Axis’ questions about the Sceptre very nicely,” he said finally. “You know the staff is the Sceptre.”
“Probably.”
“I wanted to give it to Caelum. Damn it, Faraday, I stole it. It belongs to him, and he needs it back.”
She tilted her head very slightly so he could not read her eyes, and again remained silent.
“When Axis taxed me about the Sceptre I looked for the staff, intending to hand it to Caelum. But it had disappeared. Later, hours after Caelum and our parents had gone, I chanced upon it. Faraday, do you know where it was?”
She turned her face back to him again. “No.”
“It was in the blue cart.”
“It has its own purpose, Drago. And, undoubtedly, it did not want to be handed back to Caelum.”
He sighed and rolled onto his back, staring at the forest canopy far above. “Like all beautiful things,” he said, and glanced at Faraday, “I do not understand it.”
She bit down a grin, but he saw it anyway, and smiled himself.
“Why do you help me, Faraday? Why were you there in the Star Gate Chamber, waiting for me?”
“Someone needed to believe in you. I found that no hard task.”
“You evade very well.”
“It comes naturally to me.”
Drago smiled again. He did not know why Faraday was with him, or how long she would stay, but he hoped it would be a while yet. It was a vastly new and immensely warm feeling to have such a beautiful woman walk by his side and say softly at night, “I believe in you.”
Drago’s grin subsided and he silently chastised himself for romanticizing Faraday’s motives. It was obvious she knew some secret of Cauldron Lake, and it was that knowledge, or that secret, that kept her by his side. Like himself, she wanted only to aid the land, in any way she could, and at the moment she apparently felt the best way was to continue at his side.
He felt her fingers at his neck, gently feeling the bandage, and he looked at her. Gods, she was beautiful.
“Does the wound hurt?” she asked, trying to divert his attention.
“A little.”
She drew back. “It should heal without giving you too much trouble. At least your father has enough experience with a blade to give you a clean cut and not some jagged hole.”
“Then I am grateful for the small mercies of parental experience and skill,” he said, “for, frankly, I thought he had me dead on the sliding edge of that blade.” He paused, his own fingers briefly probing the bandage. “Faraday … at some point after you dragged me from the collapsing chamber I asked you who I was.”
He frowned. “Why did I ask that?”
“I have no idea,” she lied. “But do you remember that you answered your own question?”
He nodded very slowly. “And yet I do not understand my answer, nor the impulse that made me mouth it.
“The Enemy. I am the Enemy. What does that mean?”
“Go to sleep,” Faraday murmured, and turned away and lay down herself, and although Drago stared at her blanketed back for a very long time, she said no more.
Drago dreamed he was once again in the kitchens of Sigholt. The cooks and scullery maids had all gone to bed for the night, and even though the fires were dampened down, the great ranges still glowed comfortingly.
He smiled, feeling the contentment of one at home and at peace.
He stood before one of the great scarred wooden kitchen tables. It was covered with pots and urns and plates, all filled with cooking ingredients.
But something was missing, and Drago frowned slightly, trying to place it.
Ah, of course. Of what use were a thousand ingredients without a mixing bowl? He walked to the pantry and lifted his favourite bowl down from the shelf, but when he returned to the laden table, he found that the bowl had turned into a hessian sack, and that the plates and bowls on the table no longer contained food, but the hopes and lives and beauty of Tencendor itself.
“I need to cook,” he murmured, and then the kitchen faded, and Drago slipped deeper into his sleep.
Night reigned. Terror stalked the land. To the south of the Silent Woman Woods seven black shapes, a cloud hovering above them, thundered across the final hundred paces of the plain, and then vanished into the forest west of the Ancient Barrows.
Zared woke early, just as Drago and Faraday were rising and shaking out their blankets.
“Are you sure you won’t take two of my fastest horses?” he asked, standing up and buttoning on his tunic.
“No,” Faraday said. “The donkeys will do us well enough.”
“However,” Drago said, and his face relaxed into such deep amusement that Zared stilled in absolute amazement at the beauty of it, “there is one thing I would that you give me. I had a sack, and have lost it. Can you find me a small hessian sack? I swear I do feel lost without it at my belt.”
And he grinned at Zared’s and Faraday’s bemused faces.
Far, far away he stood on the blasted plain, wondering where his master was. Last night he’d dreamed he’d heard his voice, dreamed he felt him on his back. Was there a use for him, after all? No, no-one wanted him. He was too old and senile for any use. His battle-days were behind him. His legs trembled, and he shuddered, and the demonic dawn broke over his back.
They sat, arms about each other, under the relative privacy of a weeping horstelm tree. Outside the barrier of leaves moved Banes and Clan Leaders, whispering, consulting, fearing.
Isfrael, Mage-King of the Avar, lifted a hand and caressed Shra’s cheek. She was still handsome in her late fifties, and even if the bloom of youth had left her cheeks, Isfrael continued to love her dearly. She was the senior Bane among the Avar — had been since she was a child — but she was beloved to him for so many other reasons: she was his closest friend, his only lover, his ally, his helper, and he valued her above anything else in this forest, even more than the Earth Mother or her Tree.
When Isfrael’s father, Axis, had given his son into the Avar’s care when Isfrael was only fourteen, it had been Shra who had inducted him into the clannish Avar way of life, and into the deep mysteries of the Avarinheim and Minstrelsea forests and the awesome power of the Earth Tree and the Sacred Groves. She had made him what he was, and he owed her far more than love for that.
“Can you feel them?” she whispered.
“Yes.”
He trembled, and she felt the shift of air against her face as he bared his teeth in a silent snarl. “Demons now think to walk this forest!”
She leaned in against him, pressing her face against the warmth of his bare chest. “Can we —”
“Stop them?” Isfrael was silent, thinking. He pulled Shra even closer against him, stroking her back and shoulder.
“Who else?” he whispered.
“WingRidge said that —”
“WingRidge said many things. But what has the StarSon done to help. Nothing … nothing. The Avar have ever had to fend for themselves.”
“Can we stop them?”
“We must try. Before they get too strong.”
Shra laughed softly, humourlessly. “They are strong enough