“Forna, you’re going to see Silas before the rest of us,” Jade spoke quietly as she drew the Tracker into a corner away from the others. “Please ask him to send a message to the princess, so that she can hear his own voice and know that he’s alive. And if he can make it a warm and friendly message, that would be even better.
“I know he sent a message to Mata; she said it was kind and pleasant, but it didn’t rest her heartache. She believes he doesn’t love her anymore,” Jade stated. Her voice sounded more contemplative as she continued. “Maybe he isn’t right for her; I’m coming to see that more and more now, with the way he never stops moving around. Mata wouldn’t be happy if she had to travel constantly to keep up with him, and she wouldn’t be happy if she stayed at home and he was rarely present.
“I feel badly that I introduced them,” she concluded.
“But Silas saved her life, didn’t he?” Forna asked. “That wouldn’t have happened if you didn’t introduce them.”
Jade smiled sadly and inclined her head. “You take your troops and lead them right to him, and ask him to speak to the Princess,” she repeated, then turned and returned to the others in the room.
Forna was led down to the docks two hours later, accompanied by a palace servant who carried her pack, while the princess herself discreetly joined Forna, walking with a shawl pulled up over her head.
“This warehouse is where I met Silas for the very first time,” Lumene noted conversationally to Forna as they passed a large brick structure at the waterfront.
When they reached the newly charted ship, Lumene stopped. “Good luck,” she began to say.
“I’ll be going now. May the gods give you fair winds in your journey, and the best of fortune in your mission,” she said to Forna, then she walked past the palace guard squad, waving to many of them as she went. Soon thereafter, all the people on the dock were aboard the boat, and the ship was allowed to be the first one to catch the tide and leave the harbor as the sun began to set in the west.
Chapter 11
Five days later, the ship arrived in the Barnesnob harbor, sailing in on the morning tide and disembarking its passengers, who immediately marched through the city under the leadership of Forna, whose Tracker senses provided infallible directions towards Silas. The group stopped at a market in the city and packed supplies for their trip of unknown length, and then marched smartly out of the city, watched speculatively by the guards at the gate in the city walls, who wondered about the identity of the large body of disciplined men and women who had passed through the city.
By the time the Amenozume forces sent to assist Silas marched out of Barnesnob, Silas was several days northeast of them, leading his own group through the mostly-empty countryside of northern Barnesnob. He was leading his group towards the mountains, wanting to approach Heathrin from the mountains to its east, to avoid detection by Ivaric’s forces. There were no settled lands to Ivaric’s east, only mountains, including the one that had the caves that produced Speakers, through exposure to the unusual gasses that swirled in the depths of the caverns.
Silas had learned that the strange gasses were not as unique to Heathrin as the Speakers Guild had believed. His own experience in an unnamed cave in the mountains, as well as Faralag’s reliance on the caves of Mount Inegalee to produce Movers, showed that Krusima had many ways and places that he used to influence the human world of Ellan Sheeant.
But the caves were of no consequence to Silas’s mission. Sneaking up on Heathrin was. Silas used the stars and sun to navigate, and to estimate the approach to Heathrin. He also used his knowledge of navigation to direct Jimes in the proper direction to face at night, so that Jimes could send coded messages to his covert contacts at Heathrin, checking on the status of the city and its Ivaric overlords.
He wasn’t trying to travel quickly, but his group traveled at a steady pace. The group was a number of individuals, few of whom knew one another, and Silas felt they needed to travel slowly so that they would have time to get to know one another and learn how best to rely upon each other. He hoped that the arrival at Heathrin would provide an easy conquest, but if it didn’t, his small team would have to be able to work with one another, communicate with one another, and have faith in one another. They needed to know each other better to succeed in a potential battle.
“Wither,” Silas called as the sky started to darken, “take Lexy and go ahead to find a place we can camp for the night, and get a fire started for us.”
“Yes, your grace,” the guard obediently replied. He gave a short whistle then began to trot forward as Lexy moved up from her position in the rear of the group and joined him.
“Stash, you move to guard our back position, and Octavia, you come walk with me,” Silas rearranged others in the group as they continued to move along at their steady pace. He noted that Ditto drifted back to be near Stash; the young thief seemed to respect and admire the older thief.
“Octavia, where did you come from?” Silas asked in a kindly manner.
“I came from the Guild, my lord, the Healers Guild,” she answered hesitantly.
“Yes, but before that. Where were you raised?” Silas clarified. “What made you come to the Guild headquarters?”
“I lived in Shouldteen, up north,” the girl answered.
“I lived in Brigamme, not too far from Shouldteen, up in the mountains,” Silas told her. “It’s funny, we are about the same age and we must have grown up relatively close to one another.”
“But we have to come all the way down here to meet?” Octavia concluded the thought.
“Exactly,” Silas agreed.
“Why did you want to be a healer?” he asked.
“My mother spent three years tending to my father on our farm after he had an accident. He never got completely healed, and she had to do all his work plus her own plus take care of him – it wore her out. He died of his injuries eventually, and then she was so worn out she never really recovered,” Octavia recited her history. “So, I made a vow that I’d learn how to heal people who were hurt like my dad, so that folks like my mother wouldn’t use up all their own lives giving care.”
Silas strode along beside her in silence, imagining the difficulty of seeing one parent bedridden, and the other despairing of any future as a result. He thought about Lumene, who had despaired over her mother’s fatalism about the Ivaric invasion, and then he thought about how his own parents had gone the other way – they’d despaired over him when he hadn’t been able to develop Tracker skills. He owed them a visit someday soon, to let them know he’d turned out better than they had feared – or he hoped it seemed better to them.
“I’ll bet you’ve become pretty good at it,” Silas wasn’t sure about how to respond to Octavia’s painful explanation.
“I studied harder than anyone else in my class. I want to know everything about how to cure people. Maybe someday I’ll even learn how to cure that problem with the color of your eyes,” she affirmed.
Silas laughed out loud, then looked and saw from her expression that Octavia wasn’t joking.
“My eyes were made this color by Krusima himself; he put me in a holy cave with fumes,” Silas explained. “I don’t need to change them.
“Except,” he speculated, “when I want to walk through a city without being noticed.”
“Let me examine you,” Octavia said eagerly. “I’m sure I can figure something out!”
“No,” Silas shook his head. “I can see exceptionally well at night, and besides, I think the colors and the legend of my eye colors scares Ivaric and does as much good for us as an extra twenty guardsman!”
“You know,” he tried to redirect the subject, “the sprites and the imps go to a special spring in the land of the elves, where the water is blessed by an elven goddess, and it heals all wounds.”
Octavia looked at him skeptically. “How could spring water do that?”
“It’s blessed by Kere,” Silas answered simply.
“You’re ma
king all of this up, aren’t you? Elves, sprites, magical springs and vision in the darkness?” Octavia accused Silas.
She was turning annoying, Silas decided. And she didn’t know much about the world.
“Rise up into the air,” he commanded her, calling upon his power and sweeping his hands upward.
Octavia screamed suddenly, as her feet left the ground and she lifted up into the darkening sky, rising five feet up, then ten, then twenty.
“Help me!” she shouted.
“What’s wrong!” Reese the guard came running.
“Gently return to the ground,” Silas calmly directed, his hand calmly dropping. He brought Octavia back down to the dirt road.
“Gods above! What happened?” Octavia cried, shocked by the experience.
Silas felt suddenly guilty of having over-reacted to her disbelief in magical beings and powers.
“I showed you what I can do,” Silas replied.
“You lifted me up in the air like that?” Octavia raged, and she slapped his face before he even answered.
“You’re mean. You’re a bully,” she accused. The road had grown dark, but a campfire glowed off to the side, where Wither and Lexy stood and looked out at the unpleasant confrontation.
“And you’re going to have to learn that the world contains a lot more than you think it does,” Silas let his temper flare slightly as he responded. “There are elves and sprites and magical forces. There is an evil god trying to use Ivaric to take over our continent. There is a war going on that is real, and there are people dying – the gods know they’ve made me kill enough of them!” his voice rose.
Silas stopped and took a deep breath.
“Just be prepared to see and accept things,” he sputtered, then stalked away from the girl, towards the campfire.
“What was that all about?” Lexy asked as Silas arrived next to her at the waiting campfire.
“She doesn’t believe in sprites or elves,” Silas realized that it sounded foolish to raise such a ruckus over the girl’s sheltered mind.
He sat down near the fire and lifted his pack around so that he could find food for his evening meal. Jimes came over and sat down next to him.
“You may have been too hard on the girl,” his friend said softly.
“Maybe,” Silas grudgingly agreed.
“She says she wants to go back to Barnesnob,” Jimes reported as Silas chewed on his dried food.
“We can hardly turn the whole group around to take her back,” Silas rejected the idea.
“She’s going to be a problem, Silas,” Jimes spoke his mind. “We’ve all noticed that she’s not really cut out for this type of assignment – she’s not mature enough. You spooking her didn’t help, but she was not suited for this anyway.
“You ought to assign one of the guards to escort her back to Barnesnob. That’s the simplest solution. Reese agrees; she says she’ll take her,” Jimes indicated that a solution was readily available. “But I’ll miss Reese – she’s feisty,” he blurted out the last sentence.
“It’s all settled, just like that?” Silas asked in surprise.
“We all thought she wasn’t right for the trip. This just proves it,” Jimes affirmed.
Silas stood up and went over to where Octavia sat alone, looking miserable.
“We’ll send you back to Barnesnob in the morning; someone will escort you back,” he said as he crouched down beside the girl.
The flickering light of the fire revealed the conflict that raged inside the Healer.
“I’m not a quitter,” she muttered. “But you don’t want me along; nobody does.”
“You’ll be a good Healer back in the city. I’m sure you’ll be able to cure sicknesses than nobody else will be able to,” Silas tried to soften the blow. “But on this trip, you aren’t in the right setting. Go on back and tell Dianu we really appreciated the gesture of giving us a Healer. It was a good thought.” He stood up, certain that there was nothing else he could add.
Octavia looked up at him, her lips pursed, but said nothing.
And so the next morning, she and Reese silently left the camp and headed back west, towards the city of Barnesnob.
Chapter 12
A day and a half later, the silent pair of Reese and Octavia watched a large body of men and women march eastward with military precision along the same road but in the opposite direction that the westbound pair were walking.
Reese studied the group closely, trying to determine what a squad of soldiers might be doing in Barnesnob, when clearly not in Barnesnob uniforms. The group carried no hint of Ivaric forces, which was the only alternative Reese could imagine.
Her curiosity overcame her prudence, and when the two groups passed, she spoke up.
“What army has the right to send a squad of soldiers racing across Barnesnob?” she asked loudly.
“Hold up Forna,” the man who appeared to be the commanding officer of the squad commanded to the woman who was in the front of the squad, less militaristic in appearance than the rest of the group.
“We’re not here to do any harm to Barnesnob,” the officer said to Reese, studying her own uniform and military bearing. “We’re passing through.”
“Passing through to where?” Reese blurted out the question. “There’s no place to go out in this direction, except,” she paused as she suddenly suspected their goal.
“Where are you from?” she asked.
“Does it matter?” the officer shrugged. “We’re not going to do any harm to Barnesnob or any of its people.
“We need to be moving on,” he told Reese. “Forna, resume motion.”
“Are you from Amenozume? Are you going after Silas? On your way to Heathrin?” Reese aired her suspicions.
“Forna, halt,” the officer immediately replied, shocked at the accuracy of Reese’s knowledge. “How did you know that?” he asked.
“Can we go with them?” Octavia surprised Reese with the question. “I don’t want to go back to Barnesnob; I’ll be a failure and a disappointment to the Guild. I’m ready to do better this time. Let’s join them and go back.”
Reese’s head snapped around in shock at the unexpected request.
“I want to go back. They’re going to need a Healer when they start fighting. I can show everyone how good I can be; I’ve got all my supplies still,” Octavia begged.
“What fighting? When will it start?” the officer asked sharply. “You’re a Healer? From the Guild?”
“We were part of Silas’s team going to Heathrin, but we left to return to the city. Are you going to find Silas as a friend or a foe?” Reese demanded to know.
“Everyone stop,” Forna had walked back to the confrontation. “I’m Silas’s cousin; I’m a Tracker from Brigamme. We’re on a mission – sent by Amenozume – to support and help Silas. We know he’s going to war with Ivaric, and he’s going to need help,” she explained the basic facts of the case.
“Having a Healer along would be good,” she told her officer companion. “How far behind him are we? It feels like two to three days.”
“That’s about right,” Reese said thoughtfully. “We left them yesterday morning; they went east and we came west.”
“So, we are going back to join the others?” Octavia asked.
The officer looked at Reese, who gave a noncommittal shrug, then he looked at Forna, who nodded her head.
“Fall in behind June and Natie in the back of the squad and keep up; we’re moving fast,” he instructed.
“I’ll carry your pack when you get tired,” Reese informed Octavia, pleased to have the opportunity to return to her assignment with Silas. Forna returned to the front and the others began to follow her as she broke into an easy jog along the road that Reese and Octavia started to tread for the third time.
A short time later, they were passed by a single woman who was walking briskly in the same direction they were as they traveled the otherwise deserted country road.
“Do you know how much further
it is to Heathrin?” she asked Reese as she reached the squad from Amenozume.
Reese looked at the woman in surprise. She didn’t expect the village to be a notable destination for travelers coming out of Barnesnob. Other than the Wind Word Guild, there was nothing about the village to merit a visit.
The woman had short blond hair that seemed incapable of moving out of position, and piercing green eyes.
“We’re going there ourselves,” Octavia spoke up.
“So I expected,” the blond traveler was walking along beside the other two at the end of the Amenozume forces, speaking easily despite her exertion.
“What does that mean?” Reese asked. She sensed that there was something unusual about the woman, as well as about the circumstances of their meeting.
“I had a dream, and the gods told me I would meet a large force of soldiers who were going to Heathrin to help Silas. They told me I should join forces with you, since I’m on my way there for the same reason,” the green-eyed woman explained.
“We don’t really need anyone else,” the guard commander spoke. “We’re all trained in warfare. What experience do you have in battle?” he asked impatiently.
“If I were in a battle, trying to help Silas,” the women spoke speculatively, “I suppose I would do this,” she looked at the man, and he suddenly lifted off the ground. He rose ten feet in the air immediately, then hung there.
The rest of the group began to instantly move about. Some backed away, some pulled out swords, and some began to charge towards the woman.
As they charged, she let the commander drop to the ground, then began to lift the others – one by one – and toss them backwards a few feet, thwarting their attacks on her, until they all stopped approaching, but remained in place, crouched low to the ground, as if they believed they could duck below her efforts.
“You’re like Silas!” June exclaimed. “You’re able to move things just like him!”
“Not so well as him, but well enough to make a difference in most cases,” Riesta replied. “And I would like to help him; that’s why I’ve traveled so far. It seems logical that we should travel together, but if you’re not prepared to keep up with me, I’ll go ahead and see you there if you arrive in time.”
Foundations Broken and Built Page 10
