… and closed it, violently and suddenly, wedging it shut with a dagger. As quickly as it had come, the figure slipped away, and from inside the keep came the muffled sound of the lad beating frantically, helplessly against the jammed door.
Vertumnus lay back in his hammock, the flute silent as his fingers danced across it aimlessly.
"That one," he mused. "That… hooded one."
With a delighted smile, he turned to Evanthe.
"I know him! I know him by his gait, his every movement."
With a laugh, he rumpled the hair of the dryads, pushing them playfully from the hammock.
"Go to the lady, Evanthe! Diona! Tell her the dance has become more interesting by far!"
And as the nymphs rushed off through the thick evergreens, Vertumnus leapt from the hammock and shook the mist from his long green locks. He slipped the flute into his belt and scrambled from the tree. A long journey lay ahead of him, but it was short compared to the road he had traveled for six years.
"Boniface!" he breathed. "By all the stars unfortunate and fortunate, Lord Boniface Crownguard of Foghaven! He's onto something. Now the music moves more quickly."
Boniface turned from the door of the keep, shaking his head to banish the strange humming noise in his ears.
He was content now. Surpassingly content. For now, the inquisitive lad was locked within the fastness of the tower.
It had taken all his riding and knowledge of geography to arrive at the castle before Sturm Brightblade. He had dismounted in the dark of the stables and slipped across the bailey, having barely the time to secure all the doors from the keep so that once the lad entered, it would be impossible for him to leave. All along the ground floor of the thousand-year-old tower, the doors were wedged impossibly shut. The sheer drop from the upper window was further assurance.
Boniface sighed, leading Luin to a rain-filled trough, from which the little mare drank loudly, the noise drowning out the hammering and shouting at the thick door, the unnatural gnat song in the winter air.
It was not the most pleasant of tasks, this locking of boys in towers. Sturm would most likely starve, and even if great good fortune let him escape, he would be delayed long enough from his forest appointment that his honor would be…
What was the Green Man's phrase? "Forever forfeit."
It had to be done, though, Boniface told himself as he led Luin toward the shadowy stable. It had to be done, because in asking after his father, Sturm might uncover the truth about the siege of Castle Brightblade.
He was too young to understand that truth, or how Angriff had threatened the very life of the Order.
Boniface rested his forehead against the warm flank of the mare, remembering. He remembered how Angriff Brightblade had returned from Neraka with visions, with extraordinary danger in his soul. At once they all had noticed the change in the man, how his swordsmanship flowered, how he had become more skilled and reckless and inventive.
Somehow it was a little… disturbing. After all, Angriff was newly wed at the time, and his father, Lord Emelin, had only recently passed into Huma's breast, leaving Castle Brightblade to the care of his son. It just seemed that Angriff would have been more… conservative.
Boniface shrugged and leaned against the trough.
Angriff had been a puzzle. Always a puzzle. Like that time in the garden, shortly after he returned, when the two of them had walked a narrow path lined with flowers, Boniface a dozen steps behind him and the air loud with finches and sparrows.
Boniface had come around a stand of larick and found his friend bent on the path, gloved hand lightly touching the petals of a green and silver rose. It was as if Angriff was… absent for a moment, that the flower held something he was desperately trying to remember or recover.
Boniface stood there, with his friend lost in thoughts of rare gentleness, with the sunlight of May slanting through the leaves of the Calvian oak so that all of them-Knight, trail, and silver flower-were cast in a curious green. Hardly the place for ill musings, it was.
But Boniface had thought, although idly and no more than tactically, that here would be a fitting place for ambush, if evil intent were to meet with a secluded spot in a garden and a great swordsman for once unwary.
He shuddered and dismissed such a dark musing.
Boniface smiled to recall it now. He had indeed been young that day in the garden.
Nonetheless, his thoughts had moved elsewhere, to the rose that Lord Angriff cupped in his hand and to other, tamer thoughts beyond that. But Angriff suddenly drew sword and rose quickly. He looked down a bend in the garden pathway, under an aeterna bush, then whirled about and made for the delicate wrought iron gazebo in the terraced center of the garden. He acted unsettled, distracted. He leaned against the scrolled gateway of the little building, as if he had been overtaken by some strange and sudden malady.
It was then that Boniface called the servants, thinking he would need help in carrying Angriff to the infirmary.
The servants arrived, flushed and breathless, but by that time Angriff was composed, thoroughly alert. He brushed aside Boniface's bracing hand and ordered the men to search the garden. They came back soon, assuring the Knights that the premises were secure.
Then Angriff had turned to him wearily.
"I am sorry for this immoderate display, Bonano," he said, using the childhood name Boniface hated but endured from his capable friend. "But when I stooped to admire this silver rose, there suddenly came upon me a change in the… energies of the garden. It is what you learn in Neraka, in the face of bandit swordsmen, when your heart and sword hand must learn to sense the intention and impulse of your enemy.
"I felt it just now, here in the garden," he said. "And I saw no one except you. Not even a squirrel or dog."
Angriff grinned and brushed back his dark hair wearily. "I must be more tired than I had imagined," he confessed, and it was hours before Boniface could set aside his own astonishment long enough to tell him that the "change in energy" was his own.
Even more than insubordination, more than irreverence at tournament and in the councils of the mighty, it had been that moment, remembered and magnified over the passage of years, that sealed Angriff's future for Boniface. It was why the Brightblades had to vanish forever.
And why, by simple logic, the boyhad to vanish, too.
Chapter 7
Sturm sat in the half-dark, rubbing his bruised shoulder.
He was living the bad fable told to frighten children, to steer them away from ruins and ill-kept cellars. Sturm had ventured inside, and someone-Vertumnus, he figured, for lack of a better explanation-had closed the door solidly behind him. He heard the footsteps walking away. And then, of course, the door had refused to open, whether by force or wit.
Sturm looked around. A faint light from a single high clerestory window kept the great di Caela anteroom from sinking into total darkness. And yet the hall was oppressively gloomy, paneled in mahogany or some other dark wood, its polish and glow surrendered to six years of neglect.
For Castle di Caela had fallen to the peasants in the very year that Castle Brightblade fell and Lord Angriff vanished. Agion Pathwarden was a blustery but capable steward who had kept the holdings well, but when he met betrayal and death on the Wings of Habbakuk, he left behind him a thin larder and a scant garrison of a dozen men. The garrison was starved out by the peasants in the late summer of 326, around the time of Sturm's twelfth birthday.