Alfric toyed with a tablecloth folded on a nearby chair, his mind scarcely on anything. Sir Robert folded his arms and looked at me curiously.
“What about the ‘generations from the grass,’ Galen?” he asked.
“I don’t have any idea, sir. Clever will only get you so far in a prophecy, I imagine.
“Most of all, I don’t know whom the prophecy’s for—Bayard or you or the Scorpion—but it’s at Chaktamir where the whole thing is resolved, for good or ill or both.
“Of that, I’m certain. I guess.”
Bayard smiled faintly and steepled his fingers. I remembered the pose—one I had seen back at the moat house on a morning that seemed like years ago.
Then his smile broadened. He stood, hand on the hilt of his sword.
“Then it’s to Chaktamir.”
“So comes to pass the most harebrained decision I have ever made,” Sir Robert di Caela concluded, sitting even more heavily in the same chair into which he had fallen an hour ago. The candles burned low, and the shadows rose in the hall of the banquet room until even the backs of chairs stretched long and ominous shadows over the floors.
“My most harebrained decision,” he repeated.
“We are to set off in a direction suggested by a seventeen-year-old boy of questionable honesty, who admits to trying his own fortune with the red dice of Estwilde, never quite understanding their meanings.
“We follow the shadow that this boy saw, knowing only that it went eastward—not how far it has traveled or even if it changed directions when it was out of sight. We go on the evidence of a prophecy we no longer know we are reading correctly.”
He turned to me and addressed me frankly.
“You do not have the best reputation for accuracy, boy.”
Bayard sighed and looked despairingly into the flickering candles.
“Nonetheless, Sir Robert,” Bayard claimed hoarsely, “your daughter is missing, and Galen’s is the best guess as to her whereabouts.”
The old man nodded firmly.
Finally, Sir Robert turned from me, though something told me that he would like very much to dismiss me—-to send me back to Coastlund in a wagon or a sack. I withdrew the Calantina dice from my tunic and held them palm up.
Nine and . . .
The light was bad, and Sir Robert began speaking again. I looked up and lost the reading. Nine and something. Something large.
Sign of the Weasel? Sign of the Rat?
Or of something entirely unexpected?
“If I am to find my daughter, it seems that this . . . oracular boy is forced upon me.”
He looked at all of us standing in front of him, shook his head in wonderment, then reddened and stood up wearily. His shadow darkened the entire south end of the hall, where the candles had guttered and burned out. He raised his sword in the ancient Solamnic salute, and his voice resonated in the high rafters of the great hall.
“Gather the Knights remaining at Castle di Caela. Gather those encamped in the fields surrounding, and call back those within the sound of the clarion trumpet. This very night we are off to Chaktamir. And woe betide the Scorpion when we find him there!”
While the gentlemen rummaged through armor, I made my final preparations for leaving Castle di Caela. Prospects of escape now seemed impossible.
Nor did I want to escape, especially.
Alone in my chambers for a “time of contemplation” before we set out, I tried to recover the reading of the Calantina—the one I had cast in the shadowy hall scarcely an hour ago. Down on my knees like an unlucky gambler, I rolled them again and again in hopes of seeing the same sign, but as is the way with history and with dice, the reading was gone forever. I cast in vain, receiving the Adder, the Centaur, the Hawk, the Mongoose, the Wyvern—not a nine among them. With each roll, the dice became more confusing.
As is the way with prophecy.
So I gathered my things together, taking care to put on my best tunic and the tooled gloves I had kept hidden so often throughout our journey from Coastlund.
Enjoying my renewed appearance, my red hair watered and slicked and combed into place with my fingers, I waited for the water in the basin to settle, then looked at my reflection.
Perfect. You never could tell who would be watching.
Prepared, adorned, and even a little resplendent if you counted the gloves, I scurried from my quarters down to the courtyard of Castle di Caela, where perhaps a dozen more squires were saddling horses, gathering provisions, and putting all in readiness for the journey east.
Together we busied ourselves with the final preparations, saddling and bridling Valorous, Sir Robert’s black mare Estrella, and more everyday horses for the other Knights and for my brothers. Three mules were brought from the surrounding farmlands, and that very night they were loaded with provisions and clothing and arms. Burdened and rained upon, they looked the sullenmost of all the beasts I had seen on this twisting, weather-plagued journey.
The pack mare also went with us, although reluctantly, straightening her legs and leaning backwards against the reins, snapping at a large stable boy until he turned and, to my great satisfaction, caught her a blow across the jaw that wobbled her knees and silenced her until she could be rigged and saddled and boarded. For, yes, my place was on her back again. Bayard believed that she would keep me mounted despite terrain and weather and my own incompetence.
If the poor pack mare’s load was made heavier by the addition of me to the freight on her back, then I wonder if it felt any lighter as we passed through the gates of Castle di Caela. For I felt a little lighter myself at that moment, when I turned to look back at the keep through the half light of morning and the rain that was now quite heavy.
I could swear that I saw, through the shifting grayness, a light at Lady Enid’s window. I could swear that I saw Dannelle di Caela standing there, graceful and pale and framed by the light of the window. And graceful and pale, she lifted her graceful, pale arm, and waved at me departing. My ears were hot. Instinctively, my hand went to my hair.
Which was wet and plastered to my head like the pelt of some repulsive drowned animal. I raised my hood, pretended not to notice her, and faced eastward.
At the last moment before the gates closed I looked back over my shoulder as heroically, as romantically as I could manage from atop a beast of burden. But with the angle of the road and the morning shadows and the rising rain, the window was a blur of light rapidly fading, and Dannelle was obscured entirely.
Chapter Seventeen
The road south from the castle was washed with rain already. The downpour had stripped whatever browned or reddened leaves had remained clinging to the trees, and now the countryside was bare and gray and gloomy, at last making good on the winter the skies had promised for a while.
There were twenty of us, only six of us Knights. Sir Robert could have brought his palace guards, but the practical man within him recoiled at leaving Castle di Caela undefended. He could have brought part of his escort, but the Solamnic Knight in him recoiled at “sending an army to do a Knight’s work,” as he put it. So they were left behind.
Though it seemed to me that this was the time for armies, for catapults and ballistae and engines of war—anything to take the Scorpion’s attention from yours truly—the task ahead of us began with twenty of us, and twenty of us only.
Bayard rode in the lead atop Valorous. Sir Robert brought up the rear on Estrella—I believe he was back there to round up any Pathwardens trying to escape. I rode in the middle, sandwiched between brothers and soaked in the dismal morning showers.
Alfric’s gloom was contagious. He sat atop his horse, wrapped in a bulky blue robe, the hood pulled so far over his face that he looked like a huge, animate bag of wet laundry. Even his horse, no monument to spirit to begin with, bowed its head sullenly against the cold morning rain.