The Wayward Knights Read online

  The task of spying out Vuinlod as a refuge for the Tirabot Manor folk would begin tonight.

  Vuinlod lay hard on the Solamnic coast, rising from the shore of a sheltered bay up the sides of hills that formed a bowl around the bay. The landward slopes of the hills showed few signs that a town was nearby, being mostly terraced fields and orchards, with farmhouses and byres scattered about.

  On either side of the road—well graveled, Pirvan noticed, and with drainage ditches to either side—stretches of forest lay scattered like swatches of cloth on the floor of a tailor's shop. They were mostly second growth, and to Pirvan's eye the trees seemed shrunken from the last time he had come this way.

  Of course, that was some years past, and the mere need for firewood and building timber would take its toll of the woods. But it seemed to him that it was not always the trees best suited for hearth or home that had vanished. More than one strip of scrubby ogresnut wound its way most conveniently across fields and along the banks of streams.

  It was Sir Darin who gave voice to Pirvan's suspicions, when he and Hawkbrother rode up—as befitted junior knights—to confer with their chief.

  "I think the Vuinlod folk have laid out defenses," Darin said, "to halt or at least delay any attack while they take to their ships."

  "Who has so great a quarrel with them?" Hawkbrother asked.

  Young Eskaia spoke before her father could. "The same folk who spoke against your becoming a knight," she said. "Or worse, if they are not bound by the Oath and the Measure, and have taken the kingpriest's silver."

  Those words made the day seem gloomier still. The new kingpriest had the reputation of a fierce hater of all who lacked virtue, and might be one of those who thought only humans possessed it. Certainly he had publicly appointed several men whispered to have once been Servants of Silence; just as certainly, these dogs were not yet off their chain. Time was passing, and if enough passed, even kingpriests might gain wisdom.

  At the moment, however, Pirvan unashamedly wished to gain no more than a roof over his head and something hot in his stomach. "Listen to your betrothed, Sir Hawkbrother," he said. "Now let us be on our way. And spread out a trifle farther. Trees can hide enemies as well as friends, and there has been ample time for word of our coming to reach the ears of both."

  A mizzling rain blew in their faces as they urged their horses into motion once more.

  Water dripped from Gildas Aurhinius's clothing as he climbed the stairs to Lady Eskaia's chambers. He left damp footprints on the polished wood. The lady met him at the door, holding out a heated, scented towel.

  "Ahhh," he said. "You are my good spirit."

  He must have read something in her face, because he stopped drying his hair in midstroke.

  "Never be afraid to remember Jemar, no matter when or where," he said.

  "I never have been," Eskaia said tartly, "and you can neither give nor withhold permission." Then she smiled and embraced him. "But I thank you for the kind words."

  "You will be drenched, if you go on hugging me," Aurhinius said, with his mouth muffled in her hair. "It is the sort of day that cannot decide to be winter or spring. It ends by having the vices of both, and the virtues of neither."

  "Then a soldier who does his duty out of doors on a day like this surely ought to have a warm woman embrace him when he comes inside," Eskaia said. She stood on tiptoe to kiss him, then led him inside to where a couch stood by a table holding a tray with hot spiced wine, strong tarberry tea, honey cakes, melon bread, and dried fruit.

  "How fare our defenses?" Eskaia asked, when Aurhinius had drained two cups of tea and one of wine, and was halfway through a plate of cakes.

  "All the necessary posts have sentries, and I would not ask anyone to face this weather otherwise. The tunnelers to the northwest are too busy bailing to dig. The rest are putting in extra props and moving stores and weapons to higher ground."

  "No word of our friends?"

  "None, but they are surely traveling more slowly than they intended. The roads are too thin for riding and too thick for rowing."

  "As well," Eskaia said. She reached into her overgown and drew out an oiled leather packet. "We shall have more time to consider how to reply to this."

  Aurhinius's eyebrows no longer rose when she handed him a letter concerning some matter of war or statecraft that she had already opened and read. He had accepted that Eskaia ruled in Vuinlod and he was her consort by courtesy; no less, but no more.

  His eyes, however, seemed to move from her to the text of the letter and back. She realized then that his embrace had turned the thin silk of her overgown transparent. She wore an undertunic of heavier silk against the cold, held in place by a single thong around her neck.

  At last Aurhinius placed the letter on the table. One of the cats crawled out from under the couch, perched on the letter, and started licking crumbs from the nearly-empty tray. Eskaia lifted the beast onto her lap and stroked it until it purred.

  "This idea speaks well for whoever had it," Aurhinius said at last. "Have you any notion who that might be?"

  "None," Eskaia said. "Except that it is someone who listens to the merchants of Istar. They would be the principal victims of Karthayan enmity, which would be certain if Istar sent a great fleet wandering about in northern waters."

  "Whereas a call for volunteers for a voyage to Suivinari Island," Aurhinius finished, nodding, "could bring in Karthayans, rovers, even minotaurs. Can you ask among your father's friends, if they know more?"

  Most of them believe that they have long since paid all debts to one who has, after all, become a rival in her own right," Eskaia said. She did not keep a certain smugness out of her voice. Being a good steward of what Jemar left her had made her proud. Enlarging that fortune until she was called, only half in jest, "the Princess of Vuinlod" had made her prouder still.

  It had not, however, made Gildas Aurhinius prince. His lack of envy of her wealth and power was another of his numerous virtues.

  "More than an additional voyage each year or the price of tar could be at stake here," Aurhinius pointed out. "Can you ask, even if you expect no answer?"

  "I—wait. I can ask Torvik and Chuina to ask their friends. Torvik will certainly get answers, now that he has been made captain."

  Aurhinius stared. "You did not tell me that news," he said.

  "It came only two days ago. He is leaving Kingfisher's Claw, to be captain over Red Elf. She is only a small ship, twenty crew at most, but she is his own, and at twenty-one—"

  Aurhinius interrupted Eskaia by kissing her soundly on her lips, then her cheeks, then her forehead, while his arms went around her waist. The cat squalled a brief protest, then hastily took itself off.

  Presently Eskaia realized that they were both on the couch, and she was nestled against his chest. It was a comfortable chest, rather like that of a large bear grown gentle with age, and warmed her almost as much as did her pride in her son.

  "We shall need a banquet worthy of so much good news," Aurhinius said. "Your son a captain, our friends among us, and wisdom in Istar."

  "I thought all wisdom had left Istar when you chose exile," Eskaia said.

  "Oh, I am sure some remained who could find their shoes at dawn without help," Aurhinius said. His embrace tightened.

  In time, Eskaia felt thick but still deft fingers undoing the thong around her neck.

  At long bowshot from the foot of one of Vuinlod's shielding hills the road made a sharp bend. There, an escort met Pirvan and his companions. They were three men and two women, mounted on shaggy, undersized horses, and had the air of being more at home on a deck than in a saddle. They took their positions like seasoned fighters, however, and the procession wound its way onward into the hills.

  From here the hills were mostly bare. In spots, too bare to be natural, with hardly a brown and wizened weed rising higher than a man's calf. Pirvan mouthed "Fields of fire?" at Haimya, and she nodded.

  "It seems they have cleared the ground to al
low archers free play," Hawkbrother said. "If I were they, I would also have tunnels dug through the hills, so that my men could pass through and take in the rear anyone who thinks himself safe on the crest."

  One of the escorts gave Hawkbrother a bloodthirsty look. Pirvan hoped it was over his chattering, not his being a "desert barbarian" wearing the marks of a Solamnic Knight.

  Before Pirvan could inquire, Sir Darin fixed the new-fledged knight with a look only a trifle less hostile than the Vuinlodder's. "We know that you did well in the course on fortifications, at the Keep," Darin said. "We also know that blood and training, your eyes are sharp. But you need prove neither of these, by blathering to all secrets that our hosts may wish to keep close."

  Hawkbrother gave the wisest reply: silence. This left both his betrothed and her father without cause to speak.

  Darin told the truth about Hawkbrother's study in fortifications, which to Pirvan was no small marvel. The Free Rider chief's son turned knight had been raised in a tent that could be struck in half an hour, and pitched two days later a hundred miles away. Pirvan had never known anyone with less experience of having a roof over his head, except for certain seafarers who never came ashore except to die.

  But then he remembered the caves and tunnels within the sacred mountain of Hawkbrother's birth clan, the Gryphons. These showed magic or tools or both, no perhaps the ancestors of the Free Riders had not been strangers to permanent dwellings, and the memory ran deep without having died.

  Meanwhile, the Vuinlodder who had glared at Hawkbrother was now trying to stifle laughter without falling off her horse. Pirvan labored as hard, stifling a sigh of relief. Knights of Solamnia, after all, did not admit to being so much as uneasy, let alone fearful.

  The road now wound upward across slopes too steep for a more direct path, and straightened out only when it plunged into valleys between the hills. In one of these valleys, so steep-walled that it might have been gloom-shrouded even on a sunny day, a messenger from Lady Eskaia rode up to them.

  The messenger was a kender, perched on a mule nearly the size of a horse, with elegant grooming that had suffered somewhat from the weather. So had the kender herself; her hair resembled a mop recently used to scrub the mule's stall and her clothes hung on her like wilted leaves.

  "The Lady Eskaia bids you make haste," the kender said. "She bids you to a dinner, the knights and their ladies, and must know if you will come."

  "Ask the road and the weather," Pirvan's chief guard said. Human stare and kender stare collided with an almost audible clang. Pirvan then saw the kender frown, and suspected she was waiting to see if the guards objected to being excluded from the feast or to receiving the news from a kender.

  "Aye," the chief guard said. She was so short that some suspected her of dwarven blood, but no dwarf was ever that wiry or that fast on her feet. "We have duties to our knights."

  "Duties?" the kender said, wiping hair and rain off her forehead and nearly poking herself in the eye with a thumb.

  "Yes," the chief said. "Guarding our knights. As we swore to do. You've heard of oaths?"

  "Oh, of course. Everybody takes some every week. But some of ours are not to harm guests. That's an oath even older than the Oath and the Measure of the knights. I can't imagine how anyone in Vuinlod would want to harm you.

  "Or perhaps I could imagine it. But it would take a while. My imagination doesn't work well in bad weather, either. So would you like me to tell the story in a poem or a—"

  "What we would like you to do," Pirvan interrupted, "is tell Lady Eskaia that we accept her invitation as you have given it. We shall make all the haste we can. Meanwhile, we thank her."

  "I go at once," the kender said, turning her mount. "My friends are laboring hard. They will be happy to know their work will not be wasted."

  She dug in her heels, and had the mule up to a trot before she disappeared around the next bend.

  " 'My friends?' " the chief guard said. "Are the kender preparing the feast?"

  "They may try to, if we do not ride on fast enough to help Lady Eskaia stop them," Pirvan said. "Not that the kender would poison us, you understand. But I think we all want more of a meal than they are likely to have ready!"

  Famine—or, at least, indigestion—was averted at the last minute. Kender are not the best folk on Krynn for keeping secrets, so Lady Eskaia's cook heard of what the kender planned before it was too late. A flying column of under-cooks and scullions charged in one door of the kitchen as the kender fled with more haste than dignity out of the other.

  The only irreparable damage turned out to be the biscuits, which Lady Eskaia suggested be sent to Torvik for ballast for his new ship. Surveying the rest of the scene, Gildas Aurhinius shook his head. "No one can say that kender are stupid," he said. "But they will try to be wise about six different things in the space of an hour. So nothing is done, or, even worse, much is begun but left unfinished."

  The banquet ran heavily to fish, and Eskaia noted that this was not to the tastes of some of her guests. On the other hand, Sir Darin seemed to inhale broiled salmon and fried oysters, salted leefish and planked browser with spiced kelp sauce, as if he were having the last meal of this life.

  "This is how we feasted at Waydol's stronghold," he explained. "Our feasts were few, but the sea served us most of them."

  "You at least could not have been on short commons too often," Lady Eskaia said. She was applying herself to a bowl of pickled rockfish with a peppery turnip dressing. "Not and reach your present stature."

  Darin flushed like a boy, which added still further to his notable good looks. He was far too young to stir her, even had they both been free, but he was a fine thing to see, like a blooded stallion or a vase of Ergothian alabaster.

  "I have the parents I cannot remember to thank for that," he said. "That was a precious gift, too. Even from beyond the grave, Waydol was wise beyond the common run of men or minotaurs. He still might not have taken such care with me if I had been of more common human stature."

  "And you are taking care that your line does not diminish, in any way," Aurhinius said, with that rumbling laugh Eskaia had grown to recognize as the sign to end his drinking for the night.

  Eskaia called for spice water and turned the conversation to the affairs of Belkuthas. Darin and Rynthala had made it their seat, then left it under the care of the local dwarven thane when they came north.

  "The dwarves said they could do more work on the defenses with us gone than they could with us in residence," Rynthala said. "What was it that they told you once, Darin?"

  "They told me that they did not mind having humans loom over them like the cliffs of Bardrof, but when those humans knew not one stone from another, it was a trifle wearying," Darin answered. "Is there anywhere a man can expect courtesy from those who serve him?"

  "Don't look for it at Tirabot Manor," Haimya said, and they all laughed. Indeed, there was a warmth in the air of the chamber that to Eskaia seemed to come from the presence of eight friends who were all more or less content with the courses their lives had steered. To be sure, Hawkbrother and Young Eskaia were young enough to be Gildas's grandchildren, and might never reach his years, but….

  Eskaia smiled, leaned far over, and planted a kiss on Gildas Aurhinius's cheek. Before he could move to return it, she turned to the assemblage and said, "I have news that deserves our attention. This letter—" she held up the report of the volunteer fleet's being raised "—and an announcement: Gildas Aurhinius has asked for my hand in marriage, and I have consented."

  Then, as Aurhinius tried not to gape, she handed the letter to Pirvan.

  It made the rounds of the six guests quickly enough. Eskaia was waiting for Pirvan to lead the replies long before Aurhinius had stopped murmuring what he was going to do to her for ambushing him as she had.

  "Just he sure you keep those promises, and not only on the wedding night but afterward," she whispered back, then saw that Pirvan was ready to speak.

  He spoke bri
efly, as usual, and wisely, as almost usual. "We cannot refuse this invitation," he said. "To do so, or to send only modest strength, would be to let the kingpriest's minions guide the fleet. We must do our best. Minotaurs dead on this island used so freely by both the Destined Race and our own people could lead us into a costly war. This is a matter of greater import than might be obvious at first from the situation at hand."

  Darin nodded. "Indeed," he said. "Ah—I do not know much of magic, or those who work with it, but it seems to me that we now have a chance to send wizards and priests who are not in the kingpriest's pocket.

  "If any such are needed at all," he added.

  "Likely enough they will be," Haimya said. "I have heard from my kin in Karthay that two ships that intended to call at Suivinari are overdue. We still may not need magicworkers, but if we do not have them with us, we surely will."

  "It could be minotaurs—" Aurhinius began, and was interrupted by Darin's clearing his throat. Rynthala put a hand on her husband's arm, and Haimya shook her head.

  "That was thought, too, in Karthay, and asked of certain discreet minotaur captains," Darin said. "The minotaurs said that they too had ships missing or overdue in those waters."

  "Minotaurs have been known to lie," Aurhinius said, and this time his look alone quelled any reply from Darin. "But not more than humans, and seldom in a matter of life or death at sea. They know that Zeboim has no friends among any land-dwelling race."

  Eskaia nodded. "Then Gildas and I will see to it that Vuinlod does its share," she said. "With luck, we can put to sea with enough ships to hold our own soldiers, sailors, and magicworkers. We may even have room to carry the men whom the Knights of Solamnia will surely wish to send on such an important matter."