Gennar conceded the point with a wave of his hand.
“It’s not up to us, though,” he said. “It’s up to the elders. You think old Wulran’s going to let his only son go off by himself?”
Alasha whispered, looking at Wuller, “He just might.”
5
In fact, Wulran was not enthusiastic about the idea when it was brought up at the meeting that night, and started to object.
His wife leaned over and whispered in his ear, cutting him off short.
He stopped, startled, and listened to her; then he looked at Wuller’s face and read the solid determination there.
He shut his mouth and sat, silent and unhappy, as the others thrashed the matter out, and the next morning he embraced Wuller, then watched as the boy vanished among the trees.
It was really much easier than Wuller had expected; the dragon never gave any sign of noticing his departure at all. He just walked away, not even hiding — though he did stay under the trees, hidden from the sky.
At first, he simply walked, marking a tree-branch with his knife every few yards and heading southwest — south, because that was where all the cities were, and west to get down out of the mountains. He didn’t worry about a particular destination, or what he was going to do for food, water, or shelter. He knew that the supplies he carried with him would only last for two or three days, and that it would probably take much longer than that to find a magician, but he just couldn’t bring himself to think about that in his excitement over actually leaving the village and the dragon behind.
He took the charcoal sketch out of his pack, unrolled it, and studied it as he ambled onward beneath the pines.
Whoever the girl was, she was certainly beautiful, he thought. He wondered how long it would take him to find her.
He never doubted that he would find her eventually; after all, he had the portrait, and magic was said to be capable of almost anything. If one ancient sorcerous device could provide her image, surely modern wizardry, or some other sort of magic, would be able to locate her!
An hour or so from home he stopped for a rest, sitting down on the thick carpet of pine needles between two big roots and leaning back against the trunk of the tree he had just marked.
He had worked up an appetite already, but he resisted the temptation to eat anything. He hadn’t brought that much food, and would need to conserve it.
Of course, he would get some of his food from the countryside, or at least that was what he had planned. Perhaps he could find something right here where he sat.
Glancing around he saw a small patch of mushrooms, and he leaned over for a closer look — he knew most of the local varieties, and some of them were quite tasty, even raw.
This variety he recognized immediately, and he shuddered and didn’t touch them. They might be tasty, but nobody had ever lived long enough to say after eating them. Illuré had told him that this particular sort, with the thin white stem and the little cup at the bottom, held the most powerful poison known to humanity.
He decided he wasn’t quite so hungry after all, and instead he took a drink from his water flask; surely, finding drinking water would be easy enough! If he kept on heading downhill, sooner or later he would find a stream.
Far more important than food or water, he thought, was deciding where to go. He had talked about going all the way to Ethshar, but that was hundreds of miles away; no one from the village had ever been to Ethshar. Surely he wouldn’t really need to go that far!
He looked about, considering.
His home, he knew, was in the region of Srigmor, which had once been claimed by the Baronies of Sardiron. The claim had been abandoned long ago; the North Mines weren’t worth the trouble of working, when the mines of Tazmor and Aldagmor were so much richer and more accessible, and Srigmor had nothing else that a baron would consider worth the trouble of surviving a winter there.
Sardiron was still there to the south, though.
To the west lay unnamed, uninhabited forests; he did not want to go there. True, beyond them lay the seacoast, and there might be people there, but it would be a long, hard, dangerous journey, and he knew nothing about what he might find there.
To the southwest the forests were said to end after about three days’ travel, opening out onto the plain of Aala. If Srigmor were part of any nation now, it was part of Aala.
He had never heard of any magicians living in Aala, though. He tended to associate magicians with cities and castles, not with farms and villages, and Aala had no cities or castles.
The Baronies of Sardiron it would be, then.
His grandfather had visited Sardiron once, had made the long trip to the Council City itself, Sardiron of the Waters. If his grandfather could do it, so could he.
He stood up, brushed off pine needles, and marched onward, now heading almost directly south.
6
Streams were harder to find than he had thought, and not all were as clean as he liked; after the first day he made it a point to fill his flask at every opportunity, and to drink enough at each clear stream to leave himself feeling uncomfortably bloated.
His food ran out at breakfast the third day, and he discovered edible mushrooms weren’t as common as he had expected — though the poisonous ones seemed plentiful enough — and that rabbits and squirrels and chipmunks were harder to catch than he had realized. Skinning and cooking them was also far more work than he had expected it to be; the hunters and cooks at home had made it look so easy!
He almost broke his belt knife when it slipped while he was holding a dead squirrel on a large rock as he tried to gut it; he felt the shock in his wrist as the blade slipped and then snagged hard on a seam in the rock, and he held his breath, afraid that he had snapped off the tip.
He hadn’t, but from then on he was more careful. The knife was an absolutely essential item now. He wished he had had the sense to borrow another, so as to have a spare.
He had made good time the first two days, but after that much of his effort went to hunting, cooking, eating, and finding someplace safe to sleep. He dropped from seven or eight leagues a day to about four.
He had expected to find villages, where he could ask for food and shelter. He didn’t. He knew that there were villages within three or four leagues of his own, and assumed there were more scattered all through Srigmor, but somehow he never managed to come across any. He saw distant smoke several times, but never managed to find its source.
By the third night he was very tired indeed of sleeping on dead leaves or pine needles, wrapped in his one thin blanket. Even in the mild weather of late spring, the nights could be chilly — so chilly that only utter exhaustion let him sleep.
Late on the afternoon of the fourth day, though, his luck finally changed. He saw a break in the forest cover ahead and turned toward it, since such openings were often made by fallen trees that rotted out and became home to various edible creatures.
This opening, however, was not made by just one fallen tree. Rather, an entire line had been cleared away, and the surface below was completely free of debris. It was a long ribbon of hard-packed dirt edged by grass, with two shallow ruts running parallel for its entire length, and Wuller realized with a start that he was looking at a highway.