“Go away.”
“You need to leave, my lord.”
The two flanked me, Kivern rushing ahead to open her cottage.
“His name is Arinaud...” Nanda began.
“He is Lord Tgeha’s second wing commandt...” Toss continued.
“But he’s not here working for Tgeha...”
“We don’t know that he's serving Fierell.” Toss objected.
“Why else would he be here, Toss?”
This sort of fragmented, incomprehensible chatter carried us along to Kivern’s home. She was waiting for us, trying to brush her wispy blond hair back under her kerchief as she rushed us inside and latched the door. Our room was in the back and that was where we headed, but Kivern stopped us in the kitchen. She wiped the seats and table and in her quiet way indicated that we should stay.
She set a pot of water to boiling and began gathering tea things onto the table as I settled in a chair. Toss and Nanda, distracted by her bustle separated to keep watch on the door and window.
Once she had set out cups and plates and napkins for each of us, Kivern stilled and took a deep breath, looking everywhere but at me. “We are not fond of Fierell, those of us who have lived here. And her court has been here long enough for us to know that she is not fond of you, sir. My partner was certain you were in danger so he had me follow my lady Nanda, while he kept his own eyes on you, my lord.”
"Not a lady." Nanda had to say.
I started, “Why do you call me your lord?”
“Geoffrey is a popular name thanks to your uncle’s kindness. But I was washmistress at Forte until my Denn swept me away here to his home. And you, my lord,” she looked at me for a moment, smiling, “look exactly like your father did at your age and with your uncle’s laugh to boot.”
“Does everyone know me?”
She took the boiling water from the fire and poured it into her steeping bowl. “We all respect your wishes to be unknown, as will most villages and shales you pass through on your way to the Dormounts.”
I dropped my head into my palm and rubbed my temples. These people had no reason to respect me and yet they treated me with unquestioning trust.
Nanda chimed in from her place at the window, “Fierell wasn’t absolutely certain that you're the prince.”
“She probably is now, though.” Toss threw that at Nanda as he finger combed his red beard and studied a bloody bejeweled minni by the doorway.
“Denn has gone to the pub to alert the boys. My daughter has the Elder’s ear, should we need it. Now sit, my lady. Sit and calm yourself.”
Nanda twitched the curtains shut. “Not a lady.”
Kivern continued. “For Kaveg’s sake, tell the prince what news had you at the mage’s throat.”
Nanda turned her gaze from Toss, whom we thought we’d left back in Torscreek. “Fierell, the lady you call your aunt and the current lord of this shale was trying to grill me about you, woman to woman, when a familiar voice sidled up. That guy with the apple who seems to be the leader of the five who don’t care for us? His name is Arinaud. He came to Fierell for orders while I was chatting with her about your true occupation and plans for me.”
“I know him.” Toss interrupted, “I'm originally from Stray Tor and this Arinaud is your cousin Tgeha’s second wing Commandt. But I agree with Nanda. I don’t think Lord Tgeha is the one who ordered Arinaud to follow you.”
“Auntie Fierell wants you dead, Geoffrey.” Nanda took a cup from Kivern, and stared into the steam. “They say she used to live at Forte.” Nanda spoke softly, just for me. “She’s the one who burned Forte and. . . the cellar, isn’t she?”
I met her eyes, but didn't acknowledge that I had arrived at her conclusion days earlier when we found this small shale under Fierell's rule.
“Toss,” I turned to the retired guarde we had become friends with in Torscreek, “why are you here?”
He cleared his throat uncomfortably and took a sip of his tea, “Tren told us to come."
"Your kickass sister with all the kids?" Nanda asked.
He looked at her quizzically then turned back to me. "Yes. She and her brood run the farm day to day. Krt and I aren’t needed until the fall harvest. And we all of us thought you would... especially as Nanda gets further on... you would need protection. So, I've been following while Krt scouts ahead.”
“You knew who I was too?”
“I’m from Stray Tor. You have the look of your family.”
“I have been wandering this land for eight frseason, Toss. You know that. What makes you think I need protection now?”
“Because now you're heading to the Dormounts.”
Why was it that everyone seemed to know where I was going except for me?
I left Tyurae reluctantly. I wanted to confront Fierell and give rule of the shale back to the elders. I wanted to confirm her guilt and extract a bloodprice for the ghosts of Forte. But Kivern and the elders insisted I go. They said the dragon was a danger to all Kaveg while Fierell was only a danger to Tyurae. The hard choice is often the right one. So I agreed to respect their wishes vowing to return as soon as the dragon was dispatched.
It was even harder to convince Nanda to walk away from the fight.
∞
When we arrived at her El stop in Chicago that night, she shoved me off the train and we jogged to her apartment, where, after engaging four locks, she dragged a desk in front of the door and sat on it.
“I shot a guy. My fingerprints are all over the gun and him and my hat, which they still have.”
“Shot?” I asked, still unsure how to help her.
“Shot. I pulled the trigger on the gun and the bullet went into his body.”
“You pulled the trigger on the gun?”
“Okay, so he pulled the trigger. It makes no difference, I pointed the gun at him and now he might be dead.”
“If he's dead, why are you afraid? You killed him in defense of your person. There is no blood price to be paid.”
“You really don’t understand, do you?" She hopped off the desk then and pushed past me to pull the curtains closed. "They’re going to say we attacked them. I mean, it sure looks like we attacked them. Neither of us has a scratch on us. But they’ve got a broken nose, a sliced arm, two possible concussions, and a gunshot wound among them. Do you think anyone would believe us?” She paced through the tiny apartment. “No. No they won’t. And they’ve got my cap. They can probably trace DNA or something from that.”
She was working herself into a panic again. Her breathing was quick and shallow. Her eyes were getting bright with paranoia. I did not understand her concern, but I recognized the shock of killing someone, so I stopped her and made her sit the next time she paced over to her mattress.
“Whatever is going to happen will not happen tonight. No one knows where we are or who we are. You are safe. I'll watch and make sure you remain safe. Now relax and sleep.”
Gradually her breathing slowed. Her eyes eventually dropped their gaze from mine and she let her exhaustion take over. She curled up into a tight ball as I lowered her down and pulled the covers up.
I sat with her on the edge of the futon while she cried herself out. The noises outside settled and grew quiet as I stayed by her. I watched the moon rise against the bars on her window, rubbing her back until her breath was slow and even. When I thought her safely asleep, I slid off the mattress.
She whispered, “Who are you, anyway?”
I whispered back, “You wouldn't believe me if I told you."
“What makes you thinks so?”
I curled up on the floor beside her little nest and closed my eyes. “I didn’t believe you.”
Seven
∞ Nanda Junior’s journal ∞
Dec. 13
Forte, Kaveg
We’ve been unable to find any record of who lived here before although I get the feeling that Geoffrey knows more than he’s sharing. He definitely recognized the castle’s name when we found it. Looking down
into the central courtyard from the highest windows, I was wondering if the flowery carvings in the flooring stones might actually be letters, when Geoffrey said aloud, “So, this is Forte.” At which point the letters jumped into perspective and I could see the word as clearly as he. Forte. A logical, if not terribly creative, name for a stronghold.
Geoffrey explained that yes, the people of Forte had forged a logical and practical community.
“The place was originally just a natural clearing in the woods. It was a small fort.” He turned from the little study lined with empty shelves and led the way back down the stairs to the courtyard itself. “No one ever bothered to identify it in any other way, even after permanent walls had been built up around it and the castle around that and finally the deceptive moat and wall around the castle. By the way, I apologize, the location of our apple tree makes perfect sense now.”
“And the cleared forest?” I waved in what I thought might be the general direction of our apple tree. “The lack of inhabitants? Does this make sense now, too?”
He paused on a landing. Looked up at me. “No. It doesn’t make any sense.” I thought he was going to say more, but the breath turned into a quick sigh and he continued his descent and his history.
“This was the third settling of the Lander peoples. We were so named,” he explained, “by the tribe of people who had once lived on the plains six megg, six days’ travel to the west, the people who commanded the dragons before the Lost Battle of 169. The battle was named by the Landers as none of the dTelfur tribe survived.”
I stopped in the dark stairwell and repeated, “dTelfur?”
The name startled away the query about dragons that had been rapidly forming in my head.
“Yes, our forces thought it was just an advance party, but when one brave wing, or rather,” he amended, “what remained of one brave wing ventured into the dTelfur lands, they found the dragons curled up nose to tail, unmoving and unresponsive. The village they found was smaller than the sparsely populated westquad of Voferen Kahago. And it was completely empty. They found no one.”
“But, Geoffrey,” I blocked the huge wooden door that led to the stairs, “The family who found and fed us after the fight were dTelfur.”
He stared at me blankly, his pupils huge in the darkness.
“I didn’t know what they were talking about, except that it was about us and she said something about the dTelfur. I may have been dreaming, but I couldn’t have imagined that same word.”
“Slow, Nanda.” He pushed open the heavy door. “Tell me what you think you heard.”
We sat on a velvet cushioned stone bench at the edge of the courtyard. He sat gazing about the courtyard resting his eyes on the stone chips and burnt wood debris at our feet for a moment then turning his contemplation upwards at the stone arches that spanned the yard far above us.
I sat sideways on the bench, watching his reaction, “It was after you’d gone out with Yenay to see where the five had set up camp.”
∞
We’d been running for hours, pushing our way through the massive forest. My legs eventually cried surrender and Geoffrey decided our best option at that point was to hide and let the five get ahead of us. Unfortunately, when the five (minus one) did pass us, they set up camp not fifty meters from our tree and settled in for the night.
I looked at Geoffrey, half-hidden from me in his piney bower on the other side of the trunk trying to convey what now, smart guy? with one raised eyebrow, but he was studying the five, so I wrapped my arms around the trunk, leaned my head against it, and closed my eyes. I couldn’t possibly have slept perched like that, but I certainly sank a few levels away from consciousness. I sailed away on the sounds of the night. I imagined I could hear the final leaf of the season dropping to the forest floor and crumbling to pieces. The wind picked up and I heard the five rush to protect their small fire which crackled and spit little sparks of warm light through my closed lids. Their conversation reached me as innocuous murmurings punctuated by shouts of protest and laughter.
What I didn’t hear was Geoffrey reaching over to tap me on the shoulder. His intention was to tell me his plan of climbing down and sneaking off while the night was alive with the sounds and the men were distracted with lively conversation. His effect, however, was to so startle me out of my doze that I fell out of the tree.
I hit twenty springy pine boughs on my quick journey to the needle-strewn grass and their combined effect, in addition to bruising and scraping me, was to break my fall so that I was only stunned when I hit the bottom and not fatally smashed.
With what I thought was fortuitous timing, a deer crashed through the trees and bound past the five’s small camp, at that same moment.
“Must have been frightened by a bear. Stoke that fire now and get some sleep.”
But, though the men tossed another log on their fire, they themselves were too stoked with adrenaline from the unexpected fright to sleep and renewed their arguments.
Geoffrey had taken the opportunity to descend more gracefully and was just dropping to the ground when the woman appeared. She knelt so suddenly at my side I almost cried out. Geoffrey rushed forward to protect me. But she put both of her hands out to her sides in a gesture of peace.
She couldn’t be more than ten years older than me, but she stooped over me with such maternal concern that I had to smile. She even looked a little like my mother. A dark hood covered her hair and draped down into a cloak patch-worked together in the night colors of the forest. The cloak fell all the way down her short body to the ankles of her tall, flat-footed boots. A canvas bag hung loosely from one shoulder, visible through the folds of the cloak as she stood, satisfied that I was no more than stunned by my fall. She moved silently back into the darkness, her chameleon cloak blending in completely until she turned, extended one brown hand, and beckoned us to follow her.
She led us slowly and silently in a wide arc around the five to a small cottage dug into a hillside. We came upon it from the back, crossing over the roof to a small clearing decorated with a few chairs leaning against trees that I thought were so ingeniously carved until I looked up later that night, in the early morning, and saw similar chairs hanging ten meters up, living branches growing out of them. The woman led us quickly into the hillside home.
“Rich, we have visitors. Put on the kettle and reheat the stew.”
“Visitors? dTella, where did you find visitors?”
Our guide bustled about in the entryway, stripping herself of her cloak and bag and hanging them on a peg by the door. The other four pegs each had their pairs of bags and cloaks of various sizes hanging on them already. She went ahead into the main room, brushing her shortly cropped hair with one hand.
“I’d appreciate it if you left your swords in the entrance. My younger children don’t yet need learn of such things,” she called back to us.
I watched Geoffrey as I took off my sweater in the hot foyer. I watched his face to see if this was a typical residence, a typical encounter for him. But he was sweeping his eyes over the place, his face a mask, his sword still at his side. I reached again for the high hook where I had hung my sword over the cloak and bag already there but Geoffrey stopped me.
“You’re right, she trusted enough to bring us to her home. I’ll trust her equally.” And he hung his sword over mine on the highest hook.
We entered, together, the coziest room I have seen in my entire life. To our right, our hostess was kneeling by a low wooden crib in the center of a sitting room area filled with pillows.
To our left in a kitchen area, a man who looked to be about sixty was adding leaves to a pot of boiling water. He wasn’t wearing any shoes and had long white hair tied back with a blue ribbon. A carved wooden table capable of seating eight comfortably was being set with plates and cups by a little girl with golden hair hanging straight down her back nearly to her butt. She swished and twitched that hair as she went around the table stretching on tiptoe to reach it. A younger boy with dar
k hair cropped as close as his mother’s was mopping up puddles of water from the oaken floor and trying to avoid dTella’s notice.
As we stepped into the room, the little girl looked up and noisily increased her industrious table arranging. The man at the hearth turned from his pots to see the cause of the racket and caught sight of us.
“Thank you, Tira. I believe you have found the optimum arrangement of those two plates and cups on our little table. Would you now be so kind as to help your brother clean up the evidence?”
“I can't leave you three alone, can I, without you finding some trouble.” dTella stood up from the crib, holding a swaddled baby.
“Hello.” The man wiped his hands on a cloth and approached us with a smile. “My name is Rich. Welcome. We are safe here, and while we wish it so, you are safe as well. Do you understand?”
Geoffrey stepped forward and offered his hand, “I understand. We wish you no harm. I am running not for anything I've done but for who I am. I'm Geoffrey.”
Rich, clasping Geoffrey’s arm, started and took a step back. But Geoffrey gripped his arm firmly and pulled him forward again.
“I am a mystery to my companion.” He looked carefully at Rich. “And she to me. Else I would introduce you.”
The air was charged. dTella had turned with the baby to stare at us. The children had stopped their work. Geoffrey and Rich were having some conference with their eyes. But I was tired and in pain and imagining all sorts of eerie omens.
So when Rich looked my way, I stepped forward and offered my hand. “I’m Nanda and it’s all a mystery to me. Except that these cuts are going to get infected if I don’t clean them up soon.”
The instant Rich took a good look at me, his face was wiped of all but concern. Geoffrey forgotten, he led me to a stool in the kitchen and examined my bare arms. “What have you done to yourself, lass? Fallen out of a tree, have you?”
Geoffrey's Queen: A Mobious' Quest Novel Page 8