Wild Blood (Book 7) (8 page)

“I know,” Lady Rivkah said softly, her hand on Ria’s shoulder. “The first time I saw it, I was amazed, too. It’s like another world, isn’t it?”

Another world indeed. Ria shivered. Her mother’s world, her brother’s world, her people’s world. Her world, if she hadn’t been exiled from it. No, whatever her foster mother might be feeling, it wasn’t this.

The road curved to avoid the forest by a good margin. Around midday Lord Sharl halted the wagons, and he and Lady Rivkah saddled their horses and rode off toward the forest alone, much to the dismay of the guards and of Ria, who had begged hard to go with them. Lord Sharl and Lady Rivkah rode back and forth along the forest’s edge for almost an hour, occasionally calling out in Olvenic without result, and then returned discouraged to the wagons.

“Nothing,” Lord Sharl said disgustedly. “Not even arrows. We’d have been throwing our lives down the privy to ride in there, though, no doubt.”

“There’ll be other chances,” Lady Rivkah said comfortingly. “Remember, so much of this part of the forest burned. A good deal of that’s new growth, and that means the trees won’t be large enough for their hanging huts and so on. Likely the outermost clans moved deeper into the forest with the game. There may simply be nobody living here now.”

“No sentries, no wide patrols to watch the edge of the forest?” Lord Sharl said skeptically. “The elves must have grown a good deal calmer and more trusting, then, than they used to be.”

It took days to ride around the northeastern side of the forest, and Ria continued to marvel at the size of it. At the southeast edge of the forest, a smaller track branched off from the trade road, and Lord Sharl said this was the road to Allanmere.

“The south side’s much narrower,” he told her, pulling out a map to show her the wedge-like shape of the forest. “It’ll only be a short ride around the southern tip, alongside the river, and then we’ll be almost at the city.”

On the south side of the forest, the road passed through a narrow strip of open ground separating the forest to the north from the broad expanse of the Brightwater River to the south. It was Ria’s first glimpse of the river on which her foster father was laying so many of his hopes, and Ria was rather disappointed. It was big and deep-looking, yes, but it was placid and muddy and not much different otherwise from the streams Ria had seen.

At the southern edge of the forest they stopped again. Lady Rivkah told Ria that this part of the forest had once been the territory of a friendly elven clan called the Brightwaters, who had allied with Rowan and the city during the barbarian invasion, and Lord Sharl had hopes of contacting them. Once again, Ria and Cyril were not permitted to approach the forest, and they amused themselves along the riverbank, even Cyril eager to stretch his legs after the long wagon ride. Poking in the rushes at the river’s edge, Ria saw a length of what looked like rope tied to a stake driven into the bank and trailing into the water. She nudged Cyril.

“What’s that?” she asked, pointing.

Cyril pulled on the rope, eventually drawing to light a sort of woven basket of willow switches.

“It’s a fish trap,” he said. “The elves must have set it. It’s too far from the city.”

“Then there
are
elves here,” Ria said, delighted. “We’ve come around most of the forest edge. I thought they’d all gone away or something.”

Cyril gave a short chuckle of derision.

“Where would they go?” he said. “A whole forest full of elves? They’re not like the elves in the eastern cities. They wouldn’t fit in anywhere else, and they don’t know anything outside their own forest. There’s nowhere else they
could
go, even if they wanted to.” He glanced toward the forest, then gasped, pointing. “Look!”

Lord Sharl and Lady Rivkah were riding away from the forest as fast as the terrified horses could run. Ria could see what looked like flies buzzing out of the forest after them; then Ria realized that what she saw must be arrows. Guards rode out to meet them, but Lord Sharl and Lady Rivkah were fortunately already out of range of the deadly missiles. One of the guards, more heavily armored, risked the lethal rain to ride in closer and retrieve one of the arrows.

Lord Sharl examined the feathered fletching and the painted band on the arrow shaft and shook his head grimly.

“This isn’t a Brightwater arrow,” he said. “It looks like Blue-eyes to me. Gods know I’ll never forget the arrows we pulled out of ourselves and our horses and—” He glanced at Ria and did not finish whatever it was he would have said. “That’s bad news. It means that the Blue-eyes must have claimed a good part of the border lands, as I’d feared.

The Brightwaters might have dealt with us peaceably. The Blue-eyes will never let us close enough to be heard, no matter what gestures of friendliness we make, and getting past those lands to even try to reach Rowan is going to be difficult.”

Ria could see that her foster parents were sorely disappointed by this turn of events, but there was nothing to be done. They quietly returned to the wagons and continued along the river.

Once they rounded the southern edge of the forest and turned back to the northwest, Ria caught her first sight of the city of Allanmere. Again, she was disappointed. The size of the wall indicated a large city indeed—larger even than Cielman, it appeared—but the wall was crumbled and ruined in many places, the great stone gates fallen into disrepair. Ria could not see much over the wall, but the few structures she could see through the crumbled gaps were fallen in and roofless. Ria remembered from the histories how the city had been bombarded with boulders and fireballs by the barbarian army before the wall had finally collapsed in places to admit the invaders. She shivered. Had they come this far only to live in a ruin?

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Lord Sharl said kindly, riding beside Ria. “A good part of the inner keep has been rebuilt. Most of what you’re seeing now were barracks and guild halls. The west and north sides of the city are in much better shape, and the wall’s almost entirely intact along the river and the swamp. The south and east sides of the city were the worst hit, and those buildings will be the last repaired, too. Most of the people moving into the city want houses nearer the market at the center.”

“How many people are in the city now?” Ria asked dubiously. Could anyone live in a city as tumbledown as this one appeared? There was certainly nobody to be seen—no, surely those tiny moving dots atop solid sections of the wall were guards, or possibly stonemasons.

“In the city itself, somewhere between a thousand and half again as much,” Lord Sharl told her. “Probably another hundred or two farming the surrounding lands. The farmers will be the slowest returning, I’m afraid. Most of those who left have settled elsewhere. When we first founded the city, good farmland was hard to find in the settled lands and there were plenty of families looking for land of their own. Since the invasion, there’s more good farmland available near the larger, well-established cities than there are farmers to work it. Farmers aren’t quite so ready to pack up their families and take a chance anymore.”

Ria looked back at the forest, so tantalizingly close to the city. How many elves lived in the cool shade of the mighty trees? Surely they’d scorn crumbling stone walls and half-deserted cities.

Riders approached from the city—guards, but none Ria recognized. These were guards Lord Sharl had been hiring for the past two years, sending them south to oversee the reconstruction of the city. They were recognizable as guards only by their chain armor and military bearing; under the padding, they wore rough homespun like any peasant.

The guards cheered Lord Sharl’s arrival, and Ria was surprised at their casual familiarity. Despite their “milords,” they greeted the High Lord of their city much as they might one of their own number, clapping him on the shoulder or clasping wrists with him. Lady Rivkah they treated with rather more deference, but Ria wondered whether that was not because she was a mage or a woman, rather than their High Lady. High Lord Emaril had apparently demanded much more formality from his guardsmen, if the behavior of the guards at his keep was any indicator.

Instead of entering at the south gate of the city, the guards led them around the wall to the east gate, what they called the Sun Gate, telling Lord Sharl apologetically that the south side of the city was still in very poor shape and some of the buildings fronting the street were of dubious stability. Ria didn’t doubt it; riding past the wall, she could see huge gaps, many ringed with scorching even sixteen years’ worth of rain had not washed away. The Gate had been repaired to some extent, but obviously it had been the target of a more sustained attack, and to Ria’s untrained eye it seemed ready to collapse. As Ria rode through the cracked street, tumbled buildings choked with debris on either side of her, she wondered how any of the city could possibly be any worse than what she saw. In one spot they had to detour through alleys to skirt a huge crack in the earth, the edges of which had crumbled alarmingly.

To Ria’s amazement, Lord Sharl rode perilously close to the crack, chuckling as he peered down into it.

“Rivkah, I think between you and your teacher, you did more damage to the city than the invading army,” he grinned.

“You did
that?”
Ria asked her foster mother, greatly impressed.

“Of course she did,” Cyril said irritably. “It was in the histories.”

“Well, we meant to cause an earthquake,” Lady Rivkah said, flushing slightly. “We just didn’t mean to cause quite that
much
of one. You know,” she added defensively, “we’d hardly more than experimented in pooling our magical energy and working together. It’s not as though we had much time to perfect a multimage lattice, with barbarians pouring through the walls and half the city on fire. It was no small trick to manage the earthquake and such a large illusion at the same time, either.”

Ria grinned in appreciation, both at the feat of magic and at the size of the crack it had left. Lord Sharl had commissioned a tapestry depicting the event, and now that Ria associated the crack with the event, she could truly appreciate the skill of the weavers—she could never have otherwise imagined the huge fiery figure climbing up out of the flaming crack. It had been a clever idea, to create the illusion that the fire-god enemy of the barbarians’ ice god was crawling forth to defend the city. Ria had been proud when Lady Rivkah told her that her mother Chyrie had been the one to suggest it. That idea had likely won the war, even if the city had been all but ruined afterward, even if most of Lord Sharl’s hard-won settlers had abandoned the place.

As they rode farther into the city, however, Ria saw that the city was not, in fact, deserted. Nearer the center of town, several buildings had been nicely restored into shops or houses, complete to weather tight shutters and baked-clay tile roofs. There were peasants, too, in the streets, bent on various errands of their own. Some were clearing rubble out of buildings or setting stone blocks in place, apparently refurbishing houses or shops for their own use; others were repairing the roads for more general use.

Children running in the streets stopped to watch the wagons curiously, many of them pointing to Ria and whispering excitedly. Most of the adults stopped to look, too, and Ria fancied that their expressions when they looked at her seemed to show rather more hostility than simple curiosity. Ria shivered and drew herself up. Hadn’t they been told that High Lord Sharl’s foster daughter (and their soon-to-be High Lady) was an elf, or were they simply that unhappy about it?

There were other signs of life in the city, too. At the center of the city where the road turned north was the market, and there were stalls there although it wasn’t even midweek, peasants selling early vegetables and other wares from trays or carts, and even a few small merchants offering their wares directly from their wagons. Ria had never been allowed to prowl the market in Cielman, and she pleaded to have a chance to look around, but Lady Rivkah shook her head sternly.

“When there’s time, I’ll take you to the market,” Lady Rivkah said gently. “It isn’t safe for you to go alone just yet. Sharl has had to take who he can get for settlers here, and some of them are rough people. And after so many have been shot at just for getting too close to the forest, I’m afraid you wouldn’t be very well received in the city until the citizens come to know who you are.”

A smaller wall separated the keep from the rest of the city, and this wall was largely intact. There were more guards here, mostly working on the wall at the moment, and what might be servants going about their business in preparation for the High Lord’s arrival. Many of these folk stopped what they were doing, too, to rush to greet Lord Sharl and his family as they rode along the outside of the keep’s wall toward the gate.

As Lord Sharl had said, the northern and western portions of the city, largely protected from attack by the natural barriers of the Brightwater River to the west and the swamp to the north, had remained relatively undamaged. A few buildings had fallen, but Ria speculated that that might have happened during the earthquake Lady Rivkah had spoken of, as she saw little of the fire damage she’d seen farther to the east. As Cyril had speculated, however, the keep itself, incomplete when the battle had begun and struck by massive attacks, had suffered tremendous damage. One of the keep’s two large towers had collapsed completely, and the jumbled blocks, shattered and scorched, still lay where they’d fallen at the corner of the keep. Ria stared at the ruined tower and shivered. Her mother’s mate had died on that tower, and Lady Rivkah’s teacher, too. Might the ruined tower, or even the whole keep now, be haunted?

The chirrit pup scrambled out of Ria’s tunic to sit on her shoulder, nuzzling her ear, and Ria was unaccountably comforted. This shabby stone city might not be where she truly belonged, but it was better than Lord Emaril’s country keep. Who knew what manner of adventures a curious young elf could have here? Certainly something more interesting than baiting her governess and hiding in the stable loft. And the forest
was
closer, much closer than it had ever been in her life. Yes, this place might suit her very well, indeed.