Watersmeet (18 page)

The answer came all too soon. They followed the cacophony, not to the destroyed wall as they expected but to the very center of the garden, where only yesterday Abisina had basked in peace. That memory was far from the sight that now met her eyes: rocks from Vigar’s grave lay strewn across the clearing, which had been trampled to a muddy mess. Many of the rowan’s branches had been ripped from its trunk. In the middle of this destruction stood a minotaur with tiny, hate-filled eyes, poised to impale them on its vicious horns.

For an instant, no one moved. And then the monster lowered its head and charged.

Abisina let her first arrow fly seconds after Haret threw his hatchet, and she had another on her string before either had a chance to hit their targets. With a clumsy swipe, the minotaur batted aside Haret’s hatchet, but he lifted his head to do it and Abisina’s arrow, aimed at the minotaur’s eye, caught him instead in the shoulder. Abisina loosed her second arrow, but this one went wide. The minotaur wrenched the first arrow from its shoulder and stared at it in surprise before Haret, dashing to retrieve his axe, caught its attention. With a roar the minotaur lunged for the dwarf, turning its back on Abisina.

She took another shot and managed to hit the minotaur on the upper arm. It stopped and roared again, but still bent its fury on Haret. Abisina grasped a branch and swung into a tree. From this vantage, she watched Haret face the monster, hatchet again in his grasp, and she readied another arrow. Haret dashed in and struck the beast’s shin with his blade. The minotaur reared back in pain. Here was Abisina’s chance! Her arrow lanced the minotaur’s ear beneath its horn, and it spun around to find this new tormentor.

Abisina was ready. This arrow found a vulnerable spot—its left eye. The minotaur clamped a hand over its face, blood seeping between its fingers, as it staggered around the clearing. Haret closed in, hitting it in the thigh, on the knee, and in its belly. Abisina got off three more shots, two sinking deep in the minotaur’s back and side.

The minotaur had had enough. One hand pressed to its face, the other to its stomach, the beast turned and lumbered away from the burial place. Haret and Abisina pursued until it reached the breach in the wall, stumbled through and slipped down the mountainside, leaving clots of blood on the sun-drenched stones.

Halfway down the slope, a slight figure with a staff met the minotaur and followed it out of sight.

Abisina sank down on the rubble of the ruined wall.

“How did you learn to shoot like that?” Haret choked out between labored breaths.

“Everyone in Vranille learned in case of a centaur attack,” Abisina answered, panting.

“I thought he had me there, then your arrow ripped his ear in two!” Haret dropped next to her, his bloody axe still clutched in his hand. “Minotaurs!”

“This is what I sensed,” Abisina said. “It is the beginning.”

“What is?” Haret asked.

“It’s what Vigar said when she told me to go to Watersmeet and warn my father. She said her ancient enemy had returned. Maybe this minotaur is part of that. It shouldn’t have been here. Can’t you feel how it’s broken the peace of the garden?”

Haret nodded. “I’m not sure about this ghost of yours, but it sounds like the sooner we get to Watersmeet the better.”

They stayed one more day in Vigar’s garden at Abisina’s insistence. It felt wrong to leave it torn apart. While Haret repaired the break in the wall, she cleaned the grave. She put the stones back in a circle, cleared the dirt away from the spring, and cut back the broken branches on the rowan. It didn’t look perfect when she was through, but some of the peacefulness returned. Maybe the minotaur
wasn’t
a harbinger of a larger evil, Abisina told herself. Haret waited for her by the archway until she had said her good-bye to Vigar’s grave.

Their sacks bulged with fruit, and the water skins dripped. Abisina picked up her gear and put it on; despite the load, the sack hung comfortably at her side. Haret led her to the central room and then through a maze of passages and down a steep slope to a crack in the wall that looked out onto another world: the thin air and chill of the high mountains.

Abisina and Haret squeezed into the sunshine, slipping down the gravelly slope before they could get their footing. Behind them, a jumble of rocks with a few knobby points jutted into the sky, but when they glanced back they could find no trace of Vigar’s garden—no wall, no archways, no hint of the sweet fruit on the wind. They couldn’t even find the crack they had just come through.

They stared back for a moment longer before setting their gaze forward and making their way down the mountain.

They headed northwest, as Vigar had instructed. Without talking about it, they had taken to traveling by day, eager to see the features of this new land. On the second day, they came to the torrent of a large river cutting its way south through gorges and stony beds. Abisina had never seen a river this large, and she stood transfixed by it, absorbing its power, its roar, its call. “The River Deliverance,” she said, sure that this was Vigar’s river. As if in agreement, the necklace at her throat glowed warm against her skin.

“It has to be,” Haret replied. “And it runs due north as your ghost said it would. Let’s go.”

But Abisina lingered by the river, head tilted toward the sky, eyes closed, ears filled with the water’s thunder.

Then she felt a shadow pass over, and Haret was hissing at her to stay silent and pulling her urgently toward the trees twenty paces behind them. When they reached cover, Haret stopped and looked skyward, his face tight.

Abisina followed his eyes as she put an arrow to her bow.

An enormous creature—terrible and beautiful—flew away to the west, sunlight glinting off its shiny wings. Its great head was balanced by a long, tapering tail whipping through the air behind it. Even from this distance, they could hear the rush of wings pumping up and down and the wind whistling through the spikes that marched from its head to the tip of its tail.

Dragon.
The word came to Abisina with no prompting from Haret, a creature Sina had brought to life in countless stories by the fire. “Did it see us?” she whispered.

“I don’t know. Either it didn’t—which would be very strange; they have sharp vision—or it’s not hungry. Either way, we are very lucky.”

Is it another sign? Abisina wondered. Like the minotaur?

“Are they—common?” she asked as she stared after the dragon, which had become indistinguishable against the rocky slopes.

Haret shrugged. “Not in the south. But I would have said the same about minotaurs, and now we’ve met four!”

“Will it come back?”

“We’d better stick to the trees for now.”

The dragon did not return, but Abisina glanced skyward whenever the tangle of brush, trees, and vines drove them to the riverbank. And she kept an arrow nocked, though she knew it would do little against the hide of a dragon. Then Haret discovered some wolf tracks: “the strangest wolf tracks this dwarf has ever seen—no front feet and back feet bigger than a large man’s. They shouldn’t be out much in the day, but keep that arrow ready, human,” he concluded, drawing his own axe.

Despite her fears, anticipation grew with each step. As they rounded bend after bend in the river, she expected to see Watersmeet before her. Neither of them knew what it would look like. Haret insisted that Watersmeet was underground, populated with survivors from the Obrun City. But Abisina disagreed.

“It’s going to be beautiful,” she insisted.

“The Obrun City was more beautiful than anything you’ve ever imagined!” Haret contended hotly.

“I know, I know. But Watersmeet will be—different, somehow.” She frowned. What did she expect of Watersmeet—a city of stone? A tower? A fortress on a hill? None of these pictures was grand enough. “It will be beyond what we can imagine” was all she could offer.

Her father, too, was beyond her imagination. Sina had described him as having raven hair, dark eyes, copper skin like her own, and . . . beautiful. How could all this be true? She conjured up the vision she had always held of Vran—tall and broad, golden hair, piercing blue eyes, a look of judgment on his face. She tried to shade his features, darken his hair and eyes. Would her father have that look of judgment when this daughter from the south appeared before him?

r

It was almost evening on the third day since they left Vigar’s garden. Abisina climbed among the boulders on the edge of the river, well behind Haret. Tall pines grew thickly there, leaving only a small margin of rock between the forest and the torrent. Her pace had slowed and she was lost in the wild rhythm of the water, half expecting Vigar’s voice to speak through the roar.

Ahead, the river made a turn toward the west, and Haret stopped.
Maybe he’s found a place to spend the night
, Abisina thought. But this seemed unlikely. The daylight of early summer lasted late in the evening, and Haret never stopped until the light was completely gone.
He’s probably waiting to scold me for going slowly
, she decided. But Haret did not stare back at her with arms folded as he usually did. Abisina’s curiosity peaked, and she scrambled on as fast as she could, ignoring the lingering ache in her right foot.

She caught up with Haret, who stood perfectly still, hands at his side, gaping at something.

“What is it?” she asked, breathing hard.

“What do you think
that
is?” Haret said, pointing.

Abisina followed his finger. Before them, roots spanning the width of the river, stood—what could she call it except a tree? But its girth and height made the pines around it look like saplings—pines that until that moment she would have judged to be taller than any tree in the forests near Vranille. Twenty men couldn’t hold hands in a ring around this tree, Abisina guessed. It was some kind of fir with a straight, tall trunk, branchless for a third of its height, then opening to a sudden skirt of limbs, which tapered to a point at the top. The light from the setting sun gilded the top of the tree like a jewel in a crown and turned the river to gold.

“Watersmeet,” she murmured as Haret nodded. “Do we—do we just walk up to it then?” Now that they were here, she was terrified.

“I guess we should,” Haret said without stirring from his spot.

“Well, then, let’s go.”

“Yes. Let’s.”

Neither of them moved.

“Maybe we should spend the night here?” Haret suggested.

“It might be better to arrive in the morning,” Abisina said.

They both began taking off their sacks when she stopped herself. “Haret! What are we doing? We’re almost there! We have to go on.”

He sighed. “You’re right. But what if—”

“I know. I’m scared, too.”

They put their bags back over their shoulders and kept going, side by side.

The details of Watersmeet became clearer. That first tree was the beginning of a grove of giants that widened and stretched north, several rivers winding among the trunks. Their great, gnarled roots arched across the current like bridges. The closer they came, the taller the trees seemed, until Abisina could see the tops only by leaning back so far that she almost toppled over.

In the last moments of twilight, they arrived at the spot where one of the roots spanning the river plunged into the opposite bank, creating a natural bridge leading right into the island of trees.

Haret bent down and studied the root. “The top is worn. This is where they cross.”

“Do we go over?”

“Maybe I should scout around more first,” he said doubtfully.

Abisina was studying the mass of dark trees when a spark of light flashed from between the trunks, glittering on the water, as if someone had lit a lantern.

“Look!” She pointed as another spark shone out over the water.

When a third spark appeared, Haret said, “Let’s go then. But be careful.”

Abisina stepped onto the bridge and walked steadily until they began to descend the bridge’s arch. Then her steps slowed. Ahead more lights shone, and in the lights, something that stopped her heart: something—someone was down there. Many someones. One of them might be her father! All her dreams were about to be realized. She was about to arrive in Watersmeet. She froze.