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home. Your mother will be weeping with anxiety."
"Mother?" Tabor asked in a tone so comical Ivor had to laugh. They mounted and
rode back, slowly now, and together, over their Plain. On this eve of war a
curious peace seemed to descend upon Ivor. Here was his land, the land of his
people for so long that the years lost meaning. From
Andarien to Brennin, from the mountains to Pendaran, all the grass was theirs.
The Plain was the
Dalrei, and they, it. He let that knowledge flow through him like a chord of
music, sustaining and enduring.
It would have to endure in the days to come, he knew, the full power of the
Dark coming down.
And he also knew that it might not. Tomorrow, Ivor thought, I will worry
tomorrow; and riding in peace over the prairie beside his son, he came back to
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the camp and saw Leith waiting for them by the western gate.
Seeing her, Tabor slipped from his horse and ran into her arms. Ivor willed
his eyes to stay dry as he watched. Sentimental fool, he castigated himself;
she was right. When Leith, still holding the boy, looked a question up at him
he nodded as briskly as he could.
"To bed, young man," she said firmly. "We're riding in a few hours. You need
sleep."
"Oh, Mother," Tabor complained, "I've done nothing but sleep for the-"
"Bed!" Leith said, in a voice all her children knew.
"Yes, Mother," labor replied, with such pure happiness that even Leith smiled
watching him go into the camp. Fourteen, Ivor thought, regardless of
everything. Absolutely regardless.
He looked down at his wife. She met the look in silence. It was, he realized,
their first moment alone since the Mountain. "It was all right?" she asked.
"It was. It is something very bright."
"I don't think I want to know, just yet." He nodded, seeing once more,
discovering it anew, how beautiful she was.
"Why did you marry me?" he asked impulsively. She shrugged. "You asked."
Laughing, he dismounted, and with each of them leading a horse, his and
Tabor's, they went back into the camp.
They put the animals in the stockade and turned home.
At the doorway Ivor looked up for the last time at that moon, low now in the
west, over where
Pendaran was.
"I lied," Leith said quietly. "I married you because no other man I know or
can imagine could have made my heart leap so when he asked."
He turned from the moon to her. "The sun rises in your eyes," he said. The
formal proposal. "It always, always has, my love."
He kissed her. She was sweet and fragrant in his arms, and she could kindle
his desire so. . . .
"The sun rises in three hours," she said, disengaging. "Come to bed."
"Indeed," said Ivor.
"To sleep," she said, warningly.
"I am not," Ivor said, "fourteen years old. Nor am I tired."
She looked at him sternly a moment, then the smile lit her face as from
within.
"Good," said Leith, his wife. "Neither am I." She took his hand and drew him
inside.
Dave had no idea where he was, nor, beyond a vague notion of heading south,
where to go. There weren't likely to be signposts in Pendaran Wood indicating
the mileage to Paras Derval.
On the other hand, he was absolutely certain that if Tore and Levon were
alive, they'd be looking for him, so the best course seemed to be to stay put
and call out at intervals. This raised the possibility of other things
answering, but there wasn't a lot he could do about that.
Remembering Tore's comments on the "babies" in Faelinn Grove, he sat down
against a tree on the upwind side of a clearing, where he could see anything
coming across, with a chance of hearing or smelling something approaching from
behind. He then proceeded to negate this bit of concealment by shouting
Levon's name several times at the top of his voice.
He looked around afterwards, but there was nothing stirring. Indeed, as the
echoes of his cry faded, Dave became deeply aware of the silence of the
forest. That wild rush, as of wind, seemed to have carried everything with it.
He appeared to be very much alone.
But not quite. "You make it," a deep voice sounded, from almost directly
beneath him, "very hard for honest folk to sleep."
Leaping violently to his feet, Dave raised his axe and watched apprehensively
as a large fallen tree trunk was rolled aside to reveal a series of steps
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leading down, and a figure emerging to look up at him.
A long way up. The creature he'd awakened resembled a portly gnome more than
anything else. A
very long white beard offset a bald crown and rested comfortably on a
formidable paunch. The figure wore some sort of loose, hooded robe, and the
whole ensemble stood not much more than four feet high.
"Could you trouble yourself," the bass voice continued, "to summon this Levon
person from some other locality?"
Checking a bizarre impulse to apologize, and another to swing first and query
later, Dave raised the axe to shoulder height and growled, "Who are you?"
Disconcertingly, the little man laughed. "Names already? Six days with the
Dalrei should have taught you to go slower with a question like that. Call me
Flidais, if you like, and put that down."
The axe, a live thing suddenly, leaped from Dave's hands and fell on the
grass. Flidais hadn't even moved. His mouth open, Dave stared at the little
man. "I am testy when awakened," Flidais said mildly. "And you should know
better than to bring an axe in here. I'd leave it there if I were you."
Dave found his voice. "Not unless you take it from me," he rasped. "It was a
gift from Ivor dan
Banor of the Dalrei and I want it."
"Ah," said Flidais. "Ivor." As if that explained a good deal. Dave had a
sense, one that always irritated him, that he was being mocked. On the other
hand, he didn't seem in a position to do much about it.
Controlling his temper, he said, "If you know Ivor, you know Levon. He's in
here somewhere, too.
We were ambushed by svart alfar and escaped into the forest. Can you help me?"
"I am pied for protection, dappled for deception," Flidais replied with
sublime inconsequentiality.
"How do you know I'm not in league with those svarts?"
Once more Dave forced himself to be calm. "I don't," he said, "but I need
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