There was a problem with that as well.
Highly placed sages of his suborder had learned to use Chârmun—“Sanctuary”—and its few “children” about the world as portals from one to another. No one would do so lightly; well, all right, he’d sought Chârmun’s assistance a bit more than anyone else had. And now, even though he was not highly placed anymore, nothing could take that ability from him.
However ... outcast, disgraced, and worse, if he was caught doing so, he did not want to know what would happen. Well, he did think banishment was the next possibility, but they would have to catch him first.
There was a legend reaching back to the beginning of the Forgotten History. An ancestor of the Lhoin’na—and the an’Cróan—had been a leader of the allied forces in the Great War.
Sorhkafâré—“the Light upon the Grass”—took a cutting from Chârmun and left with those who would follow him. Some of the first Fay-born, including wolves whose descendants would become the majay-hì, joined him too. He led them across the world to establish a new territory on the eastern continent. There he planted that cutting, which became Roise Chârmune—the “Seed of Sanctuary”—at the heart of what would become those ancestors’ burial ground.
Chuillyon knew this legend was true.
With Chârmun’s assistance, he had briefly sneaked into that land a few times over many years. It seemed he would have to do so again for more serious snooping about.
Finally resigned, he rose and left the common house, leaving behind the full goblet. Heading through the city and out its northern side, he entered a path that led out into the thickest part of the central forest. He knew the way so well that he did not have to watch his steps. But as he drew closer to Chârmun’s clearing, he slowed to approach with care and peeked carefully around each turn in the path. He listened to the forest as well before sneaking onward.
The last thing he needed was to be caught here, and not just by members of his former caste or the Shé’ith. As he spotted Chârmun’s faint glimmer through the forest, he heard voices behind him along the path.
“Are we nearly there?” a deep, annoyed voice demanded in Numanese.
Chuillyon froze and looked about for any place to hide.
“Yes, nearly,” answered another. “Chap, you should lead. I have already failed to find where we must go.”
Chuillyon knew that voice and ducked off the path. Momentarily tangled in leafy, damp vines, he thrashed into the dense undergrowth, hoping no one heard. There he crouched behind a dank, moss-coated oak.
An instant later, Osha pushed through along the path.
Chuillyon was quickly distracted by someone else.
A red-haired male Rughìr, or dwarf, followed closely behind the young an’Cróan.
Chuillyon recognized the dwarf, though a name escaped him. He had seen the same one in Wynn’s company on her visit to his land, just before he had tracked her all the way to lost Bäalâle Seatt. And last down the path came a tall, mature, silver-gray majay-hì.
This was rather disconcerting, aside from Wynn’s own black companion. Just how many Fay-born had taken to wandering the world with outsiders?
Once the trio passed by and were a little ways down the path, Chuillyon slipped out of the brush more carefully than he had slipped in. It was not hard to follow them, considering the grumbling of the dwarf, who constantly swatted aside branches and vines that got in the way of his wide body.
What business did these three have so close to the presence of Chârmun?
Chuillyon crept after them.
Wayfarer sat with her legs folded to one side upon the mulchy ground. With Shade beside her, she looked up through a break in the forest’s canopy at a clear, starlit sky. And here in this place, there were always majay-hì within sight.
She had grown more accustomed to them via Shade’s guardianship and comfort. Sometimes they still reminded her of their kind in her lost homeland who had spied upon her and had likely done so for years before she was aware of them. She no longer feared that.
Wayfarer had never seen—dreamed—of anything like this place.
Strange bulging lanterns of opaque amber glass hung in the lower branches of maples, oaks, and startlingly immense firs. If one looked closely into the trees’ thick foliage, tiny trinkets and other odd items could be seen bound to their limbs by raw threads of shéot’a, something the Lhoin’na used to make shimmer cloth. All of those trees loosely framed a broad gully with gently sloping sides that stretched ahead.
Decades of leaf fall had hampered much undergrowth, leaving the way clear for the most part. Yet, ivy still climbed over exposed boulders and around and up evergreens. Bushy ferns grew here and there, breaking through the mulch that now crackled under loping, scurrying paws.
A pack of five adult majay-hì, along with four pups, engaged in their own form of communication all around her. Of course, the young ones were less interested in “talking” and more interested in who could stay the longest atop their rolling, running pile of little bodies. All dashed about past one another in rubbing heads, muzzles, or even shoulders ... for they spoke with their own memories.
It was a language like no other.
Wayfarer had been learning it ... hearing it ... seeing it in her own mind. It now took only the barest touch of fingertips in fur.
Should she wish, Wayfarer could have reached out and touched them as they ran past. Flashes of their memories would be shared with her. If not for Shade guiding her, rather than Vreuvillä, this might have been terror rather than a revelation. But once it sank in, it changed everything.
Vreuvillä had said as much in a strange way. “They will prepare you.”
Wayfarer had not known what that meant. Prepare her for what? Then later, she did not care.
She had once believed herself an outsider, reviled and spied upon by the majay-hì of her own lost homeland. When they had come near her, hiding in the bushes and staring, she had thought this indicated their judgment that she did not belong.
How wrong she had been.
Majay-hì here were of all the colors she had known and feared. There were mottled brown, silver gray, near-black ones, and more. But there were none so black as Shade or any white like Shade’s mother, the one Wynn had named Lily.
The white majay-hì—Chap’s mate and Shade’s mother—had set Wayfarer on the path to this place through a terrible journey.
It had taken a while, but Shade occasionally joined the others in their touching memory-talk. Not right now, though. Wayfarer leaned over and rested the side of her face against Shade’s neck. Almost instantly, a word rose into her head out of her own memories—in Magiere’s voice.
—Dinner?—
Wayfarer sighed and pressed her face deeper in Shade’s fur. Even for all of the memories shared, she had come to like Shade’s “voices” in her head almost more.
“Soon ... not just yet,” she answered, the answer somewhat muffled.
Even Shade was such a complication, though Wayfarer had grown to need her desperately. Shade was “sister” to Wynn, ally of Chane, and even friend to Osha. Perhaps in another time and place Wayfarer might have shunned Shade as she had Osha.
Facing Osha amid all else in this new place while he still thought longingly of Wynn was too much. And so, slowly, she had cut herself off from him.
Wayfarer rolled her face out of Shade’s neck to gaze down the gulley.
At its nearer end stood a vast fir tree with a trunk nearly as wide as a tower of the keep where Wynn had once lived in Calm Seatt. The hint of a dark opening showed in its bare base, closed off by a hanging of dyed wool in that doorway.