Aglaca had assured Verminaard's protection: Osman was a veteran huntsman and a loyal sort, and his dozen troopers would protect them both.
As the young men and their escort rode forth at the head of the hunt, the castle and its settlement dwindled to a scattering of tents and standards in the southern fields. Cerestes raised his hands in the Litany of Farewells. Then a red mist rose about him, and he vanished in a flurry of faded banners and fragmented light. Back to Castle Nidus, they supposed.
Taciturn, windburnt Osman rode between the two young men, his face as dark as weathered oak. His eyes, black and brilliant, scanned the terrain for spoor and hoofprints.
Verminaard, at the huntsman's right, fumed and crouched in the saddle as though he rode into a powerful, icy head wind. He had been betrayed by this soft western lad who rode to Osman's left-faithless Aglaca, who had refused the comradeship of the casting, then demanded the glory of the hunt.
His hunt-his place of honor, his chance to be noble and courageous, to distinguish himself before Daeghrefn. Aglaca and these nursemaids! They didn't belong here beside him. For a moment, he wished that Aglaca alone accompanied him. The plateaus of Taman Busuk were treacherous country, filled with crevasses and cul-de-sacs, where a horse could stumble, a young man could fall…
Verminaard pulled himself from the bloody revery. In the passing months, the murderous thoughts had come more often, more wildly. There were a thousand mishaps waiting for a Solamnic, a thousand deceptions and enemies. Verminaard dreamed of those awful moments, savored them until the dream dissolved before the cold truth of the gebo-naud-any misfortune that befell Aglaca could be visited on Abelaard in Solamnia.
And he would not let misfortune befall his brother.
In a heedless gloom, Verminaard kept his big black stallion in steady stride with Osman's roan. The landscape passed by him in a featureless, angry fog.
Aglaca, on the other side, prayed long and silently to Paladine, to Mishakal, and to Kiri-Jolith of the hunt, as his father Laca had taught him before he was old enough to hold a spear. Let the hunting be good, he beseeched the gods, and the kill clean and noble. And let each huntsman return to his hearth and his family, at the close of the day.
Smiling ruefully at the Solamnic, Verminaard eyed the massive company. They'll just be in my way, he thought, visions of the centicore entering his mind. The beast was slow-witted, ill-tempered, and nearsighted, but if it turned, grunting and lowering its tusks and gathering speed for a headlong and witless charge, the hunt changed radically. Then his companions would be a hindrance, his armor inadequate, his horse too slow, and all that remained between him and the gigantic, thick-skinned boar and its three-foot tusks was his couched lance, strong arm, and nerve.
It was an encounter Verminaard awaited eagerly. He spurred his horse to ride ahead of Aglaca, ahead of Osman. At twenty, Verminaard was burly and strong, and physical courage came easily for him. And, apparently recognizing it, his father had put him in a place of honorin the vanguard of the hunt, where he would most likely see the first action.
An icy rain pummeled the column of horsemen as they rode north across the browned, awakening plains toward Taman Busuk. The tips of their long, barbed spears dipped and rose with the swell and fall of the trail. When they reached the high plains, the horsemen fanned out and rode four or five abreast, separating into squadrons carefully assigned by Lord Daeghrefn.
Riding in the foremost and smallest squadron, Verminaard leaned back on the iron arson of his saddle and inhaled the moist, chilly air. It was lowland breathing here-thicker, more nourishing than the air at the timber-line where Castle Nidus kept its formidable watch. Aglaca, riding beside him, seemed suddenly more animate, suddenly more at home in the saddle and the journey.
They rested the horses in a narrow notch between two cliff faces-a glittering passage where the noonday sun flickered on black obsidian, porous volcanic rubble, and a little mountain pool still crusted with the winter's ice. Dismounting, Verminaard drank deeply of the drus flask at his belt-the visionary's potion that Cerestes said was the door to prophecy for servants of the Dragon Queen.
Then he drew forth again the bag of runes, rankling at the mage's insistence that auguring one's own future was impossible. He was sure self-augury could be done, some way, somehow. Especially now, vitalized by the drus potion: The carvings on the stones seemed to shimmer like veins of light.
"Osman," he called, and the huntsman, whetting his knife by a fallen log, looked up with a frown.
"Not the runes, if you please, young master. I don't take to auguries, nor to that mage of yours."
"They have nothing to do with him," Verminaard lied. The mage had given him the stones when he saw that the lad was curious. "They're fostered under the red moon- under Lunitari. All oracles are, because they're all neutral."
That much was true. Prophecy was a neutral thing. What you made of it was good or evil. And when you read the stones for someone else… well, sometimes you discovered the things that really concern you. The things that pertain directly to you.
Reluctantly Osman approached the young man. He mistrusted Verminaard's superstition, his preoccupation with dark ritual and ceremony. Being a bluff, commonsen-sical man, Osman had little love for the confusing auguries Verminaard constantly and eagerly placed in front of him.
Better the father, who believed in nothing, than this hex of a lad before him.
"Ask about the hunt, Osman," Verminaard urged. "Ask how your company will fare."
Osman cleared his throat, looking at Aglaca for rescue. The other lad knelt by his horse, smiled, and shook his head as he tightened the flank cinch of the saddle. He was not about to enter the fuss over symbol and omen.
"I expect we'll find out shortly enough, Master Verminaard," the huntsman replied, turning coolly back to the log.
Angrily Verminaard cast the runes himself. The flat, irregular stones scattered from his hands. It was an old Nerakan reading he tried-three stones in a sequence, determining the present, the immediate future, and the outcome of the event. The cryptic silver lines seemed to scatter, to flicker on the ground like edged fire.
Aglaca, meanwhile, rose and led one of the horses to the little pool. Leaning to break the ice so that the animal might drink, the youth was astonished to see another face, dark and serene, staring back at him from the glazed surface of the water.
"Great Paladine!" he breathed in astonishment.
It was the dark-eyed woman, regarding him serenely. Leaves hung in her auburn hair, and a curious amber light played over her forehead, as though she stared into the setting sun.
Her eyes widened. She smiled in brief recognition, then vanished into the smoky whirl of the ice. Now Aglaca saw an image of himself, sword drawn amid an alcove of granite and rubble. Verminaard stood behind him in the vision, his weapon sheathed and idle.
Aglaca stepped back and gasped, trying to make sense of the revelation.
It was then that the horses started and shied, their nostrils flaring at the whiff of something sharp and musty on the rising wind. Osman leapt to the saddle, followed instantly by Aglaca and the rest of the troopers. Standing in the stirrups, the huntsman scanned the featureless fields. Finally, like an old Plainsman visionary, Osman pointed to where the high grass thrashed and quivered, like the surface of a lake when something large and unfathomable rises from its depths and parts the shallow waters.
"There," Osman announced calmly, gesturing toward the moving furrow on the horizon. "A small one, but worthy of the hunt."