“Why yes. Surely you’re aware the League keeps count.” Raith shifted the cards in his hand, and Corwin caught the faint smell of rain in the air—it seemed the magist held a fair amount of jars. “Grand Master Storr presents the numbers to the high council regularly, I believe.”
Corwin sat back in his chair, sensing the rebuke in the man’s words clearly. It wasn’t that he wasn’t aware of his own ignorance; it was that normally he could avoid situations where it was pointed out to him.
“That’s very interesting,” Corwin said drily. “I wonder how you magists can tell them apart well enough to keep an accurate count. Who’s to say you aren’t just counting the same packs over and over again?”
“We have our ways.” Raith raised his hand, palm up and fingers splayed in the universal sign of magic.
Corwin smirked—magic was a magist’s answer to everything. “Well, have no fear, Master Raith. I’m sure my brother is already concocting new and clever ways to deal with all these troubles.”
“Ah, so it’s true then,” Raith said, nodding to himself.
Corwin narrowed his eyes. “What’s true?”
“That you’ve decided not to challenge your brother for the throne.”
The words hit Corwin like a slap. The impertinence of it, the presumption. “There’s been no sign of uror,” he said, knowing full well that this magist must be aware of it already. Hardly a week went by when some newspaper didn’t speculate on its absence. In Norgard, the right to rule did not pass from father to eldest son, but from father to the son most worthy to succeed. Determining that worthiness was done through the trials of uror, but only once the sign appeared. It should’ve appeared the year Corwin came of age at sixteen. Only it hadn’t. And here he was, four years later, and still not worthy enough for the gods to initiate uror.
“Oh, my apologies then.” Raith touched a hand to his left breast. “I am not from Norgard. I can’t say I fully understand how this uror works.”
That’s because it doesn’t work at all unless both heirs are judged to be equal, Corwin thought. He forced his jaw to relax, feeling an ache in his teeth.
“Yes, that’s a common enough difficulty. Few outsiders truly understand it.” Uror was a belief peculiar to his people, although some born of Norgard struggled with the concept as well, those too young to have lived through the last uror, when Corwin’s father, Orwin, earned the right to sit on the Mirror Throne over his twin brother, Owen. The word itself meant both “fate” and “self-determination,” two forces that seemed fundamentally opposed.
Corwin cleared his throat. “It’s your play, Master Raith.” He was ready for the game—and this conversation—to end.
“Yes, of course.” Raith laid down his remaining cards. “But what happens once your father moves onto the next life if there never is an uror sign?”
Corwin stared at the play before him, his lips pressed in disbelief at the five jar cards and two shades—a nearly unbeatable hand. Sighing, he conceded the game. “Nicely played, Master Raith. But—” He broke off as a strange sound echoed in the distance, raising the hairs on his arms and neck.
Wordlessly, he and the magist stood and approached the wardstone barrier as the loud keening sounded once more, closer now. Just beyond, a pack of nightdrakes swept down the side of the hill toward them like a gray tide. Moonlight glinted off bared fangs and set dozens of beaded eyes ablaze. Drawn by the smell of live meat, the drakes raced toward the camp, their clawed feet tearing up the earth with each stride.
Corwin laid one palm against his sword hilt and the other against his pistol, instinct urging him to pull them free.
“Do not fear, your highness,” Raith said from beside Corwin. “The barrier will hold.”
Corwin didn’t respond. The truth of that claim would be determined soon enough.
Seconds later, the leader of the pack reached them. The size of a bear, the nightdrake was covered in corpse-gray scales from its reptilian head to its long, spiked tail. It leaped toward Corwin and Raith, spreading out its stunted wings to soar the short distance. Corwin held his breath, knuckles flexed over his weapons. If the barrier failed, the beast would be on him in a second.
The nightdrake struck the invisible wall with a sound like a thunderclap, and the magic flung it backward into the rest of the arriving pack. Several more hurled themselves at the barrier only to be repelled as well. Soon catching on, the pack began to swarm around the perimeter in a frenzy of snapping jaws, beating wings, and writhing bodies. Over and over again, they tested the barrier, as if probing for a weakness. It was always the largest that attacked, the ones as big as horses and oxen, while the scouts and other small ones kept making that awful keening sound.
The other people in camp had arrived by now, drawn by the noise. “Look!” one of the guards shouted. “There’re more.”
Corwin glanced where the man had pointed, lifting his gaze from the pack out into the distance, where a second pack was moving in, easily another dozen drakes. Then came a third, charging down at them from the opposite direction.
“What would you have us do, your highness?” Captain Morris asked.
“Kill them,” Corwin replied. That should help thin the numbers.
“We’ll run through all our enchanted arrows doing that.” Captain Morris glanced at Raith. “Will your blue robes be able to provide more on this trip?”
“To be sure,” Raith replied. “I doubt Prince Corwin’s purse will cover it, but we can settle with the crown when we arrive back in Norgard.”
Corwin sighed. Edwin would not be pleased at the added expense. Then again, this tour had been his idea from the start. Let him deal with the consequences.
“Make it so,” he said, and moments later the twang of bowstrings filled the air, followed by the cries of wounded drakes.
With his stomach twisting at the sound and the gore, Corwin turned to Raith, who still stood beside him. “To answer your question, Master Raith: when my father dies, Edwin will rule after him.”
Raith arched a single eyebrow, the mark of the Shade Born on his face a striking contrast to his white skin. “You mean only if there is no sign of uror before the high king’s death?”
There won’t be, Corwin thought. The last few years he’d spent away from Rime had shown him that beyond doubt.
Turning away from the magist, he spoke the assertion again, one he reminded himself of daily: “Edwin will rule.”
The next day dawned bright and bloody, the stench of burning drake corpses on the air. Corwin had passed the night in fitful sleep, spending most of it in that halfway place between waking and dreaming. His resulting fatigue made the slow pace even more unbearable. Before long he began to formulate a speech about why he and a few of the men would be striking out ahead of the caravan. We must get to Andreas soon, Corwin reasoned. These troubling events cannot wait. The speech sounded good in his mind—believable and, most importantly, inarguable. But just as he was about to approach Master Barrett, doubt set in. As usual, it came in Edwin’s voice. So irresponsible, Corwin. Always thinking of yourself first and never of your duty.
Corwin groaned inwardly, hating the debate and the way it paralyzed him. Trying to appease the divided parts of his nature, he decided to wait until after they’d crossed the Redrush.
Again, the hours slowly ticked by. But today, unlike yesterday, Corwin managed to hold a tighter rein on his thoughts, keeping them away from Kate and focused on more important matters. That was, until he spotted a Relay tower standing on top of a hill in the distance, far from the main road. It was a small one, narrow but still two stories high. He wondered if Kate ever stayed there. He doubted it, given the weathered, ill-used look of the tower. The stone blocks that formed the walls had been windswept smooth, except for the places where they were beginning to crumble.