Pel looked uncomfortable and didn’t answer. Instead he turned away, and the party continued silently up the ridge in the gathering twilight.
Chapter Twelve
“And where is he, then?” Stoddard demanded, directing his question equally to Raven and Valadrakul.
Valadrakul shrugged. “I know not,” he replied. “He gave the sign for nightfall, I am certain; thus, I understood he would be here by nightfall.”
“He will come, I am certain,” Raven said.
“Night has fallen,” Stoddard pointed out, gesturing at the darkening sky overhead. Stars were beginning to appear.
Pel, standing a step or two away from the Faerie folk, looked up at the sky and shuddered.
The stars were wrong. The constellations were strange, and the patterns and groupings just didn’t seem natural. He remembered what Valadrakul had said once, that the stars here were not unimaginably-distant spheres of gas, burning by atomic fusion, as they were at home; instead, they were mere thousands of miles away, and burned by magic.
That shouldn’t really make any difference, he told himself. After all, that was what people had believed back on Earth, for thousands of years. They had learned better, eventually.
But Valadrakul said that the wizards here had gone up and looked, that they knew the stars were small and near.
Something dark moved across the sky, and Pel blinked. He stared.
Then, as he watched, the dark object suddenly flared into light, and Pel saw that it was a man, a man holding a staff, and the end of the staff was ablaze with something that wasn’t quite flame and wasn’t quite sparks.
“We must give him time,” Valadrakul was saying. “Perchance some delay has befallen…”
“’Scuse me,” Pel said loudly, “but is that him?” He pointed.
Raven and most of the others whirled, or at any rate snapped their heads around quickly; Stoddard turned more deliberately.
“Aye,” Valadrakul said, “’tis him; Taillefer a’ Norleigh.” He raised a hand, and a yellow glow shone from his palm, casting a weak and uneasy light over the entire party as they huddled in the ruined castle.
The flying figure was approaching rapidly; now, seeing the light, the man waved, and adjusted his course to head more directly for Raven’s party.
“Can you fly?” Pel asked Valadrakul.
Startled, the wizard glanced at him, then turned his attention back to his incoming compatriot.
“Aye,” he said, “an some, though none so well as yonder.”
“I haven’t seen you do it,” Pel said.
“I’ve had no need,” Valadrakul answered.
Pel’s mouth opened, then closed.
No need, perhaps, but wouldn’t flight have been useful against Shadow’s hellbeasts? Wouldn’t it have been useful in scouting ahead, in finding food and water, in ensuring that at least one member of the party would be at the ruin by nightfall? Pel could see a dozen ways in which flying might have been convenient, yet Valadrakul’s feet had always remained firmly on the ground.
If nothing else, wouldn’t it be a way to avoid blisters and aching feet? Pel’s own feet were certainly suffering, and he assumed that Valadrakul’s hurt, too.
Still, he reminded himself that he shouldn’t pry. It wasn’t any of his business. If Valadrakul didn’t care to fly, he presumably had a reason; there might be a cost he didn’t want to pay, or some danger inherent in it.
Or maybe, despite his claim, he just couldn’t fly, any more than he could open the interdimensional portals; wizardry was obviously not all a single skill. There was nothing wrong in that, either, and Pel could hardly question Valadrakul’s power or value, since the wizard’s magic had saved Pel’s life when the hellbeasts had attacked.
And then Taillefer was coming in for a landing, not in a slow upright descent like a movie superhero, but in a headlong tumbling plunge; at Raven’s direction Stoddard and the four Imperial troopers were preparing to catch him, Stoddard at the point of a V, the soldiers two on either side of the big Faerie native, obviously a bit unsure of what they were doing.
“I’d aid, as well, an I could,” Raven said, holding up his bandaged hand, and calling to the others. “Friend Pel, here, stand you ready by the side. Ted Deranian, would take this side with me, and be my other hand? And the women, though you be frailer, stand to the rear and watch, lest any fall.”
Pel stepped up, taking a position behind Wilkins and Sawyer, not at all sure what he was doing; then, before anyone else could react, before anyone could ask any questions, Taillefer came plummeting into the wide end of the V, headed straight toward Stoddard.
“Catch you him!” Raven and Valadrakul called in near-perfect unison, as Stoddard stepped forward, arms out and knees bent, and the four soldiers thrust out their hands.
The flying wizard hit Stoddard hard; Pel could see that he had curled up as best he could, and Stoddard had positioned himself to have an arm under each shoulder, but still, Taillefer’s head drove into Stoddard’s belly hard enough to knock the wind out of the big man. The wizard’s legs flew up, and the Imperials grabbed at them.
And then Stoddard and Taillefer and Singer were all in a heap on the broken flagstone floor of the ruin, and the others were all crowding around at once, trying to help them up.
All except Amy, that is, who was leaning against a broken wall, looking sick.
* * * *
The ruins had been a castle. That had not been obvious at all until they actually reached the outer wall and fought their way through the entangling vines, but once they were inside, even Amy could see that the structure had once had a central mass, an encircling wall, and guardian towers at the corners.
It had obviously never been a graceful fairy castle like the one at Disney World, or the one that crazy Bavarian king had built on a mountaintop; from the look of it, this had been a practical and very ugly fortress, with thick walls of heavy gray stone, few windows, and little in the way of comforts or ornamentation.
Whatever it had been, however, not much remained. The curtain wall, as Raven called it, was broken down into rubble in several places; the courtyard was overgrown with weeds and thornbushes; the roof was gone entirely, the supporting arches and columns broken off short. The great hall had one side missing, the other three jagged remnants.
Oddly, the tower at one end still stood, apparently almost intact, though it was hard to be sure through the thick layer of ivy that covered it. That tower, and the adjoining mass of stonework, had been what they had seen from afar, what they had steered for.
When they had reached it, though, no one had shown any inclination to enter the tower or most of the rest of the structure; they had simply gathered in the ruined hall, where the remains of a stone floor had kept the undergrowth from getting out of hand.
When the men had begun arguing about why Taillefer wasn’t there yet, Amy had almost suggested that perhaps he was, maybe he was in the tower somewhere-but then she had thought better of it. She didn’t want anyone to go in there; she didn’t want the group to be split up into search parties. She just sat down and waited; if this Taillefer was in there, he’d come out sooner or later.
And he hadn’t been in there; instead he’d come falling out of the sky. Amy had stood up when Raven called for help, but the move had upset her delicate stomach-except her stomach had never been delicate back on Earth.
It was delicate now; she struggled to keep down the supper they had stolen from that poor woman and her children, and as the wizard tumbled into the others and knocked them sprawling, like some horribly unfunny clown act, Amy stood by, off to the side, making no move to help. As she watched the men get to their feet she thought it was a miracle that nobody had broken any bones, and that Stoddard hadn’t gotten a concussion from whacking his head on the stones.