“What’s to stop her from following us?” asked Duncan with growing dismay.
“She can’t enter Meridiana—there’s a charm against her there, and it covers the whole country. It should still be in place, unless more time than I realize has gone by.”
“So you don’t know for sure?”
“We’ll find out soon enough. She wouldn’t have been loitering around her estate if she could get back into Meridiana, though, I think.”
They traveled on through the night. Duncan could tell that the white horse was pushing himself to his very limit, but even though he longed to tell Wildfire to rest for a spell, he knew such a request would be rejected outright. They couldn’t afford to stop, not until they were safely to Meridiana.
“Is it a deep river?” Duncan asked curiously. “How will we cross?”
“There’s a ferry that runs between the two banks,” said Wildfire, “but I don’t think we’ll have time to wait for it. I can swim, probably. Can you?”
He could, and he said as much, but he wasn’t keen on crossing a river in the middle of summertime. It might not be at its highest, but the current would be strong nonetheless. Plus, he didn’t know how well his head full of gold would fare if it was submerged. When he voiced these worries aloud, Wildfire sighed.
“I’d tell you to hang on to the saddle, but I don’t want you to get tangled in my legs while I’m trying to swim. If you can stay on my back, fine, but if you fall off, you must get clear of me and make it to the other side on your own, understand?”
“Yes,” said Duncan, and out of impulse he chanced a look behind them. There was no sign of the witch or the great black horse. Wildfire trotted onward, into the night.
Eventually, the smaller road they followed joined with a larger one, and the white horse increased his pace again. “It’s close, maybe a couple miles more,” he told Duncan. He sounded exhausted, and Duncan thought it was a miracle he hadn’t collapsed yet after running all night. Dawn was only an hour away, and they had not stopped to rest once.
“Will you be able to make it?” he asked in concern.
Wildfire didn’t answer. He simply gritted his teeth and pushed onward. The sound of rushing water met their ears, afar off at first in the calm, quiet night. As it gradually approached, Duncan caught another more chilling sound on the wind: the pounding hooves of a horse behind them.
“Wildfire,” he said in growing apprehension, and he looked back over his shoulder, down the road they had come.
“I hear it,” said the white horse, and he tried to pick up speed.
A crook in the road ahead showed the river glittering beneath the moon and stars. Behind, Dame Groach and Goliath barreled into sight, faster than ever before.
“We’re not going to make it!” Duncan cried
“We will,” Wildfire retorted, and he galloped stubbornly onward.
Behind them, Dame Groach screamed an insult that was lost on the wind, and she waved her knobbly cane high in the air.
“She’s going to cast some magic,” said Duncan, terrified.
“She won’t dare, not this close to Meridiana. It’s sure to rebound against her if she does.”
Duncan did not know exactly what that meant and could only assume that Dame Groach had committed some terrible acts of magic against the little country in which they would seek their refuge. She didn’t seem to care that she was in close proximity to the place, though. Goliath’s pace was increasing, if anything. Duncan watched, transfixed, as they drew closer and closer, until the black horse seemed close enough to bite him.
“Hold on tight!” Wildfire yelled, and the roar of rushing water filled Duncan’s ears. He turned his head forward just in time to see the white horse run straight down a wooden dock. Wildfire never checked his pace, but leapt bodily from the edge into the flowing river ahead.
Duncan’s whole body tightened to keep his perch on the horse as they hit the water together. Somehow he managed not to get knocked off into the current. It was cold, but after the horrific nighttime escape, it was a welcome cold.
Wildfire breathed a sigh of relief. “Home free,” he said, and his legs churned in the water to propel them forward.
On the river’s edge behind them, Dame Groach and Goliath had skidded to a halt. She hollered threats and obscenities after them, but she hadn’t even ventured onto the dock. The river was a boundary she dared not cross after all.
“You’re incredible, Wildfire,” said Duncan as he clutched the saddle tight. “I owe you my life.”
“You certainly do,” the horse replied. “I’ll have plenty of orders to give you once we get to the other side, too.”
“After you rest,” said Duncan. “I’ll listen to anything you tell me after you rest.”
Wildfire wheezed a breathy laugh. “Good lad. I could use a rest, too. Oh, but it feels wonderful to be free, even if I am a horse!”
Chapter 9
The country of Meridiana encompassed a fair swath of lands that included fields and forests alike, and it was dotted with prosperous little hamlets that reminded Duncan of the village near his father’s farm. The people seemed friendly enough as he and Wildfire passed through, and if they stared a little too long at his ridiculous sheepskin wig, he could hardly blame them for that.
Duncan exchanged one of his gold coins for a bag full of silver ones at the first place they stopped, in order to buy supplies more easily. The exchanger had been surprised to receive such a large gold coin, but when all of his tests proved it to be real, he gave Duncan its full worth in silver, almost twice the sum a typical gold coin would have merited.
Wildfire had been elated to learn that they had such funds but warned Duncan not to flash them about, lest enterprising brigands catch whiff of some easy money to be made. Accordingly, the gold coins were kept separate from the silver, which were in turn divided between Duncan’s person and both of the saddle bags.
The bottle of goldwater had not been such a welcome discovery to the white horse. “What on earth did you bring something like that for?” he cried. “Are you really that greedy?”
“Greedy?” Duncan repeated in confusion. “I thought we might find someone who could reverse the enchantment on it so that I could have my old hair back.”
“Oh,” said the horse. After a moment’s thought, he asked, “Why didn’t you just throw it on Dame Groach back at the stable? You could’ve turned her to gold right then and there, and we’d be much better off for it.”
The thought had never even occurred to him, and he said as much. “I’m sorry,” he added sheepishly.
Wildfire snorted. “You’re a gentle soul, you know that? Not the least bit inclined to hurt or harm anything or anyone, even if they deserve it. We’ll get that trained out of you first thing. You’ve got to know how to defend yourself with a head like that.”
Duncan didn’t like this prospect at all, but he bit his tongue and accepted the white horse’s counsel. Wherever it was they were going, he surmised, there would be someone to help him learn such things.
He did not ask where their path led. Wildfire seemed to know the way well enough. “Are you from Meridiana?” Duncan inquired suspiciously.
Wildfire considered his words carefully before giving his response. “I’m from a small principality that lies along the eastern border,” he said at last, a reluctant admission. “It’s not technically Meridiana proper, but it does fall under Meridiana’s protection. I don’t know that the charm against Dame Groach extends that far, though, so we won’t be going there.”
Duncan suspected that they wouldn’t be going there even if the charm did extend that far. He couldn’t imagine that Wildfire wanted to return home while still wearing the form of a horse. Until that curse was broken, the white horse would likely stay far, far away from the nameless little principality.
They traveled at a leisurely pace for three days. Duncan felt conspicuous in his sheepskin wig, but he quickly learned that if he acted like an idiot, people mostly ig
nored him. Those who did inquire about his strange choice of headwear received the same answer, one that had occurred to him on the spot the first time such a question was posed.
“I have such terrible dandruff, you see. It flakes off my scalp so badly that people took to calling me Scurvyhead. So now I wear a wig to cover it up.” Then, he would laugh foolishly. The act disarmed whoever approached him. People assumed he was little better than a halfwit and turned their attention elsewhere.
“You’re quite good at that, acting the idiot,” Wildfire remarked after one such experience. “Where’d you pick up a skill like that?”
Duncan didn’t bother to answer. He thought the horse was probably making fun of him anyway. The “skill,” if skill it could be called, was a defensive mechanism from earlier years. His father had never liked anyone who was smarter than himself and would have been quick to punish his own child for such an offense. Nine times out of ten, acting like an idiot had saved Duncan from a beating.
In truth, he’d learned the trick from his mother, who had always been quite stupid when her husband was anywhere in the vicinity.
The only time Duncan’s idiot-persona broke was when a village merchant would try to cheat him.
“Two loaves of bread for a farthing, a wedge of cheese for another, and pound of apples for a halfpenny, then? That’ll be one shilling, my lad,” one man told him with a jovial smile.
“You mean one penny,” Duncan replied with much the same expression, and he proffered the correct coin. The merchant took the money with a rising blush and stammered something about misspeaking. Duncan merely smiled and went on his way with the procured supplies.
“How much money do we have?” Wildfire asked that evening as they ate in a ditch by the roadside.
“The seven gold, plus eighty-nine shillings and some change that adds up to eight pence,” said Duncan. “We’ve only spent four pence so far, and most of that has been on apples for you.”
The white horse crunched on a piece of fruit quite shamelessly. “You have no idea how old oats get when you eat nothing else for days on end.”
“I had oat porridge for breakfast every day for seventeen years,” Duncan replied. He had never thought it a boring food before his excursion out into the world. It was just what he ate.
“Try it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner without anything else to flavor it,” Wildfire retorted.
“I wasn’t saying you shouldn’t get all the apples you want. I was just explaining where our money’s gone so far. We’ve been eating it.”
“So your gold coins will exchange for ninety shillings,” mused Wildfire. “If we were to convert everything we had into pence, how much money would we have, do you think?”
“8,636 pence,” Duncan promptly replied. “But I don’t think we want to do that—that’s far too many coins to carry around.”
Wildfire stared.
“What?” said Duncan defensively.
“What if we wanted it all in halfpence?” asked Wildfire.
Duncan tilted his head in confusion but said nonetheless, “17,272. But why on earth would we want that?”
“How many farthings?” asked Wildfire suspiciously.
“34,546.”
“And if we spent four pence every three days, how long would it all last us?”
That calculation took Duncan a half-second longer than the others. “6,477 days, or roughly seventeen and three-quarters years,” he said. “But at some point we’ll have to spend more than that, Wildfire. I mean, come wintertime we can’t sleep outside like we have been. We’ll probably have to pay for lodging somewhere, don’t you think?”
Wildfire stared at him as though he had suddenly sprouted feathers all over his body.
“What?” he said again, even more defensive this time.
“You can’t read a word, but you can calculate all those sums in your head?”
Duncan colored. “Numbers are a farmer’s life,” he mumbled uncomfortably, and he shifted his attention to the bread he was eating.
The white horse stared at him for a moment longer before returning to his own meal. Silence settled between them, and it only broke after Wildfire had polished off his last apple.
“How much gold is on your head, do you think?” he asked.
“I dunno,” said Duncan glumly. “It’s heavy, I can tell you that much.”
“I should think so. Your hair’s as long as a girl’s.”
“It’s not!” he protested. “It’s only just to my shoulder blades! All the men from my village wore their hair that long!” The men of Meridiana tended to have hair that was shorter, chin-length at most, and most of them had it cropped close to their heads. “Besides, if my hair had been short, I’d be a golden dead man,” he added.
“I wasn’t criticizing,” said Wildfire in a placating voice. “I was only commenting. And of course it’s a good thing your hair was so long—as you said, it saved you from an untimely demise, but I’m also fairly certain we’re going to need every last strand of it.”
Duncan eyed him warily. “What for?”
“We’re going to see a blacksmith tomorrow, someone I used to know. I hope he’ll let us stay with him for a while, but I’ll tell you right now that it’ll probably come at a price: he’s a greedy fellow.”
“You want me to pay him with my hair?” Duncan asked dubiously.
“I want him to cut your hair off for you and take it as payment for a suit of armor and some fighting lessons,” Wildfire replied plainly.
“What do I need with a suit of armor?”
“We’re going to build you a legacy, of course. Look, Dame Groach can’t touch you here in Meridiana, but don’t think that’ll stop her from performing all kinds of mischief against you. I imagine right now she’s roaming all of Borealia, spreading tales of the gold-headed boy to every rogue and fortune-hunter she meets. People are going to come looking for you, and the best way to keep them from catching and caging you for the rest of your life is to establish that you’re a ferocious man not to be reckoned with.”
“But I’m not ferocious at all!” Duncan cried in dismay.
“No, of course not. But rogues and fortune-hunters don’t know that. All we have to do is make them believe that you’re ferocious, so that they’ll think twice before coming after you. That’s where my friend the blacksmith comes into the picture. He can make you some armor and a weapon, and he can teach you how to defend yourself. And I’ll help too, of course.”
“Of course,” said Duncan with growing misgivings. He didn’t like fighting, and he didn’t know the first thing about armor or weaponry. He suddenly longed for the simple days back on the farm, when the worst things he had to worry about were a kick from the old gray mule and his father coming home in a drunken rage.
Such days were long behind him, though. The following morning, he and Wildfire continued down the foreign road they traveled. They found an industrious little village, where Duncan asked around for directions to the local smithy. It was on the outskirts of the far side, easily discovered. A steady cloud of black smoke puffed up from the chimney, and the pounding of a hammer against an anvil rang in their ears as they approached.
“Do as I’ve told you,” Wildfire commanded Duncan when he dismounted.
His heart fluttered nervously as he approached the smithy. One wall of the place was half-open to allow for better ventilation from the scorching heat within. At the anvil stood a huge, muscled man in a worn leather apron and thick leather gloves. The tongs in one hand held a curved piece of red-hot iron, and the hammer in his other beat down upon it with a steady rhythm. He was fashioning a horseshoe, which he presently plunged into a vat of water. Steam burst into the air in the ensuing silence.
“Hello!” Duncan called to him over the half-wall.
The smith looked up with bright blue eyes in a soot-smudged face. In that glance, he took in Duncan’s sheepskin wig and frightened expression.
“What can I do for you?” he asked gruffly.
>
“I’ve come to commission a job,” said Duncan, reciting the words Wildfire had given him. The horse ambled up behind him, no doubt to make certain he performed his part correctly.
“What job?” asked the blacksmith.
“I need a suit of armor—standard plate with… um, chainmail.”
The huge man snorted derisively. “You have any idea what something like that costs, little lad?”
Duncan glanced toward his horse. “No?” he said tentatively. Wildfire had mentioned nothing about the specific cost. He had told Duncan what to offer, but nothing about the actual worth of the goods they wanted to procure. “I can pay you in gold, though.”
This information gave the blacksmith pause. “You have it with you?” he asked suspiciously.
Duncan fished three of his coins from his pocket and held them out in one hand. The blacksmith approached, eyed the coins distrustfully, then pulled the glove from his right hand and took one. He felt its weight, then bit it to check that it was real.
“That’s not anywhere near enough,” he said after a moment’s consideration. “You’d need at least thirty of those to make such a task worth my while.”
“You’ve got to be joking!”
This exclamation did not come from Duncan. He turned horrified eyes upon the white horse, who had not been able to contain his rage. The blacksmith, too, stared in shock at the creature.
Wildfire was only just getting started. “Seriously, Otis, you’ve always been a miserly old git, but asking thirty gold for one measly suit of armor? That’s beyond the pale! If you go about cheating honest customers like that, it’s a wonder you have any at all! And don’t you look at Duncan in surprise like that! I’m the one talking to you, and I’m the one who told him that you’d be able to help us! And yes, I realize what a spectacle a talking horse is, but that’s all the more reason for you to pay attention to me! Well, what have you to say?”
The blacksmith’s mouth hung open as he gaped at the talking white horse. As Wildfire finished his little speech, though, the man snapped his teeth together with a click and growled an angry little noise.
Goldmayne: A Fairy Tale Page 10
