Which was hardly helpful, because many sailors did. Then the third followed, but he was keeping his head lowered. All three disappeared momentarily behind high-piled debris.
“That was Rap!” Inos exclaimed. “The one in black?”
“No. Not Flat Nose!” Little Chicken growled angrily.
Rap could not tell, not knowing what he looked like from the outside, but he felt very uneasy.
“I find this extremely unhelpful!” Sagorn sniffed. “There is no way to tell where this is. That may be Master Rap with me, but I’m not sure. Does anyone recognize the second man? Where? When? What are we doing?”
Then a huge blackness swept over the two men and was gone—a giant shadow. They dropped hurriedly, cowering behind boulders and staring up at the sky. Faint shouts drifted in the wind.
Sagorn gave a strangled cry and stumbled back from the casement. The scene rippled, fragmented, turned gray, and was gone. Icy wind swirled snowflakes into the chamber. The old man tottered forward again to grip the leaves of the casement and force them closed against the Krasnegar night, fastening the clasp.
He swung around, almost invisible, for the candle had blown out long since and there was only a faint glow from the eastern window. “Did any of you recognize that shape?” His voice quavered.
“No,” said the others, almost as one, but Inos' aunt said, “Yes, I think so. Wasn’t it a dragon?”
“I think it was. Nothing else could be so big. I have been shown my death!”
“Then you had better stay away from dragon country, sir.” Rap was feeling more and more unhappy. The magic had made his scalp creep, but perhaps that had been because to his farsight the scene had been invisible, a mysterious nothing. Of course his farsight had not detected Bright Water the first time he met her, either.
“And that was Rap with you!” Inos said.
“Not!” Little Chicken snapped.
Princess Kadolan and Sagorn tended to think that Inos was right. Rap himself was uncertain. But it could have been, and none of them had known the second man, except that they all agreed he was likely a sailor. That was not a very profound conclusion, because jotnar often were, and Dragon Reach was somewhere in the southern parts of the Impire, near the Summer Seas, a very long way from Nordland.
“Well, there are no dragons here now,” Rap said, and cursed himself for babbling like a nervous child. But there were imps, and the steady thud of axes was coming closer.
“Who wants to try next, then?” Sagorn asked, shepherding them back against the far wall. “That was not very helpful.”
“I shall try, if you like, sir.” But Rap did not really want to know what was causing the unearthly radiance that he created beyond the casement. Apparently the others did not care to know, either.
“I should prefer that you stayed away from it, young man!” Sagorn now sounded more like his usual acerbic self. There were murmurs of assent from the women.
“Then I shall try!” Inos said, not sounding enthused. “I need guidance more than anyone.”
Her footsteps headed for the casement and in a moment she was silhouetted against it as it began to glow. It was going to be daylight again, Rap concluded, but not so bright as in Sagorn’s scene—a gray day. The iridescence of the symbols was less intense, the tints softer. Inos reached up to the clasp and pulled the leaves open.
Then she jumped back, a fist to her mouth to stifle a scream. There was a man standing just outside, his back to the viewers. Without conscious thought, Rap rushed forward. Suddenly—unexpectedly, unforgivably—Inos was in his arms. And they both ignored that fact, staring out of the magic casement.
The man was a jotunn, no doubt of that. He wore a fur around his loins, but the upper half of his body was bare, and only jotnar were that pale shade. His back and shoulders were slick with rain. They were also heavy with muscle and his arms were scarred, his legs invisible below the sill. His thick hair hung like silver plate to his shoulders, hardly stirring in the wind. It was not, as Rap had first thought, Darad. This man was younger, smooth rather than hairy. He had fewer scars and no visible tattoos. It was not Darad, but a man almost as tall. And he was starting to turn.
Rap noticed that Inos was clutching him, also, and her grip grew tighter as the man in the vision turned. Would he be able to see them as they could see him? Rap was just about to release Inos and reach for the flaps—
“It’s Kalkor!” Sagorn’s voice came from close behind them. “The Thane of Gark. And that’s the Nordland Moot!”
The man had stopped moving, but he seemed oblivious of the watchers beside him, who were now seeing his gaunt jotunn face in profile. Looking at it, Rap could understand the man’s reputation, and Inos began to tremble in his arms. In a way it was almost a handsome face, but Kalkor’s appearance suited his reputation. Rap would have expected an older man, but he had never seen a face that so clearly expressed cruelty and implacable determination. It would take a brave man to risk the anger of Thane Kalkor.
There was some sort of ceremony in progress. He seemed to be waiting. Then another man stepped in from the side, an elderly man wearing a red woolen robe, sodden wet from the rain, and a ceremonial helmet decorated with horns. He carried a huge ax and he raised it now, holding it vertically in front of him, using both arms, unable to prevent its great weight from wobbling in his grasp. He gasped some hurried words in a tongue unfamiliar to Rap.
Kalkor reached out one hand stiffly and grasped the monstrous, two-edged battle-ax. It must weigh a ton, Rap thought, seeing how the thick shoulders flexed as Kalkor took the strain at arm’s length, leaning back for balance.
The Nordland Moot? Now, peering into the misty background beyond the foreground figures, Rap made out what Sagorn had seen sooner—a wide flat area of turf, a bare green moorland under a weeping gray sky. Clumped in an irregular circle around the battleground was a huge audience, vague and indistinct in the mist and rain. It was a bleak and ominous scene, barbaric and deadly.
And yet… the watchers were all foggy and indistinct. There was something ghostly and unreal about that background, quite unlike the hard sharpness of Kalkor and his companion, or of the desert in the first showing. Was that just an effect of the rain, or not?
Rap’s attention switched back to the action by the casement. Kalkor raised the ax to his lips, then laid it over his shoulder, moving with military precision. He adjusted his grip and swung sharply around, turning his back to the viewers once more. The shining blue-white blade seemed to be almost within the chamber.
The sounds downstairs had stopped momentarily, then picked up again, much louder. The imps must now be tackling the door to the royal bedchamber.
Kalkor was marching forward over the turf toward the center of the circle, the ax on his shoulder, wearing nothing but the animal hide wrapped around his loins, bare-legged and barefooted.
The man in the red robe had withdrawn. It seemed safe to speak. “What’s the Nordland Moot?” Rap asked.
“It’s held every year at midsummer on Nintor,” Sagorn said quietly. “The thanes settle their disputes by ritual combat.”
“I bet that Kalkor never lost an argument.”
“But this is Inos’s prophecy! Don’t you see, boy? Kalkor will seize her kingdom, and she will take her complaint against him to the moot!”
“I hope I am allowed a champion to fight for me,” Inos said. “I don’t think I could even lift that ax. That would be quite a handicap.”
No one laughed. Muffled voices in the distance were the only sound, too far off for the words to be distinguished, but obviously coming from a large crowd.