Harric pressed his back to the lodge and paused to let his eyes adjust to the dark. The Mad Moon still hadn't risen above the Godswall; he guessed there remained no more than a half hour of darkness before he bathed the cliffs and river in his fiery light. To his left stood the foot of the stable yard, where the Hanging Road entered through the south gate and split off behind the inn through the market place; to his right the yard flared into a wide carriage turn-about, bound on two sides by the inn and on the opposite side by the stable where Jacky slept, unaware of Harric's intention to wake him for a very long ride.

When he could see well enough to make out the outlines of the roofs against the sky, he began skirting the head of the yard, keeping the inn to his right and navigating mostly by memory. He hadn't gone five paces before he stumbled upon something and fell. Throwing out his hands to break his fall, he bit back on a yell, his battered ribs erupting in protest with the impact. What he found on the ground, however, was the unmistakable softness of a body. Groping, he found the face, where he felt no breath, but his hand came away sticky and smelling of blood. He shuddered, and wiped it off on the victim's breeches. Had this been one of the grooms that attacked him? Had Caris slain the man and dragged him here?

A scuff from across the yard made him crouch and freeze. He peered in the direction of the sound, and at first he saw nothing. Then he caught movement along the stable, though it was so dark he couldn't be sure whether he'd actually seen it or merely heard it.

He was in near perfect darkness at the foot of the inn, but some of the windows above allowed a faint and indirect candlelight to tint the darkness farther out in the yard. In one of these pale shafts two figures moved parallel to his course. One was tall and thick, the other short and broad, with the larger making considerably more noise — limping, perhaps? — with an occasional click of metal on metal, as from armor plates. The smaller figure moved with a rolling, loping gait Harric could not make sense of in such low light. Crawling? Hobbling on all fours?

"God's socks, this place stinks," one of them whispered. "Whole place is an open privy."

"Hush you, now," said the other, in an accent Harric had never heard. "We're not alone."

The figures stopped, and Harric froze. He couldn't have been spotted. The darkness beneath the eaves was complete, and he'd made no noise. He scanned the yard for evidence of some third party, but saw nothing, and guessed someone must have appeared in a window above him. The figures changed course directly for Harric, passing through a swath of candlelight in which Harric glimpsed a bald pate and long mustachios.

The Phyros-thief.

"Here is your man in the green belt," said the voice with the accent. "Was he a walking bruise when you left him?"

"No. Where is he?"

"There. Behind the barrels."

"Moons take your eyes, Brolli. I can't see any barrels."

"I'm here," Harric whispered. He stepped out, hope rising in his heart. "Here."

The old man drew near, breathing heavily and smelling strongly of ragleaf and oiled iron. "Moons, I'm glad we found you, son. There's been a mistake — "

"This is not good place to talk," the shorter one whispered. "Come this way."

 "Follow Brolli," said the knight.

Brolli led them to the head of the yard, in the deeper shadows against the inn. Harric caught confusing glimpses of him as they crossed swaths of candlelight. His proportions seemed wrong. The legs were too short for his prodigious upper body. He used his arms while walking, like a child playing at horse, but his legs followed his arms in a kind of hop or lope. A dwarf? Once it had been fashionable for knights to keep dwarfed men as squires, but the young Queen Evandora found it distasteful, so it fell from fashion. Could the old man be so backward he kept a dwarfed squire? It might be the reason for his outcast blackened armor.

"Here," Brolli said, pausing in a pool of darkness at the head of the yard, where the stable joined the inn. Harric still couldn't place his accent.

"Sit guard for us, will you Brolli?"

Brolli said nothing, but by the sound of it he climbed onto one of the water barrels lined up beneath the eaves, then leapt to the side of the stable and scrambled onto the roof.

Harric listened in astonishment, trying in vain to follow with his eyes.

"Born climber," the old man grunted. He groped Harric's shoulders, and found his backpack. "Good. You were leaving. Smart boy. I assume you have the purse I gave you. I need it back"

Harric blinked. "The purse?"

"Don't play daft, son," he said, an edge of urgency in his voice. "That trinket's very important — it was a mistake that I gave it — "

A door in the lodge at the head of the yard banged open, ten paces to their left, casting a beam of lamp light into the yard. The old man hushed Harric before he could speak. A tall man stepped from the lighted corridor into the yard, and closed the door behind him, to be swallowed by the dark. Harric stared at the place where the man had been, and picked him out as a darker patch against the lodge, padding softly in their direction.

Harric glided to the side until he rested his hand against the lodge, and crouched behind one of the water barrels. The man's eyes would not be as well-adjusted to the dark as his were, and if the man continued his current course he'd pass right by Harric without knowing it. Harric could pick his pocket or trip him into the old knight, or grab him from behind. But the man crossed half the distance to where they stood, then stopped, his back against the siding.

The scent of spiced perfume reached Harric's nose. Aconite, also called "witch cloud," he thought, as if it were one of his mother's blindfold tests in courtly tinctures. Aconite is an Iberg favorite: mildly stimulating, anxiety inducing if used in incense, associated with magic.

As if to confirm the correlation, the man muttered something in the rich, round syllables of the Iberg language as he slipped a hand into his shirt, removing it with something clasped in his fist.

Then he vanished.

One moment the Iberg was there — the next, he simply wasn't.

The old knight cursed.

Harric stared in astonishment at the spot where the man had been. He'd heard tales of witches using the power of their witch-stones to enact incredible feats of stealth, but he'd never dreamed he'd see it. How vain he'd been to think himself invisible by virtue of his stillness and the man's ill-adjusted eyes! Harric felt naked and vulnerable, his own tactic rebounding against him with double the force, but remained motionless in hope that he had not been spotted.

"I don't fear your magic, witch," the old knight rumbled, suddenly loud in the darkness. "You won't be the first witch Belle's tasted, nor the last." The scrape and chime of steel on steel suggested the drawing of a long and well-tuned sword. A brag, perhaps, but a convincing one: most Arkendian knights would have pissed themselves in the presence of such magic, but the old knight seemed truly unfazed. Harric remained motionless, letting the knight draw the witch's attention until Harric could pinpoint the Iberg's location and...what? If he could grapple him, he might find his witch-stone and take it away. That would make him visible, Harric guessed, since it was a witch's source of magic.

"I see you," said a voice with a thick Iberg accent. The voice sounded hollow and distant, as if passed through a pipe, which confused Harric's sense of its location. "You put us to such troubles today."

"I don't need to see you to kill you," the old man said.

"And who is this? Una tricola bambi! Ha-ha! Do you know she follows you? No? You no see her. She is clever. Aha! She try to protect you! So much now come clear."

Harric had no memory of tricola bambi from his Iberg lessons, but he saw no sign of anyone else in the stable yard. He felt his heart thumping harder in his chest. Keep your eyes on the old man, he willed the invisible Iberg. Give me a clue where you are, and I'll have that stone before you even know I'm here.

Harric's heart stopped for a beat as another thought crashed through his fears. What if the magic of that witch-stone would keep Mother away?  His heart beat faster. You have to fight magic with magic...right?

The door at the side of the lodge flew open again, followed by an enormous knight in orange silks and cloak, and a torch-bearer with half-dozen young knights. All wore swords, but none wore armor. Harric tensed to flee, but the old man made no move, so he forced himself to stay.

"There!" cried the torch-bearer pointing to the old knight in the shadows. "I told you I saw him!"

The orange knight grinned, and flipped a coin to the torch boy, who caught it, beaming, and stood back to watch. Sir Orange drew his sword with a flourish and strolled forward, and his companions followed suit with a chorus of chiming steel.

The old knight limped back to put the stable doors behind him, and took a stand there as his enemies formed a semi-circle before him. Harric remained crouched behind the barrels, only paces from the nearest knight. He discarded the idea of running to open the doors behind the old knight so they could escape inside; if the stable boys had done their duty, the doors would have been barred at sunset. Harric himself could slip into the crack between the stable and the inn at the corner of the yard — a narrow rat run that opened on the other side of the stable on a scaffold cantilevered over the river —  but the old knight would never squeeze in the gap, even without his armor.

"Stay down, son," the old man muttered. "Brolli, you try to find that witch."

Harric had no idea if he'd been spotted by the witch, and the witch had given him no clue of his location.

The old knight wrapped his cloak around his left forearm as a shield, and raised his sword vertically before him in both hands, hilts at a level with his shoulders. He chanted, his voice flat with ritual:

"Though you wound me I die not.

Yet there will be honor in your passing."

The words sent a shiver down Harric's spine; it was the Salute of the Blue Order, and in the ballads it preceded the death of wicked knights. Several of the younger knights before him seemed also to feel its power, for they paused, eyes darting furtively at their leader.

The orange-clad knight laughed, white teeth flashing in a well-combed beard. "Words to frighten children! Don't let his name fool you. This is no ballad knight or champion. This is an old man who can barely stand without a prop. And, boys, you fight beside Sir Yolan," he said, thumping his chest with a fist, "and Sir Yolan never bows."

The old man grunted. "It's as a good a night as any to go to the Black Moon, Sir Yolan." He completed his salute in the old-fashioned hilts-to-forehead manner, but when his opponents failed to return it, he snorted in disgust. "You're no knights. You're cutthroats. You're the reason our Queen makes knights of women."

Sir Yolan lunged, and three of his companions joined in a simultaneous attack. There was a clash of steel, a blade sparked across the old man's breastplate, and one of Yolan's companions fell heavily. As the others fell back, the old man's sword pursued for half a beat longer. A young knight yelped and dropped his sword, a finger severed.

It had happened too quickly to track, yet the old man moved so positively and powerfully that the others seemed like children with wooden training swords. Moreover, what they just witnessed was so clearly at odds with Sir Yolan's boast that his remaining companions stood stricken, staring as blood pooled around the fallen.

An eerie voice irrupted from the air beneath the eaves.

"Nebecci, Destego!" Iberg words, unknown to Harric. The moment he heard them, an icy pain seized his heart, and he fell to his knees.

"Nebecci, Destego, Raghat!"

The old knight bent as if kicked in the gut.

Harric watched helplessly as his protector stumbled into a barrel, one hand clawing at the armor over his heart. Only Brolli remained unassailed by the magic, hiding somewhere in the darkness above.

"To him!" cried Yolan. Leaping over his fallen companions, Yolan swept his blade over his head and downward in a devastating two-handed blow that the old knight barely parried. Yolan grinned, pressing his advantage, until he retreated and whirled to face a fourth knight who had emerged from the darkness behind him to haul him away from the old man by the tail of his cloak.

Harric stared in shock. Caris!

As Yolan whirled, his blade whirled with him in a hissing head-high sweep. Caris ducked and lunged beneath the cut. With one hand she flipped his cloak up over his blade, while the other guided the tip of her sword to lick beneath his beard. Yolan lurched back, a lock of beard falling to the ground. As he attempted to disengage his cloak from his blade, Caris brought her blade down hard on Yolan's wrist and sent his sword spinning to the dirt. Yolan roared in pain. With surprising speed, he bent and snatched up his sword, but Caris was quicker. Her blade darted again beneath his beard, and this time it loosed a gush of scarlet like she'd broached a wine keg.

The eerie voice echoed nearer to Harric: "Destego!" The pain in his heart redoubled. Expecting the invisible Iberg to knife him at any moment, he slung his pack around to his front and donned it backwards as a kind of improvised armor. Unexpectedly, the pain in his chest diminished as if the pack also shielded him from magic. He took advantage of the temporary reprieve by fumbling it open and drawing out his saddle knife and cloak. With one hand he slashed the knife through the air before him, and with the other he whipped the cloak out in an attempt to reveal the witch's location. Making no contact, he toppled an empty rain barrel to one side, so as to obstruct one direction of approach.

"Destego!"

Again the terrible pain in his breast, this time so severe he convulsed and fell flat on his back in the dirt. Above him the dark sky whirled, half star fields, half torch-lit eaves. Brolli's strange face appeared over the eaves to look down at Harric, round eyes glowing like a cat's.

Harric flung his cloak out one last time, and this time it collided with something at his feet and fell there, rebuffed. Brolli launched himself from the eaves, long arms spread for a flying embrace. His descent halted abruptly in the air, where he sprawled and grappled with an unseen opponent, then the Iberg appeared beneath him, eyes white with surprise, and the icy hand vanished from Harric's heart. In the next moment the witch and Brolli collapsed upon him, and the weight of the two men forced the wind from Harric's lungs. The witch's stubbled cheek squashed against Harric's. In spite of all, Harric had the presence of mind to drop his knife and immobilize the man's arms in a desperate embrace, but just as he secured them the witch's head dashed sideways with a concussive shock and the man went limp upon him.

Brolli peeked down over the Iberg's shoulder, round golden eyes like coins in a flat, hairless face. He grinned, exposing huge canines. "Good!" he said, then turned and disappeared from Harric's view.

Something leaked on Harric's cheek from the Iberg's head. "Moons!" he gasped, "Get him off me!" But no one came. He struggled under a welter of perfumed cape. The pain of his ribs screamed with the effort. When he finally managed to flop one of the man's arms sideways into the dust, something rolled from the dead fingers and stopped directly before Harric's eyes.

A glassy globe the size of an egg, night-black, yet oddly luminescent. The witch-stone.

Harric palmed it.

By the time he squirmed free of the dead man's embrace and struggled to his feet, the fight in the yard appeared over. The dead Iberg lay tangled in the blue cape that marked him as "protected" by the Sapphire lord. It had kept anyone from getting the idea to hang him while in Arkendia, but fortunately did nothing to protect against cudgels. The old knight leaned on his sword, breathing raggedly, all his opponents motionless and prone, but for the whimpering torch boy and a squire who knelt before Brolli.

"Stop crying," Brolli said, as he bound their hands and gagged them. "Be glad. You live to tell the ballad of Sir Willard and the Foolish Yolan."

"What the Black Moon took you so long, Brolli?" the old knight growled.

Brolli gave another wolfish grin. "I see in night light, but I cannot see into the Unseen. And I only use ma—" He seemed to catch himself. "My people's weapons, if we are dying, remember? You were not yet dying."

"Fair enough."

Caris stared down at the inert forms of Sir Yolan and a young knight at her feet, her armor spattered with blood.

"First kill, son?" the old man croaked, mistaking her sex in the armor. "It gets easier. But that's the trouble with it, mostly. To whom do I owe my thanks?" No reply from Caris. "Well, you were most welcome here. Damned witch had me falling over with a heart-stroke."

Caris moaned, and dropped her sword in the dust. Hands on her ears, she fell to her knees and rocked back and forth.

Harric rubbed his chest, where his fingers inadvertently found a pendant lump of witch-silver the green lord had left behind, and which the Iberg had reached right past to seize his heart. He managed a brief smile at that irony, but it stung his split lip like the jab of a pin.

Brolli left the captives behind the barrels and loped to the old man's side. In the light of the single torch it became quite clear to Harric that the dwarf-man was not even human. No dwarfed human had such long or powerful arms, such eyes, or such teeth. But if not human, what? A thrill of wonder managed to rise above the fog of his pain. A Kwendi?

"You bleed." Brolli pointed with a long arm at the old knight's side.

"It can wait. I'm more concerned about our young knight here. Son?"

Caris stopped rocking and slid her hands from her ears.

The dwarf-man loped to the burning torch, and flipped it into a rain barrel. It hissed briefly, and darkness engulfed them again.

"Snap out of it, son. No reason to be ashamed. Shows you're not an animal. I'd rather have one man like you at my side than ten beasts like Yolan. Are you hurt?"

After a heartbeat Caris murmured something. Then again, louder, but hoarsely, "I'm alive."

"Good man. And where is our unfortunate grain monger, Brolli? He's still with us?"

Brolli chuckled. "He is looking worse than when we find him," he said, in his strange accent. "But he not looking good then, either. Over by the barrels. No, other way. Four pacings."

"Harric?" Caris said, reviving. "He's all right? Harric?"

"I'm all right. Sort of."

She groped her way to him and held him by the shoulders. "I tried to leave," she whispered, "but — I was worried — " Her voice hitched, and Harric cocked his head to hear her better, for it almost seemed she was...what? Choking up over him? "I thought we should travel together — " she continued, with an awkwardness somehow magnified by his inability to see her. " — Leave together. For safety."

"You know each other," the old man observed. "Pairing's a wise idea, considering your situation. Now, there's no time to explain, but I gave you the wrong purse today, son. My mistake. I need that trinket I gave you, and I have another purse to make up for your trouble. I think you'll find it a more than fair trade."

"Make up for my trouble?" Harric chuckled. "You can't afford the trouble I've had."

"I'm sorry about that. But I'm not stingy, and I know you're an honorable lad." He located Harric's arm and pressed a purse tight with coins into Harric's hand. "Take this. More than those rings are worth."

"What rings? It was a nut — "

"We want to go with you," Caris interrupted.

The old man snorted. "Ridiculous. You have no idea what you're saying."

"We all need to get out of here," Harric said, taking up Caris's cause. "We know the area and can help you escape."

"I know someone who can hide us," Caris said. "There's a stream we can follow west in the next valley — "

"No time for this, son — "

"Show us this stream," Brolli said, in a tone of decision unlike any servant. "We travel together."

"Wh — ?" The old knight choked. "Brolli, we've brought them enough trouble."

"We can't keep running, old man. You have wounds. And they know of safe places."

The side door banged, followed by the murmur of hushed voices. At the edge of the porch two house-girls appeared — neither with customers, which was unprecedented that summer. Harric guessed Bannus's arrival had cast a pall over any merriment in the place. The women bent their heads in worried conference, close enough for Harric to smell their rose perfume, but the two were too self-absorbed and unadjusted to the dark to notice others near.

When the women slipped back into the lodge, the old man spoke. "Very well. You two fetch your horses from the stable and meet us on the road. We'll be sure the north gate's open for you. But I want those rings now."

"So you can leave us again?" Harric said. "No deal. Once we're safe and clear, we'll settle up." To Caris he said, "Stay here at the doors, and I'll unlock them."

Before the old knight could protest, Harric slipped his pack to his hand, felt his way along the stable to the corner of the yard, and slid sideways into the rat run too narrow for the others to follow.

*************************************

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