Worldbinder

STRANGERS IN ONE ANOTHER’S ARMS

Warlord Madoc lay in bed that night, unable to sleep. The great changes that had taken place worried him-the breaks in the castle wall, the rise of forests where only stones and thistles should have been.

There was a new power in the world for him to contend with-a power greater than his sword, a power even greater, perhaps, than the wyrmlings.

That power had devastated him. Like so many others in the city, he had been struck down when the worlds collided. That did not bother him much. He had been knocked unconscious before.

What bothered him was the waking dreams.

In his dream, he had been a farmer, a free man with but one cow to give milk and a brood of thirteen children to drink it all. In his dream, he worked from sunrise to sunset every day, just to feed his family. In his dream, he loved his wife more fiercely than he knew a man could love, and even though there were no wyrmlings in the world, he still fretted about the future, for a hail storm in the spring could ruin a crop or grasshoppers in the summer might eat him out, and that might be as disastrous as any wyrmling, and if his cow dried up because the howling of some distant wolf frightened her, it would be as bad as a famine.

No one of import knew his name in this dream. No king feared him; no warriors vied for the honor of eating at his table. He had no rank or title. He had no future.

And yet, most disturbing of all, in the dream he was a happy, happy man.

Upon awaking, Madoc had thought it only a strange dream, vivid and disturbing. He recalled so many details-the way that the lilac bush outside his house perfumed the night air, the games of horse he played with his children, the profound joy that he took each night, sometimes three times a night, in making love to his wife, Deralynne.

Could that all have been real?

His wife lay beside him, and he could tell that she, too, was troubled. He had told her of the war council, of Daylan Hammer’s words.

More troubling still, the woman he slept beside was not the wife he’d loved on that shadow world. She was a warrior woman with bones as big as an ox and an unkind temperament. She had borne him sons, but took no pleasure in the making of them.

At last she reached out and squeezed his hand, as if to comfort him. It was an odd gesture, one that she had never performed before.

“I dreamed,” she said, “that I was a cobbler’s wife, and that I was childless. We…were wealthy, I suppose. We had everything that we could want, except for the one thing that I wanted most-a daughter. And then the raiders came, the damned warlords of Internook, and they plundered our house, took all that they wanted, and burned the rest.”

Madoc considered this. He wondered if she might go searching for the cobbler of her dreams. He wondered if he should go searching for Deralynne. His home with Deralynne had been in a peaceful land called Toom, where stories of raids and looting in faraway places were just that…stories.

Were the loves that they had forged in another life any less meaningful than the ones that they had forged here?

At last, he asked the question that burned in him.

“If you could have that life, would you?” Madoc asked.

“I would kill anyone, risk anything, not to,” she said. She turned to him then, the moonlight shining through the window just barely revealing the curve of her face, the glint of an eye.

“We are a wealthy family,” she said, “held in esteem. You could be High King someday. You should be High King. What has Urstone done for this people? For years his son has languished in prison while the wyrmlings consolidate their hold. To do nothing in a time of war, that is treason. Urstone should be…replaced.”

Madoc had never considered murdering the king before. It was a repugnant idea.

Yet he knew that she was right. The kingdom needed a strong leader now more than ever, and Urstone had become too enfeebled over the years.

To kill him would be to serve the people.