Beyond the Prophecy (28 page)

Kiara set down the bead loom with a frustrated huff.
Weaving—any kind of weaving—had never been her favorite activity. And ever
since those days spent imprisoned in the women’s hut she’d come to hate it.
These fiddly little dyed seeds were even worse than weaving cloth. She’d much
rather spend her days outside. Riding with the herdsmen, by preference. Not
that she minded watching her little brother occasionally.

She wouldn’t be doing this at all, but she’d found three
eagle feathers and conceived the idea of making a welcome-home gift for Theklan.
A belt, combining the lion of her clan in the beaded pattern with the eagle
feathers hanging down. Just like he’d combined the emblems of their clans in
the bridle he’d made for her. She scowled at the paltry two-finger widths she’d
managed so far. It’d take her a long time to complete a belt. Maybe an armband
instead?

Kiara closed up the pouch containing her beads. No more
today. She could only stand so much of that at one time. Fenar still slept
soundly, so she leaned her head back against the wall of the hut and shut her
eyes, pushing again at that wall that separated her from the magic that was
hers by right. She followed all the steps Thekila had told her. First, draw the
image clearly in her mind—that part was easy. She’d memorized Theklan’s every
mood and expression. Then think his name.

No matter how often she tried, she’d never gotten a
response. But sometimes—not often—she got a brief image. Theklan sitting under
a big apple tree, like the one in Vatar’s courtyard in Caere. But this tree stood
in a broad green lawn, with other, smaller trees scattered around it. Theklan
inside some kind of building, with a lot of other young men and women, eating
or else studying some odd
squarish
bits with strange
markings on them. Almost always with the same pretty girl sitting beside him.
Kiara had no idea whether these images were true or just something her
imagination made up out of the things Theklan had told her about the Academy.
Anyway, it made her feel at least a little closer to him.

She got another one of those glimpses, now. Theklan knelt on
a precipice, a thick forest spread out below him. And
that girl
knelt in
front of him, touching him. Then she leaned forward and
kissed
Theklan.

Kiara leapt to her feet, tossing the beading loom across the
hut and accidentally waking Fenar. She really hoped that had been just her
imagination.

Vatar whipped his staff into a defensive position just in
time to block an attack from Balan. Sky above and earth below, the boy was fast.

“Vatar!”

That was a very familiar voice. Vatar swiveled his head,
dropping his guard. His opponent’s staff whistled past his ear as Balan twisted
with unbelievable flexibility to avoid striking Vatar with his full strength.

Even knowing it was too late, Vatar couldn’t help flinching
aside.

Balan recovered and grounded his staff before Vatar could
even turn to face him. He shrugged, smiling apologetically. “Sorry about that.”

Vatar touched his ear. “Don’t be. You missed.”

“My fault,” Arcas said. “I should know better than to
distract you at a moment like that. I’ve just been all over Tysoe looking for
you. Everyone had a different idea of where you’d be—though I discounted the
ones who wanted to send me to the lakeshore. I know better than that.” He shook
his head. “Never saw a place so spread out that called itself a town. Even Zeda
is more coherent than this.”

Vatar strode forward. “Arcas! I’m glad you’re finally here.
I was starting to think I’d have to make my way back to Caere on my own.”

Arcas grimaced. “None of the other merchants in the survey
party had ever ridden all day. Or knew the first thing about surviving on the
plains. I’ll be glad to have you along to help ride herd on them on the way
back.”

“Thekila said you’d gotten the Dardani’s permission to use
the inland route for the road. Did you have any trouble with the shaman?” Vatar
raised the question—one of them, anyway—that had been on his mind.

Arcas tilted his head to one side. “Baraz didn’t weigh in on
either side. It was the promise that you’d train more smiths—from all the
clans—that finally persuaded the traditionalists. Who, I’m sorry to say, are
not your best friends among the Dardani.”

Vatar shrugged. “That’s not news to me. There are more than
a few who haven’t trusted me since Maktaz riled them up against me before our
Ordeals.” He half smiled. “I won’t be sorry to have someone else who can do the
repairs. That’s journeyman work at best. At least, that’s what your father
started me on, even before I made my own tools.”

“Me, too.” Arcas’s grin faded. “You will have to start
making
good
on that promise this summer.” He looked
around. “No matter what else is happening.”

“I know.”

Arcas looked inquiringly toward Balan, who was listening
with curiosity.

Vatar laid his hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “This is
Balan, one of the Valson who volunteered to come back with us. Orleus asked me
to give them some introductory training in weapons. Balan, this is my cousin
and partner, Arcas.”

“Fair day,” Balan said.

“Fair skies,” Arcas replied.

“How soon will we be setting out for home?” Vatar asked.

Arcas laughed. “We’ll need a day or two to rest the horses.
And for my comrades to do some trading. Then we can start back. Why, eager to
get back to your wife and children?”

“Aren’t you?”

~

Two days later, Vatar clung to the rail of the boat taking
them across the lake. He’d much rather have ridden, but that would have taken
no less than a seven-day. Well, at least the weather was calm enough that there
were hardly any waves. Not that it helped much, being surrounded by that much
water. He took several calming breaths. It was a lot farther across the lake
than across to Palace Island or even across the Lake in the Valley.

The sleek, white form of a giant lake otter gliding along in
the boat’s bow wave didn’t help matters at all. Was Balan crazy to swim out
this far? Or did he do insane things like that all the time?

So much water. It was hard even to see the shore from out
here in the middle of the lake. Vatar felt his breath coming shallower and faster.
The breathing exercises that were meant to help calm him weren’t working. He
drew in a deeper shuddering breath as he felt a strange calm settle over him.
Taleus. Vatar let out his breath.
Thank you.

I thought I’d better do something before you started
shaking hard enough to lose your grip on the rail. If you fell in, you’d sink
like a stone.
A thin whistling accompanied Taleus’s teasing voice in
Vatar’s mind. More gently, Taleus added,
Why
don’t you go sit down in the middle of the boat, close your eyes, and talk to
Thekila. She’s probably wondering about what just happened.

Good idea. Though she can probably guess what caused
that. She knew we’d be crossing the lake today.

After a brief conversation with Thekila, Vatar took the suggestion
one step further. He pulled his pipes out of his travelling pack and played his
mother’s lullaby. The music itself was soothing, but it also helped him to
watch his children playing in the sun with his Far Sight. He missed them so
much.

By the time Vatar put his pipes away and looked up from that
pleasant scene the far shore was noticeably closer. There were docks and . . .
some sort of settlement or outpost straight ahead. He stood up and walked over
to the rail to join Arcas. Most of the buildings were rough-hewn lumber, with
the look of new-sawn wood. Those large buildings near the docks must be
warehouses. Wisps of smoke farther back probably indicated dwellings of some
kind, promising food and shelter.

“That looks new,” he remarked.

“Not entirely. There’s been a sort of camp here for years,
as I understand it. Where the river boats stopped and transferred their goods
to and from the lake men’s ships. North Cove, they call it.  The docks
were here, but the warehouses were mostly in Kausalya. They didn’t need more
than a guest house here before. Now, with the need to slip around the city
secretly, the place has built up. It’ll grow more. This is the intended
destination of our road. We left our horses here, to spare them the lake
crossing.”

Vatar turned to glance at his horse, alone on the deck. On
the whole, the beast had taken the voyage across the lake better than Vatar
had. He turned back to take a closer look at the settlement. The trees were
thinner here, leaving open, sunny, grassy spaces. Good grazing for horses. Not
just theirs, but the ones that would eventually draw the wagons up and down
that long road to and from Caere. “Good spot for it.”

When they finally disembarked, Vatar didn’t think he’d ever
been as glad to put his feet on solid ground before. Not even that first time
he’d been carried off across the strait to the Palace of the Fasallon. Not even
the night he’d had to battle the waves of the Dragon’s Cove to reach Dragon
Skull Islet to retrieve his torc and pass his manhood test. His first manhood
test. Vatar was still the only man he knew who’d been forced to go through that
rite of passage twice.

Arcas led the way to the guest house, where the view of the
lake was blessedly blocked by the new warehouses. It wasn’t as comfortable as
the cabin he’d shared with Balan and Zoridan—and Arcas, last night—but it
wasn’t as if they were planning to be here long. He’d slept rougher crossing
the plains—and ate less well, too. This was just one step closer to being back
home with Thekila and his children, where he belonged.

They shared the evening meal that night at the long table on
one side of the guest house with the other members of Arcas’s road survey team
and a few other merchants who’d just arrived up the river.

“You’re not planning to go down river, are you?” one of the
merchants asked.

“Just for the first day or so,” Arcas answered. “Then we’ll
turn inland.”

“Inland? You came by foot, then?” the man asked.

“Horse,” Arcas answered as soon as he’d finished chewing a
tough piece of meat and swallowed. “The Merchant’s Guild has tasked us with
surveying for a road between Caere and Tysoe—or, at least, this close to Tysoe.
We came down as nearly straight as we could. There’s a possible route for the
road that way. We’ll be going back by way of the coast, to decide which is
best. I thought we’d start along the river. We can be sure of water for our
horses and there’s a kind of track there already, that they sometimes use to
haul the boats upstream when the current’s too strong.”

“A road would be a great relief. Of course, it’ll still take
at least a year, won’t it?”

Arcas nodded. “Probably longer, to be fully complete. There
might be a way for sturdier wagons to make the trip without waiting for the
road, if the course is well-enough marked for them.”

The merchant nodded. “Well, be careful. The cursed
Kausalyans have started sending patrol boats down the river channels we’ve been
using. We almost got caught by them on the way upstream. If they didn’t talk so
loud, we would have. We just had time to hide in some rushes and wait until
they were well past us. Don’t stay by the river too long or one of their boats
might spot you.”

“We wouldn’t want that,” Arcas said. “We’ll turn inland
before nightfall tomorrow.”

~

They rode out early the next morning, six riders and twice
that number of pack horses loaded mostly with grain, and four remounts. The
merchants would have loaded all of the spare horses if Arcas and Vatar hadn’t
stopped them. They followed the lakeshore as the lake narrowed and narrowed until,
imperceptibly, it had become a river.

At about that point, Vatar stared at a pile of large stones
as he rode out. A half dozen men were busy sawing some rough planks nearby. A
sort of stone pier had been built out into the current on both sides and the
water swirled around what looked like more piles of stones farther out. “What’s
that for?”

Arcas looked. “Oh, there’s been some talk of a bridge across
the river, like the one that crosses the Maat River between Tysoe and the Land
between the Rivers. They load the raw timber onto wagons to take it to Tysoe
anyway. Easier to bring it straight across to North Cove than to load it from
the wagons onto ships and then offload it again. I didn’t think they’d gotten
this far, yet.”

Vatar nodded and clucked his horse to move faster. Flowing
water was, if anything, more disturbing than a large body of water to him, so
Vatar rode on the landward side and kept an eye open for the tell-tale signs of
a waterhole. That different shade of green on the horizon—or at this time of
year, when the grasses were turning golden brown, just green. Or a
concentration of birds. Those things would indicate water—though not
necessarily a large enough waterhole to support the number of wagons that would
use the new road someday.

He reined his horse back to squint at a blur on the horizon.
Could be.

Before he could say anything, Arcas called out. “Vatar, can
you tell who those riders are ahead?”

Vatar turned his head. A half dozen riders were coming up
along the river. Definitely not Dardani, though he wouldn’t have expected them
to be in this area. From the color of their—uniforms? Yes, uniforms. From the
color, not Tysoeans, either. Orleus’s guard wore brown and green, the better to
blend into their environment. These wore blue and a silvery grey. “Kausalyans?”
Even as he spoke, the riders spotted them. A shout went up and they urged their
horses into a gallop.

Vatar wheeled his horse to the north toward that possible
waterhole and spurred it into a gallop. “This way!”

By the sound of hooves, he knew Arcas and the other
merchants were following. And also that their pursuers were gaining on them.
Vatar slowed his horse just slightly, waving the others to go on, so that he
and Arcas rode at the rear. They were the only two who had any ability to fight
from horseback, if it came to that. But two against six was poor odds, even for
them.

An arrow whizzed past. Not close enough to be a real threat.
Vatar knew it was very hard to hit a moving target from the back of a galloping
horse. Still, there was always such a thing as a lucky shot. He leaned forward,
driving his horse to go even faster. Arcas copied him.

A shout went up behind them. Vatar glanced over his shoulder
and breathed out, allowing his horse to drop to a canter and then a trot. Whoever
the other riders were, they were slowing down and showed no signs of resuming
the chase.

“Looks like the Kausalyans are patrolling more than the
river channels,” Vatar said.

“Yes. I think we’ll avoid the river in the future.” Arcas looked
ahead. “Should we stop at that waterhole?”

Vatar shook his head. “Long enough to rest and water the
horses. Then we push on.”

“I think you’re right.”