Eleanor

by S. F. Burgess

  Mydren’s central mountains were not as high or as barren as the mountains of the north, which Eleanor still considered home. They were gently sloped and mostly covered in a thick blanket of dark green grass, which looked so inviting that when Eleanor had first seen it she had insisted on getting off her horse and running through it barefoot, its spongy, tickling softness a pure delight. It was high summer. Beautiful blue-sky days, a floral scent heavy in the languid air, the soft, light breeze and the sounds of insects and birds gave way to sultry evenings and warm peaceful nights. Even when it rained, it was light and pleasant, leaving them feeling refreshed and cooled. Foraging was plentiful and hunting was good, and without Eleanor’s help they ate well for a change, not pushing themselves too hard and sleeping in on some mornings until the sun had fully risen. Eleanor began to feel truly connected to the earth and felt its power pulse through her; she felt so very much alive that she did not seem to be able to stop smiling.

  At Amelia’s insistence they had begun using some of their free time to explore their abilities. They spent an hour every morning sat together in quiet meditation, their energy strings woven tightly together as they explored the world around them, pushing their energy strings far out across Mydren. Eleanor was amazed to discover just how far they could reach when they used their energies together. Individually they were powerful, but together they were unstoppable. They learnt to feel the energies of their own and each other’s elements, learning how to balance them and how to manipulate the flow. Amelia had been their teacher – the solid, skilful grasp she had of her own abilities when it came to manipulating the weather was their best instruction. It soon became obvious to them that balancing the elements required the delicate attention of all four of them working in harmony; for instance, it was no use Freddie attempting to stop a forest fire if air was fighting against him, and Will was unable to stop a raging flood without Eleanor giving him somewhere to divert the water. When it came to balancing the earth Eleanor needed all the help she could get. Once they got the hang of it they worked together in silence – there was no need for conversation, in their heads or anywhere else, as they were so close they could feel the thoughts of the others. Conlan had asked them to explain what it felt like, a curious look on his face. They had tried, but it was difficult, as they were not reading each other’s minds, rather each other’s intentions, instinctively knowing what the others needed to provide balance. It felt like riding Rand; Eleanor had tried to explain that it felt like a balance of control and power aligned with the pure joy of letting go sometimes and allowing yourself to get carried along. Conlan had smiled at that, a feeling he could understand.

  As they travelled they discussed aspects of their old world that could be replicated in Mydren, insights they could bring to their adopted world. This had been prompted by Eleanor asking Conlan what was beyond the sea that surrounded Mydren’s land mass in the maps. He had looked at her blankly; Eleanor had been horrified that nobody had ever thought to look. She had explained the very serious spirit of discovery that most people had on her world. Conlan had asked where the benefit lay in knowing how tall a mountain was or what was on the other side of an ocean. Eleanor had smiled and told him that the spirit of exploration had taken men from her world to the moon, pushing forward the boundaries of medicine and science, hugely expanding human knowledge. Conlan had pointed out, unhappily, that the hard work of surviving broke most people’s spirits and that the Lords of Mydren, who had the time and wealth to explore, were far too busy stabbing each other in the back, sometimes literally. Will had told Conlan that education, research and learning were something he could encourage as king, the concept driving Conlan into a deep, thoughtful silence that had lasted several days.

  The journey east across the mountains took them several months, and Eleanor knew she had never felt happier. She pushed all her dark and unpleasant thoughts about the future to the back of her mind, and she even tried not to think about the book and Conlan’s shield. Instead, she concentrated on enjoying each day, the beauty of the world around her and the company of those she loved. As they came out of the mountains, the fun stopped abruptly. Will and Conlan started having quiet, serious conversations that Eleanor could not hear. After three days of their odd behaviour she wanted an explanation. Pulling Horse to a stop, she dismounted and stared at the whispering men, until they noticed her.

  “What is it?” Conlan asked.

  “I want to know what you and Will are whispering about, it’s making me nervous,” she said bluntly.

  “We’re trying to decide the best way to get to where we’re going,” Will answered.

  “If all you are doing is plotting a course, why can’t the rest of us help you decide?” Eleanor asked.

  “Because it’s not as simple as that, Eleanor,” Conlan said, his jaw muscles tensing with the flash of irritation in his eyes.

  “No,” Eleanor agreed. “It never is.”

  Conlan swung himself off Rand’s back and marched towards her, Freddie seeming to appear out of nowhere as he moved closer.

  “Eleanor, get my grandfather’s book out,” Conlan ordered, giving Freddie an irritated look as he stood at Eleanor’s side, arms crossed over his chest. Turning to her horse, Eleanor rummaged in a bag and pulled out the book. Conlan snatched it off her, and moving to the back he quickly flicked through until he found the map of Mydren. Holding it out in front of her, he pointed.

  “This is where we are now.” He moved his finger. “This is where we need to be; in between these two points is the Central Tower, the main seat of power for the Lords of Mydren, and around it hundreds of towns and villages, along with thousands of Protectors. We are trying to work out a safe way through.”

  Eleanor frowned and then looked at the map. “Will, lend me one of your pencils, please.”

  Will walked over, handed her a pencil and looked over at the map enquiringly. Carefully, she drew a thin line, plotting a straight course from their position to the five rivers, straight through the middle of Protector territory and taking them within three or four miles of the Central Tower. Conlan looked at her, slightly perplexed. Eleanor smiled.

  “They have no idea who we are, so nobody is looking specifically for us. If the area we are going to walk through is as populated as you say, we’ll just be five more in a multitude. As long as we don’t do anything to draw attention to ourselves, we should just be able to blend in. I don’t think we’re that important to the Lords of Mydren yet, and frankly we should take advantage of this situation for as long as it lasts.”

  “I’m sorry, Conlan, but I don’t think I can fault her logic,” Will said.

  “Me neither – if we can take the quick route, let’s do it,” Freddie agreed.

  Conlan glared at her and then at Will; closing the book with a sharp snap, he thrust it back into Eleanor’s hands.

  They did not exactly sneak past the Central Tower, but Eleanor felt like that was what they were doing, coming close enough that she could see its soaring height in the distance. Conlan and Will were wound up so tightly that Eleanor could feel their anxiety creeping through her body, leaving her tense and fearful and jumping at every unfamiliar noise or movement. They travelled mostly in silence; the conversations they did have were terse and whispered. Eleanor found that they were talking in each other’s heads more and more; Conlan noticed and did not seem particularly happy about it. The denser population meant that finding out-of-the-way places to camp was becoming harder and harder, and they were forced to use Eleanor’s dwindling supply of money to stay in various inns in the towns and villages they moved through.

  Had she not been in an almost constantly elevated state of fear, Eleanor would have found their journey fascinating. The landscape was a slowly undulating, neat patchwork of fields stretching out in front of her. She had no idea what the crops were, but fields of dark yellow, purple and gold stood out among the greens and browns. Eleanor had quietly asked Conlan if he knew what was being grown; she decided he probabl
y did, although his response of ‘Do I look like a farmer?’ had not been very helpful. The towns they moved through ranged from opulent, on the level of the richer parts of Baydon, to miserably impoverished. After Conlan’s comments she had expected broken, despairing people like those she had seen in Baydon’s slums, and while this was certainly the case in some places, it was not true of everyone they met. The main roads were busy with merchants moving carts and wagons between the thronging towns, well-dressed men and women riding past on beautiful, highly-strung horses and large dogs trotting obediently at their sides. Farmers moving herds of cows and black-horned sheep occasionally blocked the way. They even passed a troop of brightly dressed players who practiced their juggling skills in time to the cheerful sound of a flute. Nearly everyone they passed smiled and nodded polite greetings or, in the case of the merchants, tried to sell them something. They also met patrols of twenty or thirty Protectors, who forced all traffic on the road into the ditches on either side as they marched past, but not a single Protector gave them so much as a sideways glance.

  Five weeks of hard riding during the day and they made it through the area Conlan considered ‘dangerous’ and out the other side. Eleanor had no idea what they were going to do on the way back, as she had money left for maybe one or two nights in an inn for the five of them, but that was a worry for later. The towns and villages they passed through became sporadic and spaced further apart, and they were able to start camping again. Signs of cottage industry and agriculture began to disappear from the landscape, and Mydren reverted to the natural beauty Eleanor loved – vast virgin forests, grassy, rolling hills and a profusion of wild flowers. They travelled west for several weeks, eventually meeting a wide, fast-flowing river. This was one of the five rivers that led to the waterfall she had seen in her dreams and in the book; they followed it southwest along its banks.

  The sun had dipped to the warm, golden glow that preceded sunset, when they saw the great lake in the distance. Fed by five separate rivers, the lake sat in a bowl of land, steep sloping hills rising up on all sides. It reminded Eleanor of the high lake at home and she felt a pang of homesickness; how beautiful their lake would look in the warm summer sun. At the far side there was a gap in the hills, and the water ran up to the edge, looking like an enormous infinity pool. The waterfall. The land where the lake sat and the rivers met dropped away on the other side of the waterfall, a cliff edge slipping hundreds of feet straight down. God’s front doorstep. Instinctively reaching out an energy string, Eleanor investigated the underlying rock strata and found, far below them, a fault line where the earth had just slipped at some point. Eleanor tried to work out from the rocks how long ago that had been, but the strata was too messed up, too complicated – the earth was singing in the wrong key. It felt stable now, as the pressure was currently much further east. She had felt it in their morning meditations, but she also felt how easy it would be to destabilise the fault, to apply a small amount of energy in the right place and Mydren would split itself apart. This was something they were going to have to factor in to their balancing efforts.

  They moved round the edge of the water towards the waterfall, having to cross two of the wide, deep, lazily-flowing rivers which fed the lake. At the first river Eleanor was pleased to discover that Horse was an excellent swimmer and followed as she was led across with little trouble, although Eleanor felt an idiot with a bag on her head holding her books, sword and dagger so they did not get wet. Conlan, of course, had no problems at all, because Rand was a marvel on four legs. He did not even have to dismount and sat waist-high in water, holding his book, boot knife and sword above his head, a smug grin on his face. Freddie and Amelia had some difficulties, but they eventually managed to negotiate the water. Unfortunately Will’s horse was having none of it and refused point blank to get so much as a hoof wet. Stripping Rand of everything but his bridal in an effort to reduce water damage, Conlan headed back across the river. Will handed him his sketchpad, pencils, playing cards and sword so that Conlan could ferry them back across the river to the safety of dry land. Then Will tried dragging the moody, black animal into the water. Freddie laughed until he cried over Will’s efforts and Conlan’s dry comment on the irony of the Avatar of Water’s horse being afraid to swim almost finished him off. Wanting to be slightly more helpful, Amelia suggested from the far bank that Will go into the horse’s mind and encourage it to cross the river. As he tried this, the horse reared back and then plunged forward and bit his arm, pulling as far back from him as Will’s grip on the reins would allow, eyes wild and nostrils flaring. After giving them a dirty look from across the water, he shrugged a ‘what now?’ expression. Wondering what was wrong with the animal, Eleanor warned Will that she was going to try talking to it and he should watch out, just in case it tried to bite him again. Gently, carefully, Eleanor entered the frightened creature’s mind. It was a spinning tornado of terror and confusion. Sending out a steady stream of calming, encouraging feelings the spinning finally slowed down, revealing a memory of falling into a river and nearly drowning when the horse had been a foal. All water was bad and to be avoided. While the horse liked Will he was not going in the water for him. Using Will’s trick, Eleanor wrapped the animal’s consciousness in a soft, numbing cocoon of calming love, insulating it from its fear and separating it from reality – lightly anaesthetising it. She then very softly but insistently called it to her. She watched, focused on nothing but the horse, as it walked slowly into the water, its wide eyes holding a relaxed, vacant look. It had a brief moment of panic as the riverbed fell away and it had to swim, but Eleanor sent it calm instructions on what to do, adding layers to the insulation she had placed around its mind. It reached the bank, pulling itself out of the water to stand in front of her, dripping, shivering and confused as to how it got there. Will, who had swum after it, pulled himself out of the water and up the bank, giving Eleanor an odd look.

  “What?” she asked.

  “How did you do that? How do you even make sense of what’s in its head?” he asked, taking the animal’s reins and giving it an exasperated glance.

  “I just looked at its thoughts, they’re mostly pictures,” Eleanor answered.

  “I couldn’t do it, it was like trying to understand modern art; I know I should be able to see something in it, but it’s just a confusing mess. I could see the nasty beast had thoughts, but they made no sense,” Will said as Amelia tried to inspect the bite on his arm.

  Eleanor frowned. “He’s not nasty; in fact, he likes you and feels guilty about biting you. He was just frightened. He fell in a river as a baby and nearly drowned, so now he quite sensibly avoids water.”

  “Oh… How did you know that? I’m meant to be the mind-meld guy, so why couldn’t I see that?” Will asked, irritated with himself. Eleanor shrugged.

  “Maybe you can just talk to fish,” Conlan ventured with a totally straight face, looking mildly surprised when Freddie fell over laughing again.

  At the next river Will waited until they had all crossed, and when Eleanor offered to help him he gave her a smug smile and closed his eyes. Eleanor watched in amazement as the river in front of her began to slow. It was as if Will had drawn a line across the water – the river on one side of it stopped flowing, the water on the other side continued to move, draining away into the lake and leaving a wall of water, the river on one side and an almost dry riverbed on the other. Not opening his eyes, his face a mask of total concentration, Will kicked his heels, urging his horse forward. The animal gave the wall of water, gently tumbling and rolling in on itself, a frightened glance, but did as it was told, Will trusting it to pick its way across the riverbed and up the bank. The horse stopped when it reached the other side, and with a shuddering sigh Will let his concentration go. The wall of water collapsed and the river rushed in to fill the void, soon resuming its normal pace, as if it had never been stopped.

  “Show off,” Conlan said, but he did not look surprised. He’s seen Will do this before, Eleanor
realised, still trying to understand what she had just witnessed. Freddie’s look of impressed amazement matched her own; Amelia, however, looked worried and annoyed.

  “Wow, that was so cool!” Freddie said, staring at Will in admiration.

  “If you can do that, why are we getting wet?” Eleanor asked.

  “Because what he just did takes every ounce of his strength and he shouldn’t be doing it at all,” Amelia muttered, moving her horse towards Will as he slumped forward in his saddle. She managed to reach him before he fell to the ground and helped him to stay upright while he took slow deep breaths.

  Freddie was still staring. “Really, Will, very cool – just like Moses.”

  Will raised his head and smiled faintly, his eyes unfocused.

  “I don’t understand,” Eleanor said, her ever-churning mind spitting out questions and filling her head with confusion. “In our balancing sessions I’ve felt Will manipulate the water flow of far bigger stretches of water, and that didn’t do this to him.”

  Will gave her a long appraising look. “Eleanor, changing the flow of water is easy; a small nudge, an alternative route, letting it do what it does anyway but just in a different direction. What I just did was stop the flow, I made water do something it doesn’t naturally do. Could you stop the earth turning?” Eleanor shook her head, shocked by the concept. Will nodded and continued in a slow, tired voice. “When I stopped the river flowing I held back the weight of the whole river, held the molecules within it, from here all the way to the river’s source. That’s a lot of water, and it takes a lot of effort.”

  “Really? Totally awesome,” Freddie whispered as Amelia glared at him.

  “Don’t encourage him!” she snapped.

  There was an uncomfortable silence, broken by Conlan’s confused question.