Chapter 24 #2
Verna leaned out the window. She could see it, a pale smudge against the winter sky to the south, the dust a group of riders at speed would send up on a dry road.
"How many?" she called.
"Hard to say yet."
Verna pulled her head back in, then she tried something she hadn’t done before. She pressed her hand against the carriage door and felt the ring warm against her skin. Then she thought about the road ahead, about the distance between the dust and the turnoff.
She didn't know exactly how she did it, but it worked.
The wind changed.
It came from the north suddenly and strongly, the kind of wind that rolled off the Meridian Sea in winter as a gale.
It hit the road behind them, twirling the dust in the air in a blanket of thick powder that obscured the road.
As well as hiding the carriage from their sight, Verna knew it would be difficult for the riders to see where they were going.
She wasn't naive enough to think it would stop them. But it would slow them, and time was what she needed. "Kalen," she called out.
Kalen appeared at the window.
"We need to get off the main road," Verna said. "Now, not at the turnoff. There's a track through the olive groves about half a mile ahead, which comes out at the back estate walls."
Kalen frowned. "I don't know this track."
"I'll guide you."
Kalen nodded. "All right. Wave your hand when we’re nearing it," she said, and pulled her horse forward to speak to the driver.
Ten minutes later, the carriage left the road with a lurch that sent Marleen sideways into the corner, and they were bouncing along on two rutted wheel tracks barely visible through a grove of olives.
The riders dropped behind in a single file, the trees pressing close on either side, their branches scraping the side of the carriage.
"Still there, bear?" Verna projected.
"Still here, witch. My name is Dulcie," came the response, with something that was either amusement or contempt or possibly both.
The track wasn’t built for carriages. It was there for people on foot and the occasional donkey and at the pace they were moving, they could lose a wheel or break an axle. Marleen held the seat with both hands and said nothing, which Verna was grateful for.
Verna leaned out the window when they came to a fork in the track and pointed to the right.
Then further on, to the left. She knew this twisting track like the back of her hand, having spent a childhood running through these groves.
Soon the olive trees gave way to the familiar stone of the estate wall which led to the back gate.
It wasn’t a grand entrance. It was a cumbersome iron gate used by the estate workers when they came in from the lower fields. One of her guards dismounted and swung it open and the carriage trundled through.
When the bear rose on its back legs at the gate, Verna said proudly, This is home.
It dropped on all fours and walked through onto the estate grounds then stopped and looked around at the terraces and grape vines. The tension that had been in its shoulders since the arena eased by degrees.
Verna called a halt, climbed out and stood in the back field of her estate in her blue silk gown with gold trim and the laurel wreath in her hair that had somehow stayed put through everything.
She nodded to her Abrensian guards who looked back at her with their wide brown faces wreathed in smiles, and at Marleen who emerged from the carriage with her bag and her dignity intact if only barely.
Then at Kalen on horseback with a cut on her forehead, who was looking at her with an expression she couldn't fully read.
And lastly at the huge bear, who appeared quite comfortable in its new surroundings.
"Right," she said. "Let's go home. I don’t know about you lot, but I could do with some food."
Marleen made a sound that was equal parts relief and residual trauma and climbed back into the carriage, grumbling.
Kalen gazed down at her from the saddle. The cut on her forehead was bleeding again from the ride, but she appeared not to notice. "What about the bear?"
"She's coming with us."
"Where are we going to put her?" asked the captain of the guard.
Verna looked at the estate spread out before her, the terraces and the vineyards, the olive groves and the long low house with its red roof and the sea beyond. "The lower terrace," she said. "She'll like the view."
Kalen looked at the bear, and it stared back at Kalen.
She's not afraid of me, the bear observed in her head, with what sounded like approval.
"She's not afraid of much," Verna said aloud.
Kalen blinked. "Are you talking to it?"
"Her," Verna said. "And yes."
Kalen studied her for a long moment, clearly puzzled. So she should be, thought Verna. I held a war bear still with an outstretched hand and called up a wind. She’s probably realized by now that I’m a witch.
"All right," Kalen said, then turned her horse toward the house.
Verna gazed up at the three moons already visible in the winter afternoon sky: Lira pale and early, Senne a thin scratch, and Orath barely there above the horizon.
She touched the ring and thought her great-grandmother would be proud of her.