It was a strange, bewitching night, not one the twins would soon forget.
Long afterwards the memory of it would come to them—to Rinda as she swam in the waters near Corsea or sat in a Mongauli tower, to Remus as he lay between sheets of Parros silk. Perhaps even the warrior Guin recalled it somewhere in the depths of his heart. It was a night as mysterious as the holy night of birth. There they were, where not even the hardened mercenaries of the Marches patrol would think of staying after sundown, deep in the borderland woods with only their blazing campfire between them and the ghosts, ghouls, and demons that roamed the night.
Not that the three sitting around the fire seemed entirely out of place. The twins could easily have passed for naiades or dryads had they been wearing light white robes instead of their battered travel garb—so like spirits they were, with their frostcolored hair sparkling in the firelight, violet eyes that looked almost silver in the darkness, and long, slender arms and legs. Their companion seemed to have come from another world entirely—a warrior of heroic proportions with a dark rage burning in the eyes that peered out from his ferocious-looking leopard mask.
At Rinda’s suggestion, Guin had taken a black breastplate, iron gauntlets, and greaves from the corpse of the largest of the Gohran riders he had slain. He added to this a pair of high leather boots, strapped on the finest broadsword he could find, and hung a light but sturdy black cloak from his shoulders.
He did not take a helmet. Wearing one of the black helms of Gohra could have fatal consequences should they happen to encounter any of the barbarians or soldiers from one of the many lands that were at war with Gohra. Moreover, there was another, simpler reason—it was unlikely that any of the helms there would have fit over his giant features.
Rinda admitted to herself that, recovered from his exhaustion and with a full set of clothes, Guin cut quite a handsome figure. Even his strange leopard head seemed much less a horrifyingly wild thing. He was like a god, she thought—half-man, half-beast—a noble warrior infused with untold strength and an animal soul.
The three companions constantly supplied their bonfire with oily grasses and branches to maintain its strength. The steadily burning flames cast their orange light in an alluring pool of wavering radiance that made for quite a fantastic sight. The circle of firelight carved out a small but certain territory; inside was the travelers’ refuge, outside were the spirits and fiends to whom the black night of the Marches belonged.
The twins of Parros spread cloaks on the grass and sat themselves down. With their hands on their knees they huddled close together. Occasionally, they would shoot glances at the hostile darkness beyond the firelight’s reach; then they would turn their gaze toward their mysterious companion who sat hunched over, the firelight glinting on his giant frame. Reflected sparks from the fire danced like little devils across the metal fittings of his armor, emphasizing his strange features. He was the stuff of warriors’ nightmares.
In the darkness beyond, the shadows of things even darker writhed in vexation at the bold challenge of the campfire, outraged at this incursion into their territory. Even in the Marches, there was a clear borderline between the human and spirit worlds, and as long as people sat awake around a fire and it was clear that the rule of man was being upheld there, the spirits could not touch them. The Roodwood, a silent wilderness during the day, now teemed with unholy life, a swarm of ghostly things that did not walk the earth as men do; yet the flimsy boundary the three intruders had made with their circle of firelight kept them from harm.
But outside the hopelessly short range of the firelight, the forest-dwellers waited for a chance to do mischief. Rinda could hear the slithering sound of some giant thing sliding moistly through the underbrush, breathing in a ragged syuu-syukk, syuu-syukk. She could see the glinting eyes of shadowy things—several of them had gathered in the shallow darkness just beyond the reach of the light, making eerie noises that seemed to swish right past her ears. Once she heard the whoosh of giant wings as something took off, followed by the clamor of a desperate struggle; in the following quiet the horrifying snap-snap sound of bones crunching and the slurp of something drinking; then a flurry of commotion as the unseen predators quarreled over their prey.
Each time they heard a new noise, Rinda and Remus would huddle even closer and hold each other’s hands more tightly. For fifteen years they had lived as an inseparable pair—so inseparable that, if they were ever separated, each would feel incomplete, like the lost half of a broken whole. But when they were together, no matter what happened, they could always find the strength to make it through. Still, this was too cruel a place for the twins—mere children, neither of them having performed the rites—to spend a night.
Rinda could hardly bear to sit silently any longer, listening to the freakish, fearful noises in the night. “It… it’s really dark here, isn’t it? I mean, the fire’s not going out, right?” No sooner had the words left her mouth than she turned to Remus with a startled look on her face—
…the fire’s not going out, right? …going out, right? …right? …right?
The mocking sound of tree spirits echoing back her words filled the deep woods around them. The warrior Guin stiffened and sat upright. He didn’t like the undisguised malice he could hear in their voices, and he put his hand on the grip of his broadsword.
“Don’t worry, they’re just mocker imps. They can’t do anything to us,” said Rinda, glaring out into the darkness, then turning back to the fire as if to ignore them. She changed the subject. “No sleeping, Remus! If you nod off for even a second you’ll have nightmares, you know. Just pinch your knee if you start getting sleepy.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re far from it! This will be the second night we haven’t slept, and it’s going to be tough, but I know if we can just make it through until tomorrow…”
“Well you don’t know that, do you, Rinda Farseer? Nobody knows whether we’re going to see tomorrow or not,” her brother replied, sulking. Rinda fell silent and briefly considered not saying anything back to her brother, until she remembered the dark sounds that crawled in the silence, and decided she much preferred her brother’s complaints and the mockers.
“Tomorrow will come,” she said, proudly lifting her silver head. “I know it. Tomorrow will come, and everything will be better. I mean, no matter how bad it is, it has to be better than yesterday, when we had to spend the night in the vasya bushes where it hurt just to breathe. Or the day before, galloping along, hanging on to those saddles for dear life and crying and crying. Or the day before that—” Rinda bit her tongue and fell silent as a horrible scene from her memory floated before her eyes. She quickly put her hands to her mouth.
“Rinda…”
“It’s okay. I’m okay,” she said.“We’ll make it through this.” But the look she gave her brother was filled with worry.
“You two…” said the leopard-headed warrior. It seemed he was at last taking genuine interest in what was going on around him. “Why are you two wandering in this wood? What brought you to this place?”
‘Well, we were—”
“Quiet, Remus!” Rinda cut off her brother before turning to Guin. “Don’t you know who your friends are? You saved us, and we saved you, but still you don’t know?”
“I am no man’s friend.”
“That’s what I’m talking about.”
Rinda shivered slightly. The fire was still burning brightly; she shivered not because of the forest cold, but rather because she had felt something, the shadow of some giant creature that stirred the darkness with its passing.
“It’s so very dark here,” Rinda moaned. “And—can’t you hear that sound over there? That’s something gnawing on bones! It’s creepy!”
“Rinda’s a prophet—a seer,” Remus explained to the warrior, sounding a little proud. “She’s closer to the spirit world than me or other ordinary people. When we were born, the prophets of Parros foresaw that we would be two pearls—one an elixir, the other a treasure.”
Guin was silent.
“They told me it meant Rinda would be a great prophet and a sorceress, and I the sovereign of Parros.”
“Remus!” his sister said sharply, but Guin seemed to take an interest in what Remus was saying.
“Parros? Sovereign?”
“Yes, Parros! Even if you lost most of your memory, surely you still remember the Kingdom of Parros, pearl of the Middle Country?”
“The Kingdom… of Parros?”
“Yes, the Kingdom of Parros, ruled by His Holiness, Aldross the Third. But…” Rinda paused. “It is no more,” she said flatly, realizing it was foolish to speak evasively any longer. Both twins’ eyes welled with tears they had long held back; in their memory the image of the beautiful crystal spires of home blurred and ran, and once again they could see the horrible things they had been trying so hard to forget: towers burning and crumbling in the fires of war, people being cut down in the streets, everything falling, falling. “They torched the crystal tower, murdered the holy royal family, the king and the queen—who were granted their thrones by Janos Himself!—and all the crusaders of Parros, killed…” Rinda spoke softly, cursing the Gohrans. “I will not forget the blood that flowed under the blue moon, in the dragon year, not until the day I die.”
“Did I fight in that battle?” asked Guin, more concerned about his forgotten identity than her loss.
“I wouldn’t know,” said Rinda brusquely, “but there’s certainly no custom of putting leopard heads on prisoners in Parros, and I would think that someone trying to hide his face by putting on something like that would just end up attracting more attention. Now the Mongauli army of General Vlad, one of the archdukes of Gohra, is known to do all sorts of despicable things. But I’ve never heard of even them torturing or restraining a person in such an odd fashion.”
Rinda clicked her tongue, almost seeming upset that the act of entrapping someone in a leopard mask couldn’t be added to the list of the Archduke of Mongaul’s crimes.
“You know, I think this guy came from the Southlands,” said Remus.