Gidyon stood and took a deep, steadying breath. He had followed the shimmering green of Yargo as best he could, but though he remembered taking Lauryn’s hand in the cottage, they had somehow become separated.
Where was she?
At that moment, a new sensation hit him. He felt cold slicing through his mind, like a blade. Then he heard her voice in his head. It was tentative.
Gidyon?
He could not believe it.
Lauryn, is that you?
Clever, eh?
she said, more boldly now.
Very. How are you doing it?
Magic,
she said and he enjoyed hearing her laugh.
We’re empowered, like our parents—or were you not paying attention?
This is all a little too much for me,
he admitted.
She sighed.
I know. Are your sight and hearing different?
Definitely; they’re much sharper. I’m in a field somewhere. Where are you?
With Sorrel. She seems to think we’re at a place called Harymon. And I’m told we’re now going to make our way to another intriguing spot known as the Heartwood.
I see. Good idea. And what about me?
He paused theatrically between each sentence for emphasis.
Lauryn had been determined not to like Gidyon but his gently ironic manner was charming. And knowing he was her brother, family…it was just too precious and she could not help but feel a strong bond of affection towards him already.
Well, this was all your idea, Gidyon, remember? Sorrel tells me that you must make your way to the Heartwood as well.
Has she offered any suggestion how? Do I leap on the back of one of these vaguely suspicious, but not so friendly, cows and ride there?
Lauryn enjoyed his jest.
Just get there somehow, as fast as you can. Wait…
He felt the link remain open but there was silence.
Lauryn?
I’m here. Listen, Gidyon, I’m to tell you this is serious. She wants you to be very careful. Stay away from anything which smells of trouble. Don’t draw attention to yourself. She has sewn some money into your left pocket. It’s not much; you
may have to earn your way with odd jobs. But you have to hurry.
Ah. Well, do thank Sorrel for that superb help,
he said, sarcastically.
Can she give me a landmark at least
?
There was a pause again and then Lauryn replied,
Head towards the city of Tal but get into the Great Forest as soon as you can. There’s a village called Axon at the point of one of the forest’s fingers apparently—I’m not sure exactly what she means by that. And you’re going to love this. No laughing. A wolf, a donkey or a priestess will be waiting there for you. Trust them and follow.
He did laugh.
You will visit again, won’t you?
he said
. I just can’t wait for the next instalment.
You can do this too, you know,
Lauryn replied.
How?
he demanded.
Well, I just reached myself out towards wherever you might be.
Oh, totally simple then. Textbook magic.
I can’t really explain it any better than that! Sorrel calls it the link and although she cannot link with us, we obviously can with each other. You must practise.
I will, as I earn my keep shovelling dung, tilling the soil and whatever else a person of my lowly status does in this place.
How do you know that?
What? How to till the soil?
No. I mean how do you know we are of lowly status?
Lauryn, perhaps you haven’t noticed but she’s dressed us as peasants, not courtiers or scholars.
Sorrel says you’re right. And one more thing—apparently our memory of home will fade. She assures me it will help us to become more like the Tallinese.
I’ll forget all I’ve learned for the Blues?
Gidyon was horrified.
As I understand it,
she replied and he felt the link close.
Gidyon put his hands on his hips and looked around him again. A donkey indeed! This was a dream, surely? He was going to wake up soon and laugh about this. He had ridden north to see a dying grandmother—now he was here. He
was
going to wake from this because he had something important to do back at that place he came from…but for the life of him he could not, just at present, bring to mind what that important task was.
He shook his head. No use lurking here, he decided, and Lauryn had given him his instructions. He would be pleased to be with her again. She was his sister; what a lovely notion after years of it being just him. And he liked her. So, in order to reach Lauryn, this Heartwood place was where he had to go.
He made for the edge of the field and stepped over the low wall there, into a laneway. He had no idea which direction to head in. He dug into his pocket, breaking through Sorrel’s stitches, and found a coin. On one side he noticed there was a dragon; on the other, what looked like a ghoul. He flipped the coin
into the air and trapped it between his right palm and the back of his left hand.
‘Right,’ he said to the uninterested cows. ‘Demons or dragons?’
When none of his new friends even turned to look at him, let alone answer, he chose dragons. Lifting his right hand, he saw that it was indeed a dragon.
‘Then left it is,’ he said brightly, not understanding one bit how he had reached such a conclusion. Gidyon began to whistle as he strolled down the lane towards his destiny.
Sorrel looked at the girl, her expression one of enquiry. Gidyon was meant to be with them. She felt very anxious that he had been separated. She had spent fifteen years in a different world waiting to bring her charges home and it had gone wrong already. If anything happened to him…
Lauryn, on the other hand, sounded jolly. ‘He seems all right. He’s on his way.’
Sorrel nodded. She must not give away that she was worried. ‘Good. Then we must be on our way too. Help me with this bag, my girl. We have a long walk ahead of us.’
The similarity of this journey to the one she made with Alyssa so many years ago was not lost on Sorrel. And the likeness Alyssa’s daughter shared with her mother was uncanny, despite all the spare flesh she
carried on her frame. Lauryn would be as beautiful as her mother one day.
Lauryn slung the light cloth bag across her back and took the old girl’s arm. She had not wanted to come—it had all seemed like a dark jest back in the cottage. But now that the magic had proved true and she was here, she felt excited.
She had parents here. Lauryn hardly understood any of what Sorrel had told her, but she was keen to suspend disbelief and even give up all of what had been her life before, if it meant she could meet her parents and belong. If this was her birthplace, then this was where she wanted to be. There was a lightness to her step that morning which she had never felt before.
‘I have some money,’ the old girl said. ‘Not much, mind, but it will help us along. We can live frugally, though you may have to work.’
Lauryn nodded. Work? What could she do? Scribe, perhaps? She decided not to let it trouble her. There was more than enough strangeness in her life right now to bother about the least remarkable bits. She would let Sorrel make that decision.
‘There should be an inn at the next village, if my memory serves me right or the thing has not burned down in the past few years.’
‘And we’ll stop there?’
‘Just for tonight. We’ll get ourselves together and set off properly tomorrow. I’m anxious about Gidyon. We should not have been separated like this,’ Sorrel said, shaking her head, breaking her promise already.
‘Well, there’s nothing we can do, Sorrel. He had no idea where he was, so we just have to trust he will get to where you need him to be.’
‘Practical, like your mother,’ Sorrel replied.
‘And will she be there…at this Heartwood you speak of?’
‘My child, I honestly don’t know. Your father has called us back; that is all I know for sure. I am answering his summoning.’
Figgis admitted to himself that it was his own fault; he should have sensed the danger but he had been too enamoured by the feeling of freedom. It was grand to be back in Tallinor after so long, so many centuries of oppression, pain, frustration.
His normally lightning-fast reactions had failed him. So many thought Rock Dwellers were slow and witless; perhaps because of the gnarled, overhanging brow and the thick lips and wide mouth which were typical of his race. This assumption was entirely wrong, however. Rock Dwellers were slow at very little except running. They were not fleet of foot, although they possessed great stamina in their short legs, which could carry them over long distances and up an almost sheer rock face.
No, not slow of mind or reaction at all, but today the Ninth of the Paladin had simply been enjoying
being Figgis again and, he realised with disgust, had let his guard down.
Until that moment his journey had been uneventful. He had travelled swiftly down through the north since arriving at Caradoon from Cipres, sleeping in the fields and eating whatever he could forage for. He did not feel the cold nor did he experience the hunger pangs of the ordinary man. He was a Rock Dweller and travelling rough was no hardship for his kind.
He had skirted all the townships and the villages through the Midlands but it was the sleepy and sparsely populated village of Duntaryn which proved his downfall. Deciding that he needed to pick up speed, he had chanced the quicker route through the main thoroughfare instead of following his instincts and the stream that meandered around the outskirts of the village.
He should have sensed trouble, should have seen it coming. It was enough that Duntaryn was a spooky place, its main street shrouded by dense hedgerow and overhanging trees. There was a strange atmosphere as he entered the village and he felt hidden eyes boring into him.
The sack had been thrown over his head expertly. If he was a normal-sized man, it would not have hindered his arms as it did, but being a Rock Dweller—or a dwarf, as they preferred to call his kind—he could do little more than struggle helplessly. Firm hands picked him up and a blow to the head stopped him struggling further. It brought thunderous pain
and he had thought dimly how it was a fallacy that Rock Dwellers had skulls of stone. Figgis lost his bearings and his consciousness.
Now, conscious but with eyes deliberately closed, he reflected on how the disaster had occurred because he had been deep in thought. The meeting with Torkyn Gynt in Cipres had been unexpected. Figgis was glad to have helped with the young lad, Locklyn Gylbyt. That Maiden contraption was ludicrous. How could such a thing ever be considered a just resolution to a dispute? Oh, but being able to look into Gynt’s eyes had given him strength just when he was beginning to feel the whole quest was pointless.
He was the One; the reason they had strived so long. And their pain and suffering had not been in vain. This man would save all worlds when he assembled the Trinity.
It did not matter to Figgis that Gynt may not have known that the small man he briefly spoke to in Cipres was the Ninth Paladin to die bravely on his behalf. All that mattered was that he had completed the first of his tasks and now he must find his charge quickly. The boy needed his help; Lys had said so in his dreams. She had urged him to stow away on the ship to Caradoon and get himself this far; she continued to push him. He was the boy’s guardian. It was his most vital role of all as Paladin.
Suddenly cold water shocked his eyes open; someone had tipped a bucketful over his head, which still throbbed. He made himself lean up on his elbow to face the group of whispering men standing over him.
‘A dwarf, all right.’
‘Don’t see his sort in these parts. I thought dwarves were fable.’
‘He’ll bring the crowds.’
Figgis looked at them unblinking. The smoke from their pipes in this confined space made him want to gag; so did his headache.
‘Can you speak?’ one said.
‘Good day, you dung-breathed thugs,’ Figgis replied in his own language, which he knew none here would understand. This group felt dangerous; he decided to play stupid until he had worked out what to do next.
The first speaker blew out smoke and grinned, revealing more gums than teeth. He was built like a stone shed. ‘He speaks!’
A younger man said, ‘Try him on Tallinese.’
The first man nodded. He addressed Figgis, enunciating his words with the greatest of care and pausing between each one. ‘Do…you…understand…Tallinese?’
‘Yes…I…do,’ Figgis replied, though again in his own guttural language. Then he spoke a stream of what seemed nonsense. He kept it low, almost placatory, but he enjoyed using every insult known to his race. His long dead mother would be turning in her tomb if she could hear him speak such vulgarity, he thought.
The man sighed. ‘It would have been good to hear him beg in Tallinese,’ he said with some regret.
Beg? What was this about? He could see there
were five of them now that his eyesight had adjusted, and he realised he was being held in a farm building of some kind, probably a barn. They had turned away from him and were murmuring amongst themselves. Figgis closed his eyes and feigned dizziness; maybe he could get them to believe he was sleeping, which would encourage them to speak louder. Gradually he allowed himself to slip over until he was prone on the ground again, his head on the offending sack.
‘Leave him,’ he heard the first speaker say. ‘The main thing is that we have our sacrifices.’
The conversation continued quietly but Figgis’s exceptionally sharp hearing picked up every mumbled word of it.
‘How is the girl?’ The same man, he seemed to be the leader.
‘She’s all right.’ A new voice.
‘I mean, does she suspect anything?’
‘I can’t tell. Ory may know more. He delivers to the family.’
‘Ory…’
‘Yes?’ Footsteps, presumably Ory’s.
‘Does the girl know anything?’
Figgis heard scratching before Ory spoke. ‘No…I don’t believe so. I saw her yesterday. She seems her usual contrary self. She could guess, of course. She’s no ordinary-looking person and this is no ordinary time of the year for these parts.’
The leader seemed to ignore what Ory had said. ‘What about the parents?’
‘They’re not her parents, Scargyl.’
‘It matters not to me. With the dwarf here, we have a perfect union. It’s shaping up for the best ceremony we’ve had since I was a lad. I’m only just old enough to remember the Giant.’
‘They say he took his time dying.’ Figgis recognised the voice; the man who had told Scargyl to ask if he understood Tallinese.
‘He did that, Truk. He gave us very good value that spring solstice. Tasted all right too.’
Scargyl, Truk, Ory. Two more to account for. Still, Figgis thought, their number was irrelevant compared with what he had just discovered. So he and some girl were destined to be the highlight in some grisly death ritual on the spring solstice. How many more days before the solstice eve? He thought hard with his blurry, aching head and settled upon the figure of two.
Two days to plan his escape or Orlac would triumph.
Gidyon had been walking for several days. He had taken Sorrel’s advice and kept himself to himself. When entering a village, he would spend a few coins on bread and fruit. Fresh water seemed to follow him in the bright, fast-flowing stream he had kept to his left for all of his journey.
As a result of his meagre diet, his money was holding up. And, in an inspired move, he had
managed so far to convince the people he ran into that he was mute. It was an old trick he recalled playing as a child, but he could not quite remember when and on whom. Each day his memory of his past dimmed further and with it his fear of it failing him.
Being mute meant that people invariably lumbered him with the label of being stupid as well. It suited his purposes though. He could point at what he wanted and hold out his money in his palm, so the person serving could select the right coin. Gidyon had no clear idea of the value of his money but he was beginning to get a grasp on it. He would have to drop the mute affectation shortly, however. Though his money was adequate for bread and fruit, he would need to earn some more if he was to find a bed to sleep in—a luxury he longed for after many nights spent in fields. He also needed to ask for directions to this Axon place. By listening to the chatter of people around him in each village, he had worked out that he was essentially on the right path, though it was probably time to swing more to the south.
He promised himself that at the next village he would have a voice and he would find himself an odd job for the day and a bed for the night. There were quite a number of people coming and going on this road and he caught bits of conversations about a festival being held at Duntaryn in a few days. He reckoned this would be the next village he came to. A festival could be fun, he thought to himself.
Try though he might, Gidyon had not enjoyed any success in opening a link to Lauryn. It frustrated
him that she called upon him with such ease and yet the magic evaded him. Through Lauryn, Sorrel told him to keep peace with himself, that it would happen in time.
They seemed to be travelling in a slightly more comfortable style than he was, staying at inns each evening. Lauryn sounded excited that they had spent one whole day picking the redberries and frostfruit of the region, from which the famous preserves favoured by royalty were made.
My fingers are purple, Gidyon. You should see them.
I hope to soon, Lauryn.
It was lovely to hear the joy in her voice. She had seemed so sullen and argumentative when they had met.
Sorrel wants to know where you are now?
I’ve recently left Churley and am heading to another village which I believe is called Duntaryn. It should bring me further south, more in line with where I need to be, I gather.
There was a long pause.
Gidyon…
Lauryn sounded serious.
Sorrel says that Duntaryn is a strange place. When will you reach it?
Tonight, I hope. Why?
Another pause.
She says to sleep in a field, well away from the village. If you can avoid it altogether, do so. If you can’t, pass through quickly and don’t linger.
What’s this all about?
Again he had to wait whilst Lauryn related his question and then received a response.
Sorrel says—in her usual cryptic manner—that the spring solstice is not a clever time to be a stranger in Duntaryn. She refuses to give me more information but insists you don’t try to find work there, or even stop there at all if you can help it. Just walk straight on to the next main village, which is Mexford, but try to make it to Fragglesham as soon as you can. There’s a good inn there where you can stay. There will also be work there. Axon is just a full day’s walk from Fragglesham. We’re almost there, Gidyon, just stick to the plan.
All right. But I don’t understand this fear of Duntaryn. I hear there’s a festival on there.
Sorrel knows more than us. We should listen to her.
Yes, that’s true. So, it’s another cold night under the stars for me.
Sorry, Gidyon, but…
They both said it together:
It was your idea!
and they laughed.
I’ll talk to you tomorrow then.
Sleep safely, Gid.
He felt quite lighthearted after their conversation. Even the notion of spending another night curled under a bush did not make him feel irritable, though it was a long, dusty walk and well and truly dusk before he reached the outskirts of Duntaryn.
Evening began to slide in around him and suddenly the wooded laneway felt slightly more dangerous. A wolf howled in the distance, which sent a shiver through him, and the shadows began to grow
tall and ominous. By nightfall he was feeling edgy and very alone and desperately wished he had the power to open a link with Lauryn and hear her voice.
Just as he had convinced himself to walk through the night and put this village well behind him, he saw a lantern swinging in the near distance.
Gidyon reacted instinctively. ‘Hey!’
He could tell its carrier had turned by the way the lantern swung around.
‘Who is out there?’ It was a woman’s voice. She sounded alarmed.
‘A traveller. I’m sorry to frighten you.’
‘I’ve got a stick!’ she warned.
The wolf howled again.
‘I won’t harm you, miss. I’m weary, hungry. Actually, I just need somewhere warm to lie down. A barn, perhaps.’
‘Let me see your face,’ she said.
Gidyon approached, walking slowly, not wanting to scare her any further. He stopped a fair enough distance away that she would not feel threatened.
‘Closer,’ she said.
‘I promise I mean no harm. Er…I can pay.’
‘You have a kind voice, stranger. There is no malice in it. Yes, I trust you but I would like to see to whom I speak.’
Gidyon stepped forward a few more paces. He could only just see her outline. Her face was in shadow from the glare of the lantern.
‘Ah,’ she said. ‘A face to match the kind voice.’
‘Thank you. My name is Gidyon…Gidyon Gynt.’
‘I am Yseul. I live at the cottage over yonder.’ She pointed and he could make out the dark shape of a dwelling. Candlelight flickered very softly deep in the cottage.
‘Is there a barn here, Yseul?’
‘Yes. Right over there. You are welcome to share it with the two pigs, the cow and the three goats.’ She giggled. Now that he concentrated, he realised it was a young voice.
‘Are you er…married to the farmer?’
‘Farmer! The ox, you mean. No, I am not married to anyone, Master Gynt. No one owns me. But I have to work for the ox and his fat wife.’ She suddenly stopped.
Gidyon was unsure of what to say next. He ran his fingers through his hair and was glad when she came to his rescue.
‘My turn to say sorry. I did not mean to alarm you. They are not very pleasant people. Feel free to stay the night but don’t get caught, or if you do, don’t tell them I allowed you to sleep there.’