"Would that I had the magic that young Sturm needed," Hollis said, a little more soberly.
"He could choose whether or not to let the thorn be changed to music, and change him in turn," Vertumnus said. "He chose instead to have you remove it, to stay as he was. He chose his sword arm and the Order."
"But the wound will always be with him," Ragnell insisted. "Though the time will come when he does not remember it, the wound will always be there."
"To the last of this and anything," Vertumnus said, drawing forth his flute, "the lad could and can choose. But there is one thing remaining that demands my hand, my ensorceling …"
Vertumnus scowled, and Jack Derry laughed at his father's dramatics.
"My love and invention," the Green Man concluded quietly, his eyes on Mara. "For there is an ambush prepared at the Vingaard Ford. I must protect the lad from an old blood feud, from the burden of his father's quarrel on the shoulders of the son. And for this, I need the accompaniment of another flute, another music."
Mara bowed nervously. "It would be my honor to assist you, sir. And my honor," she added quickly, "to assist Sturm Brightblade."
Vertumnus nodded happily. It was the best of answers. And briefly he instructed the elf in the strange duet. She would play an old Qualinesti winter song, bracing it with the silent music of the tenth mode, the Matherian-the music of meditation and thought, for only a mind resolved and intent could bring about what Lord Wilderness had planned.
He, in turn, would play a song from the Icewall sung by the barbarous Thanoi, and behind it he would place the intricate dazzlements of the fourteenth and highest mode-the mode of Paladine and changes. And then, when four melodies were rising from the two flutes and the two players, well…
Then the changes would come, and winter would return to the Solamnic Plain.
Vertumnus smiled. He would see what he would see.
Chapter 22
There were eleven of them now, where at first there had only been three. Crouched by a fire at the banks of the Vingaard they waited, assured by the Solamnics that the lad would soon pass.
There was always safety in numbers. Sturm would be alone.
Tivok, the leader of the band, bundled himself against the brisk spring night. The other eight had joined them without warning, their scales blue and their tails twitching slowly in winter lethargy. He had prepared to undertake the murder with only two henchmen and had devised a clever plan that would see to it that the henchmen did the fighting.
Then the eight surprised him, walking into the campsite after a three-day journey from southern climes, and suddenly the plans had changed.
But that was the way in these times: there were more of his kind-the draconians, born of dragon eggs perverted by a dark and unnamed power-more than Tivok had ever imagined there would be, and he had heard talk that even greater numbers-some of them wielders of magic, some shape-shifters-were traveling north from the hatcheries of the Icewall.
Let that be as it is, the chief assassin thought, turning his lidless eyes to the cloudy sky. None of them need know the amount of gold that the Solamnics placed in my hand. Ten swords will do the work with certainty, where two would have been… more risky. I shall stay on this hill overlooking the ford until the tenth night after the first of spring, like the Solamnic said.
And I shall oversee. Yes, I shall oversee.
And the bounty, if the lad comes? I will keep my half, and divide the rest ten ways instead of two.
He laughed to himself at the shrewd economics, his laughter the sound of wind over dry leaves. If only this infernal cold would pass, if spring would come beyond the signs of the stars and calendars…
The Solamnics had said that the quarry would come, if he came at all, within the ten days following the equinox. He would be equipped with ancient Solamnic armor, more ornamental than functional. His breastplate would be adorned with an ancient family crest: red sword against the yellow sun.
The lad would be tired, they had said. Perhaps defeated, certainly vulnerable.
The assassins had killed three travelers already, unfortunates who had fit the description, or part of it, or were just ill-fated and alone at the edge of the Vingaard Ford. They had rushed from a thick stand of juniper and pulled the first one from his horse. The weather had been warmer then, and the task was easy.
He was nondescript, that first doomed wayfarer, a thin, gap-toothed boy from the southeast who spoke his last words in Lemish when the barbed swords entered him.
The second had been older, though from a distance, his posture and movements were crisp and forceful and altogether young. Tivok had given the signal to the four upriver, waiting at the makeshift dam, on the off chance that the traveler would elude the first ambush.
It took all six of his remaining henchmen to overcome the old rascal, who fought and kicked until the end, wounding two of them in the process. Ever the tactician, Tivok moved the wounded to posts by the dam, replacing them with fresh fighters.
From Tivok's vantage point, he couldn't tell the third traveler was female, especially since she was bundled against the rapidly falling temperature. She, too, had fought bravely, and she had the advantage of the weather. Indeed, one of the assassins fell to a deft thrust of her sword, but the blade had lodged in him when his body turned to stone, as his kind always did, and her tight grip on the weapon had unhorsed her.
The other five milled over her like enormous brazen flies, their dark wings flickering.
"How long will we waste our time in bad weather?" one of them asked Tivok as they buried the girl's body in a shallow grave by the riverbank.
"Yet a while," Tivok hissed, brushing back his hood to reveal his sloped and crested forehead, his copper scales. "Yet a while still." Setting his shoulder to his slain comrade, he pushed over the hulking stone figure so that to those approaching, the dead assassin would look like a boulder, an innocent brown outcropping of rock.
"Count it as… practice, Nashif," Tivok suggested to the questioner, a hint of warning in his voice. "Count it as maneuvers."
Nashif had no answer. Silently the five assassins slipped into the shadows among the evergreens, two of them stopping to lick their blades.
Sturm was scarcely two miles from the ford as they were burying the girl. He rode atop a rested and strangely unsettled Luin, his cloak wrapped tightly about him against the surprising return of winter.
Already he was forgetting his last encounter with Lord Wilderness.
His final time in Dun Ringhill had been brief. He had wandered the overgrown ruins, looking for more signs of Ragnell, of Mara or Jack Derry, or even of Vertumnus, but the place was desolate, the foliage so thick that he could have sworn it had been abandoned seventy years instead of seven days.
The loss of Mara troubled him the most. Somehow it seemed against the Measure to leave without knowing what had happened to her. And yet in the course of his strange and healing dreams, he thought he had seen her face, seen her move among the throng of villagers that he glimpsed in his fevered and wakeful moments.
Something assured him that Mara was safe, was cared for, though he wondered if he would have felt that assurance had he not been weary and inclined to leave.