Chapter 31
Fern delivered her best approximation of R. Geneviss’s timeless classic as they wended their way through the trough of the valley with the great green lake slipping noiselessly by. The reflected clouds drifted past like ghostly ships.
The world itself was preternaturally still, with only the occasional puff of snow from a peak, like frigid spring pollen, marking the passage of the winds high above. The cold scent of snow and the mineral sharpness of the lake were bright in Fern’s nostrils.
Those round, black stones advanced in an irregular squiggle along the beachward side of the path, which would have been impossible to find otherwise.
When Fern’s throat became parched from the telling and she paused to wet her lips, Astryx wordlessly passed a waterskin to her.
They continued that way for hours until they reached the eastern end of the lake, where the valley opened out into a broad, descending wedge of slope between serrated ranks of mountains that were sanded away into hills and plains below.
For the first time in weeks, they saw the snowline ahead of them like a tattered white skirt. Frosted evergreens stippled the land here and there until they swelled in number and crowded together into a mottled emerald quilt that bunched across the lowlands.
The sight was a deep relief, but it also bathed Fern in an unexpected surge of melancholy.
Despite everything, she had the sense of leaving a place of reprieve, no longer held outside of time.
Even as she smelled the first prickling hints of pine and the musk of cold, wet earth, she had an impulse to retreat back up the slopes.
The lake valley they were departing had harbored a feeling of secret holiness that the abbey never approached.
Fern was startled when their progress stopped along with her narrative. A glance upward found the Oathmaiden surveying the lands below with an expression that seemed a perfect reflection of her own feelings.
“What gives?” piped up Breadlee. “We were just getting to a good part.”
Staysha’s pony pulled alongside Bucket, puffing foggy plumes. The dwarf narrowed her eyes suspiciously at Astryx and Fern over Zyll’s orange mop of hair. “Who was that? Don’t tell me you’ve got another goblin stashed in your saddlebags.”
“It’s too much to explain right now,” said Fern.
“Is it?” asked Breadlee, his voice skeptical.
“It can wait until evening,” declared Astryx. She pointed north to where a thin cataract of water skated down a black bluff and disappeared into the forest. “We’ll find the stream that waterfall feeds and pitch camp early. We won’t push hard the first day out.”
Before Staysha could protest, the Oathmaiden gently nudged Bucket’s flanks, and they got moving again.
The stream was easy enough to find, since the road passed right through it.
They wended between pines and barrow-fir that steadily increased in density, until they reached a stony shallow that they carefully picked their way across.
Fern caught fleeting glimpses of brook trout flashing above speckled stones.
Astryx led them north along the burbling water until she found a clearing within sight of the bank. The fir-tops whispered in a sinuous dance high above, and a carpet of old needles muffled the water’s song to a throaty hush.
With little conversation, they made camp. Zyll busied herself shuttling river stones for a fire ring, and to her credit, Staysha produced a small hatchet and gathered wood from a nearby deadfall.
After stringing a highline and tending to Bucket and Staysha’s pony—Persimmon, who seemed delighted to have equine company—Astryx turned to find Fern crouched by the assembled firewood.
“This remains humiliating,” complained Breadlee as Fern rasped him briskly across a river stone, shaving blue sparks on a cone of dry needles. “You’re going to dull my edge!”
“Oh, hush. You’re not telling me Elder steel is that fragile?”
“An Elder Blade?” cried Staysha, nearly dropping her armload of branches.
“‘Blade’ might be spreading it on a little thick,” observed Fern, drawing the knife across the stone again and making a satisfied noise when the tinder popped with sudden flame. She pretended to think about it. “Pocketknife?”
“Shankling!” shouted Zyll.
“Hells with all of you!” grumbled Breadlee.
“He’s a greatsword that has experienced diminishment, I’ve been told,” said Astryx with a wry smile, as she unbuckled the longer Elder Blade from her back. Fern saw the skin around her eyes tighten as she did it, but she made no noises of pain.
“Thank you,” whispered Breadlee, his tone pathetically grateful.
Then Astryx spoiled it by skinning an inch of her longsword’s steel.
“Ahem. I don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure of meeting yet,” declared Nigel. “I am called Nigellus Primus. Undiminished, as you can plainly see.”
“Eight hells,” breathed Staysha, and this time she did drop her armful. “I need my lute.”
Staysha forewent breaking into song. At least long enough to prepare a makeshift dinner in a stewpot she produced from her wagon.
The Tarimites had provided beans and heavily salted bacon and beef, as well as a dozen hard, yeasty biscuits.
The dwarf settled the pot at the fire’s edge and built a stew of beans, hunks of meat carved off with her belt knife, and a few of the biscuits, which dissolved in the boil and thickened it.
She tossed in a handful of herbs and peppercorns from a jar.
Zyll appeared beside her, rummaged around in a pocket, and then held both fists over the stewpot. Before the dwarf could open her mouth to protest, she’d dropped in handfuls of mystery mushroom.
Staysha gave Astryx a questioning glance. “Those aren’t deadly, are they?”
The goblin fished one back out of the pot. She crammed it into her mouth, swallowed, and bared her teeth at the dwarf, who recoiled.
“Guess not,” observed Fern.
Astryx looked up from oiling Nigel’s length. She nodded at the pot. “I’m afraid we lost our bowls at the bridge.”
“No fear,” said Staysha brightly, and scurried to her wagon. They heard a series of clatters and bangs, then a long pause. “Where are my spoons?” she cried.
Astryx and Fern both looked at Zyll, who stared innocently back at them.
Grumbling, the dwarf returned with a stack of wooden bowls and a tin ladle.
The stew was tasty, even though the beans were still chewy, and they all had to slurp noisily from their bowls.
Zyll’s mushrooms turned out to be meaty and fragrant.
Night fell fully as they ate, and the darkening blue above the firs became star-flecked by degrees.
Crickets chirred in the deep woods, underscored by the snap and rustle of something ponderously bedding down in the underbrush.
When they’d finished their meal, Fern scoured the bowls in the river by the light of Staysha’s lantern. She returned to find the bard tuning her lute while Astryx stripped off her sodden socks and laid them across a pair of stones close by the fire.
“Oooh, a little entertainment,” said Breadlee.
The bard cleared her throat. The gold thread of her burgundy doublet gleamed in the firelight. “Look, it’s not lost on me that you seem reluctant to share your stories.”
Fern gave herself credit for managing not to snort a laugh.
“But maybe I haven’t done enough to reassure you that they’d be in good hands,” Staysha continued, expression earnest. Her dexterous fingers danced over the lute strings, tickling out a musical flourish.
“You may have heard this one before.” She grimaced.
“Or maybe not, but it’s possible, anyway.
If this is the first time, though, perhaps it won’t be the last. I’m proud of it. It’s called ‘Kingfisher’s Blue Cloak.’”
She strummed, her opposite hand busy on the frets. Fern had to admit, she was a hells of a lute player. Then she opened her mouth and began. Her singing voice was lower than expected, like sweet pipe smoke.
Fern set the bowls aside, pleasantly surprised. She sat cross-legged between Astryx and Zyll, leaning back on her hands.
“In the end, she found the beginning,
In the beginning, she saw the end,
From the froth of the river
Did smoke, a-spinning
The stair to the sky ascend.”
Huh, thought Fern, and shared a look of comic startlement with Zyll, of all people. She’s actually pretty good.
Fern dreamed of Viv, again.
Even in the dream, she had the presence of mind to think, Oh. Another one of these, then?
She stood on the doorstep of Legends & Lattes once more, candleglow visible through the leaded glass, and a shadow passing through the light.
Her mind wasn’t swimming with brandy. Her heart beat slow and regular. Her paw didn’t shake as she knocked.
“It’s late,” said Viv, surprised as she cracked the door, her hair rimmed with gold. “Everything okay?”
“It is, and it isn’t,” said Fern. Her voice didn’t quaver even a little. “Can I come in?”
A blur of time then, a smearing of the mundanities into an impression of talk and motion and the spaces they occupied.
When it resolved, they sat at the long table, which seemed less imposingly large now. In the curious way of dreams, her toes touched the floor, even as Viv fit perfectly well opposite her.
Without apparent effort or regret, dream-Fern reached out a paw to touch Viv’s hand on the table and said, “This isn’t working. It isn’t what I need.”
And here, Fern twinned so she was standing beside dream-Fern and Viv at the table, watching incredulously as this other-her calmly withdrew a silver knife from her cloak and brandished it.
Dream-Fern pointed toward the door with Breadlee, who seemed to grow huge in her hand.
“I’ve got to go. But you’ll be all right. I found a better reason.”
Now, Viv was Astryx, staring across the table with those ghostlight eyes. “No rocks at the bottom,” the elf whispered.
As Fern left the bench and turned to the door, she saw that it was half open already, and Quillin stood just outside, peeking into the shop. Then he was crowded aside by Zyll, grinning her shark-grin. The hazferou was atop her head again, snaggle-fanged and savage.
“We goes when is time to be somewhere else,” said the goblin, and then everything swirled into dreamlessness.