Prince Gaston had made no effort to conceal the force he had brought with him. Mounted and foot, with wagons carrying dismantled siege equipment, he appeared well-equipped to take on Golias.

Actually, Otto reminded himself, the Fireduke had come to take on Otto and Golias. Well, something could still be salvaged by repenting, begging forgiveness, and becoming a party man. The thought of Ascolet lost forever was unpalatable.

Perhaps, he thought, Dewar was right: they were much alike, being a baron of a large and powerful barony owing fealty to an Emperor and being king of a relatively small and poor kingdom next door to the same. Yet Otto couldn't think that without hateful gall in his throat: to owe fealty to anyone was contrary to his nature, which admitted the superiority of very few others.

Prince Gaston was drawing nearer. Through his spygla.s.s Otto saw him examining the wreckage of Perendlac, frowning.

"Open the gates for him," Otto said, and swallowed.

The discipline in the Prince Marshal's army was superb. No chatter; alert readiness for action at Gaston's command or gesture; even the mules seemed to step in time. Otto went to the creaking gate and waited there.

"Welcome to Perendlac," he said. "Sir."

Sorcerer and a Qentkman 373.

Prince Gaston reined in, looked at him, looked at the fortress, and lifted his eyebrows, dismounting. The columns of men and animals halted and waited for orders.

"Prospero?"

"I wish it had been," Otto said, realizing he did. He couldn't look like anything but a milk-mouthed naif to Gaston when he explained what had happened. "It's not a long story," he said, and he told it-Prince Golias, hostage, sorceress, and all.

Prince Gaston stood, one hand on his horse's bridle, listening, watching Ottaviano as he spoke, seeing his acute humiliation. The boy had overreached himself. He would pay a penalty now, a severe one, but not as severe as it would have been if he'd not had the good sense to wed the Countess of Lys.

"Chasoulis," he said when Otto had done. "A relic, but a strong-walled one."

"There's a Node there," Ottaviano said, "and someone is working a h.e.l.l of a lot of sorcery."

The Marshal nodded. "Neyphile," he said distastefully.

"It sounded like her from the description. I've not yet seen her in person there."

"Thou knowest her," Prince Gaston said.

Otto said blandly, "Yes."

"Hast scouted."

"Yes. Nothing has come or gone. He's waiting. For you, for me, for Prospero . . ." Otto shrugged. "I don't know what for."

"Naught of Prospero yet. Art certain of the girl's lineage?"

"Yes."

"How?"

"What I said before-she's in sound mind, and she knows she's his daughter. Looks a little like him, but prettier. Also-she has the same kind of-charge he does. Not the same affinity, but there's something of him in her, in the same way that you are infused with a similarity to your brothers. I'm sure she is his."

Prince Gaston nodded after a moment, digesting this.

374.

'LfizaBetd

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We'll move again in two hours. Maintain readiness." Jolly saluted and left them to pa.s.s the order on.

The Prince Marshal had his own scouts already on the scene, and he compared their reports with Ottaviano's. They had brought most of the news to him already; his siege and attack plans were made. Now he a.s.signed Otto's men positions subordinate to his own force. They would bear the brunt of any attack from the castle, but not the responsibility for anything done. Cannon fodder. Otto estimated casualties and felt an inner lurch. Lunete's words rang again in his memory, demanding he return her Lys men before there were more deaths.

"Sir," Otto said, looking at the map, "do you seriously think you can break Chasoulis?"

Prince Gaston looked at him. " Tis not beyond possible."

"There's a big gap between the possible and the probable. We've had mild weather. One good blizzard and-"

"Timing's all," the Marshal said. "Chasoulis is not unbreakable. Hath great advantages; Golias is well-entrenched. However, I've no doubt that we'll succeed."

Otto noted the we and appreciated it. So he was not utterly in disgrace.

"At present," said Prince Gaston, "I concern me for the girl. An she be injured or abused, when cometh time to restore her to her father, 'twill give him more reason than ever for retaliation."

"She was well and unharmed-" Otto said, and stopped.

"When thou didst leave her," Prince Gaston said.

Lady Miranda, thought Otto. His mouth was dry. "She's too valuable to kill." You'll regret this all your days. How would you feel if someone did this to your wife?

Sorcerer and a (jentteman 375.

Eighteen days later Otto's estimated casualty total was beginning to look low. Golias parleyed with Prince Gaston, who left Otto behind when he went, and the Fireduke told him that either he could have his head and turn the girl over or he could lose his head and turn the girl over. An immediate volley of arrows from the castle's crenelated wails followed Golias's re-entry, killing six Ascolet and Lys men.

Prince Gaston was methodically sapping. The frozen ground slowed the work, but he had chosen his points well, having plans of the fortress in his hands, and the tunnels progressed steadily toward a state in which the eastern wall could be brought down.

Golias made forays to disrupt the sappers, and Ot-taviano's men met those attacks and repelled them with difficulty.

Otto felt like a lackey, which he supposed was the point. His task was to undo Neyphile's sorcerous bindings and protections on the fortress, on which front he had made no considerable progress, uncontracted sorcery for which his guerdon would be his head and a subservient role in Landuc for the rest of his days. It made his belly burn; he watched his men fall and die, watched the pyre-smoke rise, and he swore he would not let this happen again. He had moved too soon; he had been overconfident.

He didn't write to Lunete. He picked up the pen and put it away nightly.

After his evening meal and meeting with Prince Gaston on the eighteenth day of the siege, he left his tent and, in the white light of an exceptionally bright half-moon, ascended a small knoll near the fortress to study Neyphile's Bounds again. The air was static and pure, like thin black ice. His breath froze in his moustache and beard, on the furred hood of his cloak, and stung his nostrils dry.

The Bounds were perceptible as a thickening in the substance of the walls. He shifted his attention to them and began tracing them for the dozenth time, looking for the closure. Neyphile had gotten better at Bounds. She had a knack for work like that, for Bounding and Opening. What 376.

he had learned from her had been more superficial in nature.

A breeze clattered the brittle leaves behind him, then dwindled. Cold seeped through his cloak and faded, raising his hackles.

Otto took his mind from the Bounds and looked around him. There was no movement in the air now. Nothing happening. All still and silent. Sentries pa.s.sed to and fro. A ruddy light glowed dimly around the corner of the castle where the sapworks was.

Wind. Prospero, he thought. Prospero was active in the neighborhood. That was no common wind.

A shadow moved just at the corner of his eye, near the wood's edge. Otto spun and stared full at it, but there was nothing there, no telltale shimmer of a sorcerer's invisibility spell. Otto stood stock-still, sharpening his ears for any other sound of movement the winds might let slip.

A pennant stirred, high on Chasoulis's central keep; it flapped out once and fell again.

Otto drew his breath in.

Nothing happened for the next hour. His muscles cramped; he flexed them without moving. He wasn't cold- like Prince Gaston, he ignored it-but the tension was painful and, he sensed, unrewarding. The breeze had noticed Otto. He would see nothing now.

He couldn't concentrate on the Bounds. Instead he went down to report the news to the Marshal.

Halfway to the Marshal's tent, Otto's mind revolved to turn up again the girl's voice and her still, controlled face. He admired her stoicism, her courage: she'd known her father would come looking for her. It had been a holdout game.

And Ottaviano changed his route and returned to his own tent. d.a.m.n it, he was thinking like a drone now, not just acting like one. Why should he tell the Marshal that Prince Prospero was scouting Chasoulis in his own way? Why not keep his mouth shut?

Prospero's chances of getting in and getting out with his daughter were, it seemed to Otto, better than Gaston's. When Gaston entered Chasoulis, Golias would kill the girl Sorcerer and a (jentfeman 377.

out of spite, to screw Ottaviano and the Emperor, obeying the pure venom in his antisocial veins. Prospero would be subtler than Gaston. If Otto said nothing to alert the Marshal, and Prospero succeeded- In a small way, he would have compensated for the losses to Ascolet, for his own humiliation. If the Emperor lost this one, Otto would have the pleasure of remembering that for years to come. Otto's status was the same, win or lose. In that case, the Emperor might as well lose. Let the girl go with her father. Yes.

Then Prospero would owe Otto a favor of some sort.

There were a number of small things a potent sorcerer like Prospero might do for Otto.

The Baron of Ascolet went into his tent, and the moon shone down brightly.

On the nineteenth day of the siege, the sun's first reluctant rays on Chasoulis's keep were heralded by a pair of dull booms, one after the other.

Prince Gaston, up before the late winter dawn, stared in amazement as the wall his men had sapped began collapsing ahead of schedule. Another boom, this one much louder, blew out part of the wall beside it.

Fatigue! thought Gaston, and: The men, the men below.

They were dead men. The stone was crumbling and tumbling, and rather than wonder at Ihe abrupt failure of the masonry, the Prince Marshal shou:ed orders for an attack.

A screaming sledgehammer wine tore the words away. It bent mature trees in the wood, snapping many, and banged into the wall, knocking more of it down than Gaston would have believed possible.

Never underestimate the capacities of a p.i.s.sed-off sorcerer, Otto thought, watching the stones fall. They seemed to go very slowly.

"Baron!" Gaston screamed at him over the wind, his voice raw.

"Sir!"

"Formation three for attack!"

"Yes, sir!" Otto shouted back, nodding, and he ran to 378.

'Elizabeth collect the remnants of his army in order to lead the entry into Chasoulis. It might be suicide; Golias would be ready and waiting for them. Otto's men were eager to get blood back for their comrades crushed at Perendlac. Golias's men were trapped like rats. There could be no quarter asked or given.

Otto and his men pushed in swiftly. Another section of wall collapsed; Otto wondered if Prince Gaston had figured out that Prospero was responsible. The Marshal and his soldiers from Landuc and Montgard were spreading through the yard, harrying and killing, forcing Golias's men into one another so that they interfered with their own fighting. Having studied and memorized the Marshal's maps of the place, Otto had told his men their goal was to get into the castle proper. The Bounds on the walls and buildings had disappeared with the first onslaught of winds, Prospero's work.

Golias himself was nowhere to be seen. His mercenaries were withdrawing into the castle, fighting grimly defensive fights to prolong their breaths; Otto saw faces whose names he knew, whose bearers he had drunk with, whose blood spurted red when he wounded them. He pursued them with Clay and his men, staying on the outskirts of the fighting. From the corner of his eye he saw a side door which led to a corridor which gave access to the cellars of the castle.

"Clay!"

"Sir!"

"You're in command!"

Clay didn't acknowledge, though he had certainly heard. Otto broke from the fight and, sword and shield ready, sprinted to the door and the corridor.

Winds were running through the place now, Prince Prospero's hunting winds. They whistled in keyholes and rattled the arras and windows. Otto felt them push and pull his shield and himself, some cold and some warm, one hot and dry, a desert wind.

The door to the stair was open. Ottaviano hurried down. It was dark and narrow, the air still and dank. The stone steps were unevenly worn, low and treacherous in the mid- Sorcerer and a (jenttenum 379.

die but still high and square on the sides. He heard nothing of the battle here; it was dank, cold, and quiet.

Humming tension was building in the darkness. Otto left his shield and took the last torch at the bottom of the stair, following the sorcery. Wardings, Bindings-and an Opening now, shaping the subtexture of the world nearby.

Light, and an open door. Otto ran in, feeling the tension build, and hurled his torch with a single word at Neyphile, who, with a man-at-arms carrying Prospero's daughter like a sack of meal, was preparing to step through a Way-fire.

In the moment of their surprise, Otto had time to notice that the room contained a blue velvet divan, rotting straw, a rack, a wheel, and a mixed lot of miscellaneous, unpleasant accessories. Neyphile's tastes had always been a butcher-bird's, her nesting-places never pleasant.

The torch and his shouted Unbinding word disrupted the spell. Neyphile whirled on him, her eyes yellow in the torchlight, and the man with her-not Golias-dropped the girl and began to draw his short sword. He had no shield, and Neyphile wasn't helping him. Otto half-severed the man's right hand and then shoved his sword in his belly. He fell, dying in gore.

Neyphile was attempting to reopen the Way. She and Otto stared at one another. Otto's skin chilled over; he could not look away.

"Come with me, and I'll make you powerful," Neyphile said in her light, trickling voice. "There is power you cannot have dreamed of in the world. Come with me."

The girl, whose feet were not tied, suddenly jerked herself around, jumped, and ran staggering for the door.

The Baron of Ascolet shook his head, Neyphile's hold on his attention broken. It had worked, once; never again. "f.u.c.k yourself, b.i.t.c.h," Otto said, pleasantly nasty. "Prospero is going to toast you." He darted out after Prospero's daughter.

She had stumbled and fallen just a few steps away. "I'm getting you out of here," Ottaviano told her, stooping, helping her stand. She swayed against the wall, trying to pull away from him.

380.

T&zabtth (H%ttey The light in the cell flared and died: Neyphile was gone, saving her skin rather than confront a Prince who would kill her. Otto ducked back in, grabbed the torch where it sputtered in blood, and returned to the prisoner.

Her hands were chained behind her. Her clothing was stained and ragged. She was bruise-eyed, fist-marked, sick-looking.

"You," she whispered.

"Come on, honey, we're getting out of here."

"You-"

"Me. Come on. Wait, I can undo these chains." He tried a simple Unbinding spell, and it worked; the chain fell into iinks, leaving the shackle-rings on her wrists though her arms were now freed. "Come on," he said to her, and gripped her arm, leading her at the fastest pace possible.

She could barely walk, certainly couldn't run. Otto put his free arm around her and half-lifted her along; he couldn't drop the torch to carry her. They loped unevenly to the stair, and he lifted her and carried her up, leaving the torch at the bottom again. The winds had stilled.

At the top, he realized that he had left his sword in Neyphile's guard's gut, and that this was unwise with a minor war raging in the area. If he could rob a corpse of one, he'd be far more likely to survive. There was a body twenty feel away- "Goiias!" someone bellowed in the main hall, whence came a sound of clattering and a sudden silence.