She did not spot the assassin’s camp until she was less than forty feet from it. He hid in the midst of thick trees, their branches forming a natural roof. At some time in ages past a depression had been dug there, and a small rock wall built up to chest height in a semicircle, forming a crude defense. She saw a horse’s ears poking above the rocks, and Myrrima froze for a moment.
She could hear the assassin, drawing deep, wheezing breaths. She scented the air. She could smell blood and rot. The man was injured.
Myrrima looked behind her. Borenson had seen her run, and he was leaping up the hill toward her, trying to catch her. He slipped in a deep snowdrift, and for a moment snow churned in the air all around him as he fought back to his feet. She raised a warning hand, dropped to cover behind a tree, and waited for him.
When he drew near, he was huffing for breath. He tried to still it. He peered into the dense foliage, saw the little camp there, and nodded. He motioned for her to circle the camp, come at it from behind.
Myrrima crept along the edge of the wood, walking in slushy snow. A twig crunched beneath her foot, under the snow. She could barely see the top of the horse’s head there in the camp. The horse’s ear went erect.
Wolf tracks littered the ground here at the edge of the camp. Myrrima looked up and saw a white form against some dark trees uphill. A huge wolf was there, as motionless as the snow. Suddenly it spun in its tracks and bounded away over the ice field, emitting a soft woof.
At that instant, she heard another twig snap behind her. She turned and saw Borenson, warhammer held high behind his head, charging toward the hidden camp.
A rush of wind came screaming through the trees toward them. It didn’t come from uphill. Instead, it was like a tornado leaning on its side, aiming toward Myrrima and her husband. The forest shook like thunder, while bits of pine needles, cones, and icy shards of snow suddenly whirled in a vortex, obscuring Myrrima’s view.
Her heart nearly froze in her chest. For a moment she thought that the Darkling Glory must be near, for she had experienced nothing like this outside the monster’s presence.
“Sorcery!” she cried, stunned motionless.
A blinding blast of wind and ice came whipping over her, knocking the arrow from her hands.
Pinecones and twigs pelted her; shards of ice slammed into her eyes and teeth. Myrrima squinted and raised her hand protectively, trying to see through the tempest.
With a roar, Borenson charged. The storm turned on him. He leapt into the pit.
His warhammer fell and with a sickening thud slammed into flesh. A wailing cry arose. “Oooooooh!”
Wind rushed about the trees then, circling like a storm.
The man’s cry kept ripping from his throat. Pine needles and ice lashed through the air in a maelstrom, then went rushing south up the slopes toward Inkarra.
Myrrima heard the scream “Noooooo!” in the wind, as it drew farther and farther away, echoing among the canyons.
She ran up to Borenson, knowing what she would find.
He stood over a corpse, struggling to free the spike of his hammer from a wizard’s head. The dead man wore the blue tunic of Mystarria’s couriers, with the image of the green man on his chest. But his long silver hair proclaimed him to be of Inkarran birth. His eyes were flung open, and his mouth drawn in a little circle of surprise or pain.
His horse whinnied pitifully at the sight of strangers, and tried to rise. But its legs had been shackled.
“Pilwyn coly Zandaros,” Myrrima mouthed the man’s name.
“This is the wizard that tried to kill Gaborn?” Borenson confirmed.
She nodded. Pilwyn had been both an assassin and a wizard of the Air. Myrrima shook her head in confusion. “What do you think he was up to? Waiting in ambush?”
Borenson was already studying the ground, the shabby camp. The hobbled horse had lain in its own excrement for hours. It gazed at Borenson imploringly.
Myrrima saw no sign of food, no extra wood for the fire. There was nothing left of the campfire but lightly smoking ruins.
Borenson knelt over Pilwyn’s corpse. Four days past, Sir Hoswell, who had been one of Iome’s guards, had shot Pilwyn with an arrow. The wound would have killed any commoner in a matter of minutes. The arrow had punctured Pilwyn’s lung. But wizards of the Air were notoriously hard to kill. Beyond that, Pilwyn was a Runelord with endowments of stamina. So he had merely plugged the cavity in his chest with a crude bandage. But now Myrrima could see that black blood crusted the wound, and it had swollen horribly. Maggots crawled around the lip of the bandage.
“He wasn’t long for the world,” Borenson said. “He’d have died in a few more hours, even if we hadn’t come along. If the infection hadn’t killed him, the hollow wolves would have.”
“But why was he following us the other night?” Myrrima asked.
“My guess is that he wasn’t,” Borenson said. “We’re all on the road to Inkarra, fellow travelers. He probably pulled off the road to rest and heard us pass, then just crept along behind us. He may have even hoped for our aid. But he was an Inkarran in Mystarria—an outlaw.” He sighed.
Myrrima went to the body. She reached down to pull the bandage back, look at the old wound. She felt a cool wind whip around her hand as it neared the man’s chest—suspected that she had just touched protective runes written with wind.
Up the hill, through a thin veil of trees, she heard the horrid ghostly wailing of his voice, and could see the plume of windblown ice still racing away, now nearly a mile uphill.
Borenson gazed in that direction. “His elemental will reach Inkarra long before we do,” he said, and Myrrima wondered about her own elemental, the thing growing inside her. She imagined that when she died, the Water within her would merely leak from her mouth and eyelids, leaving a moist puddle.
Borenson went to Pilwyn’s mount, removed its hobbles. The beast struggled to its feet.
Borenson then leapt up on the stone fence above the camp. He did not speak, but his posture, the tilt of his head, asked, “Ready to go?”
Myrrima asked, “What should we do with the body?”
“Leave it,” Borenson said. “The wolves will have him.”
“But he’s the Storm King’s nephew,” Myrrima said. “We should show him some respect.”
“We can’t dig a hole, and I won’t take him over the mountains to Inkarra,” Borenson argued. “King Zandaros would be none too pleased to learn that we killed his nephew on our way to beg his favor.”
“You’re right,” Myrrima said. “Of course you’re right. But I don’t feel easy about it. Wizards don’t just die. After I slew the Darkling Glory, its elemental hurled boulders around as if they were apples. Binnesman warned that the elemental was still capable of great evil. Pilwyn’s elemental is small, but that thing is headed for Inkarra.”
Again she felt the foreboding that had been growing all day. Something, or someone, would seek to take her husband from her. Could it be the wizard’s elemental?
“Look at the bright side,” Borenson said. “At least we got a good horse.”
With three force horses, the trip through the snow went fast. Or at least it would have seemed so to an outsider. Had you seen them, you would have tracked the force horses galloping up the mountainsides, churning snow and ice with each hoofbeat. When the road leveled, they seemed to almost float above it, such was the length and grace of their stride.
But Myrrima had endowments of metabolism now, more even than her mount, and to her senses the horse did not seem to be moving fast at all. Instead, she felt as if the stuff of time had stretched. The sun lumbered interminably into the sky, and gradually slanted toward darkness. Thus one day seemed to be expanding to fill five. Myrrima felt every second of her life waning past.