“I cannot say, sire. I wish I could,” Trian added, seeing Stephen look highly displeased. “We had little time for speech. And his face, Your Majesty! I caught a glimpse of it, by the ground light. I could not look at it long. I saw there evil, cunning, desperation—”
“What of it? The man is, after all, an assassin.”
“The evil was my own, sire,” said Trian.
He lowered his gaze, stared down at several of the books, tying on the desk in his study.
“And mine, too, by implication.”
“I didn’t say that, sire—”
“You don’t need to, damn it!” Stephen snapped, then he sighed heavily. “The ancestors be my witness, Magicka, I don’t like this any more than you do. No one was happier than I was to think that Bane had survived, that I wasn’t responsible for the murder of a ten-year-old child. I believed Lady Iridal because I wanted to believe her. And look where we are now. In far worse danger than before.
“But what choice do I have, Trian?” Stephen slammed his fist on the desk.
“What choice?”
“None, sire,” said Trian.
Stephen nodded. “So,” he said abruptly, back to business. “Will he do it?”
“I don’t know, sire. And we have reason to be afraid if he does. ‘I might like the killing too much,’ was what he said. ‘I might not be able to stop myself’” Stephen looked gray, haggard. He lifted his hands, stared at them, rubbed them. “That need not be a worry. Once this deed is done, we will eliminate the man. At least in his case, we can feel justified. He has long cheated the executioner’s ax. I assumed you followed the two when they left the monastery? Where did they go?”
“Hugh the Hand is skilled in shaking pursuit, sire. A rainstorm blew up, out of a cloudless sky. My dragon lost their scent, and I was soaked to the skin. I deemed it best to return to the Abbey and question the Kir monks who sheltered the Hand.”
“With what result? Perhaps they knew what he intended.”
“If so, sire, they did not tell me.” Trian smiled ruefully. “The Abbot was in an uproar over something. He informed me that he’d had his fill of magi, then he slammed the door in my face.”
“You did nothing?”
“I am merely Third House, sire,” said Trian humbly. “The Kir’s own magi are of a level equal to mine. A contest was neither appropriate nor called for. It would not do to offend the Kir, sire.”
Stephen glowered. “I suppose you’re right. But now we’ve lost track of the Hand and the Lady Iridal.”
“I warned you to expect as much, Your Majesty. And we must have done so in any case. I surmised, you see, where they were headed—a place I, for one, dare not follow. Nor would you find many here willing or able to do so.”
“What place is that? The Seven Mysteries[52]?”
Alfred wrote that he intended to explore the islands himself, but he never did so. He appeared to have a vague theory that Sartan magic was involved, but how it worked or for what purpose, he was unable to say.
“No, sire. A place better known and, if anything, more dreaded, for the dangers in this place are real. Hugh the Hand is on the heading for Skurvash, Your Majesty.”
25
Hugh roused Iridal from her slumber while they were still in the skies, the weary dragon searching eagerly for a place to land. The Lords of Night had removed their dark cloaks, the Firmament was beginning to sparkle with the first rays of Solaris. Iridal started to wakefulness, wondering that she had slept so deeply and heavily.
“Where are we?” she asked, watching with half-drowsy pleasure the island emerge from the shadows of night, the dawn touching villages that were like toy blocks from this height. Smoke began to drift up from chimneys. On a cliff—the highest point on the island—a fortress made of the rare granite much prized on Arianus cast the shadow of its massive towers over the land, now that the Lords of Night had departed.
“Skurvash,” said Hugh the Hand. He steered the dragon away from what was obviously a busy port, headed for the forested side of town, where landings could be kept private, if not necessarily secret.
Iridal was wide awake now, as if cold water had been thrown into her face. She was silent, thoughtful, then said in a low voice, “I suppose this is necessary.”
“You’ve heard of the place.”
“Nothing good.”
“And that probably overrates it. You want to go to Aristagon, Lady Iridal. How did you plan to get there? Ask the elves to pretty please let you drop by for tea?”
“Of course not,” she said coolly, offended. “But—”
“No ‘buts.’ No questions. You do what I say, remember?” Every muscle in Hugh’s body ached from the unaccustomed rigors of the flight. He wanted his pipe, and a glass—several glasses—of wine.
“Our lives will be in danger every minute we’re on mis island, Lady. Keep quiet. Let me do the talking. Follow my lead and, for both our sakes, don’t do any magic. Not so much as a disappearing barl trick. They find out you’re a mysteriarch and we’re finished.”
The dragon had spotted a likely landing site, a cleared patch near the shoreline. Hugh gave the beast its head and allowed it to spiral downward.
“You could call me Iridal,” she said softly.
“Are you always on a first-name basis with your hired help?” She sighed. “May I ask one question, Hugh?”
“I don’t promise to answer.”
“You spoke of ‘they.’ ‘They’ mustn’t know I’m a mysteriarch. Who are ‘they’?”
“The rulers of Skurvash.”
“King Stephen is the ruler.”
Hugh gave a sharp, barking laugh. “Not of Skurvash. Oh, the king’s promised to come in, clean it up, but he knows he can’t. He couldn’t raise a force large enough. There’s not a baron in Volkaran or Ulyndia who hasn’t a tie to this place, though you won’t find one who’d dare admit it. Even the elves, when they ruled most of the rest of the Mid Realms, never conquered Skurvash.” Iridal stared down at the island. Outside of its formidable-looking fortress, it had little else to recommend it being mostly covered with the scraggly brush known as dwarf-shrub, so named because it looked somewhat like a dwarfs thick, russet beard and because once it dug its way into the coralite, it was almost impossible to uproot. A small and scraggly-looking town perched on the edge of the shoreline, holding on as tenaciously as the shrubs. A single road led from the town through groves of hargast trees, climbed the side of the mountain to the fortress.
“Did the elves lay siege to it? I can believe such a fortress could hold out long—”
“Bah!” Hugh grimaced, flexed his arms, tried to ease the muscles in his stiff neck and shoulders. “The elves didn’t attack. War’s a wonderful thing, Your Ladyship, until it begins to cut into your profits.”
“You mean these humans trade with the elves?” Iridal was shocked. Hugh shrugged. “The rulers of Skurvash don’t care about the slant of a man’s eyes, only the glint of his money.”
“And who is this ruler?” She was interested and curious now.
“Not one person,” Hugh responded. “A group. They’re known as the Brotherhood.” The dragon settled down for a landing in a broad, cleared space that had obviously been used for this purpose many times before, to judge by the broken tree limbs (snapped off by the wings), the tracks of claws left in the coralite, and the droppings scattered around the field. Hugh dismounted, stretched his aching back, flexed his cramped legs.
“Or perhaps I should say ‘we,’” he amended, coming to assist Iridal down from the dragon’s back. “We are known as the Brotherhood.”
She had been about to place her hand in his. Now she hesitated, stared at him, her face pale, her eyes wide. Their rainbow hue was muddied, darkened by the shadows of the hargast trees surrounding them.
“I don’t understand.”
52
Seven islands in the Griphith Cluster, rumored, among humans, to be haunted by the ghosts of ancestors who had done some misdeed during their lives and who died unrepentant, cast off by their families. The elves have a similar belief; a common threat in elven is “You’ll be sent to the Seven Mysteries for that’” Several expeditions, both human and elven, have been sent to explore the islands. None ever returned.