Tristan Kendrick, heir to the throne of Corwell, stood in the bow of the Defiant and relished the cool spray against his face. It ran through his beard and soaked his heavy wool cloak. His feet were planted in a wide stance, and he swayed evenly with the rolling deck beneath his feet.
The ship lunged eagerly through the next swell, and the one after that. Each wave brought him and his companions closer to Corwell Firth and the castle on the little knoll, Caer Corwell.
Home.
Just a few short weeks ago, Tristan reflected, his first ocean voyage had carried him across this same water. Then, he had embarked on a mission of politics, to seek his coronation from the High King. Now he carried the crown of that
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same king梩he Crown of the Isles梐nd he returned in triumph to his home. He knew he should be feeling joy and anticipation, but he could not.
He felt, rather than saw, a warm presence beside him and turned to see Robyn. Though she had slept little and eaten less during the past week, she had never looked so vibrant and alive. Her black hair, long and falling loosely around her shoulders and back, glowed with an ebony sheen, and her green eyes flashed with vitality. Her beauty increased every day, or so thought the king.
The druid joined him in the bow but avoided his eyes. He wanted to reach out, to put his arm around her, but he feared her rebuff.
"We'll be there soon梟o more than two days, three at the most." He tried to offer encouragement, sensing her despair.
"But what will we find when we get there? What if we're too late?"
"We won't be! And whatever we find, we can best it! Ibgether, with my sword and your faith, we can rid Gwyn-neth of any shade of evil!"
"I hope so." Robyn leaned against him and he held her, sensing the deep and spiritual fear that haunted her. He felt a vague sense of guilt for the time they had remained on the island of Callidyrr. He had known that she wanted to leave immediately following the defeat of the High King. Robyn feared deeply for the fate of her fellow druids, imprisoned as stone statues around the scene of their final battle.
Yet he could not have left then. And she had chosen to remain with him, rather than embark for home alone or with Lord Pontswain, who had taken the first available ship back to Corwell.
"I'm glad you stayed with me," he said. "I can't imagine facing the kingship without you beside me."
He thought of the many problems he had solved during his week in Callidyrr. He had settled an old dispute on fishing rights between the cantrevs of Llewellyn and Kythyss. He had pardoned the bandits of Dernail Forest, good men and women who had been forced to become outlaws because of the injustices of the former king. He had dis-
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banded the few remaining mercenaries of the king's private army, the Scarlet Guard. The battles of the Ffolk, he had declared, would from now on be fought by the Ffolk.
With his ascension to the throne had come the discovery of the vast surplus in the High King's treasury, piles of silver coins, and some gold, which he had been able to return to the overtaxed lords of the land. This act alone would have done much to assure his popularity with the lords, but his wisdom and good judgment in settling the other disputes had insured their loyalty to his name,
"I'm glad I stayed, too," she sighed. "I know it was important to you, and to all the isles. You will make a splendid king.
"But all the while, I could not help wondering about the druids. Are they suffering? Are they dead? I wish I could have been both places at once. I know I cannot rest easily until I have seen evil excised from Myrloch Vale!"
Suddenly Tristan stiffened, lifting himself to the balls of his feet to peer in the distance. He squinted against the spray, and saw it again: a flash of crimson against the all-encompassing gray of sea and sky.
Robyn sensed his change in mood, and she followed his gaze, staring a few degrees to starboard of the bow. A foot shorter than the young king, she could not see what had alarmed him.
"Northmen," he grunted, pointing. She saw the flicker of color now. It could only be the square sail of a raiding long-ship, and it was facing them.
"Keep an eye on it. I'll inform the captain." Turning and sprinting like a seasoned sailor down the pitching deck, the new High King of the Moonshaes barked a warning to the laboring crewmen.
Robyn turned back to the south as the longship drew closer. She could now make out a second sail beside the first, veering to the side. The sleek vessels spread apart to block the Defiants path at either side. Some voice inside her said that she should be afraid, that these were dangerous and bloodthirsty foes. But instead she felt only a quiet anger as she faced another obstacle on the road to rescue Genna
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Moonsinger, the Great Druid of all the Moonshaes.
But this was an obstacle she could counter.
By the time Tristan returned to the bow, she had unlashed her staff from its mount on the gunwale. Captain Dans-forth, the taciturn master of the Defiant, regarded the approaching vessels through his long spying tube. The crew, two dozen steadfast Ffolk of Callidyrr, turned as a man to regard the raiders but maintained the course and sail of the Defiant without a hitch.
She was called the stoutest vessel, with the ablest crew, among the four kingdoms of the Ffolk. The proof had come when they sailed into the late stages of an autumn gale that would have kept any other vessel of the Ffolk in port. Racing through the Sea of Moonshae around the northern tip of Gwynneth, the Defiant had coursed through the Strait of Oman. Now they sailed south toward Corwell itself.
These northmen were obviously returning home梚t was already later than the usual raiding season梑ut they would doubtless welcome one last prize before making port for the winter.
"The standard of Norland" grunted Dansforth. "That one, to starboard, would be the king's own vessel."
"Grunnarch the Red. I have fought him before," mused Tristan.
"So the stories say. And bested him." The captain looked at the king with just a hint of amusement in his gray eyes. Dansforth was not yet middle-aged, though his hair and beard had silvered until they matched his eyes. Yet he had an enigmatic manner of speaking that reminded Tristan of an old, but very smug, man.
"Can we aher course?" asked Robyn quickly. "Tb there?" She pointed straight toward one of the advancing longships.
"Why?" Dansforth was mildly incredulous. "They're cutting too wide. They underestimate our speed, I think. With a little luck, we can dash between them."
"We wont need luck if you can get close to one of those ships." Robyn spoke quietly, but there was a hint of great power in her voice.
"Do as she says," said Tristan.
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"Very well," Dansforth said with a shrug. He stepped to the steersman, standing at the huge wheel amidships, and ordered the change in course. Then he hurried back to the bow as the Defiant heeled over with the turn.
The trio was joined by another pair. One was Tristan's friend Daryth, the swarthy, handsome Calishite who had become the king's chief adviser. Now he carried his gleaming scimitar lightly in his hand, awaiting battle with a half-smile across his dark brown face. The other was the halfling, Pawldo of Lowhill, a middle-aged adventurer whose wrinkled face and graying hair belied his vitality.
"What are you trying to do?" demanded Pawldo incredulously. "Let's make a run for it!" The diminutive con man had been a friend of the Prince of Corwell's for even longer than Daryth, and he now took it upon himself to protect the young king from the influences of others of a similar moral caliber.
"I hope you know what you're doing," grumbled Dansforth. "My men will stand by to repel boarders, but the crew of that one ship alone outnumbers us two to one!"
Robyn did not turn to look at the captain. "They'll not get near enough to throw a line."
Still skeptical, the captain turned to his crew while Daryth, Tristan, and Pawldo stood protectively around the druid. She closed her eyes in concentration and calmly caressed the smooth wood of her staff. The others held their swords ready. Tristan's own blade gleamed in his hand. The legendary Sword of Cymrych Hugh was a symbol of the ancient glory of the Ffolk. The fact that THstan had discovered the potent blade after it had been missing for centuries explained to a great extent why the lords of Calli-dyrr had been so willing to extend to him the kingship.
The longships raced toward them with startling rapidity. One came head-on, closing rapidly. The other tried to veer in from downwind, battling the gusts to close with her intended victim. Soon they could make out ranks of axe-wielding northmen standing along the hulls, ready to leap into the Defiant. Others stood ready with lines and grapples, though the closing speed of the two vessels would
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make a grappling attempt risky at best.
The nearest longship veered slightly from their path, a hundred yards away, seventy, forty, closing fast. Robyn held her staff over her head, spreading her hands as far apart as she could. She clenched her hands and strained, as if trying to bend the stout shaft, silently mouthing a prayer to her deity, the goddess Earthmother.
An inhuman creaking assailed their ears as the longship suddenly lurched and twisted in the water. Nails flew through the air as the sleek hull bent tortuously. Boards snapped, the mast crumpled, and then came a harsh snap, like the breaking of a bone.
Suddenly the longship buckled, her keel torn in two. Bow and stern rose into the air while the center of the hull filled with foaming brine. The sail billowed gently into the water, belying the violence of the ship's demise, and forty men tumbled into the cold gray sea.
Tristan understood what had happened, though the reality of it stunned him. Robyn's power, the power of the earth, was keyed to all things wild, all creatures of nature. The oak trees that had formed the keel of the raider were such creatures of nature, and the druid had called upon those trees to change their shape, warping them into something different, something that would not support the frame of the long-ship.
He heard a thump on the deck beside him and turned to see Robyn, pallid and motionless, lying on the deck. "What happened?" he cried, kneeling and cradling her head in his arms. Her eyes fluttered open, and a look of panic washed across her features.
"I... I fainted! The casting made me weak! Why梙ow could it do that?" She groaned, but struggled to a sitting position. "I think I'm all right now."
The king sprang to his feet as the Defiant cut through the wreck, and Tristan could see the faces of the northmen who had been dumped so suddenly into the sea. He saw anger and hatred, but not fear. Even the display of ship-killing magic was not enough to quail the hearts of these fierce warriors.
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Suddenly he saw a norihman's eyes widen in terror. The man's mouth opened to scream, but he disappeared under the water before a sound could emerge. Another, and another of the raiders vanished with a desperate thrashing. Now the remaining men began to scream loudly, in mind-numbing panic. The gray sea turned green with the thrashing of scaly bodies, and red froth exploded from the torn shapes of sailors.
Tristan saw the other longship heel toward them and then suddenly lurch off course. Her sides became a seething mass of green scales as reptilian creatures climbed from the water over the smooth planks, to fall upon the crew with sharp teeth and wicked, slashing claws.
"Sahuagin!" gasped the king, recognizing the savage fish-men they had battled upon Callidyrr.
And then it was the Defiants turn to slow in the water as the attackers grabbed her hull as well. Tristan saw a fishiike head, bristling with spines above a snarling nightmare of a face, and he stabbed instinctively. The creature fell back into the water, but two more took its place. Their humanlike hands, tipped with sharp claws and webbed between the fingers, grasped the hull as they pulled themselves upward. Tristan stared into their blank, emotionless eyes. He saw the bracelets of silver and gold, the cruel tridents, spears, and daggers tucked into metal belts. The monsters tumbled onto the deck all around him as Dansforth's crew put up their weapons against this new assault.
The humans took sword and axe and crossbow and faced attack from the Claws of the Deep. These creatures, the sahuagin, they knew to be cruel and implacable foes. Still the fish-men rose from the sea, striking at the two ships while their brethren dealt a bloody end to the northmen still bobbing among the wreckage of the third. *****
The Darkwell grew even blacker with each killing. Hobarth sat and studied the pool, praying and meditating. He had seen a panther and an owl obliterated in the last day, joining the bear, eagle, and stag in giving their lifespark to
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Bhaal. Somehow, the god summoned these wretched creatures from the surrounding wasteland. Hobarth did not know why.
The fat cleric studied well the word of his god, and slowly he began to sense Bhaal's plan. At least, he began to understand his own substantial role in that plan.
He looked to Genna Moonsinger, sitting upon one of the crosspieces that had fallen from the ruined druidic arches around the Moonwell. She stared listlessly off into space, as if awaiting a command. The fat cleric wondered at the druid's docility.
She looked like the same implacable enemy he had faced a short month ago. The statue had become a being of flesh and blood when he pressed the Heart of Kazgoroth into it. She looked, sounded, and moved like the Great Druid of Gwynneth. Even the bear, Grunt, had been taken in.
But now she was unquestioningly obedient to the commands of Bhaal, and thus Hobarth. For several days, this had been but a pleasant diversion for Hobarth. He had not been with a woman in months, and so he had taken advantage of her willingness to follow his orders. Though she displayed no revulsion, neither did she exhibit any other emotion. Hobarth had eventually realized that her lack of passion turned the whole experience into rather a bore.
Then he commanded her to use her magic, wondering if that potent weapon had been lost upon her perversion to the will of Bhaal. The cleric was delighted when she called forth an inferno of fire from the ground itself, surrounding them with greedy flames. However, he noted a difference from her previous castings of the firewall. Now, as the flames licked across the ground, they left the earth tortured, blackened, and barren in their wake, whereas before the spell had made no mark whatsoever upon the land. This spell fascinated Hobarth particularly, for it was one that no cleric could perform. She had used it to telling effect when he had sent his army of undead against her, and now it was his to command!
