Son of the Hero (17 page)

He? It was the blonde I had seen on the battlements of Arrowroot. She reined her horse to a stop before she could possibly have seen us.

“Prince Gil?” Her voice was clear and sounded like a child’s. I moved my horse to the middle of the road and eased the tension on my bowstring. Harkane followed me, but Lesh didn’t come out until I told him to.

The blonde couldn’t have been older than eighteen, if that. She had a sword hanging from her belt and an unstrung bow tied to the side of her saddle, under her right leg.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“My name is Annick.” It sounded like
an-neek
. “I live at the castle.”

“Why did you follow us?”

“I need to go with you into Fairy. I may be your only hope of getting back alive.” I let a beat or two pass. Lesh and Harkane restrained any burning need to inject their opinions.

“I think I need more of an explanation than that,” I said.

“My mother is Baron Resler’s younger sister, though he hardly admits to that since I was born. That was nine months after a raid during which the elflord’s forces briefly occupied part of Arrowroot Town, including the house where my mother lived. She was raped by an elf warrior. That makes me halfelven. Having me along is the cloak of invisibility you need. Xayber won’t spot you, at least not as quickly as he would without me.”

“Send her back, lord,” Lesh advised.

I took the arrow from my bow and returned it to the quiver. I understood that Annick wasn’t talking about literal invisibility but about being able to deceive the elflord about our identities. I stared at Annick while I tied my bow to the saddle, under my leg, the way she carried hers.

“Why is it so important to you to go with me?” I asked. “Not why I should think it’s important. And how do you know where we’re going?”

“There’s no other place you could be going from here,” Annick said. “And since it can’t be a friendly visit, you must intend something against the Elflord of Xayber. Why do I want to do?” She snorted and made a face. “Whenever my mother looks at me, she wants to kill herself in shame. She had tried to kill herself, over and over. She blames herself for what that beast did to her. When she sees me, she’s reminded of him. My uncle took me from her when I was a baby for fear she would harm me. While the beast who sired me lives, neither my mother nor I will know any peace. And if I can’t get to him yet, maybe I can at least help you foil his master’s ambitions to conquer the seven kingdoms.” It was an impressive speech, full of passion. I wondered if a single word was true.

“Lesh, do you know anything of this?” I asked.

“No, lord.”

“Of course not!” Annick snapped. “It’s not the sort of tale one spreads.”

“It’s also not the sort of tale that can be hidden easily in a place like Varay,” I said. Servants would talk. Repeated suicide attempts by a lady of note would be hot gossip, even without tabloids and their video sisters. The intelligent decision would be to follow Lesh’s advice and send her packing, but I didn’t feel any particular danger from her, and if she was by some odd stretch telling the truth, she might be the edge I needed.

“There are no proofs that will open a closed mind,” Annick said, and I nodded my agreement.

“I think perhaps you are telling the truth, part of it anyway,” I said.

“Your confidence overwhelms me, lord.” She didn’t try to subdue the sarcasm.

“I don’t give a rat’s ass whether I overwhelm you, underwhelm you, or just bore you to tears,” I said. “If you’ve changed your mind about wanting to accompany us?”

“I should, but I won’t. My quest is too important to me.”

Whatever that is, I thought. “Then we’ve wasted enough time here. Shall we go?”

The four of us rode on through the forest. I hoped I wasn’t putting too much stock in my allegedly heightened perception of danger. In any case, it would be easier to keep an eye on Annick if she rode with us than if I had to worry about her tagging along.

11
Xayber

The border between Varay and Xayber was as unmistakable as the Berlin Wall, despite the talk of fluctuations. There was no fence or any other physical barrier, no signposts saying: “You are now leaving the mortal sector.” you couldn’t
see
any difference, not at first, but we all knew precisely when we crossed the border. Even Lesh felt the change and understood it. The air seemed charged, ionized like just after a vicious thunderstorm. The breeze carried a trace of rotten-egg smell like sulfur water. The forest
felt
sinister. The calls of birds, the rustling of branches and leaves, seemed muted, deadened. The footsteps of our horses seemed to change tone, become hollow. All the scene lacked was the eerie telltale soundtrack music of a killer about to strike to fit right into a mad-slasher movie.

Better get used to it, I told myself. You could have two weeks of this creepy shit.

“You know where we’re heading?” I asked Annick after we crossed the border. It was more an attempt to distract myself than a burning curiosity.

“Just that you’re invading the realm of the Elflord of Xayber.”

“We’re going north, staying close to the western edge of the forest and the isthmus.”

“Then you must be after sea-silver. There’s no other reason for such a journey.” She sounded very sure of that, but she sounded very sure of everything she said.

“Do you come into Fairy often?” I asked.

“Only once before. When I was fifteen, I came looking for the beast who raped my mother. I didn’t find
him
, but I slit the throats of three of the elflord’s soldiers.” She talked of killing with a cool passion, the way I might have described a hot date in college. It was chilling.

Our horses needed no urging to pick up the pace. If we had asked them for a hard gallop, they would have willingly pounded away until they dropped. As it was, we had to check them more often than urge them on, varying the gait to what I hoped was an efficient combination. Our breaks were few and short that first day, taken when we spotted a place where we would be concealed from anyone passing along the road—not that it was much of a road inside Fairy. We had crossed the main coastal route almost as soon as we entered Battle Forest and went on to this track that was obviously little used.

I looked at Annick a lot, when I thought she wouldn’t notice. She was attractive, but I wasn’t at all attracted. She would fit in a TV commercial easily, maybe playing volleyball in a skimpy swimsuit on a beach full of beautiful people, but she talked like the Count of Monte Cristo justifying his long quest for vengeance. While we rode, Annick braided her hair, then coiled the braid and pinned it so it wouldn’t blow in the wind. She rode with the casual assurance of someone who lived in the saddle. I didn’t doubt that she could use her weapons with deadly efficiency. Hell, even though she didn’t set off my danger signals, she scared the crap out of me. Slender, soft-looking, no more than five-three, she scared me. Not the kind of thing to tell my college chums. Annick seemed to change physically once we crossed into Fairy. It was subtle, like the changes in the air, in the feel of the land. There was something a trifle fuzzy about her outline once we were in the land of her father, something that made it hard to focus on her. Her skin looked whiter, almost ghostly. Undoubtedly, a lot of it was my imagination—
that
was running amok. But she
was
quite different. I was there partly to avenge the death of my father. She was along, according to her, mainly to find and murder
her
father. She was half Fairy and half Varay. I was half Varay and half Kentucky. Maybe the antipathy was unavoidable.

On the map, the Isthmus of Xayber looked like a tornado, a long, narrow funnel touching down on the north coast of Varay. According to the map—and what little anyone back at Basil seemed to know about it—the isthmus was over four hundred miles long, widening as it went north, gradually at first, then more rapidly as it reached what Parthet called the blackheartland of Fairy. Along the stretch that I expected to see, the isthmus varied between thirty and seventy miles wide. Most of it was heavily wooded, and there was a hilly spine to the isthmus, with the hills becoming mountains farther north.

Except for infrequent snatches of conversation, we rode in silence. Lesh rode point. Annick rode beside me, when possible. Harkane stayed close behind. The only alarm of the day came about two hours before sunset. I can’t be more precise because my watch stopped when we entered Fairy. I felt danger approaching, a strong signal that I couldn’t possibly have missed.

“Off the road,” I hissed while I looked southeast. “Dismount. Hold the horses still.”

Nobody questioned my orders. Perhaps even Annick believed in the mystique of the Hero of Varay. The feeling of danger grew stronger, but it was several minutes before I found out what had triggered it. I sensed the approaching shadow and was looking in the correct direction when the shadow finally came into sight.

“A dragon,” I whispered. I couldn’t see the creature, but its shadow was clear. We held our breath while the shadow passed and went on north. I only caught the briefest glance of the flying reptile, a hint of the body eclipsing the sky. When it was gone, I waited for the feeling of danger to fade and disappear.

“Okay, he’s gone.” I took a deep breath and looked around at my companions. Lesh and Annick looked impressed, Lesh more than Annick. Harkane had his annoying smug look wrapped around his face again. It was almost as if he were a teacher watching me discover what I could do.

We mounted and rode on.

“For being between two warring armies, this forest seems awfully damn deserted,” I commented, wondering mainly what Annick might say.

“The armies are there,” she said. “The Elflord of Xayber doesn’t need a wall of warriors along his frontier. My uncle’s troops never cross it.”

“We’re riding an established trail.
That
should be guarded.”

“Perhaps the elflord wants intruders to get far enough to let him play with them,” Annick said. “He’s totally evil. If he finds us, he’ll toy with us as a cat toys with a mouse before she kills it.” She stared at me, her eyes almost purple in the late-afternoon light.

“How can you live with such hate?” Harkane asked from behind us. I was surprised to hear him say anything like that.

Annick didn’t bother to look back at him. “It’s the hate that keeps me alive,” she said.

“Then you’re the loser, no matter what happens,” Harkane said.

“Enough!” I said before Annick could fire another salvo. “Let’s start looking for a place to camp for the night.” Without Parthet along, we couldn’t find a place like the thicket that had sheltered us on the way to Castle Thyme—barely a week before—so we would just have to do the best we could.

We left the road a few minutes later, picking our way through the trees to the right, deeper into the forest. When I could no longer make out the line of the road, we dismounted.

“At least nobody will stumble over us by accident here,” I said. That was the only good thing about the site. There was no water and scant grazing for our horses. We got the animals unsaddled, tethered to a picket line, and tended. They couldn’t wander far.

Supper was salt beef and bread with a few radishes and onions. I made a mental note to stock up on junk food the next time I got to Louisville. A Milky Way would have tasted great right then. We didn’t even have coffee to ease the meal, not that I would have dared a fire.

“We’ll take turns standing watch,” I said at dusk. “I’ll start and wake Annick.” I looked at her. “You wake Lesh and he’ll wake Harkane. If it’s still dark when you get tired, Harkane, you wake me.”

We made up our bedding. Harkane set his closer to mine than I liked, but I didn’t say anything. Lesh set up by a tree a few yards away. Annick separated herself from the rest of us as much as the glade permitted. When she lay down, she unsheathed her sword and slept gripping the weapon. That may have been as much for our benefit as against the possibility of outside attack.

Darkness came quickly. There was no trace of a moon that should have been past the first quarter, and no stars were visible. Stars shone on the seven kingdoms, even if the constellations weren’t always the ones I knew from Earth. With the dark came new sounds in the forest. I recognized the call of an owl, but none of the other sounds. None of the noises were particularly close, and nothing stirred my danger sense. That was idling. I felt danger, but nothing imminent. It was just a constant background, something to remind me that everything about the isthmus, about Fairy, was dangerous.

I sat with my back against a tree trunk, facing the road, and checked my pistol to make sure there was a round in the chamber. That was just something to do with my hands. I didn’t really expect the gun to work in Fairy. The actions reminded me to ask Harkane what had happened to my father’s guns.

Harkane. I wasn’t sure how to relate to my father’s squire, my squire now. He was part of the life that my parents had hidden from me. I resented him for sharing that life. And I resented the way he seemed to measure me against my father all the time. He had recovered quickly from his shock and fear at Dad’s death. Once I accepted him as my squire, he perked up in a hurry. If a Varayan squire had the same functions as in medieval England—and I wasn’t completely certain of that yet—he was supposed to be my weapon bearer and apprentice, learning how to become a knight or whatever. The apprenticeship system applied to the military elite—page, squire, knight. Harkane needed to fill out a little to be a top-notch warrior. He looked as if he ought to be a freshman in high school, dishwater-blond hair cut in what I once heard called a Prince Valiant cut, faded blue eyes.

Lesh was easier to understand. I had been comfortable with him from our first meeting. He was a veteran soldier, stoical, willing to take on anything, as long as there was someone to tell him who to fight and when. Without ever seeing him in battle, I trusted him. Maybe his reflexes wouldn’t be the fastest, but there are other considerations that are important.