by Mark Anthony
Aryn’s brilliant expression returned. She nodded in excitement. “Of course, Your Majesty. I’ll show her everything a lady needs to know.” The baroness winked at Grace and whispered, “Don’t worry. This is going to be fun.”
Grace swallowed hard. Fun wasn’t exactly the word she would have chosen. She cast a nervous glance at the king. What in the world—what in this world—had she just gotten herself into?
38.
The four travelers set out from Kelcior in the brilliant late-autumn sunlight to begin the long journey south to Calavere and the Council of Kings.
In the muddy courtyard behind the old Tarrasian keep, Travis and Falken mounted the horses that had been King Kel’s farewell gift. The bard’s steed was a jet stallion with a white streak in its forelock. Travis, in turn, sat astride a shaggy brown gelding with intelligent eyes and a star in the center of its forehead. Melia and Beltan mounted their own horses, which they had ridden to Kelcior. The blond knight’s horse was a bony roan charger, while Melia, her blue kirtle artfully arranged, perched upon a mare as pale as mist, with delicate legs and a graceful neck.
Earlier that afternoon, they had gone to find King Kel and beg his permission to leave Kelcior. As Beltan had explained to Travis, under the laws of hospitality, a guest could not depart—be it from castle or hovel—without first being granted leave by the master of the house.
“What?” Kel had said with a glower after Falken had made the formal request to depart the keep. “Leaving so soon?”
They had met with the shaggy king in his solar. This was a cozy, if cramped, chamber located behind the curtain which crossed the end of the great hall.
“Some of us have been indulging your hospitality for nearly a month, Your Majesty,” Melia had said. “Surely any longer and we will overstay our welcome.”
Kel’s voice had rattled the very stones of the fortress. “Impossible!” Then he had snapped his fingers. “Would you stay, my lady, if I were to command a feast in your honor?”
Melia had refrained from answering, although by her expression the effort cost her. Falken had expressed their need for urgency, and at last Kel had acquiesced—though not without some grumbling when he learned a Council of Kings had been called and he had not been invited.
“Just because I have a few wildmen in my court, they think they’re so much better than me.” He had let out a disgusted snort. “Why, I have half a mind to march down to Calavere and show King Boreas how a real kingdom is run.”
“Now that is something I would pay good gold to see,” Beltan had whispered to Travis with a grin.
The travelers had spoken their good-byes, then had made their way from the keep. As they passed through the great hall, Travis had looked around, for he had hoped he might catch one last glimpse of Trifkin Mossberry. However, there had been no sign of the little man or his troupe of actors. They had vanished, like a strange dream, with the night.
Now, astride his horse in the courtyard, Travis cast a sidelong glance at Falken and Melia. He was still wounded by the way they had decided his fate that morning in the ruined tower. For the tenth time that day, the two were engaged in some discussion which they did not seem compelled to share. Travis sighed and turned his attention to adjusting the gear strapped to the saddle behind him.
Each of the horses bore a pair of saddlebags that bulged with provisions from Kel’s kitchen. The king had not been given the chance to hold a farewell feast in their honor, so he had apparently decided to send one with them instead. Tucked away in the saddlebags were smoked meats, hard-crusted breads, cheeses contained in protective rinds of mold, and clay pots of wild honey. Kel had also provided the travelers with extra clothes and blankets.
After he tightened the straps, Travis stared at the saddlebags. He was starting to feel like just another piece of baggage himself.
Falken shaded his brow with his one gloved hand and eyed the sun overhead. “Are we ready yet? It’s a long way to Calavere, and we’re not getting any closer just standing here in the courtyard.”
Melia adjusted her slate-blue cloak. She was seated on her gray mount sidesaddle—a feat she somehow made appear graceful and natural. Travis suspected that, if he tried the same, he would promptly slide into the muck below.
“I am ready,” Melia pronounced, as if this were the only factor constraining their departure.
Apparently it was. The others nudged their horses into motion, toward a gate in the ramshackle wall, and Travis followed suit. A brisk wind picked up, and the smoke of the castle’s cookfires scudded across the courtyard like blue mist. They had just reached the gate when a drab figure scuttled out of a swirl of smoke and brought the horses to a sudden halt.
“What?” Grisla the witch said in her chalky voice. “Leaving without so much as a simple fare-thee-well?”
Falken glared at her, annoyance written across his wolfish face. “The laws of hospitality require a guest to ask leave of a castle’s lord before departing. I’m afraid I don’t recall a line in there about hags.”
“It’s in the fine script.” The tatters that served as the ancient woman’s clothes fluttered on the wind along with her scraggly hair.
Melia guided her mount forward a few steps. “Do you know you delay our departure on a crucial errand?”
The hag clasped a gnarled hand to her cheek and affected a look of mock mortification. “Oh, forgive me, Lady High-as-the-Moon! How foolish of me to stand in your all-important path. Please don’t punish me for being drawn to your grandness. I am like a lowly fly, you see, compelled by nature to alight upon all great heaps of dung.”
Melia’s coppery skin blanched, then her eyes narrowed to slits. “What do you want of us, Daughter of Sia?”
The hag spat on the ground. “I want nothing of you, Lady Vitriol.” She turned her lone eye on Falken. “Nor you, Lord Calamity.” She bared her snaggled teeth in a sly grin. “I wish to have a word with the tasty young lad, here.”
The witch scampered on stick legs to stand before Travis’s horse, then pointed a clawlike finger at his chest. “I believe you have a bone to pick with me, lad.”
“What?” he said in confusion.
“A bone, boy!”
His expression of puzzlement only deepened.
Grisla gave her head a rueful shake. “Why does Fate always shine upon such dimwits?” She thrust out a greasy leather bag. “Go on, lad. Pick one!”
Travis eyed the lumpy sack, wary of its contents. However, there was only one way out of this situation. He clenched his jaw and slipped a hand into the bag. He half expected to touch something wet and slimy. Instead, his fingers brushed several hard, smooth objects. He drew one out and gazed at it. It was a yellowed knucklebone, three lines scratched into its surface.
“Humph!” Grisla said. “I wouldn’t have thought you would draw that one. One line for Birth, one line for Breath, and one more for Death, which comes to us all.” Her eye rolled toward Falken for a moment. “Though for some of us later than sooner.”
Travis shook his head. “But what does it mean?”
“What do you think it means?” Grisla said.
Travis chewed his lip and stared at the bone. He was reminded of Trifkin Mossberry’s play about Spring and Winter and the birth of Summer. “It seems like it’s about endings. Or maybe beginnings.” He shook his head. “But which is it?”
“Perhaps it’s both, lad. Perhaps there’s no difference between the two.” Grisla shrugged her knobby shoulders. “Or perhaps the oracle bones can lie after all.”
The witch snatched the bone from his hand and spirited the bag into the depths of her swaddling rags.
“Are you finished with your amusement yet, hag?” Falken said.
“As a matter of fact, Lord Impatience, I am.” The witch brushed Travis’s hand with her gnarled fingers. “You know, you’ve taken a little piece of my heart, lad.” She cackled, scuttled into a cloud of smoke, and was gone.
Travis felt something warm and damp against his skin.
He looked down to see a piece of raw meat on his palm. With a yelp he shook his hand and flung it into the mud. He wiped his hand on his tunic. “I really wish she would quit doing that!”
With the way clear once more, the four urged their horses through the gate and picked their way across the causeway that led from fortress to shore. The air was cold, but the autumn sunlight was warm, and it gilded the lake like gold filigree on blue enamel. It was a fine day for traveling.
“What do you suppose that was all about?” Melia asked Falken after they had ridden for a time.
“You mean the hag Grisla?” The bard shrugged. “I doubt it was about anything other than spectacle. As far as I can tell, witches derive their chief entertainment from baffling people. But I suppose there was little harm in allowing the old crone to indulge herself for a minute or two.”
Melia nodded at his words, but whether the regal woman agreed with them or not, she did not say.
A question occurred to Travis. He nudged his gelding toward the others. “Who is Sia?”
Falken gave him a piercing look. “What is Sia, might be a better question. But I suppose you could say she is a goddess of sorts.”
Travis thought about this. “Like one of the gods of those mystery cults you were talking about before?”
“No,” Melia said with a sharpness that startled Travis. “Sia has nothing to do with the gods of the mystery cults, nor they with her.”
This did little to answer Travis’s question. However, given Melia’s reaction, he decided not to press the point. The horses clambered up the steep trail to the summit of the ridge that ringed the valley. Wind tangled Travis’s sandy hair—a wind like the one that sometimes rushed down from the mountains around Castle City, that carried with it an ache of longing, and a sense of infinite possibility.
Beltan cast one last wistful glance over his shoulder at the old keep below. “So much for feasts,” he said. “And I was really getting rather used to them.”
Then the horses started down the other side of the ridge, back toward the crossroads and the Queen’s Way, and the ancient Tarrasian fortress was lost from sight.
39.
All the rest of that day they journeyed south along the grassy swath of the Queen’s Way.
The four travelers soon fell into a pattern. Beltan periodically spurred his rangy charger and galloped down the ancient highway to scout for danger. Falken and Melia rode side by side, their heads often bent together to exchange some murmured bit of conversation. Travis kept a short distance behind them and tried not to look as if he were leaning forward in an attempt to catch what they were saying. However, the wind was behind him, and any interesting items of information the bard and the lady might have uttered were blown in the wrong direction, although once, in the wake of a swirling gust, Travis did catch a snatch of one of Falken’s quietly spoken sentences.
“… that we shouldn’t dismiss the stone in the White Tower even if it is …”
The wind changed again and took the bard’s words with it. Travis’s frustration at not being paid any attention became unbearable. He urged his horse forward.
“So, how long will it take us to get to Calavere?” he asked Falken and Melia.
Falken looked up in surprise, as if he had forgotten Travis was even there. “The Queen’s Way will take us all the way, but it is a long and arduous road. Once we cross the headwaters of the River Farwander, we will be in the Dominion of Eredane proper. However, we must traverse all of Eredane and cross the highlands of Galt before we reach the northern marches of Calavan. In all, it is a journey of nearly a hundred leagues. It will take us well over a fortnight, if the weather holds.” He cast a glance at Melia. “Of course, there is also the matter of a small detour I intend to make along the way.”
“If we have time,” Melia said. “The Council of Kings is to convene in less than a month. We’re going to be slicing it rather finely as it is.”
Falken ran a hand through his gray-shot hair. “It’s not as if I’m proposing this for the sheer fun of it, you know. It’s really rather important.”
Melia’s amber eyes flashed. “So is getting to the council before it’s over.”
“Where is it you want to go, Falken?” Travis said. “Is it a white tower?” Instantly he regretted the question, for both Falken and Melia fixed him with penetrating looks.
“Someone has sharp ears,” Melia said.
“So it seems.” Falken considered Travis for a moment. “It’s not a white tower, Travis. It’s the White Tower.”
Travis didn’t understand, but the bard offered no further explanation. Instead, he and Melia urged their mounts ahead, and thus signified this was all the information Travis was going to get. Feeling terribly sorry for himself, Travis let out a sigh. However, nobody seemed to notice, so he turned his attention to not falling out of the saddle.
The ancient Tarrasians had been engineers of great skill, for the Queen’s Way continued to cut across the rolling landscape. At times it sliced through the tops of hills and at others leaped over deep ravines, supported by stone arches that, while crumbled at the edges, still bore the weight of centuries with ease. As the travelers progressed south, the hills to their left grew into rugged mountains: the Fal Erenn. Westward, to their right, the land swept away in a sea of dun-colored waves. It was all vast and beautiful, but achingly empty as well, and only served to remind Travis that this was not his world.
The sun had sunk into a bank of bronze clouds when Beltan rode back to report he had found a place to make camp for the night. This turned out to be a flat knoll a few hundred paces east of the road. The knoll was ringed by scrub oak, which offered some protection, and a spring trickled from beneath a rock near the hill’s top. Travis climbed down from his gelding and groaned. The last time he had ridden a horse had been at a county fair, and he had been eleven years old. It felt like someone had rearranged all his muscles while he rode and wedged them into places they did not belong.
They made camp as twilight mantled the knoll. Though Melia seemed to feel no compunction in ordering the others around, she did not shirk her own share of the labor. The dinner fashioned from Kel’s provisions was her work, and she seemed pleased by the compliment the other three paid her efforts by eating ravenously. Then again, she might have preferred it had Beltan not been quite so vigorous in his praise.
“And what will you be eating for the rest of the journey, Beltan?” she asked in a pleasant voice as he took his third helping of stew and bread.
Beltan swallowed hard and set the food back down. “You know, I’m really not as hungry as I thought I was.”
“I didn’t think you were, dear,” Melia said.
Travis finished his own food quietly and did not even consider asking for more.
Night deepened around them, and they spread their blankets by the fire. Beltan moved a short distance off, mail shirt jingling, to take the first watch. Travis shivered with the chill, then wrapped himself in his mistcloak and shut his eyes.
He awoke to strange stars.
They blazed against the jet sky, shards of diamond and sapphire. He thought he could see pictures in the stars, shapes far clearer than the sketchy, half-imagined constellations of Earth: feral beasts, winged maidens, warriors wielding swords of cool starlight. The murmur of conversation drifted on the air—it was this that had awakened him. His mind was turgid with sleep, but it seemed to him Melia and Falken spoke in soft voices by the embers of the fire.
The bard’s quiet words drifted on the night air. “But surely you should be able to tell if Travis comes from the same place.”
Travis struggled to sit up. If I come from the same place as what?
He didn’t think he even managed to ask the question aloud. However, Melia turned her amber gaze upon him. Her expression was stern, though not unkind.
Go to sleep, Travis.
Her lips did not move, yet her voice spoke clearly in his mind. Travis tried to protest, but a wave of drowsiness crashed over hi
m. Unable to resist the pull, he shut his eyes and sank once more into deep and starless sleep.
40.
By the time the crimson orb of the sun rose above the horizon, it found them already riding hard down the Queen’s Way. It was midmorning, and the autumn day had turned crisp but fine when they reached a moss-covered stone bridge that arched over a narrow defile. At the bottom of the gorge rushed a small, frothy river. According to Falken, these were the headwaters of the River Farwander.
The bard spoke over the roar of the water. “It isn’t much to look at here, but this is the start of a river that stretches three hundred leagues from source to mouth. By the time it reaches the Sunfire Sea, the Farwander is over a league wide. Or so the stories say, for I know of no one alive in the Dominions who has traveled to the farthest western coast of Falengarth.”
Melia arched a single dark eyebrow. “No one? Not even a great wanderer like yourself, Falken?”
He shook his head, gazed into the distance, then spoke in a low voice that was nearly lost in the rushing of the river. “There was but one road to Eversea, to the Far West, and its beginning was in Malachor. Yet that road lay in one direction only, for those who took it never returned, and the way is lost to all of us now.”
The bard smiled, and though there was sadness in the expression, there was genuine mirth as well. “Yet that is all old history. We have our own road to journey, and to less melancholy lands.”
He spurred his mount and, hooves clattering, the dark stallion crossed the Tarrasian bridge. The others followed after.
They rode all that day with only a few short breaks to chew some bread and allow the horses to drink. Finally, as the sun dipped toward the far horizon, Beltan once again rode back to tell the others he had found a place to make camp. He seemed particularly pleased with his find.