by Rick Shelley
“What prophecies?”
“That we’ll have us a new golden age when the same man is both Hero and King of Varay.”
I thought, Oh shit, not again. But I just said, “You think that will stop the attacks out of Fairy?”
“How could the age be golden if this warfare continued?”
I didn’t try to answer that.
“We’ve lived a long time on hope,” Resler said, turning to the window again. I shook my head. He was another True Believer who though that a vague legend could do what all his years of experience couldn’t. I waited, and the melancholy mood seemed to lift from him.
“You were wanting suggestions for your route,” he said. He strode across the room to me. “There is no certain way, but your best chance is to stay in the forest, fairly close to its edge, near the Mist. Any force traveling the western side of the isthmus would take the open road along the beaches and bluffs. You might chance upon a patrol in the forest, but perhaps not. Speed is essential. The elflord knows when outsiders trespass in Xayber. You may have one other problem. Lately, we’ve had two dragons flying south out of Xayber to hunt. They haven’t raided right around here yet, thank the Great Earth Mother, but dragons are nothing if not unpredictable.”
“That’s all I need,” I muttered. “We’d better get started, unless it’s safer to start after dark.”
“Light or dark means nothing to creatures of Fairy, so there’s no call to wait on that account. Come, Highness, we’ll find you horses and such food as you can carry.”
It didn’t take long to outfit us. Lesh and Harkane chose lances from the castle’s stock of weapons to go with their swords and knives, and Lesh added a wicked-looking battle-axe. I had my own weapons, all of them. The horses were excellent by appearance, a coastal breed with long hair. They were smaller than Gold or his ilk, but they looked strong, and the chief groom said they could stand the greatest rigors of a campaign. Resler told the groom that we were to have the best in the stable. The groom chose them, and Lesh signaled his satisfaction. I accepted Lesh’s judgment, because I didn’t know enough about horses to contradict him.
When we headed for the main gate, the portcullis was down and the drawbridge was up. Resler took no chances of being surprised. While we waited for the gate to be opened, I glanced up at the ramparts between the gate towers and saw a young woman staring down at me. Her long blond hair blew freely. She was dressed in dark green with a thick leather belt around her waist. I smiled. She nodded, so slightly that I though I might have imagined it.
“You know the lady above the gate?” I asked Lesh softly.
He glanced up. “What lady?” I looked again and she was gone. I described her, and Lesh shook her head. “I don’t recall anyone like that, but it’s years since I was here last.”
The portcullis went up, the drawbridge went down. We walked our horses across the rough-hewn surface of the bridge.
There was a large, open plaza between the castle and its town. Built at the shore, Castle Arrowroot didn’t have the advantage of height that helped protect Castle Basil. The near edge of the town was two hundred yards from the moat. The buildings were lower than the curtain wall as well. The plaza and streets were paved with stone. The houses and shops seemed considerably more substantial than those in Basil Town, and the roofs were of timber or slate rather than thatch. Arrowroot had a different feel to it than Basil Town. Basil was open and friendly. Arrowroot was closed and suspicious. There were no open shopfronts, no tradesmen plying their crafts in full view of passersby. Apart from the three of us, there weren’t any passersby. The lower stories of the town were made of stone, and the doors looked formidable. Living under the immediate threat of attack left a mark that I could almost feel as we rode through the silent streets.
“They don’t take much to strangers,” Lesh said.
I grunted, too nervous to speak. I looked around all the time and wondered if the feeling of—almost—dread was natural or perhaps enhanced by the elflord. That feeling could be a mighty weapon.
We had to wait at the town gate. I thought that the gatekeepers were going to insist on a pass from the baron, but after Harkane made a loud fuss, the gate was opened … and quickly closed behind us.
Beyond the town wall—another difference between Basil and Arrowroot—the farm fields provided another clear zone, three hundred yards or more from the walls to the trees. This early in the spring, the crops would offer no cover and little incentive for a raider. Halfway across the cleared acreage, I reined in my horse. I stared at the forest ahead, then turned and stared back at Arrowroot. I felt an equal sense of foreboding in each direction, as if Arrowroot was as dangerous as Battle Forest and Xayber.
“There’s magic at work here,” I whispered. “Resler said that the elflord’s magics fail outside Fairy, but there is magic working against Arrowroot.”
“How can you tell?” Lesh asked.
“I can feel it, can’t you?” Then I realized that he couldn’t, that this was my first experience of the heightened awareness of danger that was supposed to belong to the Hero of Varay. “Trust me, Lesh. There’s as much danger behind us as there is in front of us.”
“Aye, lord, I’ll take your word.” Lesh looked back. Harkane didn’t say anything, but I thought I saw a smug look sneak across his face.
As we started riding forward again, I tried to analyze the feeling of danger, but that didn’t help. Danger in front, danger behind—equal. I couldn’t localize the feeling or tell what the source of the danger was back in Arrowroot. Or who. But I didn’t question my awareness. It was firm knowledge, not nervousness. Once we reached the forest, the danger felt one-sided. The threat from Arrowroot had faded—just a little. Battle Forest was rife with danger. But the sensations still weren’t specific. I only knew that there was danger, and I hardly needed the extra sense for that.
Battle Forest was as different from Precarra as Arrowroot was from Basil. Battle Forest felt immeasurably old. The trees were mostly huge firs, some of them hundreds of feet tall. The bark was a dirty gray, cracked and scarred. There were signs of old fires that had burned out the underbrush without killing the trees. In some places, gnarled vines had grown around the trunks. The oldest vines, as thick as my thigh, squeezed the trees, forcing them to grow between the garroting loops. Impenetrable brambles isolated huge tracts of forest, defining the possible routes by their absence.
Nerves made it easy to feel an evilness about the forest, no matter how illogical that feeling might be.
The three of us rode bunched close together. The road was wide and level, and the lowest branches were well above our head, but we bunched up anyway. Whether or not they were conscious of it, my companions must have felt the danger on some level. The horses, more sensible than many people, were clearly uneasy, skittish, unsatisfied with a walk. I didn’t want to press the animals, though, certainly not right at the start. If we had to rely on speed once we crossed into Fairy, I didn’t want to squander the horses’ strength.
A little more than a mile into the forest, we heard the sounds of a horse galloping behind us.
“Off the road,” I said. “Lesh, that side. Harkane, here with me.” I took my bow from my shoulder and nocked an arrow. Lesh and Harkane had their spears ready, aimed back along the road. We weren’t perfectly concealed, but if our horses stayed quiet, we might not be noticed by a racing rider until he was too close to avoid us.
He? It was the blonde I had seen on the battlements of Arrowroot. She reined her horse to a stop before she could possibly have seen us.
“Prince Gil?” Her voice was clear and sounded like a child’s. I moved my horse to the middle of the road and eased the tension on my bowstring. Harkane followed me, but Lesh didn’t come out until I told him to.
The blonde couldn’t have been older than eighteen, if that. She had a sword hanging from her belt and an unstrung bow tied to the side of her saddle, under her right leg.
“Who are you?” I asked.
&
nbsp; “My name is Annick.” It sounded like an-neek. “I live at the castle.”
“Why did you follow us?”
“I need to go with you into Fairy. I may be your only hope of getting back alive.” I let a beat or two pass. Lesh and Harkane restrained any burning need to inject their opinions.
“I think I need more of an explanation than that,” I said.
“My mother is Baron Resler’s younger sister, though he hardly admits to that since I was born. That was nine months after a raid during which the elflord’s forces briefly occupied part of Arrowroot Town, including the house where my mother lived. She was raped by an elf warrior. That makes me halfelven. Having me along is the cloak of invisibility you need. Xayber won’t spot you, at least not as quickly as he would without me.”
“Send her back, lord,” Lesh advised.
I took the arrow from my bow and returned it to the quiver. I understood that Annick wasn’t talking about literal invisibility but about being able to deceive the elflord about our identities. I stared at Annick while I tied my bow to the saddle, under my leg, the way she carried hers.
“Why is it so important to you to go with me?” I asked. “Not why I should think it’s important. And how do you know where we’re going?”
“There’s no other place you could be going from here,” Annick said. “And since it can’t be a friendly visit, you must intend something against the Elflord of Xayber. Why do I want to do?” She snorted and made a face. “Whenever my mother looks at me, she wants to kill herself in shame. She had tried to kill herself, over and over. She blames herself for what that beast did to her. When she sees me, she’s reminded of him. My uncle took me from her when I was a baby for fear she would harm me. While the beast who sired me lives, neither my mother nor I will know any peace. And if I can’t get to him yet, maybe I can at least help you foil his master’s ambitions to conquer the seven kingdoms.” It was an impressive speech, full of passion. I wondered if a single word was true.
“Lesh, do you know anything of this?” I asked.
“No, lord.”
“Of course not!” Annick snapped. “It’s not the sort of tale one spreads.”
“It’s also not the sort of tale that can be hidden easily in a place like Varay,” I said. Servants would talk. Repeated suicide attempts by a lady of note would be hot gossip, even without tabloids and their video sisters. The intelligent decision would be to follow Lesh’s advice and send her packing, but I didn’t feel any particular danger from her, and if she was by some odd stretch telling the truth, she might be the edge I needed.
“There are no proofs that will open a closed mind,” Annick said, and I nodded my agreement.
“I think perhaps you are telling the truth, part of it anyway,” I said.
“Your confidence overwhelms me, lord.” She didn’t try to subdue the sarcasm.
“I don’t give a rat’s ass whether I overwhelm you, underwhelm you, or just bore you to tears,” I said. “If you’ve changed your mind about wanting to accompany us?”
“I should, but I won’t. My quest is too important to me.”
Whatever that is, I thought. “Then we’ve wasted enough time here. Shall we go?”
The four of us rode on through the forest. I hoped I wasn’t putting too much stock in my allegedly heightened perception of danger. In any case, it would be easier to keep an eye on Annick if she rode with us than if I had to worry about her tagging along.
11
Xayber
The border between Varay and Xayber was as unmistakable as the Berlin Wall, despite the talk of fluctuations. There was no fence or any other physical barrier, no signposts saying: “You are now leaving the mortal sector.” you couldn’t see any difference, not at first, but we all knew precisely when we crossed the border. Even Lesh felt the change and understood it. The air seemed charged, ionized like just after a vicious thunderstorm. The breeze carried a trace of rotten-egg smell like sulfur water. The forest felt sinister. The calls of birds, the rustling of branches and leaves, seemed muted, deadened. The footsteps of our horses seemed to change tone, become hollow. All the scene lacked was the eerie telltale soundtrack music of a killer about to strike to fit right into a mad-slasher movie.
Better get used to it, I told myself. You could have two weeks of this creepy shit.
“You know where we’re heading?” I asked Annick after we crossed the border. It was more an attempt to distract myself than a burning curiosity.
“Just that you’re invading the realm of the Elflord of Xayber.”
“We’re going north, staying close to the western edge of the forest and the isthmus.”
“Then you must be after sea-silver. There’s no other reason for such a journey.” She sounded very sure of that, but she sounded very sure of everything she said.
“Do you come into Fairy often?” I asked.
“Only once before. When I was fifteen, I came looking for the beast who raped my mother. I didn’t find him, but I slit the throats of three of the elflord’s soldiers.” She talked of killing with a cool passion, the way I might have described a hot date in college. It was chilling.
Our horses needed no urging to pick up the pace. If we had asked them for a hard gallop, they would have willingly pounded away until they dropped. As it was, we had to check them more often than urge them on, varying the gait to what I hoped was an efficient combination. Our breaks were few and short that first day, taken when we spotted a place where we would be concealed from anyone passing along the road—not that it was much of a road inside Fairy. We had crossed the main coastal route almost as soon as we entered Battle Forest and went on to this track that was obviously little used.
I looked at Annick a lot, when I thought she wouldn’t notice. She was attractive, but I wasn’t at all attracted. She would fit in a TV commercial easily, maybe playing volleyball in a skimpy swimsuit on a beach full of beautiful people, but she talked like the Count of Monte Cristo justifying his long quest for vengeance. While we rode, Annick braided her hair, then coiled the braid and pinned it so it wouldn’t blow in the wind. She rode with the casual assurance of someone who lived in the saddle. I didn’t doubt that she could use her weapons with deadly efficiency. Hell, even though she didn’t set off my danger signals, she scared the crap out of me. Slender, soft-looking, no more than five-three, she scared me. Not the kind of thing to tell my college chums. Annick seemed to change physically once we crossed into Fairy. It was subtle, like the changes in the air, in the feel of the land. There was something a trifle fuzzy about her outline once we were in the land of her father, something that made it hard to focus on her. Her skin looked whiter, almost ghostly. Undoubtedly, a lot of it was my imagination—that was running amok. But she was quite different. I was there partly to avenge the death of my father. She was along, according to her, mainly to find and murder her father. She was half Fairy and half Varay. I was half Varay and half Kentucky. Maybe the antipathy was unavoidable.
On the map, the Isthmus of Xayber looked like a tornado, a long, narrow funnel touching down on the north coast of Varay. According to the map—and what little anyone back at Basil seemed to know about it—the isthmus was over four hundred miles long, widening as it went north, gradually at first, then more rapidly as it reached what Parthet called the blackheartland of Fairy. Along the stretch that I expected to see, the isthmus varied between thirty and seventy miles wide. Most of it was heavily wooded, and there was a hilly spine to the isthmus, with the hills becoming mountains farther north.
Except for infrequent snatches of conversation, we rode in silence. Lesh rode point. Annick rode beside me, when possible. Harkane stayed close behind. The only alarm of the day came about two hours before sunset. I can’t be more precise because my watch stopped when we entered Fairy. I felt danger approaching, a strong signal that I couldn’t possibly have missed.
“Off the road,” I hissed while I looked southeast. “Dismount. Hold the horses still.”
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sp; Nobody questioned my orders. Perhaps even Annick believed in the mystique of the Hero of Varay. The feeling of danger grew stronger, but it was several minutes before I found out what had triggered it. I sensed the approaching shadow and was looking in the correct direction when the shadow finally came into sight.
“A dragon,” I whispered. I couldn’t see the creature, but its shadow was clear. We held our breath while the shadow passed and went on north. I only caught the briefest glance of the flying reptile, a hint of the body eclipsing the sky. When it was gone, I waited for the feeling of danger to fade and disappear.
“Okay, he’s gone.” I took a deep breath and looked around at my companions. Lesh and Annick looked impressed, Lesh more than Annick. Harkane had his annoying smug look wrapped around his face again. It was almost as if he were a teacher watching me discover what I could do.
We mounted and rode on.
“For being between two warring armies, this forest seems awfully damn deserted,” I commented, wondering mainly what Annick might say.
“The armies are there,” she said. “The Elflord of Xayber doesn’t need a wall of warriors along his frontier. My uncle’s troops never cross it.”
“We’re riding an established trail. That should be guarded.”
“Perhaps the elflord wants intruders to get far enough to let him play with them,” Annick said. “He’s totally evil. If he finds us, he’ll toy with us as a cat toys with a mouse before she kills it.” She stared at me, her eyes almost purple in the late-afternoon light.
“How can you live with such hate?” Harkane asked from behind us. I was surprised to hear him say anything like that.