And now they had a three week lead. He shook his head. He could travel with ultimate speed if he were traveling alone in pursuit of them; he could travel reasonably fast if he only had one or two companions; but in a group of twelve or fourteen or more, people who he feared and suspected were not trained, true warriors, the pace would be abysmal. He needed a guide; he needed someone who could send him in the right direction, but that was all he needed.
Andi was a problem. She was a Black Crag guard, and he’d be happy to have such as his partner in any battle. What’s more, she was a Warrior ingenaire now! He had to have her at his side, and he didn’t doubt that the two of them would be a match for any opponent they would face. But he wasn’t going to cavalierly accept her assertion that she was his soul mate; he’d not thought of her in that fashion up to the last moment he remembered, and he couldn’t force his heart to think of her differently now.
She was a Black Crag guard, someone who had the confidence of a person trained to battle. And she was young - of course, everyone was young compared to him, but at least someone like Salem had some experience of life, some sense of what had shaped them and some sense of what their shape was. That wasn’t the Andi he had observed on the road through the mountains, a girl who was impetuous and abrasive at times.
And she had a handsome nobleman obviously smitten with her, hoping for any sign of acceptance from her, actively fishing for clues as to how he could clear all obstacles from his path to her heart. Yet she made her inexplicable claims about the deep, Spiritual ties between the two of them, and buttressed the credibility of her claims with the obscure facts she knew about him. It all seemed impossible!
Alec felt adrift. He wanted his memories back. He wanted to know what to expect. He wanted to know the contours of the ground he stood upon. He continued to wander, until he saw the shadows lengthening, then he turned and walked back to the great house he was staying in. He was tired, he realized. He had been tiring even before he turned around, the effect of his body having lain prone and unmoving for so many days. When he returned to the home of Amane’s family he went straight to his room in the west wing, and laid down on his bed. Within moments he was asleep, his mind still processing the unknown new world in which he found himself, dreaming uneasy dreams.
When he returned to the house, Andi was already there, alternately stewing and worrying about discovering that she had been evicted from his room. She had gone there when she returned from another garden tour, discovered her things missing, and asked the maid what was amiss.
“Miss Andi, the Lord Alec asked that your things be sent back to your room,” the maid had told her.
Andi had been shocked by the action, but Alec was gone, and nobody knew where he had gone, so she could not ask him what he did or why. She could tell where he was; as she had gone on her pleasant garden tour, she had discovered that she could once again find Alec’s location through the mind-connection they shared, or that she shared with him, a sad and empty one-way conduit of feelings and knowledge now. When she returned to the house she knew he was not there. She had sat in her room and stewed over the eviction, then gone to sit down quietly for an early dinner with Casse, Amane, and Tarry, as was her habit.
She felt Alec’s return while she ate, and she excused herself from the small talk at the table early, skipping dessert, to go talk to the man she loved. But there was no answer when she knocked on his door, and when she opened it and entered the gloomy chamber, Alec was already asleep on his mattress. She sighed, and pulled his boots off his feet, then left and returned to the dining room.
“What time will we leave tomorrow?” she asked Tarry.
“Mid-morning, or at least we are to be at the palace at mid-morning, and we’ll leave from there with the Rangers,” he answered.
“Alec is asleep already, so I can’t talk to him. But everything is settled with the Rangers for he and me to go along?” she asked.
“And me!” Amane added in a cheerful tone.
“All three of you are officially expected to make the journey,” Tarry agreed.
“I’ll have Alec up in plenty of time. Will there be someone who is in charge of everything?” she asked. “Alec will want to find out how much intelligence we have for this trip.”
“We can talk while we ride tomorrow,” Tarry assured her, and soon thereafter they parted for the evening, Amane walking Andi to her room to bid her good night.
Chapter 3 – The Rangers of Exbury
The trip did not begin well. Alec was lethargic when Andi awoke him, and in no mood to discuss her removal from his room. “We were only going to be here one night anyway,” he echoed the reasoning Amane had given him. “I slept all the way through the night as it is.”
“But you could have asked me first, or told me directly, instead of having a servant do it for you,” Andi protested.
“Perhaps so, but it’s over with now, and we need to go see this group of Rangers we’ll be riding with,” he dismissed her concerns.
The four of them left at mid-morning, after a long, tearful departure with Lord Shaln, Lady Rooney, and Casse, full of promises to be safe. When they got to the palace they waited, for no apparent reason, with the rest of the entire assigned squad, a time when Alec’s hopes for the group began to sink downward. The members of the squad were all sons of nobility, accomplished in riding and hunting and fencing, but not a one of them had served in any guard or military service. They were content to wait until after the Prince finished his lunch and came to make a speech for their departure, and then they were off.
Their pace was slow, and Alec was disgusted to see that they brought no extra horses to carry supplies or provide replacements or rests for the mounts they rode.
They ended the first day just after sundown in an inn in a small town, and Alec forcefully bullied the leader of the group, Iar, into explaining the route they were taking, and why.
“The kidnappers are known to have gone north to Villadest and Stanless, then they were said to have doubled back to Otterby,” Iar explained slowly, as if he was stating the obvious. “They’re going to have to pass through Birnam Forest on their way to Moriadoc, which is supposed to be the last of the Twenty Cities they’ll visit before they disappear into the wilderness lands,” he explained.
“So we’ll head straight to Birnam and cut them off there. We’ll have the advantage in the forest, since we have an affinity with plants,” he said, which Alec agreed sounded like it could have some logic.
“Can we travel any faster?” Alec urged. “If we’re planning on an ambush, we need to make sure we get there first and we get there in time to be prepared.”
“We’ll wear out our horses if we travel too fast,” Iar again seemed to state the obvious, as his companions Cal and Lib nodded agreement.
“Which is why we should have brought replacement horses with us in the first place,” Alec smacked his fist down on the table in frustration.
“This interview is finished,” Iar said, folding up his map, not ready to tolerate subversion from an uninvited member of the party. Alec stewed over the foolishness of the group, and chose to sleep with the horses, in the hayloft above the stables. He wouldn’t allow Andi to join him there, his frustration and exhaustion and lingering confusion over his lost memories driving him into isolation, and so she sat at the table in the inn as the center of attention of all the other members of the Rangers until she left for her room.
Alec isolated himself for the next two nights as well, as the Rangers made adequate, but just barely adequate, progress on the western road towards Birnam Forest. The wood had a reputation of being haunted, something that the gardening Old Ones of Exbury alternately laughed at and speculated might work in their favor, given their plant powers.
On the fourth night of the trip the group swerved off the main road to take a shortcut around the city of Bracken, and wound up staying in a smaller, cruder village tavern than they had stopped in to that point. Alec again left the group immediately af
ter dinner to tend to the horses, treating their coats, sores and hooves, while Andi drew appreciation from the local ruffians in the tavern to the point that she fought one down to the ground using her Black Crag training alone. Her standing among the rest of the Rangers rose even higher, and the next morning, it was the only thing that Alec heard talk about, having missed the dust-up entirely.
“She beat the lights out of that goatherder!” Tarry told Alec as Alec brought the saddled horses out of the stables to help expedite the departure of the group.
The little interaction that Alec had engaged in with anyone to that point was Warrior training with Andi while they rode. “I think she’ll be the one training you!” Cal had jibed Alec as he mounted the horse Alec had ready following Andi’s skirmish. The training made no sense to anyone but the two ingenairii; the Rangers could not fathom that soft talk and mental exercises were training of any value.
“So you put a man in his place?” Alec asked innocuously as they took their location in the rear of the squad.
“It’s not the first time, and won’t be the last time,” Andi responded. Throughout the trip she’d had no interaction with Alec of any real depth beyond the ingenaire training, as he withdrew and walled himself off from the rest of the world. She could sense his feelings, and she knew that he was feeling frustration, impatience, and worry. He was feeling everything but affection for her, she knew, and she strained to keep from bringing it out into the open, in a situation in which she could only hope that time would make him appreciate her, or restore his memories of her. She could not shake him out of her mind, depressing as she found his spirit to be, and so she could only hope for a change in him. And as the days went by, and they grew further removed from the day of his reawakening, her hopes for some miraculous, delayed restoration of his memories faded.
She developed a pattern of spending her mornings with Alec, training in how to manipulate and maximize the Warrior power, and then in the afternoons she rode next to Amane, speaking with him, appreciating the comfort and attention he offered. In the evenings, although she was attended to by every other Ranger, it was Amane who she chose to sit next to at dinner, and it was Amane who comforted her and bolstered her as she grew morose over the disappearance of Alec’s affections.
“We won’t be a couple Andi,” Alec finally told her directly as they rode together. “I will help you with your energies, I will be your comrade in arms and your friend, but my heart does not call me to love you.”
“But that is all my heart does to me!” she cried so loudly that the heads of others in the group turned to look at them, and saw the tears streaming down her cheek. “My spirit does nothing but tell my heart about your moves and your feelings, and it remembers your memories and reminds me of what we used to share, Alec.”
He looked at her with sympathy. “We used to, I understand and accept that, Andi. But whatever person you knew me to be, a little bit of that person is gone, the part that would make me care for you. We have to accept this and live together as companions on the road – nothing more,” he finally told her bluntly, then rode apart from her as she rode to see Amane and be comforted.
Two days later, they reached the last village before entering Birnam Forest. They reached the village in late afternoon and stopped for the night. “I’m going to go take a look at the forest,” Alec told Iar as the others left their horses at the stable. “I want to see what it’s like; I’ll be back later this evening.”
Iar felt no loss in seeing the moody foreigner ride away, and promptly went into the tavern to join his friends in a drink.
Alec rode along the road to the forest, a narrow route that seemed to see little traffic, and he tried to make sense out of how he could have gotten into such a dismal set of circumstances. He had a saddlebag full of supplies, a sword and a bandolier, along with a bow and arrow, and he was tempted to leave the rest of the Rangers behind to set up his own ambush in the forest. He reached the outskirts of the woods as its growing shadows stretched to extend eastward into the middle of the next field over. The trees were vast, and the depth and size of the growth he could see persuaded him that he would be better off waiting for the group to enter in the morning. That and an uneasy sense of something that was familiar but disturbing; there was something about the forest that was, he could only come up with one word to describe it, haunted.
He turned and followed the road away from the forest, until total darkness descended, and he exercised his Light abilities to show him the road back to the tavern.
The next morning, as the group of Rangers left their lodgings they laughed among themselves over the rumors in the village – the night before a light was alleged to have entered the village, a light that had to be a ghost wandering down the road from the forest. Alec smiled, more at the ignorance of the Rangers than the superstitions of the villagers, and stayed silent as he sat on his horse and waited for the others to saddle up.
“How large is this forest?” Alec asked Tarry as they horses finally started to leave the village.
“We only know hearsay,” Tarry replied. “None of us leave Exbury very often, and not to go very far. We are Old Ones, and our talents are needed at home, so we’ve never been here. But we are told that nearly a full day is needed to go all the way through it.”
“What is the haunting like?” Alec asked.
“They say there is an ancient curse; that if you stay on the road you will not be harmed, but if you leave the road, the witches will get you,” Tarry answered, and he smiled at Alec. “Have you ever fought a witch?”
Alec shook his head.
“This is getting close to the boundary of the Twenty Cities, so I suppose anything could possibly have crossed into our lands, but there’s no other place where witches are rumored to exist,” Tarry explained. “I think it’s just a dark, lonely woods where people get spooked and imagine the worst.”
They entered the forest soon thereafter, sticking to the road they were on, one that would intercept the main north-south road from Otterby to Moriadoc, the road the ingenairii were reputed to be on.
“If we cut straight west, we can reach the southern end of the road in the forest, and wait there for the kidnappers,” Cal urged Iar.
Alec looked at the thick forest, and thought about the troubles that could come from trying to ride through the pathless wilderness, but kept his tongue still, knowing that he had little influence on the group.
“Lib, take the front,” Ian said. “I hate to admit that you’re the strongest, but you are. Let the trees in front of us know we’re coming through, and ask them to clear the way. When you get tired, let me know and we’ll send someone else up to give you a rest.”
They went to the left, their horses leaving the firm surface of the road to step into the soft loam soil of the forest floor. Alec watched with interest from his spot at the rear of the group as there seemed to always be an obvious and open path in front of them, while he noticed as he turned that there was no evidence of a clear line behind them after they had passed through. Exbury’s Old Ones seemed to have an effective means of working with the plants of the forest, he conceded, and he relaxed slightly. They rode without problem throughout the morning, until they reached a wide brook, where they decided to pause for a midday meal break.
Everyone was off their horse, and scattered in many directions, when there was a loud crashing sound in the distance, and then a chorus of screams.
“It must be the kidnappers! Come on! This is our mission!” Iar called faintly, and charged into and through the stream, his sword drawn as he led five other Rangers into the forest.
“No wait! The screams came from over here!” Cal said fervently, and he and two others ran in the opposite direction, back towards the area the Rangers had traveled through already.
Alec stood with his sword drawn, uncertain which direction the voices had called from. Three of the Rangers, plus Amane and Andi, and Alec, remained close to where the horses were tethered. Alec had his Warrio
r powers fully engaged, trying to find any clue to understand what could be happening. He looked at Andi, and jogged over to where she and Amane stood with swords drawn. “What do you sense?” he asked her.
She shrugged. “I cannot tell. There are no clear sounds or clues,” she said, as her head swiveled around.
Alec felt an impulse to call upon his Spirit energies. He dropped the Warrior ability, causing Andi to look at him sharply as she felt the change in his spirit, then he grasped his Spirit powers, and closed his eyes to focus on the perceptions that flowed into him.
There was malevolence, a strong pocket nearby, and it seemed to extend tentacles of evil in multiple directions. There was a familiarity to the energies that powered the malevolence, and he sifted through his memories and understandings, trying to pinpoint what he felt. It was closely akin to necromancy, he realized with a twang of sorrow and fear, as he thought about the black depths he had dabbled in during his long fall into depressed isolation, many decades prior. There was something in the forest that was in communion with spirits of the dead.
“What is it Alec?” Andi asked, feeling a shadow of the anxiety that blossomed in Alec.
He opened his eyes, and looked to the north. “It is something I don’t completely understand, but there is a power that is using the energy of the dead to do something. Whatever it is, it’s not over there or over there,” he pointed in the directions the two groups had run in. “It’s out there,” he pointed north, addressing Andi and Amane.
“And it’s not the Warrior ingenairii,” he added as a warning. “It’s not something you fight just with weapons. Keep your spirits up; if you believe anything in my God, from all those memories you’ve taken from me, hold on to that faith now,” he addressed Andi directly.
“Andi, you take all these men and go after Iar’s group,” he directed. Tarry had gone with the larger group, and Alec knew Andi and Amane would be concerned about him. “I’ll go in search of the smaller group. We should all return here to the horses.” He looked at Andi for confirmation, and when she nodded, he left first to try to find the trio who had disappeared into the forest behind them.
The Journey Home: The Ingenairii Series: Beyond the Twenty Cities Page 3
