"… to pass through the fire."
Verminaard started. Judyth and Aglaca sat beside him on the mare, and the girl was saying something, something he had lost in his revery.
He turned to her politely, attentively, brushing the drooping hair from his eyes. She was not the girl he had
imagined, and that really didn't matter anymore. None of his previous disappointments did. But she was lovely and dark, and she would do.
"I beg your pardon, Lady Judyth," he replied, his voice husky and low.
"The fire," Aglaca said impatiently. "It's a blazing wall between us and Nidus, and the ogres are stalking along it like wolves. If we expect to see your castle again, we'll have to pass through the fire."
"Then that is just what we shall do," Verminaard said ¦ calmly, pointing toward the gap in the flame. "Follow me, and ask no questions."
"But Verminaard …" Aglaca began.
Verminaard glared at him. "Be ruled by me, Aglaca. Be ruled by me or be damned where you stand."
Verminaard's confident words died swiftly when they reached the plain.
From above, the fire had seemed navigable to him. There was an end to it, and borders, and the ogres that moved around it and through it were scattered and few in number.
But now, the horses picked uncertainly around the southern edge of the rolling flames, and the path through the blaze seemed to have vanished in the short journey to the edge of the fire wall. The scorched ground smoldered beneath Orlog's hooves as the big stallion stepped gingerly from patch to patch of remaining green. The evening sky was smoke black and unreadable.
As he rode down the spreading wave of flame, Judyth and Aglaca close behind, Verminaard's assurance continued to wither like the blackened grass in the fire wall's wake. At this distance, the choices were quick and
baffling. The shouts of ogres came to him from the smoke, from the flames, from the charred woods behind, and he moved through a country of doubling echoes. Dodging through the black grass, foxes and rabbits, pheasant and squirrel, all panic-stricken, were driven by an instinct to flee, to burrow, to vanish, and the horses leapt and shied as the wild things scurried beneath them. Orlog leapt over fire-felled oak and aeterna, and for the first time since he had broken the beast in the high meadows north of Nidus, Verminaard could not control the black stallion beneath him. Twice Orlog veered dangerously north, until the flames rose like a battlement above them, and twice the big horse shied away, whinnying wildly and sidling through the seared undergrowth as the blazes broke around them, leaving them astound-ingly untouched.
Where is the Voice now? Verminaard thought, clinging frantically to the reins. This is my country, my power and glory. It told me so.
He looked back. Astride the mare, at the smoke's edge, Judyth peered calmly into the roiling fire. Aglaca sat behind her in the saddle, his wiry arms wrapped gently about her waist, but there was no gentleness in his eyes. Instead, he stared at Verminaard coldly, accusingly.
Suddenly Judyth called out, pointing toward a gap in the flames. There, where the fire wavered and lapsed over a little rise, a cloud of purple smoke hovered and swirled.
"Through that!" Judyth shouted. "Make haste!"
With a shrill whistle, she snapped the reins against the mare's neck. The tough little beast snorted, wheeled, and raced toward the heart of the cloud, scattering sparks and fire-blackened clods in her wake.
Verminaard gasped and started to call out, to stop her, but the mare flashed by before he could speak, could reach out, and he had to follow because Orlog had already made his own choice.
The smoke rushed over them like water.
For a moment, Aglaca held his breath, and then, as Judyth steered the mare through the whirling obscurity, he leaned back, opened his eyes, and breathed carefully.
The air was bracing and moist, awash in an odor of lilac.
"Where …" he whispered, but Judyth reached back and motioned to him for quiet.
"Hush," she murmured over her shoulder. "There is danger in words. Someone ahead beckons us through the smoke."
Verminaard strained to follow his companions, craning over Orlog's neck at the distant, dark shape of Aglaca's back, which vanished and reappeared, then vanished again in the thick, rolling smoke.
It's stifling here, he thought. Blind and stifling, and smelling of ash. How can I follow when… when Judyth…
Where is the Voice now?
The smoke parted instantly around a green-robed woman.
Instinctively Judyth tugged at the reins.
But the woman was farther away than she had imagined, standing over a fallen man in a circle of foliage. Around her, the bright grass spread and waved, and a dozen violet flowers, various and tall, blossomed strangely on the scorched plain.
The woman motioned gracefully, waving them on. Judyth felt that she knew the woman in green, that she should know her, but the smoke was rising again, and the face was fading, fading into the purple mist until all that remained was a pale arm gesturing, motioning, waving….
"Go on," the woman called. "Follow."
"How?" Judyth asked. "Where?"
"You knew before. You'll know again."
The pale hand swirled a shape from the smoke: a passage, whirling and doubling on itself like a folding tunnel, dwindling and fading slowly.
Instinctively again, Judyth guided the mare through the passage, through a flurry of shape and image, out into starlight and air, Aglaca clinging desperately to her waist and Verminaard sputtering on his stallion as it burst through the smoke behind her.
Still coughing, Verminaard rode on ahead, reoriented now, assured by faint stars and familiar terrain.
With a deep breath, Judyth guided the mare onto the open plains. Aglaca shifted in the saddle, and Judyth felt suddenly safer.
But she marveled as white Solinari peeked through the scattering smoke, marveled at what she had seen in the quiet, purple mists of the strange enchantress.
A flower, she had seen. Or the shape of a flower.
And within it, the shape of a mask.
Chapter 12
Cerestes watched from a high grove overlooking the castle as the fire raged toward Nidus.
Again in human form and wearied from flight and the Change, he knelt amid cedar and taxus, his black robes wrapped closely about his shoulders. In cold, unblinking curiosity, he gazed out at the riders bursting through the edge of the flame, the standard of Nidus-black storm-crow on a red field-tattered and burning in the diminishing light.