Read Online Icefalcon's Quest (Darwath) by Barbara Hambly - Free Book Online Page B

good warriors. I saw the practice posts you’ve made at your camps, to go over for yourself what Gnift has been teaching the Guards lately. Would you like to learn?”
    The Icefalcon considered the matter and pointed out, “I am your enemy.”
    Eldor released him then and got up very quickly, stepping clear even as the Icefalcon rolled to his feet. “Why?” he asked.
    The Icefalcon thought about the reasons that he had left the Talking Stars People and about where he might go, and what he might do, now that it was impossible for him to go back. He found that he did not have any reply to Eldor’s question.
    Eldor Endorion.
    The Icefalcon drank a little water and settled himself in the bayberry that grew in the ditch. The silence of the prairie drifted over him. He listened, identifying the crying of the coyotes and the greater voices of wolves farther off, the susurration of the ceaseless wind and the smell of dust and growing needlegrass.
    The world of his childhood reassembling itself, scent by scent and sound by sound in the darkness.
    He was home.
    Eldor Endorion.
    He hadn’t been at all surprised to learn that the man who had overpowered him, the man who had put himself in danger in order to trap a possible spy, was in fact the High King of the Wathe. Even when he learned the size of the Realm, and the rich complexity of the world Eldor ruled, he had felt no surprise at the acts.
    They were typical of the man.
    Eldor remained an extra week in Renweth Vale with the men and women he had sent to regarrison and reprovision the Keep, in order to train with the Icefalcon, to get to know him, to test him as leaders test warriors whom they seek to win to their sides. The Icefalcon had trained hawks. He knew what Eldor was doing.
    He never felt toward the King the reverence that the other Guards did or stood in awe of that darkly blazing personality. But he knew the man was trustworthy and respectworthy to the core of his being. He was content to attach himself to the Guards.
    He spent four years in the city of Gae, training with the Guards. He exchanged his wolf-hide and mammoth-wool clothing for the fine dense sheep-wool uniforms, black with their white quatrefoil flowers; wore the hard-soled boots of civilized men (though they were less comfortable than moccasins and left more visible tracks). When his beard came in the following year, he shaved, as civilized men did, though he never cut his hair. He learned to use a long killing-sword and to fight in groups rather than alone.
    In Gae he met Ingold, Eldor’s old tutor, unobtrusively mad and—he quickly learned—probably the finest swordsman in the west of the world. He saw him first sparring on Gnift’s training floor and took him for some shabby old swordmaster down on his luck, which was what he invariably looked like. Later, after he trounced the Icefalcon roundly, they’d have long discussions about animaltracks, the habits of bees, and where grass grew. Just to watch the High King spar with the Wise One was an education. Now and then he would see Alwir’s sister about the palace compound, a pretty, quiet schoolgirl who read romances and never left her governess’ side and had not a word to say for herself. Three years after his arrival in Gae she was married to Eldor, for the benefit of both their houses. Their child was Tir.
    Though no one knew it, time was running out for civilized folk, like water from a cracked jar.
    It was during this time, too, that he became acquainted with Bektis, who was much more a fixture at court than Ingold. Ingold was in and out of the city, but Bektis had a suite of chambers in Alwir’s palace in the district of the city called the Water Park—less crowded and smelly than the rest of Gae, which had taken the Icefalcon years to get used to. Bektis scried the future and the past (he said) and learned through magic of things far away, and he also worked the weather for court fetes and advised Alwir about shipping ventures,