Диана Дуэйн - The Door Into Fire

a white surcoat emblazoned with the arms of the Bright-wood: golden Phoenix rising from red flame, the oldest arms in the Kingdoms. 'Should I take this, do you think?'
'Is there some formal occasion out in the wilds that you're planning to attend?'
'No. But if I need to exert political pull, it might come in handy.'
'You could take my signet.'
'What if I lost it? That's the second-oldest thing in the Wood, I'd never forgive myself if something happened to it. No, hang on to it. The surcoat should be enough – the device could be counterfeited, but the gold in the embroidery is real.' He folded up the surcoat, stowed it in the saddlebag.
'Do you want some mail?'
'No. I'm going to travel light so I can move fast. Besides, why bother giving anyone the idea that I might be worth robbing? And I'm taking that damn turtleshell of a leather corselet, and I have plenty of padding, and that nice light Masterforge knife you gave me last Opening Night. And the spear; and the cloak is good and thick –Anybody who gets past all that deserves to kill me, I think: and if they do, it'll prove that you and Mard were wasting your talents on me these sixteen years.' Herewiss stood up straight from checking his bags. 'Besides, I inherited your iron britches. Don't worry so much.'
Hearn looked with concern at his son. Clothed in dark tunic and breeches and riding boots, cloaked in brown, Herewiss seemed one more shadow of the many in the room. The lamplight reflected from his eyes, and from the metal fittings of the empty scabbard hanging from his belt. 'Son,' Hearn said, 'I'm not too worried about you. But the pattern that's been forming bothers me. I worry about Freelorn. Not so much the fact that he's been running
around the Kingdoms like a crazy person for the past six years, staying at petty kings' courts until someone finds out he's there and tries to poison him. He's pretty alert about such things, usually. Or the business of his running around with his little sword tail and stealing for a living. He seems to steal from people who need it. But lately he's been coming to grief a bit too often, just missing getting caught – and you've been having to go and get him out of these scrapes. And now this; here he is, stuck in this old keep with a thousand Steldenes waiting to starve him out –and you're going to go get him out of it. Alone. Herewiss, it's not really safe.'
'I'll manage,' Herewiss said. 'What are you thinking father?'
'This. What happens when he gets into something that you can't get him out of?'
'By then I hope I'll have my Power . . .'
'But you don't have it yet, and if you get killed for Freelorn's sake, you never will. Son of mine—' and Herewiss's underhearing brought him a sudden wash of his father's sorrow, a feeling like eyes filling with tears – 'I have long since reconciled myself to the fact that you're going to die young – by use of the Flame, or more slowly by all this sorcery. Yet I want you to be what you can. Here you are, the first male in an age and a half to have enough of the Fire to use – the first sign that the Kingdoms are getting back to the way things were before the Catastrophe. But you have to live to be what you can. At least for a little longer. And Freelorn is endangering you.'
'Father,' Herewiss said very softly, 'what good is the Power to me if Lorn dies? He's the only thing I need as much as the Flame. Life would be empty without him, the Fire would mean nothing to me. There are priorities.'
'Is your life one of them?'
Herewiss reached out, took his father's hands in his. 'Da, listen. I won't follow Lorn into any of his famous last stands or impossible charges. I'll try not to let him get into them. I'd like to see him king, yes – but I won't let him drag me into some crazy scheme that has a dead Dragon's chance against the Dark of succeeding. However, I also won't let him get killed if there's any way I can help it –and if my life is the price of his continuing, well, there it is. I can't help how I feel.'
Hearn sighed softly. 'You're a lot like your brother,' he said, 'and just as hard to reason with. I gave you the oak as your tree at your birth, my son, and sometimes I think your head is made of it … '
'It was a good choice,' Herewiss said, smiling faintly. 'Lightning strikes oak trees more than any other kind. And I have to be crazy sometimes: I have a reputation to uphold. "The only thing sure about the Lords' line of the Wood—'"
'"—is that there's nothing sure about them,"' his father finished, smiling too. 'Fool.'
'They told Earn our Father that He was a fool at Bluepeak, and look what happened to Him.'
'I would sooner be father to a live son,' Hearn said, 'than to a dead legend.'
'I'll be careful,' said Herewiss.
'Have a safe journey, then. And good hunting.'
So Herewiss had taken his leave of his other relatives and friends in the Woodward, and had said goodbye to the Rooftree, and then had stopped in the stable to choose a horse. He had originally been of a mind to take Darrafed, his little thoroughbred Arlene mare, a present from Freelorn – or perhaps Shag, his father's curly-coated bay warhorse. But as he had walked down the aisle between
the stalls, Dapple had put his head out over his stall's half-door and looked at Herewiss as if he knew something. Herewiss was not one to ignore a sign when it presented itself.
The horse moved comfortably through the low hill country. As long as he kept to a steady southward course, Herewiss let Dapple have his head. The horse was a wise one. About a hundred years before, a Rodmistress had put her deathword on one of Dapple's ancestors and had decreed that the horses of that line would always have a talent for being in the right place at the right time. The talent had seemed to do their riders good as well. One horse, the third generation down, had carried an unsuspecting lady to the arms of the lover who had searched the Middle Kingdoms for her for twelve years. Another had led its thirteen-year-old mistress to the place where the royal Darthene sword, Forlennh BrokenBlade, had been hidden during the Reavers' invasion of Darthis City. Having Dapple along, Herewiss reasoned, would make his father worry a little less – and might incidentally ease his way as he worked on getting Freelorn out of that keep.
For three days he had been riding through empty land. It was not bare – Spring had run crazy through the fields, as if drunk on rose wine, flinging wildflowers and garlands of new greenery about with inebriated extravagance. The hills were ablaze with suncandle and Goddess's-delight, tall yellow Lovers'-cup lilies and heartheal. Butterwort and red-and-blue never-say-die clambered up the gullies toward the hillcrests, and white mooneyes covered the ground almost everywhere that grass did not. But there were no people, no homesteads. For one thing, the land was poor for farming. For another, that part of the country was full of Fyrd.
The Fyrd had always been in the Kingdoms; they were
said to be children of the Shadow, sent by Him to spread death and misery in the Goddess's despite: or even creations of the Dark itself, changed things which had been made from normal animals when the Dark still covered the world. Whatever the case, most of North Darthen was still full of the major Fyrd species –horwolves, nadders, keplian, lathfliers, maws, hetscold, and destreth. In Herewiss's time, the land around the Wood was free of them – kept that way by constant use of the Power and the cold-eyed accuracy of Brightwood archers. But outside the Wood's environs the Fyrd raided constantly, taking great numbers of livestock, and also men whenever they could get them. Sheep were pastured here in the hill country, but all the shepherds came up together after the Maiden's Day feasts. Both flocks and men stood a better chance in large numbers.
The hills were thinning out now and farms were beginning to appear. They became more frequent as Herewiss and Dapple descended into the lowlands, and one very large farm with stone markers indicated that Herewiss was close to the town he had been expecting to reach that evening. The farm was the holding of a prominent Darthene house, the Lords Arian. He could have stopped there and received excellent hospitality, being after all the next thing to a prince; but attention drawn to himself was the last thing he wanted at this point.
He rode on down from the hills, crossing a rude stone bridge over the Kearint, a minor tributary of the river Darst, and came to the forty-house town of Havering Slides just as dusk was falling. Most of the people who lived there were hands on the big Arian farm. Herewiss rode up to the gate in the wooden palisade around the town, identified himself and was admitted without question.
The inn was as he had remembered it from earlier visits, a motley– looking place with a disjointed feeling to it; new buildings ran headlong into old ones, and afterthought second storeys sagged on their supports over uneasy-looking bay windows. It seemed that some of the artisans who had done carving work in the Woodward had also passed this way. The gutterspouts were fashioned into panting hound-faces and singing frogs; crows stealing cheese in their wooden beaks leered down from the cupolas.
Herewiss rode up to the stable door and handed Dapple over to the girl in charge. As he strode toward the doorway of the inn, his saddlebags slung over his shoulder, he was greeted by the sudden and beautiful odor of roast beef. After three days of nourishing but tasteless journey rations, the prospect of real food seemed almost an embarrassment of luxury. He paused at the door just long enough to admire the carving over it, a cross-grain bas-relief of a local Rodmistress casting the Shadow out of a possessed cow.
Herewiss pushed open the door and went in. It took his eyes a few minutes to get used to the dim interior of the place, though there were oil lamps all around. He was standing in a fairly large common room crowded with tables and chairs and long trestled benches. The room was not too full, it still being early in the evening. Several patrons sat about a table, dicing for coppers, and off in one corner a hulking farmer was devouring a steak pie in great mouthfuls.
The steak pie particularly interested Herewiss. Bags in hand, he went to the kitchen door, which was carved with dancing poultry, and knocked.
The door opened, and the innkeeper looked out at him cordially. She was a tall slender woman, grayhaired but
pretty, in a brown robe and a long stained apron. 'Can I help you, sir?' she said, wiping her hands on a dirty gray towel.
'Madam,' Herewiss said, bowing slightly, 'food and lodging for the night for myself and my horse would do nicely.'
'Half an eagle,' the innkeeper said, looking at his clothes, which were in good repair.
'A quarter,' said Herewiss, smiling his best and most charming smile at her.
She smiled back at him. 'A quarter eagle and threepence.' 'Two.'
The innkeeper smiled more broadly. 'Two it is. Your horse is inside?'
'He is, madam.'
'Dinner?'
'Oh, yes,' Herewiss said. The good smells coming out of the kitchen were making his stomach talk. 'Some of what that gentleman is having, if there's another one . . .'
She nodded. 'Anything to drink? We have wine, red and white and Delann yellow; brown and black ale; and my husband made a fresh barrel of Knight's Downfall yesterday.'
'Ale sounds good: the black. Which room should I take?'
'Up the stairs, turn right, third door to your left.' The innkeeper disappeared back into the kitchen's steam.
Herewiss hurried up the creaking stairs and found the room in question. It was predictably musty, and the floor groaned under him. The shutters screeched in protest when he levered them open to let the sunset in, but he was so glad to have a hot meal in the offing that the place looked as good as any king's castle to him. He dropped his
bag in the corner, under the window, and changed into another clean dark tunic; then headed for the door. Halfway through the doorway, an afterthought struck him. He raised his hands to draw the appropriate gestures in the air, and since no-one was near,
spoke aloud the words of a very minor binding, erecting a lockshield around his bags. Then down the stairs he went.
He sat down at an empty table in a corner and spent a few moments admiring the window nearest him, which was a crazy amalgam of bottle-glass panes and stained vignettes. One of them, done in vivid shades of rose, cobalt, and emerald, showed the ending of the old story about the man who fooled the Goddess into lifting her skirts by confronting Her with an illusion-river. There he lay under the trees at Harvest festival, inextricably stuck to and into an illusionary lover, while the Goddess and the harvesters stood around and laughed themselves weak. The man looked understandably mortified, and very chastened. He had been very lucky in playing his trick on the Mother aspect of the Goddess — had She been manifesting as the Maiden at the time, She might not have been so kind. The Mother tends to be forgiving of Her children's pranks, but the Maiden is sometimes fatally jealous of Her modesty.
Someone blocked the light, and he looked up – a girl, maybe eighteen years old or so, with a droopy halo of frizzing black hair. She bent in front of Herewiss, putting his steak pie and ale on the old scarred table. Herewiss took brief notice of the view down her blouse, but he was more interested in the steak pie.
'Nice,' he said. 'A fork, please?'
'Hmm?' She in her turn was being very interested in Herewiss. 'A fork?'
'Oh. Yes, certainly—' She reached into her pocket and brought one out for him. Herewiss took it, wiped it off, and dove almost desperately into the pie.
'Ahh, listen,' she said, bending down again, and Herewiss began an intensive study of a piece of potato, 'are you busy this evening?'
Herewiss did his best to look at her with profound sorrow. She really wasn't his type, and there was a mercenary look in her eye that sent him hurriedly to the excuse box in the back of his head. 'If you're thinking what I think you are,' he said, 'I'm sorry, but I'm under vows of chastity.'
'You don't look like you're in an Order,' she said.
'Perpetual chastity,' Herewiss said. 'Or until the Eagle comes back. Sorry.'
The girl stood up. 'Well,' she said, 'if you change your mind, ask the lady in the kitchen where I am. I'm her daughter.'
Herewiss nodded, and she went away into the kitchen. He sagged a little as the door closed behind her, and settled back against the wall.
That was a bit panicky of me, Herewiss thought as he began to eat. I wonder what it is about her that bothers me so—
He put the thought aside and concentrated on the hot-spiced food and the heavy ale. The common room began slowly to fill up as he ate; the local clientele was coming in from the fields and houses to enjoy each other's company. The big table nearest him was occupied by a noisy, cheerful group of farmers from the Arian landholdings, nine or ten brawny men and lithe ladies, all deeply tanned and smelling strongly of honest work. They called loudly for food and drink, and hailed Herewiss like a brother when they spotted him in his corner. He smiled back at
them, and before long they were exchanging crude jokes and bad puns, and laughing like a lot of fools.
When the inn's cat strolled by, it was greeted politely by the farmers, and offered little pieces of meat or game. It declined all these graciously and in silence, and went on by, making its rounds. As it passed it looked hard at Herewiss, as if it recognized him. He nodded at it; the cat looked away as if unconcerned, and moved on.
As the ale flowed and the evening flowered, the storytelling and singing began in earnest. Most of the stories were ones already known to everyone there, but no-one seemed to care much about that – Kingdoms people have a love of stories, as long as the story wears a different face each time. Someone began with the old one about what Ealor the Prince of Darthen had done with the fireplace poker, which was later named Sarsweng and had its haft encrusted with diamonds. Then someone else got up and told about something more recent, news only a hundred and five years old, how the lady Faran Fersca's daughter had gone out with her twelve ships to look for the Isles of the North, and how only one ship had come back after a year, and what had happened to it. This was told in an unusual fashion, sung to an antique rhyme-form by a little old lady with a surprisingly strong soprano. There was a great deal of stamping and cheering and applause when she finished; and several people, judging correctly that the lady was quite young inside, whatever her apparent age, propositioned her immediately. She said yes to one of the propositions, and she and the gentleman went upstairs immediately to more applause.
In the commotion, the lute was passed around to the farmers' table and one of them started to sing the song about the Brindle Cat of Aes Aradh, how it carried away the chief bard of a Steldene king on its back because of an
insulting song he had sung before the Four Hundred of Arlen, and what the bard saw in the Otherworld to which the cat took him. Herewiss joined in on the choruses, and one of the ladies at the farmers' table noticed the quality of his voice and called to him, 'You're next!' He shook his head, but when the man with the lute was finished, it was passed back to him. He looked at it with resignation, and then smiled a little at a sudden memory.
'All right,' he said, pushed his chair back, and perched himself on the edge of the farmers' table, pausing a moment to tune one of the strings that had gone a quarter-tone flat. The room quieted down; he strummed a chord and began to sing.
Of the many stories concerning the usage of the blue Fire, probably the most tragic is that of Queen Beaneth of Darthen and her lover Astrin. Astrin was taken by the Shadow's Hunting one
Opening Night, and Beaneth went to her rescue. That rescue seemed a certain thing, for Beaneth was a Rodmistress, one of the great powers of her time. But the price demanded of her for Astrin's release was that Beaneth must mate with the Shadow, and take into herself whatever evil He would choose for her to bear. Beaneth, knowing that the evil to grow within her would warp her Power to its own use, lay down with the Shadow indeed, but killed herself at the climax of the act, thereby keeping her bargain and obtaining her loved's release.
Her little daughter Beorgan was five years old when all this happened. Beorgan made the decision early to avenge her mother, and determined that she would meet the Shadow on His own ground and destroy Him. She trained, and grew great in Power – and also in obsession – waiting and preparing for Nineteen-Years' Night, that night when it is both Opening Night and Full Moon. All the Kingdoms know how the story ends – how Beorgan went
down to the Morrowfane on that night, being then twenty-four years of age, and opened the Morrowfane Gate beneath the waters of Lake Rilthor, and passed through into the Otherworlds. There she met the Shadow, and there she slew Him, on one of the only nights this may be done, when the Goddess's power conjoins with the returning Sun past midnight. Beorgan's triumph was shortlived, though, and so was she. She had never planned her life past that night, and in a short time wasted away and died. Even her victory was hollow, for however bright the Lover may be, still he casts the Shadow: seven years after He died, He was back again, leading the Hunting as always.
Freelorn had always loved the story, and some years back had composed a verse form of it, and a musical setting that Herewiss had liked. At the time, though, Freelorn's voice had been changing, and Herewiss had had to restrain himself from laughing as his loved sang that greatest of tragedies in a voice that cracked crazily every verse or so. He had even refrained from singing it himself for the longest while, for the sound of his pure, deep, already-changed tenor had made Freelorn twice as self– conscious as he usually was.
He sang the setting now, letting his voice go as he would have liked to all those years ago, pausing between verses to insert the last dialogue between Beaneath and Astrin, and later the farewell of Beorgan to her husband Anmod, who later became King of both Arlen and Darthen because of her death. He forgot about the hot, smoky room, forgot about time and pain and the systematic destruction of swords, and just sang, feeling very young again for the first time in ever so long.
At the end of it he received tremendous applause, and he bowed shyly and handed the lute to someone else, going
back to his table and his ale. There he sat for a few minutes, recovering. Someone began singing almost immediately, but the farmers started talking quietly among themselves. The contrast between the sung verses of terrible tragedy beyond the boundaries of the world and the homely talk of the farmers was abrupt, but pleasant; they had slow, musical voices, and Herewiss dawdled over his ale, listening alternately to the words and the sound of them. One of the farmers started telling a long, drawn-out story of a loved of his who had gone traveling. 'All the way to Dra'Mincarrath she went,' he said in a drawl, 'aye, all that way south, and then east again into the Waste she went, not knowing where she was going, on account of being lost. Right into the Waste Unclaimed, and north she turned after a little, on account of being lost again. And came in sight of that hold in the Waste, indeed, and—'
'Ssh!' said several of the other farmers, looking upset, and 'She came out again,' said one of them, seemingly the eldest. 'Count her lucky; that place is bad to talk of, even here. Then where did she go? . . .'
Herewiss sat nursing his ale, a little curious at the sudden and vehement response. Hold in the Waste—? What could that be? No-one lived out there—
His thought was broken by the underheard feeling that someone was looking at him with unkindly intent. He glanced up and saw the innkeeper's daughter. She was across the room, serving someone else, but he could feel her eyes on him. He looked down at his ale again quickly, not particularly wanting to see her bend over again.
There was a sudden motion to his right. He looked, and saw the cat, a big gray tabby with blue eyes, balancing itself on the table edge after its leap. It lay down, tucking its forepaws beneath its chest so that it looked like a broody hen, and half– closed its eyes.
'Well, hello,' Herewiss said, putting down his mug to scratch under the cat's chin. It squeezed its eyes shut altogether and stretched its neck out all the way, purring like a gray-furred thunderstorm.
Herewiss went back to the contemplation of his ale, rubbing under the cat's chin automatically for a few minutes. Then suddenly the cat opened up its round blue eyes. 'Prince,' it said in its soft raspy voice, 'mind the innkeeper's daughter.'
He laughed a little under his breath. 'No-one keeps a secret from a cat,' he quoted. 'May I ask what you're called?'
'M'ssssai,' it said. 'That is my inner Name, prince: the outer doesn't matter.'
'I'll keep your secret,' Herewiss said in ritual response, and then added, 'but I have none to give you in return. I don't know it yet.'
'Well enough. Time will come, and then you can come back and tell me.'
'Forgive me,' Herewiss said, 'but how did you know who I am?' 'I've been in your saddlebag.' 'It had a binding on it.'
The cat smiled, and after a moment Herewiss smiled back at it.
Cats, the legend said, had been created second after men, and had a Flame of their own, one which they had never lost.
'The very fact of a binding,' M'ssssai said, 'made me slightly suspicious. I could smell it from down here, and know you for its author. And the contents of the bags settled the matter. Only two men alive wear that surcoat, and you're too young to be one of them, so you must be the other.'
'Granted.'
'What are you doing with those grimoires in your bags?'
Herewiss made a face. 'Isn't it said of my Line that there's no accounting for us? I'm a sorcerer. A part-time sorcerer, out seeing the world.'
M'ssssai half-closed his eyes again. 'Sorcerers usually stay at home unless they have something in hand. And you're more than just a sorcerer, prince. I know the smell of Flame.'
'I have no Focus,' Herewiss said, very softly, 'and no control. I can't use a Rod.'
'The innkeeper's daughter,' said the cat, 'is a dabbler; she has just enough Flame to be able to smell it herself, though she has no focus either, and no control. But she's looking for a way to free her Power, and I dare say she's noticed at least part of what you are. If I were you, I'd keep the shields up around your bags tonight, or else sleep lightly. She's a brewer of semi-effective love potions, and she throws her curses crooked. She has a most undisciplined mind. Not to mention that she'd probably try to drain you—'
'A vampire?'
'In the bedsheets; she's acquired a taste for it. I see too many people going out of here looking lost and drained in the morning.'
'M'ssssai, I thank you.' Herewiss scratched behind the cat's ears.
'But why are you telling me all this?' The cat smiled. 'You have good hands.'
M'ssssai stood up, stretched, arching his back, his tail straight up in the air. 'Mind her, now,' he said, and jumped down from the table, vanishing into the forest of trestles and benches.
Herewiss looked up cautiously. The innkeeper's daughter had just come down from upstairs, and was going through the kitchen door. He took his opportunity and
eased out from behind the table, heading hurriedly for the protection of the shadows of the stairway. He took the stairs two at a time, sloshing ale in all directions, pausing at the top of the stairs to get his bearings; it was quite dark up there. Then he headed softly down the hail, trying to keep the floor from creaking under him, his breath going up before him like pale smoke in the chill air.
His room door was ajar. He listened at it, but heard nothing. A swift cold draft was whispering through the crack. Gently he put his weight against the door; it opened with a low tired groan. There was no-one inside.
He went in, still moving carefully, and bent down by the window to check his bags. The surcoat was ever so slightly mussed, unfolded just enough to clearly show the Phoenix charged on it; and the lockshield around the bags was parted cleanly in one place, an invisible incision right through the spell, big enough for a cat to put a paw through.
Herewiss laughed and got up. With flint and steel he lit the room's one candle, a stub of tallow in a smoky, cracked glass by the big four-poster bed. Even in the glass, the flame bent and bobbled wildly until Herewiss closed the shutters at the window. For a few seconds he regarded the worm-holed old door.
'All right,' he said softly. 'Let her think I had a bit too much to drink.' He crossed to the door and closed it without shooting
the bolt, then flicked a word and a gesture back at the bags and dissolved the lockshield.
Herewiss pulled back the faded, patched coverlet and sat down on the bed. Immediately there was a sudden sharp feeling in the back of his head, a nagging feeling like a splinter, or the dull hurt of a burn. He got up again hurriedly, stripping the covers all the way back and feeling about the sheets. When he lifted up the pillow, there it was
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