Over Rock and Root

W E DECIDED TO TRUST the map we’d found and cut straight west through the forest, heading toward Crosson. Even if we missed the town, we couldn’t help but hit the road and save ourselves long miles of walking.

Hespe’s wounded leg made the going slow, and we only put six or seven miles behind us that first day. It was during one of our many breaks that Tempi began my true instruction in the Ketan.

Fool that I was, I’d assumed he had already been teaching me. The truth was, he had merely been correcting my more horrifying mistakes because they irritated him. Much the same way I’d be tempted to tune someone’s lute if they were playing off-key in the same room.

This instruction was a different thing entirely. We started at the beginning of the Ketan and he corrected my mistakes. All my mistakes. He found eighteen in the first motion alone, and there are more than a hundred motions in the Ketan. I quickly began to have doubts about this apprenticeship.

I also began to teach Tempi the lute. I played notes as we walked, and taught him their names, then showed him some chords. It seemed as good a place as any to begin.

We hoped to make it to Crosson by noon of the next day. But near midmorning we encountered a stretch of dreary, reeking swamp that hadn’t been marked on the map.

Thus began a truly miserable day. We had to test our footing with every step, and our progress slowed to a crawl. At one point Dedan startled and fell, thrashing about and spattering the rest of us with brackish water. He said he’d seen a mosquito bigger than his thumb with a sucker like a woman’s hairpin. I suggested it might have been a sipquick. He suggested several unpleasant, unsanitary things I could do to myself at my earliest convenience.

As the afternoon wore on, we gave up on making it back to the road and focused on more immediate things, such as finding a piece of dry ground where we could sit without sinking. But all we found was more marsh, sinkholes, and clouds of keening mosquitoes and biting flies.

The sun began to set before we finally made our way out of the swamp, and the weather quickly turned from hot and muggy to chill and damp. We trudged until the ground finally began to slope upward. And though we were all weary and wet, we unanimously decided to press on and put a little distance between ourselves and the insects and smell of rotting plants.

The moon was full, giving us more than enough light to pick our way through the trees. Despite the miserable day, our spirits began to rise. Hespe had grown tired enough to lean on Dedan, and as the mud-covered mercenary put an arm around her she told him he hadn’t smelled this good in months. He replied that he would have to bow to the judgment of a woman of such obvious grace.

I tensed, waiting for their banter to turn sour and sarcastic. But as I plodded along behind them I noticed how gently he had his arm around her. Hespe leaned on him almost tenderly, hardly favoring her wounded leg at all. I glanced at Marten, and the old tracker smiled, his teeth white in the moonlight.

Before long we found a clear stream and washed the worst of the smell and mud away. We rinsed out our clothes and donned dry ones. I unpacked my tatty, threadbare cloak and fastened it across my chest, vainly hoping it might keep away the evening’s chill.

As we were finishing up, we heard the faint sound of singing upstream. Each of us pricked up our ears, but the chattering sound of the stream made it difficult to hear with any clarity.

But singing meant people, and people meant we were almost to Crosson, or perhaps even the Pennysworth if the swamp had turned us too far south. Even a farmhouse would be better than another night in the rough.

So, despite the fact that we were tired and aching, the hope of soft beds, warm meals, and cool drinks gave us energy to gather up our packs and press on.

We followed the stream, Dedan and Hespe still walking as a pair. The sound of singing came and went. The recent rains meant the stream was running high, and the noise of it tumbling over rock and root was sometimes enough to drown out even the sound of our own footsteps.

Eventually the stream grew broad and still as the heavy brush thinned and opened into a wide clearing.

There was no singing any longer. Nor did we see a road, inn, or any flicker of firelight. Just a wide clearing well-lit by moonlight. The stream broadened out, forming a bright pool. And sitting on a smooth rock by the side of the pool....

“Lord Tehlu protect me from the demons of the night,” Marten said woodenly. But he sounded more reverent than afraid. And he did not look away.

“That’s ...” Dedan said weakly. “That’s ...”

“I do not believe in faeries,” I tried to say, but it came out as barely a whisper.

It was Felurian.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 890