The Silver Mage - Katharine Kerr [71]
“So!” Ranadar said. “You did love that woman. Did you want her to stay?”
“I wanted her to go, Your Highness, but only for her sake. For mine I wish she could have stayed, but I’ll hope and pray that she lives a long life and finds a little joy in it as well.”
“The thought becomes you. I doubt me if you and I will do either.”
“The only joy I can see myself finding, Your Highness, is dying before you do.”
“That’s a boon the gods will probably grant you.” Ranadar paused, looking up at the cloud-strewn sky. “One way or the other.”
PART II
THE NORTHLANDS SUMMER, 1160
The reflection in the mirror is not your actual face. No more is the world you see the world.
—The Secret Book of Cadwallon the Druid
I GOT MY WISH. I died long before the prince did.
The silver dragon spread his wings, contemplated flight, then closed them again. A wind came up, whining through the broken towers, murmuring in the trees. A dust demon whirled across the shattered paving stones of the courtyard by the long-gone gates.
“I thought I’d die here in Garangvah,” Rori said aloud, “but I didn’t. We lived through the siege, and then I followed Ranadar when he began raiding. It was all that was left to us, raiding. We stole their horses, we killed as many of their men as we could.” He laughed with a long rumble of satisfaction, remembering the kills. “It was my wyrd, when I died on one of those raids. Was it an arrow?” He considered one of Garangvah’s broken towers, as if perhaps it had heard and might answer. “I don’t remember. It doesn’t matter anymore. It’s a new war now.”
With a rustle of wings the silver dragon leaped into the air and flew, heading east. He laired that night on one of the foothills, then set out again in the morning. Late in the afternoon he reached the fortress he’d seen a-building. Although he’d flown over the area a number of times, he’d never examined it carefully. In the slanted light of the aging day, he saw marks upon the ground he’d not noticed before, places where the scrubby grass grew thicker or thinner. As if they were shadows thrown by Time itself, the marks displayed a pattern of long lines enclosing areas that might have been fields and little circles the size and shape of farmers’ huts. Yet nothing remained on the ground to explain them.
The fortress itself presented a further surprise. In the midst of flat scrubland, it stood on a hill of sorts—very much of sorts, he realized. He flew up high and glided in a lazy loop, studying the hill and the half-finished buildings, all of wood, that stood behind a wooden palisade. Despite the clutter, he could see enough to discern a crucial truth.
Like a long sausage, the ridge rose in an oddly symmetrical shape. A circular depression marked each end, as if the earth had settled over some kind of construction underneath. In the center, where the new buildings stood, he could only guess at the ground underneath, but it seemed oddly uneven, as if boulders or some sort of loose rock underlay the soil. At least part of the ridge, then, was no natural feature, but an ancient structure, perhaps even an enormous barrow joined to shrines at either end.
Did the Horsekin realize that they were building upon a supremely unstable foundation? Apparently not. Long barges, anchored side to shore, fringed the nearby river. Each of them held cubical blocks of gray stone. Somewhere upstream the Horsekin were quarrying. Rori could guess that they had learned a hard lesson about dwarven fire the summer before and intended to defend against it as best they could, but he doubted if any master masons were working on this citadel. The city-builders of the Gel da’Thae would have understood another lesson—that stone walls required a firm footing if they were to stand. A peculiar mound like this one would destabilize anything heavy built upon it.
They could perhaps build a stone fortress here if they drove pilings for a foundation, but after they drove the pilings, then what should they do? The more Rori considered the question, the more uncertain of the answer he became. While