“Me too!” Lilah laughed.
With only a few wistful glances back, Merewen led them down mossy banks to the pool where hot water boiled up in great bubbles. It was fed by a small stream, tumbling down rocks. Dense ferns grew all around and leafy trees above, forming a kind of shelter.
Pausing long enough only to throw off shoes and cloaks (and for Lilah to bundle her thief tools under her cloak), Atan and Lilah waded in. The water at first was shockingly cold, but as they swam toward the bubbling end, eddies and swirls of warm water—sometimes hot—fizzed around them. It was exhilarating, leeching away their tiredness. Laughing, Lilah sent a wave of water sloshing over Atan, who swung her arm down and smacked up a hefty splash right back.
The water fight lasted until Merewen returned, her tunic laden with apples, three kinds of grapes, and several tubers. Atan and Lilah climbed out, exclaiming over how heavy their soggy clothes felt, and they flopped on the grass at the hot-spring end, where warm air that smelled of minerals wafted over them.
They sat and ate, and then stretched out to dry—utterly unaware that their voices, ringing through the trees, had acted as a beacon for Kessler, who had abandoned his initial plan when the twang of a bow, and an arrow springing from the grassy bank a finger’s breadth from his hand, had served as a warning.
He moved away as he considered the arrow. The close correlation between the twang and the impact indicated someone not very strong, possibly a child. The arrow was meant to scare him—as if he didn’t know that no one caused violent death in Shendoral. It suggested children either playing games or who were suspicious of his purpose here.
He got up, whistled to the horse, and saddled it, riding slowly out not long after. He was in no way intimidated, except by the prospect of an annoying scramble with an unknown number of assailants impossible to knife, unless he wanted to test the truth of Shendoral’s magic.
So he rode in a slow circle, eventually finding the tracks of his three (two shod, one barefooted). Not long after, he heard Atan’s and Lilah’s laughter ringing through the trees. He marked the place and rode easily westward, husbanding the horse’s strength and keeping watch for his unknown archer.
o0o
While Kessler waited for the cloak of darkness, Rel the Traveler had boarded his horse with the village smith and trudged up the weed-choked, overgrown mountain trail that had once been a mountain road.
He was alone. He did not want to risk the horse in case he was wrong.
And it wasn’t as if he’d hadn’t been wrong before. Many times. But he meant to test the strength of generations of rumor himself, and why not begin with Sartor, the oldest kingdom, the heart of the world? When he was a boy and lay in a grassy field in faraway Tser Mearsies, reading in one of his foster-father’s old books about how Sartoran travelers used to carry a handful of home soil in their pockets when they had to leave, he’d decided one day to see Sartor for himself.
After doing as much reading as he could, and asking indirect questions along the route, he’d selected Oneh Kaer as the least famed route to Sartor. No one had any idea how closely Norsunder watched Sartor’s old access-ways.
The border was supposed to be half a day’s march from Waterdown Village. He would know he had reached the border when he crossed beneath an ancient stone archway with the words Sartor hails thee, traveler carved down each side, for the oldest version of Sartoran did not flow across the page, but vertically. The ancient scrolls called taerans from before Sartor’s Fall, rare now, unrolled left to right, with neat lines written from top edge to bottom.
The rain slowed Rel’s progress, sometimes forcing him to find shelter until the worst was over, but late in the afternoon it cleared, and mellow golden light bathed the last of his trail with light.
He slogged through ankle-deep mud, his breath clouding at each step.
When at last he reached the archway, he almost passed beneath it without realizing what it was, for it was almost completely grown over. But the unnaturally even shape of the twining starliss made him pause and look closer at the archway of stone, green with moss, almost hidden by a tangle of ferns and berry bushes.
Through the archway he could see a path and greenery.
He tossed a rock through.
No blasts of withering fire—no sparks. Nothing.
He pulled his knife, and extended it...
Nothing.
His hand.
Nothing.
His heart beat in his ears. He drew in a deep breath, and—stepped through.
Again, nothing.
He looked around.
The road ahead was curiously clear, and even more curious, it was dry. Weirder, the backs of the stone arches were also clear. All the growth was in front of an invisible line. The eeriness of the scene prickled the hairs on the back of his neck. He looked around again, expecting anything from some powerful mage to a host of armed warriors to bodies lying about, un-Disappeared by kin or conquerors.
Nothing.
He looked up, saw gray clouds extending both sides of the border marker.
Shaking his head, he began the long walk down the road, until darkness forced him to camp.
o0o
By the time Rel had found a rocky shelter and enough dry brushwood to make a fire, the girls far to the south were also preparing to sleep.
Atan and Lilah had dried out, Lilah putting her thief tools securely in her pocket. Over a supper of carrots and grapes, the two had discussed the necessity of dividing the night into watches. They agreed that poor Merewen should sleep. Not only was she dealing with her feelings about her guardian, but fair’s fair: she’d found the food.
Lilah insisted on taking the first watch. “You stayed up that first night the man threatened us, so you need to catch up on sleep,” she repeated.
Atan was too tired to argue. She finally gave in, saying as she slipped off her ring, “Then you must take this.” And she explained in a few swift, low-voiced words how it worked.
She pillowed her head on the silky long grasses, smiled up at the trees as night birds called and chuckled. Three breaths, and she was asleep.
Lilah settled comfortably into a crook made by great tree-roots, her head against the trunk. She looked up through the treetops at the stars, gleaming with faint color beyond the forest canopy.
Twice she almost dozed off, and jerked upright guiltily. After the second time, she wondered if she ought to walk around, except her face was chilly, and she did not want to unwrap from her coat-cocoon. The stars peeking between tree branches looked cold and distant.
Then a twig snapped not far away. Her heart thumped, sleepiness gone. She thrust her hand out, muttered the spell, and the ring blasted eye-searing light in that direction.
Lilah squinted, but saw nothing. She clapped a hand over the ring so she could regain her night vision, but a heartbeat later a hand slid over her mouth, and something sharp and cold pricked just below her jawline. She froze, afraid to make a sound.
This was the reaction Kessler had counted on—as far as he could think. Pain throbbed through his head, for he’d come straight from an encounter with one of the forest denizens. He’d struck the kid, smashing him against a tree, and the magic promptly smashed him back, driving him to his knees. Rumor, for once, did not lie.
But he was used to pain. So he got up and trod the last few steps to where the girls were sleeping. Made a noise, shut his eyes against the expected shock of light.
Grabbed the Landis girl the moment she ceased making the magical light, and stuck a knife under her chin, counting on her forgetting about the magical echo effect. Sure enough, she forgot. He took her to his horse, bound and gagged her, and tossed her up onto the saddle for the ride south to Norsunder’s base.
SEVEN
Atan woke up to the light murmur of voices. Birds? She opened her eyes, and found a circle of round faces looking down at her.
She sat up. “Who?” she croaked, dry-voiced.
Merewen was already awake. ?
??They live here. I wonder if Savar knew.” Her forehead puckered sadly, as Atan began taking in details. The crowd was all kids. Strangers. Lilah was not among them
“Savar?” That was said by a sturdy boy with nut brown skin and a head of curly brown hair. “You know Savar?”
“I lived with Savar.” Merewen clasped her hands. “But his house is gone, and so is he. Have you seen him?”
Four heads shook.
“Not since he brought the little one,” a red-haired boy mumbled.
Quick looks sidled around.
“During winter,” a girl said, and then turned her dark gaze Atan’s way.
The kids were dressed in worn, carefully mended clothes, but they were clean and did not look starved. And they all spoke Sartoran—not with Lilah’s accent (or her own), but as if it were their only tongue.
“Who are you?” the girl asked. The awkward lines of her gown suggested an adult’s dress adapted to fit a skinny girl of maybe thirteen or fourteen. Her dark braids swung down, two neat, shining lines, to her fingertips.
Atan got to her feet and self-consciously dusted herself off, noticing distractedly that she was taller than the others, and possibly older than two or three of them as they looked back at her with expressions varying from wary and curious to worried.
“My mother called me Atan, and so I was raised,” she said, but then she remembered that she was in Shendoral, where no dark magic would penetrate. So she drew in a deep breath and stated, “My name is Yustnesveas Landis.”
There. She’d said it out loud.
No lightning bolts crackled out of the sky, no temblors opened the ground to swallow them. But her own name... it felt like someone else’s.
All four looked quite startled, and the girl said in a tentative voice, “Landis? Descended from—?”
For the first time outside the cottage in the Valley, Atan said, “The king and queen.”
“Savar did say the youngest of them might live,” the dark-haired boy whispered.
The others regarded her with puzzlement and disbelief. Before anyone could speak, a groan startled them all.
The girl with the long braids was first to break and run. Everyone else followed down the banks, across the stream in heedless splashes, and up again. Halting beside a tree, Atan stared down in blank-minded amazement at a white-haired boy who sat up slowly, carefully fingering the back of his head.
That fine drift of blue-white hair, the pale skin, the taloned finger-ends... Atan was seeing her first morvende.
Eyes so light a brown they looked amber glanced up at her, then narrowed in a wince. The girl with the braids bent. “Let me see.”
The white head turned, and Atan caught sight of blood-matted hair. Her stomach lurched.
“Ouch!” the morvende boy yelped. “Oooh. It was that black-haired man.”
“Told you to get the rest of us,” the stocky boy said. Then he snorted. “Trying to be a champion, eh, Hinder?”
The morvende sat up, wincing against a mountain-sized headache. “No! I was following him, like we decided. But next thing I knew he’d vanished, and then he came up behind me—”
“And you got clobbered,” the girl finished.
Atan said, “A man with black hair? Blue eyes?”
Four heads nodded, and everyone else looked grim. “That’s the one,” the girl said.
“There’s no sign of him now,” the redhead put in. “We looked. Since dawn.”
Atan frowned uneasily, peering across the stream at the girls’ campsite. No sign of Lilah. She remembered that man’s demand, and fear squeezed her heart in her chest. She was reluctant to give voice to that fear, so she said, “Merewen, did Lilah tell you where she was going?”
“I did not see her when I wakened,” Merewen said.
“That is odd. I would not think it like her to wander off, but then we were all so tired, she might not have wanted to disturb us. Oh, how I wish she’d woken me up for my watch,” Atan declared.
The Sartoran kids scarcely listened. They were not at all interested in the missing girl. Their attention was solely on Atan, as the braid girl whispered to Hinder.
“Yustnesveas Landis?” Hinder repeated, then glanced around furtively.
Atan gave him a distracted glance. “Yes?” She peered intently into the woods, turning in a slow circle in hopes of spotting Lilah’s rusty-red hair.
Hinder sighed. “Well, then, Savar was right, wasn’t he?”
“And Norsunder knows it,” the brown boy added, with a dire frown. “That man had to be from them.”
“Of course Savar was right,” Merewen said wistfully.
The girl with the braids put the horrible thought into words, saying, “He was after something, or someone. I will venture a guess that he made off with your friend.”
“He was after me,” Atan admitted, sick with guilt. “I have to go after her.” Fine queen I am, she thought in sorrow, losing the very first person who offered to help me.
Even if Atan had not been anxiously searching around and around as if hope and will could restore Lilah, she would not have recognized in the furtive glances and nudges of the Sartoran kids the progress from question to decision.
Merewen, watching them all, was no better at interpreting these cues, and so, when the braid girl said, “We can talk about it at our place,” Merewen asked, “But what if Lilah is exploring? We don’t want her to come back and find us gone.”
“We patrol all the time,” the stocky boy said. “We will pass the word. If anyone sees her, we’ll bring her. Dorea?” He tipped his head toward a tall, skinny girl, who ran off, vanishing almost immediately among the leafy greens.
Atan sighed. She knew she was not likely to find Lilah by running around, screaming her name. And what if that man was lurking about? “I was going to call her name—”
And several voices said, “Don’t!”
“We don’t know if there is more than one enemy,” the braid girl said. “We would rather not all be carried off, if there is a force of them.”
Hinder said, “Pouldi, help me up. My head’s swimming faster than a whirlpool. We will go to the hideout, where we can plan in safety.”
Safety? Atan cast a look at Merewen’s hopeful face and thought bitterly, I can’t lose this one, too. “Safety, that I can agree to. Then we will plan.”
Happy, relieved smiles all around.
The braid girl introduced herself as Nirsandeas, or Sana for short. She walked at Atan’s left, her bow strung, and the stocky boy—Pouldi—on the right. Atan was kept in the middle. Atan saw in the contours of their arms in those soft, old clothes that Sana and Pouldi knew how to shoot. And they knew the price they’d pay if they shot a Norsundrian in order to kill, just to protect her.
That sick feeling gripped her insides. She felt strange, as if events had wrenched free of her control, and tumbled down an increasingly wild river.
As they walked, the redhead introduced himself as Brick—no surprise there—then gave her a rambling account of the kids’ lives in Shendoral, much punctuated by comments from the others. Only the fourth one, a weedy boy with long black hair, stayed quiet, but he was walking behind, hand on a deadly-looking dirk stuck sidewise through a worn blackweave belt, as he looked back and forth, back and forth. Atan discovered by and bye that his name was Mendaen.
“... and the first thing I really remember is meeting all the others, and Savar telling me to stay with them, and I’d be safe, but never to go outside Shendoral’s boundaries, or I’d forget again,” Brick said.
“So you don’t know who your family is?” Atan asked.
“Well, I don’t,” Brick said with a shy smile. “But others do. You’ll hear Lir—some of them bla—talk on about who is related to who, right down to their great-great-great-great grandparents. But those are the ones with titles and so forth. And all the cousins, too. I think Savar just found me, rather than searching.”
“How did Savar find you?”
“I don’t know. He
just did.”
“One at a time?”
“The others just appeared, and he would always say, ‘Here is a new one, children. Be very careful when you go beyond the bridge, for time works differently all over the forest.’”
“So you don’t know how long you’ve been here?” Atan asked.
The others exchanged glances. Some shrugged.
The tall teen boy said, “Here’s what I noticed. Savar never remembered any of our names when he would turn up with a new one.”
They sped along old pathways through dells, gentle vales, and over little stone bridges that were very old indeed. But every step that took her farther away from Lilah and the danger that had been meant for her seemed to weigh down her heart the more.
They stopped only once to drink from a stream, though everyone was hungry. From the few comments the others made, Atan gathered that the teenage orphans patrolled regularly through Shendoral, looking for anyone out of place—either others like themselves, or the occasional enemies that rode through.
“Norsunder people used to come in a lot, mostly to be away from what happens outside,” Sana said as they resumed their walk.
“But they don’t like it here, because they can’t kill anything,” Brick added. He chortled. “And even the woods don’t like ’em. I heard tell of branches falling on them, and vines tripping them, and things like that. Some of them ride round and round in a big circle. Leastways, they always seem happy enough to get out and ride south again.”
“But they haven’t been through in ages and ages,” Sana said. “At least, until that one yesterday.”
Atan wondered exactly what ‘ages and ages’ meant. It could be that in this forest, ‘ages’ were meaningless in measure.
The light slanted through the tall trees in golden shafts when at last Hinder paused, whistled a liquid series of notes. A similar whistle echoed faintly through the trees. The kids smiled and began to run. Merewen, who had listened without speaking, ran lightly after, and Atan pounded next to Mendaen, hoping for rest soon.
She got her wish. Over a last bridge—the brush of magic tingled along her nerves, and inside her head—and onto a grassy dell that was surrounded by leafy green trees, and huge-trunked redwoods that towered high above the others. Winter was not anywhere near this place, which glowed the bright green of spring.