Prophet of Moonshae

2

The chariot thundered across the vast expanse of grass, effortlessly cresting the frequent rises in the moor, then plummeting with dizzying speed into the bowls between. Two magnificent horses, a gray mare and an auburn gelding, drew the small two-wheeled platform with bounding ease. The stocky, nimble creatures darted this way and that, responding instantly to each of the driver's commands.

The charioteer carried no whip, but held the reins with strong, sure hands. Insulated against the morning chill by leather leggings and a woolen cloak, the nimble figure balanced lightly on the tiny, lurching platform, springing into the air each time the chariot skipped over a rise. A stout cap of leather covered the rider's head, slight protection in the event of a hard fall.

To the east, the waters of Whitefish Bay gleamed in the morning sun. That brightness also etched the craggy highland of the Fairheight Range in vivid detail. The crest sprawled the length of the western horizon while blue sky-the first cloudless weather in months-domed overhead. Only beyond the mountains, far to the west, did a fringe of clouds linger along the horizon.

Before the chariot stretched a seemingly limitless range of rolling grassland. The rider directed the racing team with confidence, often darting onto the narrow pole between the horses. There the charioteer perched, exhorting the steeds with encouragement and praise. The small vehicle, careening behind the horses, followed the creatures into a gully, splashed through a gravel-bottomed stream, and then bounced up the steep bank.

The driver held on, guiding the twin wheels around boulders, up a barely discernible path, and once again onto the freedom of the moor.

"Geddaway there, now! C'mon, Brit! Run, Mouse!" The voice was intense, and the rider's eyes stared toward the sea. The horses bounded forward with renewed intensity, clods of dirt flying beneath the thundering hoofbeats. The wind whipped the crouching driver, who once again perched on the bar between the straining beasts. They crested a steep rise and the chariot left the ground, soaring like a flying thing.

Caer Callidyrr came into view then, its alabaster walls gleaming in the sun. The haze had burned from the hills, and the castle stood out clearly as the dominant feature of the panorama. High ramparts stretched across three small hilltops over the town that clung to the edge of the bay. Towers soared, a dozen of them higher than any other man-made structure in the Moonshae islands, fitting grandeur for the palace and castle of the High King, ruler of all the Ffolk.

The team began the long descent with a staccato gallop, but gradually the driver pulled them into a canter, slowing to an easy walk by the time they rolled toward the stable building along the outside of the castle wall.

Here the charioteer's strong hands revealed gentleness as they tugged the reins slightly, bringing the two frothing steeds to a rest. Reaching upward, those hands lifted off the driver's leather helm, releasing a cascade of hair the color of rust. Curling slightly, as thick as a lush stand of wheat, the locks wrapped like a full blanket, trailing behind the lithe figure halfway down the slender, proud back.

Alicia Kendrick, Princess of Moonshae, returned to the castle, her cheeks stung red by the breeze, her heart pounding.

"By the goddess, what a ride!" She made the announcement to the liverymen who already moved out to tend the exhausted horses. She stepped smoothly to the ground and shrugged off her cloak, which was quickly caught by an attendant. Jauntily Alicia strode toward the door of the stables. Though the castle was huge, the Kendricks maintained their stables outside the walls for convenience's sake-and because, in Alicia's lifetime, there had never been any threat to those high walls or indeed to any other portion of her father's kingdom.

Any military threat, she corrected herself. She couldn't forget about the scourge of weather that seemed to constantly afflict the Moonshaes, the reason today's warmth had been such a compelling summons to the outdoors.

For the last five years-fully a quarter of the young woman's life-the Moonshae Islands had suffered the onslaught of terrible violence, but it had been the violence of nature run amok, not of man. Winters of deep frost, broken only by the blizzards that howled in from the great Trackless Sea to bury the land beneath tons of wet, clinging snow, had marked each of those five years. Then followed spring, such as the one just passing, with days of torrential rains, pounding hailstorms, and winds that seemed determined to rip the outposts of land from their precarious perches in the sea, all combining to blast the beleaguered isles for months on end.

But the summers, perhaps, were worst: searing weeks of blasting heat, unbroken by cloud or even the hint of rain, would yield to periods of violent thunderstorms. Lightning slashed the land, and towering, moist cyclones blew in from the sea to uproot trees and smash houses. The storms lasted into the autumn, until the cycle of ice resumed.

Then today, as they neared the start of the fifth summer of this ruinous pattern, the weather had paused, as if marshaling strength for the next horrible wrack. The skies remained clear for hours, and the winds mellowed enough to allow one to enjoy the warmth of the sun, a warmth the princess had been unable to resist.

Alicia stopped abruptly when she saw the tall, thin figure standing in the stable doorway. He was a young man who wore a long brown cloak. His narrow face wasn't displeasing, though it bore an unhealthy-looking pallor. He was cleanshaven, but his brown hair tumbled over his ears to the height of his narrow shoulders. Now, unaccustomed to sunlight, he squinted at her.

"Hello, Keane," she said, offering her most winning smile, a look that was very dazzling indeed as her green eyes sparkled. A whisper of freckles marked her cheeks and her nose, and these seemed to dance across her face, expressing her joy.

The tall man, however, did not share her pleasant mood. His heavy eyebrows dropped as he made an attempt to glower menacingly. Though older than Alicia, he was still too young to effectively look the part of the displeased senior.

"Your lessons!" he reminded her sharply. "Your father will have my head if you cannot recite the Tale of Cymrych Hugh at the councils of midsummer!"

Alicia sighed. "I'm sorry, Keane-I really have been working on them, every day but today. But this morning, for the first time in weeks, the sun was shining. Mouse and Brittany were as frantic to get some exercise as me!"

"I, not me," the tutor corrected automatically.

Then Keane, too, sighed. "I really can't blame you. These storms of late-they've gotten to all of us, the gods know! What with black clouds and rain and hail, even I might welcome a chance to spend a day outside."

Indeed, the weather had lashed the lands of the Moonshaes with unaccustomed sharpness during the past winter and spring. Even among the savage pattern of storms, the droughts and floods and cyclones that had plagued the islands for the past six months, ruining crops, freezing livestock, and destroying homes and buildings, had been particularly grueling.

"And even you used to be young once, didn't you, Keane?"

The tutor grimaced, and Alicia felt a twinge of guilt. He wasn't that much older than she. He had passed his twenty-seventh winter, while Alicia would be twenty in the fall.

"I'm sorry," she added hastily. "That wasn't fair. But I wish you'd understand-on a day like this, I didn't have a choice."

"I know." Keane shook his head. "I wonder if the king will have me beheaded or simply hanged."

Alicia laughed, knowing her teacher's displeasure had passed-at least, to the point where he could joke with her.

"Tell me which you'd prefer, and I'll see if I can use my influence with him. I am his firstborn child, you know."

She followed the man into the castle, knowing that Keane was in no danger from her father. Indeed, the regard felt by the king and queen for the tutor was the reason he had been entrusted with the education of the princesses.

Once Keane had been an apprentice to a powerful magic-user, but Alicia had gotten the impression that sorcery had proven beyond his skill. He had abandoned the study of spells, eventually, to devote all his time to the education of the royal daughters. Tristan and Robyn Kendrick could afford the finest tutors in the Realms for their children, and they had chosen Keane.

"Ah! That reminds me," said Keane. "Your father sent for you. He's meeting with the Earl of Fairheight and the Lords Umberland and Ironsmith in the Great Hall. By now, doubtlessly, he wonders with some annoyance what has happened to you."

Alicia laughed again, not worried. "No doubt he'll have both of us drawn and quartered," she teased, enjoying the look of exasperation that Keane gave her as they passed through the high castle gatehouse.

Angry pressures mounted in the icy depths, emerging as heaving waves across the storm-tossed Sea of Moonshae. Like the terrain of a jagged-toothed mountain range, monstrous swells loomed in all directions. But they were crests in motion, with living summits rising, then toppling to cascade into the next liquid massif. Overcast skies darkened the water to charcoal shades, and rain lashed the peaks and valleys of the pounding swells.

Below the storm-tossed surface, the world did not warm, though it became more still. . and more dark. The gray depths became black, and even if the sun had broken through the clouds, its rays couldn't have penetrated this far below the chill surface.

Yet still farther into the depths the pressure grew and the blackness closed in like a cloak of icy ink. Fish dared not swim so deep, and the beds of kelp remained far above.

Finally came the ocean bottom, a wasteland of silt-strewn plain dotted with the occasional skeleton-like framework of a ship or the bones of some great sea creature. The plain of the ocean's floor stretched, featureless and flat, for many miles. Then yawned a place where the descent plunged still farther as a great chasm cut like a raw wound through the flatness of the seabed. Sheer walls plummeted into the unimaginable deep, farther still below the realms of light where the fish and the fauna dwelled. Yet even at this frightful depth, under the burdens of pressure and darkness, there was life.

Within this undersea canyon, occupying both sides of the steeply sloping walls, the sahuagin had built their city of Kressilacc. The aquatic humanoids were constantly vicious and hungry, the mortal enemies of air-breathing humankind. Covered with hard scales and, on the males, bristling dorsal spines, the fish-men formed a horrific army when they ventured forth. They carried bronze weapons, wore shell shields, and swam in great, swarming companies.

From Kressilacc, twenty years earlier, the Deepsong had thrummed, luring hordes of the fish-men into war with the Ffolk and northmen of the surface world. It had been a war during which the sahuagin armies fared very badly indeed.

After the battles, their ranks decimated and their pride savaged, the proud warriors of this evil submarine race had returned to their remote city, there to lick their wounds, to praise their dead, to punish their clerics. . and to let their hatred fester.

The clerics had been followers of Bhaal, and it had been their exhortations that had led the sahuagin into the ill-starred war. Bhaal was now a vanquished god. And so the priestesses had died-slowly, with much suffering, which is the way the sahuagin prefer to dispose of their enemies.

The king of Kressilacc, a great bull of a fish-man called Sythissal, had barely escaped the slaughter wreaked upon the clerics-indeed, it had only been his vehement cries for vengeance, claiming that he himself had been dazzled by foul sorcery, that had shifted the rage of the sahuagin away from the one who had led them to disaster.

Thus King Sythissal's hatred of the surface dwellers was even more profoundly rooted than was the vengeful bloodlust of his subjects. And yet, though he loudly declaimed human treachery and greed and often sent his leanest warriors forth to harass and sink the ships of men, the king had never returned to the surface since the last battle, a disaster that had culminated with an abject collapse of morale. His army fled in disarray from the base of Caer Corwell back to the sheltering darkness of the sea.

This defeat had done another thing to King Sythissal. It had inflicted upon him a deep and vengeful mistrust of all things clerical.

Temples to gods of chaos and evil had long stood in the wide galleries and long, curving balconies of the cliff-wall city. Images of Bhaal, and Malar the Beastlord, and Talos the Destroyer and Auril Frostmaiden and many others had occupied these holy places for untold centuries, but the king ordered them all cast down. Thus at the same time as the New Gods secured their grip upon the worship of the Ffolk, the evil gods worshiped in the deep were cast aside, abandoned by their followers, their power spurned with them.

All except one, that is. The faithful priests and priestesses of Talos the Destroyer foresaw, quite accurately, the day when the power of their god would gain prominence in the Moonshaes. With a surface world swept free of interference by the gods of good and their pitiful human tools, these scaly priests understood that the sahuagin would be able to attain ultimate power. Mastery of the isles was a dream that could soon become real!

The key to the future of the sahuagin race, Sythissal knew, lay in defeating the hated humans and the air-breathing dwarves, elves, and halflings who were their allies. His loathing of the surface peoples grew into a palpable abhorrence, a hatred so strong that, for the King of Kressilacc, it became a reason for living.

The clerics of Talos prepared their king for the coming of their god. They sent to him nubile priestesses for the Great Spawning, and these pleased him well. While the king rested, the priestess fish hissed premonitions to the piscine monarch, and Sythissal dreamed of a great messenger. That one would come with word of a plan, the king saw, wherein the humans would bring about their own destruction. Talos and his faithful would rule!

Sythissal saw one whose skin had scales like his own. But this messenger claimed all the skies as its sea and moved through those lofty heights with the same ease that the king glided through brine. Sythissal saw that the messenger was a thing of death, but also of unspeakable power.

To prepare for this messenger-one the king did not yet know as the harbinger of Talos-the great sahuagin desired gifts. He wished to meet this great one in a fashion that would indicate the might and richness of Kressilacc. Thus Sythissal decided to personally lead a war party to the surface, reveling once more in the taste of warm human blood.

The sahuagin city lay in the Sea of Moonshae but wasn't far removed from the trading routes connecting the eastern cities of the isles-most notably Callidyrr-to the wealth of the distant Sword Coast. Instinctively the king desired to strike at the Ffolk for his treasure raid; a lingering sense of vengeance required it. Too, their vessels tended to be slower than the longships of the northmen, making easier targets for the swimming fish-men.

For the first time in two decades, King Sythissal led a great host of his warriors forth from the city, upward and eastward toward the realms of sunlight and air. He would find a prize, he knew, and claim it for his own. Then when the messenger of the gods came to them, the sahuagin would be ready with appropriate offerings.

Soon now, the priestesses told the king, that messenger would come to the Moonshaes. Then the sahuagin vengeance could begin.

Following Alicia to the council, Keane understood why the princess felt no concern that her father would punish her tardiness. The king indulged the whims of Alicia and her sister Deirdre in a manner that the tall tutor often found annoying. As High King, Tristan Kendrick was the mightiest ruler in the Moonshae Islands, yet still his daughters had always been uppermost in his thoughts and cares, to the point where both of them had become somewhat spoiled, in the opinion of their hardworking teacher.

Keane watched Alicia walk. The princess moved with the confident swagger of a warrior, inexplicably coupled with an alluring sensuality that allowed no mistaking her for a man. He shook his head, embarrassed but not surprised by the awareness of her femininity. It was a knowledge that intruded into his consciousness with disturbing frequency. For years he had quashed it, but now that she had reached full adulthood, Keane found it harder to stifle.

Alicia trusted him and usually treated him with respect. Of the two girls, she was the more enjoyable to teach, though days like this made him wonder. But whatever Alicia did-even when it was simply to complain about her tasks-she did with energy and enthusiasm and humor.

A perfect counterpoint to Alicia, Keane knew, could be found in her younger sister, Deirdre. Born barely a year after Alicia, Deirdre seemed to be her sister's opposite in every way. She was dark and quiet, even sullen, where Alicia was fair and outgoing to the point of boldness. They were tutored by the same man, but Keane felt none of the rapport with the younger sister that he knew with the elder. Indeed, sometimes Deirdre disturbed him, for she seemed to remain completely distant from any of his attempts at friendship, at the same time absorbing completely whatever information he happened to be imparting.

In their studies, he had to admit that Deirdre outshone her older sister in every category. Always focused and intent, the dark-haired girl would brusquely confront him if he tried to short-cut an argument or present as fact some knowledge not fully documented.

In an earlier decade, perhaps, Deirdre would have followed the druidical calling of her mother. Now, however, the druids who still lived served primarily as caretakers of the shrinking tracts of wild land that could still be found among the kingdoms of the Ffolk. Their powers of magic, which had allowed them great control over aspects of nature, had been broken by the passing of the goddess Earthmother twenty years earlier.

Keane often reflected on, and taught, the great irony: It had been the great victories of Tristan Kendrick that brought the Ffolk to a pinnacle of unity and power they had not known for hundreds of years. Bearing a blade of legend, the Sword of Cymrych Hugh, the young king had used the aid of the druids and the ancient folk of the isles, the dwarves of Mountainhome and the Llewyrr elves of Synnoria.

Yet the price of that victory had been a change in godship, from the hallowed nature worship of the goddess Earthmother to the agricultural domination offered by Chauntea, a goddess of crops, irrigation, and tamed, quiet pastures. The great mother had perished at the moment of the Ffolk's ultimate triumph, and now Chauntea and the other New Gods ruled the land.

Keane's reflections were interrupted as they reached the doors to the Great Hall of Caer Callidyrr. The huge oaken panels loomed and then swung outward, opened by a pair of blue-cloaked guardsmen.

King Kendrick chose to hold counsel in his Great Hall more often than in his imposing throne room. He said that his visitors showed a greater tendency to talk when gathered around the huge hearth with its perennial blaze.

"Hello, Father," said Alicia, ignoring the king's brief look of annoyance.

"Come in," Tristan said impatiently. "You, too, Keane."

Tristan Kendrick, High King of the Folk, was a man who had grown into the role. He sat in a huge armchair, his long brown hair still thick, though streaks of gray lightened its fringes. His beard, worn full in the traditional manner of the Ffolk, covered the upper half of his chest.

Emblazoned in silver on his blue tunic was a lone wolf's head, the king's personal crest. Over the hearth, snarling from the wall, was mounted the head of a great bear, symbolizing the unity of the four lands of the Ffolk.

Another man sat in a nearby chair, and raven-haired Deirdre almost disappeared into a small sofa a few feet back from the fire. Overhead, the heavy oaken support timbers crossed back and forth, soot-covered and stained. The dark wooden ceiling was lost in the overhead shadows, though long, slitted windows along each side of the room stood open, admitting the fresh air for once instead of sealing out the perpetual storm.

"You know Earl Blackstone, Master of Fairheight," began the king, gesturing toward the visitor. "The Lords of Ironsmith and Umberland were here briefly to discuss their iron and coal production. They have gone to attend to business in the city."

"My lord." Alicia nodded politely to the black-haired, stern-visaged noble, wishing privately that she had arrived while the other two lords were still present. She knew Umberland and Ironsmith to be unprepossessing rural lords, neither of them too bright but both loyal and direct.

Not so the Earl of Fairheight. She looked at him surreptitiously as she seated herself. The earl's thick eyebrows grew together over his great beak of a nose, and his full black beard parted in a smile that sent a slight shiver down Alicia's back. As always, she felt an uneasiness when she was around Blackstone that she could not totally explain.

Among her father's subjects, Angus Blackstone was the most powerful noble in all Callidyrr, presiding over the cantrevs of the Fairheight Mountains. These were the towns of miners and smelters, the Ffolk who had supported the kingdom during these years. Yet whenever she was forced to be in the same room with him, which was blessedly rare, she felt a sense of menace that made her want to pull a cloak tightly about her shoulders and keep her eyes watchfully upon the swaggering earl.

"To business." Tristan spoke brusquely, and Alicia sensed that the king was annoyed by Blackstone. "Continue your tale," he instructed the brawny nobleman.

Blackstone's demeanor grew grim. "He came out of nowhere, raving like a lunatic. My son set the hounds on him, but he worked some kind of sorcery. The hounds ran, leaping the palisade, and disappeared into the night."

"Have you had sign of them since?" inquired the king.

"No, sire. They may as well have chased a shadow off the face of the earth! Then the madman went berserk, in a fury. My son Currag had to slay him to defend himself!"

"The body?" asked the king.

"We burned it-like a witch, or any other foul sorcerer! The bastard claimed the life of my oldest son!" fumed Earl Blackstone. "It was sorcery, Your Highness. I know this!"

He finished the gruesome tale of the discovery of Currag's body the following morning, smashed on the stones of the courtyard, and how, even after the brutal force of the fall, his face retained that hideous, tortured grimace of terror.

"You have two sons remaining, I believe?" Tristan ventured sympathetically.

"Aye. Gwyeth and Hanrald. The former, Gwyeth, is my heir now. He's a good knight, Your Majesty."

Alicia thought it curious that he said nothing about his youngest son, Sir Hanrald. She wondered about a knight who could be a disappointment even to one so base as Blackstone.

"The ravings." Deirdre, out of the shadows, surprised them by speaking to the earl. "What did the lunatic say?"

The nobleman turned toward the younger princess, his dark brows knitting in concentration. "He came out of the storm. He hollered about doom, I recall. And he told the guards to flee … said it was their only chance of survival. To escape the power that would rise, or some such idiocy."

"What else?" persisted Deirdre, her voice sharp. "There must have been more."

Blackstone bristled. "I don't know! I can't remember!"

"Enough." King Kendrick spoke to the lord. "When my envoy reaches Fairheight, you will make your guards, and any other witnesses, available for interview. That is all."

"Yes, sire." Blackstone nodded in assent.

"Now," Tristan continued, "tell me of the matter that brings you all the way to Caer Callidyrr."

"Certainly, sire. It is a matter of some good news, I should think. Naturally you know of the wealth of gold my miners have pulled from the Granite Crest."

"Indeed. It has given me the profits to purchase food for years-food without which thousands of my people would have starved."

"Well, Your Majesty, it appears that the vein extends for a greater extent than we had any previous right to hope. Our initial explorations indicate a find of more vast and wealthy extent than any previous gold mine in the islands."

"Splendid! The additional tariff shall do much to see that our coffers can be filled by winter. Is it simply this news that brings you to the castle? Or, as I suspect, is there more?"

Blackstone sighed, apparently in real regret. "A small thing. . trifling, really. I regret to trouble Your Majesty with it."

"A Moonwell." said Keane, speaking without thinking.

"I beg your pardon?" King Kendrick scowled, turning toward the young man who had spoken. Even his favored young tutor had bounds of propriety to observe. Lord Blackstone, meanwhile, glared darkly at Keane.

"It's the reason he comes here," Keane blurted, as if regretting his earlier remark but now determined to amplify his decision. "Gaining access to the new vein will require him to destroy a Moonwell."

"Is this true?" The king turned to regard the lord.

"Yes-if you can call the stagnant cesspool a Moonwell!" Blackstone forged ahead, his anger toward Keane thickening his voice. "We all know that the power of the Earthmother is gone, and with her went the enchantment of her pools-all of them! I know that some wild-eyed druids still tend them, but just to keep the waters free from weeds! Their power exists only in memory!"

"We have always honored the custom of leaving her Moonwells undisturbed. The Great Mother is the symbol and the heritage of the Ffolk!" Keane boldly countered the duke's arguments. The king appeared content to let the two wage the verbal battle; he remained silent, watching each speaker in turn.

"No one would question the wisdom of that policy." Blackstone's tone was not as sincere as his words. It sounded as though he wanted very much to question the policy. "But this is different. Exception is called for!"

"The site is sacred!" Keane persisted.

"Enough." King Kendrick silenced the debate. He looked at the participants and then at his daughters. For a time, no one said anything, sensing that Tristan was about to speak.

"I debark for Murann, on the coast of Amn, in one week," he said. "Regardless of the weather. The storms scattered half of the last fleet of merchant vessels, and we lost much badly needed sustenance. Lord Pawldo already engages in a mission to Waterdeep, but even with his bargaining skills to help us, we shall need more!"

The king's voice thickened, and he suddenly seemed very tired. "In addition, our coffers have fallen dangerously low. The grain merchants of Waterdeep and Amn remain agreeable only so long as the gold in my hands is pure."

Tristan sighed. For a brief moment, he looked very old. "My next voyage will deplete the treasuries to dangerous levels. I cannot, in good conscience, allow the kingdom to face the prospects of starvation so that we can preserve sites to the memory of a vanished goddess."

Keane's eyes dropped to the floor. Alicia felt a surprising surge of outrage at her father's swift capitulation. Even more disturbing was his casual dismissal of the Earthmother as a "vanished goddess."

Yet as a retort formed upon her tongue, she looked at King Kendrick and realized that the burden of his decision already weighed heavily upon him. She would do him no service by adding to his woes.

Instead, she turned toward her sister. Deirdre seemed to be paying no attention to the discussion, but Alicia knew this was not the case. Her sister's dark eyes were half closed, her heavy black hair-the hair Deirdre had inherited from their mother-veiling her cheeks. She feigned disinterest now, just as she feigned so many things of her life, perhaps feeling that the less people knew about her thoughts, the greater advantage she could gain over them. And Alicia knew her sister was a young woman who looked for advantage wherever she could find it.

Alicia suddenly realized that the men had risen to their feet. She hadn't heard the rest of the conversation, but it seemed to have ended. Blackstone left, and Deirdre followed, walking slowly, deep in thought. Alicia paused at the door, wondering about Keane's role in the meeting.

The princess wanted to talk to him, but then the king gestured to the lanky tutor. "Stay a moment, Keane," he commanded. At the door, Alicia fussed with her boot, curious to overhear.

"How did you know they wished to excavate a Moonwell?" asked the king. His tone was understanding.

"A lucky guess, I suppose, sire."

Tristan Kendrick chuckled softly. "Not if I know you."

Keane lowered his eyes, then looked back up at the king. "Perhaps, Your Majesty, it's because Blackstone takes so many liberties. He exploits his power to rule like a king in his own earldom! He will do as he pleases, for the most part. So it was a simple matter of elimination, sire. The Moonwell is the only part of his estate where he still feels bound to consult you."

The king nodded, not offended. "May the gods curse it, but I need him right now. Without Blackstone gold, the kingdom couldn't support itself for another six months."

"I know, sire." For a moment, Keane felt a flash of sympathy for the monarch. It was a revelation to see how neatly the king was caught in this trap borne of necessity.

Tristan clapped the younger man on the shoulder. "You're important here, Keane. What you did in there, pointing out arguments to me as well as to the earl-I need you to keep doing that." The king paused reflectively for a moment, a soft smile playing upon his lips. "When you came to the castle-what was it, seventeen years ago now? — and asked to apprentice yourself to my council of mages, I had little thought for what you might become."

"I shall always be grateful, sire, for that first chance."

"No-I should be grateful." The king spoke with sincerity. "You're more than an adviser to me. You've given my daughters an education that far surpasses my own, and I well know they're not the easiest pupils to teach!"

"I make every effort," replied Keane, coughing awkwardly as he gave Alicia a sideways look. At the door, the princess hastily fixed her lace and left.

King Tristan smiled and clapped the tall mage on the shoulder. He raised his head, looking absently past the younger man. "I know that, my boy," he said gruffly, affectionately. "I know I can count on you."

Keane thought, as he saw the king's eyes focus on some distant scene-something far beyond the Great Hall-that the monarch seemed sad.

Alicia hurried down the hallway, strangely agitated. She caught up with Deirdre as her sister neared the library of arcane materials where the younger princess spent so much of her time.

"Deirdre?" Alicia called as her sister slowed and turned toward her, eyes still cautiously hooded. The dark-haired woman looked once, anxiously, at the library door. Then Deirdre turned back to her sister, regarding Alicia with a blank stare.

"What do you think?" asked Alicia. "Should they dig up a Moonwell for gold?"

"The goddess has gone. Those wells are nothing more than muddy ponds," Deirdre retorted.

"But. . doesn't it seem sacrilegious?"

Deirdre shrugged and looked back to the door. Alicia turned away, knowing that her sister's mind was elsewhere.

The younger princess disappeared behind the shelter of the dark-paneled door, and Alicia drifted aimlessly through the hallways, beneath their towering ceilings. Wandering up the grand stairway, vaguely remembering the morning's fine weather, she walked through the crystal doors that led to the high courtyard.

This courtyard was actually the roof of the Great Hall, throne room, royal kitchens, and other rooms that made up the heart of Caer Callidyrr. Surrounded by a stone battlement, it was a vast open area with a good view to all four sides. Indeed, only the castle's towers could bring one to a loftier height.

She saw the blue waters of the bay and noticed them turning gray. With a sigh, she looked upward at a wall of storm clouds rolling toward Callidyrr, darkening the sky over the Fairheight Mountains and promising soon to cast all the rest of the island under bleak shadow.

Suddenly angry, Alicia turned around and went back inside. Here it was, barely noon, and the first hours of good weather in nearly six months had already come to an end. She couldn't begin to guess how many more days might pass before she would again see the sun.

Musings of the Harpist

My dreams are troubled, and so I rise and walk the parapets of Caer Corwell. Earl Randolph, the king's trusted regent here, has graciously allowed me the freedom of his castle, and his hospitality has warmed me through the long winter and chill, windy spring. (Indeed, the earl, a handsome widower, has found many ways to drive the ice from these old limbs!)

Too, Lord Pawldo is a delight, as always. I shall never tire of his company. Even now, after all these years, he spins tales I have never heard, makes me laugh in ways I once took for the giddiness of a young girl.

And only in Corwell can I behold the wonder of Caer Allisynn. The castle was miraculously moved here by the goddess Earthmother twenty years ago, a sign that she favored the reign of the then-young king, Tristan Kendrick. Even as the power of the Mother faded from the land, the tall castle stands as a proud symbol of her memory.

But beyond that memory, so much has vanished. I miss the magic of her presence in the strings of my heart and in the empty hopes of our age. I have always missed her, but now, for the first time, I am also afraid.

Soon, with the approach of summer, I leave Caer Corwell, taking ship for Alaron, to the palace of my king. Yet it is not time for me to depart-not quite. I do not know for certain why I wait, but I sense this need to delay as strongly as any premonition I have ever known. I await some symbol, some sign, I must be here when it happens.

When what happens? I do not know.. cannot even guess. But I will remain in Corwell till it is time to learn. Then I shall carry word to my king.