Sartor (9 page)

Atan looked eastward.
Do you know, Tsauderei?

But there was no answer. She was in charge—and here
were two faces turned toward her, one smeared with tears, the other pale and
tense.

“The house is gone, but that does not necessarily mean
that Savar is gone as well. He might even have bound it in some spell, if he
had something important inside,” she said.

Merewen drew in a ragged breath. “Yes.” She
gulped. “That’s right! So we will hope to find him anon.”

Atan nodded, relieved and worried. “Shall we camp,
then find something to eat? We’ll keep watch, as well. And tomorrow we’ll
plan our trip to the tower.”

Merewen wiped her eyes. “There’s a hot spring
not far, and I can go back and see if any of our kitchen garden is left. I saw
the grove where the cow lived, but I fear she is gone. Perhaps Heron the
wood-gatherer has her.”

“How about later for that?” Lilah asked. “Did
you say there was a hot spring?” She scratched her head, gritty from
sleeping on dusty ground for so many nights.

Atan exclaimed. “Oh, that does sound good. I think I’ll
go into it, clothes and all. I’m one giant itch.”

“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.

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.”