——— 1 ———

⁠—⁠—⁠— I ⁠—⁠—⁠—

It was dawn in the Marches.

The morning mist formed a pale purple veil above the surface of the Kes. Across the river lay a no man’s land, a rugged wilderness of rock and sand that stretched all the way to the horizon. The meager tufts of grass were the same color as the sand, possessing a kind of harsh beauty and pride that said, Here is no cultivated soil, no verdant grove, no country path. Here is only death. On maps these wildlands were shown as part of the Marches, but compared to the thick green woods on the side of the Kes where Rinda stood, they were another world entirely.

The leafy boughs of the Roodwood looked peaceful. But looks can be deceiving, thought Rinda as she stretched her arms to the sky and yawned. Half of the forest lay in ashes, and the Gohran stronghold that for years had towered in its midst was gone.

“And to think it seemed so big, so… solid.” Shivering, Rinda hugged her shoulders with her long slender arms. She shook aside the platinum hair that fell down across her shoulders and got into her eyes and looked up at the smoldering pile of rubble that had once been the keep. Thin wisps of inky black smoke still rose from the ruins in places. The near-impregnable fortress had fallen to an army of the Nospherus Sem tribes in the space of a night and a day. Rinda’s pale violet eyes flared and she shivered again, though her boy’s leather jerkin was warm enough. How many thousands died here?

“Did you say something, Rinda?” came a sleepy voice from behind her. She turned to see her brother stepping up alongside her. The morning light shone down on them, illuminating a masterpiece of creation: beautiful, fine-featured faces that would have been nearly identical were it not for Rinda’s longer hair.

Standing next to her, the boy looked like a highly polished reflection, peering back at her with the same exquisitely colored eyes. Only their expressions were different. Remus, prince and rightful heir to the throne of Parros, had the look of a dreamer. There was a softness to his stare and a gentleness in the way his lips parted, tasting the cool morning air. But his sister, the princess Rinda Farseer, had the hard, resolute look of someone who had seen too much at too young an age.

Right then, she was remembering. This was not the first time she had seen towers fall. The spires of the crystal city of Parros, too, had seemed impervious until the barbarous Gohran soldiers trampled the cobblestones of her home beneath their heavy boots. On that day in the War of the Black Dragon, when their father and mother, the king and queen, were put to the blade, Rinda and her brother had been saved by an ancient device hidden deep within the Crystal Palace. Yet a mistake had been made, an error in calculations, and they had found themselves transported out here to the Marches of Gohra, only a short distance from the wildlands of Nospherus. The twins and their strange new traveling companion had been caught and taken prisoner at Stafolos Keep, and Rinda didn’t know whether it was luck or fate that hordes of wildling Sem had attacked the Gohran keep that very night.

The warrior Guin had rescued them from the keep’s burning roof. Now he was numb to the world, fast asleep behind a boulder at the base of the cliff that rose up from the Kes to the ruins of the keep. The Sem forces had finished their looting during the day and left the night after the attack; by the time that Guin declared it safe enough for them to emerge from their hiding spot, the chariot of the Sun God Ruah was shining again on the land. The tension of the long wait had melted away and they had slept.

Guin might have been in a sleep deeper than the dark pits of Doal, but Rinda knew that if there were even the slightest suspicious sound, he would be on his feet in a flash, wielding the longsword which even now lay ready across his knees. She smiled, and brushed her grimy locks back to fall over her shoulders.

“Rinda.”

Remus had finally swept the last sleepy cobwebs out of his head, and now whispered to his sister in a low voice, as if he feared to break the morning’s silence.

“We made it, didn’t we? We’re alive.”

“Of course we’re alive,” she snapped back at him.

Remus blanched. “Not so loud, Rinda⁠—what if they’re still around somewhere…”

“They aren’t!” the girl exclaimed, utterly sure of herself. “Even you should be able to figure that out! The Sem know that the smoke from yesterday’s battle was like a giant beacon to the other Marches keeps. Why, reinforcements from Alvon and Talos will probably be arriving sometime today, I should think. The wildlings know that, and that’s why they left in the night on those canoes⁠—they were scared. Otherwise they would have spent all last night piling up the dead and having a victory feast. And that was good for us, too. If they hadn’t been in such a hurry to get out of here, do you really think they would have left without searching for survivors?”

“I guess not.”

“Really! I swear you only use half of your head most of the time.” Rubbing her empty stomach, Rinda broke off her attack. She sighed. “Anyway, I’m really quite hungry. I’m sure there’re fish even in these parts, but after seeing all that blood in the river yesterday, I’m not sure I fancy eating anything from the Kes. Did you see all those dead Gohrans and Sem get swept downstream? I’m sure this morning the fish have bellies full of them!”

“Ugh! That must be why it’s so clear now. And to think that it was full of blood and corpses just last night,” Remus murmured in genuine amazement.

Rinda clicked her tongue. “They were washed downstream, silly. No matter how many fish there are in there, they couldn’t have eaten all that in one night!”

Rinda was wrong, but she had no way of knowing it. Being a young princess raised in the tranquility of the Middle Country with all the care given a delicate flower, the true nature of the river known as the “Black Flow” was a mystery to her, and she gave it no more thought. Right now she had more pressing concerns than the ecology of some wildlands river. “I really think I’ll die of starvation… though that might be preferable to dying at the hands of the Gohran reinforcements. If we don’t want to be found, we’d best move out of here…”

Rinda’s voice trailed off as she looked around. She shook her head. The waters of the Kes offered little hope of safety, and turning back into the forest behind them would put them right in the path of any Gohran scouts. And who could know what barbarous and fiendish things might rampage through the wildlands that stretched as far as she could see on the other side of the river?

“I hope Guin wakes up soon and lets us know what he plans to do,” Rinda muttered, chewing on her lip.

Remus tried his best to sound encouraging. “We’ll be fine. I’m sure Guin will find a way to get us through this.”

“Well, I hope so, because right now we’ve got a choice between the wildlands and the Roodwood, and that’s no choice at all!” Rinda exclaimed; but her expression softened when she turned around.

“Suni… Guin!” she called to their two companions, who had finally emerged from their nighttime hiding spot behind the boulder and were walking towards her.

They made quite a couple. Suni, the young Sem girl, almost had to run to keep up with Guin’s long strides. Rinda noted, too, a slight wariness in the way the child glanced from side to side as she moved. It was understandable, after the terror of the last two nights. Why, Rinda and Guin had saved her from a certain and grisly death no less than three times since they had met⁠—once from her own kind! Suni was a Sem, but from the Raku tribe, a rather gentle clan compared to the violent Karoi Sem who had led the attack on Stafolos Keep.

There were other differences between the various Sem tribes, though most were about the same in appearance: around three feet tall, of slender build, with a bristly coat of fur covering their hands, their feet, and even their faces. They looked more like monkeys than humans, and conventional wisdom was that their capacity for rational thought, too, was more on the simian side. But they were not mere beasts, Rinda had learned that much.

They had a rather queer, complex-sounding language, and they could make weapons that pierced Gohran steel. They had demonstrated that they knew how to use fire, too, in the siege of the keep. They wore clothes of a sort: cut animal skins and crude cloth. Most of all, they could feel affection and love; one look at the devoted reverence in Suni’s acorn eyes as she gazed up at Rinda made that clear.

In contrast, the leopard-headed warrior Guin revealed nothing in his expression. Like his identity and his past, Guin’s face was a complete blank. Rinda found herself thinking back to when she and her brother first saw him: stripped of his memory and his possessions, wandering out of the darkness of the Roodwood.

He slowed to walk beside Suni, the morning sun glinting off the tawny fur of his mask. He was more than twice the little girl’s height, and at least six times her weight, though not an ounce of that incredible bulk was wasted. The muscles that ran like banded steel across his chest spoke of years of hard training. Had there been any doubt that here was a true warrior, the dried blood on his tanned skin and the innumerable battle scars⁠—some old, some fresh⁠—would have provided proof enough of the terrible conflicts he had withstood. And of course, topping his godlike form was the leopard mask, concealing his true features with those of a beast. He towered, a figure of violence incarnate.

“Are you rested up?” Guin asked in his low rumbling voice⁠—a voice that the twins had only recently learned to understand without considerable effort. “You’ll need your strength. We’ll be in danger if we’re not free of these Gohran lands by sundown.”

“Leave Gohra?” said Remus, his eyes wide. “But how?”

“Simple. We need only to cross the river and we’ll be in the wildlands… You know that much, do you not?”

Suni came up with a quick shuffle and threw herself at Rinda’s feet, gazing longingly up at the princess’ silvery hair. Rinda, absentmindedly patting the girl’s head, was transfixed by Guin. He looked like something out of legend as he stood by the bank of the Kes bathed in the ruddy morning light.

“B-But if we go out into the wildlands…” Remus shivered and gulped.

“You know a better way? I thought long on this last night. We must cross the River Kes, somehow, then cut through the wildlands of Nospherus until we arrive on the eastern edge of the Middle Country. Any other route would be more difficult and more dangerous. Particularly as, with myself and Suni in the party, we cannot pass incognito through the human lands of Gohra.”

“But the wildlands of Nospherus?”

“You’re forgetting something, Guin! There is another way,” came a voice from behind them. The four turned to see the ruggedly handsome and still youthful face of the Crimson Mercenary, Istavan of Valachia.

Two nights before, when Guin and the children had fled from the rampaging Sem and the Roodwood specter that haunted the halls of Stafolos in the guise of the keep-lord, they had been chased to the roof of the black tower. There, Guin was faced with a choice: perish at the hands of the pursuing hordes, or trust himself and the children to fate and the roiling black waters of the Kes far below. Rinda still remembered what it felt like as they leapt, she clinging to Guin’s belt: the fear of flying through the night, then the jarring impact with the water’s surface, then nothing but watery blackness swallowing the four of them whole.

Whether they were lucky, or whether Jarn Fateweaver was watching over them, she did not know. But they had lived. Jumping from a height of several hundred feet, they could easily have missed the deep water and struck the jagged boulders jutting out along the riverbank. Such a fall surely would have broken every bone in their bodies. As it happened, however, they had hit the river towards the middle, and after sucking them in it spat them back out to drift along with the current, unconscious from the impact.

Then luck favored them again. Floating defenseless in the Kes, it would not have been long before a large fish⁠—or far worse⁠—found them. But there had been someone hiding in the rocks at the base of the cliff, watching as they plummeted from the sky like a giant bird that had lost its wings. It was Istavan.

The young mercenary from the seaside region of Valachia, as cheerful as he was crafty, was congratulating himself on his escape from the cell next to that in which Guin and the boy Remus had been held. Anything was better than going to the block for a trivial bit of insurrection against the lord of Stafolos Keep. The beast-man and the boy could be damned for all he cared⁠—Istavan made his own fate, and he was willing to get around anything in his way, even taking apart a wall brick by brick, which is exactly what he had done. He had climbed down a makeshift rope of torn bed sheets until he was below the walls of the keep. He had known he didn’t have much time left, just as a torqrat knows when to escape a sinking ship. There was a reason he was known as “Spellsword”: he had an almost supernatural nose for danger… and Stafolos Keep reeked of it.

His timing was perfect, too. Had he sat wasting in his cell any longer the Sem would have killed him along with the other captives in the tower; and had he escaped any earlier, he would have run headlong into the Sem armies as they came prowling up the shores of the Kes in the night. Then, no matter how great a warrior he was, he would have stood little chance against the endless battle waves of the tiny wildlings.

Jarn is fickle: for, had the guards on watch heard the sounds of a fight breaking out at the foot of the cliff below their walls, the fate of the entire keep would have been different that night. As fortune would have it, however, it was just after the Sem forces had quit the banks of the Kes to split into two strike forces, one in the heavy cover of the woods, the other along the cliff side where it wound away from the river, that Istavan lowered himself carefully down his knotted ladder.

The mercenary of Valachia was still in his hiding place at the cliff’s foot when Guin and the children made their daring plunge. He sat where he was, watching their shapes bob up and down in the river for quite a while before coming to the conclusion that he would probably be better off with allies.

He crawled warily from his hideout. Finding a rope and grapple next to the remains of a boat on the bank, he tossed with a sure eye and, after a few tries, managed to hook the floating figures. With much effort he dragged them out of the water, and just in time, for as he finished pulling his waterlogged catch onto the rocky bank, the muscles in his arms knotting and bulging with the strain, a great wave broke the surface of the thick, dark, and deceptively quiet river water as a giant mouth rimmed with ferociously long teeth clamped down right where the four had been. The monster snapped its jaws two or three times more before finding the corpse of a keep guard floating nearby. Grabbing the dead man in its maw, it disappeared once more beneath the waves.

Istavan whooped, then made a sign to ward off demons. “A bigmouth!”

After making sure the fiend was gone, Istavan examined his catch. And what a catch it was! He passed over the little Sem girl and turned all his attention to Guin. After shaking the unconscious warrior vigorously, he attempted to gently lift off the miraculously life-like leopard mask.

“By the flaming hackles of the hell-hound Garmr!” Istavan murmured in amazement, “this thing’s really real⁠—he’s got the head of a leopard! And I thought he’d stuck on a mask in a fit of drink, or to hide his face from the guard.” Whistling appreciatively, he knelt down to give Guin’s muscles a prod, then drew the longsword from the scabbard at Guin’s side. At last, his face deep in thought, he turned to where Rinda and Remus lay; and his long, slitted eyes suddenly narrowed. “This is that kid from the next room⁠—and that must be the girl he was talking about. Aye! By the pallid face of Aeris, give this girl ten years and she’ll be starting wars between the closest of friends, she will. This is no common peasant girl, I’d stake my sword on it. Now just you wait, Crimson Mercenary, this might be the start of something very profitable!”

Thereupon Istavan sat down, his legs crossed under him in the Valachian style, and stared at Rinda’s beautiful, sleeping face as though he would never tire of it, excitedly muttering to himself⁠—until suddenly he sprang to his feet with a grunt.

A lone Sem had come sneaking up on him from behind, either a straggler from one of the wildling armies or a rogue out to do mischief. Just as the mercenary noticed him, he let fly a poisoned arrow⁠—but it flew too late. Istavan’s blade flashed even as he twisted artfully out of the arrow’s path, and the Sem’s head flew through the air to land with a plop in the Kes.

The mercenary glared and spun around, checking to see if the little rascal had any friends waiting in the shadows. As he did he heard a rustle. Guin and the others were waking.

The four companions had spent the night hidden in a hollow among the boulders, in the care of the Crimson Mercenary.

“I couldn’t help but overhear your conversation.” Istavan folded his arms across his chest and favored Guin with an ironic sneer.

Though not quite of Guin’s stature, Istavan was a very tall man. When it came to breadth, he lagged well behind the leopard-headed warrior. Istavan’s body was slender, like a whip, but he was strong and agile⁠—as those are who have lived the life of a mercenary from the age of twelve. He was wearing Gohran armor, minus the crests and insignia that his captors had torn from him when they threw him into the tower cell. At his belt hung two blades, a longsword and a shortsword, and his boots were of ankle-high leather.

He wore his helm with his faceplace set back, letting the sunshine fall on his youthful features. He was around twenty, with a tight face and a shrewd look in his eyes. A long face, thought Rinda, but not unattractive. His black hair was cut short in the Mongauli fashion, and a sarcastic smile stretched between his taut, almost sunken cheeks.

Yet perhaps the most striking thing about the mercenary were the black eyes that sparkled and shone out of his tanned face. They were always scheming⁠—even the way they blinked was somehow crafty. But they had a certain charm, and they were so vibrantly full of life that the unwary might find themselves smitten with this man from Valachia even if they knew they couldn’t trust him.

“There is another way⁠—is that what you said?” Guin asked, turning his expressionless leopard head to face the soldier.

Istavan nodded impatiently, straining to understand Guin’s muffled voice. “We all made it through the other night one way or the other, and, to our great fortune, the Sem decided to pack up and leave. But, like you say, if we wait around here we’ll be found by Gohran troops sooner or later. So we leave. But first there’s something I need to do.”

“What?”

“Eat.” Istavan grinned and reached behind his back and, as if by magic, brought out bundles of food: cold meat and grain balls that he had taken with him when he escaped from the tower.

Just seeing food made the twins drool. Istavan generously doled out his stash to everyone, though his face took on a grudging expression when he gave Suni her portion.

Together, they all sat down to break their fast. Sitting atop a flat boulder, they pushed the pieces of meat in to the grain balls and ate as they talked about what to do next. Suni aside, they all shared the same goal: to somehow cut across the Marches and return to civilization, all the while avoiding Gohran territory.

As Istavan said, “The Sem girl has friends out here, I’m sure⁠ ⁠… and I’m done in Gohra⁠—nobody will hire a wanted man. Truth be told, I was in a bit of trouble back in the capital⁠—that’s why I joined the Marches patrol in the first place.”

Istavan’s face lengthened into a sour grin.

“I… er… shortened the life of a kid back in Torus, turned out to be the son of a noble. They put out a warrant for me in Yulania, so I made my way down to Kumn… where I got into a bit of a duel with someone… that’s when I came back out to Mongaul. Yep, I don’t have a shore to sleep on in any of the three duchies of Gohra. And I’ve pretty much had it with these monkeys out here. That leaves Cheironia way up in the north, or the ancient Kingdom of Hainam…”

“Well, we…” Rinda began, but then she thought twice about saying too much. It was clear that Guin still didn’t trust this Istavan. “We were planning on going to Cheironia ourselves, or to Earlgos.”

“The Earlgos grasslands, eh? Wasn’t the king of Parros’⁠—rather, I should say the late king of Parros’ younger sister wed into the royalty out there?” Istavan asked. His tone was innocent, but he watched the twins’ startled reaction closely. They glanced at each other, but did not answer.

“What about you, leopard-head?” Istavan prompted.

“I…” Guin paused, thinking. “I must find out what the word ‘Aurra’ means. If I find that out, I might discover who I am, and how I came to be like this. That is all.”

“So, there’s no objection to going through the Marches with the aim of reaching Cheironia, then.”

“None.”

“Then it’s decided!” said Istavan cheerily. “Now, as I was saying before⁠—about the other way we could travel⁠—if we’re lucky, we might just find one or two rafts back in the keep that weren’t destroyed in the fires. Hell, even a damaged one will do if we can repair it. The way I see it, we could get on one of those and just ride the Kes River out of this place.”

“Ride the Kes?!” shouted Remus, startled. “Are you crazy? No one’s ever gone down the Black Flow and survived the trip⁠—even I know that! We learned it in our classes! The Kes is the border between civilization and the wildlands, the lands of Nospherus! They say there’re horrible things in there… things not from our world.”

“Boy, I knew that and more about the Kes before you were born! I was making my living on the battlefield while you were still in dirty diapers.” Istavan laughed out loud, ignoring Remus’ fierce glare.

“Even so⁠—why go down the Kes?” asked Rinda, thinking that her brother was quite right to be perturbed.

Istavan flashed the pretty girl a mischievous look. “The Kes reaches the sea at Rosmouth. In the town of Ros, we can find a merchant ship to take us across the Lentsea. From there, it’s an easy matter to go to Cheironia or even Valachia if we want, and then we’re free to do as we please.”

“Though I doubt any merchant ship would take me on as passenger or crew without suspicion,” Guin observed.

Istavan guffawed, licking the grease from the cold meat off his fingers. He let his laugh rumble on for a while before he spoke again. “Yes, we do have to do something about that big leopard head of yours.” The mercenary’s voice was serious, but a derisive laugh still sparkled in his eyes.

“If there were anything he could do about it, he would have done it a long time ago,” Rinda said protectively. “I think he’s under some kind of curse⁠—otherwise he should be able to take the mask of. Maybe if he hid it with a hood or something…”

“He’d stand out all the more that way.” Istavan waved his hand in the air dismissively and took a swig from the canteen at his belt. “We can worry about that once we reach a town. The bigmouths and the other carrion feeders in the Kes couldn’t care less if he was a leopard-headed freak or a full-blooded beast. Both taste the same, I’d wager. Still…”

Istavan gave Guin a long look-over, then whistled. “You have to wonder what chain of events led what wizard to use his powers to make something like you! I’ve fought on battlegrounds all over the world, from Queensland and Taluuan in the north to the archipelagos of the south, from beautiful Simhara to the mudlands of Lute; I’ve even gone all the way to god-forsaken Ferah-la, Kingdom of the Cripples, and I’ve seen more and heard more than I care to remember… but I’ve never heard of anything like you…

“Little girl, you probably don’t know about the Ice Queen Tavia who rules the frigid snows of Queensland? She’s trapped in ice, and yet she lives! Then there was the ruler of Simhara, jewel of Corsea. He was half-man, half-bull, a great priest… with a tail! But it turns out his bull head was just a mask, set with gems. Aye, that was right freakish, but like a good half of the strangeness in this world, it was the result of man’s mischief.

“But anyhow⁠—this leopard noggin is something else!”

Istavan stared at Guin and sighed. “It’s like someone ripped the head off a warrior and slapped on the head of a real live leopard from the grasslands of Mos, but kept the warrior’s brain in there somehow, and his soul… maybe. Gaa… it’s enough to drive a man to mulsum, just looking at it. I don’t like things without good logical explanations, see.”

He acts as though it were his problem, thought Rinda angrily. It’s not as if Guin chose to become like this!

“You’re right, little girl,” said Istavan calmly. Rinda jumped⁠—she was sure she hadn’t said anything, but Istavan answered her thoughts as if he had heard. “He was turned into this leopard-headed monstrosity by someone else, and through no fault of his own. That’s why it makes sense he wants to find this ‘Aurra’⁠—it could be the key to finding out who he really is! I’d do the same if I were in his shoes.

“Still, there’s just something odd about the situation, leaves a sour taste in my mouth, and I swear I won’t get a good night’s sleep until I get to the bottom of it. Don’t you see? It’s like some thing is behind all this, pulling the strings; and the Crimson Mercenary, Istavan Spellsword, is not going to sit idly by! You shouldn’t either.

“I mean, it’s like the⁠—hey, little girl, have you heard of the Shining Lady?”

“The Shining Lady?” Rinda thought for a moment. She could swear she’d heard that phrase somewhere before. She and Remus exchanged glances, then she shook her head. But when she asked Istavan to explain, he only mumbled something, then fell silent. She asked again, but Istavan ignored her and rose abruptly, brushing bits of grain off his knees with his hand.

“Now’s no time for small talk! Well, what’ll it be? Do we follow my plan of finding a raft and going down the Kes to Rosmouth, or do we not? Do you want to wander forever in the pathless wastes of Nospherus, fighting barbarians and fiends and worse… or do you want to ride the Kes? Sure, we might have to take care of a few nasties along the way, but once we reach the sea, it’s smooth sailing to Cheironia. I’ll have to go find us a raft. Reinforcements from Alvon Keep are bound to be here soon, and we’d better be somewhere other than here when they come⁠—so make up your minds quick.”

The twins held hands and looked nervously at each other, then at Guin. Suni couldn’t understand what they were saying, but she could sense that they were talking about things of great importance, so she sat quietly in the shadow of the boulder, chewing what was left of her food. Istavan’s jet black, impatient eyes sparkled as he watched the twins, waiting for them to make a decision.

Guin’s expressionless leopard head slowly nodded, an unfathomable expression in his yellow eyes. Slowly, his mouth opened. Even Istavan understood that whatever Guin said now would determine their course of action. Somewhere along the line, without so much as a word, it had been decided that Guin was their leader. Surely, this had always been the case no matter where he went, or with whom he traveled. The proud princessof Parros, too, waited for him to speak; for this accursed, leopard-headed warrior had an aura of majesty about him⁠—the kind of aura that surrounds one who is destined to rule.

In his thick, gravelly voice, Guin spoke⁠—“If we’re looking for a raft, we better start in the underground cellars.”

Istavan slapped his knees. His armor caught the sunlight and shone black like his obsidian eyes. Their path was decided.