“. . . until we get to Castle di Caela. From there you may find a dozen paths home, Galen. If not Knights returning from the tournament, then certainly merchants or bards or pilgrims will pass by on their way to the West—to Coastlund or to Ergoth through the Westgate Pass—and they’ll not mind an extra hand with the horses until you’re back to your father’s house.
“But as for me, I owe your father the courtesy of seeing to it that you’re not lost or waylaid in Solamnia. Nonetheless, be ready and mounted at once, or I leave without you.”
Bayard was always threatening, but after the events in the mountains, I had no confidence that he was bluffing any more. Gasping in the chill night air—the air that feels all the colder when you first awaken—I wrapped my blanket about myself, then grabbed onto the mare’s mane for dear and desperate life as we galloped off after the galloping Sir Bayard, who was just underway in the dark ahead of us. It was three days more to Castle di Caela.
In the early hours of the morning, we galloped like apparitions through the small town we had seen from the overlook in the Vingaard mountains—the town in which Bayard had promised we would rest. Side by side, we rushed between dark thatched houses, only a banked lamp or two in the windows to guide us through the sleeping streets, those lights the only signs at this hour that the town was not abandoned entirely. Aside from the brusque awakenings, a shouted command or two, Bayard refused to speak to me, ignoring every question or statement I made, looking beyond me or even through me as though I were invisible. I felt like the puppeteers of Goodlund, designers and performers of the kender puppet shows, who stand on the stage with their wooden creations, move them, and supply their voices. By tradition, the audience has ignored these artists for so long, paying attention only to their puppets, that many outsiders wonder if the kender see the puppeteers at all.
Yes, things had changed between us. As the sky clouded and the rains began once more, Bayard mired himself in silence. He looked at the road ahead of him only. And no doubt he brooded over the comments the ogre let drop.
The sameness of things those days on the road—the rolling hills, the silence, the gloominess of weather and of spirits—was so maddening that I was relieved and grateful, finally, to see a change in the landscape when we reached a rise in the road. Looking down into a valley sloping gently eastward, we saw Castle di Caela in front of us, the bright tents and pavilions of two dozen Knights pitched around it.
“Castle di Caela,” Bayard said offhandedly, and pointed down to the stronghold below us. “We are late, without a doubt.”
He should have been more impressed. Castle di Caela was no huge, imposing structure like, say, the High Clerist’s Tower scarcely a week to our north; yet it made the moat house of my boyhood look like a cottage. I pulled on the mare’s mane, urging her to stop for a moment, even though Bayard was well on his way into the valley.
Castle di Caela faced west. We could see the main entrance and the drawbridge from where we stood. Four small towers rose perfectly from the corners of a huge square bailey, and these towers varied in height. The farthest one from us was the tallest by far, a square structure looming high above the two conical towers in front of it.
The upkeep was remarkable. Merlons and crenels altered on the curtain walls like gapped but otherwise perfect teeth. The westward faces of the towers, lit as they were by the sun setting behind us, glistened with a reddening light that made the castle seem brown or rusty, but flawless nevertheless. I had never seen its like. I know I was a poor boy from the provinces, unaccustomed to solid architecture, but even though this place had stood for over a thousand years, it shone with the glint of newness as though, like the swamp we had left far behind us, it was constantly growing, constantly recovering from the damage of time and of weather.
“Something, isn’t it?” I whispered to nobody in particular. The pack mare twitched anxiously, shaking me in the saddle.
I thought of Agion and of how he would have recoiled at the architectural foolishness of the castle below us, then remembered the few cottages and farmhouses we had passed between the swamp and the western foothills of the mountains, and how our centaur friend would recoil at the little buildings, as though they were somehow a mistake the earth had made.
The castle seemed to blur in front of me. There was no time to think of Agion. Sir Bayard was getting too far ahead of me. With a sharp clicking of my tongue and a slap on her haunch, I prodded the mare into movement. She galloped down the rise with her rider clinging on desperately, and sooner than I could have imagined, we reached the plain in front of Castle di Caela and started to pass by some of the pavilions. Where Knights were striking camp.
The tournament was over, evidently.
Bayard was past the tents and the noisy encampments, almost to the gates of the castle before I caught up with him. He had stopped at the edge of the moat, shouted his name up to the sentinel on the battlements, and was waiting for the message to travel to the keep—no doubt to Sir Robert di Caela—and the huge gate to open and the drawbridge to descend. Rigid in the saddle, eyes fixed on the entrance to the castle, Bayard paid me no mind, even when I spoke to him.
“There is no chance, of course, that we will be offered a warm bath and a feather bed for the night, is there, Sir Bayard?”
From the moat’s edge, the castle was even more impressive, the walls rising thirty feet or more to the merlons overlooking the gate. Half a dozen archers, perhaps more, stood up there on the battlements and gazed idly down at us. They were not curious at all—Just another outlander Knight, they probably thought. Only this one is late.
Behind the archers, if you leaned back in the saddle and craned your neck almost to the point of snapping, you could see over the gate wall to the top of the tallest tower, there in the southeastern corner of the castle. Atop that tower fluttered a wide blue banner, clearly visible because it was held aloft by the north wind—the flag of the House of di Caela, red flower of light on a white cloud on a blue field. It was all very rich, very blue-blooded and forbidding.
Nervously I looked to Bayard, who paid me no attention. Instead, he dismounted and rummaged through the blankets on Valorous’s back until he drew out a thing wrapped in linen, large enough that it surprised me I had not noticed it before.
Indeed, had I been half a squire, I not only would have noticed it but have taken pretty good care of it. It was a shield, naturally, that Bayard unwrapped there at the entrance to Castle di Caela. Not the one he had been using to absorb the battery of vanishing satyrs or mysterious ogres, but a shiny one, unscratched and unscathed, bearing the imprint of a red sword against the background of a burning yellow sun. The Shield of the Brightblades.
As blue bloods met blue bloods.
The gates were thrown open for us, and Robert di Caela himself came down from the keep to greet us, all polite smiles and elegance. He was one of those men whose hair turns gray or even white in his twenties, who retains those youthful features under plumage that should belong to a man twice his age, and as a result looks even younger in the bargain than he actually is. And within the young face hung a white moustache neatly trimmed over a highbred nose, as handsome and as curved as a hawk’s bill.
His eyes were green as the ocean offshore. This was no man to wrestle hunting dogs in his great hall. It was good blood, good breeding, a bone structure to be envied. I began to hold out hopes for Enid. Indeed, I began to hold out hopes for Bayard—that something had happened in the lists or in the musings of this important, elegant man that had left Bayard the swain of the moment, Enid di Caela’s suitor of choice. That Bayard, according to his prophecy, would tie his family name to that of the di Caelas. Or so I was hoping.