A broad smile crossed the young armsman/smith’s face.
“Be careful with your blade. You want to live to start that smithy,” Nylan advised.
Sias looked down sheepishly and scuffed a battered boot in the yellow dust.
“Best you go.” Tonsar’s eyes flicked toward the eastern hills.
After a moment of silence, Nylan nodded, then turned and walked his mount and the pack mare toward the stoop where Sylenia waited. Ayrlyn led her mount and Sylenia’s after the pair Nylan guided.
The nursemaid walked forward and handed Weryl to Nylan. The smith eased his silver-haired son into the seat behind Sylenia’s saddle, while she lugged her bags-and the two bags of hard biscuits and cheese and other assorted provisions Nylan had commandeered-toward the pack mare.
“Orse. Orse.” Weryl jabbed his hand toward his father.
“Definitely a horse.” Nylan fastened the straps in place, then stepped back and pulled the floppy hat from his belt. No sense in getting further blistered by the sun that remained far too hot for too much of the year.
“Ready?”
“I’ve been ready,” answered Ayrlyn.
“I know. I’ve been talking too much.” He swung up into the saddle. After a last gesture like a salute to Tonsar and Sias, he turned the mare toward the lane and the road southward.
Tonsar raised his bare blade in return, holding it up for a time. Sias just stood silently by the subofficer as the four horses carried their riders out of the encampment and toward the brown slopes of the hills to the south.
“Wadah pease, Enyah?” asked Weryl.
“In a moment…a moment,” choked the woman.
Nylan glanced back at the valley, more yellowed and dusty than ever under the pitiless sun and the green-blue sky, then toward the long and dusty road ahead.
CV
Themphi checked the saddlebags again, then mounted. The lancer officers behind followed his example. Belatedly, so did Fissar.
The white mage glanced back at the small house that had been his quarters for more than a season, frowning momentarily as he saw the green wall to the north.
“I don’t understand, ser,” said Fissar, easing his mount up beside Themphi’s. “His Mightiness sent us here to hold back the forest, and now that you’ve pushed it back here on the south, we’re supposed to leave it and go to Syadtar? And let it take over everything we’ve won back?”
“Yes,” answered Themphi.
“One questions the lord of Cyad at great risk,” offered Majer Jyncka, from where he rode on Themphi’s left. “I know.”
“You are pleased to leave?” asked Themphi, turning to Jyncka.
“It is a chance to redeem myself in battle.”
“Battle?” asked Fissar. “The dispatch…it did not mention a battle,” he finished lamely.
“I see you have mastered some of my lessons. The ones about screeing what you could not see.” Themphi laughed. “Would you were so assiduous with all of them.”
Fissar kept his eyes on his mount’s mane.
“Young magelet,” offered the majer after they had covered another kay westward and toward the Grand Canal, “one must read not only what is written, but what is meant. Sometimes, the most important words are those which are not committed to parchment.”
Fissar nodded solemnly, waiting, not glancing toward the white mage.
“Syadtar is the northernmost city in Cyador. If something is pressing enough that His Mightiness must recall your master and a disgraced lancer officer from battling the Accursed Forest, then either a great campaign is planned against the northern barbarians or they threaten us. Either way means a battle-or many battles.”
“The news is not the best,” added Themphi, “not for Cyador.”
Fissar turned toward his master.
“For its size, Cyador has not that many lancers and foot soldiers and mages. Triendar knows that the Accursed Forest will swell in our absence, yet has chosen to summon us.”
“No, that is not good news,” Jyncka agreed. “Yet Cyador has always prevailed. How could it be otherwise?”
Themphi frowned, but said nothing as they rode westward.
CVI
After adjusting the floppy hat and drying his forehead, Nylan stood in the stirrups to try to stretch his legs and thighs, and to unkink his knees. When he reseated himself, he glanced out across the rolling hills of sun-browned grass, hills that seemed to extend forever southward. “Two days and the hills still seem endless.”
“Another day and they’ll get flatter, more like steppes or high grasslands,” predicted Ayrlyn. “Just think what it would be like on foot.”
Nylan winced. His lips and mouth seemed dry all the time, and the water in their bottles was nearly gone. “We don’t have that much water left.”
After the first day, they had turned off the main road and followed a trail that led more to the southeast, back toward the still-distant Westhorns. Nylan thought he recalled that the mountains extended farther westward in the southern half of Candar, but that could have been wishful thinking. Then, anymore, what wasn’t wishful thinking?
A thin stream from an underground spring that dried up as it flowed south had been the only water they had found. He licked his dry lips with a tongue almost as dry.
“If we keep on this trail, I think there’s a small lake ahead.”
“And probably a town, with a garrison of white lancers or the local equivalent.”
“I didn’t sense that. There might be some holdings.”
“How far?”
“A good half day, maybe longer.”
“We’ll need water before that.”
“We do need water,” said Sylenia. “You are mages.”
“Waada…” added Weryl from his seat behind the nursemaid’s saddle.
“I’m not a mage,” protested Nylan. Even as he spoke the words, his head throbbed. Was his internal lie detector insisting he was? “Anyway, just being a mage doesn’t mean we can find water.”
The sun continued to beat on their backs as they rode to the southeast, along the trail where the dust had gradually shifted from the yellow of Syskar to a grayed brown, mixed with sand.
Still, underneath the browned grass, Nylan could sense the boulders and stones that were too close to the surface, separated from the sun and light by that same thin line of chaotic order.
“It’s still the same,” Ayrlyn said. “They must have…I don’t know what.”
Neither did Nylan, but it felt wrong. He tried to lick his lips, but his tongue was dry, and there was no water left in the bottles on the mare. Had he drunk his too quickly?
By mid-afternoon they had crossed two or three more lines of hills and found no sign of streams, ponds, or springs-or of settlers, just more lines of hills covered with sun-browned grass.
They reined up at another hill crest, perhaps two more lines of hills later.
“There’s something down there.” Ayrlyn pointed almost due south, where a slightly higher hill cast a shadow over a flat, barely shining surface.
“I thought there weren’t any lakes this close. That’s not your lake, is it?”
“It doesn’t feel like a lake,” admitted the redhead.
“It be a lake,” said Sylenia. “It needs be a lake.”
With that Nylan could definitely agree.
As their mounts carried them downhill and closer, he could see that the flat surface was a small lake or a large pond, but it looked almost bright green, even in the late afternoon shadow. Even the shores of the lake were sere, without vegetation. There were no signs of houses.
Nylan continued to study the ground around the lake, finally noting several circular arrangements of stone in bare spots between the irregular clumps of brown grass on the higher ground to the south and east of the dried lake bed. “Someone’s had a campsite here-not recently.”
The mare’s hoofs crackled as she left the sparse grassy flat around the lake bed and carried Nylan down the gentle barren slope toward the edge of the water. There, he dismounted slowly, and swallowed.