"The next time you decide to dive out of a window," Dolanna said with a crisp voice but a smile in her eyes, "try to land on your feet."
"I'll remember that," he grunted as he sat up. "What happened?"
"The fire spread faster than I have ever seen a fire spread without the use of oil or magic," Dolanna said sourly. "By the Goddess's grace, nobody was killed. You were the last one out, young one.
"Did we get everything?" he asked.
"I believe so," she replied. "We need to get dressed and decide what to do next. Tiella, come with me."
"Yes ma'am," Tiella said, picking up her pack and following the diminutive woman.
"That was impressive, the way you dove out of that window," Walten said with a grin as he tossed Tarrin a pair of breeches. "You landed on your head."
"I didn't have time to do it any other way," he shrugged. "Better a bump on the head than barbecued Tarrin."
Faalken chuckled, picking up another pack and starting to tie it onto a packsaddle.
"Where's my staff and bow?"
"They're over here," Faalken assured him. "You landed right on the bow. You'd best make sure it didn't crack."
They dressed quickly, and Tarrin checked his bow and staff for damage as Walten helped Faalken add the rest of the packs to the saddles. Tarrin was bone-weary for some reason. No doubt an effect of the healing. Faalken had said that it took some of the strength of the person being healed. Well, he certainly felt drained. He leaned heavily on his staff for a few moments, then sucked in his breath and set his weapons into the skirt on the saddle. "I see the stable was spared," Tarrin said.
Faalken grunted as Walten said "we had time to get everything. Sir Faalken, what are we going to do now?"
"I'm not sure," he said, tying down the last pack, "but it would be best if we just rode on. It's a couple hours til dawn right now, and it serves us no purpose staying when we have nowhere to stay. They'll want us travellers out from underfoot while they deal with this anyway. That, and the longer we stay, the more that they'll think the fire was set by someone."
"Why is that?" Walten asked.
"Because we'd be visible, we're strangers, and something bad happened. It's natural for them to want to blame somebody."
"I didn't think of that," Walten said quietly as Dolanna and Tiella returned. They were wearing curiously similar brown dresses, but Tiella's was of wool while Dolanna's was of silk.
"Tarrin, do you feel well enough to ride?" she asked immediately.
"I can ride, ma'am," he said confidently.
"Excellent. We will start out. There is no place for us to stay, and it is close to dawn. It will just give us more time to travel this day."
Quietly, the small group mounted their horses and, with Faalken leading, they left the village of Watch Hill with the reddish light of the fire illuminating the road. That large fire was like a beacon that was visible for miles on end, a grim monument to the passing of a fifty year old building.
It was not a good start to this trip, Tarrin thought grimly as he looked back.
It was cloudy all day, and there was a fierce wind that tore from the north. Tarrin had his cloak on, pulled around him and with the hood drawn up to protect himself against the dust and leaves that blew on the wind, the dust picked up off the road behind them and the leaves from the forest. The air had also noticably cooled; at this time of year, with the conditions the way they were, Tarrin knew it meant that there was a thunderstorm moving in.
The day had passed in almost total silence. They'd left Watch hill moving at a very fast pace, as if to put distance between them and the accident behind them They stopped not long after daybreak for a short rest, eating a cold breakfast of cheese and dried meat, then had set out again at a pace only slightly slower. The fire last night had subdued Walten and Tiella somewhat the same way it worried Tarrin. They all thought that it was a bad omen of some kind, a warning that there was worse to come. Dolanna and Faalken were quiet as well, but theirs was a wary quiet; this stretch of road was wild, with the next populated area being Torrian itself, some two and more days down the road. The reason the caravans hired guards was to defend against raiders and brigands that were known to ambush along the road from time to time. Tarrin's strength seemed to rush back into him after breakfast, and he felt his old self by noon. Faalken had scouted ahead from time to time, leaving the defense of the rear to Tarrin.
He rode up past his friends to Dolanna, who was riding her small white palfrey at the lead while Faalken ranged ahead to sniff out any potential hazards. "Mistress Dolanna," he called.
"Just Dolanna will suffice until we reach the Tower, Tarrin," she said in her gentle, relaxed voice.
"Dolanna, we need to find shelter, soon," he said. "There's a storm chasing out of the north."
"Yes, I know," she assured him. "Faalken is looking for a place of relative shelter as we speak."
"I hope he's looking for something solid," Tarrin said. "The thunderstorms we get this time of year can be really nasty."
"He will find us something," she assured him.
Faalken rode towards them even as she spoke, coming around a bend farther up the road as Tarrin glanced behind them. The clouds were getting black back there. The storm wasn't too long in coming.
"Dolanna, there's a cave about a quarter mile up a game trail, about a half mile up the road," he told her. as he reined in beside her. "It's been used. It's a bandit hideout of some sort, or was at one time."
"It will have to do," Dolanna said, glancing over her shoulder, back at the clouds. "Is there room for the horses?"
"Yes, plenty," he told her.
"Then I think we had best get there soon," she said. "There is not much time before the storm reaches us." She turned to Tiella and Walten, who had begun to watch the black clouds behind them and talk to each other. "Faalken found a cave for us to shelter in," she told them. "I think it best we hurry. Let us pick up the pace."
They urged the horses into a canter, and quickly reached the game trail as the first rumblings of thunder reached them. The black clouds were moving faster now, but their progress was hidden by the trees as the small party moved as fast as the horses could along the narrow, twisting trail. The forest turned gloomy, and then dark; it seemed to Tarrin that it was more like darkness than the gloom of a storm. "It's going to be a bad one!" Faalken warned. "The cave is right past that bend, so let's get moving!"
The cave was set into the face of a steep incline that marked the base of a hill. The opening was rather large, but it quickly bottlenecked into a tight passage not far inside. They dismounted outside the cave mouth. "Take the reins and follow me," he said, holding out an unlit torch to Dolanna. Tarrin felt that curious sensation again, and then the torch lit by itself. "There's a large chamber just inside the chokepoint we can put the horses."
Tarrin had to yank on the reins of all three horses as a loud crash of thunder almost instantly followed up a blindingly brilliant flash of lightning. "I'm going to need help with the pack horses!" Tarrin shouted over a sudden howling gale that tried to drown out his voice, but Faalken's nod and wave told him that he'd been heard. Tarrin waited just inside the entrance as the others led their horses into the narrow passage one by one, forcing the unwilling animals to enter the confining space as Tarrin sawed and yanked on all three sets of reins to calm the horses down. Faalken and Walten reappeared quickly, and the three of them led the remaining horses into the narrow passage with Faalken leading and Tarrin in the middle.
The chamber at the end of the chokepoint was indeed large. It was almost the size of the stableyard of the Road's End Inn, nearly a hundred spans long. There was an obvious place set up on the north end, the end holding the entrance, for horses. There was even a water trough and fodder laid in neat stacks. The walls of the cavern were very rough and irregular, meandering this way and that, but the chamber was still rather wide at its widest point. The ceiling was also irregular, but at its lowest Tarrin could just barely scrape his f
ingertips across the stone when he raised his arm. The south end of the chamber had a sand-covered floor, with a firepit neatly laid out directly under a very small hole in the ceiling. The hole didn't open directly to the outside. Tarrin looked up there and saw that it was pretty badly slanted, but that didn't let the rain just fall it. Instead, there was a pretty steady stream of water that fell from one side of the hole and dropped into an area where the sand had washed away, creating a loud splashing. There was another white flash from the hole, and the whole cavern shook with the ear-splitting crash of thunder that followed it up. They all took down the packs, and pretty quickly a well organized campsite had been set up. Tarrin laid out the bedrolls as Walten set up wood for the fire, moving the stones forming the firepit a bit to get the fire away from the waterfall pouring from the chimney hole. Tiella and Dolanna were taking out food for dinner and cooking utensils. Faalken had taken a large piece of tarp, probably one of the tents, and was securing the entrance to the chamber with it to form a door of sorts. He then ducked through it to do something outside. Tarrin doubted he would be long, for it was raining like the furies out there.
Tarrin was sitting to one side of the fire, back to the wall, checking his arrows one by one in a methodical fashion, as Walten sat beside him. Faalken was stirring a stew that had been set over the fire, and Tiella was talking with Dolanna in hushed tones across the cave. "Not such a great start to an adventure, is it?" he asked.
"Adventure?"
"That's how I see this," he said. "Getting out of stinking Aldreth, getting a chance to travel with a knight and a Sorceress, going to see Suld. This beats making cabinets any day of the week."
"I'd be eating dinner at home about now," he said.
Walten gave him a strange look. "You know, there's alot of rumors that fly around about your family," he said. "Tel Darlik used to say that all you did over there was train to kill people."
"Not quite," he chuckled. "I did learn how to use weapons, and hunt and all, but how do you think we got our food?"
Walten laughed. "We never thought about things like that," he admitted. "I've never even been out to your farm before."
"It's a farm," he shrugged. "We have a house and a barn and a toolshed and such. Father has a brewhouse where he makes his ale, and we have fields out behind the house."
"Sounds like you miss it," he said.
"I do," he replied. "I've been preparing to leave Aldreth for two years now, but now that I'm really gone, most of me wants to turn around and go home."
"Preparing to leave?"
"Since I was a boy, I've wanted to be a knight," he said. "Well, mother and father trained me with that in mind. Two years ago, I decided that that's what I was going to do. I'd earn a chance to test for it, and go to Suld. If I got in, great. But if I didn't, well, there was always the army, or fletching, or something that I could do to earn my way."
"Everybody always used to say that you didn't do anything," Walten said. "You weren't apprenticed to anyone. All you seemed to do was hunt. My mother used to say that you were a shiftless, lazy freeloader. But that's her," he said quickly.
"Words are words, I guess," he said. "Besides, the rest of the village really didn't understand. Most of them couldn't see past my mother."
"She is a bit strange," Walten said defensively.
"Only to you," he replied.
Walten laughed. "I guess you're right."
"She's Ungardt. Of course she'd do things differently than everyone else," Tarrin told him. "Ungardt ways aren't much like Sulasian ways."
"How do you mean?"
"Well, women aren't just wives and mothers," he said. "Most women are as big as men there, so they can learn to fight if they want. They crew the sailing ships like men, they fight in the clan armies, they do about anything that men do. And men don't mind all that much, cause they're used to it."
"That is different," Walten said, taking out his knife and a chunk of wood and starting to work on it. "You ever meet your mother's father?"
"A few times," he replied. "His name is Alrak, and he's about twice as big as me. He's very nice. He came to the village to visit with mother."
"Oh, yes, I remember that now," he said. "The last time was, what, five years ago?"
Tarrin nodded, putting away his last arrow and securing the quiver cap. The rain sounded like it was beginning to taper off outside. "I don't think I'll ever understand that," he said.
"What?"
"That you hate carpentry, but you like woodcarving."
"Nailing boards together is boring," he said defensively. "This is alot more fun."
"Whatever you say," Tarrin said with a grin.
The storm passed quickly after that, so they ate with general silence, then went to sleep.
The next day dawned clear and warm, and they set out again. The forest showed signs of the ferocity of the storm, for there were limbs and even a few trees littering the forest floor, and Tarrin spotted one tree that was split in half with its insides blackened and charred. It had been struck by lightning. The road was damp but not muddy, having mostly dried over the night, but Tarrin found that he rather liked it, for it eliminated the dust that had been swirling in the wind the previous day. Dolanna pulled them up for a moment as she considered the area. "If we move a a good pace, we can reach Torrian some time after nightfall," she said to Faalken.
"Aye," he agreed. "We made good time yesterday, even with the storm."
"It was the extra time we had, from when we left after the fire,"Walten surmised.
Dolanna nodded. "We get no closer standing here," she said. "Let us move on."
They rode rather hard most of the day, stopping only for very brief rests and eating lunch in the saddle. The pain of the saddle had begun to creep into Tarrin's legs and backside again, and about midafternoon he saw that he wasn't the only one. Dolanna had stopped them when Walten began to slow down, then did her healing work on them all again. After that, they returned to the brisk canter that had propelled them so far. They encountered five or six other travellers on the road, all but one of them groups of merchants riding to Watch Hill. The last was a party of King's Men patrolling the Torrian road to discourage bandits. They rode past the armed party without a word.
It was well past sunset, riding by the light of three full moons and the brilliant Skybands, when they topped a hill and looked down into the shallow valley that held Torrian.
From what he could see of it, Torrian was a large city, surrounded by a stout wall of huge logs sharpened at the tops. The hazy sight of buildings could be seen inside the walls, as well as occasional points of light that marked a torch or other light source along the streets. It was about ten times the size of Aldreth. Tarrin wasn't the only one to gawk at the size of the place; he'd never seen something quite so large before.
As they started down the hill towards the city gate, Tiella looked fretfully at the wall. "Won't they have the gates closed?" she asked.
"Yes, but there will be a guard at the gatehouse, over the gate," Dolanna replied. "That guard will order the gates open."
"Good," she said. "I'd like to sleep inside tonight."
"What is the matter?" Dolanna asked.
"I don't know," she said, looking around, "but I have the feeling that something is going to happen."
The gate was a large pair of wooden slabs bound with iron, with a large room of some sort built onto the wall above it. A single light oulined a small window, and at that window a silhouette appeared. "The gates stay closed til sunrise," the man called down.
"I am Dolanna Casbane," she called back.
"I don't care if you're Sheba the Pirate," the man said back.
Dolanna reached into her bodice. "I am not she," she said in a level voice. "But I am a katzh-dashi. By law and the agreements between the Tower and the King, you must obey my request to open the gates." She held the amulet up, and Tarrin saw that it started to glow with a milky white light.
There was a span of silence after the
silhouette disappeared, and then it was back. But it was a different voice. "He's a new man, Mistress," an older voice called. "They're readying to open the gates now. Please step back a bit."
"My thanks, sir guard," she said as they moved back. "It has been a long day, and we require food and rest."
"Most of the inns are full, Mistress, but the Duke is at home," the guard called down as the gates began to creak and groan. The left gate pulled away slightly, moving at a slow, loud pace. "I'm sure you can get hospitality from him."
"I know Duke Arren," Dolanna said. "He is a most kind and generous man, and one of the best stones players I have seen in many years. Yes, I would like to pay him a visit."
"I take it you know the way to his keep?"
"Yes, I am familiar with the way," she told him as the gate came to a groaning stop, more than wide of an opening for them to enter.
"The Gods be with you, Mistress," the man above called down.
"May the light of the Goddess illumine you," she returned.
They followed Dolanna as the three younger ones gawked and stared at the streets of Torrian. The streets were narrow and a bit crooked, with large houses built so close together that they all seemed to be the same structure in the darkness. There was an acrid pall that hung in the air, what his father had always called the "city smell", the smell of garbage, unwashed people, waste, and stone and wood. The streets were not deserted, as people moved to and fro in small groups, or parties of city watchmen patrolled the city in search of thieves.
It was obvious where Duke Arren lived. It was a huge keep set on a small hill overlooking the river that flowed through the city. It was a brooding structure, with impressive stone walls and a deep, steep ditch dug around the walls that were filled with sharpened stakes, the towers of the keep itself visible over the walls. There was a drawbridge out over the staked ditch, down, with a gatehouse on the other side. A portcullis hung threateningly at the top of the gatehouse roof, ready to drop down to protect the castle from invasion on a second's notice. Four men stood at the other end of the drawbridge, and Tarrin could see about ten more sitting around a table set up in the courtyard beyond the gatehouse. Dolanna stopped them at the edge of the drawbridge as two of the four advanced. Tarrin could see that they were all wearing chain mail armor, and all four held pikes.
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