43. Idrilia
IDRILIA
Generations of people may be repeating the same tall tales, but usually those tales grow and change with every retelling.
When they stay consistently the same, the question becomes whether those implausible stories should be dismissed as folklore just because they defy logic and what we understand of the universe we live in.
—From the journal of Professor Lorento Haldren
It had been eight days since Professor Haldren had let me borrow his father's journals, and after delving into them, it had taken me exactly two days to decide on another expedition and start assembling a crew.
Now, as I stood at the bottom of a mountain that I had sworn to my mother I would not climb until after the ball, drinking bad caff and watching the sun come up over a camp that was half the size of the previous one, I wasn't sure of my impetuous decision.
I'd changed every parameter I could think of about this expedition, so it was nothing like the one that had killed two men.
The truth was that the avalanche could have easily claimed many more lives, so we'd been lucky to lose only two, but it felt wrong to call it luck when two families had lost their husbands and fathers.
The biggest difference in this expedition was that the site lay well within Tarina's borders.
That kept the first of my two vows intact, it was also a much easier climb than the slope where I'd found my Silver Princess.
Professor Haldren had gone up this slope many times while he was well into his sixties, and Professor Lubina Graff hadn't been much younger, so it couldn't be a difficult climb.
They had set up their makeshift laboratory on a shelf of mineral rock and done the work right there on site instead of attempting to transplant a flower that didn't take well to being removed from its natural habitat.
I had the professor's maps and his coordinates, written in his own hand. I knew where I was going almost to the step, which was a luxury I hadn't had the first time.
"It's cold up here." Ursa stepped down from the hauler and handed me a thermos. "Not the place to drink ice caff, Your Highness." She took the mug I was holding. "Drink the fresh one."
"Thank you," I said.
It was cold. Most of Tarina was relatively flat, but close to its border with Elucia the land rose, and though the incline was gradual and moderate, the temperature change was dramatic.
As before, we made base camp in the furthest possible spot the vehicles could reach, and from here on out we would continue on foot, but it wouldn't be a hard climb.
There was a path, and it wasn't very steep.
Even Ursa could join us, but I knew she would prefer to stay behind inside the warm hauler.
"Are you sure you don't want to come?" I asked. "It will be a safe adventure for you."
"I am a lady's maid, Your Highness, not a goat.
" She surveyed the slope with open distaste.
"I climb stairs when I must. I do not climb mountains.
I will keep the kettle hot for when you all come down half-frozen.
" She leaned closer and lowered her voice.
"Someone needs to watch over the camp. I don't trust those two.
" She pointed her chin at the drivers who were staying behind.
"They were vetted by Jeffson, so I don't expect any trouble from them, but it's a good idea to keep your eyes on things down here just in case someone who saw us making camp gets ideas."
Gavon hadn't joined us at all, which surprised no one but still managed to disappoint me even though it shouldn't have. I kept hoping he'd rise above the low expectations everyone had of him, and that he had of himself, but he kept proving them right and me wrong.
He'd made a whole act out of it, pressing his hand to the ankle he'd broken in the avalanche and making an impassioned speech about how his body simply wasn't ready to be tested again and how he'd only slow me down and worry me.
I didn't fall for his act, but I pretended that I did because the alternative was to confront him, and that was pointless. I wasn't going to change him. The only thing I could do was either accept him as he was or end things between us.
The thought had crossed my mind on more than one occasion, but I wasn't ready to do that yet. So, I'd let him kiss my forehead and tell me to come back to him with wonderful stories, because my expeditions made excellent scenes in his screenplays that no one wanted to produce.
I'd told him I'd bring him a souvenir.
Denna and Palel, my research assistants who had been hurt as badly as or worse than Gavon during the avalanche, were accompanying me on this trek, and Palel wasn't even complaining because it looked easy from where we were standing.
The other members of my team were Jeffson, my trusted mountain guide, and two new porters he'd brought along, named Dyshas and Borin.
Dyshas was tall, light-haired, and wore a colorful wool cap that looked like it had been knitted by a child, and Borin was short and dark-haired, and wore a traditional Tarinian cap that was knitted from natural fibers and extended over his ears to keep them warm.
Denna walked up to me and patted her satchel. "I'm ready, Your Highness."
I rolled my eyes. "You know the rules, Denna. I'm Royal Highness only in the palace and on television. Everywhere else I'm just Idrilia."
"Sorry." Denna pushed her new pair of glasses up her nose. "I've been influenced by Ursa. She's not following your rules."
"I know." I grimaced. "It's a lost cause with her."
"Fine her every time she calls you Royal Highness when you are outside the palace. That will make her stop. My mother used to do that to my brother and me to get us to stop swearing."
I arched a brow. "Did it work?"
"It did, except for the times we were so mad at each other that we were willing to pay the price for each of the swear words we hurled."
I couldn't imagine the straitlaced Denna using inappropriate language, but as I was learning, sometimes appearances could be misleading.
"Oh, don't look so surprised." She waved a dismissive hand. "I'm not as prim and proper as I look."
"Says the girl who is carrying two extra pairs of glasses in her satchel."
"I am not going to be blind on a mountain again. I don't repeat prior mistakes. I learn from them."
"That's smart. Perhaps I need to take a page out of your book."
She frowned but smartly didn't ask me to explain.
"So? Are we going or what?" Palel asked. "I'd rather be done with this trek and back in camp before it gets dark."
To his credit, this was the first semi-complaint he'd lodged, which was admirable given how much he hated field work.
The guy had chosen the wrong specialty, expecting to spend his days in the lab examining soil that had been delivered to him. He hadn't figured on actually collecting samples himself.
He loathed it, and after getting hurt badly during the avalanche, he hated it even more.
Denna cast him an amused glance. "Are you so eager to start climbing?"
"Not at all. I just want it done in a timely fashion so we don't get stranded and need to be evacuated. I don't want to see another dragon for as long as I live."
"Jeffson is not done yet," I said. "We start when he gives the signal."
Palel turned to look at the guide. "I wouldn't want to rush him. He knows what he's doing. We probably owe him our lives."
That was a slight exaggeration, but it was true that after the avalanche Jeffson had dug with his bare hands alongside the rest of us to get to people buried under the snow.
When the packs were sorted, and there was nothing left to delay us, Jeffson turned to me. "We are ready, Your Highness."
It was a lost cause to make him stop addressing me formally.
"Before we go, I just want to reiterate that I'm not going to push this time," I told him once more. "If I do, I'm authorizing you to overrule me. Hopefully, no intervention will be needed. This is an easy climb on an established path, and the weather is good."
"The weather was good when we started the other one," Palel murmured. "And it stayed good. And we still got hit with an avalanche."
He had a point, and I looked up to assess the amount of snow above. It was a long way to where the peaks were white, and if there was an avalanche, it would probably lose its momentum by the time it reached us, but there was always the possibility of things going wrong.
"Not likely this time," Jeffson said.
We set out up the lower slope, and the path was wide and easy at first, the mountain lulling us into a false sense of security before showing us its teeth.
I hoped the teeth would not come out. Jeffson had set the pace at the front of the porters, and I dropped back because I had questions for them.
"You've been guiding people up these mountains your whole life," I said. "I wonder if you are familiar with the folklore regarding thin places."
Jeffson made a derisive sound in his throat.
"Nonsense to scare children from going where they are not supposed to," he said.
"My grandmother swore that there were real accounts of people who saw those supposed thin places, but then she also swore her goat could predict the weather, and that she saved the entire flock from freezing by refusing to leave the barn the morning before a severe snowstorm hit us out of nowhere.
" He stepped over a large rock and guided me around it without breaking stride.
"She used to tell my brother and me about a place two valleys east, where strange things happened once the sun went down.
" He smiled. "She talked about light bending, but since the auroras are a constant in these mountains, that was most likely something related to them. "
"What did she mean by light bending?" I asked. "How can light bend?"
"On water," he said, as if I was a little dim for not knowing it. "You see a shine in it. Only according to my grandmother, the story claimed that there was no water there, and that shapes could be seen moving on the far side of the shine."
That echoed the stories in Professor Haldren's journals.
"I've walked that valley a hundred times," Jeffson continued. "I've never seen anything magical."
"The shapes in that bent light, what did they look like?" I asked.
"People going about, like you'd see folk across a field, only instead they were on the other side of the shimmer.
" He shrugged. "It was just light reflecting off the ice, or simple hallucinations.
The high air does it. Makes water appear where there is none and shows a man his dead mother waving and smiling at him. "
"It's not just the east valley," Dyshas said from behind us.
"My gran's from over the ridge, and they tell it there too, only their place sings.
You hear it before you see the shine, she said.
Music and voices speaking strange sounds.
" He grinned. "Gran told us to never answer those voices, or they would pull us through to the afterworld. She said to run away."
"Did anyone ever try to walk through?" I asked.
"If anyone did, he didn't come back to tell about it," Borin said. "Just like the dead. They never come back to tell us what's on the other side. My gran said she would come back to tell us, but she didn't." He sighed, and I could see that he missed his grandmother. She must have passed recently.
"It's just thin there, she used to say," Borin continued. "Worn, like a place in a blanket you can almost see daylight through, but your finger won't go to the other side." He made a small gesture as he said it, two fingers brushed quickly over his closed eyes, the sign against the evil eye.
I was tempted to do the same but refrained because a sophisticated woman like me shouldn't believe in silly superstitions like common folk.
"There is nothing to it," Borin said. But if it was nothing, why had he just made a ward against the evil eye?
The stories they'd just told me were the same as the ones Professor Haldren had collected from herders and villagers over many years.
The light that bends where there was no water. The shapes on the far side, always at a distance, always indistinct. The sound in the older tellings, music and voices speaking unfamiliar sounds.
When I'd repeated Professor Haldren's argument to Gavon, that a true wonder ought to grow and change in the retelling in the way invented ones did, he'd dressed the dry scholarly point in stage silk.
"A made-up wonder grows in the telling." He'd enunciated every word, delighted with himself.
"It acquires heroes who step through and come back changed, because that is what an audience wants the storyteller to give them. "
The line was prettier than Haldren's. It was also beside the point.
Because the trouble with the argument, however lyrically he'd phrased it, was that this wonder hadn't grown. It hadn't acquired its heroes. It had stayed exactly the same.