Warautumn (17 page)

Merryn frowned in turn. “Too strange to think about right now.”

Div nodded mutely.

“You still haven’t told me what
you’re
doing here,” Merryn continued after a pause, staring hard at Strynn.

“Looking for you,” Strynn replied flatly. “Looking for the
regalia, more properly. And now that we’ve found you and it—”

“Not all of it,” Merryn corrected.

“No, and that’s the problem.”

Merryn glanced at the sky. “I’m a fool to stay here any longer, but tell me—now. And then—well, you already know one reason why we need to travel.” She eyed the horses speculatively. “Though with them, maybe I can make up some time. I wonder if birkits can track geens,” she added. “Or would be willing to.”

Strynn cleared her throat pointedly. “To cut to the bone,” she began, “as I said, we’re here to retrieve the regalia—and this is why …”

It was all Merryn could do to keep from screaming from pure frustration by the time Strynn had finished. Even so, she was pacing around in a narrow ellipse, unable to sit still any longer. “Damn it, damn it,
damn it!”
she raged, pausing to face her friends. “And of course you don’t know anything that’s happened since you left Tir-Eron, which means that my fool of a brother is probably sitting at Gem-Hold’s gates right now waiting for me to show up in a blaze of glory and save him.”

“I think he’s willing to save himself,” Div observed dryly. “And that sounds like you plan to simply jump back up there, and that is
not
a given.”

“He’s got the blessed gem,” Merryn growled. “He could have contacted me!”

Strynn shook her head. “It’s mad. You know that. He dares not use it—though I’ll bet anything I own that he’s tried.”

Div frowned. “You still have the other gems, don’t you?”

Merryn rounded on her. “What’s left of them! They were burned, Div. Scorched, anyway. I don’t know if they still work, and even if they do, I don’t know whether I can jump with them.”

“We did before,” Strynn countered. “You and I, when we rescued Eddyn.”

“We were fools, too!” Merryn snapped. “Besides which, I’m
not so sure that I wouldn’t be so afraid of what nearly happened before that my fear alone would sabotage my intentions—even if my surface mind wanted more than anything to return to my brother.”

“It’s a moot point anyway,” Div concluded. “For now. There’s no reason to attempt it until you’ve recovered the sword.”

Strynn rose decisively. She looked utterly drained. Then again, she had spent all night in the saddle—and here she was about to assay another day’s ride. “You don’t have to come with me,” Merryn murmured. “With a horse, it shouldn’t take long—”

“To
what
?” Strynn gritted. “To get yourself killed? These are geens you’re talking about, Merry! The most dangerous animal—or whatever—there is. We’re going with you, and
that’s
not subject to argument. I’ll—I’ll sleep in the saddle if I have to, if that’s what you’re worried about. But I
will
be there. You’ll need all the help you can get!”

“You shouldn’t,” Div warned, too loud.

Strynn glared at her, then looked away quickly, but not before Merryn had caught the exchange. “Strynn,” she said softly, “is there something you’re not telling me?”

Strynn stared at the ground. “I—”

“She’s pregnant,” Div said flatly. “We found out on the road.”

“Then that settles it!” Merryn spat, fighting back a surge of joy that was almost as strong as the mix of concern, confusion, and frustration that was already encumbering her convictions.

Strynn’s face was hard as iron. “It settles nothing, Merry. You have a duty, and I have a duty. I don’t want to lose this child. But I don’t want to lose the Kingdom either. I don’t have to tell you which one would be harder to replace. Besides, the longer I delay, the greater the risk will be.”

“No,” Merryn stated flatly.

“My chance. My child. My choice.”

“The heir to two great clans,” Merryn countered.

“My chance. My child. My choice,” Strynn repeated, not moving. “And not, except for the addition of geens, a decision I’m only making now.”

“Not a decision anyway,” Krynneth echoed softly, from where he was sitting calmly at the foot of his tree.

And for some odd reason that settled it.

A hand later—with everything Merryn had preserved from her own gear along with everything of use that could be salvaged from the Ixtian dead or butchered from the more intact portions of their mounts—they were riding north. It was slow going, granted, for the horses were tired—Boot to the point of exhaustion—and they had to make frequent stops to confirm the trail when the geen prints veered over bare rock or stretches of hard earth.

But increasingly, Merryn was heartened to find, they were moving toward the mountains and slopes of true, living green.

Avall thrust an armload of freshly harvested “cauf” ferns into Riff’s grateful care, wiped soil-stained hands on his tunic, and ambled over to where Rann was crouched at the juncture of wall and floor, midway along their shelter’s length. Rann’s arms moved rhythmically, accompanied by the raspy sound of metal on stone, and the soft ping of a hammer that made a counterpoint melody of metal on metal. Avall squatted beside him, watching.

“This stone works fairly well,” Rann offered without looking up. “Or would if we had decent tools. A quarter here with a brace of my kinsmen, and we’d have this ground as flat as the floor in the Royal Suite, and a good start on getting the walls trued. There’s plenty of height for more than one level, and it wouldn’t be hard to close off the front if we had to, though I’d as soon leave it open for the view and the ventilation. Or we could—”

Avall stilled the hammer with a touch. “You sound resigned to staying here.”

Rann paused, laid down the tools, then twisted around to look at him. A thin skim of sweat moistened his brow; his hair
was bound back with a strip of tunic trim. “There are worse places I can think of,” he said flatly.

“You’re not serious!” Avall blurted out. “About staying, I mean.”

A shrug. Rann picked up the broken knife he’d been using as a chisel and fingered its edge absently. “I repeat: There are
worse
places. Mostly what I’m doing is weighing options. One is to stay on this island; one is to establish a base on the shore; one is to hightail it back to the battle and all that entails.”

Avall snorted in frustration. “Including my obligation. I haven’t forgotten that, you know. It gnaws at me constantly.”

“I know. But something tells me that The Eight have taken you out of
that
game for a while. Not that I’d blame you for being concerned—or for trying to return. It’s your Kingdom, after all; and your family and friends at risk. And if you do decide to go back, rest assured that I’ll go with you. But in the meantime, there are supplies we’ll need. And tools. And while this island is a wonderful place, we’ll exhaust its resources before we exhaust those on the mainland—if that’s what it is—and, geens notwithstanding, we really do need to be over there well before that occurs.”

“And of course reaching the mainland is also the first step on returning to Gem-Hold.”

Rann nodded solemnly. “It is.” He paused, gazing past Avall’s head toward a new source of noise in the cave. Avall twisted round to follow his gaze. The remaining foragers were returning—which is to say Lykkon and Myx, since Bingg had assumed cooking duties for the day, and Riff was keeping an eye on Kylin, just in case. The harper seemed fine, if somewhat confused, but kept complaining of a headache and splashes of color before his blind eyes, for which reason he was lying down with a wet cloth across his brow. At least he was ambulatory. And (when not resting) was soaking up anything anyone would tell him about their present situation. “I can make a harp,” he had announced already. “A flute would be easier, though.”

“Soon,” Avall had assured him, not wishing to add that, however highly his countrymen prized music and art, both were luxuries when set against survival.

Myx, it evolved, had speared two more fish, each larger than the one that Bingg had caught the first day out; and Lykkon had shot a bird with bow and arrow—but lost an arrow in the process, which wasn’t good, even if Rann said they could strike points out of fire-glass.

Avall cleared his throat meaningfully. “Now that we’ve secured our day’s rations,” he began, “I guess it’s time to think about the future. Fortunately”—he glanced at Kylin—“we have one less thing to worry about and one more able body.”

“Marginally able,” Kylin corrected. “I’ll do what I can, but I’m not very strong, and most of the things I’m good at—”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” Avall warned. “You saved me, don’t forget. By doing that you saved countless other lives, as well as making the Chief of the Ninth Face look stupid, clumsy, and ineffectual. I’ve no doubt you’ll display similar resourcefulness here.

“In any case,” he continued, “it’s time we talked about getting off this island. It’s a fine place as far as it goes, but we obviously can’t stay here indefinitely. We’d already ruled out swimming to the mainland because that wasn’t viable with you unconscious, Kylin—and because it would take forever to get any of our gear across. And that was before we saw what lives in the water. That leaves building a raft or a boat.”

“A raft would be easier,” Riff observed. “If for no other reason than because we could build one large enough to accommodate all of us and the supplies we have here a lot faster than we could build a boat that would accomplish the same things.”

Lykkon nodded. “And while there are plenty of trees on this island, they’re either way too big to be workable, or too small. Whereas a raft—”

“There’s thick-cane down by the shore on the south side,” Bingg supplied. “I saw it from up top. There’s more up there,
for that matter, but the growth onshore is larger, plus we wouldn’t have to carry anything we made so far to set it afloat.”

“Which means that we spend the afternoon looking for cane to cut and a good place to build the thing once we’ve secured the raw materials,” Rann said with a sigh.

Avall shot him a wicked grin. “Did anyone here besides Riff spend more than a quarter at Seacraft? And if so, did you spend it studying boat-building instead of learning the names of fishes, which is mostly what I did?”

“I studied basic shipwrighting,” Myx volunteered. “But it
was
basic. I crewed a couple of fishing boats, read the prescribed texts, and helped hew a half dozen beams and true, peg, and caulk some planks.”

“Which might be useful and might not,” Avall mused. “In any case, unless someone has a better suggestion, thick-cane would seem to be our best choice. It’s light, strong, and it floats unless you pierce the chambers between the knots—and if you do that, you’ve got more problems than getting from here to shore.”

“Which sounds like we’ve just filled up the afternoon,” Lykkon chuckled. “So much for the rural life of leisure.”

“The question is,” Rann broke in, “do we have anything besides swords that will actually
cut
thick-cane? Knives will take forever, but it wouldn’t be good for our primary weapons to abuse them that way.”

“I’ve got a whetstone,” Lykkon informed him calmly. “And a saw. I’d suggest we use the latter.”

A hand later, fortified with the smaller fish and more augmented cauf, and equipped with their sturdiest clothing and virtually everything they possessed that had an edge (Rann’s caution notwithstanding), everyone except Kylin began the trek to the island’s southern shore.

For the first third of the journey, they followed the route Avall and Rann had established the previous morning—a route which actually took them out of the way for a while, since it initially tended north. Roughly halfway to the shore, however, the pitch of the path lessened significantly, so that it was possible to turn back south without having to navigate any dangerously steep slopes. The second third of their journey thus ran below their cave, midway between it and the lake, but views of either the nearer or farther coast were intermittent, courtesy of trees, which, though more widely spaced than in other places, admitted sufficient light to support a luxurious understory, which in turn allowed a wealth of head-high ferns and ankle-thick mosses to flourish. The latter made for slow going, but the ground underfoot was soft enough that a functional trail would not be slow in forming.

The last third of the journey was the most difficult, because the terrain turned very steep indeed, so much so that they finally found themselves standing on a ledge looking down at the tops of the very thick-cane they hoped to harvest. The patch itself extended a good way to either side of where they stood, with the left-hand portion blocked by a fissure too wide to jump, beyond which—and higher up, of course—the path continued maybe a dozen spans more to where a handsome waterfall frothed and rumbled beside an all but sheer escarpment that thrust a blade of stone toward the opposing shore. The upper extremes of the patch were swathed in a froth of more ferns and flowers that slopped over the ledge on which they were standing, while the lower reaches were invisible, but clearly fought an ongoing battle with a good-sized crescent of beach. All in all, it was quite beautiful—and extremely exotic, to people born to a cold and rugged land.