Beyond the Pale (18 page)

The road left the copse behind, then began to wind its way up a series of ridges that rose ever higher, like gigantic stone steps. Not only was this road narrower than the Queen’s Way, it was in far worse repair. The paving stones were crumbling and treacherous, and in places they were gone altogether, leaving patches of hard ground where little grew besides stinging nettles, though these did so in great profusion. Soon Travis’s shins were burning with nettle stings, for the barbs seemed to prick right through his breeches.

Just when Travis’s lungs were starting to burn, the two men crested the shoulder of a ridge and came to a halt. Below them the land fell away into a bowl-shaped valley. In the center of the valley was a lake, its waters molten with the light of the westering sun. A rough finger of rock protruded into the lake, and atop the craggy peninsula stood a fortress of stone. Even from here Travis could see that at least half of the fortress had fallen into ruin. Broken columns loomed like rotten stumps over jumbles of stone that might once have been walls. Even the part of the fortress that still stood sagged under its own weight as if, with one final sigh, it might collapse inward at any moment.

“There it is,” Falken said. “Kelcior.”

Travis eyed the weathered keep, his expression dubious. “I hope you won’t be insulted, but it really doesn’t look like much.”

Falken laughed. “These days, it
isn’t
much. Though once, long ago, this was the northernmost garrison of the Tarrasian Empire, and after that it was a keep of Malachor. However, these days the fortress—or at least what’s left of it—is occupied by a scoundrel named Kel. Barbarian though he is, Kel fancies himself a king, and it’s a good idea not to disagree with him, at least not in his own great hall.”

A gloomy thought occurred to Travis as he gazed at the keep. He let out a troubled breath.

“What is wrong, Travis?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. It’s just that you’re going to be meeting your friends here, Falken. That means your journey is over. But I still have no idea where I’m supposed to go to find a way back to my world.”

Falken studied Travis for a moment, then reached out to grip his shoulder. “I never said my journey ended at Kelcior, Travis.” He chuckled softly. “Given the nature of Kel’s court, it would be ill luck indeed if that were the case.” His visage grew solemn once more. “To speak the truth, I’m not certain either where best you should journey. But there is some hope one of my acquaintances will have a better idea of that than I. And do not forget the weavings of Fate. Who knows? It may be our paths lie together for a while yet, friend.”

Travis gave the bard a grateful smile. He was far from the world he had known all his life, but at least he wasn’t alone. Together the two started down the road toward the ancient fortress below.

Grace clung to the knight’s broad back as his horse galloped toward the castle that loomed in the distance.

Castle
?

The word skittered off the surface of her frosty mind. She tried to grasp at its meaning, but it was no use. Like a fish beneath the surface of a frozen lake, it flashed brightly and was gone.

She was cold, so terribly cold. A rolling landscape slipped by in blurs of gray and white. Yet a moment ago there had been something else, hadn’t there? She remembered branches against a pale sky, sharp and black as lines of ink on paper, forming angular words she could not read.
Trees
? Then there had been an expanse of silver, and the drumbeat of hooves on stone. However, the names for these things could not break the icy plane of understanding in her brain. After that the trees had fallen behind, and on a distant hill before them she had glimpsed towers and high walls muted
by swirling shards of ice, just like a scene inside a child’s snow globe. Yes, it almost certainly had to be a …

She was too cold to grasp the word again. Perilously cold. She huddled inside the woolen blanket the knight had wrapped around her. It smelled of sweat and horses. Her half-frozen blouse and chinos clung to her skin, yet she was not shivering. Wasn’t she supposed to be shivering?

You’re hypothermic, Grace
, spoke a dispassionate voice deep in her turgid brain. Even now, while the rest of her was numb with cold, the doctor in her evaluated the situation and offered its precise diagnosis.
Your heart rate is depressed, your blood pressure is dangerously low, and you are clearly experiencing an altered mental state. You know these symptoms, they’re the first signs of a patient going into shock. You have to get warm, Grace. If you don’t, you will die
.

It was so hard to move: Her muscles were lead. Yet somehow, ever so slowly, she tightened her arms around the knight’s chest, and pressed her body against the heaving back of the horse beneath her. This action drained the last remnants of her strength. Paralysis stiffened her limbs, the landscape around her faded away. Darkness pressed from all sides. It was neither cold nor warm, nor was there fear in its soft folds. There was only sweet and endless emptiness. Though a tiny presence seemed to whisper something to her—
you can’t sleep, Grace, not now
—she could not quite comprehend its words. She slipped deeper into the gently suffocating darkness.

It appeared as a tiny but brilliant spark against the black backdrop of her consciousness. It flashed and was gone. Grace ignored it and continued her descent into the abyss. Just a little farther now and she would never be cold again.

Another bright pinpoint flared in the dark, and another. Then there were thousands of them, small and sharp and white-hot as stars. At last she realized what the specks were. Pain. Countless pinpricks of pain crept along the surface of her skin. The sparks tore apart the darkness that surrounded her. She felt a twinge deep inside, followed a moment later by a noticeable twitch. Then, all at once, a violent shiver wracked her body.

She opened her mouth, drew in a shuddering breath, and only then did she realize she must have stopped breathing. Pain sparkled up and down her limbs as warmth from the horse and the knight crept into them. Again a shiver coursed through her, and again. After that she could not stop shivering.

This is a good sign, Grace
, the doctor’s voice said without emotion.
The reflexive action of your muscles will generate chemical heat and restore blood circulation to your extremities. The pain indicates you don’t have frostbite. You’re going to make it
.

Shiver-warmth continued to seep through Grace’s body as the horse pounded onward through the wintry day. The dullness in her mind began to melt, and she grew more aware of her surroundings. For the first time she saw the knight as something more than a dim blur before her. She sensed that if he stood, he would not be a tall man, but he was powerfully and compactly built. He gripped the horse’s reins with mesh-gloved hands, and he wore a kind of long, smoke-gray shirt, slit on the sides, beneath which Grace felt numberless small, hard, interlocking rings of metal. A black cloak hung from his shoulders, and on his head he wore a flat-topped helmet of beaten steel.

The man glanced to one side, and Grace caught a glimpse of his profile. Pockmarks dinted his skin here and there, the legacy of some childhood disease. Ice clung to his drooping black mustaches, and his breath fogged on the air. His nose was hawkish beneath brown eyes, and creases framed the grim line of his mouth. She guessed the knight to be in his forties.

Knight
?

Where had she gotten that word? Perhaps in her fog she had heard him use it. Or perhaps the term had been dredged out of her unconsciousness in response to the sword sheathed at his hip and the metal rings beneath his long shirt. Either way, the term suited the man. Noble, solemn, slightly dangerous. He looked like a knight should look.

She wondered then if she had been rescued by some sort of anachronist, a mountain recluse who styled himself as a kind of medieval warrior. The more she thought about the possibility, the more it began to make sense. Although it
was difficult, she forced her brittle mind to search back and remember what had happened before she had found herself on the horse, riding with the knight through the frozen forest. She could almost recall a place, a door, a voice. Then, like dark water bubbling up through a hole in an icy lake, memories welled forth.

She remembered the orphanage. Yes, that was it. She had driven to the mountains in Hadrian Farr’s sedan, fleeing Denver, and the police, and the men with the hearts made of iron. Then she had been too weary to go on, and somehow, by chance or fate, she had ended up before the burned-out husk of the Beckett-Strange Home for Children. Now darker memories threatened to gush through the hole in the ice, but Grace forced them back. She did not want to remember those things. Not here, not now. It was already too bitterly cold.

What next?

An image flashed before her, of obsidian-chip eyes and a cadaverous grin. The man in black. Yes, that was right. She had spoken with the weird preacher in the old-fashioned suit, the preacher who was certainly akin to the porcelain doll girl in the park. What had the man in black told her?

Open the door, child. What you see beyond is up to you.…

That was just what she had done. She had opened the charred door of the old orphanage, and beyond the door had been … 
snow
. The last thing she remembered was the sound of a door shutting behind her. Everything had turned white as she fell, and then—

—then she had been here, gripping the knight as the horse galloped on.

No, that wasn’t quite right. There had been something before that. The memory was as pale and fragile as the drifting snowflakes, but she recalled a moment when she had opened her eyes. Trees had woven their dark fingers against a white sky above her, and a shadowy form had bent over her as a deep voice spoke in wonder.

Why, ’tis a lady
!

Piece by piece, her analytical mind began to patch together the puzzle. Of course—it all made sense. She had seen snow when she opened the orphanage’s door, but that was only
because it had been snowing outside. It was hardly unusual for the mountains in late October. No doubt the flakes had drifted down through holes in the building’s ceiling. At that moment she had collapsed, an inevitable physiological reaction to stress and exhaustion. It was luck plain and simple that the knight had found her before she died of exposure.

Grace turned her thoughts to her rescuer. She supposed he was some sort of historical re-creationist. No doubt he lived in a remote valley, rode his horse, wore his costume, and pretended he dwelled in a time long past. Certainly it would have been better if someone passing by on the highway had seen her prone form, but Grace would not complain. She was grateful to have been rescued before hypothermia stopped her breathing for good. She supposed the knight was taking her to his hut or fort or whatever structure it was he had built for his home. Once she was warm enough, and when the weather permitted, she could walk back to the highway. And then? She wasn’t sure, but she could worry about that when the time came. She remembered the card the mysterious man, Hadrian Farr, had given her. It was still in the pocket of her now-thawed and wet chinos. Perhaps she would call the number on the card. The Seekers might be able to help her decide what to do next.

Carefully, for she was still dangerously cold, Grace parted the blanket in which she huddled, then peered around the knight’s broad back. She was curious to see if she could recognize any landmarks in the direction in which they rode. After all, this area had been her home once. Certainly she would recognize something.

Through the gap in the blanket, she watched fields bordered by low stone walls slip by, all dusted by the snow that fell from the colorless sky. None of it looked remotely familiar. Only after a long moment did Grace realize she could see no mountains. Instead, they rode across an undulating plain. But that couldn’t be right. Maybe the falling snow had obscured her vision. She leaned to one side, in order to get a view of what lay directly ahead of them.

She had forgotten about the castle.

It was closer now, standing atop a low hill that rose above the horizon. Turreted towers reached toward the sky, surrounded by a wall of gray stone. With sudden certainty she
knew there was not now and never had been a place like this in Colorado. And the knight was riding directly for it.

Grace’s carefully crafted explanation shattered like so much ice.

“Where …?”

The word was barely a whisper and was snatched away by the frigid wind. Grace drew in a gulping breath and pressed her lips together in an attempt to warm them. She tried again.

“Where are we?”

This time it was something between a whisper and a croak. The knight craned his neck and glanced back at her over his shoulder. For a fleeting moment he smiled, displaying whiter and straighter teeth than Grace would have guessed. Then his expression grew solemn once more.

“So, my snow lady is awake,” he said in a grave voice that was rich with a lilting accent Grace did not recognize.

It seemed he had not understood her faint words. With great effort, she spoke the question one more time.

The knight frowned, as if this were a peculiar thing to ask. “Why, we are in Calavan, of course.” He let out a forlorn sigh and his shoulders slumped. “But that was greatly discourteous of me, was it not? I will ask your forgiveness, though I doubt you can possibly grant it. You must feel distressed after your ordeal. Indeed, it is a wonder your mind was not completely addled by the cold, and that you can speak at all. So allow me to answer you again. We have been in the Dominion of Calavan proper ever since we crossed the old Tarrasian bridge over the Dimduorn, the River Darkwine.” He pointed toward the rapidly growing castle. “Yonder is Calavere, the seat of King Boreas.”

Grace did her best to digest this information. She could not fathom precisely what it meant—there were far too many intriguing but unrecognizable words. However, it all seemed to confirm her suspicion this was somewhere very far from Colorado. She tried to swallow and found she could.