Barrenlands (The Changespell Saga) Read online

  Laine frowned in frustration, but he'd had enough of riddles. He crossed his arms, leaned back against the door, and said, "I asked first."

  Ehren laughed. "I should have expected that," he said, shaking his head, though he soon grew serious again. " I don't think the thing is safe, that's why. Varien sent me on this mission— you know that. He as much as said I'd be killed if I stayed, and that success on this venture was the only way to appease the factions who felt I was no longer an asset."

  "You've spent too much time at court to think straight," Laine said bluntly. "No longer an asset, my lost Guides. That's no reason to kill a man."

  "Depends on how much he's getting in your way. Don't get hung up on that. Think instead about new magic in the mountains, and of generations of smuggling. Think about border bandits and Lorakan military presence, and how ugly things get during change. Now think about this ring— and who gave it to me. Do you really want it around?"

  Laine felt a stubborn reluctance to let go of his claim. "I do."

  Ehren sat back against the chair with a sigh; it creaked its protest and for an instant both men hesitated, waiting to see if it would hold.

  When it did, Laine shrugged at the wounded Guard, feeling a victory of sorts. "Yes," he repeated. "I want the ring around."

  Ehren's voice regained some of its strained quality. "I was supposed to use this ring to find your family, and then I was supposed to trigger it. That spell would confirm your identity— and it would tell Varien of my success. Only then am I allowed to return. Do you really want this ring around?"

  Laine understood. He understood the strength of Ehren's need to return to Kurtane and find Benlan's killer— and that Ehren was weighing that need against the needs of Dannel and Jenorah, and of the son who had trusted Ehren enough to bring him here.

  "None of you are a threat to Rodar," Ehren told him. "That's enough for me. It probably won't be enough for Varien... but it's time to destroy this ring and take my chances."

  Laine jerked to attention. "But—"

  Ehren interrupted, his voice inexorable. "Remember that wizard on the road in Loraka? He told me this ring has four layered spells on it— and I only know about two of them. One of them, he says, will be triggered simply when the other is. That means if I trigger the spell, something else is going to happen, too. Something of Varien's doing. Are you willing to trust that? Or those two unknown spells?"

  Now that Laine was sure of, just as sure as the fact that he wanted to keep the ring. "No," he said decisively. "But that doesn't mean we have to destroy it."

  "Nine Hells!" Ehren snapped in exasperation. "When will you understand its danger? When it rises up to consume you?"

  Laine shrugged, deliberately insouciant. "I would've thought you wanted to know who killed Benlan."

  Ehren froze, as Laine'd known he would— it almost wasn't fair to dangling that out in front of the Guard, not when the struggle of this decision still showed so clearly on his face. "Guides-damned right I do."

  "I think my Dreams might tell you— and that ring always takes me straight to them. At least, the Dreams would, if I could get all the way through one of them. Lately, everyone's been waking me up."

  "There's a reason for that, Laine," Ehren said heavily. "Did you know you stopped breathing once? Shette told me that. It was the first night I was with you. She was terrified."

  Laine's inner eye flashed to the vision of Guards falling around him, blood everywhere. He remembered the death blows, and the way he'd felt dragged down with them. For the first time, he hesitated. "I... knew she was frightened. I didn't know... Sometimes it's hard to break away. Sometimes I think, when they die... that maybe I'm too close to escape."

  "It wouldn't do you much good to discover who killed Benlan if you were too dead to tell us," Ehren said flatly.

  "It wouldn't come to that." Laine tried to muster his confidence again.

  Ehren raised an eyebrow. "You think not?"

  Laine didn't answer this time. He just held Ehren's gaze, and it wasn't an easy thing— those grey eyes seemed to see everything. Finally Ehren sighed, closing his hand back around the ring. "For now."

  "I don't think you'll regret it," Laine said, and hoped he would be able to say the same of himself.

  ~~~~~~~~~~~

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  "What I don't understand," Shette said, taking a swipe at the strawberry juice on her chin, "is why Laine has any wits at all." She gave him a sideways glance and amended, "Well, not that there's much to spare."

  Laine made an exaggerated face at her. They sat on the porch with their legs dangling over the edge, plucking late-season strawberries from the pail Shette had gathered early that afternoon. Dannel sat at the top of the stairs, and Ehren rested in the chair usually reserved for Jenorah, feeling a little guilty even though she'd urged him to take it. But she looked content enough, nestled between Dannel's knees and letting him feed her strawberries. Beneath the steps, their two sturdy little herding dogs slept in shallow hollows of cool dirt, their paws twitching.

  It was the way they often ended their summer days, Laine had told him, with the bugs starting to rise and the crickets and cicadas growing loud in the background. It left Ehren somewhat bemused by its bucolic tranquility— though it was his third evening with the family and he ought to be used to it.

  Every time he reached for a berry, the ring moved gently against his skin beneath his shirt. The touch made him think about the obligations associated with that cold metal— obligations that Varien would consider yet unfulfilled. After all, despite Varien's orders to ensure that the self-exiled royal family would pose no problem to Rodar, no matter what it took, Ehren hadn't revealed them with the ring. But Dannel's family had no designs on a throne or anything else— except perhaps their own privacy.

  And a few quiet moments with strawberries, on a cool summer evening.

  "After all," Shette continued, oblivious, when no one seemed inclined to ask her what she was talking about in regards to Laine's wits, "Unai's journal— or Hetna's journal, I mean— said that there was a curse put on all the firstborn of the Therand ruling line. And when Laine was born, wouldn't Mum have been in the ruling line?"

  "What are you talking about?" Jenorah asked.

  "That's right," Ehren said, realizing it. "Jenorah's mother of Clan Grannor. Clan Grannor still rules, for that matter."

  "Sherran of the Grannor," Dannel said. "A strong woman." He twisted on the step to frown at them all. "What's that to do with anything?"

  "You didn't tell them about the journal?" Ehren asked Laine.

  Laine shrugged. "There were so many other things..."

  "The man Shette went after in Loraka," Ehren started, then cocked an eyebrow at Laine. "You did tell them about that?"

  "I started to. We never got any further than the part where she took Clang."

  "Tell us now," Jenorah suggested, sweet steel.

  "I was trying to help!" Shette instantly exclaimed around a strawberry.

  "She was," Ehren conceded. "She did." He sketched for him the events of that day, skimming over Shette's abduction to say that they'd simply caught up with her on the road. He'd likely pay a price for that later, but Shette's pleading expression… "I've still got the journal, if you'd care to see it."

  "I believe I would," Dannel said. "But from what you say... I see Shette's point. Laine should be affected by the curse."

  "Even before we left, the Clans T'ieran suspected there was a problem," Jenorah said. She rested her arm on Dannel's leg, sitting sideways on the step to look back onto the porch. "With our system of rule by acclamation, the position of the T'ieran can change clans once every several years... or sometimes not for two generations. So we have many more firstborn of the ruling line than Solvany would have." She fingered the ends of her long hair, she'd clasped at her nape, like Ehren's. But where Ehren's hair was slightly wavy, Jenorah's fell straight, black as Laine's if it hadn't been silvered by age. She brushed the end of the thick fall a
gainst her cheek, staring contemplatively at her oldest child. "The pattern has been, overwhelmingly, of blindness."

  Dannel laughed. "That's one thing our Laine is not," he said. "Two different colored eyes; two different kinds of sight. Maybe you're making up for the rest of them, son."

  Laine shrugged, but the vision under question seemed turned more inward than anything else. Then he reached around Shette to steal the berry bucket, and asked, abruptly, "Do you know of another pass, Da? A... secret sort of thing."

  Dannel's expression closed up. "What makes you ask?"

  "Different things coming together." Laine popped a berry in his mouth and seemed to be putting his thoughts together, but Ehren got there first.

  "The journal was written sixty years ago by a young servant who discovered smuggling activity in court— something from Therand. She never identifies it, just called it ML. She also found a reference to a hidden and dangerous pass through to Loraka. But its Solvany-Therand end has been in the Barrenlands for so long, and was known by so few to begin with...."

  "We thought," Laine said, "that maybe the smuggling is related to the hostile spells that showed up this year. If someone was trying to scare us away from the pass... well, they did it."

  "I'd like to know who sent that wizard at the avalanche," Ehren said, thinking of Varien— and of the possibility of generation-spanning treachery in the Levels.

  "Ooh, he was disgusting," Shette said. "You should have seen him, Da— lying on the rocks like this—" And she assumed the contorted posture of the dead man they'd found shortly before the avalanche.

  "Shette," Jenorah remonstrated quietly.

  "Well, he was." But she slumped forward against the porch rails, hanging her arms over the low rung.

  "There are so many loose pieces floating around," Ehren mused, rubbing his hand over his leg— trying to soothe the ache without daring to get close to the wound. "It'd be nice if I could get just some of them to make sense." He gave Laine a wry smile. "Not that anyone wants me to."

  "What they want is for you to mind your own business," Laine agreed.

  "There is a pass," Dannel said suddenly, resting his hand on Jenorah's shoulder. "I stumbled on it the summer before I met your mother— I was always out wandering where I shouldn't have been. It opens in the Barrenlands, all right; only someone of ruling blood or a damn good wizard could get to it in the first place. Even then, it's a very difficult journey, some of it underground. You won't have seen it from the caravan route you've described to me, but it's not far. Certainly close enough to make someone nervous, if they were using the pass to smuggle contraband. Oh... but I'm losing track of your pieces, Ehren. The smuggling happened many years ago."

  Ehren just looked at him, still massaging his leg. "Maybe."

  ~~~~~

  Ehren rose early again the next morning, roused by his leg and no longer willing to drug himself to sleep. He dressed in darkness, taking up the cleaned, torn pants and a borrowed shirt to replace the avalanche-tattered remnants of his own. He made his halting way through the house, as silent as his wont in spite of the uneven gait, but the stairs came slow. He broke a sweat on them, although the dawning morning remained cool.

  It could have been worse. It could have been avalanche-flattened King's Guard instead. The thought did nothing for his mood, however. Too much to do. No more time to do them. He walked through dewless grass to the barn, absently checking the sky for signs of rain, and retrieved his grooming brushes from the packs stowed in the barn.

  The boys were in the corral behind the barn. They greeted him with the kind of snorting and snuffling that seemed to imply they hadn't been fed or watered in days, and Ehren stood between them, intercepting the jealous nips they aimed at one another and trying to keep his balance amidst their nudges of affection. When Shaffron wandered away to see what was left of their hay, Ehren retrieved the brushes and set to work on Ricasso.

  This was when he could think best. No one around but the two horses, his hands busy with the rhythmic work of grooming, his mind free to wander.

  He'd been told to trigger the ring upon discovery of Dannel and his family.

  He'd chosen not to.

  He'd been told to ensure the family would cause no trouble.

  He'd decided they wouldn't, and planned to leave as quietly as he'd come.

  Varien, he knew, would prefer— had all but ordered— Ehren to slaughter the family in their sleep.

  But Ehren was a Guard. Utterly loyal to his king— if not the king's wizard— and with enough honor beads for any two men. And being a Guard meant doing what was right, not just what was convenient for those in power.

  Or doing what was right, and not necessarily what he'd been told to do— despite the little-veiled threats behind those orders.

  In this case, right meant returning to Kurtane to unravel the tangle of events he'd discovered— to see how they tied together, where Varien fit, and if things were as bad for Solvany as Ehren thought they were.

  New goals, to replace the ones he now struggled to walk away from.

  Ricasso swung his head around in a tight arc and nudged Ehren's unmoving hand, and Ehren patted him with a rueful smile. "Sorry, son," he said. "Deep thoughts. You really don't want to know. It's bound to cause trouble for both of us."

  He wondered if Jada and Algere had stumbled into anything in Kurtane, if they'd sent messages to the border station— and if they were waiting for his help. He hoped not. His spine stiffened at the thought that they might go to Gerhard— and that Gerhard had been a Lorakan import.

  Hells, the trip back promised to be a long one. The caravan route was no longer an option, and every mile he went on the long Trade Road would be one during which he could do nothing with what he'd learned.

  He finished brushing out Ricasso and moved on to Shaffron's long, tangled mane. "You've been rolling," Ehren accused him.

  The flame-colored horse ignored him; his small, neat ears pricked at the barn. Ehren's first impulse was to draw his sword... which he had not brought with him. Damn stupid. Anyone could have followed us here...

  "Breakfast's on," Laine called.

  Anyone could have followed us here— and hadn't there been men asking about him in T'ieranguard? Damn. Ehren took a resolute breath and gave Laine a wave with the hand that held the brush; he made a quick job of untangling the flaxen hair of Shaffron's mane, and left the horses.

  He and Laine walked back to the house together, but neither of them made conversation. It wasn't until they were sitting at the smooth wood table in the kitchen alcove and Jenorah had offered him a "Guides grant you a good day," that Ehren spoke.

  "We've got to leave," he said.

  Shette looked up from the seasoned potato chunks she doled out, her hair still loose and her eyes sleepy— though it seemed she was waking fast. "Why?"

  "We?" Dannel said, pointedly, as Jenorah fastened a concerned look on Ehren.

  Laine met Ehren's gaze evenly. Waiting.

  "Laine, Shette and I," he said, answering Dannel's question. "It's a... feeling."

  "A feeling," Dannel repeated. And Laine waited.

  Then Shette shook her head. "That's just the pain-slip, I'll bet, Ehren. It's affecting you more than you know."

  "Do you think I haven't had pain-slip before? I haven't had it this morning, in any event."

  "You're not near ready to go back out on the road. That must be one mighty strong feeling," Laine said quietly— and Ehren heard no indication that Laine disbelieved him. In fact, he thought he saw alarm hidden in Laine's expression, far more notable for the fact that he'd bothered to hide it when his expressions usually mirrored his thoughts whether he meant them to or not.

  "The dead Lorakan investigator," Ehren said, his words clipped as memory suddenly added this man to the equation. "I'd started out on that road before, Laine— when I first ran into you. Plenty of people knew I was going. What if he came out to meet me?"

  "Well, yes, but…why?" Laine's potatoes sat untou
ched. "Why would anyone care where you were going? You're a Guard, not a member of the royal family." He grinned. "Guess I can't say that about us anymore."

  "There have been several attempts on my life since Benlan was killed," Ehren told him. "No doubt because I won't stop looking for the killers. And there are ways to get messages from the Solvan border station to T'ieranguard."

  "Birds, for one," Dannel said. "Or magic."

  Ehren nodded, feeling grim. "And what about those men who asked about me in T'ieranguard?" They'd asked Ansgare to play dumb should anyone inquire again, but... "Do you suppose it's occurred to Sevita or Dajania that discussing me with the other women might be a problem?"

  "They'd never do anything to get you in trouble," Shette said, all confidence. She returned the iron skillet to the small cookstove and dropped in a generous number of ham slices.

  "Not on purpose," Ehren agreed. "But anyone who really wanted to find me could discover I'd gone off with you and Laine. I should have thought about it right away, but it seems I wasn't doing much thinking at all. The only way to keep them from coming here is to make ourselves known at T'ieranguard again."

  Jenorah said, "Don't let the ham burn, Shette," and turned back to Ehren. She gathered up a hank of her long hair and fiddled, worried. "That agent may have had nothing to do with you. As you've said, there seems to be plenty going on at the border right now."

  "Then going to T'ieranguard poses nothing but an inconvenience. Jenorah, I'm trying to protect what you and Dannel have built here. If people come to this valley looking for me, they're going to ask questions. It may not take them very long to figure out who you really are."

  "I don't think you're ready to travel again," she told him. Ehren noticed she wasn't arguing his point.

  "And I don't think we have any choice. I may not have any magical Sight, but I've lived this long because I know when to heed my feelings."

  "Mum, Da..." Laine started, then hesitated. He took a deep breath and spoke quickly, the words tumbling out. "I think Ehren is right. I think I've caused more trouble than I ever thought."