“It’s alright,” Ryder said. “You couldn’t have known. However, what she told me amazed me. Arya, Cliona begged me to find her child, who has been missing for years, and to take the child in. I fully intend to do so.”
“And just how are we supposed to identify this child?” Arya asked.
“I have already identified her,” Ryder said. “I have also identified her father, and it is her father’s wish that the girl become a Ranger. It is also the wish of the woman that her father would make her step-mother.”
Arya snorted. “How callous a father the poor girl has, to have no interest, and to choose his new bride-to-be over his daughter, to push her away and send her to us as if we are the boarding academy that so many of the wealthy send their children to in order to keep them out of sight and out of mind.”
Ryder sighed. There was no denying it. Arya could certainly be dense at times. “Arya, my love, this is not about keeping his daughter out of sight and out of mind. It is about family tradition, for the father and would-be step-mother are both Rangers, right here in this very camp.”
“Don’t tell me,” Arya said. “You’re the girl’s father?”
“Aye, and I would gladly make you her mother, if you would agree to it.”
“If she will consent, then so will I,” Arya said. “I don’t believe your daughter should suffer to have me as a step-mother if she and I cannot get along.”
“You already get along with her, Ayra,” Ryder said. “My daughter is Tesni.”
Chapter 9
Arya stood there in amazement. Despite her dislike for Cliona, born of jealousy, she had known the other woman well enough to know her features. Now the bow-mistress compared those features and Ryder’s to Tesni’s. Now that she thought about it, the girl’s features were a perfect blend of those of her parents. Thinking harder, she remembered when Tesni had shown her the contents of her locket, and she realized that the faces of the couple were, indeed, those of Cliona and Ryder.
“Come on in to Enid’s tent,” she said at last. “Perhaps you can figure out what kind of curse Agrona placed on her, and maybe even the cure.”
Ryder followed Arya into the healer’s tent and knelt down next to the cot on which Tesni was lying. He brushed stray hair from her face. “You will come back to us, Tesni. We will figure out this curse and the cure before it’s too late.”
Tesni spent most of the next day exploring her dreamscape. It was something that she had never done before. She had never even thought it possible to direct where she went in her dreams and how the landscape of her dreams looked.
The field of wildflowers was constantly in bloom. Tesni had imagined and, thus, planted a stand of fruit trees. Apples, cherries, pears, and plums were always ripe and ready to pick, along with mulberries, blackberries, raspberries, and gooseberries.
Tesni’s clothes had also changed. She had switched out the fine dress and jewels for the uniform of a Ranger of Linwood, complete with a bow on her back like the one she often saw Arya carrying. Arya had been right. Tesni’s heart was the heart of a Ranger, and the girl had become acutely aware of the fact that she never could have been happy remaining with the Thieves Guild. Her heart’s dream was to be a Ranger, she had realized, and she was ever grateful to Arya for bringing her to camp because of it.
She managed to remain patient, certain that she would be rescued and the curse defeated. Agrona had not said the night prior what the cure might be, but Tesni intended to get her to let it slip.
The girl had discovered, much to her happiness, that there was, indeed, a border to her dreamscape. Upon approaching this border the night previously, Tesni had wondered whose dreamscapes bordered hers. In thinking about her friends, she noticed that the borders changed, and she need only think about a person to see their dreamscape.
Now, however, she was sitting in her apple tree. The sun was beginning to set for the second time, and she could see Agrona approaching. The sorceress smirked up at the girl. “I thought you were going to be rescued by this time tonight?”
“It’s alright if they need a few hours longer,” Tesni said. “You said yourself that I shall be here until the sun sets tomorrow, and that by then I’ll either die or serve you.” She jumped down, looking bored. “So I shall die tomorrow evening, if they cannot break the curse. Death before dishonor is what Arya taught me, and I think it’s a good lesson.”
“You foolish child, do you really think that dying would be better than living?” Agrona asked.
“Ryder says that it is better to die standing than to live kneeling. I didn’t quite understand what he meant at first, but he explained it to me when I asked.”
“Ryder is as foolish as you are,” Agrona snapped. “They all are. That is why they will never break the curse.”
“If they are so foolish, why don’t you tell me what the cure is?” Tesni asked. “After all, if they are too foolish to figure it out, and I am unable to communicate with them, what harm could it do to give me some sort of comfort in the knowledge of whether or not the task is a simple one? If it is a difficult one, then I might die knowing that there was never any hope. If it is a simple one, then I get frustrated at their inability to figure it out.”
“You’re right, child, it does not matter much,” Agrona said at last. “Whatever happens, you either serve me or die in agony, either frustrated or hopeless. Besides, there is no way they could remove the curse. Your father is dead.”
“Yes, I know my father is dead, but what does that have to do with anything?”
“Because, dear, only a father’s love can save you in your current condition, and so it doesn’t matter even if they figure it out somehow.”
“Will you be here again tomorrow evening to see if I have changed my mind?” Tesni asked.
“Of course I will, child,” Agrona said. “Perhaps, when you are at last on the brink of death, and you know that they cannot save you, you will finally relent.”
She disappeared, then, and Tesni immediately took off towards the border. As soon as she got there, she thought about Arya and watched as Arya’s dreamscape appeared before her eyes.
She watched the haze between the dreamscapes, and when it went from blue to clear, Tesni stepped through, knowing and understanding that this was an indicator that her friend and guardian was asleep.
“Arya! Arya, where are you?”
“Arya! Arya, where are you?”
Arya couldn’t believe that she was hearing Tesni’s voice. Then she looked around and recognized her dreamscape. “I’m over here, Tesni!”
Immediately, the girl came jogging up to her. “Arya, I’m going to die at the next sunset. The curse is impossible to break unless Agrona takes it off of me, herself. She said that she would only do that if I came to serve her, but I won’t. Death before dishonor.”
“Why is the curse impossible to break?” Arya asked. “I don’t want you to die. None of us want you to die. We all want you to live.”
“It’s impossible because my father is dead,” Tesni said. “Agrona said that only my father’s love can save me. Since my father is dead and has been for years, I choose death before dishonor, just as you have taught me.”
Arya’s eyes widened. “Don’t worry, Tesni. You are not going to die, do you hear me? You are not allowed to die, because your father is still alive. He has been found, and I will alert him as soon as I am awake.”
Tesni nodded, grinning. She stepped back into her own dreamscape, and Arya woke up.
As soon as Arya was awake, she ran to Ryder’s tent and shook him awake, as well. “Ryder, you are not going to believe what just happened.”
Ryder blinked. “What do you mean?” he asked. “What won’t I believe?”
“Tesni has figured out how to manipulate dreamscapes and travel between them,” Arya said, her voice growing ever more excited.
That woke Ryder up. He sat up and immediately began pulling
on his boots. “How did you figure this out?”
“Because she came into mine,” Arya said. “Not only did she manage to enter into my dreamscape to speak with me, your clever little girl somehow tricked Agrona into letting slip the means of waking her!”
“Well then what are we waiting for?” Ryder asked, his own excitement growing. “How do we break the curse?”
“Tesni was unable to get anything specific,” Arya admitted. “However, apparently Agrona has not yet heard about your discovery regarding Tesni, because she taunted Tesni about her father being dead-” This drew a snort from Ryder and Arya rolled her eyes as she continued, “-and then she admitted that only her father’s love could save her.”
Ryder had never run so fast as he did just then to the healer’s tent. His entrance, not exactly designed for stealth, woke Enid up. “What is it, Ryder?”
Ryder didn’t answer. Instead, he pulled Tesni into his arms. The girl had been getting worse. Though it had been a struggle, her breathing had at least been steady, at first. By the time they had gone to bed, it had been shallow and ragged. None of them had been sure exactly how much time they had until Tesni had managed to inform Arya, as the bow-mistress had said on the way over, that the girl would almost certainly die at the next sunset.
Not now, though, and not ever. Not before she had lived a long and full life would Tesni be allowed to die if Ryder had anything to say about it. He cradled his daughter gently in his lap and softly kissed her forehead. “It’s alright, Tesni. Daddy’s here. I’m here, and I love you, and you are not allowed to die yet. Do you hear me? I don’t care what that witch says. She was wrong, Tesni. But then, how could she have known that I’m your father? I didn’t even know until your mother finally told me. But it’s all going to be alright, Tesni, because I know, now, and I love you.”
It didn’t seem to work, at first, and Ryder found himself wondering several things. Could Cliona have been mistaken in whether or not he was Tesni’s father? Could it be that it was a different Tesni who just happened to have the same necklace? Could Agrona have known what Tesni had been trying to do and given her false information? Could Arya have been mistaken and not actually speaking to Tesni in her dreamscape?
And then the girl’s eyes fluttered open, and Ryder knew that none of it had been a mistake. For ten years he had thought that turning to Cliona had been nothing more than a drunken mistake. Now, here was this beautiful nine-year-old girl, his own daughter, and he knew that he would gladly do it all over again.
He was grateful to Alastar for taking Tesni in, even if it had meant she was, for a few years, on the wrong side of the law. He was even more grateful to Arya for not turning Tesni over to the authorities that day nearly a year ago. He laughed, then, and hugged Tesni tightly, filled with the joy that only a parent could know.
Tesni had settled into her favored seat up in her apple tree when she first heard it. “It’s alright, Tesni. Daddy’s here. I’m here, and I love you, and you are not allowed to die yet.”
She continued to listen. Did she dare believe what she was hearing? Arya had promised to fetch her father as soon as she was awake. Could her father have been so close at hand? Again, the voice told her that he loved her, and for a moment, Tesni thought that the voice sounded familiar. She was unsure, at first, but then she knew it. That was Ryder’s voice!
Everything seemed to shift, and she was suddenly falling again, but it was a soft, slow, gentle fall. Everything went black for a moment, and then she woke up. Her eyes fluttered around. She saw a curious Enid, an anxious Arya, and then her eyes focused on the face closest to her own. She had not been mistaken in identifying Ryder’s voice as the one who called to her.
Before Tesni knew it, Ryder was laughing and hugging her. She supposed that if it had been some stranger whom Arya had identified as her father, she might have felt a bit more shy and awkward about it all. As it was, she already knew and loved Ryder, had already looked at him as a father-figure, and she wrapped her arms around him, as well. “I love you, too,” she whispered, her voice only a little hoarse from lack of use.
“Be careful with her ankle,” Enid said, suddenly. “She reinjured it in her fall, and I’m still keeping an eye on it.”
“What fall?” Ryder asked. When Arya had told him about the curse Tesni was under, she had neglected to tell him anything about a fall.
Tesni shrank down a little, embarrassed. “In the ropes course,” she admitted. “I got bored and decided to try it. I was almost done when the balance rope snapped.”
Oh, yes, that fall, Ryder reminded himself. Now he remembered Arya saying something about it. He had been so concerned about the curse on his daughter that he hadn’t truly been paying attention to anything else about the situation.“Has the rope been fixed?” Ryder asked.
“I fixed it as soon as I made sure Tesni was safe here in Enid’s tent,” Arya said.
Ryder sighed. “Come talk to us the next time you get bored, alright?” he told Tesni, who nodded. “Well, Tesni is safe, and as much as she shouldn’t have been in there without informing someone who could supervise, her fall did alert us to the fact that the course needed some maintenance.”
“I went through all three courses because of it,” Arya said, “while you were in town. It helped me to keep busy so that I wasn’t hovering over Tesni and bothering Enid.”
“So, you would have let me on the course if I had asked permission?” Tesni asked.
“Well, I would have gone over the safety rules with you first,” Arya said, “and made sure I was there to supervise.”
“I agree with Arya,” Ryder said. “If you must go on one of the courses, I’d very much like it if you just stick to the ropes course for now. You haven’t even started your training. You are nowhere near being ready for the other two courses. Just, please, let one of us know. So long as one of us knows and you have a Ranger with you who has already earned his or her bow or blade, you can be on the ropes course.”
Chapter 10
So it was that Tesni ended up adding a new part to her routine. Now, every morning after her run, she could be found on the ropes course. She still did the rest of her chores and tended to the horses in the evening, but the morning was her time on the ropes course.
Once in a while, one of the other Rangers would join her, urging her on. Word had spread quickly through the camp about Ryder and Tesni’s newly discovered relationship and Cliona’s deathbed confession. Tesni suspected that she should mourn her mother, but she couldn’t bring herself to do so. Though she had lived with her for the first four years of her life, her memories did not go beyond a smiling face and a few notes from a lullaby.
She supposed that her earliest days must have been happy ones. Ryder had assured her that Cliona had loved her dearly and had searched for her every day from the time Tesni was four until the day Cliona died. How could Cliona have known that Tesni had been found and taken in by Alastar Redleaf?
Somehow, though, the darling of the Ranger camp could not bring herself to cry for the lost mother she didn’t truly remember, and in the end, she gave up feeling any sort of guilt about it and just chose to enjoy now knowing her father and the mother she would gain in Arya when the bow mistress and horse master wed.
The proposal had been a very informal one, and when Tesni heard that Ryder had made his intentions clear while she was still under the curse and that Arya had accepted, she was slightly resentful if only for the fact that she had not been there. Still, a week later, she had been there when Ryder had given Arya an engagement ring, slipping the silver band, as was tradition amongst Elves of any type, onto Arya’s right forefinger, and Arya placed a similar one onto Ryder’s hand. They had also promised that they would not hold the wedding feast if, for any reason, Tesni would not be able to be there, and so the girl was satisfied.
“And who knows?” Arya had said. “It is traditional to wait a year. Perhaps by then, Agrona will be defeated and the true heir to the thro
ne found.”
Arya and Ryder set the date for the summer solstice after Tesni’s tenth birthday. Because his was a tent made for a bachelor, Ryder decided to just let Tesni stay with Arya, an arrangement both girl and bow mistress were comfortable with. It would do, at any rate, until a tent fit for a family could be put together.
And that was what the three of them had become. A family. Alastar visited regularly, never begrudging Ryder for gaining what had once been his, happy merely because Tesni and Arya were both happy. He became a favored uncle and brought Tesni treats on a regular basis, though he was never allowed to give them to her unless he solemnly swore that they were obtained legally. He complained about this regularly, but it was well understood that it was in a joking manner.
In the meantime, Tesni’s friendship with Fiona also continued to grow. The older girl had quickly become proficient with throwing knives, and Branwen regularly beamed with pride at her protégé’s skill.
“She has me working on a swinging target, now,” Fiona said one day. “She also wants me to pick a close-range weapon.”
“I already know what kind of close-range weapon I’ll take up,” Tesni said. “Arya says that it’s common for archers to take up dual blades.”
Fiona blinked in surprise. “Truly?” she asked. “You have more than two years before you can even start training, yet. How do you know that you will even be suited to archery, let alone that you will have a secondary preference for dual blades?”
“How did I know that I was meant to come here instead of stay with the Thieves Guild?” Tesni asked in return. “I just know.”
The truth was, of course, that it was Arya’s influence, as always, that had Tesni knowing what she wanted. The girl adored her soon-to-be step-mother, and the simple fact was that anything Arya said, Tesni was bound to listen to. It was already obvious exactly who Tesni’s mentor would be when she turned twelve and was finally old enough to train formally.
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