Before the girl could reply, Sturm was on his feet, and with a swift, athletic turn, he had hoisted her bundled belongings onto his back.
The pain in his shoulder had vanished, mysteriously and entirely. He wasn't surprised. The hand of Vertumnus had touched everything about this wooded encounter, this evening of battle and music and promises and moonlight.
Sturm grunted uncomfortably at the weight of the bundle. All of a sudden, his burden was five times as heavy, the road five times as long. He thought of Silvanost, there in the midst of the evergreen grove. He thought of the long trek over the Khalkist Mountains, through the Doom Range to Sanction along the Nerakan border, then down into Blode and south to the great forest. A passage through bandits and ogres, he had heard. Sturm almost hoped that Vertumnus would slay him on the first day of spring.
Mara was her name, and the story she told was pure Kagonesti, full of magic and forbidden love and doom. "It started four years ago," she explained, framing her answer to Sturm's question as the two of them emerged from the evergreen copse. It was early morning, and the sun peeking over the eastern horizon was their guidepost.
Sturm shifted the weight of the baggage on his back. Though it was barely sunrise, he was already weary, having wandered the groves all night, burdened by the gods knew what belongings. Mara followed him, leading Luin by the reins, and once or twice in the near distance, he had heard the unsettling sound of the spider, clambering from branch to branch.
"Four years ago?" he asked idly. Fatigue warred with politeness. It was hard to attend to another story.
"Down in Silvanost," Mara continued, "where the High Elves rule, with their fairness and hazel eyes. Cyren was of the Calamons, scion to the noblest of families, while I was but a handmaiden to his cousin."
"I see," Sturm said. He wasn't sure he did see.
"Obstacles right from the start. The course that never runs straight," Mara explained.
She paused, as though remembering. Sturm heard birds rising from the junipers behind him, rousted by the approach of something-no doubt the scion in question.
"We first saw each other," Mara continued, "at the Great Festival of Peace commemorating the signing of the Sword-sheath Scroll. It happens every year, the festival, and every year it seems altogether new. The forest fills with lights beyond imagining, and torches lit in Qualinost and Ergoth mingle amid the trees."
Mara sighed. "It's a glorious evening. As you might imagine, the females of the House Royal, daughters and servants all, are kept from the sight of the lads because… well, because it might make someone untoward!'
She blushed and tugged thoughtlessly at Luin's reins. The mare nickered and bowed her head in protest.
"This time was the most glorious of festivals," Mara said dreamily. "I remember his eyes-Cyren's, that is. He stepped from the coracle, steadied himself on the soft banks of the Thon-Thalas, and with scarcely a pause, he entered the Dance of Dreams, the fifth and greatest dance of the festival evening. You could tell by his dancing that he was highborn Qualinesti, but I studied his eyes as the cellos sounded. Brown they were, and as deep as the woods, his gaze so direct you would think that he never closed his eyes, never even blinked when he stared into the midday sun. Though I have seen them only three times since, I remember them as clearly as I do the lights in the forest or the tilting stars of Mishakal-the stars that I watched for months, waiting for the one night in five years…"
Sturm winced. The road to the Darkwoods looked longer and longer as Mara spoke.
"But enough of that," Mara declared. "You asked how we came to last night and this pass."
Sturm shifted the bundle again. The eggs of spiders? Rocks? Houses? What was bound in the blankets and leaves and webbing?
"Immediately Lord Cyren took a liking to me," Mara said. "He paid court with his eyes in the altering light, in the song of the harp and the deep cello. But I was a servingmaid, my family a trophy of war. And though Cyren was handsome, I set aside thoughts of those eyes and those songs, for ours was a match too farfetched to imagine. And more than that, he was a strange and exotic one-almost without history, he was, from the far reaches of the forest, and of his many cousins, none had met him and few had heard of him."
She traveled on in silence, and it was a while before she spoke again.
"Notes he sent me in the days that followed-notes borne on small leaf-boats such as a child makes as a plaything. He floated his messages downstream on the slow-moving Thon-Thalas as I stood in the current, thigh-deep in water, washing the clothing of my mistress. His words would scorn and tease and inveigle, luring me away with him.
"There was a bridge, wrote Cyren, at the westernmost edge of the forest. If I were to consent to go away with him, I should meet him at the bridge by moonlight, and we would ride away together out of Silvanesti, over the Plains of Dust to a land where Kagonesti and Silvanesti are indistinguishable, where folk couldn't tell High Elf from Wild Elf."
"There are such lands," Sturm offered. "I do believe Solamnia is one of them."
"Even the Knights can tell elf from spider," Mara retorted bitterly. "But that comes later in the story.
"Let it be said now that Cyren Calamon of the House Royal sent his green fleet down the Thon-Thalas daily, and each night I would return to my mistress's tower, leaving his notes unanswered. It is improper for a maiden to be so… forward. He persisted and persisted, until I knew that, had his intentions been dishonorable, he would have left off long ago. It was then I consented to meet with him-not at his bridge where the wood ended and the lands beyond our borders beckoned in freedom and wildness, but at a safer place, at the ferry west of Silvanost. It was a place out of sight from the marble fastness of the great encampment, where King Lorac and his daughter Alhana live in the Tower of Stars, and yet it was a place less… venturesome and hidden than the ones my new friend proposed to me.
"We were foolish in our eagerness. Though our meetings were cautious, even proper, someone saw and someone disapproved. Perhaps," she added ominously, "someone was jealous. And someone spread the story of our tryst through the House Royal. My duties were changed, the quarters of my mistress moved to the high chambers of the Tower of Stars. 'Twas an honor for her-an emptyheaded little fluff who thought her stature raised with her altitude, never quite aware that her newfound position at court had anything to do with her servantry. But it was torment for me.
"So we suffered the months, both of us lonely, both of us yearning for escape and reunion, for a midnight flight to a place where lineage and ancestry mattered not at all."
"There is no such place!" Sturm exclaimed, then fell silent immediately, surprised at his vehemence. Mara didn't seem to notice, her mind on the rest of her story.
'The tale turns even darker here, Solamnic. For Cyren was barred from the Tower, and the high windows were beyond his reach unless he had the wings of a bird or could climb…"
"Like a spider?" Sturm asked.
"Like a spider indeed," Mara said with a nod. "You see the plan, do you not? Well, know it for what it was-a foolhardy risk. As it has done for thousands of years, love sent the unwise heart to sorcerers. To Master Calotte went Cyren, in the darkest part of the forest, where Waylorn's Tower lies gray and windowless, its shadow mingling with the shades of willow and aspen until all light, whether moon or sun, is blocked by leaf and branch and turret. They say the butterflies are black there, and that the squirrels have gone blind because it is so dark that they steer by smell and hearing alone, their eyes grown useless through the generations."