Arkus demanded with the voice of authority, “What have you done? How dare you murder one of my lord’s people?”
Panicked eyes looked from one to the other of the two soldiers, but no one dared speak.
Helmuth said, “Tell us why you have done this.” He was an old man, his voice gentler than Arkus’.
One of the peasants stepped forward, half bowing, and looking furtively toward Lenardo, who sat numbly staring at the blood-spattered tableau.
The peasant took in Lenardo’s fine clothes and the wolf’s-head pendant hanging on his breast. Then he stared at the sword Lenardo wore and asked hesitantly, “My lord?”
Lenardo understood his confusion. If a Lord Adept could not use his magical powers, neither could he then use a sword. But I’m not a Lord Adept. I’m not fit to be a lord at all.
Before Lenardo could answer, Arkus said, “Bow to your new lord. And then speak, before his first act in this land is to punish you.”
The peasants fell to their knees, and their spokesman babbled, “Oh, my lord—be welcome! The boy was a Reader, my lord—your enemy. We only killed one with the witch-sight—”
“Enough,” Lenardo got out past the lump in his throat. He knew that they killed Readers here, had known the danger he faced when he left the empire on his quest into the savage lands—but that would change now. “I am—” he began, but Helmuth cut him off.
“This is Lenardo, your ruler. Never again will you take the law into your hands this way. You will take your problems to the magistrate Lord Lenardo appoints or to my lord himself.”
The peasants were astonished, Lenardo Read. Drakonius, the Adept who had ruled this land for many years, had taken no interest in the problems of the common people except to punish them if they did not provide enough men and food for his armies.
“Listen well to Helmuth’s words,” Lenardo said. “There will be a system of justice in this land.” He could not yet bring himself to say “my land.” “Never again will you kill someone without a proper hearing.”
“But he was a Reader, my lord.”
“He was not—”
Again Helmuth cut him off, this time recalling that he could communicate directly with Lenardo without the peasants’ knowing. //They are terrified enough, my lord. Do not let rumor destroy you before you prove you can rule.// “He was not given a hearing,” the old man said aloud. “You cannot be certain he was a Reader at all.”
Lenardo was sweating after the hard ride, the pain, and his own nervous tension. He flung back the light cloak he had put on against the early-morning chill, exposing his right forearm, where the dragon’s head, mark of the Aventine Exile, was burnt deep and permanently into his flesh. It was long-healed now, and he had grown accustomed to it, but when the peasants saw it, they gasped.
Lenardo felt their eyes devouring him in a strange combination of hope and fear. Then the man who spoke for them cried, “The white wolf and the red dragon! The boy was right. And he was a Reader, my lord, to have seen ye so.”
No, the boy had not been a Reader. Lenardo knew that but accepted Helmuth’s caution and didn’t say it. Instead, he said, “Should you suspect anyone else of Reading, you will do him no harm. He is to be brought to me in Zendi. Is that clear?”
“Yes, my lord.”
The peasants continued to grovel, waiting anxiously, and Lenardo Read that they expected to be punished for breaking a law he hadn’t made yet. It was what Drakonius would have done.
Looking at the battered corpse, he asked, “Does this boy have a family?”
“Yes, my lord. A mother and a sister in the village. His father and granther died in the battle at Adigia.”
“And you have destroyed the last man in that family,” said Lenardo. “There can be no recompense for such a loss, but I charge all of you: Whatever needs those women have—plowing land, cutting wood, anything their men would have done for them—you are to do it. Do not think you can neglect this charge without my knowing. Arkus, ride back to the village with these men and extend my sympathy to the boy’s family. Give them a measure of silver. It will not compensate, but perhaps it will ease their lives a bit.”
The utter astonishment of the peasants followed Lenardo as he and Helmuth rode back toward their train. The old man said, “That was a very good move, my lord. It is exactly what the Lady Aradia would have done.”
“Aradia could have stopped them before the boy was murdered,” Lenardo replied bitterly.
“But she wouldn’t have known it was happening at all,” Helmuth pointed out.
That was true. Readers and Adepts had individual powers, but when they worked together....
How life has changed in just a few short weeks!
Lenardo had been a teacher in the Academy at Adigia, expecting to spend the rest of his life there, until Adigia was attacked by savage Adepts under the direction of a Reader: Galen, a boy Lenardo had trained but who had turned traitor to the empire. The only person who could hope to take Galen from the enemy was another Reader. Lenardo, who had taught Galen the techniques he had turned upon his own people, volunteered to go, speaking the same traitorous words Galen had in order to be condemned to exile: “We cannot fight the savages off. They are defeating us with their Adept powers. We must offer to share our Readers’ abilities with them in order to gain peace.”
The words were a lie at the time he spoke them. But now I believe them, he thought as he rode beside Helmuth angling back toward the road.
Arkus joined them, reporting, “You really surprised those men, my lord. Drakonius would have destroyed their whole village if they’d gone against his will.”
“Even if they didn’t know his will?”
“That way, people got to know it very quickly.” The young officer grinned, and Lenardo felt a moment’s disgust at his callousness.
“Arkus, the destruction of people’s lives is never amusing.”
Arkus sobered. “My lord, I have not forgotten that you spared my life. Whatever your will, I shall serve you.”
But Arkus did not really understand. Years of teaching had given Lenardo patience. Only time and exposure to a different way of thinking would change Arkus’ attitude. Just as leaving the empire changed mine.
Leaving the empire in total ignorance, only by good fortune did Lenardo escape being taken by Drakonius. Fortune or fate—he was not certain what to term the sequence of events that had led him to wander, delirious with fever from an infection in his branded arm, into Aradia’s lands. There his wolf’s-head pendant—a gift from an old friend on his day of exile—was identified as the sign of the Lady Aradia, leader of an alliance of Adepts seeking to halt the spread of Drakonius’ power and cruelty.
Aradia’s father, Nerius, the one Adept with powers to equal Drakonius’, was dying of a tumorous growth in his brain. With Lenardo’s Reading to guide them, Aradia and her foster brother, Wulfston, had been able to dissolve the growth—and the old Adept had recovered
