Fields stretched for miles, row after row of berries. The farmland was bordered by grassy hills, and clusters of lush trees filled the spaces where one hill met another. Wild horses danced across those hilltops. Above all this Earthsong, the sunset was a banner of orange and red streaming across the lavender-blue, setting the clouds on fire.
In the distance was a stone mansion, and just ahead were stables and several barns, built of wood, not crooked and gray, but sure and straight and freshly painted.
“Dasher!” Venture pounded on the carriage wall with one fist, the reins tight in the other. “Dasher, I found it!”
The little window next to the driver’s seat bang-slid open and Dasher said, “Pull over! Let me have a look around.”
Dasher clambered out and Earnest stumbled after him, yawning and shaking his stiff limbs. Chance followed close behind.
“It’s been too long,” Dasher said.
“Whose land is this?” Earnest blinked at the setting sun. “It’s spectacular.”
“It belongs to Star of the Glen. One of his country estates. It’s promised to his son.”
“Of the Glen? The Crested family?” Earnest said.
“That’s them.”
“You know them?”
Cresteds. Blasted Cresteds. The sort of family who’d like to see me dead? And all this richness, the sort of inheritance Jade might marry into. What a prospect that would be, compared to marrying him.
“They’re letting us stay with them?” Venture said. “Why would they do that?”
“The Glens aren’t here much. They prefer their newer estates. Their stewards are running the house and the farm. But I have permission to be here and to bring others to train if I like.”
“They’re patrons of yours, then?” Venture said.
Dasher nodded.
“What sort of Cresteds would let us train in their house, would support fighters like us at all?” Venture said.
“Most wouldn’t. Most see Uncrested fighters as a threat to them—a threat to their superiority, to the respect they get from everyone else for their skill as warriors. Whether they admit it to themselves or to anyone else, they’re afraid they’re actually not the best anymore.”
“Like the men who threatened me?”
“Probably.” Dasher gestured at the buildings ahead. “But not all Cresteds are the same.”
“It’s good of the Glens to let us train here,” Venture conceded. “Are you going to have me fighting the bulls and running after the wild horses, Dash?”
Anticipation glinted in Dasher’s eyes. “You’ll see.”
Venture climbed back up to the driver’s seat, determined to take them the rest the way. But Dasher took the reins and steered them directly to one of the barns. The nearer they got to it, the bigger he realized the barn was, but only once inside did he truly grasp its size—three times that of the Fieldstones’ biggest.
“I’ve never set foot in a barn so big,” Earnest said.
“This is where the berries are brought after they’re picked and packed into crates. They load them onto those wagons and take them to the surrounding towns to sell.”
“But how are we going to train in here?” Earnest asked, nudging the earthen floor with the toe of his boot.
Dasher grinned. “Upstairs.” He pointed to a set of bare wooden steps they’d failed to notice in the corner.
Once he reached the top of the wooden stairs Venture looked to his left and saw more heaps of berry crates and baskets piled on the second floor. To the right was a plain wooden wall, and in it, a simple door.
“Go ahead,” said Dasher, who had followed behind him.
At the threshold was a small space with a wooden rack for boots, and hooks above for clothes, and beyond that, mats. Sixty of them fitted perfectly against the walls. Venture smiled and reached for Chance. He pulled him into a sideways hug.
“It’s perfect, isn’t it?”
“Perfect, sir.”
Amid the barn smells of hay and manure, here was the smell of sweated-on canvas and old, woven straw. These mats were stained with the sweat of Crested men, men of a renowned warrior family. Boots off, Venture strode boldly across the mat and looked up at the elaborate, carefully painted emblem of the Glen family on the wall. A stallion, a sword, and a tree layered over other intertwined symbols, with such complexity that he could scarcely separate one from the other.
“I wonder what it would be like to fight one of them—one who’s not trying to kill me, I mean.”
“Not so different as you might think.”
Venture hadn’t expected an answer from Dasher. “Have you seen them fight?”
“I have. Right here.”
“How’d you manage that?”
“I’ve spent some time with them. It’s a long story.”
“Have you ever been on the mat with them?” Venture persisted.
“You know the Crested policy about fighting with or teaching others.”
“I know, but I wouldn’t have thought they’d let you watch, either.”
“No, I guess you wouldn’t,” Dasher said quietly, almost somberly. Then, brightening, he said, “Well, let’s get settled in the house and have something to eat. It’ll be pitch dark in here soon, and they’re expecting us. I sent a messenger ahead, and they’ve been watching our carriage come for miles, I’m sure.”
An ancient, low stone fence surrounded the yard in front of the house, which was much like the Fieldstones’ home, only larger. Two wings came off either end, so that it formed an incomplete square. Garden hedges formed the fourth wall of the square. Dasher promised them he would take them out to the back later to see the courtyard and gardens that filled its center.
The steward, Jasper, greeted them on the front walk. While he was friendly and gracious, his wife, Pearl, the overseer of the housekeepers and cooks, was a reserved woman with a pointed little face and a dismal gray dress too large and too generous in coverage for her small figure and the warm weather. But the house, in perfect order, was proof of the pride she took in her work. The stone walls were as white and free of fingerprints as though the plaster had been applied fresh that morning.
Thick arched frames, hewn of sparkling silvery stone with swirls and flecks of white and black, formed the window and doorways. A larger stone frame formed the opening through which wide, carpeted stone steps sloped gently upward, to the second floor. The top of the arch widened, like a sort of silver hill above the portal, and in its center, white stone was inlaid in a pattern Venture knew well. The leather cord rubbed soothingly at the back of his neck as he tilted his head back to look at this pattern—the leather cord that he’d used to replace the black ribbon his mother’s little wooden emblem had once hung on.
“Sir,” he asked Jasper, “The symbol of the Faith of Atran—is it common in Crested homes?” He traced its pattern in the air with his finger.
“This is a very old house, over three hundred years. It’s adorned with the ancient symbol, one you’ll find in most of the crests of the great warrior families. So much has been added over the generations that it’s hardly visible in most crests now, eliminated altogether in some. The Atranians who first settled in Richland were shocked by the murder, the feuds, the hunger and cruelty and injustice here,” said Jasper, with a sympathetic glance at Chance. “We’d be shocked, I’m sure, to see what’s happening in Atran today.”
“I saw the symbol at Champions Center, laid into the floor,” Venture said, in an effort to steer the conversation away from the stuff of Chance’s nightmares.
“The main building of Champions Center was once a temple,” Dasher said.
“I thought so.”
Chance nodded almost imperceptibly. He whispered something in Atranian.
“What?” Venture asked softly. He put his hand on the side of Chance’s face and turned it toward his.
“Like home.” The sounds of the words barely passed his lips.
Venture pressed Chance’s face against hi
s side and guided him away from the archway and into a sitting room.
“The table will be laid for you right away, sir,” Jasper said to Dasher. “Any wine while you wait?”
They were cared for so well by the staff that evening that Venture wondered how the master of the house himself could be treated much better. After they had eaten their fill, each of them was shown to his own room.
In a house this size there was no need for them to double up. It was strange to unpack alone. He was so used to fighting over who got which spot, to tripping over Earnest’s things and getting Dasher’s shirts mixed up with his. He wandered over to Earnest’s room. The door was open, and his friend was sprawled across the bed.
“Hey,” Earnest mumbled up at him.
The wine had been good. Venture had gotten a little tipsy, but Earnest was drunk.
“You doing all right?”
“Yup. You?” Earnest lifted his head and made an effort to focus his eyes on Venture. Had he been sober, the look would have been piercing.
Venture shrugged. Earnest had been trying to get him to talk about Jade, but Venture hadn’t said a word about her since his revelation on the jogging trail. Earnest knew him well enough to know that, as fired up as he’d been about trying to win Jade back, he would have done something. He knew something had happened.
Earnest sighed, giving up and letting his head plop back down onto the pillows. “Never been so comfortable,” Earnest slurred, “except for with that girl called Rain—remember her, the one with the silky hands . . . aah. Let’s stay here forever.”
Venture was fairly certain Rain was the girl whose shoes Earnest had thrown up on after the Championship last year. He must have forgotten that part. Earnest was showing every sign that he was just about out for the night, so Venture left.
He’d barely shut the door to his own room when Chance came knocking at it.
“I stay with you?”
Venture didn’t miss the hauntedness that had returned to Chance’s eyes. The kid would probably be tossing all night with bad dreams.
“Of course. You stay with me.”
As he followed Dash out the barn door the next morning, Venture noticed a pair of bright little eyes peeping at them from outside. “Hey,” he greeted the eyes. He crouched down with one knee on the crushed hay and dirt of the barn floor.
“Summer, Drake, say hello to my friends, Mr. Delving, Mr. Goodview, and Chance.”
Two children crept forward. “Father says we’re to call you Mr. Starson,” the little girl, Summer, said timidly, almost questioningly.
“That’s right,” Dasher said.
Summer took the boy, Drake, by the hand and pulled him back around the corner. But Venture leaned his head around the side of the building. “Hey, you two, you forgot to say hello. I might have to take you upstairs and give you a thrashing.”
“Hello, Mr. Delving,” Summer said dutifully.
But Drake twisted his fingers free of his sister’s grasp and ducked under her arm to get closer to him. “Are you a fighter, Mr. Delving?” His smile revealed a gap where his top front teeth hadn’t yet come in.
“Drake! Don’t ask questions,” his sister scolded him half fearfully, half self-importantly.
“It’s all right. I don’t mind questions. Yes, I’m a fighter.” To Summer he said, “You’re a good sister to look out for your brother and try to make sure he behaves himself.”
“He doesn’t like it, sir, but I’m just trying to spare him a spanking.”
Venture tried not to laugh at this too-honest revelation. “I understand. But either one of you can ask me a question any time you like, and you can say ‘hello’ to me anytime you want, even if I don’t say it to you first.”
“Yes, sir,” they both answered. Drake smiled, but Summer looked skeptical.
“Harder, Vent,” Earnest said.
Venture nodded. He blinked against the sting of sweat in his eyes, locked up tighter, stepped in faster, drove off his rear foot, threw Dash harder.
“Still not enough.”
Earnest shook his head, but Venture hid a half-grin. Chance, sitting in the corner, out of the way, narrowed his eyes at Earnest on Venture’s behalf, but Venture had caught the gleam in Earnest’s eye. It was one of his best. He knew that look. Earnest wanted to see how much better he could make it, wanted to see if perfection itself was possible. I’ll do it for you, Earnest. I’ll make him fly, and the floor crack when he comes down, and you’ll only be able to say, “Beautiful.”
Venture gave Dasher a hand up and settled back into starting position. But then Dasher jolted, pulled back. “Drake, what are you doing?”
“I’m sorry, sir,” the little servant boy lisped toothlessly from the space by the shoe shelves, in front of the mat. “I know I’m not supposed to be watching. I was only waiting, to tell you lunch is ready, sir.”
“Let’s go. I’m starving!” said Earnest, forgetting the perfect throw promised by its predecessor, probably at the thought of a bit more of that perfect wine.
Well, Dash can probably use a break anyway, Vent consoled himself as they filed down the stairs. He could have asked them to wait for one more, but the concentration, the momentum, the moment itself, was already interrupted, already lost. Venture hung back in the barn as his friends walked out into the sunshine. Drake had seated himself on a crate. Swinging his feet and scratching the ears of a favorite gray barn cat, he watched the men pass by.
“She have a name?” said Venture.
“Smoky.” Drake ran his hand along the cat’s back to the tip of her tail. “Do you like it, sir, being a fighter?”
“There’s nothing I’d rather do.” Seeing the fascination on the boy’s face, he asked, “Would you like to be a fighter?”
“Me? I’m a bonded servant.”
Venture pulled up a crate and sat down next to him. “So am I.”
“But you can’t.” Drake shook his head. “Bonded servants can’t—“
“That’ll be enough, Drake.” Dash stood in the doorway, regarding the boy sternly.
Drake scrambled to his feet. “Yes, sir.”
Dash nodded toward the open doorway, and Drake obediently ran out, in a scuffle of straw and bits of dust.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Dasher tossed his bag down onto the tile floor of their room.
Venture rubbed his temples. His brain felt just as rattled as his bones from all the travel. “Where are we again?”
“Brown’s Bend,” Earnest said, cracking his neck.
“Right.” He was pretty sure he’d already asked Earnest the name of the village they’d stopped in several times since they’d arrived. It was their last night on the road together, before they went their separate ways.
Dasher plopped himself into a chair and let out an exasperated sigh. “I should just go to Twin Rivers with you three. We never should have left Earthsong.”
“What about your sister?”
He waved his hand. “You don’t know my mother. She’s been trying to get me home for months. Message after message. You just wait. I’ll get there and Heather will have a sniffle.”
“You don’t want to take a chance on something like that, Dash,” Venture said.
“I guess not.”
Through cool spring rains and through the ever-longer sunny days they had trained at Earthsong. The strawberries were red and shining sweetly in the sun, and the raspberries and blackberries dangled in hard green clusters on the sprawling brambles, when Dasher received word that his sister was gravely ill. Venture had urged him to go and see his family, while he and Earnest headed back to Twin Rivers to complete his training for the Championship. So they’d tossed their bags into the carriage and Venture had tossed Drake into the air, and talked of stowing him under the seat. It had been hard to say good-bye to him and all of Earthsong.
Earnest thought that, given the threat, if they had to be without Dasher, and if they couldn’t keep their location secret, it was better to be in Twin River
s than anywhere else. It would be easier, in a private training room at Beamer’s, to hide the intensity of Venture’s training, to hide the fact that he was uninjured and preparing to fight in the Championship. And if Venture were to be attacked, it was preferable that it be in his hometown, where many of the town guards were former students of Beamer’s. They would be eager to defend the up-and-coming local fighter, the one who brought the reigning champion to their town and their fighting center.
The strawberries were just beginning to turn pink and the blackberries and raspberries were blooming when they’d tossed their bags into the carriage and said good-bye to all of Earthsong.
“After I win the Championship maybe I can meet your family, once I’m more worthy of their class,” Venture joked.
“My class?” Dasher glanced at Earnest out of the corner of his eye.
“Come on. You’ve had a good upbringing. Even with your scruffy hair, it still shows.”
Dasher didn’t jump to defend himself against the playful insult to his hair, as Venture had expected. Instead, he looked down at his hands. “It doesn’t all show,” he said quietly. “but I guess it’s time you knew. What do you think, Earnest?”
“I think it was time a long time ago.” Earnest sat down on one of the beds and crossed his arms, his tone sharpening beyond the usual fatigue-induced crankiness.
“What are you guys talking about?”
Dasher let out a long breath. “Earthsong is mine. It’s my inheritance.”
Venture shook his head. “Earthsong belongs to the Glens.”
“Star of the Glen is my father.”
“Dauntless Dasher Starson, of the Glen,” pronounced Earnest dourly. “Quite a name, isn’t it?”
Venture sank into a chair by the window. Chance, who’d been leaning on a pile of their bags near the door, stood up straight, looking from one of them to another as though he didn’t know what to make of this.
Venture Unleashed (The Venture Books) Page 15