The Steward and the Sorcerer by James Peart (small books to read .TXT) 📗

an inevitable future confrontation with Longfellow.  Brinemore was a corrosive influence on the Northern Earth.  If no one stood up to whoever had authored that corrupting power then these lands, and the lives of those that lived here, would be altered beyond reckoning.  He couldn’t tell her that because she didn’t think he could act for himself, let alone others, and, more importantly, she did not understand his purpose.  But what he’d told her was true.  He was getting better.  Yet if that had not been the case he still would not have agreed to flee the city with her.  He looked at her now, at her elegantly beautiful face, her long, ash-blond hair spilling to either side of its oval contours, her jade-grey eyes gazing at him with such brilliant intensity.  A man could fall in love with such a woman, he thought.  A man who had not learned to temper his attraction with stern principles, principles that had nothing to do with chaste morality yet everything to do with the need to serve a higher ideal.  The cause of the Druids.  It had never been a conflict for him, though he had felt attraction for women before.  Oddly, he thought of Simon and how he had made Christopher his cause.

“You would leave the Englishmen behind?” he repeated what he’d earlier said.

“They have the Drey Torch and the Meta Crystal to defend themselves with,” she answered in a low voice.

“They will die without my involvement, Mereka.”

Her cheeks flushed.  “They handled things well in Fein Mor when you were close to death and they had to contend with Iridis.  They got him to kill the Furies that surrounded the keep.  They told me.”  Daaynan gave no response to this.  “You think I’m cowardly?” she said.  “That I’m only looking out for my safety?”  A lock of her hair fell forward over her eyes, obscuring her vision.  She brushed it away impatiently.  “I am looking out for your safety too.  Mainly that...” her voice tapered off.

When she found it again, she asked “how long have we known each other, Daaynan?  A long time.  Since before you became Druid.  You travelled all the way from Bottom Dell to visit the towns and cities of the east and you came to Carasan and visited my shop.  We became friends, never more than that, though your friendship was special to me.  I had never met anyone like you.  A changeling- a crossling like me- learns to notice differences in people.  We are more sensitive to diversity than others, not because of our gift of perception but perhaps as we are punished for being different.  Your unique qualities are immediately apparent, even on short acquaintance.  You stand out from others because you are guided by high principles.  Almost everything you say or do serves those values and people despise you for it.  Despise you, Druid, just like they did me.  We have that in common.  But people also look to you for guidance and certainty, to confirm their own principles.  I see it in those boys you took with you, in Simon in particular.  I don’t know where you got them from but they would follow you wherever you led them.  I see that in them.  Daaynan, I...”

“Shh.”  The Druid pressed his finger against his lips.  “There’s someone outside.”

She turned and saw a blur of movement skirt past the edge of the copse, a flash of red and green, headed in their general direction.  As it approached they could see that it was a man dressed in citizen clothes, carrying an implement of some kind- a stick with a long wooden shaft looking as if it had been adapted to become a pike.  He was tall and thickset yet moved easily on his feet, his gait tense, rangy.  He stopped ten feet from where they hid, standing and listening as if trying to identify the source of a sound he had heard.  Apparently satisfied, he moved on yet stopped again and made his way back, this time walking directly toward them.  They hunkered down behind a screen of plants and scrub, hoping against reason that he hadn’t heard them.  Quickly, Daaynan passed Mereka a short blade which he kept concealed in his robes so that she could defend herself, silently cursing his own weakness, wishing he were powerful enough to see off this threat.  She gripped the handle, hefted it, feeling its weight, panic flooding through her body.  Daaynan was trying to tell her something, wordlessly mouthing instructions to her.  She seemed not to understand at first and then she did and her body went rigid in fear.  As she watched the man approach, she understood that she could not simply wait for him to discover them.  He was likely not alone and on seeing them would raise the alarm.  He would have to be taken by surprise.  The Druid was ill, not dying like before, but still not able to fight.  Others would come and finish him if this man did not.  Thinking quickly, she got up on her haunches and circled in a perimeter around the man, moving as silently as she could in the brush.  He did not appear to notice her, going forward instead, his eyes focused on the level of the trees.  Then he stopped, spying something in the undergrowth, a movement that registered in the corner of his vision.  He lifted his pike suddenly and speared it.

She very nearly cried out but it was only a small dead mammal.  She could see that from where she was.  She also knew that he was right alongside Daaynan.  If he turned even slightly to the right he would see the Druid.  She would have to act now, she thought.  She gripped the blade handle harder, a fierce determination registering on her features as she considered what she was about to do.  If Simon had seen the look on her face in this moment he would have exclaimed ‘That’s Christopher’s mother!  That’s