Fortress of Frost and Fire Read online

  Fortress of Frost and Fire

  by Mercedes Lackey and Ru Emerson

  version 2.1 fixed a few mistakes took out original page breaks

  Chapter I

  For the first time in many days, the west wind died away with sunset. It was fairly warm and very quiet along the edge of the Whispering Woods. Quiet enough in the stable that the human boy grooming two travel-worn horses could easily make out individual voices from the Moonstone Inn, some distance to the west—and upwind—across a neatly tended courtyard. Mostly dry or downright sarcastic elven voices, but of course, the Moonstone was owned by White Elves. An occasional, coarser human voice rose above the rest.

  Gawaine sighed and freed a hand from his present task to push long, loose carrot-colored curls back under the edge of the cloth band, then went back to currying the horses. His master would wonder where he was, why it was taking him so long to finish such a simple task. But I like being in a stable, Gawaine thought. Even after four years, I feel like I've come home, tending to the horses, breathing the smell of horses and hay. A loud burst of laughter from the inn made him jump; his gray stepped back nervously and he automatically rubbed the heavy neck muscles, reassuringly. "It's all right, Thunder; sorry I startled you," he said softly. "They startled me, though. Somehow you don't expect that kind of raucous noise from an inn full of White Elves."

  Probably that had been some of the humans.

  Though Gawaine had had to reevaluate his notions of White Elves when Naitachal brought him into elven country. "I thought they would be—well, look at them, tall and beautiful, so long-lived! You'd think they would all have beautiful souls, too; that anyone with so much time would be more spiritual. It's just like everything else, Thunder," he mumbled gloomily. "Things used to be so simple." Thunder—named partly for his storm-cloud color, mostly for the heavy way he set his feet down—leaned against him and lipped his hair. Gawaine chuckled softly, gave him a shove so he could get past him into the open, and patted his rump on the way by.

  Across the aisle, there were at least a dozen elven horses. He smiled and sighed happily. Thunder was his own horse, and he dearly loved the cobby dapple gray, but those beauties . . . they made him warm and shivery all over. "Look at those long legs, at that golden tail, and you," he murmured as he wandered down the aisle. "Oh, you love." The horse in question turned its head to give him a long look from under thick lashes, then turned back to its feed. Gawaine sighed again and turned back to take care of his Master's black, Star. What an insipid name for such a nice-looking fellow, he thought. From another point of view, he'd been named by his Master after one of the heroic steeds from an epic verse—which was really silly when you got to know the phlegmatic, unexciteable Star.

  Star munched while Gawaine rubbed, ignoring both the boy and Thunder, whose jealousy made an hour like this difficult. Thunder caught hold of Gawaine's tunic and tugged, and when Gawaine turned his head to free the garment, lipped at his hair again, catching hold of the band and pulling it off his young master's head. Thick, copper-colored curls fell across his face and Gawaine had to shove them back and hold them with one hand while he snatched at the cloth band. He finally caught it, slid it over his forehead and smacked Thunder's neck. "Stop that. Behave yourself." Thunder simply looked at him. Gawaine scowled as he shoved the last of his hair off his forehead and out of his eyes, and moved around to Star's other side to finish his grooming.

  Another burst of laughter from the inn; someone was telling lamp-wick jokes in there, from the sound of things: ". . . only one, but the wick has to want to change!" And a cutting retort topping the laughter, "How dreadfully witty the entertainment is tonight!"

  Change. Gawaine stopped rubbing and let his chin rest on Star's back. Four years of change for him—four years that sometimes felt more like a full lifetime. It was increasingly difficult for him to remember that boy who had been one of Squire Tombly's horseboys. "Sixteen and looking for all the world like twelve," he murmured. Star laid back one ear and Thunder turned to look at him curiously. Not that it was much better now; at twenty, he still found that most of those around him looked at the carroty hair, the slender build, and those wretched freckles and thought, "Fifteen, at most." It had been worse, though: he had been short to boot, back then, smaller than anyone else on the squires land save the genuine children.

  Fortunately, he hadn't been the twelve he'd looked, because before his voice broke, he hadn't been able to sing two notes in tune together. "I would probably have still been stuck in that foul-smelling little cell where Naitachal found me—if the squire hadn't simply executed me."

  Unpleasant thought. For five years—six?—his whole life had revolved around caring for the squire's horses. Life had been hard, of course, especially for the smallest horseboy, and particularly for one who looked like he did—the only pale, freckly redhead, half the size of the others, and especially for someone as serious as he normally had been, even then. It had been even harder once he had shown so much of a gift for dealing with horses and had come to the personal attention of the squire's horsemaster. Standing out for size and looks had been one thing; standing out because he was good at what he did had caused no end of trouble, with first one and then another of the other horseboys finding ways to make life miserable for him.

  All the same, it hadn't been a bad life. He'd been cared for, well fed, and there was a simplicity to things he looked back at with longing. In that life, a boy performed his tasks and did them well, obeyed orders, kept to his place and got on with the other boys in the stable—or at least, didn't fight with them enough to bring himself to the attention of the horsemaster. That was Right; anything else was Wrong. There weren't any complications, none of these moral dilemmas one tripped over constantly in the Real World. No shades of gray anywhere.

  Gawaine sighed, righted himself, and applied the brush to Star's dusty flanks. Probably that had only been a boy's view of matters, or what Naitachal called "looking back with one blind eye." Things couldn't have been quite as simple as all that, however they looked from a distance of four years and a lot of miles.

  They had certainly gotten complicated with a vengeance when the squire's prize stallion had vanished—and Gawaine, as the horse's groomer and the only one of the stableboys who dared approach the brute, had been accused of its theft.

  "So stupid," he mumbled, and Star shifted to look back at him. "The horse vanished from his stall, it was so obvious that magic had to be involved—and back then, what had I ever done that someone could think I had the least bit of magic? Besides, if I'd been able to create Darkness all around the stable, even at night, and then send the stallion elsewhere, wouldn't everyone been aware I had that kind of Power?" He looked at Star and shrugged; the horse blinked and went back to his feed. "Anyway, what was a mere stableboy supposed to do with a horse like Firestorm?" Sell it, and at a very high price, they'd said. Yes, and how was a mere horseboy supposed to account for such sudden wealth? That had been most conveniently glossed over—everyone ignoring the fact that Gawaine hadn't disappeared with the horse, or shown any signs of having a personal supply of coin. The mage the squire hired to examine the entire stable and all the staff hadn't been able to locate a cache of coin or find any trace in Gawaine's mind of having cached anything—except the wooden top he had hidden, years before, to keep one of the older and larger boys from taking it.

  Gawaine grinned, remembering the look on that mage's face—and on the squire's—when the compost heap had been excavated and they had found, not a bag of silver and gold, but a rotting bit of fashioned oak. At the time, he had found that episode almost more embarrassing than being put on trial for horse thievery.

  There wa
s no doubt the squire had been deeply embarrassed, too: bellowing all those orders, up to his knees in the hole, waiting for evidence to be pulled from the hot, reeking mess only to find . . . That moment had ended Gawaine's public trial; Squire Tombly had tromped off, shouting furiously, and his final order had resulted in his erstwhile horseboy being chucked into a cell.

  Magic. "Who would ever have thought?" Gawaine murmured. He hadn't ever given it any thought himself; so far as he knew, neither had anyone on that entire vast estate. If it hadn't been for someone saying what so many thought, that the stallion could only have been spirited out of the stable by magic . . . Gawaine patted Star's neck, ran his fingers through the long mane to comb free several thorny seed-pods. That had been the real cause of all his troubles: magic. He had only been a minor suspect in the matter until that mage showed up. Tottery, white-haired, half senile, the mage had gone down the line of horseboys and come back twice before stopping in front of Gawaine and leveling a trembly, liver-spotted hand at his nose. And on the strength of his word that there was "something about this boy"—and no other evidence whatever—the squire had named Gawaine horse thief, and turned him over to the guard.

  Gawaine leaned against the back wall of the stable and stared into space; he could almost see—and smell—that nasty little dirt-floored chamber, right next to the goat sheds. Almost as if they had known how very much he loathed the smell of goat and wanted to get in a little subtle torture. Not Squire Tombly, of course: the squire wasn't a subtle man at any time, and he had no doubt been heating irons and consulting with his by-the-day rent-a-mage, to see what would hurt the most—even if the first application of pain got a response to the whereabouts of his stallion. Between the two—the reality and the possibilities—Gawaine's spirits had been very low indeed.

  "If I'd been squawking in a boy's soprano, I'll wager Master Naitachal would have gone right by—probably at double step," Gawaine added to himself, and grinned. He'd been singing, partly to pass the time and mostly to keep his spirits up, and the Dark Elf—once Necromancer, now a full Bard—later claimed he had been stopped in his tracks by the underlying Power he felt in that voice. There wasn't any doubt Naitachal had been impressed enough by Gawaine's singing, and his potential; as proof of that, he had immediately gone to the manor house to find out who the singer was, and, when he had gotten that far, discovering what such a singer had done to deserve such a fate. Learning that much, he had somehow convinced the squire to keep the hot irons in the firepit and off his horseboy, and had talked long and hard enough to—well, not convince the man of Gawaine's innocence, but at least to let Naitachal investigate the matter on his own.

  Of course, who would dare argue with a Bard? Naysay him, and Squire Tombly would have been cringing for the rest of his life as his name was bandied across the kingdom in truly hilarious, eminently singable, and extremely unflattering song.

  Something tugged at his hair, Gawaine started back into the present and looked up to see Thunder, his long gray head resting on Stars back, gazing mournfully into his face. Gawaine laughed, freed his hair and gave Thunder a shove. "Stop that, you fool," he said. "You look so silly when you do that. And Star has carried enough weight today!" Thunder shook his head, spraying grain fragments across Star's back; Gawaine gave him another shove, this one hard enough the gelding gave him a reproachful look before pulling back into his own stall.

  "Naitachal," Gawaine mumbled, and sighed heavily. Oh, the Bard had gotten him released from that gruesome, reeking little box of a cell. He'd found the horse and—unfortunately—also found the thief: the squire's own son. "At least he took me with him when he left—and at least he left quickly." The squire hadn't been wildly pleased to learn his spoiled son had gone from being merely spoiled to becoming actively involved with the wrong kind; Gawaine was glad his new Master not only knew all the stories and songs about the fate of messengers with ill news, he'd had the sense to act on that knowledge—and to ask as his reward the services of the boy he'd rescued. "I wonder how long I would have lasted, if I had remained there." Not a very good thing to think about.

  He looked up, brought back to the present once more as several men came into the stable, two of them noticeably weaving. One of these latter was at the stage of too much drink that he'd become maudlin; his companions were trying to shush him, get their horses together, and get free of the inn and surrounding country before full dark fell.

  "Wretched, snotty elves," one of them whined. "Tell a few jokes, try to get people laughing, and wha'd they do? They kick us out!" He turned to one of his companions and clutched his tunic. "Did you ever see such a dull crowd?"

  "Well, all right, not recently," the second man allowed. "Come on, Robyun, time we went home." But Robyun had seen the boy at the far end of the stables; he pulled free of his friend and came down the aisle. He wasn't so drunk he couldn't see Thunder edging a few steps back into the open, or the shift in the gelding's withers; he halted two stalls short of Thunder's and asked cheerily, "Hey, boy! Carrots! How many Mystics does it take to change a lamp-wick?"

  "Sir?" Gawaine asked. He couldn't manage any more than that, without adding something truly abusive. Carrots, indeed!

  The man laughed raucously; his friend came up and started to drag him away, and the drunk shouted out, "Two! One to change the wick, and one to not change the wick!"

  "—and three to make loud fools of themselves," came a sardonic remark from the front of the stable. The men halted so abruptly their joke-telling friend fell flat on his face. Gawaine sent his eyes sideways to see a long, lean, silver-haired figure propped indolently against the doorframe, arms folded across his chest. "Are you not gone yet?" he asked pointedly.

  "We're just going." One of the standing men spoke quickly and loudly, covering whatever the fallen one was trying to say. They pulled him to his feet and hurried down to the horses waiting there—still saddled, poor creatures, Gawaine saw with irritation. Without a backward glance or remark, the three mounted—the joke-teller had to be pulled up by one arm and the neck of his coarse-woven shirt—and rode out the back way. As they vanished into the darkness, though, a loud voice slurred out, "Hey! How many White Elves does it—" The voice was cut off abruptly, and the only further sound was that of hooves moving quickly into the distance.

  As if things weren't complicated enough, just being in elven territory—in the company of a Dark Elf, Gawaine thought tiredly. He went back into the stall to check that Star had enough to eat and that the bucket was full and knelt to collect the saddlebags Naitachal had left for him to bring—as usual, all the heavy stuff, but that was one of the perquisites of being a Master—then staggered back to his feet. He was watching the bags as he juggled them into better position, paying no attention to anything else, as he put a shoulder into Star's withers to get past him. A low sound, someone clearing his throat, and the sound of a pair of long shoes not two steps away.

  Gawaine let out an airless squawk and dropped everything. He had forgotten all about the White Elf who had followed the drunks out to the stable, assuming he'd gone back inside once they'd left. Apparently not.

  "My. Jumpy, aren't we?" the elf asked dryly. He ran a practiced eye over the bardlings travel-stained shirt and breeches, ending at the scuffed boots, then looked rather pointedly, Gawaine thought, at the pile of leather bags between them. His stomach tried to fall into those boots. Don't let him see how badly he did scare you, he thought. He squared his shoulders and drew his eyebrows together.

  "You weren't exactly making your presence known, and I was busy," he replied shortly.

  "Did you expect me to tromp like a three-legged cow, or a human?" the elf replied. "And are you going inside with those?"

  "Why? Are you trying to say I'm stealing them?"

  Impass. The elf bared his teeth in what could have been a smile except that it didn't move beyond his lips.

  "Why would I? Or why should I care if one human steals the goods of another human?" He took a step forward; Gawaine held his
ground as the elf looked in both directions, then leaned close to his ear to murmur, "Or those of a Dark Elf, hmmm?" He tilted his head to one side, waited for some reaction. Gawaine raised one eyebrow, something he knew many found very irritating, and waited. "A Necromancer?" the elf added, in case this fool of a human boy didn't understand. "The Necromancer Naitachal?" he added helpfully.

  "You mean, the Bard—my Master?" Gawaine asked with a lips-only smile of his own.

  The elf tipped his head to the other side and studied him for a very long moment. He raised one eyebrow himself then. "You—know what he is, then? And who?"

  "If you want to know, if I know his name, I have for the past four years. And if I know the meanings of those terribly long words," Gawaine replied dryly, "the answer is yes. If you have nothing important to say, the Bard, my Master Naitachal, who was a Necromancer but no longer is, is waiting for his bags."

  For a moment, he wondered if he might not have pushed his luck; the elf narrowed his eyes and looked genuinely dangerous. Suddenly, he laughed, jumped back and gave the bardling a sweeping bow, then turned and left the stable. Gawaine blotted a damp forehead with his sleeve, gathered up the bags, and practically ran for the inn.

  "What, does that make three of them now?" he grumbled as he had to slow for a very poorly lit section of path. "Three White Elves with my best interests at heart and a very low impression of human ability to tell nonhumans apart."

  Even if he hadn't been able to tell White from Dark Elves—he would have to be blind or babe-witted to not see that—it didn't matter. Because one of the first things Naitachal had done—even before he had let Gawaine swear the oaths that would bind him as apprentice to Master—was to set the boy down and explain who and what he was, and what he had been. He didn't really have to tell me, not then; he could have let it go until I'd learned to trust him for what he was. But that had never been Naitachal's way; the Dark Elf had always been totally honest with him, and however much his Master irritated him by shunting aside his questions about matters mystical and the greater truths, Gawaine had to admire his honesty. After all, most people—most beings—went out of their way to avoid Necromancers. All Dark Elves, really, since it was said they all practiced that black art.