrach's returned smile was weak.

"Ah, by the Good Lord, that's true," he groaned. "I am reminded

that life is sweet, that the sea is treacherous, and that I am a fool."

Miriamele nodded solemnly, staring up at the bellying sails.

"Those are good things to remember," she said.

42

Beneath the Uduntree

"THERE'S NO hurrying it, Elias," Guthwulf growled. "No hurrying.

Naglimund's a tough nut . . . toughyou knew it'd be ..." He

could hear himself slurring his words; he had needed to get drunk

just to face his old companion. The Earl of Utanyeat no longer felt

comfortable around the king, and felt even less so bringing him bad

news.

"You have had a fortnight. I have given you everythingtroops,

siege engineseverything!" The king pulled at the skin of his face,

frowning. He was drawn and sickly, and had not yet met

Guthwulf's eyes. "I can wait no longer. Tomorrow is Midsummer's

Eve!"

"And why should that matter?" Guthwulf, feeling chilled and

sick, turned away and spit out the now-tasteless lump of citril root

he had been chewing. The king's tent was as cold and dank as the

bottom of a well. "No one has ever taken one of the great houses in a

fortnight except by treachery, even if they were poorly defended

these Naglimunders have fought like cornered animals. Be patient,

Highness; patience is all we need. We can starve them out in a

matter of months."

"Months!" Elias' laugh was hollow. "Months, he says, Pryratesi"

The red priest offered a skeletal smile.

The king's laughter abruptly ceased, and he lowered his chin until

it almost touched the pommel of the long gray sword propped be-

tween his knees. There was something about that sword that

Guthwulf did not like, although he knew it was foolish to have such

thoughts about a mere thing. Still, everywhere that Elias went these

days the sword was with him, like some pampered lapdog. 'Today is

your last chance, Utanyeat." The High King's voice was thick and

heavy. "Either the gate is opened, or I must make . . . other ar-

rangements."

714 Tad Williams

Guthwulf stood, swaying. "Are you mad, Elias? Are you mad?

How can we possibly ... the miners have scarcely dug half-

way . . ." He trailed off dizzily, wondering if he'd gone too far.

"Why should we care whether tomorrow is Midsummer's Eve?" He

dropped to a knee again, imploring. "Talk to me, Elias."

The Earl had feared an explosive response from his angry king,

but he had also, distantly, hoped for some faint return of their old

camaraderie. He got neither.

"You cannot understand, Utanyeat," Elias replied, and his staring

red-rimmed eyes were fixed on the tent wall, or empty air. "I have

. . . other obligations. Tomorrow everything will change."

^

Simon had thought he had gained an understanding of winter.

After the trek across the desolate blankness of the Waste, the endless

white days of wind and snow and stinging eyes, he had been sure

there were no further lessons winter could teach him. After the first

few days on Urmsheim he was amazed by his former innocence.

They traveled along the slender ice paths roped in file, digging in

carefully with toe and heel before taking each step. At times the

rising wind plucked at them as though they were tree leaves, and

they had to shrink back against the Umisheim's icy side and cling

until the wind subsided. The footing, too, was treacherous; Simon,

who had thought himself quite a climber as master of the Hayholt's

high places, now found himself skidding and clinging on narrow

trackways barely two cubits from wall to precipice, a whirling cloud

of powdery snow the only thing between the path and the distant

earth. Looking down from Green Angel Tower, which had once

seemed the world's summit, now seemed as childish and comforting

as standing atop a stool in the castle kitchen.

From the mountain path he could soon see the tops of other

peaks, and clouds eddying about them. The northeast of Osten Ard

lay spread before him, but so distant he turned away from the view.

It would not do to stare down from such heights. It made his heart

race and the breath catch in his throat. Simon wished with all his

heart he had remained behind, but now his only hope to come down

again was to keep climbing.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR715

He found himself often in prayer, and hoped that the loftiness of

their location would speed his words to Heaven all the faster.

The sickening heights and his own fast-failing confidence were

terrifying enough, but Simon was also connected by the cord around

his waist to all the rest of the party but the unbound Sithi. Thus,

there were not just his own mistakes to worry over: misstep by one

of the others could pull them all down, like a weighted fishing line,

and send them plunging into the limitless, vertiginous depths. Their

progress was painfully slow, but no one, Simon least of all, wanted it

otherwise.

Not that all the lessons of the mountain were painful ones. Al-

though the air was so thin and achingly cold that he sometimes felt

another breath might turn him to frozen stone, the very iciness of

the atmosphere brought with it an odd exaltation, a sensation of

openness and insubstantiality, as though a startling wind blew right

through him.

The icy mountain face itself was a thing of painful beauty. Simon

had never dreamed that ice might have color; the tame variety he

knew, that which festooned the roofs of the Hayholt at Aedontide

and shrouded the wells in Jonever, was diamond-clear or milky

white. By contrast, the icy armor of Urmsheim, warped, twisted,

and buckled by wind and the seemingly distant sun, was a dream-

forest of colors and strange shapes. Great ice-towers shot through

with veins of sea-green and violet leaned out above the heads of the

toiling party. Elsewhere the ice cliffs had cracked and fallen in crys-

talline chunks, gemlike raw edges etched in stormy blue, crumbling

into tesselate confusion like the abandoned blocks of some giant

architect.

In one place the black bones of two frozen, long-dead trees stood

like abandoned sentinels before the rim of a white-misted crevice.

The ice sheet that stretched between them had been melted parch-

ment-thin by the sun; the mummified trees seemed the gateposts of

Heaven, the ice between them a shimmering, evanescent fan that

shattered the dayshine into a glowing rainbow of ruby and nectarine

light, into swirls of gold and lavender and pale rose thatSimon felt

surewould make even the famous windows of the Sancellan

Aedonitis seem dull as pondwater and candle-drip.

716 Tad Williams

*

But even as its brilliant skin beguiled the eyes, the mountain's

cold heart schemed against its unwanted guests. Late in the after-

noon of the first day, even as Simon and his mortal comrades were

trying to grow used to the strange and deliberate pace forced upon

them by Binabik's shoe-spikesthe Sithi, who disdained such de-

vices, nevertheless climbed almost as slowly and carefully as the

othersdarkness overtook the sky as suddenly and thoroughly as

ink spilled upon a blotter.

"Lie downl" Binabik yelled, even as Simon and the two Erkyn-

landish soldiers were staring up curiously at the spot where, mo-

ments before, the sun had hung in the heavens. Behind Haestan and

Orimmric, Sludig had already flung himself down onto the hard

snow. "Down to the ground!" the troll shouted. Haestan pulled Si-

mon down.

Even as he was wondering if Binabik had seen something danger-

ous on the trail aheadand if so what the Sithi were doing, since

they had disappeared where the path bent around part of Urm-

sheim's southeastern flankSimon heard the pitch of the wind,

which had been a low, steady whistle for hours, rise to a shriek. He

felt a tug, then a hard pull, and dug his fingers through the powdery

snow into the icy pack beneath. A moment later a crash of thunder

banged painfully in both his ears. Even as the first drumbeat was

echoing down the valley below, another shook him as Qantaqa

might a captured rat. He whimpered and clung to the ground as the

wind raked him with bony fingers, and the thunder crashed again

and again, the mountain they clung to an anvil for some gargantuan

and terrible blacksmith.

The storm halted as abruptly as it had descended. Simon

crouched in place for long moments after the wind's scream had

subsided, his forehead pressed against the freezing ground. When he

sat up at last, his ears ringing, the white sun was emerging from the

inksplatter of clouds. Beside him Haestan was sitting up like a baf-

fled child, his nose bleeding and his beard full of snow.

"By th'Aedon!" he swore. "By th' sufierin', bleedin', sorrowful

Aedon and God th'Highest." He wiped his nose with the back of his

hand and stared stupidly at the red streak left on his fur glove.

"What . . . ?"

"Lucky we are we stood on a wide pan of the path," Binabik said,

717

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

climbing to his feet. Although he, too, was covered in clinging snow,

he looked almost cheerful. "Here the storms come fast."

"Fast . . ." Simon muttered, looking down. He had pierced the

ankle of his right boot with the spikes strapped to the left, and the

way it stung he was sure he had drawn blood.

A moment later Jiriki's slender form appeared at the bend of the

trail.

"Have you lost anyone?" he shouted. When Binabik called back

that all were safe, the Sitha gave a mocking salute and vanished

again.

"I don't see any snow on him," Sludig remarked sourly.

"Mountain storms are moving quickly," the troll replied. "But so

are Sithi."

The seven travelers spent the first night together against the back

wall of a shallow ice cave on the mountain's eastern face, with the

far edge of the narrow path only five or six cubits away, the black

abyss waiting below. As he sat shivering in the penetrating cold,

comforted but unwarmed by the quiet singing of Jiriki and An'nai,

he remembered something Doctor Morgenes had once told him in

the heart of a drowsy afternoon, when Simon had complained about

living in the crowded, unprivate servant's quarters.

"Never make your home in a place," the old man had said, too

lazy in the spring warmth to do more than wag a finger. "Make a

home for yourself inside your own head. You'll find what you need to

furnish itmemory, friends you can trust, love of learning, and other

such things." Morgenes had grinned. "That way it will go with you

wherever you journey. You'll never lack for a homeunless you lose

your head, of course ..."

He was still not quite sure what exactly it was that the doctor had

meant; more than anything, he felt sure, he wanted a home to call

his own once more. Father Strangyeard's bare room at Naghmund

had begun to feel like one in only a week. Still, there was a sort of

romance to the idea of living free on the road, making your home

wherever you stopped, like a Hyrka horsetrader. But he was ready

for other things. It began to seem as though he himself had been on

the move for yearshow long had it been, anyway?

As he counted carefully back by the changes of the moon, with

help from Binabik where he had trouble remembering, he was

718 Tad Williams

dumbfounded to realize that it had been . . . less than two monthsl

Astonishing, but true: the troll confirmed his guess, that three weeks

ofYuven had passed, and Simon knew for a fact that his journey had

begun on ill-fated Stoning Night, the last hours of Avrel. How the

world had changed in seven weeks! Andhe reflected dully, as he

tumbled toward sleepmostly for the worse.

In late morning the company was climbing a massive slab of ice

that had slid down from the mountain's shoulder to lie athwart the

path like a vast, discarded package, when Urmsheim struck again.

With a horrifying, grating sound a long wedge of the icy slab crack-

led from blue-gray to white and broke loose, sliding away beneath

Grimmric's feet to plunge, crumbling, down the mountainside. The

Erkynlander had time only for a brief surprised shout; a moment

later he had tumbled out of sight into the gash the wedge had left

behind. Before he could think, Simon felt himself jerked ahead by

Grimmric's fall. He tumbled forward, flinging out a desperate hand

to catch at the ice-wall; the black crevice came ever closer. Help-

lessly horrified, he saw a thin slice of empty air through the crack in

the path, and beyond that the dim form of the crags half a league

below. He screamed and felt himself skid forward, his fingers clutch-

ing fruitlessly at the slippery path.

Binabik was leading the rope, and his experienced swiftness al-

lowed him to dive forward when he heard the shattering ice; he

sprawled face down, clutching the ice with one gloved hand, digging

his axe and spikes in as deeply as he could. Haestan's broad band

now caught at Simon's belt, but even the bearded guardsman's bulk

could not halt their inexorable slide. Grimmric's hidden weight

pulled them down, even as he cried piteously below the crevice-edge

and swung from side to side, suspended by the rope above snow-

swirling nothingness. At the back of the line Sludig dug in, tempo-

rarily halting Simon and Haestan's movement, and shouted anx-

iously for the Sithi.

An'nai and Prince Jiriki came pelting back along the mountain

path, touching as lightly on the powdery surface as snow hares.

They quickly dug their own axes deep into the ice and lashed them

to the end of Binabik's rope with swift knots. The troll, thus freed,

edged around the crevice with the two Sithi, and back to help

Sludig.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR719

Simon felt the tug on his belt strengthen, and the crevice slowly

began to recede. He was sliding backward. He wasn't going to die!

at least, it seemed, not this moment. As he regained his footing he

bent to snatch up one of his fallen mittens, and his head pounded.

With all the party now heaving at the ropes, they at last brought

Grimmricsenseless now, his face gray within his hoodback up

through the gap in the ice where he could be dragged to safety. It

was long minutes after he awoke before Grimmric could recognize

his companions, and he was shaking as with a deadly fever. Sludig

and Haestan rigged a sling from two fur cloaks to carry him until

they could stop and made camp.

When they found a deep cleft that ran back into the mountain

until it reached actual stone, the sun was only slightly past the mid-

point of the sky, but they had no choice except to make early camp.

They lit a small fire, scarcely more than knee-high, with kindling

they had scavenged at Urmsheim's feet and carried up into its

heights for just such a reason. Shuddering Gremmric lay beside it,

teeth a-chatter, waiting for the troll-draught that Binabik, mixing

herbs and powders from his pack with snowmelt, was laboring to

prepare. No one begrudged Grimmric the precious heat.

As the afternoon progressed, and the narrow sliver of sun that

arrowed down into the cleft rose up the blue walls and then disap-

peared, an even deeper and more agonizing chill set in. Simon, his

muscles trembling like lute strings, ears aching despite his fur hood,

felt himself slidingas precipitously and helplessly as he had slid

toward the naked emptiness of the crevicetoward a waking dream.

But instead of the bleak cold he expected, his dream reached out to

welcome him with warm and fragrant arms.

It was summer againhow long had it been! No mind, for the

seasons had swung around at last, and the hot, expectant air was full

of the sizzle of bees. The spring's flowers now hung swollen and over-

ripe, crisping brown at the edges like Judith's mutton pies baking in

the castle ovens. In the fields below the Hayholt's walls the grass was

turning yellow, beginning the alchemical transformation that would

end in Autumn, when it would be piled in golden, fragrant ricks,

dotting the land like tiny cottages.

Simon could hear the shepherds singing drowsily, echoing the bees

as they led their bleating charges across the meadows. Summer! Soon,

720 Tad Williams

he knew, would come the festivals . . . Saint Sutrin 's, Hiafmansa

but first his own favorite. Midsummer's Eve . . .

Midsummer's Eve, when everything was different and all was dis-

guised, when bemasked friends and costumed enemies mingled un-

knowing in the breathless darkness . . . when music played all

through the sleepless night, and the Hedge Garden was festooned with

silver ribbons, and laughing, leaping shapes populated the Moon's

flours . . .

"Seoman?" A hand was on his shoulder, gently shaking. "Se-

oman, you are weeping. Wake up."

"The dancers ... the masks . . ."

"Wake up!" The hand shook him again, more vigorously. He

opened his eyes to see Jiriki's narrow face, all forehead and cheek-

bones in the dim, angled light.

"You seemed to be having a frightening dream," the Sitha said as

he sank into a crouch at Simon's side.

"But . . . but it wasn't really." He shivered. "It was s-summer

... it was Midsummer's Eve . . ."

"Ah." Jiriki raised an eyebrow, then shrugged sinuously. "I think,

perhaps you have been wandering in realms where you should not

go."

"What could be bad about summer?"

The prince of the Sithi shrugged again, then produced from inside

his cloakwith a gesture like a favorite uncle producing a toy to

distract a sniffling childa shiny object in a delicately-carved

wooden frame.

"Do you know what this is?" Jiriki asked.

"A ... a mirror . . ." Simon was unaware of what the Sitha

was asking. Did he know Simon had handled it in the cave?

Jiriki smiled. "Yes. A very special mirror, one that has a very long

history. Do you know what can be done with such a thing? Besides

shaving the face as men do?" he reached over and tapped a cool

finger on Simon's furry cheek. "Can you guess?"

"S-s-see things that are f-far away?" he replied after a moment's

hesitation, then waited for the explosion of temper he was sure

would come.

The Sitha stared- "You have heard of the mirrors of the Fair

folk?" he said at last, wondering. "Still they are the subject of tales

and songs?"

THE DRACONBONE CHAIR721

Now Simon had a chance to slide away from the truth. Instead, he

surprised himself.

"No. I looked at it when we were in your hunting lodge."

Even more surprisingly, this admission only widened Jiriki's eyes.

"You saw other places in it? More than reflection?"

"I saw ... I saw Princess M-Miriamelemy friend," he nod-

ded, and patted her blue scarf where it wound about his neck. "It

was like a dream."

The Sitha scowled down at the mirror, not angrily, but as if it

were the surface of a pool beneath which darted an elusive fish he

wished to locate.

"You are a strong-willed young man," Jiriki said slowly,

"stronger than you knoweither that or you are touched by other

powers, somehow . . ." He looked from Simon back to the mirror,

and was silent for a time.

"It is a very old thing, this mirror," he said at last. "It is said to be

a scale of the Greater Worm."

"What does that mean?"

"The Greater Worm, the one that many stories say encircles the

world. We Sithi, though, see the Worm as circling all worlds at once,

those of waking and those of dreaming . . . those that were, and

those that will be. His tail is in his mouth, so he has no end or

beginning."

"A worm? Do you mean a d-d-dragon?"

Jiriki nodded once, an abrupt motion like a bird pecking grain. "It

is also told that all dragons are descended from the Greater Worm,

and that each is less than the ones that went before. Igjarjuk and

Shurakai were less great than their mother Hidohehbi, as she in turn

was not as great as her parent Khaerukama'o the Golden. Someday,

if all this is true, the dragons will disappear altogetherif they have

not already."

"That w-would be good," Simon said.

"Would it?" Jiriki smiled again, but his eyes were cold, shiny

stones. "Men grow while the great worms - . . and others ... di-

minish. That seems to be the way of things." He stretched, with the

shuddering, slippery grace of a new-wakened cat. "The way of

things," he repeated. "Still, I brought out this scale of the Greater

Worm to show you something. Would you like to see, manchild?"

Simon nodded.

722 Tad Williams

"This has been a difficult journey for you." Jiriki flicked a glance

over his shoulder to where the others were gathered around Grimm-

ric and the tiny campfire. Only An'nai glanced up, and some un-

readable communication flickered between the two Sithi. "Look,"

said Jiriki a moment later.

The looking glass, cupped in his hands like a precious drink of

water, seemed almost to ripple. The darkness it heldsplit by a

jagged slash of light gray, the reflection of the sky above their crev-

iceseemed to slowly sprout points of green light, like strange vege-

table stars germinating in the evening sky. "I will show you a true

summer," Jiriki said softly, "truer than any you have known."

The flecks of shining green began to flutter and coalesce, sparkling

emerald fishes rising to the surface of a shadowy pond. Simon felt

himself sinking into the mirror, although he did not move from

where he leaned above it. The green became many greens, as many

shades and tints as ever were. In a moment they had resolved them-

selves into a startling confusion of bridges and towers and trees: a

city and a forest grown together, sprouting as one in the midst of a

grassy plainnot a city a forest had grown over, like Da'ai Chikiza,

but a thriving, living amalgam of plant and polished stone, mrytle,

jade, and viridian.

"Enki-e-Shao'saye," Jiriki whispered. The grass on the plain bent

luxuriantly before the wind; scarlet, white, and sky-blue pennants

fluttered like blossoms amid the city's branching spires. "The last

and greatest city of the Summer."

"Where ... is . . . it . . . ?" Simon breathed, astonished and

bewitched by its beauty.

"Not so much where, manchild, as when. The world is not only

vaster than you know, Seoman, it is also far, far older. Enki-e-

Shao'saye is long crumbled now. It lay east of the great forest."

"Crumbled?"

"It was the last place where Zida'ya and Hikeda'ya lived together,

before the Parting. It was a city of great craft and greater beauty; the

very wind in the towers made music, and the lamps of night shone

bright as stars. Nenais'u danced under moonlight by her forest pool,

and the admiring trees leaned down to watch." He shook his head

slowly. "All gone. Those were the summer-days of my people. We

are now far into the Autumn ..."

"Gone . . . ?" Simon could still not grasp the tragedy. It seemed

723

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

as though he could reach into the mirror, touch one of the needle-

sharp towers with his finger. He felt tears struggling to break free.

No home. The Sithi had lost their homes . . . they were lonely and

homeless in the world.

Jiriki passed his hand over the glass, and it clouded. "Gone," he

said. "But as long as there is memory, Summer remains. And even

Winter passes." He turned and looked long at Simon, and the ago-

nized expression on the youth's face at last brought a small, careful

smile to his own.

"Do not mourn so," he said, and patted Simon's arm. "Brightness

is not completely erased from the worldnot yet. And not all beau-

tiful places have fallen to ruin. Still there is Jao e-Tinukai'i, the

dwelling of my family and people. Perhaps someday, if we both

come down safely from this mountain, you will see it." He grinned

his strange grin, thinking of something. "Perhaps you will . . ."

The rest of the climb up Urmsheimthree more days on narrow,

dangerous pathways scarcely more than ice-ribbons, over sheer,

glassy sheets by laboriously hacked hand and footholds; two more

nights of evil, teeth-grinding coldpassed by Simon like a fleeting

but painful dream. Through the terrible weariness that beset him he

held onto Jiriki's gift of summerfor it was a gift, he knewand

was comforted. Even as his numb fingers struggled to cling, and his

numb feet to stay on the path, he thought that somewhere there

would be warmth again, and something like a bed and clean clothes

even a bath would be welcome! All those things were out there

somewhere, if he could just keep his head down and get off the

mountain alive.

When you stopped to think about it, he reflected, there weren't

many things in life one truly needed. To want too much was worse

than greed: it was stupiditya waste of precious time and effort.

The company slowly worked their way around the body of the

mountain until the sun rose each morning to shine over their right

shoulders. The air was growing painfully thin, forcing frequent halts

for the catching of breath; even hardy Jiriki and uncomplaining

An'nai were moving more slowly, limbs weighted as though by

heavy garments. The human companions, except for the troll, posi-

tively dragged. Grimmric had revived, thanks to the potency of

Binabik's Qanuc elixir, but shivered and coughed as he climbed.

724 Tad Williams

From time to time the wind increased, sending the clouds that

hugged Urmsheim's shoulders flying like tattered ghosts. The moun-

tain's silent neighbors would slowly materialize, jagged peaks hold-

ing lofty convention far above the surface of Osten Ard, indifferent

to the sordid and minuscule landscape at their feet. Binabik, as com-

fortable breathing the insubstantial air of the Roof of the World as

he had been sitting in Naglimund's pantry, pointed out wide, craggy

Mintahoq in the east to his gasping companions, as well as several of

the other mountains compassing the troll-fells of Yiqanuc.

They came upon it suddenly, while fully half the mountain's

height still towered above them. Struggling over a rocky outcrop-

ping, the rope pulled taut as a bowstring between them, every breath

burning their lungs, they heard one of the Sithiwho had climbed

ahead and out of sightlet out a strange, whistling cry. The com-

panions scrambled toward the top with all possible haste; the ques-

tion of what they were hurrying toward dangled unspoken. Binabik,

leading the line, stopped on the hillcrest; he swayed a little to keep

his balance.

"Daughter of the Mountains!" the troll gasped, a plume of vapor

rising from his mouth. He stood and did not move for long mo-

ments. Simon carefully mounted the last few steps.

At first he saw nothing before him but another wide valley of

snow, its white wall rising across from them, open on the right to the

air and sky and a succession of snowy cliffs that dropped away down

the side of Urmsheim. He turned to Binabik to ask what had made

him cry out. The question died on his lips.

On the left hand the valley dug deep into the mountain's face, the

valley floor sloping up as its high walls gradually angled together. At

their apex, stretching up from the ground to the triangle of gray-blue

sky, loomed the Uduntree.

"Elysia Mother of God!" Simon said, his voice cracking. "Mother

of God," he repeated.

At first, confronted by the vast, mad, implausibility of the thing,

he thought it was a treea titanic tree of ice a thousand feet tall,

myriad branches sparkling and coruscating in the noonday sun,

shadowed at its impossible summit by a halo of mist. It was only as

he finally convinced himself it was realthat such a thing could

exist in a world that also contained such mundane objects as pigs

THE DRAGON BONE CHAIR725

and fences and mixing-bowlsthat he began to understand what it

was: a frozen waterfall, the accumulation of years of icy snowmelt

captured in a million icicles, a crystalline tracery down the jagged

stone-spine that formed the Uduntree's trunk.

Jiriki and An'nai stood transfixed a few ells below the valley floor,

staring up at the tree. Simon, following Binabik, began struggling

down the slope toward them, feeling the rope around his waist grow

tense as Grimmric reached the summit and was himself struck mo-

tionless; Simon then waited patiently as the process was repeated

two more times for Haestan and Sludig. At last they all made their

stumbling, preoccupied way down to the deep snow of the valley

floor. The Sithi were quietly singing, and paid no heed to the arrival

of their human companions.

For a long while no one spoke. The majesty of the Uduntree

almost seemed to suck the breath from their bodies, and for a great

span of time the companions just stood and stared, feeling emptied.

"Let us be going forward," Binabik said at last. Simon started

resentfully. The troll's voice seemed a rude intrusion.

"Tis th' d-d-damnedest sight my eyes have ever h-held," Grimm-

ric stuttered.

"Here old black One-Eye climbed to the stars," Sludig said qui-

etly. "God save me from blasphemy, but I can feel his presence

still."

Binabik started out across the open valley floor. The others fol-

lowed after a few moments, tugged along by the troll's harness rope-

The snow was thigh-deep and slow going. After they had moved

some thirty difficult steps, Simon finally tore his eyes from the spec-

tacle to look back. An'nai and Jiriki had not joined them; the two

Sithi still stood side by side, as if waiting for something.

They moved forward. The valley walls leaned ever closer above

their heads as though fascinated by these rare travelers. Simon could

see that the base of the ice-tree was a huge, jumbled, hole-dotted

rockery sheltered beneath the arching lower branchesnot true

branches, but rather layer upon spreading layer of melted and

refrozen icicles, each one wider than the one above, so that the

bottommost branches made a ceiling half as wide as a tourney field

over the strew of boulders.

They had come close enough that the great ice-pillar seemed to

extend through the very roof of the sky. As he bent his neck pain-

726 Tad Williams

fully for one last glimpse at the near-vanished peak of the tree, a

rush of surprise and fear ran over him, blackening his sight for a

moment.

The tower! From my dreams, the tower with branches! Stunned, he

tripped and tumbled into the snow. Haestan reached down a broad

hand and lifted him without a word. Simon chanced another look

up, and a frightening sensation that was more than mere dizziness

sluiced over him.

"Binabiki" he cried. The troll, just passing into the violet darkness

of the Uduntree's shadow, turned swiftly.

"Quiet, Simon!" he hissed. "We have no knowing if we may knock

sharp ice loose, much to our regret."

Simon made his way forward through the clinging snow as

quickly as he could.

"Binabik, this is the tower I dreameda white tower with

branches like a tree! This is it!"

The troll surveyed the clutter of huge boulders and shattered rock

in the tree's dark underside. "I thought it was your belief you saw

Green Angel Tower, from the Hayholt?"

"I didthat is to say, it was part of both. But since I'd never seen

this before, I didn't know that some of it was some of this! Do you

understand?!"

Binabik cocked a bushy black eyebrow. "When we are next find-

ing time, I will cast the bones. Now we have a mission still unper-

formed."

He waited until the others had straggled up before speaking again.

"It is my thought," he said at last, "that we should be soon making a

camp. Then we can spend the last hours of daylight hunting for

some sign of Colmund's company, or the sword Thorn."

"Are them . . ." Haestan indicated the now-distant Sithi,

". . . goin' t'help?"

Before Binabik could voice an opinion, Grimmric whistled excit-

edly and pointed up at the jumble of rocks. "Look, you!" he said, "I

think there's been someone stayin' here before. Look at th' rocks

there!"

Simon followed the soldier's finger to a spot farther up the sloping

pile of rocks, where several rows of stones had been piled in the

mouth of one of the cavelike holes.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR727

"Y'r right!" Haestan exiaimed. "He's right! Sure as Tunath's

Bones lie north t'south, someone made th'selves a camp there."

"Careful!" Binabik said urgently, but Simon had already shed his

harness and was making his way up the scree, setting off tiny

avalanches where he stepped in cautiously. He reached the cave in

short moments, and stood, teetering on a loose stone.

"This wall was made by men, that's certain!" he called back excit-

edly. "The cavern mouth was perhaps three ells wide, and somebody

had hurriedly but not unskillfully set rock to rock across the front

to keep in warmth, perhaps? To keep out animals?"

"Kindly do not shout, Simon," Binabik said. "We will be up di-

rectly with you."

Waiting impatiently, all thoughts of thin air and killing cold in

abeyance, Simon watched the company climb after him. Even as

Haestan began his clamber up the pile, the two Sithi appeared be-

neath the eaves of the Uduntree. After taking in the scene for a

moment they mounted up to the cave as nimbly as branch-leaping

squirrels.

It took a moment for Simon's eyes to adjust to the more profound

darkness inside the low cavern. When he could finally see, it took

only a moment more for his eyes to widen with shock.

"Binabik! It's . . . they're . . ."

The troll, able to stand upright at his side where Simon crouched,

brought the heel of his hand against his breastbone.

"Qinkipa . . . !" he said. "They have been waiting for our com-

ing."

The cave was scattered with the brown bones of men. The skele-

tons, naked but for fittings and jewelry of corroded black and green

metal, sat propped against the cavern's walls. A thin layer of ice

covered everything, like preserving glass.

"Is it Colmund?" Simon asked.

"Usires save us," Sludig choked behind him, "get out, the air

must be poison!"

"There is no poison here," Binabik chided him. "As to whether it

is Sir Colmund's partythe chances seem to me good."

"It is interesting to wonder how they might have died," Jiriki's

voice was startingly resonant in the small cavern. "If they froze, why

did they not huddle together for warmth?" He indicated the scatter-

ing of the bodies about the chamber. "If they were killed by some

728 Tad Williams

animalor each otherthen why are the bones arranged so care-

fully, as if each lay down to due in turn?"

"There are mysteries here worth much talking someday," the troll

responded, "but we have other duties, and light is failing fast."

"All of you," Sludig said, his voice strained with some terrible

urgency, "come here! Here!"

He stood over one of the skeletons. Although the bones had col-

lapsed into a madder-colored heap, still it had the look of someone

caught in the act of prayer, kneeling with arms outstretched. Be-

tween the bones of its two hands, which lay half-submerged in ice

like stones in a bowl of milk, was a long bundle wrapped in frosted,

rotting oilcloth.

All the air suddenly seemed (o leak out of the cavern. A taut,

deadening silence fell on the company. The troll and the Rim-

mersman kneeled, as if in imitation of the ancient bones, and began

chipping away at the frozen bundle with their ice-axes. The oilcloth

came away in chips, like bark. A long strip splintered away to reveal

a profound blackness beneath.

"It's not metal," said Simon in disappointment.

"Nor is Thorn made of metal," Binabik grunted, "or of no metal

you have ever been seeing."

Sludig was able to wiggle the point of his axe in beneath the

petrified cloth, and with Haestan's straining help they tore loose

another strip. Simon gasped. Binabik was right: this thing emerging

like a jet-black butterfly from its prisoning chrysalis was not only a

sword, it was a sword like no other he had ever seen: long as a man's

arms spread wide, fingertip to fingertip, and black. The purity of its

blackness was unmarred by the colors that sparkled on its edge, as

though the blade was so supematurally sharp that it even sliced the

dim light of the cavern into rainbows. Had it not been for the silver

cord wrapped around the hilt as a handgripleaving the uncovered

guard and pommel as pitchy as the rest of its lengthit would have

seemed to bear no relationship to mankind at all. Rather, despite its

symmetry, it would have seemed some natural growth, some pure

essence of nature's blackness extruded by chance in the form of an

exquisite sword.

"Thorn," Binabik whispered, a sort of reverence coloring his satis-

faction.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR729

"Thom," Jiriki repeated, and Simon could not even try to guess

the thoughts behind his naming of the thing.

"So this is it, then?" Sludig said at last. "It is a beautiful thing.

What could kill them with such a blade in their possession?"

"Who can know what happened to Colmund?" Binabik said. "But

even a sword like Thom you cannot eat when there is being no

food."

They all continued to stare at the blade. Grimmric, who was clos-

est to the cave mouth, at last straightened out his crouch, hugging

himself with thin arms.

"As th'troll says, y'can't eat swords. Fin goin' t'make fire for

th'night." He stepped outside the cavern and stood, stretching. He

whistled a little; the tune, weak at first, grew stronger.

"There is scrub brush in the rock crevices that might bum with

our kindling," Sludig called after him.

Haestan leaned forward, then touched the black blade with a cau-

tious finger. "Cold," he smiled. "No surprise that, is't?" He turned

to Binabik, oddly diffident. "May I lift it?"

The troll nodded. "Carefully."

Haestan slipped his fingers gently under the cord-wrapped hilt

and pulled, but the sword did not move. "Frozen," he guessed. He

tugged again, harder, with no better result. "Frozen up hard, 'tis,"

he panted, pulling now with all his might. His breath rose in a cloud.

Sludig leaned over to help him. Grimmric, outside the cavern,

stopped whistling and said something unintelligible.

As the Rimmersman and the Erkynlander both heaved, the black

sword at last began to move, but rather than snapping free of prison-

ing ice the blade merely slid a little to one side, then stopped.

"It is not frozen," Sludig gasped. "It is as heavy as a millstone. We

two together can barely move it!"

"How will we get it down the mountain, Binabik?" Simon asked.

He wanted to laugh. It was all so silly and strangeto find a magic

sword and then not be able to carry it away! He reached his own

hand forward and felt the deep, cool weight of the thingand some-

thing else. A warming? Yes, some indefinable life beneath the cold

surface, like a sleeping serpent stirring into wakefulnessor was he

imagining things?"

Binabik stared at the immobile blade and scratched his shaggy

hair, thinking. A moment later Grimmric appeared in the cavern,

730 Tad Williams

waving his arms. As they turned to look at him, he slumped to his

knees, then toppled over, limp as a sack of meal.

A black arrow, a thorn of a different sort, quivered in his back.

^

Blue light bathed the silver mask, touching its contours with pale

fire. The face beneath had once been the model for its sculpted,

inhuman beauty, but what the mask now covered no living creature

could say. The world had made uncountable revolutions since the

face of Utuk'ku had disappeared forever behind its gleaming lines.

The blue-brushed mask turned and surveyed the giant, many-

shadowed stone hall, eyeing her scurrying servitors as they labored

to do all that she had bid them. Their voices were raised in songs of

praise and remembrance; their white hair fluttered in the eternal

winds of the Chamber of the Harp. She listened with approval as the

clatter of witchwood hammers echoed through the endless maze of

corridors riddling frozen Nakkiga, the mountain the Noms called

Mask of Tears. The mortals called her home Stormspike, and

Utuk'ku knew that it haunted their dreams ... as it should. The

silver face nodded, satisfied. All was in readiness.

Suspended in the mist that crowned the Great Well, the Harp

suddenly moaned, a desolate sound like wind in the high passes. The

Nom Queen knew it was not His voicenot He who could make the

Breathing Harp sing and howl, not He whose wrathful song sent the

entire well-chamber thundering with impossible musics. Some lesser

voice was crawling through the Harp, trapped in its infinite com-

plexities like an insect in a sealed maze.

She lifted a silver-and-white-gloved finger mere inches above the

black stone of her chair and made a small gesture. The moan became

louder, and something quivered into substantiality in the fog above

the Wellthe gray sword Jingizu, pulsing with painful light. Some-

thing held it: a shadowy figure, its hand a formless knot around

Jingizu's hilt.

Utuk'ku understood. She did not have to see the supplicant; the

sword was there, far more real than any mortal temporarily allowed

to possess it.

731

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

Who comes before the Queen of the Hikeda "ya? she asked, know-

ing the answer full well.

Elias, High King ofOsten Ard, the shadowy figure replied. / have

decided to accept the terms of your master.

The word "master" nettled her. Mortal, she said at last, with

queenly languor, what you wish will be given to you. But you have

waited long . . . almost too long.

There were . . . The shadowy thing holding the sword swayed,

as if weary. How fleshy, how weak these mortals were! How could

they have caused such damage? / thought, it continued, . . . that

things would be . . . different. Now I submit.

Of course you do. And you shall receive what was promised to you.

Thank you, 0 Queen. And I shall give you what I have promised in

return . . .

Of course you will.

She lowered her gloved fingers, and the apparition vanished. Red

light bloomed deep in the Well as He came. As He took possession of

it, the Harp vibrated to a note of perfect triumph.

^

"I ... don't want t'die . . . !" Grimmric wheezed. A froth of

blood on his chin and cheek, his crooked teeth standing in his gaping

mouth, he looked like a hare caught and savaged by hounds. "It's

. . . it's so bloody cold," he shivered.

"Who did it?" Simon squeaked, losing control of his voice in

shock and panic.

"Whoever," Haestan muttered, ashen-faced as he bent over his

stricken countryman, "they got us like coney up a plug-hole."

"We must get out!" Sludig snapped.

"Wrap cloaks around arms," Binabik said, assembling his blow-

pipe from the pieces of his walking stick. "We are having no shields

against arrows, but that will be some help."

Without a word Jiriki stepped over Haestan and the fallen

Grimmric, moving toward the mouth of the cave. An'nai, tight-

lipped, followed.

"Prince Jiriki . . . ?" Binabik began, but the Sithi paid no heed.

732 Tad Williams

"Come then," Sludig said, "we cannot let them go out alone." He

snatched up his blade from the cloak where he had set it.

Even as the others followed the Sithi to the cave mouth, Simon

looked down at the black sword Thorn. They had come such a long

way to find itwere they to lose it now? What if they escaped, but

were cut off from the cavern and could not come back? He put his

hand on its hilt and again felt the strange, thrumming sensation. He

tugged, and to his amazement it came up in his hand. The weight of

it was tremendous, but using two hands he was able to lift it off the

frozen cave floor,

What was happening here? He was dizzied. Two strong men

could not lift it, but he could. Magic?

Simon cautiously carried the long, achingly heavy blade to where

his companions stood. Haestan untied his cloak, but instead of

wrapping it around his arm for protection he laid it gently over

Grimmric. The wounded man coughed, bringing up more blood.

Both Erkynlanders were crying.

Before Simon could say a word about the sword, Jiriki strode

from the cave mouth onto the rocky porch, cocky as a juggler.

"Stand forward!" he shouted, and the icy walls of the valley sent

the echoes tumbling back. "Who attacks the company of Prince

Jiriki i-Sa'onserei, son of Shima'onari and scion of the House of

Year-Dancing? Who would war on the Ziday'a?"

In answer a dozen figures clambered down the sloping valley walls

and stood, a hundred ells from the base of Uduntree. All were

armed, all wore glare-masks and hooded white cloaks, and each bore

on his breast the triangular badge of Stormspike.

"Noms?" Simon gasped, forgetting for an instant the strange ob-

ject cradled in his arms.

"These are not Hikeda'ya," said An'nai shortly. "They are

mortals who do Utuk'ku's bidding."

One of the cloaked men took a limping, stiff-legged pace forward.

Simon recognized the sunburned skin and pale beard. "Go away,

Ziday'a," Ingen Jegger said. His voice was slow and cold. "The

Queen's Huntsman has no quarrel with you. It is those mortals

cowering behind who have thwarted me, and who cannot be allowed

to leave this place."

"They are under my protection, mortal man." Prince Jiriki patted

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR733

his sword. "Go back and sit beneath Utuk'ku's tableyou will get

no scraps here."

Ingen Jegger nodded. "So be it." He waved a negligent hand and

one of his huntsmen swiftly drew his bow and fired. Jiriki sprang

aside, pulling Sludig along, who had stood just at his back. The

arrow shattered on a rock beside the cave mouth.

"Down!" the prince shouted, even as An'nai let fly an arrow in

return. The huntsmen scattered, leaving one of their company face

down in the snow. Simon and his companions went skittering down

the slippery rocks to the base of the ice-tree as arrows hummed past.

Within minutes both sides' meager ration of arrows had been

exhausted, but not before Jiriki had feathered another of Ingen's

raiders, putting a barb in the running man's eye as neatly as shooting

an apple balanced on a stone wall. Nearby, Sludig was stricken in

the fleshy part of his thigh, but the arrow had caromed off a stone

first and the Rimmersman was able to pluck the head out and limp

to shelter.

Simon crouched behind a stone promontory, part of the Udun-

tree's trunk, cursing himself for leaving his bow and precious arrows

in the cave. He watched as An'nai, his own quiver exhausted, cast

bow aside and pulled his slender dark sword from it sheath; the face

of the Sitha was as implacable as if he had been mending fences.

Simon was sure his own must be a mirror of his overwhelming inner

fear, of his tripping heart and hollow stomach. He looked down at

Thorn, and felt a pulse of life in it. The heaviness had become differ-

ent somehow, animate, as though it were full of rattling bees; it

seemed a bound animal, stirring as it breathed the enticing scents of

freedom.

A short way to his left, on the far side of the stone trunk, Haestan

and Sludig were slinking forward, using the great curving branches

of ice for cover. Safe now from arrows, Ingen was gathering his

huntsmen for a charge on the valley floor.

"Simon!" a voice hissed. Startled, he turned around to see Binabik

crouching on the stone prominence above his head.

"What will we do?" Simon asked, trying to keep his voice level

but not succeeding. The troll, however, was staring down at the

black length of Thorn, nestled in Simon's arms like a child.

"How . . . ?" Binabik asked, his round face full of surprise.

734 Tad Williams

"I don't know, I only picked it up! I don't know! What are we

going to do?"

The troll shook his head. "You are now to stay right here. I am

going to help with what I can. I wish that I had a spear." He sprang

down lightly, his heel spattering Simon with a flirt of gravel as he

bounded past.

"For Josua Lackhand!" Haestan shouted, and charged out from

the eaves of the Uduntree onto the white valley floor, Sludig limping

purposefully behind. As soon as they reached the deep snow they

slowed as if running in treacle. Ingen's huntsmen slogged toward

them, performing the same halting, deadly dance.

Haestan swung up his heavy sword, but before he even reached

the attackers the first white-cloaked figure fell, clutching his throat.

"Yiqanuc!" Binabik shouted in triumph, then crouched to reload

his blowpipe.

The clang of swords reverberated as the first of Ingen's men

reached Haestan and Sludig. The Sithi were there a moment later,

moving nimbly over the snow, but still the companions were far

outnumbered. A moment later tall Haestan caught the flat of a blade

on his hooded skull and went down in a puff of snow. Only An'nai

leaping forward to stand over him prevented his being skewered on

the spot.

Blades shimmered in the thin sunlight, and cries of pain and rage

almost drowned the clash of metal. Simon saw with a sinking heart

that Binabik, whose remaining dans had proved useless against the

thick cloaks of huntsmen, was pulling his long knife from his belt.

How can he be so brave? He's too smallthey'll kill him before he

can get close enough to use it!

"Binabik!" he shouted, and climbed to his feet. He lifted the heavy

black sword over his head, feeling its great weight dragging at him

even as he stumbled forward.

The ground suddenly pitched beneath his feet. He staggered,

spread-legged, and then felt the very mountain seem to sway. A

rumbling screech pierced his ears, like the sound of a heavy stone

dragged across a quarry. The combatants stopped, dumbfounded,

and stared down at their feet.

With another horrible shriek of tortured ice the ground began to

bulge. In the center of the valley floor, only a few cubits from where

Ingen Jegger stood gaping in horrible confusion, a great slab of ice

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR735

pushed upward, cracking and buckling as it came, snow sliding off in

great drifts.

Propelled by the sudden shifting of the ground beneath him, Si-

mon tripped and tumbled forward, holding tightly onto Thorn, and

came to a stop virtually in the middle of the combatants. No one

seemed to notice him: they were all frozen in place as if the very ice

of the Uduntree had turned their blood to immobilizing frost, gog-

gling at the impossible thing pushing its way up from beneath the

snow.

The ice dragon.

A snakelike head as long as a man thrust out of the new-formed

crevice, white-scaled above a toothy mouth, and staring eyes blue

and occluded. It waved sinuously from side to side on its long neck,

as though curiously observing the minute creatures who had awak-

ened it from years-long slumber. Then, terrifymgly swift, it darted

out and caught one of the huntsmen in its jaws, biting him in half

and swallowing his legs. His crushed, bloodied torso fell into the

snow like a discarded rag.

"Igjarjuk!it is Igjarjuk!" came Binabik's thin shout. The gleam-

ing ivory head snapped up another shrieking, white-cloaked morsel.

As the rest scattered, their faces emptied by unthinking horror,

splay-clawed white feet gripped the crevice's rim, and the dragon's

long body, back covered with strange, pale fur, yellowed as old

parchment, humped slowly up from below. A whiplike tail, long as a

jousting run, swept two of the huntsmen wailing into the pit.

Simon sat stunned upon the snow, unable to force belief in the

monstrous thing that crouched on the rim of the ice-crevice like a

cat on a chairback. The long-snouted head dipped to regard him,

and the murky, unblinking blue eyes fixed his with calm, ageless

malice. His head throbbed, as though he tried to stare through water

those eyes, hollow as glacial crevices! It saw him, it knew him in

some wayit was as old as the bones of the mountains, as wise and

cruel and uncaring as Time itself.

The jaws parted and a sliver of black tongue knifed out, tasting

the air. The head bobbed closer.

"Ske'i, spawn of Hidohebhi!" a voice shouted. An instant later

An'nai had vaulted onto the creature's hindquarters, grasping the

thick fur for support. Singing, he lifted his sword and hacked at a

scaly leg. Simon got to his feet and stumbled back, even as the

736 Tad Williams

dragon brought up its tail and smashed the Sitha away; An'nai flew

fifty cubits to land crumpled in the snow at the valley*s exposed rim,

nothing beyond him but mist. Jiriki ran after with a cry of anger and

despair.

"Simon!" the troll shouted, "Run! We can do nothing!"

Even as he spoke the mist that had enshrouded Simon's wits be-

gan to clear. In a moment he was on his feet, flying after Jiriki.

Binabik, who had been perched on the crevice's far rim, flung him-

self backward as the dragon lashed out, and the great jaws snapped

shut on nothing with a sound like an iron gate. The troll fell into a

rift in the ice and disappeared.

Jiriki huddled over the body of An'nai, motionless as a statue.

Pelting toward him, Simon looked back over his shoulder to see

Igjariuk slithering down from the broken battlement of ice and mov-

ing across the little valley, short legs gripping the ice as it wound

along the ground, quickly narrowing the distance between itself and

its stumbling prey.

Simon tried to shout Jiriki's name, but his throat caught; all that

came out was a strangled grunt. The Sitha turned around. His am-

ber eyes were bright. He climbed to his feet beside the body of his

comrade, holding his long, rune-carved witchwood sword up before

him.

"Come, Old One!" Jiriki cried. "Come to me and taste Indreju,

you bastard child of Hidohebhil"

Simon grimaced as he dug toward the prince. No need to shout

the dragon was coming of its own accord.

"Get behind . . ." Jiriki started to say as Simon reached him,

then the Sitha abruptly pitched forward; the snow beneath him had

fallen away. Jiriki skidded backward toward the valley's edge and

the empty distance beyond. Desperately, he reached out to grab at

the snow. He stopped, clinging, his feet dangling over nothingness.

An'nai, a bloodied tangle, lay undisturbed a cubit away.

"Jiriki . . . !" Simon stopped. There was a noise like thunder

behind. He whirled to see the vast white bulk of Igjariuk bearing

down, head flailing from side to side with the motion of the driving

legs. Diving to one side, away from Jiriki and An'nai, he rolled and

came up on his feet. The blue saucer-eyes tracked him, and the

creature, now only a hundred paces away, swerved to follow.

Simon realized he was still carrying Thorn. He lifted it up; it was

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR737

suddenly light as a willow-wand, and seemed to sing in his hands,

like a wind-sawed rope. He glanced back over his shoulder: a few

paces of ground was all, then empty air. One of the distant peaks

hovered in the swirling mists across the chasmwhite, quiet, serene.

Usires save me, he wondered, why doesn't the dragon make a

sound? His mind seemed to float loose inside his body. One hand

stole up to Miriamele's scarf at his throat, and then he grasped the

silver-wrapped hilt once more. Igjarjuk's head loomed, the gullet a

black pit, the eye a blue lantern. The world seemed constructed of

silence.

What should he shout at the last?

He remembered what Jiriki had once said of mortals, even as the

frosty musk of the dragon blew down on him, a stench like sour cold

earth and west stones.

"Here I am!" he cried, and brought Thom whistling toward the

baleful eye. "/ am ... Simon!"

Something caught at the blade, and a gout of black blood spat at

him, burning like fire, like ice, searing his face even as a great white

something crashed through and carried him down into darkness.

43

The Harrowing

THE ROBIN, orange breast glinting like a fading ember, lighted on

one of the elm's low branches. He turned his head slowly from side

to side surveying the herb garden, and chirped impatiently, as if

displeased to find everything in such poor order.

Josua watched him fly away, dipping over the garden wall, then

arching sharply upward to speed past the battlements of the inner

keep. Within a moment he was a speck of black against the bright

gray dawn.

"The first robin I have seen in a very long time. Perhaps it is a

hopeful sign in this dark Yuven."

The prince turned, surprised, to see Jamauga standing on the

path, eyes fixed on the spot where the bird had disappeared. The old

man, apparently unmindful of the cold, wore only breeches and a

thin shirt; his white feet were bare.

"Good momingtide, Jamauga," Josua said, pulling the neck of his

cloak a little tighter, as if the Rimmersman's unsusceptibility in-

creased his own chill. "What brings you out to the garden so early?"

"This old body needs very little sleep, Prince Josua," he smiled.

"And I might ask you the same in turn, but I think I know the

answer."

Josua nodded morosely. "I have not slept well since I first entered

my brother's dungeons. While my comfort has improved since then,

worry has taken the place of hanging in chains as a denier of rest."

"There are many kinds of imprisonment," Jamauga nodded.

They walked quietly for a while through the maze of walkways.

The garden was the lady Vorzheva's onetime pride, set out to her

meticulous guidelinesfor a girl born in a wagon, the prince's

courtiers whispered, she was certainly a stickler for elegancebut

had now been allowed to deteriorate due to poor weather, as well as

an abundance of more pressing concerns.

739

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

"Something is amiss, Jamauga," Josua said at last. "I can sense it.

I can almost feel it, as a fisherman feels the weather. What is my

brother doing?"

"It seems to me he is doing his best to kill us all," the old man

replied, a tight grin creasing his leathery face. "Is that what is

'amiss'?"

"No," the prince said seriously. "No. That is just the problem. We

have held him off for a month, with bitter lossesBaron Ordmaer,

Sir Grimstede, Wuldorcene of Caldsae, as well as hundreds of stout

yeomenbut it has been nearly a fortnight since he has mounted a

serious assault. The attacks have been . . . cursory. He is going

through the motions of a siege. Why?" He sat down on a low bench,

and Jamauga sat beside him. "Why?" he repeated.

"A siege is not always won by force of arms. Perhaps he is plan-

ning to starve us out."

"But then why bother to attack at all? We have inflicted terrible

losses on them. Why not just wait? It is as though he seeks only to

keep us inside, and himself outside. What is Elias doing?"

The old man shrugged. "As I have told you; I can see much, but

the insides of men's hearts are beyond my vision. We have survived

so far. Let us be thankful."

"I am. But I know my brother. He is not the type to sit patiently

and wait. There is something in the wind, some plan . . ." He

trailed off into silence and sat staring at an overgrown bed of

mockfoil. The flowers had never opened, and weeds stood insolently

among the twining stems like carrion-eaters mingling with a dying

herd.

"He could have been a magnificent king, you know," Josua said

suddenly, as if in answer to some unspoken question. "There was a

time when he was just strong, and not a bully. That is to say, he was

sometimes cruel when we were younger, but it was only that inno-

cent sort of cruelty that big boys show to the smaller ones. He even

taught me some thingsswordplay, wrestling. I never taught him

anything. He was not very interested in the things I knew about."

The prince smiled sadly, and for a moment a child's fragile look

seemed to shine through his close-pared features.

"We might even have been friends . . ." The prince knitted his

long fingers and blew warm breath into them. "If only Hylissa had

lived."

740 Tad Williams

"Miriamele's mother?" Jamauga asked quietly.

"She was very beautifulsouthern, you knowblack hair, white

teeth. She was very shy, but when she smiled it was as though a

lamp had been lit. And she loved my brotheras best she could. But

he frightened her: so loud, so big. And she was very small . . . slim

like a willow, jumped if one only touched her shoulder . . ."

The prince said no more, but sat lost in thought. Watery sunshine

broke through the clouds on the horizon, bringing a little color to

the drab garden.

"You sound as though you thought much of her," the old man

said gently.

"Oh, I loved her." Josua's voice was matter-of-fact, his eyes still

firmly fixed on the tangled mockfoil. "I burned for love of her. I

prayed to God to take the love away, even though I knew that I

would be but a husk, the living core of me scooped out. Not that my

prayer did any good. And I think she loved me, too; I was her only

friend, she often said. No one else knew her as I did."

"Did Elias suspect?"

"Of course. He suspected anyone who as much as stood near her

at court pageants, and I was with her constantly. But always honor-

ably," he added hurriedly, then stopped. "Why should I be so ear-

nest about that, even now? Usires forgive me, I wish we had be-

trayed him!" Josua's teeth were clenched. "I wish she were my dead

lover, instead of only my brother's dead wife." He stared accusingly

at the knob of scarred flesh protruding from his right sleeve. "Her

death lies on my conscience like a great stoneit was my fault! My

God, we are a haunted family."

He broke off at the clatter of footsteps on the path.

"Prince Josua! Prince Josua, where are you?"

"Here," the prince called distractedly, and a moment later one of

his guards stumbled into view around a hedge-wall.

"My prince," he gasped, bending a knee, "Sir Deomoth says you

must come at once!"

"Are they onto the walls again?" Josua asked, standing and shak-

ing dew from his wool cloak. His voice still sounded distant.

"No, sire," the guard said, his mustached mouth opening and

closing in excitement as though he were a whiskered fish. "It's your

brother1 mean the King, sire. He's pulling back. The siege is end-

ing."

741

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

The prince gave Jamauga a puzzled, worried glance as they hur-

ried up the path behind the excited guard.

"The High King has given over!" Deomoth shouted as Josua

made his way up the steps, cloak billowing in the wind. "See! He

turns tail and runs!"

Deomoth turned and gave Isom a comradely smack on the shoul-

der. The duke's son grinned, but Einskaldir beside him glared

fiercely at the young Erkynlander, lest he should think to try any-

thing so foolish on him.

"What now, what?" Josua said, pushing up beside Deomoth on

the sagging curtain wall. Directly below them lay the shattered ruins

of a miner's box, evidence of a futile attempt to drop the curtain wall

by tunneling beneath it. The wall had dipped a few feet, but held:

Dendinis had built for the ages. The miners, even as they had set fire

to the wooden pillars shoring their tunnel, had been felled by the few

stones they had themselves shaken loose.

In the distance lay Elias' camp, an anthill of scurrying activity.

The remaining siege-engines had been toppled and shattered so that

they would benefit no one else; the rows and rows of tents had

vanished, as if swept up and carried away by gale winds. Thin

soundsthe distant cry of drovers, the crack of whipsfloated up

as the High King's wagons were loaded.

"He is retreating!" Deomoth said happily. "We have done it!"

Josua shook his head. "Why? Why should he? We have whittled

away a bare fraction of his troops."

"Perhaps he realizes now how strong Naglimund is," Isom said,

squinting.

"Then why not wait us out?" the prince demanded. "Aedon!

What goes on here? I can believe Elias himself might go back to the

Hayholtbut why not leave even a token siege in place?"

"To lure us out," Einskaldir said quietly. "Onto open ground."

Scowling, he rubbed a rough thumb over the blade of his knife.

"It could be," the prince said, "but he should know me better."

"Josua . . ." Jarnauga was looking out beyond the decamping

army, into the morning haze cloaking the northern horizon. "There

are strange clouds away to the north."

The others stared, but could see nothing but the dim beginnings of

the Frostmarch.

742 Tad Williams

"What sort of clouds?" the prince asked at last.

"Storm clouds. Very strange. Like none I have ever seen south of

the mountains."

^

The prince stood at the window listening to the murmur of the

trailing wind, his forehead pressed against the cold stone frame. The

spare courtyard below was moonpainted, and the trees swayed.

Vorzheva extended a white arm from beneath the fur coverlet.

"Josua, what is it? It is cold. Shut the window, and come back to

your bed."

He did not turn. "The wind goes everywhere," he said quietly.

"There is no keeping it out, and there is no staying it when it wishes

to depart."

"It is too late at night for your riddles, Josua," she said, yawning

and running fingers through her inky hair, so that it spread upon the

sheet like black wings.

"It is perhaps too late for many things," he replied, and went to

sit on the bed beside her. His hand gently stroked her long neck, but

still he looked out toward the window. "I am sorry, Vorzheva. I am

, . , confusing, I know. I have never been the right mannot for

my tutors, not for my brother, or my father . . . and not for you. I

sometimes wonder if I was bom out of my time." He lifted his finger

to trace her cheek, and her warm breath was on his hand. "When I

see the world as it has been presented to me, I feel only a deep

loneliness."

"Lonely!?" Vorzheva sat up. The fur robe fell away; her smooth

ivory skin was banded in moonlight. "By my clan, Josua, you are a

cruel man! Still you punish me for my mistake in trying to help the

princess. How can you share my bed and call yourself lonely? Go

away, you moping boy, go sleep with one of those cold northern

girls, or in some monk's den. Go then!"

She struck at him, and he caught her arm. She was strong despite

her slendemess, and she slapped him twice with her other hand

before he could roll atop her and pinion her.

"Peace, lady, peace!" he said, and then laughed, although his face

stung. Vorzheva scowled and struggled. "You are right," he said. "I

743

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

have done you insult, and I ask your apology. I sue for peace." He

leaned down and kissed her on the neck, and then again on her

anger-reddened cheek.

"Come nearer and I will bite you," she hissed. Her body trembled

against his. "I was frightened for you when you went to battle,

Josua. I thought you would die."

"I was no less frightened, my lady. There is much in the world to

fear."

"And now you feel you are alone."

"One can be lonely," the prince said, offering his Up to be bitten,

"in the highest and best of company."

Her arm, now free, closed around his neck to pull him closer. The

moonlight silvered their intertwined limbs.

^

Josua dropped his bone spoon back into the soup bowl, and an-

grily watched the small eddies wash back and forth across the sur-

face. The dining hall hummed with the rush of many voices.

"I cannot eat. I must know!"

Vorzheva, eating in silence, but with her usual good appetite, shot

him a disquieted glance down the table.

"Whatever is happening, my prince," Deornoth said shyly, "you

must have your strength."

"You will need it to speak to your people. Prince Josua," Isom

commented around a mouthful of bread. "They are upset and puz-

zled. The king is gone. Why no celebration?"

"You know damnably well why not!" Josua snapped, then raised

his hand to his temple in pain. "Surely you can see it is some trap

that Elias would not give up so easily?"

"I suppose," said Isom, but did not seem convinced. "That does

not mean the people who have been crowded in the inner keep like

cattle" he gestured with a large hand at the milling folks pressed

around the prince's table on all sides, most sitting on the floor or

against the walls of the dining halls, chairs too precious for any but

the noblest, "that they will understand. Take it from one who

spent a hellish winter snowbound in Elvritshalla." Isom bit off an-

other great hunk of bread.

744 Tad Williams

Josua sighed and turned to Jamauga. The old man, his serpent

tattoos strangely mobile in the lantemlight, was deep in conversa-

tion with Father Strangyeard.

"Jamauga," the prince said quietly. "You said you wished to talk

to me of a dream you had."

The old Rimmersgarder excused himself from the priest. "Yes,

Josua," he answered, leaning close, "but perhaps we should wait

until we might speak privately." He cocked an ear to the clamor of

the dining hall. "Then again, no one could eavesdrop in here even if

he sat under your chair." He showed a frosty smile.

"I have had dreams again," he said at last, eyes jewel-bright be-

neath his brows. "I have no power to summon them, but they some-

times come unbidden. Something has happened to the company sent

to Urmsheim."

"Something?" Josua's face was shadowed, slack.

"I only dreamed," Jamauga said defensively, "but I felt a great

rupturepain and terrorand I felt the boy Simon calling out ...

calling out in fear and anger . . . and something else ..."

"Could what has happened to them be the cause of the storm you

saw this morning?" the prince asked leadenly, as if hearing bad news

long expected.

"I do not think so. Urmsheim is in a range farther east, behind

Drorshull lake and across the Wastes."

"Are they alive?"

"I have no way of knowing. It was a dream, and a short, strange

one at that."

They walked later in silence on the high castle walls. The wind

had rolled the clouds away, and the moon turned the deserted town

below to bone and parchment-

Staring out in to the black northern sky, Josua exhaled steamily.

"So even the faint hope of Thom is gone."

"I did not say so."

"You had no need. And I suppose you and Strangyeard are no

nearer to discovering what has become of Fingil's sword Min-

neyar?"

"Sadly, no."

"Then what more needs to be done to assure our downfall. God

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR745

has played a cruel joke on . . ." Josua broke off as the old man

clenched his arm.

"Prince Josua," he said, gazing squint-eyed at the horizon, "you

convince me never to taunt the gods, even those who are not your

own." He sounded shaken, old for the first time.

"What do you mean?"

"You asked what more could be done to us?" The old man

snorted in bitter humor. "The storm clouds, that black storm in the

north? It is moving toward usand very swiftly, too."

^

Young Ostrael of Runchester stood shivering on the curtain wall

and reflected on what his father had once said.

" 'Tis good fserve thy prince. Tha 'II see a bit o'th' world as soldier,

boy." Firsfram had told him, folding his leathery farmer's hand over

his son's shoulder, even as his mother, red-eyed, silently watched.

"Maybe an' tha'll go t'Southern Islands, or down Nabban-way, an'

get thasel' out o' this be-damned Frostmarch wind."

His father was gone now. He'd disappeared last winter, dragged

off by wolves during that terrible cold Decander . . . wolves or

something else, for no trace of him was ever found. And Firsfram's

son, the southern life still untasted, stood on a wall in the freezing

wind, and felt the cold penetrating his very heart.

Ostrael's mother and sisters huddled below, with hundreds of the

other dispossessed, in makeshift barracks inside Naglimund's heavy

stone keep. The walls of the keep provided far better shelter from

the wind than did Ostrael's high perch, but even stone walls, no

matter how thick, could not keep out the dreadful music of the

approaching storm.

His eyes were drawn, fearfully but irresistibly, up to the dark blot

roiling on the horizon, spreading as it came like gray ink poured into

water. It was a smear, a blank space, as if something had rubbed

away the stuff of reality. It was a spot where the very sky seemed to

tilt, fimneling the clouds downward into a slow-swirling mass like

the tail of a whirlpool. From time to time bright prickles of lightning

leaped across the top of the storm. And always, always, there was

746 Tad Williams

the horrible sound of drumming, distant as a spatter of rain on a

thick roof, insistent as the chattering of OstraePs teeth.

The hot air and fabled sun-dotted hills of Nabban seemed more

and more to Firsfram's son like the Book-stories told by priests, a bit

of imaginary comfort to drag one along, to hide the terror of ines-

capable death.

The storm came on, throbbing with drums like a hive of wasps.

^

Deomoth's lantern guttered in the stiff wind and nearly flickered

out; he shielded it with his cloak until the flame grew steady once

more. Beside him, Isorn Isgrimnurson stared out into the cold, light-

ning-scratched darkness.

"God's Tree! It's black as night," Deomoth groaned. "Just past

noon, yet I can scarcely see at all."

Isom's mouth opened, a dark slash in his pale, lantern-lit face, but

no sound came out. His jaw worked.

"All will be well," Deomoth said, frightened himself by the

strong young Rimmersman's fear. " 'Tis just a stormsome evil,

petty trick of Pryrates* . . ." Even as he said it he felt sure it was a

he. The black clouds that masked the sun, dragging night to the very

gates of Naglimund, brought with them a dread that pressed on his

very being like a weight, like the stone lid of a casket. What magi-

cian's summoning was this, what mere wizardry, that could push an

icy spear of horror right into his very guts?

The storm trudged toward them, a clot of darkness spreading far

beyond the castle walls on either side, looming above the highest

battlements, shot through with the blue-white flicker of lightning.

The huddled town and countryside leaped into relief for a moment,

then vanished again in the murk. The throbbing of drumbeats ech-

oed against the curtain wall.

As the lightning flashed once more, momentarily counterfeiting

the stolen daylight, Deomoth saw something that caused him to

turn and grasp Isom's broad arm so tightly the Rimmersman

winced.

"Get the prince," Deomoth's voice was hollow.

Isorn looked up, his superstitious fear of the storm overcome by

747

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

the strangeness of Deomoth's manner. The young knight's face had

gone slack, empty like a meal bag, even as his fingernails drew an

unnoticed rill of blood from Isom's arm.

"What . . . what is it?"

"Get Prince Josua," Deomoth repeated. "Go!"

The Rimmersman, with a backward glance at his friend, made the

sign of the Tree and staggered along the battlement toward the

stairs.

Numb, heavy as lead, Deomoth stood and wished that he had

been killed at Bullback Hilleven that he had died in disgrace

rather than see what was before him.

When Isom returned with the prince and Jamauga, Deomoth was

still staring. There was no need to ask what he saw, for the lightning

illuminated all.

A great army had come to Naglimund. Within the storm's

swirling mist stood a vast forest of bristling spears. A galaxy of

bright eyes gleamed in the darkness. The drums rolled again, like

thunder, and the storm settled over castle and town, a great, billow-

ing tent of rain and black clouds and freezing fog.

The eyes gazed up at the wallsthousands of shining eyes, all full

of fierce anticipation. White hair streamed in the wind, narrow white

faces turned upward in their dark helms, staring at the walls of

Naglimund. Speartips glinted blue in another flash of skyfire. The

invaders peered silently upward like an army of ghosts, pale as

blindfish, ethereal as moonsheen. The drums pulsed. In the mist,

other, longer shadows stalked: giant shapes cloaked in armor, carry-

ing great gnarled clubs. The drums pulsed again, then fell silent.

"Merciful Aedon, give me rest," Isom prayed. "In Your arms will I

sleep, upon Thy bosom ..."

"Who are they, Josua?" Deomoth asked quietly, as if merely curi-

ous.

"The White Foxesthe Noms," the prince answered. "They are

Elias' reinforcements." He lifted his hand wearily, as if to block the

spectral legion from his sight. "They are the Storm King's chil-

dren."

Vfr

748 Tad Williams

"Your Eminence, please!" Father Strangyeard tugged at the old

man's arm, gently at first, then with increasing force. The old man

clung to the bench like a whelk, a small shape in the darkness of the

herb garden.

"We must pray, Strangyeard," Bishop Anodis repeated stub-

bornly. "Get you down on your knees."

The throbbing, percussive sound of the storm intensified. The

archive-master felt a panicky urge to runsomewhere, anywhere.

"This is ... it is no natural twilight. Bishop. You must come

inside, now. Please."

"I knew I should not have stayed. I told Prince Josua not to resist

the rightful king," Anodis added plaintively. "God is angry with us.

We must pray to be shown the rightful pathwe must remember

His martyrdom on the Tree . . ."He waved his hand convulsively,

as though swatting at flies.

"This? This is not God's doing," Strangyeard replied, a scowl on

his usually pleasant face. "This is the work of your 'rightful king'

he and his pet warlock."

The bishop paid him no need. "Blessed Usires," he babbled,

crawling away from the priest toward the shadowy tangle of the

mockfoil bed, "Your humble supplicants repent of their sins. We

have thwarted Your will, and in doing so have drawn Your just

wrath ..."

"Bishop Anodisi" cried Strangyeard in nervous exasperation, tak-

ing a step to follow him, then halting in surprise. A dense, swirling

cold seemed to descend over the garden. A moment later, as the

archive-master shuddered in the deepening chill, the sound of drum-

ming stopped.

"Something ..." A frosty wind napped Strangyeard's hood in

his face.

"0, yea, we have sinned m-m-mightily in our haughtiness, we

puny men!" Anodis sang out, rattling through the mockfoil. "We p-

pray ... we ... p-p-pray . . . ?" he trailed off, his voice rising

curiously.

"Bishop?"

There was a shudder of movement in the depth of the mockfoil.

Strangyeard saw the old man's face appear, mouth agape. Something

seemed to catch at him; dirt began to gout up all around, further

749

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

obscuring events in the shadowy vegetation. The bishop screamed, a

thin, keening sound.

"Anodis!" Strangyeard shouted, plunging into the mockfoil.

"Bishop!"

The screaming stopped. Strangyeard halted a moment later,

standing over the bishop's huddled form. Slowly, as if the old man

were revealing the end of some elaborate trick, the bishop rolled to

one side.

Part of his face was a wash of red blood. A black head sat on the

ground beside him, like a doll thrown aside by a forgetful child. The

head, chewing rapidly, turned grinning toward Strangyeard. Its tiny

eyes were white as bleached currants, the scraggly whiskers shiny

with the bishop's blood. As it reached a long-fingered hand out of

the hole to pull the bishop closer, two more heads popped from the

ground on either side. The archive-master took a step backward. A

scream lodged in his throat like a stone. The ground convulsed again

here, there, on all sides. Thin black hands wriggling like mole-

snouts pushed up through the soil.

Strangyeard stumbled backward and fell, dragging himself toward

the path, certain that any moment a clammy hand would close on

his ankle. His mouth was stretched wide in a rictus of fear, but no

sound came. He had lost his sandals in the undergrowth, and he

lurched up the path toward the chapel on noiseless bare feet. The

world seemed damply blanketed in silence; it choked him, and

squeezed at his heart. Even the crash of the chapel door behind him

seemed muffled. As he fumbled the bolt home a curtain of feature-

less gray came down before his eyes, and he fell into it gratefully,

like a soft bed.

^

The flames of countless torches now rose among the Norns like

blossoms in a poppy field, throwing the horridly beautiful faces into

scarlet half-silhouette, adding grotesquely to the stature of the bat-

tle-garbed Hunen lurking behind. Soldiers clambered up onto the

castle walls, only to stare down in shocked silence.

Five ghostly figures on horses pale as spider silk rode out into the

open space before the curtain wall. The torchlight played on their

750 Tad Williams

hooded white cloaks, and the red pyramid of Stormspike glimmered

and pulsed on their long rectangular shields. Fear seemed to sur-

round these hooded ones like a cloud, reaching out into the hearts of

all who saw them. The watchers on the walls felt a terrible, helpless

weakness fall upon them.

The lead horseman lifted his spear; the four behind him did the

same. The drums sounded three times.

"Where is the master of Ujin e-d'a SikhunaeThe Snare That

Traps the Hunter?" The first horseman's voice was a mocking, echo-

ing moan, like wind blowing down a long canyon. "Where is the

master of the House of a Thousand Nails?"

The hovering storm breathed for long moments before the reply

came.

"I am here." Josua stepped forward, a slender shadow atop the

gatehouse. "What does such a strange band of travelers want at my

door?" His voice was calm, but there was in it a faint quaver.

"Why . . . we have come to see how the nails have rusted, while

we have grown strong." The words came slowly, forced out in a hiss

of air, as if the horseman was unused to speech. "We have come,

mortal, to have a little of our own back. This time it is man-blood that

will spill on the soil ofOsten Ard. We have come to pull your house

down about your ears."

The implacable power and hatred of the hollow voice was such

that many of the soldiers cried out and began to scramble down the

walls back into the castle below. As Josua stood on the gate, un-

speaking, a cry shrilled above the groans and frightened whispers of

the Naglimunders.

"Diggers! There are diggers within the walls'"

The prince turned at a movement close by. It was Deomoth,

climbing up on unsteady legs to stand at his side.

"The gardens of the keep are full of Bukken," the young knight

said. His eyes were wide as he looked down on the white horsemen.

The prince took a step forward. "You speak as though of re-

venge," he shouted to the pale multitude below. "But that is a liet

You come at the bidding of the High King Eliasa mortal. You

serve a mortal, as a tickbird does a cockindrill. Come then. Do your

worst! You will find that not all the nails of Naglimund are rusted,

and that there is iron here that can still deal death to the Sithi!"

751

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

A ragged cheer went up from those soldiers still atop the walls.

The first rider spurred his horse forward a pace.

"We are the Red Hand!" His voice was cold as the grave. "We

serve no one but Ineluki, the Lord of Storms. Our reasons are our own

as your death will be your own!"

He waved his spear above his head, and the drums burst out

again. Shrill horns wailed.

"Bring up those wagons!" Josua shouted from the gatehouse roof.

"Block the way! They will try and throw down the gate!"

But instead of bringing up a ram to try and shatter the heavy steel

and stout timbers of the gate, the Noms stood silent, watching as the

five horsemen rode unhurriedly forward. One of the guards atop the

wall loosed an arrow. It was followed by a score of others, but if

they struck the riders it was only to pass through them: the pale

horsemen faltered not a step.

The drums beat furiously, the pipes and strange trumpets groaned

and shrieked. Dismounting, the riders appeared and disappeared in

flashes of lightning as they strode the last few steps to the gate.

With dreadful deliberateness, the leader reached up to pull open

his hooded cloak. A scarlet light seemed to spill forth. As he tore it

away, it was as though he turned inside-out; suddenly he was all

formlessness and smoldering red glare. The others did the same.

Five beings of shifting, flickering lines grew and stood revealed

larger than before, each tall as two men, faceless, billowing like

burning vermilion silk-

A black mouth opened in the leader's eyeless face as he lifted his

arms to the gate and placed his burning hands against it.

"Death!" he bellowed, and his voice seemed to shake the very

fundament of the walls. The iron hinges began to glow a dull orange.

"Hei ma'akajao-zhaf" The massive spars blackened and smoked.

Josua, tugging frantically at the dumbstruck Deomoth's arm, leaped

down to the top of the wall.

"T'si anh pra INELUKI/"

As the prince's soldiers dove shrieking down the staircases there

was a burst of light, a deafening crack louder than drums or thun-

der, and the mighty gate burst into steaming, sparkling finders. The

shards hissed down in a deadly rain as the wall collapsed on either

side, crushing men beneath it even as they tried to flee.

Armored Noms leaped into the smoking gap in the walls. Some

752 Tad Williams

lifted long tubes of wood or bone, touching them at the end with

naming brands. Horrible gouts of fire leaped out of the pipes, turn-

ing fleeing soldiers into jigging, wailing torches. Great dark shapes

pushed through the rubble: the Hunen, swinging long iron-studded

clubs in their shaggy hands, howling like maddened bears as they

crushed all in their path. Shattered bodies flew before them like

ninepins.

Some of the soldiers, courageously resisting the choking fear,

turned to fight. A giant went down with two spears in its guts, but a

moment later the spearmen were dead, feathered with white-fletched

Nom arrows. The pallid Norns were pushing through the fuming

breach in the wall like maggots, shouting as they came.

Deomoth pulled a stumbling Josua toward the inner keep. The

prince's soot-blackened face was wet with tears and blood.

"Elias has sown the dragon's teeth," Josua choked as Deornoth

pulled him past a gurgling soldier. Deomoth thought he recognized

the young pikeman Ostrael, who had stood sentry at the king's par-

ley, buried beneath the squirming black bodies of a score of diggers.

"My brother has planted seeds for the death of all men!" Josua

railed. "He is mad!"

Before Deomoth could replyand what reply, he briefly won-

dered, could he possibly make?two Nom soldiers, eyes fire-gleam-

ing within the slits of their helms, rounded the corner of the inner

keep dragging a shrieking girl. Spotting Deomoth, one hissed some-

thing, then reached down with his dark, slender sword and dragged

the blade across the girl's throat. She dropped twitching to the earth

behind them.

Deomoth felt the bile rising in his throat as he threw himself

forward, sword upraised. The prince was there even before him,

Naidel flickering like the lightning that etched the black skyafter-

noon, it was only afternoon!

This is the hour at last, then, he thought wildly. Steel rang on

polished witchwood. There must be honor, the thought was desper-

ate. Even if there is no one to see it . . . God will see . . .

The white faces, hateful and hating, swam before his sweat-sting-

ing eyes.

^

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR753

No dream of Hell, no woodcut in any of his many books, no

warning of any of his Aedonite teachers could prepare Father

Strangyeard for the howling inferno Naglimund had become. Light-

ning sizzled across the sky, thunder roared, and the voices of slayers

and victims alike rose to the heavens like the babble of the damned.

Despite the wind and driving rains, fires were leaping up everywhere

in the darkness, killing many who thought to hide behind stout

doors from the madness outside.

Limping along in the shadows of the inner hallways, he saw

Norns clambering in through the shattered windows of the chapel,

and stood helplessly by while they caught poor Brother Eglaf, who

was kneeling in prayer before the altar. Strangyeard could no more

stay to watch the horror to come than he could do anything to help

his fellow man of God. Slipping outside with his eyes full of blinding

tears and his heart heavy as lead in his breast, he headed for the

inner keep and the prince's rooms.

Hiding in the black depths of a hedge he saw stout Ethelferth of

Tinsett and two of his guardsmen smashed to a red pulp beneath the

cudgel of a barking giant.

He watched trembling as Lord Constable Eadgram bled to death

standing upright, swarmed by squeaking diggers.

He saw one of the court ladies ripped limb from limb by another

of the shaggy Hunen while another woman crouched on the ground

nearby, face black with madness.

All through the shattered freehold these tragedies were mirrored a

thousandfold, a nightmare seemingly without end.

Weeping out a prayer to Usires, certain that God's face was

turned away from Naglimund's death throes but praying neverthe-

less in desperate, passionate reflex, he staggered around to the front

of the inner keep. Two scorched, unhelmeted knights stood there in

a tangle of corpses, eyes showing hunted-animal white. It was a long

moment until he recognized Deornoth and the prince, and another

heart-freezing wait before he could convince them to follow him.

It was quieter in the residence's maze of hallways. The Norns had

broken in; a few bodies lay crumpled against the walls or splayed out

on the stone flags, but most of the people had fled toward the chapel

or the dining hall, and the Noms had not stayed to search. That

would come later.

754 Tad Williams

Isom unbarred the door at Josua's shouted command. Is-

grimnur's son, with Einskaldir and a handful of Erkynlander and

Rimmersman soldiers, stood guard over the Lady Vorzheva and the

Duchess Outrun. A few other courtiers were huddled there as well,

Towser and the harper Sangfugol among them.

While the prince pulled himself coldly from Vorzheva's weeping

embrace, Strangyeard discovered Jamauga lying on a pallet in the

comer; a blood-soaked bandage was twined haphazardly around his

head.

"The roof of the library fell," the old Rimmersman said, smiling

bitterly. "The flames, I fear, have taken nearly all."

For Father Strangyeard this was, in some way, the worst blow of

all. He burst out in fresh weeping, tears even trickling down from

beneath his eye patch.

"Worse ... it could be worse," he gulped finally. "You might

have gone with them, my friend."

Jamauga shook his white head and winced. "No. Not quite yet.

Soon, though. I did save one thing." He pulled from out of his robe

the battered parchment of Morgenes' manuscript, the top page now

ribboned with blood. "Carry it safe. It will be of some use still, I

hope."

Strangyeard took it carefully, tying it with a cord from Josua's

table and slipping it into the inner pocket of his cassock. "Can you

stand?" he asked Jamauga.

The old man nodded carefully, and the priest helped him to his

feet.

"Prince Josua," Strangyeard said, holding Jamauga's elbow. "I

have thought of something."

The prince turned from his urgent conferral with Deomoth and

the others to stare impatiently at the archive-master.

"What is it?" His eyebrows singed away, Josua's forehead seemed

more prominent than ever, a pale lunar bulge beneath his close-

cropped hair. "Do you wish me to build a new library?" The prince

sagged wearily against the wall as the clamor built outside. "I am

sorry, Strangyeard. That was a foolish thing to say. What has come

to your mind?"

"There is a way out."

Several of the dirt-streaked, desperate faces turned toward him.

755

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

"What?" Josua asked, bending forward to stare intently. "Shall

we march out through the gate? I hear it has been opened for us."

Strangyeard's sense of urgency gave him the strength to stare the

prince down. "There is a hidden passageway leading out of the

guardroom to the Eastern Gate," he said. "I should knowyou

have had me staring at Dendinis' castle plans for months in prepara-

tion for the siege." He thought of the rolls of irreplaceable brown

parchment, covered in the fading ink of Dendinis1 careful notes,

ashes now, charred in the rubble of the library. He fought down

more tears. "If ... if we c-can get there we may escape up the Stile

into the Wealdhelm Hills."

"And from there what?" Towser asked querulously. "Starve in the

hills? Eaten by wolves in the Oldheart Forest?"

"Would you rather be eaten here and now, by less pleasant

things?" Deomoth snapped. His heart had sped at the priest's

words; the faint return of hope was almost too painful, but he would

hear anything to get his prince to safety.

"We will have to fight our way out," Isom said. "Even now I can

hear the Norns filling the residence. We have women and some chil-

dren."

Josua stared around the room at nearly a score of weary, fright-

ened faces.

"Better to die outside than to be burned alive here, I suppose," he

said at last. He lifted his hand in a gesture of benediction or resigna-

tion. "Let us go swiftly."

"One thing. Prince Josua." Hearing him, the prince came to

where the priest was aiding struggling Jarnauga. "If we can make

our way to the Tunnel Gate," Strangyeard said quietly, "we have

still another problem to solve. It was built for defense, not escape. It

can be as easily opened as closed from the inside."

Josua wiped ash from his brow. "You are saying that we must find

some way to block it behind us?"

"If we are to have any hope of escape."

The prince sighed. A cut on his lip dripped blood onto his chin.

"Let us reach the gate at all, then we shall do what must be done."

They burst through the door in a pack, surprising a pair of Norns

who waited in the corridor. Einskaldir crashed his axe through the

helmet of the nearest, throwing sparks in the darkened hallway.

756 Tad Williams

Before the other could do more than raise his short sword, he had

been skewered between Isom and one of the Naglimund guardsmen.

Deornoth and the prince quickly herded the courtiers out.

Much of the din of slaughter had died away. Only an occasional

scream of pain or rising chant of triumph floated through the empty

hallways. Eye-stinging smoke, licking flames, and the mocking songs

of the Noms gave the residence the look of some terrible under-

world, some labyrinth on the edge of the Great Pit.

In the savaged ruins of the castle gardens they were set on by

cluttering diggers. One of the soldiers fell dead with a jagged Buk-

ken knife in his back, and as the rest of the company fought off the

others, one of Vorzheva's maidservants was dragged squealing down

into a gash in the black earth. Deomoth leaped forward to try and

save her, impaling a squirming, whistling black body on the end of

his sword, but she was gone. Only her delicate slipper lying in the

rain-spattered mud showed she had even existed.

Two of the immense Hunen had discovered the wine cellars, and

were fighting drunkenly over the last barrel before the inner keep's

guardhouse, clubbing and scratching each other in roaring fury. One

giant's arm hung limp at his side, and the other had gotten such a

terrible wound to his head that a flap of skin hung free, and his face

was a sheet of blood. Still they tore at each other, snarling their

incomprehensible language in the wreckage of shattered casks and

the crushed bodies of Naglimund's defenders.

Crouched in the mud at the edge of the gardens, Josua and

Strangyeard squinted against the driving rain.

"The guardroom door is closed," Josua said. "We might be able to

get across the open yard, but if it has been bolted from the inside we

are doomed. We would never burst it open in time."

Strangyeard shivered. "Even if we did, we would not then . . .

not then be able to bolt it behind us."

Josua looked at Deornoth, who said nothing.

"Still," the prince hissed, "it is what we came for. We shall run."

When they had formed up the small company, they set out at a

stumbling dash. The two Hunen, one of them with his great teeth

fastened in his fellow's throat, were rolling on the ground, locked

still in howling battle like gods of the primordial past. Oblivious to

the humans passing by, one of them threw out a massive leg in a

paroxysm of pain and knocked the harper Sangfugol sprawling.

757

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

Isom and old Towser hurriedly turned back and picked him up; as

they did so a shrill, excited shout came from across the courtyard.

A dozen Noms, two of them on tall white horses, turned at their

fellow's call. Seeing the prince's party they gave a great cry and

spurred forward, galloping past the now-senseless giants.

Isorn reached the door and pulled. It sprang open, but even as the

terrified company began to push inside the first rider was upon

them, a high helm upon his head, a long spear poised in his hand.

Dark-bearded Einskaldir dashed forward with a snarl like a cor-

nered dog, ducking the serpentine strike of the lance, then leaping

and throwing himself against the Norn's side. He caught the Norn's

flapping cloak in his hand and pushed away, tumbling to the ground

and bringing his enemy down after him. The riderless horse skidded

on the wet cobbles. Kneeling over the fallen Norn, Einskaldir

brought his axe down hard, then crashed it down again. Blind to all

around him, he would have been pierced by the spear of the second

Norn rider, but Deornoth hefted and threw the lid of a broken

barrel, knocking the rider off his horse and into one of the hedges.

The howling foot-troops were bearing down fast as Deornoth pulled

the foaming Einskaldir off the Norn's hacked corpse.

They drove through the door moments ahead of the attackers,

and Isorn and two of the other pursuers rammed it shut. Spears

crashed against the heavy wood; a moment later one of the Norns

called out in a high-pitched, clicking voice.

"Axes!" Jarnauga said. "I know that much of the Hikeda'ya

tongue. They are going for axes.

"Strangyeard!" Josua shouted, "where is the damned passage-

way?"

"It's . . . it's so dark," the priest quavered. Indeed, the room

was lit only by the inconstant light of orange flames beginning to

burn through the roofbeams. Smoke was gathering beneath the low

ceiling. "I ... I think it is on the south side . . ." he began. Ein-

skaldir and several others sprang to the wall and began pulling down

the heavy arrases.

"The door!" Einskaldir barked. "Locked," he added a moment

later.

The keyhole in the heavy wooden door was empty. Josua stared

for a moment, even as a sliver of axe-blade crashed through the door

758 Tad Williams

from the courtyard outside. "Break it down," he said. "You others,

pile what you can before the other door."

In a matter of moments Einskaldir and Isorn had hacked the bolt

right out of the jamb, while Deomoth lifted an unlit torch to the

smoldering ceiling. An instant later the door was knocked off its

hinges and they were through, fleeing up the sloping corridor. An-

other piece splintered out of the door behind them.

They ran for several furlongs, the stronger helping the weaker.

One of the courtiers at last fell weeping to the ground, unable to go

farther. Isom went to pick him up, but his mother Outrun, herself

staggeringly tired, waved him off.

"Leave him lie," she said. "He can keep up."

Isom looked hard at her, then shrugged. As they continued up the

slanting stone pathway, they heard the man struggle to his feet,

cursing them, and follow.

Even as the doors loomed before them, swart and solid in the light

of the solitary torch, extending from the floor of the passageway to

the roof, the sound of pursuit came echoing up behind them. Fearing

the worst, Josua stretched out his hand to one of the iron rings and

pulled. The door swung inward with a soft groan of its hinges.

"Usires be praised," Isom said.

"Get the women and others through," Josua ordered, and a mo-

ment later two of the soldiers had led them well up the passageway

beyond the mighty doors.

"Now we come to it," Josua said. "Either we must find some way

to seal this door, or else we must leave enough men behind to slow

our pursuers.

"I will stay," Einskaldir growled. "I have tasted faerie-blood to-

night. I would not mind more." He patted his hilt.

"No. It is for me, and me alone." Jamauga coughed and sagged

on Strangyeard's arm, then straightened. The tall priest turned to

look at the old man, and suddenly understood.

"I am dying," Jamauga said. "I was not meant to leave Nag-

limund. I always knew that. You need only leave me a sword."

"You have not the strength!" Einskaldir said angrily, as if disap-

pointed.

"I have enough to close this door," the old man said gently.

"See?" He pointed to the great hinges. "They are wrought very fine.

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR759

Once the door is shut, a blade broken off in the hinge-crevice will

balk the stoutest pursuer. Go."

The prince turned as if to object; a clicking shout reverberated up

the passageway. "Very well," he said softly. "God bless you, old

man."

"No need," Jamauga said. He pulled something shiny from

around his neck and pressed it into Strangyeard's hand. "Strange to

make a friend at the very last," Jamauga said. The priest's eye filled

with tears, and he kissed the Rimmersman's cheek.

"My friend," he whispered, and went through the open door.

The last they saw was Jamauga's bright gaze catch the torchlight

as he put his shoulder to the door. It swung closed, damping the

sounds of pursuit. The bolts inside slid solidly into place.

After climbing a long stairway they emerged at last into the

windy, ram-lashed evening. The storm had thinned, and as they

stood on the naked hillside below the wooded Stile they could see

fire flickering in the ruins of Naglimund below, and black, inhuman

shapes dancing among the vaulting flames.

Josua stood and stared for a long while, sooty face streaked by the

rain. His small party huddled trembling behind him, waiting to take

to the path once more.

The prince raised his left fist.

"Elias!" he shouted, and the wind whipped the echoes away. "You

have brought death and worse to our father's kingdom! You have

raised an ancient evil, and shattered the High King's Ward! You

have unhoused me, and destroyed much that I loved." He stopped

and fought back tears. "Now you are king no longer! I will take the

crown from you. / will take it, I swear!"

Deomoth took his elbow and led him away from the pathway's

edge. Josua's subjects stood waiting for him, cold and frightened,

homeless in the wild Wealdhelm. He bowed his head for a moment,

in weariness or prayer, and led them into the darkness.

44

Blood and the

Spinning World

^

THE DRAGON'S black blood had spilled over him, burning like afire.

In the instant of its touch he had felt his own life subdued. The

dreadful essence coursed through him. scalding away his spirit, and

leaving only dragon-life. It was as if he had himself becomein the

failing moment before darkness camethe Worm's secret heart.

Ifgarjuk's smolderingly slow and intricate life captured him. He

spread; he changed, and the changing was as painful as both death

and birth.

His bones became heavy, solid as stone and curvingly reptilian. His

skin hardened into gemlike scales, and he felt his pelt sliding on his

back like a mailshirt of diamonds.

The dragon's heartblood now moved powerfully in his breast, pon-

derous as the movement of a dark star in the empty night, strong and

hot as the very forge-fires of the earth. His claws sank into the world's

stony skin, and his age-old heart pulsed . . . and pulsed . . . and

pulsed . . . He grew into the brittle, ancient cleverness of the drag-

onfolk, feeling first the birth of his long-lived race in the earth's infant

days, then the weight of uncountable years pressing upon him, dark

millennia rushing by like roiling waters. He was one of the Eldest of

all races, one of the cooling earth's firstborn, and he lay coiled be-

neath the world's surface as the least of worms might lie hidden in the

rind of an apple . . .

The old black blood raced through him. Still he grew, and he

perceived and named all things of the spinning world. Its skin. the

earth's skin, became his ownthe crawling surface of which all living

things were born, where they struggled and failed, surrendering at last

to become a part of him once more. Its bones were his bones, the rocky

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR761

pillars on which all things stood, and through which he felt every

tremor of breathing life.

He was Simon. Yet he was the serpent. And he was nevertheless the

very earth in its infinitude and detail. And still he grew, and growing,

felt his mortal life slipping away . . .

In the sudden loneliness of his majesty, fearing that he would lose

everything, he reached out to touch those he had known. He could feel

their warm lives, sensing them like sparks in a great, windy darkness.

So many livesso important, so small . . .

He saw Rachelbent, old. She sat on a stool in an empty room,

holding her gray head in her hands. When had she become so small?

A broom lay at her feet, an orderly mound of dust beside it. The castle

room was fast darkening.

Prince Josua stood on a hillside, looking down. A faint flame-hued

light painted his grim face. He could see Josua's doubt and pain; he

tried to reach out and give him reassurance, but these lives were only

to see, not to touch.

A small brown man he did not know poled his fiat boat up a

stream. Great trees dangled their branches in the water, and clouds of

midges hovered. The little man patted protectively at a sheaf of parch-

ment tucked into his belt. A breeze rattled the trailing branches, and

the little man smiled gratefully.

A large manIsgrimnur? Where was his beard?paced on a

weather-warped pier and stared out at the darkening sky, at the wind-

lashed ocean.

A beautiful old man, his long white hair tangled, sat playing with a

crowd of half-naked children. His blue eyes were mild, distant, wrin-

kled in a happy squint.

Miriamele, hair close-cropped, looked out from the rail of a ship at

the heavy clouds massing on the horizon. The sails snapped and rip-

pled above her head. He wanted to watch her for a longer time, but

the vision whirled away like a falling leaf.

A tall Hemystiri woman dressed in black kneeled before two cairns

of stones in a grove of slender birch trees, high on the side of a wind-

swept mountain.

King Elias stared into the depth of a wine cup, eyes red-rimmed.

Sorrow lay across his knees. The gray sword was a wild thing feigning

sleep . . .

762

Tad Williams

***

Morgenes suddenly appeared before him, crowned in flame; and

the sight drove an icy spear of pain even into his dragon's heart. The

old man was holding a great book, and his lips moved in anguished.

silent cries, as though he shouted a warning . . . beware the false

messenger . . . beware . . .

The faces slipped away, but for one last ghost.

A boy, thin and awkward, made his way through dark tunnels

beneath the earth, crying and crawling through the labyrinth like a

trapped insect. Every detail, every twist and turn unwound tortuously

before his eyes.

The boy stood on a hillside beneath the moon. staring in horror at

white-faced figures and a gray sword, but a dark cloud covered the

boy in shadow.

The same boy, older now, stood before a great white tower. A golden

light flashed on his finger, although the boy stood in deep and darken-

ing shadow. Bells were tolling, and the roof had burst into

flames . . .

Darkness was engulfing him now, pulling him away toward other,

stranger placesbut he did not wish to go on to those places. Not until

he remembered the name of that child, that gawky boy who labored in

ignorance. He would not go on; he would remember . . .

The boy's name was , . . the boy's name was . . . Simon!

Simon.

And then his sight faded . . .

^

"Seoman," the voice said, quite loud now; he realized it had been

calling him for some time.

He opened his eyes. The colors were so intense he quickly shut

them, blinded. Spinning wheels of silver and red danced before the

darkness of his closed lids.

"Come, Seoman, come and rejoin your companions. There is need

of you here."

He unlidded halfway, letting himself grow used to the light. There

763

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

were now no colors at alleverything was white. He groaned, trying

to move, and felt a terrible weakness, as though some heavy thing

pressed down on him all around; at the same time he felt himself as

transparent and fragile as if he were spun from pure glass. Even with

closed eyes he thought he could feel light passing through him,

filling him with a radiance that brought no warmth.

A shadow crossed his sensitive face, seeming almost to have tangi-

ble weight. Something wet and cold touched his lips. He swallowed,

felt a bite of pain, coughed, and drank again. It seemed he could

taste everywhere the water had ever beenthe icy peak, the swollen

rain cloud, the stony mountain sluice.

He opened his eyes wider. All was indeed overwhelmingly white,

except for the golden face of Jiriki looming nearby. He was in a cave,

the walls pale with ash but for the traces of faint lines; furs and

wooden carvings and decorated bowls were stacked along the edge

of the stone floor. Simon's heavy hands, numb yet strangely acute,

clutched at the fur coverlet and probed weakly at the wooden cot on

which he lay. How . . . ?

"I . . ." He coughed again.

"You are sore, you are tired. That is expected." The Sitha

frowned, but his luminous eyes did not change expression. "You

have done a very terrible thing, Simon, do you know? You have

saved my life twice."

"Mmmmm." His head was responding as slowly as his muscles.

What exactly had happened? There had been the mountain . . .

the cave . . . and the ...

"The dragon!" Simon said, choking, and tried to sit up. As the fur

robe slid down he felt the chill of the room in earnest. Light was

leaking past a skin hanging at the room's far end. A wave of dizzi-

ness left him limp, and set his head and face to throbbing. He sagged

back.

"Gone," Jiriki said shortly. "Dead or not I do not know, but

gone. When you struck, it tumbled past you and down into the

abyss. I could not mark where it fell in the snows and ice of the great

deeps. You wielded the sword Thorn like a warrior true, Seoman

Snowlock."

"I . . ." He took a shaky breath and tried again. Talking made

his face hurt. "I don't think ... it was me. Thorn . . . used me.

764 Tad Williams

It ... wanted to be saved, I think. That must sound foolish,

but . . ."

"No. I think you may be correct. Look." Jiriki pointed to the cave

wall a few feet away. Thorn lay cushioned there on the prince's

cloak, black and remote as the bottom of a well. Could such a thing

have ever felt alive in his hand? "It was easy enough to carry here,"

Jiriki said, "perhaps this was a direction it wished to go."

The Sitha's words set in motion a slow wheel of thought in

Simon's mind.

The sword wanted to come herebut where is here? And how did

we get . . . Oh, Mother of God, the dragon . . . !

"Jiriki!" he gasped, "the others! Where are the others?"

The prince nodded gently. "Ah, yes. I had hoped to wait longer,

but I see I have no choice." He closed his wide, bright eyes for a

moment.

"An'nai and Grimmric are dead. They have been buried on the

mountain Urmsheim." He sighed, and made a complicated gesture

with his hands. "You do not know what it means to bury a mortal

and a Sitha together, Seoman. It has been seldom done, and never in

five centuries. An'nai's deeds will live until world's end in the Dance

of Years, the annals of our people, and Grimmric's name will now

live with his. They will lie forever beneath the Uduntree." Jiriki

closed his eyes and sat for a silent moment. "The others . . . well,

they have all survived."

Simon felt a clutch at his heart, but pushed away thoughts of the

fallen pair for later. He stared at the ash-painted ceiling, and saw

that the lines were faint scribings of great serpents and long-tusked

beasts, winding all across the roof and walls. The blank eyes of the

creatures troubled him: when he looked too long, they seemed to

move. He turned back to the Sitha.

"Where's Binabik?" he asked. "I want to speak to him. I had the

strangest dream . . . the strangest dream ..."

Before Jiriki could speak, Haestan poked his head in through the

cave mouth. "Th'king doesna want t'talk," he said, then saw Simon.

"Y'r up, lad!" he crowed. "That's fine!"

"What king?" Simon asked, confused. "Not Elias, I hope?"

"No, lad," Haestan shook his head. "After . . . after what hap-

pened up on the mountain, th'trolls found us. You were sleepin' for

some days. We're on Mintahoq, nowthe troll-mountain."

765

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

"And Binabik is with his family?"

"Not quite." Haestan looked at Jiriki. The Sitha nodded.

"BinabikSludig, tooth'king's holdin' them for prisoners. Under

sentence o' death, some say."

"What!? Prisoners?!" Simon exploded, then sagged back down as

a band of pain tightened cruelly around his head. "Why?"

"Sludig because he is a hated Rimmersman," Jiriki said.

"Binabik, they say, has committed some terrible crime against the

troll-king. We do not know yet what it is, Seoman Snowlock."

Simon shook his head in amazement. "This is madness. I've gone

mad, or I'm still dreaming." He turned accusingly to Jiriki. "And

why do you keep calling me that name?"

"Don't . . ," Haestan began, but Jiriki ignored him, producing

instead from within his jacket the looking glass. Simon sat up and

took it, the fine carvings on its frame rough to his sensitive fingers.

The wind howled outside the cave, and cold air crept in below the

door-cloth.

Was all the world covered with ice, now? Would he never again

escape the winter?

In other circumstances he would have been quite taken with the

reddish golden whiskers which were coming in thickly all over his

face, but his attention was captured by the long scar running up

from his jaw, over his cheek and past his left eye. The surrounding

skin was livid and new-looking. He touched it and winced, then slid

his fingers up to his scalp.

A long swath of his hair had turned as white as the Urmsheim

snows.

"You have been marked, Seoman." Jiriki reached out and touched

his cheek with a long finger. "For better or for worse, you have been

marked."

Simon let the mirror drop, and covered his face with his hands.

Appendix

^

PEOPLE

ERKYNIANDERS

BamabasHayholt chapel sexton

Beomothone of Jack Mundwode's mythical band

BreyugarCount of the Westfold, Lord Constable of the Hayholt

under Elias

CalebShem Horsegroom's apprentice

ColmundCamaris' squire, later baron of Rodstanby

Deorhelmsoldier at Dragon and Fisherman

Deomoth, SirJosua's knight, sometimes called "Prince's Right

Hand"

Dreosan, Fatherchaplain of Hayholt

Eadgram, SirLord Constable of Naglimund

EahlferendSimon's fisherman father, husband of Susanna

Eahlstan FiskerneFisher King, first Erkynlandish master of

Hayholt

Eglaf, BrotherNaglimund monk, friend of Strangyeard

EliasPrince, Prester John's elder son, later High King

Elispethmidwife at Hayholt

Ethelbeamsoldier, Simon's companion on journey from Nag-

limund

EthelferthLord of Tinsett

FengbaldEarl of Falshire

Freawaruinnkeeper, master of Dragon and Fisherman in Flett

Godstansoldier at Dragon and Fisherman

GodwigBaron of Cellodshire

Grimmricsoldier, Simon's companion on journey from

Nagilmund

Grimstede, SirErkylandish noble, supporter of Josua

770 Tad Williams

OuthwulfEari of Utanyeat, High King's Hand

HaestanNaglimund guardsman, Simon's companion

HeahferthBaron of Woodsall

Heanfaxinnkeeper's boy

Helfcene, FatherChancellor of Hayholt

Hepzibahcastle chambermaid

HruseJack Mundwode's wife in song

InchDoctor's assistant, later foundry-master

Isaakpage

Jack Mundwodemythical forest bandit

Jaelcastle chambermaid

Jakobcastle chandler

Jeremiaschandler's boy

JohnKing John Presbyter, High King

JosuaPrince, John's younger son, lord of Naglimund, called

"Lackhand"

JudithCook and Kitchen Mistress

LangrianHoderundian monk

LeiethMiriamele's handmaiden

Lofsunusoldier, Hepzibah's intended

Lucumanstable-worker at Naglimund

Malachiascastle boy

MaryaMiriamele's servant

MiriamelePrincess, Elias' only child

Morgenes, DoctorScrollbearer, King John's castle doctor,

Simon's friend

NoahKing John's squire

OrdmaerBaron of Utersall

Osgalone of Mundwode's mythical band

Ostraelpikeman, son of Firsfram of Runchester

Peter Gilded-BowlSeneschal of Hayholt

RachelMistress of Chambermaids

Rebahcastle kitchen maid

Ruben the Bearcastle smith

SangfugolJosua's harper

Sarrahcastle chambermaid

ScenesefaHoderundian monk

Shem Horsegroomcastle groom

Simon (Seoman)a castle scullion

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

SophronaLinen Mistress

Strangyeard, FatherArchivist of Naglimund

SusannaSimon's chambermaid mother

Tobascastle houndmaster

Towserjester (original name: Cruinh)

WuldorceneBaron of Caldsae

771

HERNYSTIRI

ArthpreasCount of Cuimnhe

BagbaCattle God

Brynioch of the SkiesSky God

Cadrach-ec-Crannhyr, Brothermonk of indeterminate Order

Cifghayoung lady of Taig

Craobhanold knight, advisor to King Lluth

Cryunnosa God

DochaisHoderundian monk

Efiatheoriginal name of Queen Ebekah of Erkynland, called

"Rose of Hernysadharc"

Eoin-ec-Cluiaslegendary poet

EolairCount of Nad Mullach, emissary of King Lluth

FiathnaGwythinn's mother, Lluth's second wife

Gealsgiathship's captain, called "Old"

Gormhbatalegendary chieftain

Gwelanyoung lady of Taig

GwythinnPrince, Lluth's son, Maegwin's half brother

HemFounder of Hemystir

InahwenLluth's third wife

Lluth-ubh-LlythinnKing of Hemystir

MaegwinPrincess, Lluth's daughter, Gwythinn's half sister

MirchaRain Goddess, wife of Brynioch

Murhagh One-Arma God

PenemhwyeMaegwin's mother, Lluth's first wife

Red Hathrayhinncharacter in Cadrach story

Rhynna God

SumachPrince, Battle of Knock war-leader

772 Tad Williams

TethtainKing, only Hemystiri master of Hayholt, called "Holly

King"

Tuillethyoung Hemystiri knight

RIMMERSMEN

BindesekkIsgrimnur's spy

DrorAncient War God

EinskaldirRimmersgard chieftain

ElvritFirst Osten Ard king of Rimmersmen

FingilKing, first master of Hayholt, "Bloody King"

FrayjaAncient Harvest Goddess

Frekkeold soldier

OutrunDuchess of Elvritshalla

Haniyoung soldier killed by Bukken

HengfiskHoderundian priest

HjeldinKing, Fingil's son, "Mad King"

Hoderund, Saintpriest from Battle of Knock

Hoveyoung soldier, relative of Isgrimnur

IkferdigKing, Hjeldin's lieutenant, "Burned King"

Ingen JeggerBlack Rimmersman, master of Nom hounds

IsbeomIsgrimnur's father, first Rimmersgard duke under John

IsgrimnurDuke of Elvritshalla

IsomIsgrimnur and Gutrun's son

Ithineg the Harpercharacter in Cadrach story

JamaugaScrollbearer from Tungoldyr

JormgrunKing of Rimmersgard, killed by John at Naarved

LokenAncient Fire God

MemurAncient Wisdom God

Nisse(Nisses) Hjeldin's priest-helper, writer of Du Svardenvyrd

Sigmaryoung Rimmerswoman courted by Towser

SkaliThane of Kaldskryke, called "Sharp-nose"

SkendiSaint, founder of abbey

Sludigyoung soldier, Simon's companion

StorfotThane of Vestvennby

Thrininsoldier killed by Bukken

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR773

TonnrudThane of Skoggey, Duchess Gutrun's uncle

UdunAncient Sky God

Uteof Saegard, soldier killed by Bukken

NABBANAI

Aeswides (probably Nabbanization ofErk. name)first lord ofNag-

limund

Anitullesformer Imperator

Antippa, Ladydaughter of Leobardis and Nessalanta

Ardrivislast Imperator, uncle of Camaris

Aspitis Provescount ofEadne, master ofPrevan House, Benigaris'

friend

BenidrivineNabbanai noble house, kingfisher crest

Benidrivisfirst duke under John, father of Leobardis and Camaris

Benigarisson of Duke Leobardis and Nessalanta

Camaris-sa-Vinittabrother of Leobardis, friend of Prester John

ClaveanNabbanai noble house, pelican crest

Clavesformer Imperator

Crexis the Goatformer Imperator

Dendinisarchitect of Naglimund

DevasallesBaron, intended of Lady Antippa

DinivanLector Ranessin's secretary

DomitisBishop of Saint Sutrin's cathedral in Erchester

Elysiamother of Usires

Emettinlegendary knight

EnfortisImperator at time of Fall of Asu'a

Fluiren, Sirfamous Johannine knight of disgraced Sulian House

Gellessoldier at market

HylissaMiriamele's late mother, Ellas' wife, Nessalanta's sister

Ingadarinenoble family, albatross house-crest

LeobardisDuke of Nabban, father of Benigaris, Varellan, Antippa

Mylin-sa-IngadarisEarl, master of Ingadarine House, Nessalanta's

brother

NessalantaDuchess of Nabban, Benigaris' mother, Miriamele's

aunt

774 Tad Williams

Nin ReisuNiskie aboard Emettin 's Jewel

Nuanni (Nuannis)ancient sea god of Nabban

Pelippanoblewoman from Book of Aedon, Saint, called "of the

Island"

Plesinnen Myrmenis (Plesinnen of Myrme)philosopher

Prevannoble family, osprey house-crest

Pryrates, Fatherpriest, alchemist, wizard, Ellas' counselor

QuincinesAbbot of Saint Hoderund's

Ranessin, Lector(born Oswine of Stanshire, an Erkynlander)

Head of Church

RhiappaSaint, called "Rhiap" in Erkynland

SulisRogue noble, former master of Hayholt, "Heron King"

Tiyagarisfirst Imperator

Turissoldier at market

Usires AdeonAedonite religion's Son of God

VarellanDuke Leobardis' youngest son

VelligisEscritor

VilderivisSaint

Yuvenisancient chief god of Nabban

SITHI

AmerasuEri-queen, mother of Ineluki and Hakatri

An'naiJiriki's lieutenant, hunting companion

FinajuSithi-woman in Cadrach story

HakatriIneluki's elder brother, gravely wounded by Hidohebhi

InelukiPrince, now Storm King

IsikiSithi Kikkasut (Bird God)

Iyu*unigatoEri-king, Ineluki's father

Jiriki, (i-Sa'onserei)Prince, son of Shima'onari

Kendharaja'aroJiriki's uncle

Ki'ushapoJiriki's hunting companion

MezumiiruSithi sedda (Moon Goddess)

Nenais'uSithi woman from An'nai's song, lived in Enki

e-Shaosaye

Shima'onariKing of Sithi, Jiriki's father, son of Hakatn

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR775

SijandiJiriki's hunting companion

Utuk'kuQueen of the Noms, mistress of Nakkiga

Vindaomeyo the Fletcherancient Sithi arrow-maker of Tumet'ai

OTHERS

Binabik (QANUC)(Binbimqegabenik) Ookequk's apprentice,

Simon's friend

Chukku (QANUC)legendary troll hero

He Who Always Steps on Sand (WRAN)god

Kikkasut (QANUC)king of birds

Lingit (QANUC)legendary son of Sedda, father of Qanuc and

men

Lost Piqipeglegendary troll hero

Middastri (PERDRUINESE)trader, friend of Tiamak

Ookequk (QANUC)Singing Man of Mintahoq tribe, Binabik's

master

Qinkipa of the Snows (QANUC)snow and cold goddess

Roahog (WRAN)potter

Sedda (QANUC)moon goddess

She Who Birthed Mankind (WRAN)goddess

Steawe (PERDRUINESE)Count of Ansis Pelippe

Tallistro, Sir (PERDRUINESE)famous knight of Johannine Ta-

ble

Tiamak (WRAN)scholar, correspondent of Morgenes

Tohuq (QANUC)sky god

Vorzheva (THRITHINGS>Josua's companion, daughter of a

Thrithings-chief

Yana (QANUC)legendary daughter of Sedda, mother of Sithi

776 Tad Williams

PLACES

Ce/todsAwErkynlandish barony west of Gleniwent

Da'ai Chikiza (Sithi; "Tree of the Singing Winds")abandoned

Sithi city on east side of Wealdhelm, in Aldheorte

Eirgid Ramh (Hemystiri)Abaingeat tavern, haunt of Old

Gealsgiath

Enki-e-Shaosaye (Sithi)"Summer-city" east of Aldheorte, long-

ruined

Ereb IrigH (Sithi: "Western Gate")the Knock; in Rimmerspakk:

Du Knokkegard

Hewenshirenorthern Erkynlandish town east of Naglimund

Hullnireastern Rimmersgard village on northeast rim of Dror-

shullven

Jao e-Tinukai'i (Sithi: "Boat on [the] Ocean [of] Trees")Only

thriving Sithi settlement, in Aldheorte

Jhina-T'senef (Sithi)city of An'nai's song, now beneath ocean

Little Nosemountain in Yiqanuc where Binabik's parents died

Moir Brack (Hernystiri)long, finger-shaped ridge off Grianspog

Mountains

Nakkiga (Sithi: Mask of Tears)Stormspike, Stunnrspeik (Rim-

merspakk)

Qilakitsoq (Qanuc: Shadow-wood)Troll name for Dimmerskog

Runchesternorthern Erkynlandish town on Frostmarch

Sent Anzi'in (Sithi; Tower of the Walking Dawn)Tumet'ai's great

tower

Sent Q/hisd (Sithi)cited in An'nai's song

Skoggeycentral Rimmersgard freehold east of Elvritshalla

Tsi Suhyasei (Sithi: "Her Blood is Cool)river running through

Da'ai Chikiza; in Erkynlandish: Aelfwent

Tan'ja Stairs(great Asu'a stairs, formerly centerpiece of Asu'a

Tumet'ai (Sithi)northern city buried under ice east of Yiqanuc

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Ujin e-d'a Sikhunae (Sithi: "Trap that captures the Hunter")Sithi

name for Naglimund

Woodsall barony between Hayholt and southwestern Aldheorte

CREATURES

AeghonwyeMaegwin's brood sow

AtarinCamaris' horse

Croich-ma-Feareglegendary Hernystiri giant

Greater WormSithi-myth, original dragon from which all others

are descended

HidohebhiBlack Worm, mother of Shurakai and Igjarjuk, slain by

Ineluki; in Hernystir: Drochnathair

IgiarjukIce-worm of Urmsheim

Khaerukama'o the Goldendragon, father of Hidohebhi

Kiku'aIngen Jegger's lead hound

One-EyeOokekuq's ram

QantaqaBinabik's wolf companion

Rimplow horse

ShurakaiFiredrake slain beneath Hayholt, whose bones are

Dragonbone Chair

THINGS

Boar and Spearsemblem of Guthwulf of Utanyeat

Bright-Nailsword of Prester John, containing nail from the Tree,

and finger bone of Saint Eahlstan Fiskerne

Citrilsour, aromatic root for chewing

Ciyana Nabbanai fruit shrub, very rare

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Fire Drake and Treeemblem of King John

Ilenitea costly, shimmery metal

IndrejuJiriki's witchwood sword

KvalnirIsgrimnur's sword

Lu'yasa's Staffline of three stars in the sky's northeast quadrant

early Yuven

Mantingesa spice

Mezumiiru 's Netstar cluster; to Qanuc: Sedda's Blanket

Minneyariron sword of King Fingil, inherited through line of El-

vrit

Mock/oila flowering herb

NaidelJosua's sword

OinduthHern's black spear

Quickweeda spice

Pillar and Treeemblem of Mother Church

Rhynn 's CauldronHemystiri battle-summoner

ShentSithi game of skill

Sorrowsword of iron and witchwood smithied by Ineluki, gift to

Elias (Sithi: Jingizu)

SotfengselElvrit's ship, buried at Skipphavven

Thornstar-sword of Camaris

Treethe Execution Tree, on which Usires was hanged upside down

before temple of Yuvenis in Nabban, now sacred symbol of

Aedonite religion

KnucklebonesBinabik's auguring tools;

Wingless Bird

Fish-Spear

The Shadowed Path

Torch at the Cave-Mouth

Balking Ram

Clouds in the Pass

The Black Crevice

Unwrapped Dart

Holidays

Feyever 2Candlemansa

779

THE DRAGONBONE CHAIR

Marris 25Elysiamansa

Avrel IAll Fool's Day

Avrel 30Stoning Night

Maia 1Belthainn Day

Yuven 23Midsummer's Eve

Tiyagar 15Saint Sutrin's Day

Anitui 1Hiafmansa

Septander 20Saint Grams' Day

Octander 30Harrows Eve

Novander 1Soul's Day

Decander 21Saint Tunath's Day

Decander 24Aedonmansa

Months

Jonever, Feyever, Marris, Avrel, Maia, Yuven, Tiyagar, Anitui,

Septander, Octander, Novander, Decander

Days of the Week

Sunday, Moonday, Tiasday, Udunsday, Drorsday, Frayday, Sat-

rinsday

A GUIDE TO PRONUNCIATION

ERKYNLANDISH

Erkynlandish names are divided into two types. Old Erkynlandish

(O.E.) and Warinstenner. Those names which are based on types

from Prester John's native island of Warinsten (mostly the names of

castle servants or John's immediate family) have been represented as

variants on Biblical names (EliasElijah, EbekahRebecca, etc.)

Old Erkynlandish names should be pronounced like modem En-

glish, except as follows:

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aalways ah, as in "father"

aeayof "say"

ck as in "keen"

eai as in "air," except at the end of names, when it is also

sounded, but with an eh or uh sound, i.e., Hruse"Rooz-uh"

easounds as a in "mark," except at beginning of word or name,

where it has the same value as ae

galways hard g, as in "glad"

hhard h of "help"

ishort / of "in"

j hard j of "jaw"

olong but soft o, as in "orb"

yoo sound of "wood," never yoo as in "music"

HERNYSTIRI

The Hemystiri names and words can be pronounced in largely the

same way as the O.E., with a few exceptions:

thalways the th in "other," never as in "thing"

cha guttural, as in Scottish "loch"

ypronounce yr like "beer," ye like "spy"

Aunvoiced except at beginning of word or after t or c

eay as in "ray"

// same as single /; LluthLuth

RIMMERSPAKK

Names and words in Rimmerspakk diner from O.E. pronunciation

in the following:

j.pronounced y: JamaugaYamauga; HjeldinHyeldin (H

nearly silent here)

eilong / as in "crime"

eee, as in "sweet"

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781

ooo, as in coop

auow, as in "cow'

NABBANAI

The Nabbanai language holds basically to the rules of a romance

language, i.e., the vowels are pronounced "ah-eh-ih-oh-ooh," the

consonants are all sounded, etc. There are some exceptions.

imost names take emphasis on second to last syllable; Ben-i-

GAR-is. When this syllable has an i, it is sounded long (Ardrivis:

Ar-DRY-vis) unless it comes before a double consonant (Antippa:

An-TIHP-pa)

eat end of name, es is sounded long: GellesGet-leez

yis pronounced as a long i. as in "mild"

QANUC

Troll-language is considerably different than the other human lan-

guages. There are three hard "k" sounds, signified by: c, q, and k.

The only difference intelligible to most non-Qanuc is a slight cluck-

ing sound on the q, but it is not to be encouraged in beginners. For

our purposes, all three will sound with the k of "keep." Also, the

Qanuc u is pronounced uh, as in "bug." Other interpretations are up

to the reader, but he or she will not go far wrong pronouncing

phonetically.

SITHI

Even more than the language of Yiqanuc, the language of the

Zida'ya is virtually unpronounceable by untrained tongues, and so is

easiest rendered phonetically, since the chance of any of us being

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judged by experts is slight (but not nonexistent, as Binabik learned).

These rules may be applied, however.

iwhen the first vowel, pronounced ih, as in "clip." When later

in word, especially at end, pronounced ee, as in "fleet": JirikiJih-

REE-kee

aipronounced like long ;, as in "time"

* (apostrophe)represents a choking sound, and should not be

voiced by mortal readers.

EXCEPTIONAL NAMES

GeloeHer origins are unknown, and so is the source of her name.

It is pronounced "Juh-LO-ee" or "Juh-LOY." Both are correct.

Ingen JeggerHe is a Black Rimmersman, and the "J" is Jegger is

sounded, just as in "jump."

MiriameleAlthough bom in the Erkynlandish court, hers is a

Nabbanai name that developed a strange pronunciationperhaps

due to some family influence or confusion of her dual heritagethe

sounds as "Mih-ree-uh-MEL."

VorzhevaA Thrithings-woman, her name is pronounced "Vor-

SHAY-va," with the zh sounding harshly, like the Hungarian zs.

WORD AND PHRASES

NABBANAI

Aedonis Fiyellis extulanin mei"Faithful Aedon save me'

Cansim Felis"Song of Joy"

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Cenit'Dog," "Hound"

Cuelos"Death"

Duos wulstei"God willing"

Escritor"Writer": one of group of advisors to Lector

Hue Fauge"What's going on"

Lector"Speaker": head of Church

Mansa sea Cuelossan"Mass for the Dead"

Mulveiz nei cenit drenisend"Let sleeping hounds lie"

Oveiz mei"Hear me"

Sa Asdridan Condiquilles"The Conqueror Star"

Tambana Leobardis eis"Leobardis is (has) fallen"

Timior cuelos exaltat mei"Fear of death lift me"

Vasir Sombris, feata concordin "Shadow-father, accept this bar-

gain"

HERNYSTIRI

Bynioch na ferth ub strocinh . .

away . . ."

E gundhain sluith, ma connalbehn . .

one . . ."

Feir"Brother" or "Comrade"

Goirach'Mad" or "Wild"

Sithi"Peaceful Ones"

."Brynioch has turned

."We fought well, my dear

RIMMERSPAKK

Im todsten-grukker"A grave-robber"

Vaer"Beware"

Vawer es do iikunde?"Who is this child?"

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QANUC

Aia"Back" (Hinik Aiaget back)

Bhojujik mo qunquc(idiom) "If the bears don't eat you, it's

home."

Binbiniqegabenik ea sikka! Uc Sikkam mo-hinaq da Yijarjuki"I

am (Binabik)! We are going to Urmsheim!"

Boghanik"Bukken"

Chash'True" or "Correct"

Chok"Run"

Croohok"Rimmersmen"

Hinik"Go" or "Get away"

Ko muhuhok na mik aqa nop."When it falls on your head, then

you know it's a rock."

Mikmok hanno so gijiq(idiom) "If you want to carry a hungry

weasel in your pocket, it's your business."

Nihut"Attack"

Ninit'Come"

Sosa"Come" (imperative)

Ummu"Now"

Yah aqonik mij-ayah nu tutusiq, henimaatuq."Ho, brothers, stop

and speak with me."

SITHI

Ai Samu'sithech'a"Hail Samu'sitech'a

Asu'a"Looking eastward"

Hei ma'akajao-zha"Bring it (the castle) down"

Hikeda'ya "Children of Cloud": Noms

Hikka"Bearer"

Im sheyis t'si keo'su d'a Yana o Lingit"For the shared blood of

our Ancestors (Yana and Lingit)"

Ine"It is"

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Isi-isi'ye"It is (indeed) that"

Rasterm of respect "sir" or "noble sir"

Ruakha"Dying"

S'hue'Lord"

Skei'"Stop"

Staja Ame"White Arrow"

Sudhoda'ya"Sunset-children": Mortals

Tsi anh pra Ineluki!"By Ineluki's blood!"

T'si e-isi'ha as-irigu! "There is blood on the eastern gate'"

T'si im T'si"Blood for blood"

Ua'kiza Tumefai nei-R'i'anis'^ong of the Fall of Tumefai"

Zida'ya"Children of Dawn": Sithi