interrupted, rolling his eyes. “I’ve told you both before, Caramon. It’s … it’s a
pilgrimage
of sorts, and when I’ve learned a few things in the north and settled a few others, I’ll be back.”
Caramon clutched the sides of the table with his red, thick-fingered hands and smiled apologetically at his prim and serious friend. Raistlin, meanwhile, remained silent, his dark, attentive face turned toward the hearth and the last of the dwindling firelight.
“But all this questing and searching, Sturm,” Caramon explained. “It
could
take you away forever. It does that with the
real
Solamnic Knights.”
Sturm winced at the
real
.
“And if it did, we’d be none the wiser as to why you went in the first place.”
“That, too, I’ve told you again and again, Caramon,” Sturm repeated calmly, his voiced strained and brittle. “ ’Tis the Oath and the Measure, and it is the Oath that binds theSolamnic brotherhood.
That’s
why I have to go north—into Solamnia … the Vingaard Mountains … the High Clerist’s Tower.”
“The Code again,” Raistlin observed, quietly breaking the silence.
The two larger youths turned at once to their scrawny, dark comrade. Leaning back in a darkened nook in the vallenwood trunk, the young adept was half lost in shadows, almost as insubstantial as his own sleights and illusions.
Out of the gray flickering gloom, Raistlin spoke again, his voice melodious and thin, like the high notes of a viola. “The Code and the Measure,” he said scornfully. “All of that smug behavior that the Solamnic Order swears by. And the thirty-five volumes of your Measure—”
“Thirty-seven,” Sturm corrected. “There are thirty-seven volumes to the Measure.”
Raistlin shrugged, wrapping his tattered red robe more closely around his shoulders. Quickly, with a birdlike grace, he leaned forward, stretching his thin hands toward the fading glow of the fire.
“Thirty-five or thirty-seven,” he mused, his pale lips tightening to a smile, “or three thousand. All the same to me, in its foolishness and legalism. You aren’t bound to obey a page of it, Sturm Brightblade. Your father, not you, was the Solamnic Knight.”
“We’ve disagreed on this before, Raistlin,” Sturm scolded. He stopped himself and leaned uncomfortably back in his chair. He sounded like a reproving old schoolmaster, and he knew it.
Raistlin nodded and swirled his tea in the cup, staring into the bottom as though he were reading omens in the cool dregs.
“There have been other years, Sturm,” he whispered. “Other Yules.”
Sturm cleared his throat.
“It’s … it’s because Mother’s gone now, Raistlin,” he replied tentatively, looking thoughtfully at the glittering poolof wax in the dark ceramic candle holder. The wick floated on the shimmering surface. Soon the candle would go out entirely.
“The Order is my last remaining family. There’s nowhere else to go but north. But mostly it’s because of what Mother told me … about what happened the night my father vanished.”
The twins leaned forward, stunned by this sudden news.
“Then there was something more?” Raistlin asked. “More that your mother hadn’t told you?”
“She … she was waiting for the proper time,” Sturm replied, his hands unsteady on the table boards. “It was just that … the plague … then there was no other time …”
“Then when she told you was the proper time,” Caramon soothed, resting his huge hand on Sturm’s shoulder. “Tell us, in turn. Tell us of that night.”
Sturm looked into the eager brown eyes of his young companion. “Very well, Caramon. Tonight I shall tell you that story. Remember that it is not easy in the telling.”
And with the twins leaning toward him expectantly, the autumn night uneasy with the high wind and the rattle of leaves across the roof of the inn, Sturm began the story.
“First of all,” Sturm began, his gaze fixed on the table, “Lord