There had been no further sign of the Ard Rhys. She had not come to them again. She had not asked them to visit the airship to look around, which they would have dearly loved to do. She had not sent any of the other Druids to talk to them. The entire ship’s company had gone back aboard and stayed there.
Redden lay cocooned in his hammock, wrapped up and motionless. Railing was sitting on the porch steps, his blanket draped carelessly over one shoulder, staring out at the night. Inside the cottage, Farshaun was snoring.
“Can’t sleep?” Redden asked from his hammock.
Railing glanced over his shoulder. “Not a wink. You?”
“Not much.”
They were silent for a few minutes, the snores inside changing pitch and cadence.
“I’m going,” Railing said suddenly. “I have to. If I don’t, I’ll wonder about it for the rest of my life.” He paused. “But I don’t want to do this without you.”
“Don’t worry. You won’t have to. I’m going, too.” Redden raised himself up, causing the hammock to sway. “Because I think the Ard Rhys is right. Finding those Elfstones is important. If we can help, like she seems to think we can, then we have to do so.”
They went quiet again for a bit. It was decided, Redden thought. Just like that. Both of them had come to the same conclusion. Amazing, but that’s how they were.
“You’re not going without me,” Mirai said from the doorway.
The twins looked around in surprise as she stepped out of the shadows and into the moonlight, her long hair unbound, her blanket wrapped around her.
“How long have you been there?” Redden asked.
“Hours. Sitting just inside the doorway, watching you, thinking. I don’t know if you should do this, but I do know that you shouldn’t do it without me.”
“We’ll have to send someone to tell Mother,” Railing pointed out.
Redden cleared his throat. “I’m glad it won’t be me.”
21
On the following day, carrying a total of forty men and women as crew and passengers, the Walker Boh sailed west. The day was bright and sunny, the skies clear and blue, and the weather conditions favorable. There was palpable excitement as she lifted off, a sense of possibility that tamped down doubts and misgivings and left everyone aboard feeling ready and eager to be under way.
“Forty,” Redden mused. “Do you think that’s a lucky number?”
Railing shrugged. “I don’t know. What do you think, Farshaun?”
The old man did not look up from the maps he was studying. “Doesn’t matter how many you set out with. Only how many you bring back.”
Railing looked at Redden and rolled his eyes.
They had announced their decision to go with the Druids that morning, and the Ard Rhys had wasted no time making preparations to leave. Little was needed. The few additional supplies that were required had been loaded the previous day; everything else was already aboard. Farshaun was asked to come because of his vast experience with airships and had agreed because of his friendship with Khyber Elessedil. He brought with him eight of his Rover kin to help sail the warship. While not directly denigrating the capabilities of the Trolls, he had nevertheless gently suggested that his people were better trained and more experienced than members of the Druid Guard, an assertion that neither the Ard Rhys nor the Trolls tried to contradict. Once the eight were chosen there was nothing to delay their departure, and by midday they were under way.
Farshaun was along for another reason, as well. While discussing with the Ard Rhys the details of where they were going and how they were going to get there, the latter had described the vision she had skived from Aphenglow’s memory. It was clear enough that their journey would take them into the wilderness of the Breakline and the surrounding mountain chains, but that was about all either of them could tell. Even Farshaun, who had traveled that country extensively during his time flying airships along the coastal regions of the Blue Divide, did not recognize any of the places the vision had revealed.
But he knew someone who might.
Among the Rovers, there were those who chose to lead lives more resembling an earlier time, when established communities did not exist. Frequently, these throwbacks were traders and scavengers and made their way through the world in a solitary fashion and without any particular goals or plans. One among them—the one Farshaun believed might be helpful to the Druids—lived out along the far western borders of the Breakline in country so bleak and unforgiving that it seemed impossible anyone could survive it. Yet he had done so for more than twenty years, subsisting off the land, a hermit and a recluse. Now and then he would drift back within the boundaries of civilization to gather things he could not find in his own country, though he seldom bothered with human contact and never stayed for long.
Except that sometimes he would come to see Farshaun. The old man had known him before he went into the wilderness, and they had formed a friendship. It wasn’t a friendship in the normal sense of the word. There were few expectations involved on either side; there was only conversation and often little of that. Mostly, it was the other man’s strange ramblings and digressions.
But in some of those ramblings and digressions, he would tell of things he had dreamed would happen.
And then they would.
That strange ability to foresee the future, coupled with the fact that he knew the Breakline country like the back of his hand because he had spent so many years exploring it, made him someone Farshaun Req believed they should seek out before they undertook their search for the missing Elfstones.
Khyber, who knew something of seers and those possessed of prescient abilities—and who believed in their value—had agreed.
“This foreteller of the future you’re taking us to see, the one who has the dreams?” Redden asked Farshaun suddenly. “Why is he called the Speakman?”
The old man paused in his study of the maps. “It’s a name Rovers give to those who speak of a future that others can’t see. In this case, it stuck. His real name was forgotten by most long ago and never used in the time he’s lived in the Breakline. Now, he’s just ‘the Speakman’ to everyone.”
“But you knew him? You knew his real name?”
Farshaun nodded. “I don’t use it, though. I don’t say it aloud.”
“What was he like before he went into the wilderness?” Railing asked. “Was he normal? Was he a boy like us?”
Farshaun gave him a look suggesting that the word normal might not apply to them. “He was damaged. Now leave me alone.”
The twins moved off to one side, closer to where Mirai stood in the pilot box working the controls that flew the Walker Boh westward. She glanced over and smiled, evidence of how much she enjoyed flying the big airship.
“I like watching her better than talking with Farshaun,” Railing observed. “What an old crab.”
“That’s an understatement,” Redden said.
He could have watched Mirai do anything or nothing all day long. How lucky they were that she had been allowed to join them. Even after she had announced to them that she was coming, it wasn’t settled that she would be permitted to join the expedition. But the Ohmsford twins wouldn’t have been comfortable going without her, and perhaps Khyber Elessedil had sensed as much, suggesting it might help their mother come to terms with their going if Mirai were there, too.
But Mirai didn’t feel as strongly as the twins did about the advisability of undertaking this quest. She reminded them later she had decided to come mostly because she agreed with the Ard Rhys that it might ease their mother’s concerns.
“It will kill her if something happens to you,” she’d told them. “If you don’t believe that’s true, you had better rethink it. You’re all that matters to her, even though you’re mostly ungrateful clods.”