A Hero's Curse (10 page)

Chapter 11
 

I
wake with a familiar scratchy tongue licking my chin. Dad used to say, “If you have never had a cat lick you on the chin as a wakeup call, you are missing something wet, scratchy, and very ticklish.” I gasp and push away Tig, rubbing my chin.

“Good morning to you, too,” I laugh. I feel Tig sit down in my lap and start washing himself.

“You were sleeping so soundly I didn’t think you would ever wake up.”

“What time is it?”

“No idea. All the Urodela are up. Although, I never heard them go to sleep. My clock tells me it’s probably late morning.”

I yawn, sit up, and stretch. I groan at the stiffness in my right shoulder. It’s still wrapped in the hard moss, but it feels a bit more mobile. I can move my fingers just fine, and the moss allows me to barely bend my arm at the elbow. I want to scratch it so badly I feel like I’m going to go crazy. I flop back down on the moss. Nothing has ever felt so soft and springy as this moss bed. I feel Tig walk over to stand looking down at me. He puts both paws on my neck.

“If only I had thumbs,” he muses.

“Go away, Tig.” But I know he won’t.

“Can’t. I’m locked in.” A scratchy tongue starts at my chin and licks all the way up my face.

“Okay!” I gasp, “I’ll tell you anything, just stop with the scratchiness!”

Tig chuckles, then in a serious voice asks, “How are we going to break out of here?”

Instead of answering I just dig my fingers back into the moss as deep as they’ll go. Pretty deep it turns out. I can’t find the stone underneath the moss.

“Do you think the king was here?” asks Tig.

I think about it for a second, then unwrap my fingers from the clinging vegetation and set Tig aside. “I think so. The magic on Cheep, speaking Lingua Comma, the leather armor, details about what the king was trying to accomplish . . . And the timeline is right.”

“Do you think they’re telling the truth about him promising to help? Promising to kill the daemon?” Tig asks.

I scowl. “That’s harder to say. I’ve never heard anyone—my parents, the people at the valley market, Uncle Cagney—discuss why King Mactogonii disappeared. What the Urodela are saying makes sense. If King Mactogonii thought that the only way to stop this drought was to defeat the daemon, he might have traveled this way. He might have even promised the Urodela help. Why not? If he was going to kill it anyway, the Urodela are already on his side. They might have been useful.”

Tig coughs. “Maybe by providing information, but these aren’t exactly your fighting hero types.”

“Even so, it didn’t hurt him to promise to help them,” I say, a little nettled. I don’t know if I’m irritated that Tig keeps cutting at the Urodela or annoyed at his tone that the king would consider helping the Urodela. It fits with what I would want the king to say, which only makes me feel worse because I’m not willing to say it.

“Hmm . . .” purrs Tig, “well, in that case, we’re on the king’s trail,” he says. “We could try to find him. That might help things back home.” He pats my leather britches cautiously, testing the sensitivity.

“Or we could try to avoid being rock basilisk lunch and just try to get back,” I retort.

“A noble suggestion.”

“It’s not noble. It’s practical. Why would you say noble?” I ask, letting him hear the irritation in my voice.

“Because in my world I admire those who bluntly cut to the chase. Your suggestion has done so. To go trekking around the Valley of Fire or who knows where looking for a loony bird who left his own kingdom to a despot—who may or may not be alive, let me remind you—and who obviously hasn’t figured out how to kill the daemon yet, sounds like one of those stories Linan Garrig tells to hawk his ‘magic’ trinkets or everywoman potion.” Tig raises his voice and yowls in a surprisingly accurate imitation of Garrig, “If it doesn’t kill you it might make you stronger!”

He drops his voice and continues in his deadpan tone. “Except it would not only kill you, it would kill me. Hence, I feel your choice is noble. You’re thinking of me. How sweet.”

“If we had a chance to find him we could try,” I say a little peevishly.

“Hmm . . . except we don’t have a chance. Let me also reiterate that even if you did find him, he obviously hasn’t figured out a solution yet, or else he would be galloping back home to tell the world all is okay and take his kingdom back. You have no hope of finding him and no chance of helping if you do find him. It’s admirable of you to think through all these possibilities and come to the only logical conclusion: We should go home.”

The longer I hear Tig’s voice the angrier I get and the more I want to argue against my own suggestion. “We might be able to help—”

“No offense but—”

“Then don’t offend by saying something stupid,” I snap.

“I was going to say something brilliant about little blind girls,” he says.

“Yeah right.”

A silence ensues for a moment. Tig is right about the king. We only chanced on his trail. We could have missed it much more easily.

“Tig, this isn’t a game,” I say quietly.

Tig flexes his paws, pushing against the leather britches. I feel him twitch his tail. He’s worried. “I’m thinking the same thing.”

“It was just a chance that we managed to find the mouth of the river and the cave in time, and another incredible turn that we stumbled on this kingdom—the very place that the king visited on his way,” I say, thinking out loud. I twist the mossy blanket in my hands. “You’re right. The chance of finding where the king went next is impossible.” We’re both silent for another moment. “I don’t even know if we can get home,” I say. I feel Tig sit up and look at me. “We don’t know how to get back, and if we did know how to get back,” I pause, “we just barely made it here, Tig . . .”

Tig puts one paw on my shoulder. I continue, “Did the Urodela really ask a blind girl for help last night?”

“It sure sounded like it,” says Tig. “They wanted you to help kill the daemon who created the Cauldron’s Crater and singlehandedly demolished their kingdom. From what we know, it has beaten the kingdom protectors twice, and has thus far stumped the king. The words
presumptuous
and
overreaching
come to mind if you ask me.”

I grin. “Maybe you didn’t notice, but they didn’t ask you.”

Tig grunts. “They should have.”

I wish Tig would say that he knows the way home, and we should make our way straight there, but part of me still feels like arguing with him. I let the silence stretch out. He’s won this contest. We can’t follow the king. It will take everything we have to make it home. That is our mission.

I throw my legs over the bed and stretch again. “Let’s go home,” I say.

Tig yowls. “That’s the Essie I know.”

It only takes me a few minutes to get ready for the day—not that I can feel the sun, but I trust my body—if it says it’s morning, it probably is. I splash water on my face from the stone basin and pull my hair back in a loose braid. Combing my hair with my fingers will never get all the moss out, so I give up pretty quickly.

An awkward scuffle against the door announces the return of the Urodela. I hope they have food and not cave spider. I shudder and rub my stomach. In a few minutes the door to our cell, that’s how I’ve started thinking of if since last night, pushes open over the moss carpet. Cheep is back, announcing he will be our guide around the Kingdom of Crypta while my arm finishes healing.

We do get breakfast. This time we are in a smaller room with only a few other Urodela chattering away around us. Instead of the individual seats we had when eating with the queen we are seated on a low, moss covered bench that runs along the wall. There is no table, which is okay for me, but Tig has to have two spaces so that he can have his bowl next to him. I ignore courtesy and let Tig inspect my bowl. I want to know exactly what I’m eating this time around, even if I am being rude.

Being locked in our room last night has not put me in a gracious mood.

Most of what I am eating is mushrooms and some kind of berry-like fruit. Despite being disgruntled I can’t help but ask for seconds. The fruit is about the size of my thumb and is so full of moisture each one is like an explosion of crisp, sweet water.

Cheep must notice my interest because he tells me more about them. “Grandulum. We brought seeds with us from the marshes. They grow well in the shallow parts of the lake. We can plant and harvest them in less than three days,” he boasts. “The old ones say they used to get to be the size of my head when they grew in the marshes.” 

“Really?” I ask, in spite of myself.

“Certainly,” says Cheep. “And if you are finished with your meal, come with me, and I will show you more of our kingdom.” Cheep doesn’t seem to think about the fact that he can’t really show me anything, but I don’t comment.

“I apologize for not telling you we would shut the rooms last night. It might have seemed that we were locking you in. Here in Crypta we have to shut the doors to keep the cavern stalkers out. I was upset and forgot to explain.”

Tig brushes my ankle, and I follow them out the door of the dining room and into the tunnel again. I’m still irritated about last night, but his excuse sounds legitimate. “Can you tell us what King Mactogonii was doing and where you think he went? And what are cavern stalkers?” I ask.

“I need to let the queen answer your first question. As for cavern stalkers, they are many things,” Cheep says. “It’s what we call any of the hunters that come up from the lower parts of the Valley of Fire. Our advance spotters are supposed to give warning or scare them away, but sometimes there are too many, or if an ogre wanders through you can’t usually scare them.”

“How do you get rid of an ogre?” Tig wonders.

“I helped with that once,” says Cheep. Even though I am following Tig’s tail, Cheep takes two fingers on my other hand and leads the way down the tunnel. I resist the impulse to jerk my hand away. I know he is probably just trying to be nice so I let it slide.

“The way to get rid of an ogre is to lead it around to another exit from the Valley of Fire, or if you can’t do that, to get it as far away from Crypta as possible. You have to be fast.”

“Are the Urodela fast?” I ask, trying to keep my voice from being rude.

“We can be,” says Cheep, his voice a little higher than before. “Ogres are easy to confuse underground. They usually stay in shallow caves, and they don’t see as well in the dark as we do.”

“What else is under the Valley of Fire? And why aren’t they here around the lake?” I ask.

“Lots of things live deep under the Valley of Fire, much deeper than the Lake of Hemleth. Many big, some smaller. When the Urodela fled the marshes we chose this spot for a couple of reasons. Water is one. Water is what keeps us alive, so we followed the track of the Redlan River back to its source, here. There was an old wyrm that had lived here for years and made this its territory, so nothing else lived here. That was what made so many of these tunnels. By the time we got here the wyrm was too old and sluggish to move—”

“A wyrm?” interrupts Tig, his voice openly incredulous. “Wyrms are huge and you’re, well, not huge. You attacked and
killed
a wyrm?

“Not exactly,” says Cheep, again defensive. “We avoided it. Eventually it died. We put pieces in the tunnels all over this part of the Valley of Fire. Wrym is a very distinctive smell that doesn’t go away quickly.”

We walk on in silence for a few seconds. A right turn, then a left, and we come out of the tunnel into the city. The chirruping is scattered and inconsistent today, without the massive crowding of our previous entrance.

“The smell of wyrm in the tunnels has kept most things out of this part of the Valley of Fire, at least until more recently. The scent is fading, so the other things are moving in more often.”

“Like?” asks Tig. I let my hands trail on the shaped moss hedges around us as we walk.

“I already mentioned the occasional ogre. Cave spiders every so often. Big ones. We’ve been able to scare them off with light so far, but we’ve never had to actually attack one. Grundles. They have long arms, short legs, and huge teeth. They can jump or climb anything but the real danger from grundles is they move in packs.”

“Wait, are they hairless and white?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“Dad called those cave apes. They’re supposed to be really dangerous. He said even a protector or a champion wouldn’t try to attack a group of those alone. You have those here?”

“They are down below us, but we’ve seen packs come close recently.” Cheep leads me to a bench. “This is the park off of our trade square. I have an appointment to see the queen, and I’ll raise your questions. You can wait here until I return.” I nod and feel the bench in front of me. It is a little low, but it will work. I sit down and stretch out my legs.

Cheep says farewell and scampers off to the right, opposite the direction we just came. I usually have an excellent sense of direction, but since last night I have been completely turned around. I couldn’t say where the palace was, and I probably couldn’t find my way back to the banquet hall from last night if my life depended on it.