Oath and the Measure by Michael Williams

Sword to sword, knight to knight, man to man!”
    But the music continued serenely, perpetually, the tune varying and doubling back on itself, always recognizable and yet never the same. The fog began to dance to the music, swirling and shifting in a mad, encircling reel. Now Sturm could no longer see the ground. It was as though Luin waded through shallow, indefinite waters.
    Cautiously the lad dismounted and walked beside his mare, each step light and doubtful. He could no longer feel the newly grown grass, and he was beginning to wonder if the ground itself had turned to mist.
    “The keep … is Vingaard Keep to the left? The setting sun …” Sturm muttered. Directions were useless now, even if he could remember them in the midst of this infernal, confusing music. The rules of the road were changing rapidly, and he hated himself for being already lost.
    For an hour or so, Sturm trudged on through the murk, his path winding hopelessly and his thoughts slipping from bewilderment into alarm.
    Quite abruptly, the music stopped. The silence that followed was again breathless and hostile, as though the plains themselves were hushed in the expectation of some terrible crime. Sturm felt his sword shake in his hand.
    For a few minutes, he continued his wandering, his steps even more tentative. The hooting of an owl in a blasted oak sounded like a call from the land of the dead, and once ortwice the lad thought he heard a baby crying nearby. The sounds brought him dangerously close to panic. Twice he set foot to stirrup but both times gathered his wits and thought better of it.
    “ ’Tis all you’d need!” he whispered angrily. “A nasty fall from a horse in a deep fog! Crack your skull and drive out what little brains you have left!”
    Finally, suspecting that he might even be headed back toward the Tower, Sturm decided to stop and wait out the fog. “For wouldn’t it please Derek Crownguard,” he asked Luin, “if I were simply to walk out of the mist in front of the great southern gate, having turned myself entirely about in a terror?”
    He gritted his teeth. “By Huma!” he swore, “I’d rather
die
than give that scoundrel a moment’s triumph!”
    Luin rolled her long nose over the lad’s shoulder and nibbled his hair thoughtfully.
    Together the two of them waited, old mare and young rider. They dozed, startling awake now and then at the wingbeat of quails, at the chittering sound of squirrels in the distant trees. Finally the evening approached, and the country fell hushed and settled around them.

    Sturm awoke with a start. For a moment, he thought he was back in the Clerist’s Tower, safe in the squires’ barracks. But he was armed and cloaked, and his bed was open ground. He turned over and blinked stupidly, remembering at once where he was.
    “Luin!” he whispered. The mare had wandered off, but she was somewhere nearby. Through the early morning darkness, he heard her, sniffing and pawing the earth. Sturm struggled to his feet, his father’s breastplate unwieldy and too heavy to balance. Reeling one last time, the lad righted himself and stalked off in the direction of the sound.
    Suddenly there was a gentle rustling on the breeze, asound he would remember at once when he heard it years later in the ruins of Xak Tsaroth. At first he thought it was a storm wind coursing through the leaves, but the air was still. Sturm thought of Vertumnus, of the unnatural change of the seasons.…
    He stumbled forward as a hot breeze passed over him, carrying upon it a smell of sulfur and ash and anger. At first it seemed as if the plains were burning, that the mist was igniting around him. He was choking.
    Sturm spun about, whistling frantically for Luin. The mare emerged calmly out of the mist and the curling smoke, stopping only to browse lazily at a low clump of clover. He scrambled to her side, hoisted himself onto her back …
    And held on for dear life as Luin caught wind of something beneath the sharp