“I know,” Kelryn interjected drily. “At my service. But how, pray, can a kender offer service? And why should I accept it, if offered?”
Emilo chuckled good-naturedly. “Both very good questions, of course. Actually, I wouldn’t think that you’d get many kender around here. But if there is anything I can do for you, well, I’d be glad to talk about it.”
“Stop that confounded midget!” shouted Bolt, who was still upset about his lost steel pieces. “I’ll take each missing coin out of his hide.”
“Well, really,” said Emilo in exasperation. “I’m the one who returned your purse. I don’t see why you should be taking such an attitude.”
It was then that Danyal noticed his bonds had miraculously fallen from his wrists. Remembering the enthusiastic handshake from the kender, he regarded Emilo Haversack with growing awe.
And concern. Unmollified, Bolt was advancing on the little fellow. The bandit’s short sword was raised, and he was clearly in no mood for fancy explanations.
“Hey! My purse is missing, too!” Zack’s roar of outrage checked Bolt’s menacing approach.
“Is this it?” Emilo was holding up another pouch full of coins. “You should really be a little more careful.” Again the purse flew through the air, and again, to cries of outrage and glee, valuable coinage tumbled to the road, bouncing into the ditches, rolling along the ruts.
Even Kelryn had paused, hand on his sword as he watched in amusement, Danyal noticed. The bandit lord advanced to stand close behind Emilo Haversack and finally put his hands on his hips to laugh aloud at the antics of his followers.
The lad cast a glance at Foryth and saw the historian looking with amazement at the loose ropes dangling from his own wrists. Dan felt a flickering dawn of hope, but it was quickly dashed. Even free from their bonds, it didn’t seem likely that the two of them could evade their captors for long before they would be run down and caught. And he didn’t even want to think about the precautions the bandits might take if the pair showed an intention to escape, nor about the vengeance Zack might take if he should recapture his fugitives.
“Here, let me help with that,” Emilo offered genially. He sauntered toward the men, who backed away, each unconsciously revealing the location of his valuables as he placed a hand at belt, side pouch, or, in one case, the top of his boot.
Ignoring their distress, the kender skipped through the group of suspicious bandits. “Here!” he cried, flipping a steel piece to Bolt. “And another!” This time the glittering coin tumbled past Zack’s outstretched hand, bouncing onto the road, then rolling between Bolt’s legs.
“That’s mine!”
“Keep yer paws off it!”
Immediately the two bandits lunged, colliding heavily, then falling to the ground where they exchanged sharp punches. Rolling back and forth, spitting and swearing, the pair thrashed from one side of the road to the other. Steel flashed in the darkness, and Danyal saw that Zack had drawn his wicked knife.
“No blades!” Kelryn Darewind’s voice cracked through the night, and the one-eyed bandit, cursing loudly, tossed his dagger aside and delivered his fist into Bolt’s blunt nose.
“Hi again!”
Danyal whirled at the sudden voice, almost falling down as he saw that somehow Emilo Haversack had sauntered around the large boulder and now stood behind the youth and the historian, regarding them curiously.
“You stirred them up pretty good,” Danyal noted, grimacing as Bolt bit down on Zack’s wrist, drawing a howl of outrage from his writhing opponent.
“Yes,” the kender agreed, nodding with a certain sense of justified pride. “I’d like to stay and watch, but don’t you think we should be going?”
“Tsk—we’re prisoners,” Foryth Teel chided. “We’re not allowed to—”
“We’re not prisoners right now!” hissed Danyal urgently, seeing a design behind the kender’s antics and hoping there was more to the plan than simply running as fast as they could into the night. “He’s right. Let’s go!”
“But—”
“Come on!” Danyal insisted, grabbing Foryth’s hand and pulling. The historian reluctantly stumbled along, though he cast a glance at the bandits, almost as if he hoped Kelryn might see them and put a stop to this nonsense about escape.
For his own part, the lad felt certain their argument and departure would draw the attention of the bandits, but a quick look showed that Kelryn had joined the ring at the edge of the fight, which was building to a climax as Zack tore his bleeding hand from Bolt’s mouth and tried to get a stranglehold around the burly man’s neck.
“This way,” Emilo said, leading them up the road. “I picked this spot on purpose.”
The sounds of the fight receded in the distance as they sprinted into the night. Danyal was tense and fearful, expecting a shout of alarm at any moment, but if anything the intranecine duel raged with increasing intensity.
“Here.” Emilo Haversack halted quickly, pointing to a niche between two rocks on the downhill side of the road. “Sit down, and you’ll be safe.”
“What? How?” demanded Danyal, who thought that the place offered precious little concealment, and even then barely enough for one person.
Any further objections, however, were overcome by a sound of real alarm down the roadway. Kelryn’s voice barked through the chaos. “Find them. Bring them to me!”
“You go first! I’ll follow!” whispered the kender, prodding Foryth toward the place he had indicated.
With a sigh, the historian stepped off the road—and immediately vanished from sight. Danyal heard an “oof” of alarm, but even that sound swiftly faded into the night.
“Now you go!” urged the kender. Hearing the sounds of running feet, the lad didn’t hesitate. He stepped after Foryth and felt his foot lose purchase on the edge of a slippery, smooth-walled chute. Instantly he was on his back, skidding and sliding over a muddy surface with incredible speed. Only with the greatest of effort did he bite back the shout of alarm that threatened to explode from his mouth.
Instead, he tried to pay attention, to pick out the features of the hillside before him. A thin trickle of water drained down this smooth ravine, providing lubrication for a plummeting, headlong slide. Danyal had a fearful thought of Foryth coming to a halt below only to be smashed by the lad’s uncontrolled plunge. Or what if this gully debouched into a waterfall and dumped them unceremoniously onto a waiting pile of jagged, unforgiving rocks?
But the slide seemed to continue smoothly for a very long way. Through the bouncing and scraping and the rushing of the wind, Dan gradually became aware of another body plunging along the gully behind him, and he guessed—and fervently hoped—that Emilo had accompanied them. He had to pray the kender wouldn’t have recommended the route if he didn’t have some hope of its success. Still, the lad was far from enjoying the slide as he skidded through a patch of mud, then felt a rough surface of rock scrape him painfully on the back.
And suddenly he was airborne, floating, falling, certain that he was doomed, yet even then some deep-seated instinct kept him from crying out.
He smacked into water that was icy cold and deep. The force of the impact knocked the breath from his lungs, but he was immediately stroking for the surface, kicking desperately until his face broke free and he could draw a deep lungful of air.
Another figure splashed into the water beside him, and only when Emilo popped to the surface, treading water easily, did Danyal hear the churning, choking sounds a short distance away. The two swimmers each grabbed one of Foryth’s flailing arms and thrashed through the chilly pool until they could pull the historian onto a sandy bank. All three lay for several minutes, gasping for breath, slowly absorbing the awareness of their changed circumstances.
Danyal noticed heavy evergreens drooping overhead, and the lad felt certain they were concealed from the road on the mountainside so far above. He waded into the shallow water to look upward and saw the ridgeline, where the road was, silhouetted high against th
e night sky.
“My guess is that they’ll figure we kept running and chase along that road for a long distance,” Emilo explained. “The chute we came down is pretty much invisible at night, though if they’re still up there at dawn, they won’t have much trouble spotting our trail.”
“Perhaps by dawn, then, we should be somewhere else,” Danyal suggested. “And thanks for rescuing us.”
He shivered, and the chill came from more than his wet garments. Indeed, as he considered the prospects of a long captivity, with Zack and his knife waiting always in the shadows, the lad didn’t have any doubts but that the kender had indeed saved their lives.
Chapter 28
A Mysterious Affliction
First Kirinor, Reapember
374 AC
Danyal was startled by a sudden movement in the shadows of the pines. He whirled, reaching for the fishing knife that he no longer wore at his belt. Then, as his eyes focused in the dim light, he gasped in shock.
“A girl!”
She was hiding in the deep shadow of a streamside boulder but, seeing she was discovered, came hesitantly forth, taking Emilo’s arm in a protective gesture.
“This is Mirabeth,” said the kender with grave formality. “She was waiting here for us.”
There was something familiar about the slight figure, who stood a little taller than Emilo. Danyal saw the topknot that split into two long tails, one over each shoulder, and he was certain.
“You’re not a girl. You’re the kendermaid who tamed Nightmare, who showed me where the apples were!”
“Yes … that was me.” Again he heard the musical voice, soft and hushed but still delightful to his ear.
“Remarkable! Simply remarkable. Now, wait—I must get this down,” declared Foryth, fumbling in his pouch for the tools of his trade. “You were feeding apples to our lad, here?”
“Forget about the book!” hissed Danyal. “Remember, we’ve got to get away from here before daylight!”
“The boy is right,” Emilo said. “I picked this place for your escape carefully, and we’ve got a bit of a head start, but we don’t want to dally any longer than we have to.”
The historian looked as though he were about to argue, but Danyal stepped in front of him and addressed Emilo Haversack. He felt like a chronicler himself, wanting to ask a thousand questions—starting with why the kender had taken such a risk. Instead, he forced his thoughts along practical lines.
“Where do we go from here? What’s our best chance of getting to some kind of hiding place before daylight?”
“If we go downstream, we’ll meet the river in a few miles. We won’t be able to cross, but there’s thick woods in the valley, and we could go either right or left along the bank. The walking’s easy, with lots of cover.”
“So they’ll assume we went that way?” Danyal was trying to think, remembering how easily their camp had been discovered late on the night when he had met Foryth Teel.
Emilo nodded in response to the question. “Upstream, there’s still woods, but we’ll find groves of evergreens, like this one, or aspens, with lots of meadows in between. Also, there’s a few cliffs where the stream turns to a waterfall.”
“I remember.” In fact, Danyal had spent the hour of sunset looking over this same valley, though from the road high on the ridge, the terrain along the streambed had looked much less daunting than it did from here. Still, he didn’t think any of the cliffs would prove unclimbable.
“We should go upstream,” Danyal urged. “I don’t think they’ll try to look for us that way, and the route down the valley is too easy, too obvious.”
“I agree,” Emilo said, quelling any objections Foryth Teel might have raised.
Surprisingly, the historian also nodded in agreement. “Loreloch is somewhere up in these mountains, so I certainly don’t want to waste a lot of time marching back down to the lowlands.”
Danyal looked at the historian in amazement. “You still want to go to Loreloch?”
“My dear boy, a slight setback should never be allowed to deter the diligent research of the hard-working historian.”
“Setback? You were captured! For Gilean’s sake, he held you for ransom!”
“Tsk—and that provided me with a perfect opportunity to conduct my interviews. An opportunity which, through no fault of my own, has been indefinitely postponed. Now, am I correct in assuming that we should be on our way?”
“Quite right,” the kender declared with a curt nod.
Emilo led the way, with Mirabeth at his side and Foryth stumbling through the darkness behind. Shaking his head at the historian’s single-minded obstinacy, Danyal brought up the rear.
They tried to climb in silence, but the terrain was rough, and overhanging pines, as well as sharp crags of rock, cast much of the footing into deep shadow. As a result, they frequently stumbled over unseen obstacles, tumbled loose stones into the river, and generally made enough noise, Danyal thought, to rouse the dead from their graves.
Fortunately they encountered no sign of the bandits. Emilo postulated, reasonably enough, that the men would have backtracked along the road for quite a distance, assuming that in the darkness the escaped captives would not have dared to venture on the steep slopes above and below the rutted track.
Danyal had no difficulty keeping up, even over the rough ground. In fact, he found himself anxious to continue when Foryth and Emilo paused to catch their breath. They had progressed no more than a mile, and the youth was vividly aware of the dawn that must eventually illuminate the skyline and reveal the muddy slide that had been their escape route.
“I’ll have a look ahead,” he said, passing the historian and the kender, who had taken seats on flat rocks near the bank of the stream.
“I’ll come with you,” Mirabeth said.
“We’ll be along in a minute,” Emilo promised, while Foryth nodded weakly in agreement.
The kendermaid seemed unaffected by fatigue as she climbed along with Danyal. They picked their way between large rocks, seizing roots and branches to pull themselves upward. In one place, the human youth had to leap to catch a handhold. Scrambling up the steep face of a boulder, he saw that the distance was too great for Mirabeth.
Danyal stretched himself flat on top of the rock and reached down the face.
“Here—take my hand,” he whispered, projecting just enough to be heard over the musical splashing of the nearby stream.
She jumped and caught his grip, her weight surprising as she was suspended momentarily by his clutching fingers. Quickly her feet, in their soft moccasins, found solid purchase and she scrambled up to join him atop the rock.
“Do you think we should wait for them?” Danyal asked, fearing that Foryth and Emilo would have difficulty over this portion of the route.
“Yes,” Mirabeth replied softly. Her eyes were wide, almost luminous in the darkness, and—as when he had first seen her beside the horse—Danyal was struck again by her resemblance to a human girl.
“Were you traveling with Emilo the other day when I saw you beside the stream near Waterton?” he asked.
“We were following the road,” she said with a nod. “And I saw the orchard and wanted to get some apples. Emilo was tired—he gets that way a lot—so he took a nap while I came down to the trees. I wasn’t expecting to see you or your horse.”
“She wasn’t my horse,” Danyal objected. “At least, not until you haltered her for me.”
He cleared his throat and shook his head against a wave of melancholy, suddenly feeling a strong pang of sadness, missing the mean-tempered mare with more feeling than he would ever have imagined.
“Where is she—the horse, I mean? Did those men get her?” Mirabeth’s smooth brow furrowed in concern, and suddenly the lines of her age were heightened, revealed like clear shadows in the starlight.
Danyal’s chuckle was rueful but fond. “Actually, it was Nightmare that got some of them.” His laughter died quickly at the memory of poor Gnar, crippled b
y the kick of the horse and then executed by his companions, who found his presence an inconvenience. He wondered about Nightmare, hoping the horse was all right.
Movement stirred below as Foryth and Emilo came into sight. Danyal helped them both up over the steep boulder, then resumed his place at the rear of the little party as they continued upstream along the course of the plunging, splashing brook.
Soon the steepness mellowed into a grassy valley, where the ground proved soft and marshy underfoot. Moving to the side, they hastened along a low ridge where the terrain was still open, though large clumps of gray-black rock jutted from the carpet of grass and flowers. The stream was a shimmering ribbon of silver, visible as it meandered back and forth through the flat, low ground.
Finally the valley walls closed in again, and the course of the waterway returned to its steep and rocky dimensions. More trees grew here. Conscious of approaching dawn, Danyal was relieved to have some semblance of cover overhead. They found a trail that, while narrow and winding, was clear of the obstacles that had tripped them up all night.
Padding through the dark woods, Danyal strained to see Foryth Teel’s tan robe, following the blur of color as they moved more quickly than they had been able to before.
A gasp of alarm accompanied Foryth’s skidding to a halt, and Danyal bumped into the historian roughly.
“What is it?” asked the lad, pushing for a view around the historian’s side.
Foryth pointed mutely to the ground before them, where one figure writhed on the ground and another, recognizable by her twin ponytails as Mirabeth, knelt nearby and cooed soothing sounds.
“Emilo!” cried Danyal, in his alarm forgetting to hold his voice to a whisper He, too, knelt beside the kender, seeing that their rescuer was rolling from side to side, back arched, eyes wide and staring.
“What’s wrong?” Foryth whispered, clutching Danyal’s shoulder.
“I don’t know.”
Even as he spoke his quiet answer, the youth was remembering a man from his village, Starn Whistler, who had been subjected to spells like this—“seizures,” the villagers had called them. Danyal had been frightened when he witnessed one of the attacks as a young boy, but his neighbors had been nonchalant. Soon he had learned that, though Starn looked as though he was locked in the greatest agony, the man would awaken slowly from the seizure without lasting harm. Within an hour, he would have returned to normal.
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