He felt swindled, he had claimed back at the gates of Castle di Caela.
“For why,” he asked, “is everyone so sure that Enid is going to marry Bayard if we rescue her? Seems to me that it’s been decided a little too soon.”
He fell into a sulking silence.
But if Alfric’s gloom was contagious, Brithelm was thoroughly immune, his musings somewhere far from this road, this part of the country, as he sat benignly and unhooded to the worst the rain had to offer. Lost in thought, he was lost to the rest of us. His horse was his sole guide, as it followed my pack mare unquestioningly. We rode without rest until mid-morning. It was some Solamnic notion, I suppose, that you traveled farther and more efficiently when you were so miserably uncomfortable that the prospect of ambush or a monster in the roadway would seem like a welcome break from the routine.
To make things worse, neither of my brothers was speaking—to me, to each other, to anyone, as far as I could figure. Brithelm remained lost in thought behind me, his eyes on the rain and on the eastern horizon, and Alfric was ahead of me, suspicious and sulking, no doubt trying to guess what goods I had on him and what I had told the Knights.
So I drifted in and out of slumber that morning, jogged awake by a sudden rise in the road or a dip when the pack mare slipped or sank a bit into the mud. On occasion a distant roll of autumn thunder would disturb my sleep, or the rain would drip inside my cloak and across my face, sprinkling and startling me. One time I was jostled awake by Bayard, who had slowed Valorous and let most of the party pass him. Reining his horse in abreast of mine, he offered me a large, coarse cotton handkerchief.
“Whatever these vapors were that saddled you back at the castle, you haven’t shed them yet. I can hear your sniffling all the way up the column.”
“Who’d have thought it, Sir Bayard?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“All along you’ve made fun of these dice I carry with me. And now all of us are armed and appointed and drenched by the rain, following a prophecy that’s every bit as many-sided and cloudy as any of the Calantina readings. What’s the difference?”
“You explained the prophecy quite well for a skeptic.”
“But you haven’t answered my question. What is the difference?”
Bayard smiled and flicked Valorous across the withers with the wet leather reins. The big horse snorted and lurched toward the head of the column, and Bayard called back to me.
“Maybe no difference.”
By mid-morning of the next day, we reached the swollen eastern fork of the Vingaard River. There was no longer time for musing, for pondering mysteries. As I looked ahead of me into the gray rush of waters, I could see that the Vingaard had overflowed its banks. Fording would be dangerous, perhaps even deadly.
“Flood time nearly, boys,” Sir Ramiro shouted, championing the obvious above the sound of the rain and the river. “Autumn is the flood season here anyway, and we have come at the wrong time . . .”
He looked up at Bayard sullenly, thick brows cascading water.
“. . . Perhaps even to the wrong place?”
Things about us grew even more ominous, even more gloomy as the rain fell and the river rose and the overcast day permitted no sun. Here at the banks of the Vingaard, it seemed as though everything was fixed against us: the clever enemy, the night’s head start, the terrible weather. Even the land itself had betrayed us. I sat atop the pack mare. Things could be worse. We could be out there in mid-current.
“Across the ford, then, young fellow?” an elegant voice boomed in my ear, and I started at the presence of Sir Robert di Caela beside me. There was the sound of more horses approaching, and soon Sir Ledyard and Brithelm had joined us.
“Well, Galen?” Sir Robert insisted, wrapping his cloak more tightly against the mounting rain.
“Galen?” Bayard chorused, leaning forward and stroking Valorous’s mane as the big horse shouldered its way between Ledyard’s big mare, Balena, and Sir Robert’s smaller, more graceful Estrella.
“I don’t know,” I murmured into my hood. I crouched, curled up, and tried to look like a piece of baggage on the pack mare’s back.
“Speak up, boy! These are old ears and clamorous raindrops!”
“It’s just . . . just that I don’t think this mare of mine is going to breast that current out there. You didn’t see her in the swamp and on the mountain paths, Sir Robert. She’s far more . . . anxious and roundabout than she seems on level ground and a wide road.”
“We’re all a little more jumpy at an impasse,” declared Sir Ramiro, who had approached astride his big, forgiving percheron. Water cascaded off his gray wool robe like springs coursing down from a mountain lake.
“Get to what we need to do,” he said, smiling wickedly. “And leave me . . . to encourage the mare.”
Bayard pointed toward a stretch on the river bank, almost submerged in the rising water. Sir Robert nodded, and galloped over to inform the rest of our companions.
I could have mulled over this crossing for hours, stacked thought upon thought until I had confused myself completely and entirely, as Gileandos said I was inclined to do.
But there was no time for thinking. Immediately my companions began tying together the pack mare and the mules. The Knights hitched their cloaks tightly about their legs so as not to tangle in the rushing water. And Sir Ramiro slapped the rump of the pack mare sharply with his enormous hand. She started and leaped toward the water.
We were fording the Vingaard.
The water was icy cold about my ankles. I drew my feet from the stirrups of the saddle, thought twice about it, and braved the water for the purchase on the back of my steed.
The mare grunted, then breasted the current. To the right of all of us squires, Brithelm’s horse began to navigate the waters, and to the right of him was Sir Robert on Estrella. Beyond them was Alfric, then two other Knights, then Ledyard and Ramiro, and then Bayard, of course, active and secure atop Valorous. Alfric, who had been challenging Bayard’s authority at every turn of the road, was more than willing to let my protector take the rightmost path.
The boy to the immediate right of me, a blond-haired gap-toothed monstrosity from Caergoth, grinned hatefully at me.
“Got that mare in line?” he taunted nasally. “Or is it the rider that’s got to be pushed through the water?”
“Those teeth will look good tangled in seaweed,” I replied, and slapped the pack mare on the rump again. We slid farther out into the current, then sagged in the water a moment as the riverbed gave way beneath the mare and she began to swim.
I pressed my knees against her sides. I held to her mane so tightly that she snorted and shook her head at first: then I loosened my grip, but not too much, thinking of the current that could carry a drowned body almost all the way to Thelgaard Keep.
In midstream the waters were indeed tricky, plunging into an undertow deep and powerful along the spine of the river. When we reached that point in the crossing, we were pulled more insistently, more heavily. One of the mules brayed behind us, and through the rain I saw a bundle slip from its back into the driving current. The gap-toothed boy reached for it in vain.
“I’m losing hold!” he cried, and toppled into the water.
“Brithelm!” I screamed frantically as the boy slipped downstream behind my brother. It sounded thin and shrill and cowardly above the roar of the river. I was almost embarrassed to have cried out, for certainly someone would haul the oaf from the water. But then a swell in the current rushed over us, knocking me from the back of the mare.
I was dangling from the saddle by my right ankle, which had lodged in the stirrup and had twisted in all directions. But the ankle held, and the stirrup held, and my head was above the surface, gasping and coughing out the water that rushed by me and into me.