Days of Blood and Fire - Katharine Kerr [201]
“I want to kill some.”
“Arzosah, by your name—”
“Oh, I know! East it is!”
A few moments more brought them their second omen of evil. Off to the south a thin plume of smoke rose at the horizon, as if some large thing burned. Rhodry would have thought that someone had fired a dun, if there’d been a dun there to fire. As it was, the smoke lay dead south, the wrong direction for Haen Marn. Since calculating distances from the air lay beyond him, he could only guess that the source of the smoke was a burning farm, down near Lin Serr’s plateau, perhaps. Enj yelled out something incomprehensible, but the fear in his voice spoke as clearly as words. Arzosah put on a burst of speed; she’d seen the smoke as well.
Under them the hills sped by, a dusty green carpet of forest where here and there a stream winked silver. The dragon began to labor, slowing now and then or catching a current in the air to glide and rest. Finally they flew over the last hill to the valley that should have held Haen Marn. Rhodry saw nothing but more hills, stretching green and placid, on either side of the river, the recognizable river that once had sprung from Haen Marn’s lake. Now it ran through a narrow valley, not a broad one, and the land was dotted with pines, not oaks.
Behind him Enj howled in grief and rage both.
“Land!” Rhodry called out. “Down by the water, so you can drink.”
With a long glide and flap the panting dragon settled to earth. Rhodry slid off, then helped Enj down. For a moment neither of them could speak.
“Are you sure I didn’t guide Arzosah wrong?” Rhodry said at last.
Enj merely shook his head no and strode off, heading for a familiar-looking pile of boulders by the riverbank. Rhodry followed and helped him lift the rocks, shoving them out of the way, rummaging round in a kind of desperate hope that they’d find nothing. He was aware of the dragon crouching behind him on the riverbank, her sides heaving in the hot sun. All at once Enj keened, just one wail, bitten off fast. He held up a black and twisted thing, all flattened, tarnished, and torn as if by the passage of a thousand years—the remains of the silver horn that once had summoned the dwarven longboat.
“It’s been withdrawn,” Enj choked out. “Haen Marn.”
“Withdrawn? What do you mean?”
“To its own world. It doesn’t truly belong in ours. In times of trouble, it can withdraw. That’s the dweomer I was speaking of, when you’d worry and such.”
“Speaking of? A bare hint, lad, a bare hint.” Rhodry wondered what was wrong with him, that he’d feel so calm, feel nothing, truly, but a strange and distant curiosity.
“You don’t dare speak plainly! What if it heard? Or they heard? The spirits, I mean. Whatever guards the place. You could find yourself gone in an eye blink.”
“And when, then, will it return? When the danger’s past?”
Enj shook his head. His eyes glistened tears.
“I don’t know. Maybe never,” he whispered. “My grandmother, my father’s mother, the Lady of Haen Marn, the true lady, the one Avain should have replaced if she’d not been born a mooncalf—she told me always, when I was a lad, that we ran that risk, living in Haen Marn, that someday it would withdraw, and there we’d be in its true world, whether we wanted to bide there or no.”
It be a baleful thing, the hefting of this shield. Pray, Rori, pray that never it be needful.
The thought sounded so loud in his mind that Rhodry turned, thinking Angmar stood behind him, started to ask her a question, in fact, and found he couldn’t speak. No one stood there. Only wind sighed in grass. He took a few steps north, toward the spot where the river had once poured from a crack in the cliffs. He was thinking that he really should say something comforting to Enj, seeing as the lad had just lost his mother, when suddenly the view blurred and began to dance in front of him. He dropped to his knees, but he never quite wept, fought himself cold, rather, beside the fast-flowing river, while Arzosah turned her enormous head his way and watched unblinking,
“They slew my mate,” she said at last. “And now they’ve driven