by Unknown
Without warning, I slammed my foot toe-first into the rocks. Hissing in pain, I cursed aloud and quickly withdrew my foot, which left me in an awkward half-mounted position. Cloud shifted ever so slightly underneath me, as if wondering what I was doing. Still growling and grumbling, I gingerly put my left leg down again, feeling my way this time so that it went in between the wall and the horse’s side. Only then did I feel around and slide my boot into the other stirrup.
Untying the reins from the pommel, I slapped my heels into his sides and urged him silently to go. The reins I just let rest in one hand, as they were more or less useless in this situation anyway. I couldn’t guide him when I couldn’t see anything.
I could’ve really done with a hat right about now. That would’ve at least kept the rain out of my face. It had to have been a good twenty minutes or so since the storm rolled in, but it hadn’t abated in the slightest. This definitely couldn’t have been a normal storm.
Chatta had explained to me once that magic followed intent more than anything else. That was why young magicians had to go through so much schooling and training, to discipline their own minds so that they could guide their magic in proper ways instead of just running off their own instincts. Right now, I appreciated the need for teaching magicians more than ever before. Becca had to be running scared. Her instinct was to hide, to somehow defeat the scary Star Order Priests and prevent them from ever finding her. A mother storm like this one would surely do the trick, which was why she had instinctively called for it.
But it also came with complications. The storm might keep the priests from finding her, but it might also prevent me from finding her, which was more than a little problematic. It also obscured all those handy landmarks that I needed to navigate by. Aletha and I had planned on reaching the mouth of the Elkhorn River—which was relatively close by—catching a boat, and riding it up and into Hain. In this crazy weather, we were likely to ride right past it without even realizing. Travel problems aside, by using her magic she was even brighter and more obvious than before to anyone with magical ability. It would be especially easy right now to be found by any priest looking for her, at least with their magical senses. Of course, he’d have the same trouble as me tracking her down in this muck.
Try explaining all of that to her instincts, though. It wouldn’t work. That was the trouble with instincts—they often fed into one feeling at the expense of something else.
I slicked the hair back from my face in a gesture of frustration. What to do? Assuming I caught up with them, I would have to find some way of either reassuring Becca so that she naturally stopped summoning this storm or find a way to turn her magic off for a while.
Unfortunately, I only knew of one way to do that.
I’d probably traveled in more miserable situations than this, but at the moment nothing else sprang to mind that could top it. Cloud and I both were soaked to the bone, rivulets of water streaming into our eyes and near blinding us, wind strong enough to set the ears to ringing. The wind coming up from the sea, had a distinct chill to it, which made goosebumps rise along my skin. I would’ve given my eye teeth for a cave right now. I’d give more than two teeth for a fire to go with it.
On top of this mother storm making things unbearable while traveling, it completely skewed my sense of time. I would’ve sworn that we’d been trudging along this winding path for a decade, but it was probably closer to a few hours. The sky had lightened somewhat, indicating that the sun had risen. I hadn’t spent much time beating the priests, so I would have thought that we’d have caught up with Aletha and Becca by now. We hadn’t. And that worried me.
Cloud had understood me, right? Or had he lost their trail in this wet, muddy madness? He hadn’t faltered or paused, so I’d thought he’d known where to go. But then, I’d named him Cloud for a reason. Perhaps I should rethink this blind trust I had in his tracking skills….
Sheer instinct had me ducking, hugging Cloud’s back, as an arrow whistled past where my head had been.
I could think of two types of people that would be out in this crazy weather. Hoping it was the one I wanted, I sucked in a lungful of air and bellowed, “GORGEOUS! DON’T SHOOT!”
“Shad!” a faint, familiar voice responded from up ahead. Aletha stepped around a tree and came into view, sort of. The day had lightened up enough that the path ahead looked dim, but I could see silhouettes, at least. She waved a hand at me in greeting, a bow and arrow held ready in her other hand. How she’d managed to use that while getting pelted by rain, I didn’t know. After all, water and bows did not mix well. Wait…she had that water-repellant bow Chatta’d made her, didn’t she? I’d nearly forgotten she had that.
Cloud, still on orders, took me directly to Aletha without worrying about stray arrows flying about his head. He stopped in front of her with a pleased swish of the tail and glanced back at me, eyes saying, Didn’t I do good?
“You did great,” I praised him, patting him on the neck. “Good horse.”
“I’m amazed he managed to track us in all of this,” Aletha observed, also reaching out to pet him on the nose.
“Wifey,” I said mildly, dismounting, “shouldn’t you have called out and made sure it wasn’t me before shooting?”
She shrugged, unconcerned that she’d nearly put an arrow in my forehead. “Well, I figured it this way. If it was a priest, it would be one less to worry about. If it was you, you’d duck.”
“I find your faith in my dodging abilities a tad alarming, darling.”
“Why? You ducked, didn’t you?”
“There’s a hole in your logic somewhere. I just can’t put my finger on it.” She unabashedly smirked at me. Shaking my head, I let it drop and focused on more important things. “Becca?”
The little girl came out from behind Aletha, her arms shielding Tail from the worst of the rain. He still looked like a drowned rat, though. Becca’s eyes lit up in relief when she saw me, and she bounded forward, stopping just shy of touching me. “Shad!”
“Hi there,” I responded, smiling slightly. “The scary priests are all defeated and won’t come chasing after us. So set your mind at ease, eh?”
She nodded, then bit her lip uncertainly. “Aletha says my magic is doing that.” She pointed upward towards the sky. “But I can’t turn it off.”
“This happens with young magicians,” I assured her patiently. “My Earth Mage friend said he once nearly uprooted a forest because of a bad dream. It’s not something you need to be scared of or worried about.”
“But…” she trailed off and looked upwards again.
“True, it’s not making traveling any fun,” Aletha pitched in supportively. “But it’s also obscuring our tracks and making it hard for anyone to find us. So it’s helpful in that way.”
“Oh.” Becca thought that over before she finally relaxed a little.
I’d prefer to have her magic settle again into that docile mode where it didn’t stir up the weather, because at the moment, it wasn’t doing anything more than messing up our travel plans. I slicked a hand over my hair and looked around.
“Shad, do you have any idea where we are?” Aletha asked, also looking around, brow furrowed in confusion.
“Chahir,” I drawled.
I got quite the stink eye for that.
“Along the southern coast,” I added helpfully.
Becca poked me in the thigh reprovingly. “Be serious.”
“Now, I ask you, where is the fun in that?”
For some reason, both women gave me an unamused look.
Sensing that my humor had missed its timing, I gave a put-upon sigh and tried to behave. “No, I don’t know precisely where we are. I have a bad feeling that we missed the highway leading to the Elkhorn River, though.”
“In the dark—” her tone added, and in this raging storm, “—it would be easy to miss. I estimate that we’ve been riding about eight, nine hours straight.”
No wonder my stomach was clamoring for attention. Not th
at we could do anything about that now. We had no equipment to cook with, even if we could stop and take the time to hunt something down. “In that case, we’re several hours past the highway. Curses.”
“Shad, Garth said the old safe houses were back in commission, right? Isn’t the nearest one dead east of here?”
“Aletha, that’s another two days’ ride!” I protested. “Most of it through mountainous terrain, as we have to cross the Black Ridge Mountains to get there!”
“We lost all of our supplies,” she pointed out with ruthless logic. “We’re not going to be able to pick up much from these local fishing villages. We should avoid them as much as possible anyway, as they’re just as likely to call the priests on us as the last group was. We’re not supplied enough to make a trip across the country. Our best bet is getting to the safe house and letting them help us. Or going into Hain proper and having a magician there ferry us to Strae.”
I shook my head before she could even finish that sentence. “And risk Becca falling into the hands of the Trasdee Evondit Orra? No way. Garth has more or less wrested all of the Chahiran magicians away from them, but I don’t think even he could get Becca back if they ever got their hands on her. He told us point-blank on the way down here that even having her in Strae would be a major battle.”
Becca inched in closer to me, huddling against my legs. “Are they bad people?”
“Not bad,” I assured her with a wry twist of the lips. “Just…greedy. Some of them are good people, but some of them aren’t, and I’d rather not take chances with you. If they ever got their hands on you, you’d never be allowed to leave Hain. Being wet and hungry for another day or so won’t kill us. I’ll take my chances with the safe houses, but we’re not going any deeper into Hain than that.”
Aletha was aware of the politics as much as I, and she gave a reluctant shrug of agreement. “Probably wise. Let’s mount up, then. The sooner we get to shelter, the better.”
I couldn’t disagree.
I’d harbored a secret hope that when Becca saw me alive and well that her instinctive call on her magic would calm and the storm would break up and go away.
Alas, it was not to be.
Aletha’s reassurance earlier had not been a lie. The storm did cover our tracks, washing them all away and making it impossible for a normal tracker to find us. However, that didn’t hold true for the priests. They, after all, had a way of tracking magicians miles and miles away. Especially with Becca openly using her magic like this, she would blaze for them. The storm was like a giant, glowing sign pointing toward our location.
I waited a good five hours, traveling along with her, waiting for the storm to abate. It didn’t. In fact, it might have gotten a little worse. Our uncertainty of where to go, the lack of supplies, and the way we wandered these back, twisting roads did not set Becca’s mind at ease.
Unfortunately, half the problems we had were a direct result of her magic being used. I had no other choice. I had to turn her off.
Lifting her up by the waist, I turned her sideways in the saddle. She looked up at me, head cocked, not understanding what I wanted. My mouth twisted up in a sorry smile. “Sorry, kiddo. No choice. I’ll make it up to you later.”
Her brows furrowed, not at all understanding what I meant by this.
Not about to explain, I simply lifted my hand and chopped her sharply in the back of the head. Her eyes rolled up before she abruptly slumped forward, out cold.
“Shad.” Aletha’s tone had a disconcerting mildness to it. “Did you just knock her out?”
“No choice,” I sighed. “It’s the only way to turn her magic off.”
“What?” Aletha spurred her horse forward to ride next to me. The trail didn’t really have the width for that, so her knee jammed right next to mine at an uncomfortable angle, but she didn’t back off and stayed right there. “What are you talking about?”
“Unless a magician anchors a spell, if they lose consciousness, their magic stops.” I had a weather eye on the sky as I explained, waiting to see how quickly the storm would dispel. “That’s why Garth had to stay up those few times when he had a shield up over us in Chahir, camouflaging our camp. He couldn’t anchor the spell—it would leave too much of a signature behind—but he couldn’t sleep either, or the spell would break.”
Aletha regarded the little girl slumped against my chest. “True, it’s all-around better for her magic to be dormant again, but…did you have to do it that way? You couldn’t wait for tonight, while she sleeps?”
“And risk the priests following us straight to our camp tonight? Again? You do remember they have ways of tracking magic that can go over miles, right?”
She held up a hand. “You’re right. I just don’t like the idea of manhandling her like that.”
“I don’t either,” I admitted morosely. Even though I had very good reasons for doing it, I still felt guilty, and a phantom ache had settled into my hand. “I kept hoping that with me back, she’d feel reassured enough that her storm would go away on its own. I didn’t really have a choice. We can’t keep traveling like this.”
Shrugging agreement, she looked up at the sky. Already the rain had stopped, the wind had dropped down to a light breeze, and the clouds were starting to break up. The storm was disappearing as fast as it had appeared.
With the clouds no longer obscuring the sun, we could see our surroundings much better. We had—somehow—managed to enter the Black Ridge Mountains without realizing it. At least, the way the trail sloped abruptly and the amount of trees surrounding us suggested as much. Where we were exactly, I hadn’t the foggiest. Hopefully we’d stumble across a landmark, or a town, soon and be able to get our bearings.
Pointing at Becca, Aletha inquired dryly, “And how exactly are you going to make it up to her later?”
“Shhh. I’m thinking.”
“Uh-huh. Good luck with that.”
Without a storm obscuring our vision or a magical beacon drawing in pesky Star Order Priests, we made much better time. The roads were clogged with mud and small streams, of course, so the path could hardly be described as clear, but it still beat riding through a mother storm.
Becca slept peacefully in my arms as we wound through the mountain trails. Tail sat on the back of Aletha’s horse and openly glared at me.
“What?” I demanded finally. “I didn’t have a choice, alright? Her magic was out of control and I’m not a magician, I couldn’t help her turn it off.”
Tail let out a disgusted mewl.
“Oh, so you have a better suggestion? No? Then what are you blaming me for?”
“I’m not sure which worries me more,” Aletha said to the air in general. “The fact that you’re arguing with a cat, or that you understand what he’s saying.”
“Please, as if it takes any talent to know how mad he is at me for hitting his girl.”
Tail’s eyes narrowed to mere slits and his ears went flat on his head, fur rising on the back of his neck. I recognized the warning signs clearly. At some point, in the dead of night, he would get his revenge.
We came around a switchback bend in the trail that led directly to a rather substantial road that bordered on being a highway. I stopped at the edge and looked both ways, but it remained open, broad and relatively mud-free. Someone had gone through the trouble of putting pea gravel down and some sort of hardened mud that made the road firm.
“I didn’t expect to see something like this here,” Aletha observed, tone openly delighted. “Are we near a major town or something?”
“We must be getting close to Rykern.” Jaunten knowledge said as much, anyway. “It’s a famous logging town. Most of the lumber that you see on the southern edge of Chahir comes from it. It’s been a major settlement for decades now.”
“Oh, so the wide road is for them to ship lumber out of the mountains?”
I nodded confirmation even as I used the sun to get my bearings. “We’re probably a little north of the town right now. I say we go do
wn, get supplies there. Who knows? We might even be able to hitch a ride on one of their ships and get around to a major port that way.”
“Several weeks at sea beats land travel,” Aletha agreed fervently. After all, on a ship, the priests couldn’t get at us. We’d be much safer on the ocean.
Of course, the trick would be avoiding suspicion long enough to get on the boat. If they even had a boat. There were too many ifs in all ofs this for my peace of mind. “So, cover story. We’re a young family traveling to visit my relatives and we got lost in that mother storm last night?”
“Our equipment got lost in the process of us trying to find shelter,” Aletha added.
“And we’re tired of riding like this, so we’re looking for a boat to get us to the next main port, which will cut down on our travel time.”
“Most of it’s not even—technically—a lie.”
“The best cover stories have a little truth in them.” I grinned at her and got a grin in response.
Aletha pointed at Becca with her chin. “And have you thought of what to tell her when she wakes up?”
“I’m waiting for a brilliant flash of inspiration.”
“Ahhh.” Aletha nodded with mock-wisdom. “How’s that going for you?”
“Not well,” I admitted cheerfully.
“I suggest you think of something quickly. We’ll have to wake her up before we hit the town.”
My smile stayed in place, but my heart sank. The odds of me thinking of something appeasing in the next few minutes were not good.
I think…I was in trouble.
There are two creatures in this world that you do not want to ever upset. The first are women. The second are cats.
I knew that the universe must’ve been especially pulling my leg because at this precise moment, I had both mad at me. The bribes I had bought to pacify them weren’t working either.
Sitting back on my haunches, I looked at the two of them for a long moment. We’d managed to find a good inn that had a rather spacious room. Aletha went and bought clothes, equipment, and such while I babysat Becca and Tail. We more or less spent our time washing up while waiting for her to get back. Then Aletha had taken a turn at the baths while I ducked out and bought bribes. Unfortunately, the delectable salmon I bought for Tail and the new hair clasp for Becca did not succeed as planned.