The Warslayer(86)

Right?

"Slayer?" Ivradan said, after another long quiet while.

"Um?" Glory said fuzzily.

"Why did she give you Maidarence?"

"What? Who?" Glory asked, struggling further awake. She looked around. She didn't know how Ivradan could see to find his way—it was as black as the inside of a coal mine at midnight out here. It even smelled late: three or four o'clock, say, a couple of hours before dawn. If she ever saw a bed again, she promised herself she was going to sleep for a week.

"The woman in white. Why did she help us? She was one of the Warmother's allies."

Glory thought about it. "You know, mate, I don't reckon she was like the others, her and her girls. I don't guess you saw much of what happened up there in the palace?"

"The wizard betrayed you." Ivradan's voice was flat with anger.

"No, Ivro," Glory said sadly. "She tricked him, and he didn't have someone like you to let him know what she was on about. She tricked him and she scared him, and she didn't give him time to think."

And now that it was all over, she found that she could actually be sorry for Dylan as well. He hadn't asked for any of this, God knew. Fra Diavolo had been just another acting job to him, not even a chance to play out a wonderful game of make-believe, the way Vixen was for her.

She sighed, and brought her thoughts back to the present. "Anyway, that thing Charane gave him was a gun—a weapon from my world. And he went a little bit troppo with it—started shooting at everybody, not just me. So the Amazon queen—that's the Woman in White to you—put a spear through him. Killed him dead. And I gave her the gun. Guess she used it to shoot her way out of there."

"So the wizard is dead?"

"I reckon."

"And the— the Amazon queen was grateful to you?"

"I reckon," Glory said again. "Or something close enough to it so that we're here now, any how."

"Good," Ivradan said comprehensively. "What will happen to her now? They will not be grateful to her for allowing us to escape."

"I don't know," Glory said honestly. "It depends on if they sober up enough to figure it out. But I know I wouldn't want to get on her bad side."

A while later the first birds began to call out from the tops of the trees, and a little after that, there was enough light that Ivradan mounted up in front of Glory again.

* * *

Glory wasn't sure which of them the others were more stunned to see: her and Ivradan, or the enormous white horse they rode in on. Unlike the Allimir livestock, Maidarence had no opinion of the Oracle cave, and both Glory and Ivradan had gone on foot to coax her along through the cave passage.

"They've returned! Tavara—Mage Belegir! The Slayer has returned to us!" Cambros shouted when he saw them.

His voice echoed weirdly through the cavern of the Pilgrim's Fountain. Maidarence, at last seeing something she understood and approved of, was pulling Ivradan across the floor toward the water. Her shod hooves clicked loudly on the smooth stone.

Glory stopped where she was and let them go on ahead.

Belegir was lying on his makeshift bed beside the fountain, with Tavara sitting beside him. The Allimir healer had gotten to her feet at their approach, and was standing uncertainly, looking almost as if she wanted to fend Glory off. Belegir looked pale and worn, ground down by his injuries, but alive and obviously on the mend. It was only when she saw him, when she was standing once more in this place that all her instincts told her was a really safe place, that Glory could honestly feel that her task was over, the battle ended.

She'd won. Vixen the Slayer had won.

She walked over to the fountain and knelt, stiffly and awkwardly, beside Belegir. Her leather, only faintly damp now, creaked loudly as it flexed.

"It's over," she said simply. "The Warmother will come to trouble you no more."

Belegir closed his eyes in relief, but the tears Glory had somehow expected of him did not come. The Warmother's unbinding had changed everything, everyone she'd known here in Erchanen. Even him.

"There is more to tell?" he asked, after a moment.

"A lot," Glory said. She glanced back over her shoulder. Cambros and Ivradan were fawning on the white mare, like boys with a flashy new car, and Tavara was regarding Glory warily from a safe distance. All of them seemed somehow more normal, more there, as if some missing ingredient, like salt in stew, had suddenly been supplied. "I don't think I did what you wanted. What Cinnas wanted. I'm sorry for that."

"It is the way of heroes," Belegir said gently, reaching out to take her hand. His eyebrows rose at the sight of the makeshift bandage. "I think you must hear now what the Oracle told me, Slayer."