He turned, and though he looked at her, he did not see her. His were the eyes of a young man who stood a long time ago in the Tower of High Sorcery at Istar, the eyes of an old man who not even an hour ago woke screaming from nightmare. He said nothing, though, and he let her lead him away from the dragon orb, back up the narrow cold stairs.
In the morning, when the last rosy fingers of dawn were withdrawing and leaving behind a hard blue autumn sky, Dalamar woke to the tolling of all the bells in the city of Silvanost. Over the tolling, he heard frightened voices and running feet.
"What is it, my lord?" he called to Tellin, hurrying past his window. Lord Tellin didn't know, and Dalamar dressed to find a better answer. Outside, he found the temple-folk, clerics and servants alike, running into the streets already clogged with people, students running from the Academy District, advocates from the Embassy District. From the Market District and the Servitor District in the west, men and women and children came, following their neighbors to the heart of Silvanost, to the Garden of Astarin round which the temples clustered, where the Tower of the Stars stood, tall against the sky. Griffins sailed above the Tower, their wings golden in the new day, their harsh cries, like battle cries, filling the sky.
"What's happened?" Dalamar asked his master again.
Grimly, looking north, Tellin said, "The Barrier Hedge is on fire. Phair Caron's dragons have set it alight!"
A cleric, overhearing, cried out. Others picked up her shout and sent it round and round the gathering until the Wildrunners at the gates of the Tower looked at each other, silently wondering whether they would be called upon to quell a panicky mob.
"Look," Dalamar said, pointing north and then south, east and then west.
Ripples of motion shivered through the crowd, starting at the four corners and making itself into a parting of the sea of people as, one after another, the lords and ladies of the Sinthal-Elish left their homes and went among their clans, speaking words of comfort or offering quieting gestures. They came, one and all, to the Tower of the Stars, for it had been appointed that they meet with the Speaker at this hour. Not one of them, not even Lord Garan of House Protector, looked up to the griffins and the Windriders. They went as though upon any ordinary day. From them, calm emanated, and certainty and a measure of peace.
All would be well said the Householders by gestures and with words. The people heeded, for how could they not? These were their lords. This was the council of the king, and who should know better? In groups and singly, the citizens of Silvanost returned to their homes or the tasks they had left. In the sky the griffins circled, round the top of the Tower of the Stars, and one of all that crowd looked up at them and expressed his unease.
"It doesn't look good, my lord," Dalamar Argent said to the cleric beside him. "Windriders circling the Tower as if they expect some attack from the sky, the Barrier Hedge on fire…" He looked away north. He had never seen the Barrier Hedge. In all his life he had never gone father than his secret cave in the north of the woods, but he could imagine the hedge now, a wall of flame. "Phair Caron has made her move at last."
Chapter 4
They came, old men and women, children and babes in arms. They left footprints in blood on the stony ground. Their tears watered the earth, and their lamentations terrified the birds of the air. On days of pouring rain and on days of sun, they came walking, staggering through the aspenwood in the golden season, in autumn so beloved of elves. They came, an army of misery, disease, injury, and despair, an army of woe. The careful shaping of the forest fell to ruin before them, and the trail they left behind was one of deer carcasses, sodden campfires, worn out boots, and of their own dead. Old men fell, their hearts broken and refusing to beat. Old women collapsed and did not get up. Small children died of exposure. Mourning, they simply covered the dead with brush and moved on.
In the days of Phair Caron's border raids, the refugees had been a trickle, a few fleeing the burning of villages in the northmost part of the land. By the middle of the month of Autumn Harvest, the trickle became a stream, running down to Silvanost. They shivered in the cool nights, sleeping on stony ground. They had only the clothes on their backs. Some fortunate few carried ragged blankets to wrap round their weeping children. They had no young men to protect them. No one who looked strong enough to turn into a soldier ever survived a ravaged village. Those were killed at once. The draconians sweeping through villages sought them out as robbers seek gold. Before the eyes of screaming old men and women, wailing children, the young and healthy were cut down and killed.
The aged, the sick, the children, these were allowed to leave each village, even encouraged to do so. It was the favorite tactic of Phair Caron's mage, Tramd o' the Dark. "Let them go," he cried over each slaughter. Some said they saw him, a tall human on dragonback. Others said he was a dwarf, still others an ogre. But then others would say, "Who would imagine a dragon letting an ogre ride?" However it was, all agreed that the mage's voice, magic-aided, boomed over the burning villages and towns like the bellowing of a terrible god. "Let them go! Drive them out! Let them spread fear like disease! Let them clog the forest and fill up the cities with need and terror!"
War raged behind this army of woe, little villages aflame, awash in blood. To the east, out by the Bay of Balifor, a great fire burned. The Barrier Hedge was in flames. What then for the elves? What then for the best beloved of the gods?
In the Temple of E'li, the Dawn Prayer lifted upon the winged voices of the old and young, men and women. Day after day, Dalamar woke to it until he could no longer hear it as anything but the sound of desperation. To him, it was the helpless cacophony of people bleating like sheep to a god who-if he had indeed returned to the world as rumor said-had not bothered to stop the hand of Takhisis from ripping apart the kingdom of the Silvanesti. Lords and ladies came to pray, as did merchants and masons and gardeners and servitors. Elves of high station and low trooped in for morning services, for noontide worship, and were often back again for Day's End prayers. The smoke of incense hung in the air, stinging the eyes and making old ladies cough. It did nothing to cover the odor of fear permeating the Temple of E'li and all those others clustered round the Garden of Astarin as reports came to the city of burned villages in the north and west, of battles on the border. Some of those battles between elves and the dragonarmy were victories. Others were not. Troops of Wildrunners practiced war-work on the training grounds around the barracks, their cries and the ringing of steel on steel heard even in the Garden of Astarin. Others moved out of the city, marching north even as flocks of citizens marched to the temples and dark rumor ran like smoke through the city. The Speaker and his council were considering the idea of evacuating the kingdom if Phair Caron broke past Alinosti.
"Why don't they do something?" Dalamar muttered, watching out the window of the scriptorium on one of the last warm days of autumn. One of the last he knew, for each time he went in the forest to hunt for herbs to fill the Temple's storerooms he saw signs that colder weather was coming. Seed dropped fast now. Stalks withered. The plants drew all their life downward to hide it under the ground till spring. Farther north, in the forest where his secret texts lay hidden beneath magical wards, mice and voles had moved inside the cave. He had been obliged to put a warding on each book to protect it from the incursions of nesting creatures.