“Young Pathwarden, I’ve been to Chaktamir twice myself. Perhaps there’s a conspiracy afoot you haven’t noticed!”
“What’s your problem, Alfric?” Bayard asked calmly, idly stroking Valorous’s mane, clearing it of mud and stray brambles.
“Ever since we left the castle,” Alfric whined, “it’s been ‘Bayard, do this,’ and ‘Bayard, lead us here’! When we get to Enid, of course she’s going to want to marry you, on account of you’re the only one Sir Robert lets do anything!”
“Is that what is bothering you, Alfric?” Bayard asked slowly, dangerously, and I huddled deeply into the wool blanket I had been given, for I could tell by the flatness in his gray eyes that Alfric had just passed into the eye of a great and powerful storm.
“That is what bothers you, when we have lost fourteen to the current behind us?
“There will be plenty for you to do, Alfric,” Bayard declared coldly. “And sooner than you’d like, I’d wager.
“For our enemy is already watching.”
Bayard pointed to a spot not far ahead of us, where a bare-branched, dying vallenwood drooped heavily on the gray and rain-soaked plains.
In its topmost branches a raven perched.
Two days later, we passed through the Throtyl Gap. It is a country as rocky and forbidding as eastern Coastlund—plains, to be sure, but plains steeply rolling, rising gradually out of the fertile river lands to the west until the country around the traveler is parched and cracked, like the face of a moon through astronomer’s glasses, or like a landscape ravaged by fire.
Through this desolate region of dark, volcanic rock we were led by Bayard, at a slower pace than before because of the terrain and also because the accident at the river had left many of our horses and mules bruised and skittish. They balked, bit, kicked, and brayed through the lengthened hours of the journey. They were not alone in their weariness, their discontent. Each of us had suffered a pounding fording the Vingaard.
Bayard and I led the way, Bayard following a worn path through the glittering rocks, occasionally calling back something to Sir Robert, who followed us. Ramiro and Alfric followed Sir Robert. Alfric crouched uncomfortably in the saddle as though he expected a hail of arrows at any time, and Sir Ramiro grew less and less amused with my brother’s cowardice and bluster as the miles wore on. Brithelm brought up the rear, and several times, to Sir Robert’s great impatience, we had to stop and send Ramiro back for him. Once the big Knight found Brithelm bird-watching, once lifting a rock to inspect more closely the hardy insect life of Throtyl Gap.
A third time Ramiro found Brithelm dazed and sitting in the middle of the trail, felled by a low-hanging branch he had not noticed while riding along rapt in meditation.
Bayard occasionally lent a hand at guiding the pack mare, but more often he was examining the rocks for the trail, mounting and dismounting as our path was lost and recovered in the hard, volcanic terrain. Ahead of us and above us, the only birds were predators and scavengers, the only trees were pine, spruce, and a ragged strain of vallenwood which could not sink its roots deep in the rocky soil and, as a result, grew stunted and bent in the dreary landscape.
“The country of hawks,” Bayard muttered once, skillfully reining Valorous around me in order to herd the pack mare back onto the road. “The hardiest animals venture up here, and kill one another simply because there’s nothing else to prey on.”
“Sounds like growing up in the Pathwarden moat house,” I ventured, and he laughed harshly, drawing beside me as the road widened and a cold wind struck our faces from out of the south.
“Or on the streets of Palanthas,” he countered, smiling. Then he grew serious.
“Something’s come over you, Galen, and in ways I could not have foreseen back in the moat house when you first pleaded your case in front of me. You’re . . .”
“Less of a vermin?”
Bayard flushed.
“I’d have said ‘more cooperative,’ ” he ventured, eyes on the road ahead of him. “Were it not for your size, and . . .”
He looked at me, smiled, and turned away.
“. . . and for the absolute refusal to cooperate of that moustache you’re trying to grow, I’d take you for the oldest Pathwarden among us.
“What I’m trying to say, Galen, is that there’s Knighthood peeking out through your seams.”
I had no time to bask in the compliment. For the road was rockier, and steeply ascending, and ahead of us the hawks were turning.
By noon of the next day, it was more than hawks ahead of us. On occasion the eastern horizon shimmered with that brilliant, metallic mist that is the hand of mirage, that makes you think you are looking through water at the country ahead of you.
The mirage itself was inhabited. Strange things walked upright through the blurred landscape. Nor could we make out their form all that clearly—it was, after all, a mirage into which we looked. But dark red and brown they were, and hairless, and ever running from one fading, dissolving rock to the next one. Sometimes the mirage would vanish, only to appear again several winding miles east of where we last saw it. Each time it was peopled by dark, scurrying forms.
The horses grew skittish at something in the air.
“W-what are they, Bayard?” I asked uneasily.
“I am not sure. I do know we have crossed into Estwilde, and if the Scorpion knows we are coming, they may be his scouts. Or his first wave of illusions.”
Sir Robert reached into his robe, drew something out, and cast it by the roadside. Sir Ramiro followed suit, and when he did I heard the faint tinkle of breaking glass.
“What’s going on, Bayard?” I asked, but my protector had not been watching. His horse had moved slightly ahead of mine, and he rode with his eyes fixed to the road ahead of us.
“Beg your pardon?”
“Sir Robert and Sir Ramiro each reached into his robe, drew something out, and threw it away. I haven’t the least idea what Robert discarded, but Ramiro’s was glass, I am sure.”
Bayard chuckled softly, murmured, “The old school.”
“I don’t understand.”
“An old Solamnic custom. When a Knight rides into battle, there is always the possibility he’ll be killed.”
“Of course.”
“If something were to happen to you, chances are there’s something on your person—something small, perhaps, but there nonetheless—that you’d rather your people not find when your body returns to them.”
“I see. And then what I saw . . .”
“Was our two older Knights discarding their vexations. I have no idea what Sir Robert cast aside, but Sir Ramiro’s was dwarf spirits.
“It always is.”
Deftly, quickly, Bayard’s hand flashed out from under his robe. Something small and glittering sailed through the air and into the rocks above the trail. I heard a metallic ring as something fell from rock to rock and finally settled and became still.
To this day I do not know what it was.
As we rode farther, the purple of the Khalkist Mountains rose gradually, mistily out of the eastern margins. Somewhere within those mountains lay Chaktamir, lay the pass, and when I first made them out on the horizon I thought again on the custom, of the prospect of my returning on a shield.
Yes, I had thought of it before, but always as some grand, dramatic scene out of the romances, in which everyone tore hair and wailed and apologized to my lifeless form for the injuries done me. My final return would be high theater, suitable punishment to Father for the lack of attention I received or perceived from my days in the moat house.
Now I thought of what I should discard—what it would be best if he never saw. It was between the gloves and the Calantina dice: the gloves ill-gotten, the dice smacking of eastern superstition, incantation, incense, and the sacrifice of birds.
It was a close call. For a moment I thought of discarding both, but I figured that would be excessive. Especially since I had absolutely no intention of returning to Coastlund, alive or dead. I wondered what Enric Stormhold had cast away.