"Even so," Daeghrefn replied oddly, as though he had read her thoughts. He turned toward the fire and braced himself against the back of the chair, which creaked and teetered beneath him. "What does he want, druidess?" "1… I don't understand, sir. And my name is Judyth." "It's a simple question, really. What does Verminaard want?"
Judyth shifted uncomfortably on her stool. "I don't know, sir."
"Are you with him?"
"I beg your pardon?" Daeghrefn's questions were vague and needling. Judyth felt suddenly hot and itchy, as though she were dressed in wool under high summer sunlight.
"Are you part of the mutiny, damn it!"
He was much too loud. The voices in the hallway stopped abruptly, and Judyth imagined the soldiers who had escorted her to Daeghrefn's chambers now crouched at the door outside, listening as their commander further unraveled.
"No, sir. I would not conspire against you."
"So there is a conspiracy. I knew it! What have you heard, then?"
I must leave his presence, Judyth thought. I must get word to the west, regardless of soldiers and mages and dragons. Nidus is fast becoming a madhouse.
She started to stand, but Daeghrefn's menacing stare fixed her to her seat. He slipped into the shadows, crouching behind a statue of great Zivilyn, a spreading vallen-wood carved from veined marble.
"I have heard little, sir," Judyth replied uneasily. "Bits and snatches, but no more than that. Actually, I'm not certain. I have only just met him."
"You met him on a snowy night twenty years ago, in a cave south of here. Do not lie to me. And you said then, druidess, you said then, that his darkness would eclipse my own. Look upon your curse, woman!" He emerged from behind the marble tree, and he threw back his hood.
Judith quietly gazed upon the dark skin, though somewhat paler for his confinement in the tower, the dark hair, and the wild, dark eyes.
"Don't you see what he's done?" Daeghrefn insisted. "What you've done? I should have killed you both that night. Had it not been for Abelaard…"
Daeghrefn snorted and turned back toward the fire. Quietly, after a long, uncomfortable silence, Judyth rose.
"I shall be leaving now, sir. That is, if you have no more questions."
"You know much more than you are saying," the Lord of Nidus declared calmly, solemnly. "Do you remember how cold it was?"
" 'How cold', sir?"
"The night of his birth. In the mountains south of here. Before the fire."
Judith glanced nervously toward the door. Daeghrefn was shifting from time to time, place to place. For a brief, nightmarish moment, Judyth lost sight of him in the shadows. Then suddenly he was standing before the little chapel altar, a candle in his hand. His eyes gleamed brilliantly, like twin flames.
"Oh, I know who you are. This innocence and Lord Daeghrefn, sir serves you ill, druidess. I thought you were long dead, but, no, Robert failed me. He was worthless, and it is good that I left him on the plains. Though perhaps you fooled him as well. I know that your kind can change shape, altering like the seasons or like clouds in the summer sky, though I recognized you at once by the pendant around your neck."
"I still do not understand, sir." Judyth covered the purple stone at her throat.
"The old stories are right," Daeghrefn pronounced, turning to face the altar. "The druids do steal babies."
"Steal babies, sir?"
"They take the promised son, the second child whose birth you await with joy for seven long months, and in its stead they leave… a night-grown changeling." He laughed bitterly.
"I do not-"
"So you have said!" Daeghrefn roared. Then softly, almost wonderingly, he continued. "I saw him dancing last night in the eastern hills, where the little copse of evergreen… where, on the night of the fire…"
He fell silent. Judyth cleared her throat and waited for words that did not come as a minute passed, then another. Finally she backed from the room, leaving the Lord of Nidus staring into the fire.
As he looked at the flickering flames, Daeghrefn remembered another fire, another burning. Suddenly, as though the Abyss had opened to receive him, his thoughts were consumed again with a vision of dark, spreading wings.
Two figures walked the walls of Castle Nidus that night.
On the southwest corner of the battlements, Aglaca kept a lonely vigil, watching the walls, the towers, and the bailey for a sign of his old companion. He had slipped his guards by the stables, but it was nothing new. A lazy pair, they would no doubt wait for him to return, knowing he was going nowhere without Judyth, without all his belongings, left in the room he had stayed in since he was twelve years old.
Resting for a moment against the stone crenelations, the Solamnic youth gazed toward Eira Goch, veiled in a deep western darkness, and smiled as he remembered how he had pointed out the pass to Verminaard from their bedroom window ten years ago, on the night after the gebo-naud.
Verminaard had known the name of the place and its history, but he could not locate it in the dark. Aglaca had given Verminaard the dagger then, and though the little weapon lay polished and well kept in the room upstairs, the promise of their friendship had suffered far worse over the years.
It seemed somehow fitting. Fitting and circular. Aglaca would have to find the pass for Verminaard again- another kind of pass, through another kind of darkness.
For the last three weeks, Verminaard had kept to himself. No one knew where he was quartered, nor had any in the garrison-from aged Graaf down to Tangaard and young Phillip-spoken with the new Lord of Nidus. All of them, however, had glimpsed him at twilight, walking these very battlements.
Pacing in the moonlight. Clutching the mace.
The men were afraid to approach him.
Aglaca was not afraid, but he waited as well, as the dark form stalked the battlements. For Aglaca did not relish new meetings with Verminaard, nor the prospects of being asked again to become the new Marshal of Nidus, second-in-command of a bleak legion of bandits and mercenaries.
No. His part of the story did not lie in war and conquest.
That evening, standing on the cold battlements of Nidus, Aglaca had at last understood that the story he was in was not really his own. It was not an easy thing to admit, even for a gentle and generous soul such as Aglaca, but after he had spoken with the old man in the garden, it came to him quietly that his was only a small part in a great unfolding tale. While he had spent his time in Nidus, hostage in a pact of lesser nobles, large, ungovernable forces had wrestled and warred in the mountains, over the entire continent of Ansalon-throughout all Krynn, for that matter. At stake in their vast contest was history itself, for whichever side in the struggle emerged victorious, the world Aglaca had known would all be changed in a moment.
He knew as well, and with a strange serenity and relief, that his role in the coming history, one way or another, would be over soon. Soon the songs that the old man had taught him would come of age. They were dangerous and volatile words, a god's magic to distract the mage and save his friend. After the magic was spent, Aglaca could never use it again. Then he would walk a path even more dangerous and volatile as Verminaard made a choice of his own.
But Aglaca would try the spell and brave the danger to free Verminaard from his own gebo-naud with Night-bringer and the goddess who gave the weapon life.
"So be it," Aglaca whispered, and a warm, unseasonable wind rose from the western slopes. "I am almost eager for it to begin."