Ilse Witch

“Mostly. You called up that you had a message from Allardon Elessedil. I gather the message is for me?”


“It is.” Hunter Predd wiped at his mouth with the back of 1his hand. “Do you have any ale you can spare?”

Walker smiled. Blunt and to the point, a Wing Rider to the core. “Come inside.”

He led the way across the courtyard to a doorway into the main keep. In a room he used for storing foodstuffs and drink and for taking his solitary meals, he produced two glasses and a pitcher and set them on a small wooden table to one side. Gesturing the Wing Rider to one seat, he took the other and filled their glasses. They drank deeply, silently. Rumor had disappeared. He seldom came inside these days unless called.

Hunter Predd put down his glass and leaned back. “Four days ago, I was patrolling the Blue Divide above the island of Mesca Rho, and I found a man in the water.”

He went on to tell his story—of finding the castaway Elf, of determining his condition, of discovering the bracelet he wore and the map he carried, of conveying him to the Healer in Bracken Clell, and of continuing on to Arborlon and Allardon Elessedil. The bracelet, he explained, had belonged to the King’s brother, Kael, who had disappeared on an expedition in search of a magic revealed in a dream to Queen Aine’s seer thirty years earlier.

“I know of the expedition,” Walker advised quietly, and bid him continue.

There wasn’t much more to tell. Having determined that the bracelet was Kael’s, Allardon Elessedil had examined the map and been unable to decipher it. That it traced his brother’s route to the sought-after magic was apparent. But there was little else he could determine. He had asked Hunter to convey it here, to Walker, whom he believed might be able to help.

Walker almost laughed aloud. It was typical of the Elf King that he would seek help from the Druid as if his own refusal to supply it in turn counted for nothing. But he kept silent. Instead, he accepted the folded piece of weathered skin when it was offered and set it on the table between them, unopened.

“Have you provided sufficiently for your mount?” he inquired, his gaze shifting from the map to the other’s face. “Do you need to go outside again tonight?”

“No,” Hunter Predd said. “Obsidian will be fine for now.”

“Why don’t you have something to eat, a hot bath afterwards, and then some sleep. You’ve done much traveling over the past few days, and you must be tired. I will study the map, and we will talk again in the morning.”

He prepared a soup for the Wing Rider, tossed in a little dried fish, added a side portion of bread, and watched in satisfaction as the other ate it all and drank several more glasses of ale in the bargain. He left the map where he had put it, on the table between them, showing no interest in it. He was not sure yet what he had, and he wanted to be very sure before he conveyed to the Wing Rider a reaction that might be carried back to the Elf King. The uneasy relationship he shared with Allardon Elessedil did not permit giving anything away in their dealings. It was bad enough that he must pretend at civility with a man who had done so little to deserve it. But in a world in which alliances were necessary and, in his case, tended to be few and infrequent, he must play at games he would otherwise forgo.

When Hunter Predd was fed, bathed, and asleep, Walker returned to the table and picked up the map. He carried it from that room down musty halls and up winding stairs to the library, which had served the Druids since the time of Galaphile. Various inconsequential books filled with Druid recordings of weather and farming and li1sts of surnames and the births and deaths of noted families lined the ancient shelves. But behind those shelves, in a room protected by a magic that no one could penetrate save himself, lay the Druid Histories, the fabled books that recorded the entire history of the order and the magic its members had conceived and employed in the passage of more than a thousand years.

Settling himself comfortably in place amid the trappings of his predecessors, Walker unfolded the map and began to study it.