That ice in her voice, Ember thought. She knows more, and she is not telling. But with these runes…
The Nerakans have her now, Takhisis informed him. They intend her for my temple's first sacrifice, because of her lavender eyes. But they will not destroy her, nor will they keep, her forever.
"Suppose they find her secrets before… before we do, m'Lady? Nerakans have a way of gathering secrets."
The voice of the goddess rose softly after another long, uncomfortable silence. The Nerakans are my servants. They will not rebel. But if they do, and if they dare to sound the rune…
All of the gods will know it at once. And whom, my dear Cerestes, do the hundred clerics worship? Who controls armies in Sanction and Estwilde? All that the Nerakans would augur in the runes are their own deaths.
"This… quarrel with Laca," the dragon offered, shifting the ground of the talk.
Will cost him a son, Takhisis interrupted. Of that I am certain.
"But what of the other? This Verminaard-"
Is no less the son of Laca Dragonbane, fool! the Dark Queen announced sharply. The cavern walls seemed to recede, and the dragon began the slow transformation back to his human form, back to the dark mage Cerestes.
He should have known. The silence as to Verminaard's birth. Daeghrefn's cruelty and marked prejudice against the boy. The lack of physical resemblance between father and son.
Astonished at the Lady's tidings, Cerestes suddenly felt frail, baffled and cold, as a whole cloudy history of deceit and betrayals formed at the edge of his understanding, something he needed to know, needed to use.
/ will use one, Takhisis said and chuckled. The other is… dispensable. Lord Laca has left me an abundance of sons, and I shall need only one of them. For the blood ofHuma runs through Laca Dragonbane, and Huma's line is tied with the sounding of the rune. I need just one of Huma's line. He will be the last survivor.
"B-But how, Highness? How do the young ones fit?" Cerestes asked. But the goddess was not telling. The dark eye above him faded, and the exhausted mage lay at the center of the chamber, his black robes, tattered and split by the Change, scattered to the far corners of the cavern. Again the uncovered slant of light glowed silver and gray from the mouth of the cave, and the mage rose blearily and crouched at the edge of light, stitching his robes back together with spells.
I shall win, Takhisis prophesied, her voice no more than a whisper of thought or memory, no matter what anyone chooses, I shall be triumphant. Go now and do my bidding, Cerestes…
Verminaard could not forget the girl.
At night, in the midst of his meditations, her hooded form and the black tattoo on her leg haunted him, as did his fleeting view of her as her horse turned on the far side of the stone bridge and she rode away, bound to the saddle and guarded by bandits. When Aglaca bent to his devotions, Verminaard would draw forth the Amarach runes, turning them intently in his hand as if some new symbol on the ancient stones would appear to give him a clue as to her name, her origins…
Why the bandits held her as captive.
He had no idea why she drew him so, but he thought of her all his waking hours, and especially when he was sup Chapter 6 posed to be at his studies.
Not long after the hunt, through Cerestes' suggestive power, Daeghrefn appointed the mage official tutor to the boys. It was an acknowledgement rather than a promotion, but now Cerestes began their instruction in earnest, with rigorous classes in higher astronomy, mathematics, and ceremony. As Verminaard scratched on parchment the phases of the black moon and learned more powerful dark spells, Cerestes quarreled with Aglaca, who was now forced to attend the lectures but sat stubbornly in the corner, still refusing to give himself to the new mysteries.
In the midst of this new academic pressure, Verminaard found his mind wandering, wool-gathering in long, adventurous fantasies in which he rescued the girl from dragons, from ogres, from other dangers.
The mage would rap the table, and Verminaard's thoughts would return grudgingly to the castle's solar, to the sunlit classroom made suddenly strange by his own imagination and consuming dreams. Aglaca, poring over his botanicals rather than the books of spellcraft, would regard him with concern, and Cerestes would scowl and point to the text. Verminaard would renew his attention with energy, with promises…
And in a matter of minutes, he would be lost once more in thoughts of the girl.
Once, in high summer, when the images of her were still unmanageably strong, he boasted to Aglaca all he had imagined.
It was late evening, one of those summer nights when the darkness itself delays and the world seems to hover in a half-light until nigh onto midnight, an evening when nightingales keep awake the restless. After a few minutes of practicing a slow, graceful fighting kick, Aglaca had stretched against the battlement and asked him unsettling questions.
Had he seen her eyes?
The expression on her face? What color was her hair?
He smiled at Verminaard's stammer, his dodging answers.
"I suppose you could draw her portrait, then?" Verminaard retorted coldly.
Not ten yards away, three ravens settled ominously on the crenels, and Aglaca shivered and turned away. "I saw little more than you, Verminaard, though I'd wager I could pick her out by the way she sits a horse."
He looked out over the battlements toward the reddening west as the sun settled on the Solamnic foothills.
"'Tis summer again, Verminaard," he continued, his voice distant and softer still, scarcely audible over the boding and rustling of the roosting birds. "And when the summer comes, dreams spill over into waking hours. My father told me to beware that time. 'High summer smoke and deception, light sickness,' he called it."
"A right poet, your father is," Verminaard grumbled, catching only the final phrase. "But I've enough of his verse and your cautions for this long season."
Aglaca lifted an eyebrow. When Verminaard began to grumble and declare, it was always a sign of recklessness and challenge-a ride on a hunt, perhaps, or a climb up a sheer rock face. He was predictable, and though the shape of the deed might change, Aglaca knew a deed was coming, that Verminaard was sick of shadows, eager for the tumult of chase and discovery.
Aglaca smiled to himself and shielded his eyes against the last reddening flood of sunlight.
The deed was coming, and he did not mind at all.
For the druidess had withdrawn since his battle with the Nerakans; she said she had taught him all she could. And now what had he at Nidus but this long captivity and the dark lessons he refused to learn? And unsettled thoughts of his own.
"And therefore the poetry shall be set aside,"
Verminaard declared, his voice hushed to a whisper, drawing Aglaca toward him by the collar, his grip firm and commanding. "When the season turns and the night isn't so blasted short, I'm off to Neraka to find her."
Aglaca smiled calmly into a face the very image of his own.
Verminaard consulted the runes for a plan and an auspicious night. In the solitude of his quarters, crouched over a table in the dim candlelight, he pondered the Circle of Life-the six irregular rune stones set in a sanctioned pattern centuries old, reflecting the energies of the past and indicating the challenges ahead.
Let the others laugh at him. Let Robert and Daeghrefn and even Aglaca call the runes childishness and nonsense.
The laughter would change when he found the key to prophecy.
Solemnly Verminaard set the stones before him, and gazed long and deeply at the scarred lines along their faces, banishing thoughts of the girl, of his father's anger, of the perils of Neraka.
Yet again the stones were silent. The old proverb held, he thought sourly, that a man cannot read his own future in the runes.