A Solitary Journey (51 page)

He forced a short chuckle and shook his head again. ‘Not
their
Amuchki. From what I understand he was a fool—something to make stories about and to scare children with.’ Then his face became serious. ‘I might have been a Dragonlord had the world been different
back then. Here, in your world, except when I touch you like this, I’m an ordinary man, not even truly like any of you because of my dead Aelendyell heritage. In Se’Treya who knows what I might be? I have to go back to find my destiny. Perhaps it isn’t even there, but if I don’t return I’ll never know the truth.’ He sighed and squeezed her hands. ‘I—I wish I could stay.’ He met her gaze and held it, bathing in her green eyes. ‘If—’ he started, but hesitated, and his brow creased as if he was struggling.

‘I know the way there,’ she said softly, and she leaned towards him. Their lips met and the kiss made their bodies thrill with so much sparkling energy that when they parted they stared at each other for a long time, unable to speak and unwilling to look away, both caught in a maelstrom of emotion.

‘Goodbye, Meg,’ he finally whispered. ‘I do love you,’ but before she could reply he turned and strode into the blue haze. The portal sparked and vanished.

The face of the first mountain loomed ahead, sunlight sparkling on the snow. ‘You know how dangerous this will be,’ Luca said, grinning eagerly. ‘Only two dragoneers have ever successfully made this crossing and they followed the Central Pass.’

Meg glanced at Emma before she looked back at Luca with a deliberately wicked smile, ‘They didn’t fly with me.’

Luca raised an eyebrow, but when he saw that she was serious he laughed and fired a long burst from the burner, the hot air lifting the dragon egg by degrees. ‘Western Andrak it is!’ he cried and he kept laughing as the dragon egg rose above the first mountain, the thrill of adventure coursing through his blood.

Emma stared at the mountains with wonder, holding her mother’s hand as if she never intended to release it.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked, looking up.

‘To find a new home,’ Meg said, and squeezed her daughter’s hand as reassurance.

‘And Treasure?’

‘One day soon,’ she promised. ‘First, we need to be safe. Then we can find him and bring him home.’

A soft nose nuzzled Emma’s ankle and Whisper sat up. Emma lifted the rat and Whisper climbed onto the girl’s shoulder making Emma giggle. ‘She’s clever,’ she said, looking up at Meg.

‘Very clever,’ Meg replied, encircling her daughter with her left arm and scratching Whisper’s left ear. Emma pressed against her mother and together they gazed at the snow and grey rock and stunted trees sweeping beneath them. As the dragon egg drifted into the Great Dylan Ranges, the morning sun warm on their backs, the past receding quickly, Meg touched her lips with her right hand, still feeling A Ahmud Ki’s gentle pressure and the echo of the thrill of energy that they shared and wished that he would find his destiny. Only then, she knew, would his restless spirit find peace.
Hope,
she decided, feeling the warmth of her daughter’s hand,
hope drives us all.

R
ees!’ the shopkeeper called across the street to the dark-haired woman and her daughter. ‘Rees Feond!’ Meg turned her head. ‘I’ve got some of that material you were asking for!’ the shopkeeper yelled.

‘We’d better go see what Mister Ealdraca has,’ Meg said to Emma as she waved to the balding, bespectacled man.

‘Can I go to the stables, please?’ Emma asked eagerly, and when her mother hesitated she pleaded, green eyes wide,
‘Please?’

Meg laughed. ‘You can see Windrider if you want.’

‘Thanks, Mum,’ Emma said and she ran towards the stone facade of the Marella stables in the main street. Meg watched her daughter until she reached the entrance where a young blond boy Emma’s age named Ian greeted her and the two headed inside where Ian’s father, Mykel Wynthrop, had a light grey mare that Emma loved to feed and curry.

In Bryon Ealdraca’s Marella Emporium, Meg examined the blue cotton material she had ordered to make a new dress for Emma and paid for it, along with thread and needles. ‘How is the job?’ Bryon asked from behind his rimless eyeglasses as he packaged her purchases.

‘Good,’ she replied.

‘Missus Tunbridge expects a solid day’s work but she’s kind at heart,’ Bryon remarked. He handed the package to Meg and produced a green candy cane. ‘For that fine young lady of yours,’ he said, grinning.

Meg accepted the gift, telling the shopkeeper that as always he was too kind, and headed for the screen door. Before she reached it, it swung open and three Western Andrak Peacekeepers in light blue uniforms entered. Meg bowed her head and stepped aside. ‘Sorry, missus,’ a Peacekeeper apologised as the three men passed her on their way towards Bryon. With a quick glance at the men, Meg stepped outside, heart racing wildly.

‘What do you think
they
want?’ Meg whirled to face two women who were a little older than herself. ‘Oh, sorry, Rees,’ said the shorter of the women. ‘I didn’t mean to frighten you.’

Meg blushed and laughed nervously and the women laughed with her. ‘I was thinking of other things,’ she explained quickly, trying to calm her nerves.

‘What have you bought?’ the taller woman inquired, and the conversation quickly settled into the mundane, and although she wanted to get away from the shopfront to find Emma, Meg was obliged to chat with the women who had adopted her as a friend since her arrival in Marella.

The taller, reddish-haired woman, Letta Olderson, and the shorter one, Dyan Trapper, worked in Tunbridge’s factory where Meg had found employment and they’d made her welcome from the start, inviting Emma and her to their homes to share meals and introducing her to other people. They had sympathy for the dark-haired young woman and child who’d come west in search of a husband and father gone to the Ranu war. ‘You’re not the first,’ Letta told Meg, smiling at Dyan, and Dyan related her personal tale of how she had done the same ten years
earlier, until she accepted that her young husband was never returning and remarried a Marella farmer.

‘Sometimes,’ Dyan said, ‘the past has to be let go so that we can get on with living.’ And so they adopted her into their circle.

Their small talk was interrupted when the Peacekeepers emerged from Ealdraca’s shop and chorused, ‘Ladies,’ as they passed and headed for their horses. The shop door creaked again and Bryon joined the women.

‘What was that about?’ Dyan asked.

‘They’re looking for a tall red-haired woman who killed several people in Central Andrak,’ he answered, watching the Peacekeepers mount. ‘Apparently she uses magic and flew over the Great Dylan Ranges in a dragon egg about two months ago. She has long hair and travels with two men, one of whom has features like a Lendel.’

Dyan and Letta burst out laughing and Bryon, who couldn’t contain his mirth any longer, laughed with them, leaving Meg bewildered. ‘What’s so funny?’ she ventured, wondering what she had missed.

Letta caught her breath and stared at her, saying, ‘Didn’t you hear that? She uses magic?’ and she started giggling again.

‘As if anyone is going to believe
that,’
said Dyan between fits of laughter. ‘And a Lendel? They’re chasing fairy folk now?’

‘We pay good taxes for idiots like that to chase gossip,’ Letta complained.

Bryon looked Meg up and down and snorted. ‘Well if we gave this one long red hair and a couple of male companions we could collect the reward.’ He kept a serious expression only a moment before it melted into laughter when he saw the horror on Meg’s face. ‘Oh, my,’ he gasped. ‘I think she thinks we’d do that.’ The women laughed with him at her and she made a pitiful attempt to
smile, but inside her confusion churned her stomach and all she wanted was to collect Emma and go home.

It was Luca’s idea for her to cut and dye her hair and to take the Andrak name—a combination of the woman’s name, Rees, who guided her to finding Emma, and of his own surname, Feond. ‘As much as I would love to stay with you,’ he told her as he prepared to leave her outside of Marella early one morning, several days after they crossed the Great Dylan Ranges, ‘you’re better off travelling into the town alone, with Emma. The Central Andrak Peacekeepers will keep searching for you, but you have time on your side. The bureaucratic procedures they have to go through to get the assistance of the Western Andrak Peacekeepers will hold them up long enough for you to get settled and establish your new identity.’

‘What about Emma’s name? What will we call her?’

Luca smiled. ‘Foreign names aren’t unusual any more. Keep it.’ He smiled at Emma. ‘It will be less confusing for her, but you will have to teach her only to speak Andrak. That will be the hardest part. You’re lucky that you can speak the language. Say you came from Crossing. It’s a town as far to the east as you can go in Andrak, on the border with Targa, and no one from here would have travelled there. It’s safe to say that you’ve travelled this far in search of your husband who’s gone to the front lines of the war. Plenty of women have done that.’

‘And papers of authority?’ she asked.

‘You were robbed on the road and everything was stolen. You’ll get sympathy and they’ll probably take you in with Emma,’ he told her. He winked and added, ‘Just don’t flash the rat around, all right? The rat rules are everywhere—legacy of the plague years ago. Everyone thought rats spread the disease and even though it’s not proven it’s still believed.’

‘But you don’t believe it?’ she asked.

Luca laughed, his white teeth glowing, and replied, ‘You haven’t seen me exactly cuddling the rat, have you?’

So she entered the town of Marella situated on a rolling plain, a full day’s travel west of a large city Luca told her was called Claarn, and the townspeople took in the abandoned wife and her child and cared for them until Meg was able to find employment and rent accommodation. Meg Farmer, foreign spy and murderess, vanished from the Andrak landscape as effectively as the magical spirit she was vaunted to be, while Rees Feond and her daughter Emma were warmly embraced by the Marella community.

Sitting on the bare earth at the rear of the rented two-roomed wood-and-thatch cottage on the edge of the town, she watched Emma playing with Whisper under an ash-oak, wishing she was under a gum tree back in Summerbrook. Andrak was a foreign world in every way—from the inventions to the people to the animals and plants. A flock of multicoloured birds chattering in the boughs of the dark-leaved ash-oak reminded her of the rosellas that often fed on the blossoms outside of her mother’s house in the mornings and evenings during the cycle of Varsoo and she realised that she was homesick for the first time since embarking on the adventure to find her children.

‘How long do rats live?’ Emma asked in her native Shessian language as she sat beside her mother, the black bush rat sitting up in expectation of being picked up.

Meg embraced her daughter’s shoulders with her left arm. ‘We don’t speak Shessian any more,’ Meg reminded her, using the Andrak tongue.

‘Sorry. I forget when it’s just us,’ Emma said. She concentrated on the words and asked, in Andrak, ‘How old is she?’

‘Whisper isn’t like an ordinary animal. She lives a lot longer.’

‘But how old is she?’ Emma insisted. ‘I’m nearly nine years old and she was a grown rat when I was little.’

‘She’s very old,’ Meg replied.
How old is she really?
she wondered, remembering that Whisper had been old Samuel’s pet and came to Meg when Meg was almost sixteen. That was fourteen years ago.

‘Will she die soon?’

‘What sort of question is that?’ Meg asked indignantly. ‘Of course she won’t. She’s healthy. You can see that.’

‘Then how long will she live?’ Emma persisted.

Meg reached down and scooped up Whisper so that the rat could nestle in her lap. ‘She’ll live as long as she needs to,’ she said, smiling at her daughter.

‘What sort of answer is that?’ Emma asked, mocking her mother’s indignation, and the pair broke into laughter as Whisper curled up to snooze in the warm comfort of Meg’s lap and the afternoon sunshine.

She dreamed of him most nights, sometimes waking with the sensation on her lips that he had left when they last parted, and she wondered if he had found what he searched for and what he was doing.

In Marella, over the months after Luca’s departure, she engineered the life for which she’d been craving—a life of anonymity and peace for her daughter and herself. The story of the red-haired sorceress and murderess who vanished in Central Andrak to the puzzled consternation of the Peacekeepers briefly passed through town and was quickly forgotten, and no one associated her with it except in jest as a newcomer to Marella. She worked in Tunbridge’s shirt factory to earn a living during the weekdays and in the evenings she taught Emma the Andrak language and how to read in preparation for going to the town school when the next season came.
Letta and Dyan insisted daily that Emma should already be in the school, but Meg didn’t want her daughter to start until she was certain there would be no curious questions inspired by a slip of Emma’s tongue into the Shessian language.

With Emma’s help while she was at work, she transformed the dilapidated and abandoned cottage into a tidy, if tiny, home and within months she had a healthy garden of vegetables and flowers and she was content. Some day she would have to face the task of searching for her son, Treasure, but for the moment she had Emma and she had peace, and both sustained her.

But her nights were restless with dreams of A Ahmud Ki. She saw him always standing before her as he had on their last morning together and they kissed and she would wake. The dreams were not like the first ones she had when she was younger, when he spoke to her and urged her to free him from his entrapment in Se’Treya. These were dreams of longing and regret—the dreams of a forsaken lover—and the dreams filled her with longing and sadness.

One night after three months, the world awash with moonlight, she checked that Emma was safe and asleep under Whisper’s watchful guard before she crept from her cottage across an open paddock to a stand of trees nestled between two hillocks. There, when she was certain no one else was stirring in the vicinity, she conjured a portal and stepped through the blue haze.

The brilliantly bright, endless blue sky reminded her of her old home in Western Shess because it was so different to the dull grey sky of her new homeland from which rain fell with annoying regularity. She missed the long, lazy days of sunshine and heat in Western Shess when the sweetest moment was sitting beneath a shady gum tree to drink cool water from a water bottle. The endless grey
dust plain stretched in every direction, studded with the white skeletons of dead trees—a place devoid of life.

Forsaking the forbidding vista, she ploughed through the dust that felt as if it wanted to resist her for intruding, until she reached the familiar rectangular opening that led into the underground chamber where she’d first discovered A Ahmud Ki. She listened at the head of the stairway and checked the stone steps for footprints, but the chamber was silent as if no one had come or gone for a long time. She instinctively surveyed the landscape again, but the grey plain and blue skies were empty.

She summoned her courage and descended the grey stone steps, prepared to run as darkness enveloped her, remembering her last encounter with the Demon Horsemen. At the base of the stairs she listened again for telltale warnings, her heart racing, before she crept along the stone corridor to the central chamber which was dark, empty and silent. She knew corridors led to the four compass points, but they were also dark and silent. When she felt certain that it was safe, she conjured a light sphere to illuminate the circular chamber in soft white light, and she listened and watched again for the chamber’s custodians.

Her eyes finally rested on the ebony sleeping dragon statue. A Ahmud Ki was pinned to it by his shoulders with a pair of axes when she first found him, enveloped in a green magical shaft of light called a glyph designed to lock him in his suffering for eternity. The concept of magic so powerful and enduring had astonished and daunted her, but she had dismantled the magic to release him and he had become her companion on her search for her children. He had become someone very special to her, someone who haunted her dreams. Only the clefts in the statue where the axes had been embedded confirmed that what happened was not one of her prophetic and confusing dreams that still plagued her nights. The axes
were gone. The chamber was cold and dead, as if no one had ever been in it.

Meg stared at the empty corridors. ‘Where are you?’ she whispered. ‘I need you.’ She waited, expecting an answer but the chamber stayed silent. A Ahmud Ki? she projected. Where are you? She sighed and headed for the left-hand corridor. It was risky, but she was curious and determined to know if anything still existed in this ancient place of the long-dead Dragonlords.

She walked warily, shrouded by her ball of light and ready to sprint for safety in case a Demon Horseman appeared, ready to create an escape portal in the frame of the corridor, but the corridor was empty and eventually came to a dead end. The grey stone wall she faced was solid, but her spine tingled in its presence and she knew she was facing more than ordinary stone, and when she pressed her hand against it energy surged through her and made her step back. ‘What is this?’ she whispered. Suddenly afraid, she glanced over her shoulder to check the corridor behind her, and even when she confirmed that she was alone her uneasiness did not subside. She retreated into the dragon chamber, her heart racing, and caught her breath. ‘A Ahmud Ki?’ she asked the empty room, but there was no answer. She conjured a portal in the chamber doorway. A solitary tear in her right eye, she stepped into the soft blue haze.