Roger realized he was taking a chance in coming back near the town, but with Mrs. Kelso safely on her way to Tomas and the others, he simply couldn’t resist the sport of it all. He relaxed comfortably, his back against a tree, as two stupid goblins wandered right below him. When that patrol had moved farther along and no others were in the immediate area, he moved in even closer, climbing into the same oak he had slithered around to get to Mrs. Kelso in the first place.
Then he watched contentedly. The humans were back to work the two men who had been flanking Mrs. Kelso now shackled togetherand the powries had returned to the town, leaving a handful of goblins to guard the humans, and another dozen or so of the nervous wretches searching the woods.
Yes, it was a perfectly wonderful situation, Roger mused, for never in his young life had he found so much fun.
CHAPTER 4
At the Gates of Paradise
Graceful and strong, Nightbird slipped down from Symphony’s side while the horse was in mid-gallop. The ranger hit the ground running, stringing Hawkwing as he went, while Pony, who had been sitting behind him on the horse, hopped forward, took up the reins and kept Symphony’s run true and in control, for the muddy ground was treacherous. She expertly veered the horse to the left, around the base of a wide mound, while Elbryan went right.
Before Pony and Symphony were halfway around, they spotted the trio of goblins they had been chasing. Two were far ahead, running wildly for the cover of a copse of trees, but the third had doubled back and was going around the mound the other way. “Coming fast!” Pony yelled and bent low on Symphony, angling the horse more sharply about the hillock.
Symphony broke stride as the goblin came staggering back out from behind the mound, clutching at the arrow lodged in its throat A second arrow hit it in the chest, dropping it to the mud.
“They made for the trees,” Pony said to the ranger as he came running into sight. “They will lay up in there,” she reasoned.
The ranger slowed and glanced at the copse, then, apparently agreeing, he went to the dead goblin and began extracting his arrows. That done, he stood again and scanned the landscape, a curious expression crossing his handsome face.
“We can do a circuit of the copse,” Pony reasoned. “Find the best way to get in and strike at them.”
Nightbird seemed not to be listening.
“Elbryan?”
Still the ranger kept looking around, his mouth open now, his face full of wonderment.
“Elbryan?” the woman said again, more insistent.
“I know this place,” he replied absently, his gaze darting from spot to spot.
“The Moorlands?” Pony asked incredulously, her face scrunching with disgust as she looked around at the desolate region. “How could you?”
“I passed this very way on my road back to Dundalis,” he explained. “When I left the elves.” He ran to a nearby birch tangle, bending low as if he expected his long-ago campsite to still be under there. “Yes,” he said excitedly. “I slept here in this very place one quiet night. The gnats were horrific,” he added with a chuckle.
“The goblins?” Pony asked, nodding in the direction of the distant copse.
“I did find some goblins in here, but farther to the east, on the edges of the Moorlands,” Elbryan replied.
“I meanthose goblins,” Pony said firmly, pointing ahead.
Elbryan waved his hand dismissively. The goblins were not important to him at the moment, not with that long-ago-traveled road coming clearer and clearer in his mind. He scrambled to the side, past Pony and Symphony, and looked over the splotchy brush and the rolling clay to the black silhouette of mountaintops just visible far in the west, their outlines silver under the light of the descending sun.
“Forget the goblins,” Elbryan said suddenly, grabbing Symphony’s bridle and leading horse and rider away, on a course that would bring them well to the side of the copse of trees and more directly in line with the distant mountains.
“Forget them?” Pony echoed. “We chased that tribe twenty miles, into the Moorlands and more than halfway through. I’ve got a thousand gnat bites swelling on every part of my body, and the smell of this place will follow us for a year to come! And you want me to just forget them?”
“They are unimportant,” Elbryan said without looking at her. “The last two out of thirty. With their score-and-eight companions slain, I doubt they’ll head back toward End-o’-the-World for some time to come.”
“Do not underestimate goblin mischief,” Pony replied.
“Forget them,” Elbryan said again.
Pony lowered her head and growled softly. She could hardly believe that Elbryan was leading her farther west, away from the Timberlands, even if he meant to dismiss the goblin pair. But she trusted him, and if her guess was right, they were closer to the western edge of the Moorlands than the eastern. The sooner they got out of this wretched, bug-ridden place, the better she would like it.
They went on for a short while, until the sun began to set over the distant mountains, then Elbryan went about the task of setting up camp. They were still in the Moorlands, still haunted by the buzzing insects, and, even more to Pony’s dislike, they were still too close to the copse of trees wherein the goblins had disappeared. She repeatedly tried to point this out to her companion, but he would hear none of it. “I must go to Oracle,” he announced.
Pony followed his gaze to the base of a large tree, one root pulled up out of the soft ground to create a small hollow underneath. “A fine place to be sitting when the goblins come charging in,” the woman replied sourly.
“There were only two.”
“You doubt that they’ll find friends in this wretched place?” Pony asked. “We could set our camp with thoughts of a quiet night, only to find that we are fighting half the entire goblin army before the dawn.”
Elbryan seemed to have run out of answers. He chewed his bottom lip for a bit, looking to the nearby tree, its hollowed base inviting him to Oracle. He had to go to Uncle Mather, he felt and soon, before the images of that long-lost trail faded from his thoughts.
“Go and do what you must,” Pony said to him, recognizing the true dilemma etched on his face. “But give me the cat’s-eye. Symphony and I will scout about for any signs of enemies.”
Elbryan was genuinely relieved as he took the circlet from his head and handed it to the woman. It was a gift from Avelyn Desbris that he and Pony had been passing back and forth as needed. He couldn’t use it in Oracle anyway; it would defeat the whole mood of the meditation, for the gemstone set in the front of the circlet, a chrysoberyl, more commonly known as cat’s-eye, would allow the wearer of the circlet to see clearly in the darkest of nights, even in the darkest of caves.
“You owe me for my indulgence,” Pony informed him as she placed the circlet about her thick mop of blond hair. Her tone, and the sudden grin that lifted the edges of her mouth, told the ranger what she might have in mind, a notion reinforced when she hopped over to him a moment later and kissed him passionately.
“Later,” she said.
“When we are not surrounded by goblins and insects,” Elbryan agreed.
Pony swung up onto Symphony’s saddle. With a wink at Elbryan, she turned the horse about and trotted away into the growing gloombut with the cat’s-eye securely in place, the images before her remained distinct.
Elbryan watched her go with the deepest affection and respect. This was a trying time for the young ranger, a time when all his skills, physical and mental, were being put to the absolute test every day. Every decision could prove tragic; every move he made could give his enemies the advantage. How glad he was to have Pony, so thoughtful, so skilled, so beautiful, at his side.
He sighed when she passed out of sight, then turned to the business at hand: the construction of a proper sight for Oracle and a meeting with Uncle Mather.
It didn’t take Pony long to discern that the goblins had not given up the chase, and had in fact begun trailing he
r and Elbryan. And the tracks she found when she circled back indicated that the goblin pair had indeed found some friends, more goblins, perhaps as many as a dozen. Pony looked ahead, back toward her camp, which was now no more than a mile away. She would be hard-pressed to ride by the goblins and get to Elbryan in time, she realized.
“Oracle,” she said, shaking her head and giving a great sigh. She bade Symphony to stay put, then reached into her pouch for her malachite. She slipped her feet out of the stirrups as she put her thoughts into the gem, summoning its power. Then she began to rise, slowly, into the nighttime sky, hoping the darkness was complete enough to keep her hidden from sharp goblin eyes.
She had only gone up about twenty feet when she spotted the creatures, gathered about a small, well-concealed fire in another copse of trees, barely a couple hundred yards from her position. They hadn’t settled for the night, she knew, but were up and agitated, sketching in the dirtprobably approach routes or searching routespushing each other and arguing.
Pony didn’t want to expend too much of her magical energy, so she gradually released the malachite’s levitational powers, drifting back down to land atop Symphony. “Are you ready to have some fun?” she asked the horse, replacing the malachite in her pouch and taking out two different stones.
Symphony nickered softly and Pony patted his neck. She had never tried this particular trick before, and especially not while taking a horse in with her, but she was brimming with confidence. Avelyn had taught her well, and, given her newfound insights into the gemstonesan understanding that went beyond anything she had ever knownshe believed with all her heart that she was ready.
She started Symphony walking in the direction of the goblin camp, then took up a serpentine and began gathering its magic. In her other hand she held both bridle and a ruby, perhaps the most powerful stone in her possession.
With the cat’s-eye, Pony picked her path carefully, a trail that would take her and Symphony in fast and hard. Barely twenty yards away, Symphony’s hoofbeats covered by the sounds of arguing goblins, the woman communicated her intentions to the horse via the turquoise, then kicked the powerful stallion into a dead gallop and let her own thoughts fall into the serpentine, bringing up a glowing white shield about her and the horse, making it look as though she and Symphony had fallen into a vat of a sticky, milky substance.
Pony only had seconds to secure the shield about them both, to switch hands on the bridle and bring the ruby up high, dropping the serpentine shield about the ruby, then completing the protective bubble about her hand under the gemstone.
Goblins howled and reached for their weapons, diving and rolling as horse and rider thundered into their midst. One ugly brute had a spear up and ready to throw.
Pony paid it no heed, could see nothing but the red swirls within the ruby, could hear nothing but the wind in her ears and the simmering, mounting power of the gemstone.
Symphony ran straight and true, right to the goblins’ fire, then skidded to an abrupt halt and reared.
Goblins shouted; some charged, some continued to scramble away.
Not far enough away.
Pony loosed the destructive power of the ruby, a tremendous, concussive fireball that exploded out from her hand, engulfing goblin and tree alike in a sudden blazing inferno.
Symphony reared again and whinnied, pulling wildly. Pony held on and called comforting words to the horse, though she doubted that Symphony could even hear her through the tremendous roar of the blaze, or even sense her calming thoughts with the sheer commotion of the conflagration. Pony could hardly see, smoke rolling all about, but she urged Symphony forward, and so solid was her serpentine shield that neither she nor the great horse felt any heat whatsoever. They passed by one fallen goblin, the one who had raised its spear to throw, and Pony looked on in disgust as the blackened creature, still holding fast the charring spear, settled, its super-heated chest collapsing with a crackle.
Soon after, horse and rider came out of the copse, into the cooler night, and moved away, an exhausted and coughing Pony dropping the protective shield. “Oracle,” she said again and sighed again, glancing back at the blaze.
No goblins would emerge from that catastrophe, she knew.
When she got back to her camp, she found Elbryan standing on the edge, staring at the continuing fire nearly a mile away.
“Your doing,” he stated more than asked.
“Somebody had to see to the goblins,” Pony replied, slipping down from the still-agitated black horse. “And it should interest you to know that their numbers had swelled.”
Elbryan gave her a disarming grin. “I had confidence that you could handle whatever situation arose,” he said.
“While you played at Oracle?”
The smile left the ranger’s face and he shook his head slowly.
“No play,” he said gravely. “A search that might save all the world.”
“You are being very mysterious this night,” Pony remarked.
“If you took a moment from your insults and considered the tales I told you about my time away from Dundalis, you would begin to understand.”
Pony cocked her head and regarded the man, the ranger, the elven-trained ranger.
“Juraviel?” she asked suddenly, breathlessly, referring to an elf she had once known, friend and mentor to Elbryan.
“And his kin,” Elbryan said, nodding his chin toward the west. “I believe that I have remembered the road back to Andur’Blough Inninness.”
Andur’Blough Inninness, Pony echoed in her mind. The “Forest of Cloud” wherein lay Caer’alfar, home to the Touel’alfar, the slight, winged elves of Corona. Elbryan had told her many tales of the enchanted place, but always answered her pleas to go there with a frustrated reply that he could not recall the trail, that the elves desired their privacy even from him, the one they named Nightbird, a ranger trained in their home. If he was right now, if he could indeed find the trail back to the elven home, then his words about the unimportance of a couple of goblins suddenly rang with more conviction.
“We shall set off in the morning,” Elbryan promised into her eager expression. “Before the dawn.”
“Symphony will be packed and waiting,” Pony replied, her blue eyes twinkling with excitement.
Elbryan took her hand and led her to the small tent they shared. “Have you any enchantments which will repel insects?” he asked on a whim.
Pony considered the thought for a moment. “A fireball would give us a short reprieve,” she replied.
Elbryan glanced back to the east, to the still-burning, thoroughly decimated copse, then scrunched up his face and shook his head. He’d suffer the inconvenience of a few thousand gnats.
No goblins bothered them the rest of that night, nor the next day as they exited the Moorlands through the western border. Both rode atop Symphony as soon as the ground became more firm, and Elbryan pushed the horse at a swift pace. Joined telepathically through the turquoise, the ranger understood that Symphony wanted to run hard, had been born to run hard. And so they made their swift way, setting camps for only short hours in the darkest part of the night, and, on Elbryan’s insistence, avoiding any goblins or giants or powries, or any other distraction. His purpose was singular now, while the ever-elusive trail to Andur’Blough Inninness remained clear in his thoughts, and Pony didn’t argue with the wisdom of trying to enlist the elves in their continuing struggle.
And there was an added benefit for the woman. With all the enchanting tales Elbryan had told of his days training as a ranger, she dearly wanted to see the elven forest.
She used the reprieve from battle for another purpose, as well. “Are you ready to begin your new career?” she asked one bright morning, Elbryan breaking down the camp and grumbling that they had overslept and should have been on the trail before the dawn.
The ranger cocked his head curiously.
Pony held aloft the pouch of gemstones, and gave them a definitive shake when Elbryan’s expression sour
ed. “You have seen their power,” she protested.
“I am a warrior, and no wizard,” Elbryan replied. “And certainly no monk!”
“And I am not a warrior?” Pony asked slyly. “How many times have I put you down to the ground?”
Elbryan couldn’t suppress a chuckle at that. When they were younger, children in Dundalis before the goblins came, he and Pony had wrestled several times, with Pony always emerging the victor. And once, after being caught by the hair by Elbryan, the girl had even laid the boy out cold with a punch to the face. The memories, even of the knockout, were the brightest of all for Elbryan, for then had come the dark time, the first goblin invasion, and he and Pony had been separated for so many years, each thinking the other dead.
Now he was Nightbird, among the finest warriors in all the world, and she was a wielder of magic, a wizard trained in the use of the sacred gemstones by Avelyn Desbris, who had been perhaps the most powerful magic-wielder in all the world.
“You must learn them,” Pony insisted. “At least a bit.”
“You seem to do well with them on your own,” Elbryan replied defiantly, though he was privately a bit intrigued by the prospects of using the powerful gemstones. “Would we not be weakened as a fighting team if some of the stones were in my possession?”
“That would depend on the situation,” Pony answered. “If you get wounded, I can use the soul stone to mend your injuries, but what if I get wounded? Who will heal me? Or would you just leave me sitting against a tree to die?”
The image conjured by that thought nearly buckled Elbryan’s knees. He couldn’t believe that neither he nor Pony had thought of that possibility beforeat least not enough to do anything about it. All objections gone, he said, “We must be on the trail.” He held his hand up as Pony began her expected protest. “But with every meal and every break, I will be tutored, particularly with the soul stone,” he explained. “All our waking hours will be filled, then, with traveling and learning.”
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