And listened to the politics from on high, to the speculations of Heros and the grumbling of the foot soldiers. For something was clearly afoot, and Heros described it as a bitter dance of moons, Derek's on the wane and Sturm's waxing, power flowing like light away from one man into another.
Heros championed neither of the factions: both were, as he would say, TOO VARIABLE. There was Sturm on the rise, once dishonored, once the companion of dwarves and kender and elves and the vagabond mage with the hourglass eyes whom nobody had trusted or quite mistrusted, and could the road back to honor lie in the company of such a patchwork crew? Heros did not have the answer, and without certain answers it was his nature to disapprove.
Derek, on the other hand, had ceased to be an option, his armor too bright from polishing too much and too long, his eyes too bright from something far more unsettling than wine or the fever of approaching battle. He had taken to winding a horn in imitation of Huma, and at all hours of the night the footmen were called on alert, equipped and assembled to find only that the alarm had been raised by Lord Derek himself, alarmed by what he considered the unnatural closeness — or sometimes distance — of the red moon and the silver. And the men did not complain loudly, nor comment too loudly when Lord Derek wore the horns of a stag on his helmet, as if in recalling the old divine contest between the hero and the quarry, he had chosen to play both the hunter and the hunted.
It was one night, not long before his riding forth, pursuing a disaster of which you have no doubt heard, that I was awakened once again by the sound of the horn winding. I armed myself, thinking continually, PERHAPS THIS TIME, PERHAPS HE WILL NOT CRY WOLF FOREVER, and moved through a courtyard as silent as if nothing had happened, the footmen crouched around the fires sleeping or drinking or dicing, or drinking and dicing themselves to sleep, all as if the night were soundless and as safe as any other. And of all these, only Breca watched the battlements where, outlined in red and silver, a glittering figure all metal and antler sounded a lonely horn.
I stood beside Breca, who never took his eyes from thesolitary figure as he leaned on the pommel of his two handed sword, chuckling a dry laugh as desolate as the winter outside the fortress and, glancing sideways at me, murmuring, THAT ONE HAS A THOUSAND DEATHS ON HIM. HE HAS BEEN DISMOUNTED BY THE WINTER AND THE ICE AND THE WAITING AND THERE IS NOT A THING IN THE MEASURE TO COVER THIS, SO THEY WILL DO NOTHING.
And when I ventured that perhaps Lord Derek had lost some faculties, but that the most brilliant of generals often seemed at sea in the times of peace and waiting, Breca asked me where I had read such things, FOR YOU MUST HAVE READ THEM.
THIS ONE IS NOT ONLY AT SEA BUT CAPSIZED, he said. FOR THEY ALL ARE AT SEA, CROWN, SWORD, OR ROSE, AND THIS ONE AT HIS BEST HAD NOT ENOUGH SENSE TO POUR PISS FROM A BOOT IF THE DIRECTIONS WAS ON THE HEEL. AND THIS, he said, pausing to light his pipe, the sword still upright beneath his elbow, point to the ground, THIS IS THE ONE THEY WILL SURELY PICK TO LEAD US.
And so in the early days of the siege, before Lord Derek unraveled completely and rode off into death and the horrible oblivion of legends, we spent our time watching the battlements and the dwindling food, looking for smoke on the horizon and listening to the sound of the horn by night and the rumor by day that somewhere, forgotten within the bowels of the fortress, lay something the kender had stumbled upon in his curious wanderings, something that could — if time and place and desperation were to meet — alter the course of the siege.
It is tiring to remember this all, Bayard, for already I grow unaccustomed to the old habit of seeing, and though it would seem that the memory of vision would be that much more strongly burned into the thoughts of the newly blind, when you lose the habits of seeing you often lose the memories of sight, for the motions of the eyes and the mind grow rusty and with them the thoughts established before through those motions.
And what is more, the light must be fading, night must be approaching, for the warmth that settles upon the sill of my window is fading now and I smell smoke and burning tallow as I face into the room. Some things there are for which the night should have no ear, and among those are the ride of Lord Derek and the disasters that followed. So again in the morning, if my nurse will only remain patient — patient and undeniably kind — I shall recount the darkest leg of the journey.