Icefalcon’s Quest. Barbara Hambly

      Still nothing. It was true that none of the people of the Real World had much use for bandits, not wanting the possessions that lawless folk so stupidly craved, but it was not the way of his people to speak with enemies.

      “I don’t want to kill you,” said Eldor, though he didn’t relax his grip or move the knife. “It would be a waste of a good warrior, and I need good warriors. I saw the practice posts you’ve made at your camps, to go over for yourself what Gnift has been teaching the Guards lately. Would you like to learn?”

      The Icefalcon considered the matter and pointed out, “I am your enemy.”

      Eldor released him then and got up very quickly, stepping clear even as the Icefalcon rolled to his feet. “why?” he asked.

      The Icefalcon thought about the reasons that he had left the Talking Stars People and about where he might go, and what he might do, now that it was impossible for him to go back. He found that he did not have any reply to Eldor’s question.

      Eldor Endorion.

      The Icefalcon drank a little water and settled himself in the bayberry that grew in the ditch. The silence of the prairie drifted over him. He listened, identifying the crying of the coyotes and the greater voices of wolves farther off, the susurration of the ceaseless wind and the smell of dust and growing needlegrass.

      The world of his childhood reassembling itself, scent by scent and sound by sound in the darkness.

      He was home.

      Eldor Endorion.

      He hadn’t been at all surprised to learn that the man who had overpowered him, the man who had put himself in danger in order to trap a possible spy, was in fact the High King of the Wathe. Even when he learned the size of the Realm, and the rich complexity of the world Eldor ruled, he had felt no surprise at the acts.

      They were typical of the man.

      Eldor remained an extra week in Renweth Vale with the men and women he had sent to regarrison and reprovision the Keep, in order to train with the Icefalcon, to get to know him, to test him as leaders test warriors whom they seek to win to their sides. The Icefalcon had trained hawks. He knew what Eldor was doing.

      He never felt toward the King the reverence that the other Guards did or stood in awe of that darkly blazing personality. But he knew the man was trustworthy and respectworthy to the core of his being. He was content to attach himself to the Guards.

      He spent four years in the city of Gae, training with the Guards. He exchanged his wolf-hide and mammoth-wool clothing for the fine dense sheep-wool uniforms, black with their white quatrefoil flowers; wore the hard-soled boots of civilized men (though they were less comfortable than moccasins and left more visible tracks). When his beard came in the following year, he shaved, as civilized men did, though he never cut his hair. He learned to use a long killing-sword and to fight in groups rather than alone.

      In Gae he met Ingold, Eldor’s old tutor, unobtrusively mad and – he quickly learned – probably the finest swordsman in the west of the world. He saw him first sparring on Gnift’s training floor and took him for some shabby old swordmaster down on his luck, which was what he invariably looked like. Later, after he trounced the Icefalcon roundly, they’d have long discussions about animal tracks, the habits of bees, and where grass grew. Just to watch the High King spar with the Wise One was an education. Now and then he would see Alwir’s sister about the palace compound, a pretty, quiet schoolgirl who read romances and never left her governess’ side and had not a word to say for herself. Three years after his arrival in Gae she was married to Eldor, for the benefit of both their houses. Their child was Tir.

      Though no one knew it, time was running out for civilized folk, like water from a cracked jar.

      It was during this time, too, that he became acquainted with Bektis, who was much more a fixture at court than Ingold. Ingold was in and out of the city, but Bektis had a suite of chambers in Alwir’s palace in the district of the city called the Water Park – less crowded and smelly than the rest of Gae, which had taken the Icefalcon years to get used to. Bektis scried the future and the past (he said) and learned through magic of things far away, and he also worked the weather for court fetes and advised Alwir about shipping ventures, something that made the Wise Ones mistrusted by merchants and farmers throughout the civilized realms. Shamans among the Icefalcon’s people also worked the weather, insofar as they would avert the worst of the storms from the winter settlements and the horse herds, but such workings were known to be dangerous. Besides, working the weather might let enemies guess where you camped.

      Alwir and Bektis referred to the Icefalcon as “Lord Eldor’s Tame Barbarian” and made little jests about the things that were, to him, simply logical, like always having weapons and a day’s supply of food on his person, keeping to corners and never being where he could not immediately get out of a room. Their jokes did not offend him. Merely they informed him that they were fools, as most of the people of the straight roads were either mad or fools.

      And most of them died with the coming of the Dark Ones.

      Wind moved over the land, bitterly cold. Above the overcast that veiled the sky most nights now, the waning moon was a ravel of luminous wool. It had taken the Icefalcon most of a year to separate the reflexive terror about being outdoors after nightfall, developed by those who had passed through the Time of the Dark, from the reasonable wariness he had possessed before. Now he listened, identifying sounds and smells, gauging the scent of greenery and water somewhere beyond the slunch to the northwest that meant he might hunt tomorrow, measuring it against the certainty that there would be predators there as well. A small glowing thing like a detached head on two legs ran by along the top of the ditch – most slunch-born things glowed a little. A night-bird skimmed past, hunting moths.

      Tir was out there in the dark, in the camp with Bektis and Hethya and those three identical black warriors.

      Eldor’s son.

      Eldor was not the kin of the Icefalcon’s ancestors. By the standards of the Talking Stars People, he would be considered an enemy. But he had not been. And he was the only person in Gae – the only person in all that new life the Icefalcon had lived among civilized people for four years – to whom he had spoken about why he had left the Talking Stars People and why he could not go back.

      Speaking to him had made him less of an enemy. But what he would be called, the Icefalcon did not know.

      The Dark Ones ringed this place.

      Tir forced his eyes open, forced himself to look out past the campfire that seemed to him so pitifully inadequate; forced himself to look out into the darkness.

       They aren’t really there.

      He had never actually seen the Dark Ones. Not that he remembered by himself – his mother had told him they’d all gone away when he was a little baby. Sometimes in nightmares he’d be aware of them, amorphous waiting stirrings in the shadows and a smell that scared him when he smelled things like it sometimes, some of the things the women of the Keep used to clean clothing with.

      He saw them now. The memory was overwhelming, like a recollection of something that had happened to him only yesterday: clouds of darkness that blotted the moon, winds that came up suddenly, seeming to blow from every direction at once, carrying on them the wet unnatural cold, the blood and ammonia stink. On this very stream bank – only the gully wasn’t this deep then, and the stream’s waters had lain closer to the surface, gurgling and glittering in the light of torches, a ring of torches – he had watched them pour across the flat prairie grass like floodwaters spreading and had felt his heart freeze with sickened horror and the knowledge that there was no escape.

       They aren’t really there.

      He faced out into the darkness, and the darkness was still.

      The memory retreated a little. He felt weak with shock and relief.

      “For the love o’ God, Bektis,” said Hethya, “let the poor tyke eat.”

      She stood in the firelight,