The King's Might: A Legend of Averdan

Part Four, Chapter One

PART FOUR

BORDERLANDS

*****

One

In Which Jalith Learns A Lot About Traveling

Jalith had not picked the fastest horse in the stables--that he had possessed enough foresight to do this was a source of great relief over the next few weeks. He had, instead, picked the strongest and hardiest, a horse that looked more like a sausage with legs than a living creature. This venerable animal, though it did not look like a prince's mount, did Jalith the great favor of not dying through weeks of travel, not even when the roads were bad and food was scarce. Though its gallop was more like a trot, and its trot more like a walk, the horse accepted its lot with dignity and took its new owner through strange scenery and stranger climate without batting an ear about it.

He assumed he was traveling through Horsa and Furst, though with no boundaries marking the deliniation between them he could only assume. They were rocky lands, full of twisted short trees and dangerously steep hills. He saw few people on the road, for which he was grateful--though he went steadily North he suspected men of his coloring were still scarce enough to require an explanation. Once or twice he passed villages, sad little rows of stone in the misty grey horizon. He ate what little game he could trap, handfuls of berries and mushrooms, water from the clear little streams that trickled down through the hills.

Though the weather was still damp, as it had been in Rekhani, it grew colder and colder every day. Jalith grew very fond of his furred cloak, and the blankets he had brought with him in the horse's saddlebags. He became good at making fires from even the smallest mounds of twigs, the most sodden heaps of leaves. His skin became browner, his hands harder. His beautiful yellow hair became streaked with the dirt of travel.

The magician was with him every night.

They were no longer precise dreams--more a sense of being watched over, of a vague protective presence in the cold and dark beyond his little fire. Every once in a while, upon waking, he would have a memory of a narrow white face, pale hair, a straight Norchladil nose. He would remember walking in a high white hall, marvelously bright, with the world spread out below him like a jumble of children's toys on a nursery floor. The names came back to him over and over, sustained him in rain and later in snow:

Sixdoves. Mourninghall. Sirili.

Names like bells. Names like fate.

It was not that he trusted the magician. He simply no longer cared if he trusted the man or not. For now their ends were similar enough. The rest could be sorted through later.

He had become very thin, very silent. His hearing was as sharp as a cat's. He occasionally thought about Alair, thought about his father. The thoughts made him smile slightly, as though recalling something that had happened a long time ago.

He rode for one month, then for two. When, at one village, he was obliged to stop in and buy new blankets, the shopkeeper almost threw him out of the store.

He had been on the road for nearly three months when, for the first time, he noticed somebody following him.

He was in the Borderlands, or near them. The road rose up before him in high rocky swaths, and the wrecked and cracked cobblestones were hard with frost. His breath fogged the air before him like a great white cloud.

He had heard the hoofbeats of another horse, but had paid them no mind. More folk had been passing him of late, probably on their way to the Holdings of the Borderlands or the Grateful Pass they protected.