by Unknown
We could’ve used the extra travel food, no doubt of that, but that wasn’t the main reason why Aletha bought a little something. It was always good form to repay information in one way or another. So my mission-wife bought six apples, paid more than what they were probably worth, and then we moved on to the next stall.
I personally find it very unfair, but a pretty woman can always get more and better information than a man can. Even one as charming as me. So as we went from stall to stall, I hung back and let her do the asking. This place was such a mix of people that I even saw a few Hainians and other Solians in the crowd. Aletha wouldn’t meet with any southern prejudice here. This might be the last time she could openly ask such questions though. When we hit the smaller towns and villages, they would be much more suspicious of a foreigner.
I trailed along and kept an eye out for pickpockets, letting her talk and charm and shop. Women were naturally gifted at multi-tasking, so she did all three at once with ease. In between the traffic, tradesmen calling out wares and prices and such, I couldn’t always hear her or the replies that she got. But I noticed that in between stalls, she started to frown in growing puzzlement. Oh? Not getting the answers that she wanted, or not getting answers that agreed with each other?
We finally got through that street and fetched up at the main fountain in the town center. I hadn’t expected to see such a large, decorative fountain in such a shabby, thrown-together town like this one. But someone had invested in it and put in some very pretty blue tiles, making an arcing wave pattern around the base. We pulled up to it and dismounted, giving our backs a rest from the saddles and the horses a well-deserved water break.
“Well?” I asked her. “I couldn’t always hear you or the answers you got.”
“For the most part, it was very conflicting.” Aletha put her hands on her waist and stretched backwards, arching to relieve the ache there. “I think I can see the overall pattern, though. Where’s the map?”
I went to Cloud’s side and dug through a saddlebag. It didn’t take much digging, as the map usually stayed on top one way or another. It had seen a lot of travel and was worn around the edges, but it was still perfectly readable. I passed it over without a word.
Aletha sat on the edge of the fountain and smoothed the map out over her knees, preventing it from getting splashed. “I didn’t think to ask this of the first two farmers’ stalls, but the other seven were from somewhat different areas. Two of them were from near here, and they hadn’t seen any difference. But the others were from farther south, more toward the Kaczorek/Beddingfield areas, and they did notice the weather had changed in the past two weeks.”
“Changed badly?”
“Just changed. Most of them were happy about it, actually. It meant more rain, so their crops are better this year than usual.”
I rocked back on my heels and thought about this. “Is this a significant enough change to warrant it being magical? Or not?”
“Now, that is the question, isn’t it?” She frowned down at the map. “But right now, it’s the only clue we have.”
“So where were these farmers from? Exactly?” I leaned forward to get a better look.
“Hubby.”
“What?”
“You’re blocking my light.”
“My bad.” I took a step to the right, bumping into Cloud a little when I did so. “So, where again?”
She traced a line near the Beddingfield/Kaczorek border. “Along here. Now, they weren’t from very far away.”
“No surprise, they can’t travel far without their produce spoiling, after all.”
“Right. But the farmer who experienced the most difference in the weather was the one farthest out.”
I hummed and thought about it. “So we really do need to get farther south? Busted buckets, I was hoping that my large body of water was the Elkhorn River.”
“You and me both.” She stretched out her legs with a grimace. “All this riding gets old after a while.”
“So…you’re thinking that the body of water we need is the ocean?”
“Or it’s still the Elkhorn, just farther down. The Elkhorn does dump into the ocean, right? So it goes all the way to the southern coast. Who knows? She could be anywhere along the river.”
“Right. Well, should we head towards Beddingfield, then? The only major highway in the area skirts along the Beddingfield/Kaczorek border anyway.”
“On one condition.”
“Name it.”
“Let’s get a decent meal first?”
I laughed but had to agree. A person could only eat so much travel food before they just had to have a real meal. “Sure, why not?”
For the next three days, we just rode south. I kept my eyes on the landscape we traveled through, comparing it with the image that the Gardener had given me, but it didn’t match up. It slowly started to, though, as we passed through the greener farmlands and into the drier, rockier landscape of southern Chahir.
Midafternoon of the fourth day, the coastline of Beddingfield came into sight. At this point, the land almost looked right but it didn’t feel right. As much as I wished that the Gardener had known the human name of the place and simply given that to direct me, I had to admit there were perks to his method of direction. It wasn’t just the way the land looked, but the way it smelled, the air about it. I had no doubt that when we finally came to the right place, I’d know it instantly.
Of course, that assumed I went in the right direction to find it.
We stopped in sight of a fishing village that rested on top of the shore. It didn’t seem to be a particularly prosperous place, as it barely had twenty houses all huddled together and only four fishing boats docked. I was of two minds about going anywhere near it as people from rural, small villages like this were not tolerant of strangers. They certainly wouldn’t look kindly on foreign strangers like Aletha.
But in truth, we were short on food and had to get it from somewhere.
“Gorgeous, I don’t think it wise for you to go in there.”
She studied the place through narrowed eyes. “I think you’re right. I’ll sit tight here while you buy some food. See if you can’t get some information too.”
“Will do.” With a tap of the heels, I urged Cloud toward the village.
Distance had definitely made the place look better than it was. ‘Shabby’ didn’t even come close to describing it. Everything was clean though, without any refuse or garbage in sight. I got many a curious look as I rode through the one and only street in town. But then, I’d have gotten strange looks in a crowded city. A white-haired man, on top of a white stallion, with a white cat riding comfortably on the horse was bound to attract attention.
There was a large well in the center ring of houses, and since I didn’t see any signs of a tavern or inn, that was where I chose to stop. I dismounted with a creak of leather and a sigh, as it felt good to be on my own feet for a while. A middle-aged man with dark skin and thinning blond hair cautiously approached me.
“Yar name, sar?”
Whew, talk about an accent! It was thick enough to slice up and serve on bread. “Shad,” I responded with a smile. “I wonder if I could buy some traveling food from someone here. I think I have a ways to go yet and I’m runnin’ short on vittles.”
At the word ‘buy’ he brightened up perceptibly. “Sure, sure. I’m Vick. Leave the horse thar and come with me.”
I dropped Cloud’s reins on the ground and murmured for his ear alone, “Stay. Do not go off with anyone. Tail, guard him.” It was sad, but I trusted the cat more than the horse to remember simple commands.
“Whar ya headin’?” Vick inquired, leading me to a nearby home that seemed marginally more prosperous than the others. Well, at least this one had glass windows instead of thin wax paper.
“Now, that is the question,” I admitted, making up a story on the spot. “You see, my family was from this area and I stayed here often as a boy. But then my parents moved farther north and die
d some years afterwards. I thought to come back down here, look up the rest of my family, but I don’t remember the name of the village. I’ve been searching all along the coast for a place that looks familiar.”
We ducked into the house and I had to blink several times to adjust to the dimness. A lean, tough-looking woman looked up from the bread she was kneading and gave me a suspicious look. “Vick?” she asked in a husky voice.
“Traveler wantin’ to buy some vittles,” Vick responded as if she had asked a full question.
She perked up at the word ‘buy’ as well. “Sure, sure. I’ve fresh bread, a wheel of cheese, and fish jerky that should travel well.”
Fish jerky? Who’d heard of fish jerky? My mouth wasn’t sure what to think about eating something like that. But it beat having nothing to eat at all, so I nodded amiably. “Sounds fine.”
“How much ya need?” she asked me.
“However much you can spare,” I responded carefully. “I’m not sure how far I’m going.”
She gave me an odd look. “What sorta man travels without knowin’ his destination?”
“He’s looking for his childhood home and kin,” Vick supplied. “He don’t rightly remember the name of the place, just what it looks like.”
“Ahhh.” She nodded sagely, as if she’d heard of something like this before. “Sar, yar family name?”
“Warr,” I said, picking out the most common name in all of Chahir.
“Many a village has Warrs in it,” Vick commented, stroking his chin thoughtfully with his palm. “Not helpful, that. What’s the place look like?”
I described what the Gardener had given me, being as exact as I could.
Vick nodded a time or two, but never interrupted. At the end, he gave a gusty sigh. “Now, I know a few places that look like that. Seen ‘em while I’m fishin’. Mostly towards Aboulmana, near the coastline.”
My attention sharpened on him. “I need to head further west, then?”
“Nothin’ like what ya say if ya go east, towards Kaczorek,” Vick assured me. “Not for a hundred miles, leastways.”
Was I ever so glad I’d come in and talked to this man. He had just saved me a lot of traveling if he was right. And since he’d been fishing and sailing around these parts his entire life, he probably was.
His wife tied up the food in a clean cloth and handed it to me. I was generous when paying them, as it wasn’t just the food but the information they gave. With a smile and word of thanks, I stepped back out and headed to Cloud. So, we needed to go west. Good. I liked having a firm direction rather than just flipping a coin to decide.
When I went back outside, I found Tail sitting on the saddle, glaring at everyone around. There was something of a crowd, roughly a half-dozen men staring in bemusement at the cat. When I lifted the reins, one man was bold enough to ask, “Sar, ya mean that’s yar cat?”
I smiled at him with easy confidence. “It sure is. Well, that is to say, he decided he likes me and he’s been following me around ever since.”
“Ah,” he nodded in understanding. “When a cat adopts ya, a wise man just goes along with the flow.”
“Nothing else to be done,” I agreed. The crowd started to disperse as I remounted Cloud. Tail hopped back to his usual spot as we rode out of the village and rejoined Aletha.
She had been lying on the ground, comfortably propped up as she enjoyed being out of the saddle for a while. At my approach, she quickly rolled up to her feet. “Well? How’d it go?”
“They weren’t as hostile as I’d feared they’d be,” I answered. “I got bread, cheese, and fish jerky.”
Aletha blinked at me, head cocked. “Fish jerky? Never heard of it.”
“Makes two of us. Hope it tastes alright.” I’d feed it to Tail if it didn’t.
“I second that. Any information?”
“I spoke to a fisherman and he said the area we’re looking for could be in Aboulmana. He said there’s several places along the coast that look like that.”
Her eyebrows arched, interested. “Oh? So we need to go west, then? Good, I like having a direction. You said that the impression you had of the place included a lot of water nearby. Maybe it was the sea instead of the river.”
“Could well be.” We wouldn’t know for certain until we found the place. “At any rate, let’s head west.”
I held up a hand to shield my eyes from flying dust and debris, grimacing as my ears started to ache from the constant wind. “Wifey!” I shouted over the howling.
She was only a little ahead of me, so she didn’t need to do more than look over her shoulder and shout back, “What, darling?”
“We’ve got to get out of this storm!” I had experienced this once before. It hadn’t been down here, but much farther north. The wind had been inescapable, unrelenting, and the flat area we’d been in had no cover to offer. Being battered by the wind like that wore a man out, left his ears aching for days, and often got something sharp and unpleasant lodged in his eye.
Here, in this gently rolling grassland, we didn’t have a lot of options for shelter either. But we’d been passing little ravines here and there, and if we hunkered down in one of those and staked the tent overhead, we’d be out of the worst of it. Right now, that sounded like a splendid option.
Aletha must have read my mind, as she pointed ahead to a ravine that wound near the road. It had a gentle slope to it on one side, easy enough for the horses to use, but wide enough in parts that we could all fit onto it. I gave her a nod, signaling that I liked it too, and we made a beeline for it.
Even with us shouting, we could barely hear each other, the wind snatching at our words. I gave up talking to her about three sentences in and fell to hand signals, which she understood perfectly well. We’d been working with each other for so long that we didn’t need to communicate a lot anyway. I could more or less anticipate what she would do next, and she the same of me.
In short order we had the tent unpacked, the horses temporarily settled in the ravine. Just being down here cut the wind chill in half. I no longer felt like a man being battered on all sides.
Unraveling and staking out a tent in a windstorm was quite the trick, let me tell you. It was akin to a beaver building a dam during a typhoon. It almost took off on us several times, and only by leaping on top of it did I prevent it from flapping away into the sky. By sheer determination, we managed to stretch it over both sides of the ravine, one of the dirt walls hemming it in and letting it have enough support that it didn’t budge. I still staked it so hard into the ground that the tops of the stakes were depressed into the dirt a little.
In relief, we climbed inside. Well, I did take the precaution of wrapping cloth around the horses’ eyes first, just to prevent them from being hurt. I didn’t think they would though, it was so much better down here. When I got into the tent, tying the flap firmly behind me, I noticed that Aletha already had my bedroll and hers rolled out, our food pack open and half its contents strewn about in a semicircle.
“Shad, almost everything we have requires a fire to cook it,” she informed me with an unhappy pout.
“You want to start a tent fire by cooking in this wind, be my guest,” I invited her cordially. “But do warn me, as I’d rather be a good ten feet away when you do.”
Shaking her head, she started putting food back in. “No, thanks, I’d rather be a little hungry than deal with that wind.”
Couldn’t argue there.
Since we didn’t really have anything to do and it was fairly late in the evening anyway, we just ate a cold dinner before settling into our bedrolls. We were both soldiers, after all, and we understood that we should take advantage and sleep when we could. Tail seemed to agree, as he found a corner of my bedroll and curled into it, falling almost instantly asleep.
No matter how firmly we’d strapped the tent down, the center of it still flapped above our heads, although not enough to risk smacking someone. It was as noisy as a flock of upset magpies. The horses, not l
iking the noise or the wind storm raging around us, shifted uneasily and whickered to each other. Between their restlessness, the noise of the flapping tent, and my worry that our shelter really would take off, I found it hard to go to sleep.
“Shad.”
Apparently I wasn’t the only one. “Hmm?”
She rolled onto her side and put a hand on my arm, body coming in close enough that I could feel the heat of her skin, although we didn’t quite touch. “I don’t want you to go.”
Go? Where? Oh, she meant— “Why, darling, I’m touched.”
Blowing out a breath, she admitted sourly, “I realize that it’s selfish of me, but a part of me wants to ask that you stay in Ascalon.”
I grasped her hand and sighed, not sure how to handle this. My teasing had not had the desired effect. “We both know that if Garth actually asked for my help, he’s at his wits end.”
“He’s gotten better at communicating since he got married, though.”
“Well, sure. Wives have that sort of effect on their husbands. Or so I’ve seen.” From this angle, I could only see the top of her head, but the way she tightened her grip on me, and the odd inflection of her voice, told me how upset she really was by this. For the first time, I really felt my decision to leave, and I had to admit, it left me feeling…strange inside.
“Aletha, I have to go. I can’t not go. This first generation of magicians cannot be lost. Chahir can’t afford that. We must safeguard them, and the only way to really do that is to teach them how to defend themselves.”
“Who are you trying to convince? Me or you?”
“Yes,” I admitted wryly.
She let out a year’s worth of sighs. “I suppose you don’t have a choice anyway, not with the task the Gardener set for you. You’re right, once you have that girl, you’ve got to protect her for the foreseeable future, at least.”
“Right? So I have to be at Strae, one way or another.”
“Have you decided what you’ll be to her?”
Sometimes Aletha and I were so in sync that we could finish each other’s sentences and know what the other was going to do before they even started moving. But other times, like now, she’d ask me a question and I hadn’t the foggiest notion of what she was thinking.