Fortress of Dragons

"Relay that to Captain Gwywyn."

Anwyll rode off at a good clip, met with the captain of the Prince's Guard, who stood in Idrys' place in general command of the king's forces, and came back again in haste toward him, to take his place as shieldman.

" Sound the advance!" Cefwyn cried to the trumpeter, and as the trumpets sounded, gave Kanwy rein to resume a measured advance.

Only when he was close enough to the foot of the long descent did he let the pace increase, and set himself not in the lead, as he had done in other wars, but back with the line: his guard was around him, the Dragons beside him, and the forest of ash wood lifted at the heavens now began to lower as the ranks closed.

He lowered his own visor, lowered the lance, took a good grip for the shock to come; and hoped to the gods the veteran Dragons evaded the brush where he wagered stakes were in place: they were too expert for such traps.

And his leading was not to ride full tilt into the lines that offered; they evaded the rows of brush that skirted the center and met the shock of heavy horse that swept out from the enemy's line to prevent that flanking move—met it with a crack like a smith's hammer. Horses went down, fewer of theirs than the enemy's, and they slid by—doing nothing to attack the entrenched line of brush-hidden stakes and pikemen. They went past the flank of the cavalry, and the heavy horse of Tasmôrden's center, seeing the gap they had left, charged past them, going uphill, unchecked.

Ryssand had buckled, had retreated.

And Tasmôrden's riders plunged up and up into that pocket of retreating men, blind to the sweep from either wing that now turned behind them.

Cefwyn took down an opposing pikeman with the broken stub of his lance, sent Kanwy through a last curtain of infantry, and saw Maudyn's ba

More, he saw Tasmôrden's ba

"With me!" he shouted at Anwyll and whatever of his own guard could keep up, and, sword in hand, he rode for that gold-crowned man in the heart of the enemy.

The pretender to the High Kingship failed to see his approach; he shouted in vain after his charging troops, who by now had chased halfway up the hill in pursuit of Ryssand's retreat.

"Tasmôrden!" Cefwyn shouted, and the man turned his face toward him, a dark-bearded man in a crowned helm, in black armor, bearing the forbidden Tower Crowned on his coat and his shield.

Kanwy went through the guard like a bludgeon, scattering unready pikemen, shouldering horses aside as Cefwyn laid about him with sword and shield; with a shove of his hindquarters as if he were climbing a hill, Kanwy broke through the last screen of defense, trampled a man, kept going. The clangor of engagement was at Cef-wyn's back: his guard was still with him, shouting for the gods and Ylesuin; and the crowned man, realizing his danger, reined full about and swept a wild blow at Cefwyn's head.

Cefwyn angled his shield, shed the force of it, and dealt a blow past the opposing shield. Kanwy shouldered a horse that hit them hard, bit another. Cefwyn cut aside at the encroaching guard, veered

Kanwy full about as he bore, in time to intercept another of Tasmôrden's attacks, this one descending at Kanwy's neck.

The sword grated past the metal-guarded edge of his shield, scored Kanwy's shoulder. Kanwy stumbled, recovered himself against another horse, and blows cracked like thunder around them. One numbed Cefwyn's back, but as Kanwy regained solid footing he had Tasmôrden in sight and drove his heels in, sending Kanwy over a fallen rider and through the mistimed defense of two pikemen who tried to prevent him. A pike grated off Kanwy's armor. A man cried out and went down and Kanwy bore him past, and up against his enemy.

Tasmôrden flung up his shield, desperately choosing defense: but Cefwyn's strike came from the side, with Kanwy's impetus behind it on a wheeling turn. The blade hit and hung, needing force and a twist of the arm to free it, and when Cefwyn freed the blade, Tasmôrden toppled from his saddle, helmless, a black-bearded and bloody face disappearing down into a maelstrom of horses and men.

"Majesty!" Cefwyn heard a man shout, and saw Lord Maudyn across an ebbing rush of Tasmôrden's forces.

Suddenly the air thickened. The hairs of his head and Kanwy's mane alike stood up.

Wizard-work, he thought. A trap.

And force and light and sound burst from the heart of the enemy.

Lightning broke above the towers, ripped across the sky, and even at a distance the air shivered with it. "Gods bless!" Uwen said, yet to Tristen's knowledge not a man behind them turned back.

The child and the Lady still went before them, and still that inky flow ran along the edges of the woods, but the lightning flash had for the blink of an eye seemed to illumine men and horses, gray as morning mist, that moved where the darkness flowed.

"I see men," Crissand said, while above them and near at hand the towers of Ilefínian now seemed to flow with inky stain in the cracks and crevices. The darkness flowed, too, in the ditch beside the road, and between the stones of a ruined sheep wall. It wound itself among the thin, straggling branches of blackened, bare trees, and drifted down like falling leaves, to coalesce and run like dark fire along the ground.

It became footprints, and the next flicker of the heavens showed ghostly riders in greater numbers.

"Haunts," Sovrag said, and Umanon blessed himself. Ahead of them all moved the lady of Emwy, but now it seemed ba

"Lord Haurydd," Aeself said in a muted voice, and Tristen, too, recognized the man and the ba

Behind his ba

Tristen turned in the saddle and looked back over the host that had come to this place, men who had left their own lands for a comfortless camp and the risk of sorcery out of the stones of walls that had known too many wars. The earth itself seemed to quake, and the gray place held no comfort.

— At my very doors, the Wind whispered. Mauryl's precious hatchling. Have we known one another at some time, disagreed, perhaps?

He swung about. It was not only that voice. There was another presence, far more familiar, that drifted around the perimeter, one that taunted and mocked him and still dared not come close.

He recalled the courtyard at Ynefel, and Mauryl's face within its walls, as all the others had been imprisoned, all the lost, all the defeated.

So might Ilefínian stand, as haunted, as wretched in its fall.

"The gates are barred," he said to Uwen, for the Wind told him so.

— Ylesuin's down, it said. Folly. Great folly. Will you help him, I wonder?

In the unstable clouds of the gray space he saw a field where lightning had struck, and the dead lay all about, men and horses, and Cefwyn… yet alive, within reach of him, if only he reached out to rescue him.

He turned his head suddenly and looked up at the walls, seeing the lure it cast him, its intention to have Cefwyn's life and his as surely as he turned that direction, and he would not do as it wished.