Andelusia, Rellen knew. “Watch yourself, little one,” he warned.
“Then you know her? You know this girl? If you do, then you also know how special she is.”
Who is this Jix? He smoldered. Who let him in my hall? “Ande is special…to me and no one else. It is time for you to leave, little one.”
Meek and miserable, Jix remained in the shadows beneath the archway. “She is our only hope, Rellen. Without her, the dead will have their fill.”
Rellen hoped none of his guests could see him. He felt his blood pounding inside his veins, and he knew his face was red as wine. If I had a sword, he burned. I would make Jix shorter still.
“I knew…” Jix trembled. “I knew my message would not sit well, but we are not yet lost. Speak with your lady friend. Tell her our predicament. If you must search your heart before deciding, Thillria will understand. To brave such a journey takes more than common courage. And of course, should you accept, a ransom shall be yours.”
“You cannot be serious,” Rellen growled. “Gold? Look around you. Does Gryphon look so poor? My decision is made. You will not have Ande. You will not dare approach her.”
Jix lowered his head, at last defeated. “As you wish, Master Rellen. But in two nights, you and I shall speak again. Do not abandon us lightly, I beg you. Thillria needs Gryphon, else Thillria is lost.”
The Calling
Over the meadows beyond Gryphon, the sun slipped behind a grey curtain of clouds. A summer storm, so common upon the Grae prairie, stewed on the horizon, swimming westward, darkening the sky like a vast bird of prey. Beautiful, Andelusia thought as she gazed upon the clouds. Nothing nicer in the world than the rain.
The breeze whisked past her ears. Her dress, a simple thing woven of white cloth and olive lace, fluttered behind her. Her hair drifted over her shoulders, dancing in the wind like lashes of fire. She was all alone in the tall golden grasses, having released Garrett after a fine few hours of wandering the city. She was out in Gryphon’s fields, where the wind made her feel alive and the approaching darkness stirred the wanderlust within her heart. She gazed into the roiling clouds, and though she did not know why, she wanted to fly amongst them. She wished she were a slip of wind dancing amongst the shadows, a droplet of rain carried by the breeze.
Eight days removed from Garrett’s feast, and she had yet to receive Rellen’s betrothal ring. She knew what it looked like. A band of moon-shaded silver, she remembered seeing it on his dresser. With a red stone for my hair and two little green ones for my eyes. She had dwelled upon it every night in her room, waiting for him to come to her door and slide it on her finger. She had lost sleep over it. She had stayed up late in every morning, sitting up in her pile of pillows, all alone in the darkness. Last night she had even wept, her tears soft and silent as white wine trembling over the lip of a chalice.
But today she felt nothing.
Basking in the cool currents, she cared only that she was alone. These were her hours, her moments of peace, and no one could take them away. So lost was she in her daydreams of the sky she did not notice the presence behind her. It was Jix, plodding through the grass like an old, ungraceful goat. He pushed wave after wave of meadow stalks out of his way, and when he came to her side, she was oblivious to him. He waited and waited, until finally she glimpsed him in the corner of her eye. And who is this? She smiled like sunshine upon him. A new friend?
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello.” She pushed several strands of windblown hair from her cheek. “A fine afternoon, no?”
The little man stared at her in rapt silence, seeming incapable of speech.
“Are you alright?” she asked.
“Yes.” He snapped to attention. “It’s just that…milady...you are the loveliest woman I have ever seen.”
A flatterer, she thought. How nice of him to say. “The rain comes.” She looked off into the clouds again. “It will wash summer’s stickiness off. You should find a good roof. It will last all night.”
“How can you be sure?” The little man looked surprised.
“I just know.” She smiled. “It is no Fury rain, but it will last the night all the same.”
She expected him to run off toward whatever farmstead he hailed from, but he remained. He is as small as I am, she mused. Rellen would say I should be worried for strange men who talk to me, but not this one.
The next time she glanced at him, he made a show of bowing to her. His dirty red raiment caught in the wind, and she worried he might topple. “Milady, what would you think if I said I had come to see you?” He steadied himself.
Again she looked to the sky, her curiosity glimmering like moonlight in her gaze. “You came to see me?” She spotted a cloud sailing like a ship, its masts white against the deep blue of the coming storm. “But you are not from Gryphon.”
“No.”
“Have we met before?”
“Not that I can recall.”
“Oh.” She never once looked away from the sky.
“Quite a brew, that,” he regarded the storm warily. “In Thillria, storms come from the sea. Mostly they are mild, but sometimes, they wrack the inlands for days. Every year my king parts with much from his coffers just to rebuild what the winds destroy.”
“Thillria? Is it far away?” she asked.
“A fortnight south and east as the falcon flies,” he sighed. “Much longer to walk.”
After a moment more, she wrenched her attention away from the skies. He is too polite to ignore, she thought. “Sir, you must be looking for someone else,” she explained gently. “Lord Rellen is at home, his mother too. I am no one important.”
“But you are,” he replied.
She flinched. The little stranger, barely as tall as the bottoms of my eyelashes, was sincere.
“I am Jix, from the court of King Orumna.” He bowed again. “And you, I presume, are Andelusia, lady of Gryphon?”
“Yes. I suppose I am. Who is Orumna?”
Jix stepped back, drinking in the sight of her, looking at her as though she had relieved him of some great burden. “Milady,” he exhaled. “I have long looked for you. My king hoped I would find you alive and in good spirits, and so I have. I bring you a message. I hope you will hear it. It is of great importance. Orumna’s words are meant for you and you alone. I beg that you mention this to no one else.”
She felt a lump rise in her throat and a sharp gust of wind brush past her shoulders. I do not know this man, she shivered. And yet…I want to hear him.
“Yes.” She faced him. “Tell me. Please.”
Jix placed his hand upon her shoulder and led her farther out into the field, where the wind rattled the grass like a sea of sabers, their color drained beneath the quickening clouds. She felt oddly at ease beside him, like walking with an old friend. She ached to hear his words, and when he spoke, she heard no other sound in the world, not the wind, not the shuddering of Grandwood’s leaves, not even the rumble of distant thunder. There was only Jix and his story.
And quite a story it was.
That night, as she sat to supper alone in her room, the storm descended upon Gryphon. The rain came an hour after dusk, pounding against the whitewood walls and pale-stoned streets, running like rivers down every alley. The wind was fiercer still. It pried at doors, windows, and roofs. It tore shingles from hundred year-old houses and ripped limbs from a thousand trees. For many hours the thunder rolled like drums against the backdrop of the sky, and the lightning cast a pallor behind a sheet of boiling clouds. It was exactly as Andelusia had guessed. Almost like a Fury storm, she imagined. Only no one is dying.
She finished her supper of bread, potatoes, and dumpling soup, and for a time afterward she tried to read. She had found the tome, Olden Thillria, in the darkest corner of Saul’s cellar, but had thus far managed only a few pages. Every time thunder shook the keep, she halted reading. She could not help but imagine herself in the fields beside Jix, listening rapt as he described the wonders of Denawir,
the cold mysteries of Shivershore, and the horrors of the Nightmare Forest. After a while, she gave up reading entirely. I will never finish, she knew. I must see Thillria for myself.
Quite by accident, her thoughts wandered to the home she had left behind some four years ago. Cairn, she recalled the little village, the forested hills, and the tiny house in the woods she had shared with her mother. Only four years ago, I was at the Rockbottom serving drunkards, she remembered. I had no friends beyond Symon, no Rellen, no Saul…no Garrett. If I had stayed, I would still be there. And now if I stay in Gryphon, I will never know Thillria.
For a long while she dwelled upon Jix’s promises. Convincing herself to follow the odd little man to Thillria felt like the easiest part of her decision. Jix said Rellen could go and that we would stay with the King. He said the road by summer would be long, but easily traveled. If he truly needs our help, how can we deny him?
The hardest part was knowing what Rellen would say.
She looked to her finger, naked and pale, and she understood Rellen would not marry her any time soon. She remembered returning to Graehelm after many months lost in Furyon, the look on his face when she and he had reunited in the rain on the barren streets of Orye. He loved me then. She smiled at the memory. He had no qualms. There were no doubts. We would marry. We would have children. We would grow old together.
But now, as she sat on the edge of her bed, the candlelight flickering in her eyes, she was not so certain. Adventure no longed called to Rellen as once it had. He cared less for long walks in Grandwood and secret nights in his tower than for the gloom of his father’s chambers, his fallen comrades’ tombs, and his cups. Garrett’s return was supposed to reinvigorate him, but even that seemed a hollow cause. They talk, but not liked they used to, she recalled what Garrett had told her. We thought to go to Briar, and Rellen would not. Garrett asked him to try his hand at hunting, but he declined.
Her thoughts returned to Thillria. Jix’s promises were all but impossible for her to believe, but no matter. The very name, Thillria, called to her. She felt the same desire to journey there as she had to leave Cairn. She could not fathom why. Jix’s tales of long winters, grey slate skies, and forests filled with death should not have tantalized her, and yet they do. Perhaps it was Jix himself, whose passion for his homeland seemed second to none, or perhaps it was something else. Sorcery, she remembered what he had hinted at. I thought it only existed in Furyon, and nowhere else. What if there is more to it than dead men, black towers, and world-eating storms? What if it thrives in Thillria? What if…?
She heard hinges groan and the creak of her door opening. From the darkness of the hallway beyond her room, Rellen entered her bedchamber, and her book fell from her fingers. Stunned to see him, she slid off her bed in nothing more than waifish nightclothes. “Rellen.” She kissed him, hugged him, and stood smiling in his shadow. “You came.”
“I did.” He walked to her window.
She trailed him to the wide-open portal, beyond which the rain still fell. His mood was sour, she sensed. He had shaven his beard and cropped his golden hair, but for all his handsomeness he looked lost. He did not come here to make love to me, she knew. Nor give me his ring.
“What is the matter, love?” She knotted his arm with hers.
“I talked to mother tonight.”
“About us?” she hoped.
“Somewhat, yes. A bit about you. More about me.”
Her heart sank. I must support him, whatever he says. “Tell me. Please.”
“Mother looked unwell,” he said. “This weather does little for her.”
“Is she sick? Should we send for someone?”
“No, not sick.” He shivered the suggestion off. “But she is not quite herself. Her color was a bit strange, and the things she suggested… I wonder for her state of mind.”
“Tell me, love.”
Finally he faced her. He dropped a gentle kiss on her forehead, a brush of his lips against her skin that melted many of her worries away. “I had guests today,” he said. “You saw them. Would you believe they want me to raise taxes for a new army? They worry our enemies will be emboldened by our losses during the war. They want horses and timber from Gryphon, as well as a few hundred conscripts. And all this with half our lads dead in the Mooreye fields.”
“Your mother told you this?” She felt confused. “Or the nobles?”
He hung his head. “Mother did. Apparently I failed to grasp just what the nobles were asking for, and some of them complained to her. Seems I am quite the fool.”
“You were daydreaming again.” She squeezed his hand. “Hardly the end of the world. How can they expect you to leap right into lordship after everything that has happened?”
“Mother made me feel awful about it. But that was only the beginning.”
What about Jix? Did she tell him about that? Unwontedly nervous, she led him to the bed and plunked down beside him. “What else did she say?”
“She has a letter from the King.” Rellen paled.
“From Jacob,” she sighed. “He still wants you to be a councilor.”
“No. Not this time.” He shook his head. “He wants much more than that. He wants me to go to Thillria, and mother agrees.”
Thillria? How is this? Her stomach knotted and her heart leapt into her throat. “Thillria? Why? Why there?”
“He wants me to be Graehelm’s ambassador to the Thillrian king. I read the letter three times. I could not believe it. Of all the places to send me. And why now?”
Then and there, she almost told him about Jix. I should, she thought. I know I should, but…
“And then there is Jix.” Rellen’s pallor deepened to a rich shade of scarlet. “You will not have heard of him. This little creature, he slid into Gryphon just this morning and snuck into the hall with the nobles. You will never guess what he asked of me. I told mother, but she already knew. Can you believe it? My roof, they call it, and yet everyone beneath it knows more than I do!”
“Rellen,” she trembled, “What did he ask?”
“I will tell you, but not tonight.” He waved her question off, and I know why. “The little mouse deceived me. He never told me he had already spoken with Jacob and mother. The way he was dressed…how could I have known? As it happens, he is Thillria’s ambassador, high lord of this and grand minister of that, or so mother tells me. ‘Impossible,’ I said to her, but she swears it is so. And now they want me to follow him all the way back to the edge of the world.”
“I…” She tried to say what had happened between Jix and her in the meadows, but again her tongue betrayed her. “What will you do?”
“Home is Gryphon. Why would I want to leave?”
“What if I went with you?”
“No.” His gaze darkened. “Not this time. Thillria lies across the Dales, down through Triaxe, and on the far side of some great grey wilderness. If I go, you will stay here.”
The air grew cold between them. I could slap him for presuming to own me. She felt angry, then miserable. “Rellen, I…”
“I have already talked to Garrett.” His face was a slate mask, cold and unreadable. “There will be no sneaking you off in his saddlebags this time. I mean it, Ande. If we go, you cannot follow.”
She blinked her tears back. “Then marry me.”
He did not expect that, she knew right away. His sternness fell off his face like dirt carried away by the rain. “Marry you?” He seemed not to believe it. “Now?”
“Why not?” She took his hand and squeezed it hard. “I have waited for you; everyone knows it. Garrett said you meant to announce our betrothal on the night he returned, and I nearly died when you did not. I will not hide it any longer. I will be yours, if only you will take me.”
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