Ruins of Camelot (22 page)

The angle of the sun did not indicate late morning, but early evening.  She had slept almost an entire day away.

A moan of panicked frustration came from deep in her throat.  She turned on the spot and then realised something even worse.  Her eyes widened beneath the tangled thicket of her hair.

"No!" she half whispered, shaking her head in denial.  "No!  How could I have been so stupid?"

She ran several paces this way and that, glancing feverishly through the trees.  After a minute, her feet splashed in the stream she had originally been looking for.  It was small comfort now.

Her horse was gone.

She clapped a hand to her forehead, clawed her fingers into her hair, and let out a guttural cry of mingled anger and despair.  She hadn't properly secured the reins when she had stopped for the morning.  Chances were that the horse had already retraced his steps all the way back to the castle stables.

She would have to travel the rest of the way on foot.

After several minutes of useless raging, Gabriella forcibly calmed herself.  Still fuming, she knelt by the stream, splashed her hands and face, pulled her hair back in a tangled but economical ponytail, and re-shouldered her pack.  After a moment's inspection of the angle of the shadows and the height of the sun, she set off.

She was young, she reminded herself.  She could travel much further in a day than could any Army division with its supplies and arsenals.  Besides, she wasn't traveling the same path that the Army had gone.  They had been forced to take the thoroughfares and highways.  More important, they had not approached Merodach via the most direct route.  They had skirted through the Shambles, and Godramgate Hills, and Broadmoor Valley, finally approaching Merodach's camps in the rocky foothills of Mount Skelter.

Now, however, Merodach and his armies would be on the move.  Gabriella had no time to take the long route, especially if she was reduced to traveling on foot.  She had no choice but to get to the man as quickly as possible.  To do so, she would take the only short cut she knew—the best and worst short cut imaginable.

She would head straight through the cursed steppe of the Tempest Barrens.

The sun crept downwards as she plodded on, making decent progress even without her horse.  For now, her journey was taking her through such dense forest that she would not have made much better time even on horseback.  The gloom of the trees blotted out the daylight, hearkening a very early evening, and Gabriella determined that she would continue into the night, traveling by starlight in order to make up for lost time.  As she walked, she nibbled more of the bread and dried venison from her pack, careful only to eat enough to keep up her strength.  Fortunately, she encountered numerous streams along the way, allowing her to replenish and preserve the water in her flask.  These were often bordered by wild blackberry bushes, which she harvested and ate even as she walked.

Slowly, night began to settle firmly across the sky, and the distance between the trees began to increase.  The huge, ancient oaks, their trunks carpeted with moss and as thick as pillars, began to give way to fresh birches and spruces.  The air cooled and grew busy, gusting noisily.  Colourful dead leaves crunched and swished before Gabriella's persistent footsteps, occasionally catching in the wind and swirling away like startled birds.

She began to see signs of human occupation.  Clearings appeared, pocked with stumps and often centred with small cabins or cottages, candles lit within their windows and thin streams of smoke issuing from their fieldstone chimneys.  These, she skirted around, all the while deeply longing to approach, to knock at the heavy doors and seek shelter, even just a simple straw bed and a cup of hot broth.  But she resisted.  She had to keep moving.  On some level, despite the gravity of her mission, she feared that if she stopped once, even for a small comfort, she might find it doubly difficult ever to begin again.

For the Little Prince,
she thought, forcing herself onwards. 
And for Sigrid, and my father, and all the rest.
  Then, more darkly:
And for Darrick.  And Rhyss.  For their memory, and vengeance…

She pressed onwards as the moon arced high over the trees, casting its cold light down and creating its own spindly shadows on the forest floor.

Scars of grey bedrock began to show through the undergrowth, protruding in occasional humps and spines.  Gabriella walked over these with growing trepidation, knowing she was nearing the outermost reaches of the dreaded Tempest Barrens.  The further she traveled, the fewer human outposts she would discover.  This, along with the gusting wind and the silent eye of the moon, filled her with quiet dread.  Still, she did not stop or slow her pace.  She was committed to the path regardless of her unspoken fears.

There were many stories about the Barrens.  Most of them, she reminded herself, were pure fantasy, invented for sport, to be told around midnight hearths in the safe confines of taverns and castles.  Perhaps only a small percentage of the tales were true.

But, she couldn't help wondering,
which
percentage?

Unbidden, her mind dredged up the old legends, things she had collected in her memory since she had been a very young girl.  The barren steppe was cursed with ancient black magic, the histories claimed, leftover from the days when wizardkind warred there, scorching the earth with their worst and most inventive battle spells.  The magic had tainted the very rocks and plains, never dissipating, but sinking into the earth like acid.  It pooled invisibly in caves and depressions, growing in the very grass, poisoning the creatures that fed there and turning them horrible and mutant.

Worse, the legends declared that the magical armies had employed mystical creatures in their forces—dragons and centaurs, elves and goblins, giants and cyclopses, even monstrous spiders, walking trees, and rock trolls with boulders for fists.  Many of these creatures had been left behind, wandering the Barrens for centuries, mad and vicious, stalking the unwary traveler.

Most awful of all, however, the myths whispered of dead armies that still roamed the plains, cursed ghosts rejected even by hell, forever marching in search of an enemy to destroy and devour, to claim unto themselves.

Surely, the worst of the stories could not be true.  As with most legends, the reality was surely far less horrible than the tales that had grown up around it.  Even today, brave adventurers occasionally trekked off into the Barrens in search of artifacts and treasures, magical remnants that could be exploited for gain.  Many of these adventurers returned full of wild tales, eager to impress their meeker listeners.  Surely, exaggerations were to be expected.  Probably, the worst the steppe had to offer was a dearth of drinkable water and the occasional cursed burial mound or rogue wildcat.

She told herself these things as the night deepened around her and the trees thinned, became scraggly and bare.  She walked on, and the ground seemed to terrace vaguely downwards, descending and growing barren, marked by increasingly larger patches of dead rock and scree.

She encountered ancient campsites, reduced to little more than black scorch marks where fires had once burnt, surrounded by litters of small bones.  Once, she came upon an abandoned cottage, mostly buried in vines, pulled apart by a crooked oak tree that had grown through its roof.  Symbols had long ago been painted across the open doorway, but now they were faded to worrying obscurity.  Gabriella walked around this, keeping her distance, and tried not to think that the leaning structure was watching her as she passed on.

Tall, yellow grass became the dominant feature of the landscape, dotted only occasionally with stunted trees and scrubby bushes.  The grass tossed busily as the wind threaded through it, making thousands of whispering voices, hinting at words.

The moon climbed the sky, became a lantern high overhead.  Gabriella's shadow moved alongside her now, short but distinct, like an inky ghost.

She was weary and hungry.  The chill of the deepest watch of the night weighed heavily upon her.  She stopped finally in the centre of an ocean of shushing grass and considered lying down for a few hours.  She must be very near the border of the Barrens now, and she did not wish to close her eyes within that cursed landscape even one more night than she had to.

She ate just a little more, unrolled her blanket, and then, achingly, removed some of her armour and lay down.

She longed for a fire but was too exhausted to search for kindling and work the flint.  Even in the cold, however, she felt the subtle warmth of the sigil around her neck.  Perhaps it was her imagination, but the falcon emblem almost seemed to radiate heat in waves, soothing her and calming her shivers.  It was impossible of course, but she did not reject its comfort, even if it was only a figment of her exhausted mind.  Nearby, bobbing jovially in the breeze, a spider hung in a web between two stalks.  It seemed to regard her, and she was reminded of the spider in the castle halls, the one that had visited her briefly on the night Rhyss had been killed.

"Watch over me, friend," she whispered, turning away.  "Be my guardian this night."

She lay in the tall grass, blinking slowly, feeling a dismaying sense of déjà vu.  It seemed to her that she could hear the bell of the academy tolling faintly under the rush of the wind, could feel the slope of the hill beneath her, leading down towards the valley brook and the castle bridge.  She closed her eyes and remembered the shadow of Darrick as a young boy, his dirty face and wild hair silhouetted against the sun.

That was Whisperwind powder… I won't tattle on you if you get me some.

She was always very good with the magical tools and potions.  That was why she was always the one to blow the Whisperwind, or pluck the strings of the enchanted harp, or speak the words to conjure the smoke visions.  Toph had always told her she was talented in the magical arts.

She closed her eyes.  Fleetingly, she felt the memory of Darrick's first, impetuous kiss pressed onto the corner of her mouth like a promise of good things yet to come.  In her memory, she covered that kiss with her hand even as he ran towards the academy, grinning mischievously.

In reality, lying amongst the dead grass and pale moonlight of the borderland, she slept.  The spider watched, unmoving, bobbing in the constant wind.

The next morning dawned bright and clear, waking her with its blazing orange light.  She sat up, chilled to the bone and once again ravenously hungry.  Blinking and rubbing her eyes, she looked around.