by GJ Kelly
But Elayeen had throttled and swallowed the sob that had threatened to choke her, and simply nodded, sheathing her knife emphatically and chewing a strip of frak furiously while she saddled her horse. They’d set off in silence, watchful, all senses alert and eyes scanning all directions but the one which led to the horror that was Elayeen’s hair. One thing she did know, once the shock had diminished a little and the threat of tears had subsided: any of the Toorsencreed searching for Elayeen Rhiannon Seraneth ní Varan Raheen wouldn’t give her a second glance, unless it were to confirm the shock, disbelief, or laughter evinced by a first.
They made good time though, arriving at Mallak Spur on the evening of the twelfth, only seven days after leaving Tarn. They camped on the western slopes of the Spur, waiting for daylight before attempting to go around the massive outcrop of rock, a journey which would briefly take them and their horses out onto the treacherous surface of the farak gorin. The weather had not been kind, and frak had been all they had for food, none of them daring to risk a cooking fire this close to the watchtower atop the Cloven Hill even had there been dry fuel available.
The journey around the Spur was fraught with danger but thankfully passed uneventfully, and once on the safer ground on the eastern side of the Spur, they moved quickly into the cover of tree-lined slopes, and waited there for darkness. It would be impossible to cross or pass around the vast expanse of the Barak-nor unseen by the watchmen in the tower atop the hill in daylight, which was of course why Sarek had had the tower built and manned in the first place.
So they’d waited, quietly, for nightfall, wrapped up well against the chill of cruel northerlies, and marking well the cratered and pockmarked wilderness stretching away before them. Valin studied the terrain and compared it with a copy of the map Sarek had made the first time they’d made the journey, and compared that with a newer, augmented map made from the vantage of the tower. The crevasse into which a Dark Rider had plunged was clearly marked, though it would be easy enough to pass its southern end now, for they intended to hug the slopes and go around the wasteland rather than directly across it.
The acrid stink of the Barak-nor had brought the memories of that first dark journey flooding back. Gawain’s ignoble lessons in stealth, concealment and ambush. The discovery of Morloch’s north-eastern army hidden in a crater near the farak gorin, and their foul and evil diet. Fleeing the Dark Riders and abandoning Gawain to his fate while they themselves hurried to safety to take up defensive positions… and Gawain’s subsequent reunion with them all. And all of it less than a year ago.
By the time they’d passed unobserved beneath the watchtower and begun taking a more south-easterly track towards the coast, Meeya and Valin had become accustomed to Elayeen’s shocking appearance, and since Elayeen herself had refrained from gazing at her reflection in her knife, it was easier for her to forget the awful truth of her ‘disguise’. Not until the smell of sea salt tainted the breezes two weeks out of Tarn and Valin had foraged enough dry kindling to fuel a fire was she reminded of it.
Valin dug a hole for the fire as they had so often seen Gawain do, and when it was glowing in the pit and thus unlikely to be seen from a distance, Elayeen drew out the small bundle containing the scissors, dye, and hanks of her hair. There was a brief moment of genuine sorrow, and then she fed the cuttings into the flames, all except for the length of braided hair.
Once, the strands of the braid had been black, the mark of the throth. They had been bleached in the Circles of Raheen, the throth broken, and the strands re-tied by Gawain in their room at the abandoned inn at the foot of the Downland Pass. She simply didn’t have the heart to consign the braid to the flames, and instead, coiled it, and tucked it into a pocket inside her tunic.
Valin set a pot of water over the fire to boil, and began adding some of the dried vegetables and powdered herbs that dwarf Rangers had assured him would make a hot and hearty broth. Meeya settled closer to Elayeen.
“He will return to you,” she said, nudging Elayeen from her reverie.
“If he is able.”
“He will be.”
“Well, until he does, I shall keep the braid safe, and close to my heart.”
“It’s only hair, Leeny. It’s the way your hearts are braided together that truly matters. Besides, here in these eastern lands, they don’t know what a braid signifies anyway.”
“I know. I was just wondering where he is, and what he’s doing. They’ll be on the plains now, south of Juria’s Castletown.”
“Settling to a meal of frak, no doubt, and the wizard Allazar eyeing wild rabbits voraciously.”
Elayeen smiled, and could see the scene clearly in her mind’s eye. “Yes. And G’wain will chide him, and say they must make no fires for the enemy to see, and cook no food for the enemy to smell.”
“Which is all well and good if there are enemies about and you have the palate of a Threlland miner.”
Elayeen drew her knees up under her cloak, and smiled at Meeya. “I’m sure half the time Gawain only says such things to tease the wizard. But he genuinely does like frak. I do not know why. I once asked Lady Merrin if they could make it with the taste of strawberries, or sweetroot, or arrowmint. But she just looked at me and blinked as though I’d whacked her between the eyes with a stick.”
“It makes me wonder what this broth will taste like. Have you tested it yet, mihoth?”
“No,” Valin replied, leaning forward and sniffing the pot. “The water is yet cold. The wind is chill, in spite of my serving as a shield for the pot.”
“I thought lord Rak said it would be milder here,” Meeya complained, drawing her cloak tighter.
“I expect he meant once we are on the lower ground in Mornland,” Elayeen sighed. “We still have a long way to go before the mountains and high hills of Threlland shield us from the northerly winds.”
“Shall we see the ocean?”
Elayeen smiled again, knowing her friend’s desire to see the vast expanse of water whose salty presence nearby was carried on the wind and spoken of in the screeching of wheeling gulls during the day. She remembered the first time she herself had seen the ocean, the vast and sparkling blue carpet seen over her shoulder, gently heaving in the south as she galloped up the Downland Pass at Raheen.
“Yes, I think we shall. We can follow the coast a little, at least as far as the Three Beacons, then we must turn inland more before the descent into northern Mornland.”
Meeya beamed happily and leapt to her feet to fetch a map from a pack, returning to sit beside Elayeen again while she unfolded the calfskin and hunted for the Three Beacons.
“There,” Elayeen pointed at the south-eastern coast of Threlland. Three small mountains, close beside each other and running in a line north-south, stood atop the cliffs overlooking the eastern ocean some days ride to the north of Mornland’s Norist Bay.
“They’re called the Three Beacons,” she explained, “Because according to lord Rak, the sight of them gives warning to Mornland’s fishing boats that they are sailing too far north. The southernmost beacon is the first warning, the middle is the second warning, and the third mountain, the northernmost, is the final warning. So he said. When a sailor sees the final warning off his port bow, he should turn about and run south.”
“Why?”
Elayeen shrugged. “Dangerous waters I think. The coastline is treacherous here, east of the Barak-nor. We’ll see it soon. We have to pass to the west of the Three Beacons though, the going will be easier there. Besides, I do not wish to find myself with the cliffs at my back and a mountain to the front should a Graken sight us. And there are villages and larger towns around Norist Bay I wish to avoid completely. Once we have the second of the Three Beacons on our left, we’ll turn southwest, more towards the centre of Mornland. It is wilder there.”
“Do you really think we’ll sight a Graken?”
Again, Elayeen shrugged, though the question set her doubt-filled stomach stirring again. “I don’t know. By now word
may well have reached Juria that we have abandoned Tarn, and if Morloch does indeed have spies there, then it is possible that our enemies have begun hunting for us.”
“Perhaps we should consider travelling at night, miThalin?”
“No, Valin. We are still in Threlland, and the ground rocky and treacherous in places. I’d rather we travel safely by day than risk a horse’s leg or one of our own by night.”
Elayeen noticed the smile of admiration on Meeya’s face, and felt a little abashed.
“What have I said?”
“You sounded just like Thal-Gawain.”
“Bah.”
Meeya giggled.
The soup, when it was finally ready, made a change from frak, but had little else to commend it apart from its warmth. It was also their last hot meal for a time, their south-easterly track taking them to unnamed cliffs overlooking the eastern ocean, and the windswept terrain was bereft of all kindling save hardy, wiry shrubs which were too green and too wet for burning.
The ocean, when they saw it, bore no resemblance to the gentle spangled carpet that had been the Sea of Hope in summer. Instead, the waters were dark and grey, angry, huge swells testifying to great storms at sea, and just to the north of where the three elves sat on horseback, occasional plumes of spray where those immense swells slammed into the rock face of the cliffs carried up over the top, and the spume whipped towards them on the breezes, soaking them.
It was, they all agreed, terrifying, and very far from anything their imaginations might have conjured from books in Elvendere. That gentle folk of Mornland put out onto that ocean in flimsy wooden boats beggared belief, though of course none could be seen, and indeed none would dare venture north of the Three Beacons in any season, never mind in the third week of January.
They gazed out over the roiling waters for some time, the cliffs hundreds of feet above the swells in places, though none of them dared venture close enough to the edge of the sheer drop to look directly down upon the heaving ocean. Gulls wheeled and screeched overhead, as if crying out frantic warnings, and though here and there a shaft of sunlight lanced through the heavy overcast, the effect was altogether ominous and filled with dark foreboding, and as one they turned their backs to the sea, and rode a mile inland, heading south towards the high peak of the final warning of the Three Beacons.
The going was far from easy, and Elayeen’s decision to travel in daylight proved a sensible one. With the northernmost Beacon to the left of their path and immense mountains to their right in the west, the pass between the two was rocky, creased and crumpled, and run-offs from both had carved deep washes in the land which needed great caution to negotiate. To be caught in a flash-flood in one of the washes would have been disastrous, and great was the relief when the second Beacon was behind them, and the ground sloping gently downwards towards the wide open lands of the south. Elayeen then turned sharply to the west and further inland.
Finally, with the mountain range that marked Threlland’s southern border stretching away to the west and behind them, the land became more fertile, pines proliferating, springs pouring forth pure, icy, crystal-clear water, and when they camped in the shelter and relative warmth of a stand of evergreens, they did so light of heart and with a sense of palpable joy.
It was the twenty-fifth day of January, the southerly of the Three Beacons was now visible as little more than a distant hill on the far eastern horizon, and the vista before them on their descent into Mornland was as Lord Rak of Tarn had described; lakes and woodlands, rolling hills and verdant grasslands, though they weren’t close enough to the coast of Norist Bay to have seen orchards or groves.
Hot soup was again on the menu, though this time they called it a stew, adding to the pot a scrawny hare shot by Valin that morning.
After tasting a spoonful and chewing the tough meat made only slightly more tender by its time in the pot, Elayeen declared in a gruff voice: “Ah! Rabbit stew! Isn’t it wonderful?”
It wasn’t, but the quiet laughter they shared certainly was.
oOo
9. Valdo
The days that followed were warmer, if only because Threlland served to shield the lowlands from the brunt of bitter northerly gales and drew much of the rain from the heavy clouds scudding south. Elayeen was in no hurry, gauging that it might take eight weeks at a leisurely pace to reach the southernmost reaches of Arrun and the great River Sudenstem which marked the principality’s southern border with Callodon.
According to the map, the hills wherein the ‘museum’ of Dun Meven lay, the terraced hill-fort so quaintly described by Tyrane of Callodon, were a little to the northwest of Lake Arrunmere, and it was closer to the eastern coast of that region, directly opposite the Dun Meven hills and close by the first fork of Sudenstem, that the last Riders of Raheen had made their new home. That was their ultimate destination, and since Elayeen intended to arrive there in early June, there was no need for haste now, at the end of January.
It was while they were still in the last days of that first month, the ground levelling out on the approach to a much hillier region, that they spent the night on the eastern shore of a small lake. They’d been travelling generally southwest since leaving the highlands of Threlland behind them, and Elayeen had decided that they were well enough into the midlands of northern Mornland now and should turn due south in the morning.
The three of them had breakfasted on leftover stew, rabbit of course, since all of them proved utterly hopeless at fishing, and had doused the fire by filling in the fire-pit when Valin paused for a moment, gazing away to the southeast.
“Something?” Meeya whispered, and all of them scanned the area.
“I thought I saw something, far off, but there is nothing there now. I think it was a horse. But it was only glimpsed, and too far to be certain.”
Elayeen felt her heart beat a little faster, and though the Sight revealed no lights bigger than woodland animals in the trees in that direction, she was wary, and spoke softly.
“There is nothing nearby, according to the map. The nearest mark is a place called Fourbanks, and at the very least it is a week’s ride to the southeast. We’ll continue a little more west, I think, and then turn due south. That should keep us far enough from Fourbanks to pass unseen, I mean to avoid that town and its river folk. Then we’ll cross the river, continue due south, and descend through the midlands.”
They prepared the horses quietly, watchful of their surrounds, and rode cautiously onward. The ground began to rise, a gentle slope at first which became slowly steeper, signs of the beginning of the rolling hills Lord Rak had spoken of, and when they crested the rise the trees thinned, giving way to a long and grassy downslope at the foot of which a gentle ribbon of a stream wound its lazy way across their path. In the distance, there was a tall, conical hill topped by a large stand of mixed trees, and Elayeen instinctively headed for that.
They were perhaps halfway to that hill and its crown of a copse when they heard the sound of a distant horn, high-pitched, like a trumpet, sounding from east.
“A single rider, heading towards us,” Valin sighed, disgusted with himself for not having seen the threat before they themselves had been spotted.
“Do we run for the trees?” Meeya asked.
Elayeen reined in and gazed at the rider, approaching at the extent of her vision both ancient and normal. Again the rider sounded the small horn, and seemed to be waving, and riding quicker now.
“Leeny, do we run for the trees?”
A sudden swarm of butterflies in her stomach, and she knew they were waiting for her decision. It was but one rider, though the horn might be signalling others they could not see. She flicked her gaze towards the copse on the crown of the hill now perhaps half a mile south of them. It would provide cover of a kind they were more than familiar with should the horn-blowing rider be leading an assault against them.
Then she snapped her eyes back to that rider, hoping the Sight of the Eldenelves might give her some clarity of
thought. It didn’t. But it did show the approaching rider to be waving, almost frantically, and the rider seemed really rather small in comparison to the size of the horse which, while running, didn’t seem to be making as much speed as might be expected of a charger or war-horse.
“Leeny?”
“We wait,” she heard herself say, though it was something of a surprise to hear the words. “Stand ready.”
Bows were unslung, waterproof wraps removed from strings and arrows nocked while they waited for the approaching rider.
“I had thought our goal the avoidance of all people,” Valin muttered, perhaps a little louder than he’d intended.
“It is,” Elayeen agreed, her tone stern and belying the burst of nervous energy which had spread through her. “Yet we failed to avoid this one, in spite of eldeneyes and watchfulness. To run now would be suspicious, and whoever that is who evaded our Sight has ceased blowing the horn since we came to a halt.”
“Whoever it is, is small,” Meeya announced.
“Or the horse is big,” Valin sniffed.
“Or both,” Elayeen nodded, and as the rider drew nearer, they could see that ‘both’ was indeed the case.
The rider was a young woman, in her early teens perhaps, slender and coltish, long straw-blonde hair streaming in the wind, a sight which made Elayeen suddenly very self-conscious. The horse was immense, a great shire-horse, jet black but for four white socks and blaze, and its lumbering run on the soft and verdant earth sounded like thunder. The girl on its back, seeing now that the three unknown travellers were armed with longbows and carried other weapons, slowed, and seemed suddenly to regret her hasty approach.
Still, with great courage, she rode closer, coming to a halt a respectful and cautious distance away. She studied them, as they studied her, waiting patiently for each other to speak.
