From Across the Clouded Range (33 page)

He threw his arms out in futility, but
it was too late. The formulas smashed together on top of him. The
sun blinked out, and the world shattered into all the pieces of the
order he had destroyed.

#

“
Dasen, wake up!”
delivered him from the nightmare. Tethina yelled and shook him back
to consciousness.

“
Alright, I’m awake!” he
called.

Tethina stopped, looked at him to
confirm that he was awake, and dropped back onto the floor of the
shelter. “It’s about time," she moaned. "I don’t know what kind of
a dream you were having, but you almost kicked me in the face with
all the flailing.”

Dasen tried to remember the dream, but
Tethina’s assault had dispersed it so that all he remembered was a
feeling of futility and tremendous dread. “I can’t even remember
what it was. Sorry.” He suddenly remembered what had happened the
night before and added, “How are you feeling?”

“
I feel like I fought a
bear and lost.” That was about the only thing they hadn’t done the
previous day, Dasen thought as he put his hand on her forehead. It
felt normal. “What’s the prognosis, doctor?”

Dasen snatched his hand back at the
sight of Tethina's cold eyes – he also remembered how they had left
things and obviously, so did she. “You fainted last night. You had
a fever.”

“
I remember.” Tethina
managed to sound ominous even as she spoke through a yawn. “There
should be a bag of water around here somewhere. Can you find it?
I’m really thirsty.”

“
It’s almost gone.” Dasen
held up the bag.

She took it anyway. Dasen could only
smack his dry lips as she finished it. She made a face then handed
the bag back to him. “That was awful. We’re going to need some
more. I’m really weak. Do you think you can manage? The stream is
easy to find.”

Dasen nodded. “I suppose, but what is
the plan? We need to get to the forest masters. The bandits could
already be moving my father and Rynn.”

“
Not today,” Tethina
mumbled. “I can barely move.” Her words slurred as she fell back
toward sleep. Then she roused herself and finished, “There’s a path
outside the shelter. It’ll take you right to the st. . . .” The
final word faded as her eyes drifted closed.

Just great!
Dasen thought
. Who knows
where the bandits are or what they’re doing? And here we are stuck
on the wrong side of the river.
And
Tethina is worthless.
She can’t stay awake
long enough to give me directions, so how many days will it be
until she can walk? And what will we do until then?
Apparently water is close by, but what will we do
about food? If the bandits don’t get us, we’ll by-the-Order
starve.
He took a deep breath to calm his
spiraling sense of dread.

Well
, a voice told him,
isn’t that what
you wanted, a wife like any other, a woman dependent on you?
He snorted at the irony. It was just his luck to
get exactly what he wanted at the very moment it would kill him.
With the thought, he watched his sleeping wife. She had a blanket
pulled up over her shoulders despite the heat that was already
building inside the shelter. She lay on her side with fine auburn
hair splayed across her face. He watched what he could see, her
lips, the freckles scattered across her nose, her sharp chin and
thought about their kiss, the way her body had felt pressed against
his, the way her lips had felt on his, her tongue.

He felt himself getting uncomfortable
and decided that he best get out of the shelter before Tethina woke
up and saw him staring. So, with great effort, he rose and
literally stumbled from the shelter.

From one knee – his other was still
far too sore to kneel on – he laboriously and agonizingly rose bit
by bit to standing. Every inch of his body bemoaned the effort. He
could not ever remember being so sore. His back and neck stabbed at
him from spending the night against the angled wall of rock. His
head pounded. His knee was stiff, sore, and swollen. And every
muscle ached beyond anything he had ever felt. All told, he wanted
nothing more than to curl up in a ball and go back to sleep. He
could not imagine walking, let alone trekking back through the
forest that surrounded him.

The sun overhead showed how tired he
had been. It stood well above the trees in a perfect blue sky that
did not betray any of the previous day’s misery. Somehow, the
beautiful day seemed wrong. It felt like nature itself should be
acknowledging the hardships they had faced. Dasen drew a deep
breath and tried not to think about his father, Rynn, or the
harrowing events that had brought him here.

To keep his mind from those traps, he
scanned his surroundings. The clearing was a half-circle about
twenty feet in diameter. A small pit ringed with rocks was in its
center. A crude hammock – a piece of tarp tied between two trees –
hung to the side. The shelter stood behind him, but it was
otherwise empty. The backdrop to the scene was fifteen feet of
sheer rock in one direction and the tangled forest in the other. It
was an imposing location, and he marveled at how Tethina had
managed to find it, build a shelter on it, and return to it again
and again. For a man to do something like this would be strange,
for a girl it was sheerest lunacy. The absurdity of it boggled him
almost as much as the fact that he was now joined to that
girl.

He spotted the head of the trail
Tethina had mentioned very near the place where he had emerged the
night before. He stumbled toward it, cursing silently with each
ill-formed step. Muscles stiffened to the point of near immobility,
he looked like a poorly made, grunting mannequin lumbering through
the clearing. He wondered for a second if he could have used the
trail the night before but was relieved to see that it cut in the
opposite direction, heading west and south.

He did find his walking stick from the
previous night and, with much effort, retrieved it. With the stick
to support his knee, he started down the trail and found that,
unlike the previous day, this trail was a good one. It was somewhat
rough where the rains had washed it out, but it was wider and
largely clear of obstructions so that he could at least see what he
was tripping over. As he walked, he kept his eyes open for some of
the white trees – higg trees Tethina had called them – that they
had found the day before, and it was only a few hundred yards
before a clump of them appeared beside the trail. Dasen practically
ran to the first of them and cut away a large piece of bark with
the small knife he had found in the shelter. He cut off a corner
and started chewing. The flavor was horrific, but he forced himself
to swallow the acrid juice and felt almost instant relief for his
body’s myriad complaints.

All the complaints, that
was, except the rumbling hole in his middle. Chewing the bark made
him think of real food, and his stomach released spasms of
displeasure that momentarily overwhelmed his other pains.
For a man who has nothing, time can either feed
him or starve him.
One of Ipid’s favorite
phrases strengthened Dasen's resolve at the same time it gave him a
pang of worry for his father and Rynn. It also reminded him of the
events that had brought him here, and he felt fear bubble inside
him. Could the raiders be looking for him? Were they out there in
the trees right now searching? Would they suddenly appear, waving
swords and firing arrows?

Heart suddenly hammering
he watched the trees but saw nothing that could substantiate his
worries.
You have to keep going,
he told himself.
If they
come there’s nothing you can do. But if you stand here paralyzed,
they’ve already won. Just forget about them. You can only fight one
battle at a time and survival is the one that needs fighting
now.

Taking another deep
breath, he scanned the trees one last time and forced his mind to
his father’s advice. He continued walking and watched for the few
edible berries or plants he might recognize as he walked. Yet his
mind turned inevitably to his father and friend.
Surely they are safe
, he
told himself. Despite what they had done in the village, the
raiders would need Ipid and Rynn alive to collect the ransom.
Tomorrow, he and Tethina could leave for the village. If they could
get across the river, they might reach Potter’s Place in another
day or two. From there, they could send word to the forest masters
in Rycroft. Then they’d find transport to Gurney Bluff and wait out
the ordeal there. That meant only a few days before he set his
father’s rescue in motion. The information they had gathered at the
village would be invaluable to the forest masters, and if they
could not handle the situation, Chancellor
Kavich would surely use every resource in the Kingdoms to
rescue one of his closest advisors and friends. All they had to do
was get to a town.
The rabbit who mourns
his friend may find himself in the same pot.
Another of his father's nuggets explained the situation
best.

The walk to the stream was not long, and Dasen
was there before he knew it. He had not seen any plants that he
knew were edible, but the serenity of the forest had given him a
sense of calm that made everything seem more tolerable. The section
of the forest through which he walked was composed primarily of
great evergreens that lined the path with walls of needles to give
it a perfect sense of isolation. Those trees limited the vegetation
around them, making the forest seem less overgrown than it had on
the other side of the river. At the same time, they housed
countless birds and squirrels whose calls and chatter filled the
forest with welcome sounds while a slight breeze perfumed the air
with the scents of pine sap and wild flowers. It was a journey the
likes of which he had never enjoyed. Other than the trail, he felt
like the first person ever to set foot in this area, and he was
soon so enraptured that he almost walked into the stream before he
realized that he had found it.

The babble of water saved his boots but also
made him realize how unbearable his thirst had become. He eased
himself stiffly to the ground then labored to find a way to reach
the water while on only one knee. Eventually, he got himself to the
water and drank deeply. He shoveled handful after handful into his
mouth and finally dunked his entire head into the ice-cold torrent.
The water felt wonderful. Fast moving and crystal clear, Dasen had
never seen such beautiful water. Even the flavor was amazing, crisp
and almost sweet. He could not get enough of it, and he drank until
his stomach was sloshing then filled the water bag so he could
barely replace the cork that acted as a stopper.

Having filled one need, Dasen’s mind
returned to food. He studied the stream and wondered if there were
fish in it. The stream appeared to be sufficiently deep, but he
knew absolutely nothing about fishing. There was little chance he
could catch anything even if there were fish to catch. Still, the
idea tantalized him.

He stood by the stream for
several minutes developing then dismissing ways to spear or catch a
fish.
Wouldn’t it be
nice
, he thought,
if one of them got lost and jumped onto the bank?
He laughed at the thought but allowed his mind to
linger on it. He pictured a huge fish jumping into his hands and
willed the impossible act to occur. He saw every aspect of the
fish, thought about how it would taste, felt the rumbling hole in
his middle that it would fill. The idea was wonderful. His hunger
and the fish that would relieve it were the only things he could
think of. He wanted it more than anything, dug deep, and begged for
it to happen.

Runes flashed before his eyes. He did
not understand them or how they had made their way into his mind,
but they were there just the same, and he had no apparent control
over their progress. He studied them and realized that they were
familiar, but it was not until they were almost gone that he placed
them.

Dasen’s eyes snapped open and searched
for the ball of fire he expected to see erupt from the trees.
Something cold and wet hit him instead. It smashed into his shins
and almost sent him to his knees. Stunned and fearful, he looked at
his feet and saw an enormous trout flopping by the side of the
stream, edging itself toward the water as he gawked in surprise. He
did not try to explain the fish’s appearance. He grabbed the
creature and threw it with both hands into the trees just before it
reached its sanctuary. The fish thumped hard into a nearby tree and
hit the ground twitching.

Dasen looked around still expecting to
see a ball of fire explode from the trees, but nothing happened. He
was confused. Had he formed the runes? Had he somehow made the fish
jump from the water? He dismissed the idea as ridiculous. There was
no way that he could make a fish jump from the water. The runes
were a figment of his imagination, a resilient fantasy from the
previous day’s trauma. They had never existed and neither had the
ball of fire. The bandits had set a trap in the road. The old man,
if he had been there at all, had simply sprung the trap. That was
the only logical explanation, and there must be a logical
explanation – sometimes the Order seemed mysterious, but by
definition it could always be explained. Just as there was a
logical explanation for what had just happened. Maybe fish did that
all the time. Maybe the Order had deemed that he and Tethina needed
food. It was impossible to know something as complex as the Order,
but Its will was indisputable. That being the case, he said a
prayer of thanks and retrieved his prize.