by Terry Brooks
Mistaya listened to her footsteps recede, and as she did so she felt a pang of regret over what she intended to do. She had committed herself, though, and there was no guarantee that her mother could help her in this business, no matter how well intended she was. Better that she go to her grandfather’s and bargain from a position of relative strength.
She gave it another ten minutes, then pulled on her cloak and went out the door.
It was dark and silent in the hallway, and she slipped down its length on cat’s paws, little more than a passing shadow faintly outlined by clouded moonlight against the wall. She didn’t have far to go, so she took her time, careful not to make a sound or do anything that would alert the watch. Once she was safely down the hallway and had reached the hidden passage, they were unlikely to find her no matter how hard they looked.
She arrived at her destination without incident, triggered the lock in the panel that concealed the door, waited for it to slowly open, and stepped inside. From there, she went through the walls and down the stairs to the cellars, opened another hidden door in the stone-block walls, and followed a second passage to the outer walls and the door hidden there that opened to the outside world. She knew all this because she had made a point of finding out. You never knew when you might need a way to slip out without being seen, and an obliging Questor Thews, not once suspecting her reasons for asking, had revealed it all to her some time back. She supposed this constituted some sort of betrayal of trust, but she didn’t have time to worry over it now.
Once outside the walls, she slipped around to where the old rowboat was anchored at the back docks, stepped in, and paddled her way across the moat to the far shore. It took hardly any time at all, and because the moon had slipped behind a bank of clouds, there was no light to betray her to the watch should they happen to look down from their towers.
Smiling with no small measure of self-satisfaction at how easily she had accomplished her goal, she prepared to set out for the stand of Bonnie Blues and Poggwydd. But first she decided to see if Haltwhistle was anywhere around. She called for him in a whisper, and almost immediately he appeared, standing right in front of her, short legs barely enough to keep his mottled brown body off the ground, long floppy ears faring little better, reptilian tail wagging gently.
“Good old Haltwhistle,” she greeted, and she kissed at him on the air.
Together they went looking for Poggwydd. They found him waiting in something of a grumpy mood, sitting with Mistaya’s sheet-wrapped travel bag clutched between his bony knees, a scowl on his wizened face. “Took your sweet time about getting out here, Princess,” he muttered.
“I had to be careful,” she pointed out. She reached for her bag, smiling. “Thank you for taking care of my clothes, Poggwydd.”
To her surprise, he put both arms around the bag and hugged it possessively. “Not so fast. I have a few questions first.”
She fought down a sudden surge of irritation. “What do you mean? What sort of questions?”
“The kind that require explanations. For instance, why do you need a compass, a map ring, a fairy stone, and a book of wizard spells to deliver a bunch of old clothes?”
Her jaw dropped. “Did you look through my things?”
“Answer my question.”
She was fuming now. “Precautions against trouble. I have to travel some distance to make the delivery. Will you give them to me please?”
He ignored her. “Traveling is required because whoever you are taking these clothes to cannot come to the castle to get them?”
“That’s partly it. Give me the bag, Poggwydd.”
If anything, his grip grew tighter. “Hmmm. You know, Princess, it’s dangerous traveling alone at night. I think I had better go with you.”
“I can do this by myself, thank you. Besides, I have Haltwhistle.”
“That’s right. You have the assistance of your weird little dog. Clearly, he is a better friend to you than I am.”
“What are you talking about?” she snapped.
“Well, you trust him enough to take him along, but not me. He probably knows the truth about what you’re doing, doesn’t he?”
Her mind was racing. “I don’t know what you are talking about.”
“Then allow me to enlighten you. Maybe it slipped your mind, but you are running away.”
“I am not!” She tried to sound indignant. “If you don’t give me my bag right now, I really will stop being your friend!”
“Sneaking out of the castle at night, having me meet you with clothes and travel stuff you could have carried out by yourself, and then telling me you intend to go somewhere mysterious alone? Sounds like someone running away to me.”
She regretted ever thinking it a good idea to give her bag to this ferret-faced idiot. But it was too late for regrets. She had thought herself so clever, letting Poggwydd do the hauling. That way, she had reasoned, she wouldn’t be burdened with the extra weight and if caught could argue that she was just going for a walk.
“You better tell me the truth about this right now!” he insisted. “If you don’t, I’m going to start yelling.”
“All right, don’t do that!” She sighed, resigned to the inevitable. “My parents and I have had a disagreement. I am going to visit my grandfather for a while, and I don’t want them to know where I am. Okay?”
Poggwydd looked horrified. He leaped to his feet, arms waving. “You really are running away?”
“Not exactly. Just … taking a vacation.”
“Vacation? You’re running away! And I’m helping you! And after you’re gone, they’re going to find out about me, and they’re going to say that it is all my fault!”
She held up her hands in an attempt to calm him. “No, they’re not. Why would they blame you?”
“Because G’home Gnomes get blamed for everything, that’s why! And I’ll get blamed for this! Someone will remember that I was the last one to visit you. Someone will remember that I left carrying a bag of clothing. Someone will tell that kobold, and he will come after me and hang me from the tree again!”
“No, he won’t. Bunion promised—”
“It doesn’t matter what he promised!” Poggwydd snapped, cutting her short. He was beside himself, hopping up and down in agitation and dismay. “This is all your fault! You’re leaving me behind to pay for your bad behavior! You used me to help you, and now you are leaving me! Well, I won’t stand for it! I shall alert the watch immediately and then they can’t blame me!”
He started to turn away, heading for the castle, and she was forced to reach out and grab his arm. “Wait! You can come with me!”
He tried to jerk his arm free and failed. “Why would I do that?” he demanded, stopping where he was. “Why would I come with you?”
“Because we’re friends!”
That silenced him for a moment, and he stood there looking at her as if she had just turned into a bog wump.
“Friends don’t leave friends behind,” she continued. “You were right about my decision to leave without you. I was being selfish. You should come with me.”
He seemed suddenly confused. “I was right, wasn’t I? I knew I was. But …” He stopped again, trying to think it through. “You’re going to see your grandfather? The River Master? You want me to go with you to the lake country? But they don’t like G’home Gnomes there. They like them there even less than they do everywhere else.” He paused. “Except maybe in the Deep Fell, where the witch lives.”
“We’re not going to the Deep Fell,” she assured him, although suddenly she was thinking that maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea. With Nightshade still not returned from wherever her misguided magic had dispatched her almost five years earlier, the Deep Fell was safe enough. Well, maybe not all that safe, she conceded.
“I think this is a bad idea,” he continued. “You shouldn’t leave home like this. You should tell someone or they will worry and come hunting for you. If they find you, they’ll find me and I’ll get all th
e blame!”
She was massively irritated with his whining, but she recognized that there was a reason for it and that she had brought the whole thing on herself by involving him in the first place.
“What if I write you a note?” she asked him.
“A note? What sort of note?”
“One that says you are not to blame for this. They would know my handwriting. They would know it was genuine.”
He thought about it a moment. “I think I will just come with you and take my chances,” he said finally.
She almost started arguing against it, then remembered it had been her suggestion in the first place. “Well, that’s settled then. Can I have my bag now, please?”
Grudgingly, he released his grip and shoved it toward her. “Here. Take the old thing. Do what you want with it.” Surly and grumpy-faced, he lurched to his feet. “Let’s get going while we still can.”
She started off without speaking, already determined to get rid of him at the first opportunity.
MISERY LOVES COMPANY
Whatever reservations Mistaya might have harbored about her decision to allow Poggwydd to accompany her on her journey to the River Master were quickly proved insufficient.
He started to annoy her almost immediately by talking without taking a breath. He didn’t appear to have any idea at all that it was possible to travel in silence. It began to seem after the first hour that his mouth was somehow connected to his feet, and that if one moved, the other must naturally follow suit. He talked about everything—about things he was seeing, about what he was thinking, about his worries and hopes and expectations, about his aches and pains, about his struggles to get by in life, but mostly about the undeserved lot of all G’home Gnomes.
“We have been set upon relentlessly, Princess,” he declared, shaking his finger at her as if she were somehow to blame. “We are persecuted from the day we are born until the day we die, and there is never any letup in the effort. All creatures feel it is their bound duty to make our lives miserable. They do so without compunction and without reason. I think it is a game with them—an evil, malicious exercise. They consider it a pastime, an activity in which all must participate and from which great enjoyment is to be gained. They see us as toys—small playthings made for their amusement.”
She tried to slow him down. “Perhaps if you—”
“There is no ‘perhaps’ about any of it,” he continued, cutting her short. “Do not try to change the reality, Princess, with encouraging words and empty promises of better days ahead. We Gnomes know better. It is our lot in life to be abused, and however unfair and arbitrary, we have learned to accept it. Teasing and taunting, sticks and stones, beating and flaying, even the burning of our homes”—this one slowed her down a bit, since G’home Gnomes lived in burrows in the ground—”are all part and parcel of our everyday lives. We bear up nobly under our burden. You will not see a G’home Gnome flinch or hear him cry out. You will not witness a moment of despair revealed in our faces.”
She could hardly believe what she was hearing, but she decided not to get into an argument about it. “Yet you continue to steal what isn’t yours, which just encourages your mistreatment by others?”
“We do what we must to survive, nothing more.” He sniffed with obvious indignation. “Most of the accusations of theft are baseless. Most are the product of overactive imaginations and willful resentments. When a G’home Gnome takes something that doesn’t belong to him—a rare occurrence, as you know—it is usually because there is no clear ownership discernible of the thing taken or because there is a starving, homeless child to be cared for by a parent trying to do the best he or she can. I, myself, have witnessed this on more than one occasion. But do our persecutors take this into consideration? Do they give one moment’s thought to those helpless children so in need of food and shelter? Sadly, no.”
“If you kept to your own territories—”
“We are citizens of the world, Princess,” Poggwydd interrupted her again. “We are nomadic travelers of all the parts of the land, and we cannot be confined to a single patch of ground. It would destroy us to do so. It would contradict and diminish centuries of Gnomic lives gone before, make mockery of all that we are, belittle our heritage—what little we have—a travesty of unparalleled proportions …”
And so on. And so forth.
She endured it stoically, all the while plotting his demise. If she could drop him into a pit, she would. If she could feed him to a hungry tiger flunk, she wouldn’t hesitate. She would welcome lockjaw in any form. She kept hoping that something would happen to cause him to turn back. But nothing suggested this was about to happen, as was apparent from his assurances between his endless tales of Gnomic persecution.
“But we are not like them, and so I shall stay at your side, Princess, and do what I can to see you through this trying time.” He puffed up a bit at this pronouncement. Apparently, he had forgotten his stand on the matter some hours earlier. “No danger, however dire, shall force me to leave you. We G’home Gnomes are a strong-hearted and determined people, as you shall see for yourself. We do not abandon or mistreat our friends. Unlike some I know. Why, not two weeks ago, there was a farmer with a pitchfork …”
And so on. And so forth.
They walked steadily through the moonlit night for several hours, traveling south out of Sterling Silver’s boundaries and into the wooded hills that fronted the lake country. All the while, Poggwydd talked and Mistaya gritted her teeth and tried not to listen. Even Haltwhistle, ever faithful, had disappeared from view, obviously not any happier with the irritating Gnome than she was. She tried turning her attention to her surroundings. The sky had been mostly clear at the beginning of their journey, but now it began to fill with clouds. Moon and stars disappeared behind their heavy screen, and the dry, warm air turned damp and cool. By midnight, it had begun to rain—lightly, at first, and then heavily.
Soon the young girl and the G’home Gnome were slogging through a downpour.
“I remember another storm like this, perhaps a couple of years back. Much worse than this one. Much.” Poggwydd would not give it up. “We walked for days, my friend Shoopdiesel and I, and the rain just kept falling on us as if it were tracking us for personal reasons. We huddled under old blankets, but it just seemed another instance of how everything works against you if you’re a G’home Gnome …”
Just shut up, Mistaya thought, but didn’t say. She wondered momentarily if magic might silence him, but she had resolved not to use magic of any sort on her journey to her grandfather unless she was absolutely forced to do so. Using magic was like turning on a great white light that everyone who had a connection with magic could see from miles away. She was trying to stay hidden, not broadcast her whereabouts, and there was no surer way of alerting her father.
So she couldn’t use it to do anything about Poggwydd or the rain and the cold, either, and she had to content herself with trying to ignore the Gnome and pulling the collar on her cloak a little tighter around her neck and choosing a path that kept her under the tree canopy as much as possible in an effort to deal with the weather.
Poggwydd, for his part, tramped along as if it were a sunny day, ignoring the rain as it streamed off his wizened face and leathery body, his lips moving in time to his feet in a steady, nonstop motion.
Such dedication, Mistaya thought irritably. If only he could apply half of that effort to avoiding all of his bad habits and irritating ways, he might manage to become at least reasonably tolerable.
At some point during the seemingly endless trek, she caught sight of the cat.
She wasn’t sure what drew her attention—a small movement or just a sense of something being there—but when she looked, there was this cat, walking along in the rain as if it were the most natural thing in the world. What a cat was doing in the middle of the forest in the midst of a rainstorm escaped her completely. It didn’t look feral or lost or even damp. It was slender and sleek, its fur a glistening sil
ver save for black paws and a black face. It was wending its way through the trees, staying parallel to her, but keeping its distance. She waited for it to glance over, but it never did.
She looked away, and a few minutes later when she looked back, it wasn’t there.
Maybe she had imagined it, she thought. Maybe it was Haltwhistle she had seen, mistaking the mud puppy for a cat.
Maybe it was a wraith.
When she had walked as far as she could, gotten as wet and cold as she could, and endured the elements and the incessant chatter of her traveling companion for as long as she could, she called a halt. She found shelter under the branches of a closely grouped clump of giant cedar, then took up a position on a dry patch of ground to wait for things to improve. Haltwhistle joined her, curling up a few feet away. Poggwydd chose a dry spot that was some distance off, yet still close enough for him to be heard should he choose to keep talking through the night. Mercifully, he seemed to have run out of steam and was rummaging through his rucksack, searching for food.
Food held no interest for Mistaya. She sat hunched down within her cloak in the rain and the darkness, rethinking what she intended to do. In retrospect, her plans seemed foolish. What made her believe the River Master would welcome her? Grandfather or not, he was a difficult and unpredictable creature, a once-fairy who had no use for her father and little more for her mother. Nor, she had to admit, had he shown much interest in her, at least of late. At best he had exhibited some small pleasure in having her as his granddaughter—much the way one enjoyed having a pet. It hadn’t been so when she was younger, but things had changed. Why did she think he would give her any special consideration now, when she was no longer little and cute?
She chided herself for not visiting him more often and certainly sooner than this.
Even more distressing was her growing certainty that she could not avoid being discovered by her father before she was ready. There was no hiding from the Landsview, which could find anyone anywhere in Landover. Unless, of course, they were in the Deep Fell or in Abaddon, home of the demons, and neither was a reasonable alternative to the lake country. She might try using her magic to conceal her presence, but she didn’t think she could afford to rely on a spell she had never used. She had to expect that she would be found out and confronted about what she was doing.
