The Lord Son's Travels (36 page)

Adrien
demanded, “What are they?”
 
She had
never seen any fear in his eyes through any of the battles they had faced.
 
Now his lips trembled and his eyes
widened at the sight of the pictures.
 
She had no idea how to explain photography with their limited understanding
and mortal fear of the results.

“Photos.
 
Oh, shit, how do I… if you use a
special kind of machine, and hold it up to an object, it transfers an image of
the object onto paper.
 
It's just a
picture, not the real thing."

“Tis
magic,” Adrien insisted.
 
"Forbidden magic that you have secretly brought among us."

Elenna
shook her head violently.
 
“Its not
magic!
 
Anybody with the right
equipment can do it!”

“The
right magic equipment.”

Elenna
threw up her hands and exclaimed.
 
“What can I say to you to make you believe me that there is nothing
magical about this!
 
This book is
just a description of knowledge from my home.
 
Just like the books you have here.”
 
She sighed, and dropped the textbook
again on the table.
 
“And I’m not a
witch.”
 
Then she twisted around to
race off into the captain’s bedroom.
 
Adrien followed closely behind.
 
She pushed his neatly arranged belongings off the desk, and scooped up
her backpack from the floor.
 
Dumping the contents on the desk, she pawed through until she found her
wallet.
 
She flipped around to show
him the drivers license and school ID cards she kept inside.

Pointing
to each in turn, she said, “These are all pictures of me, right?
 
I didn't rip my face off or give away
my soul or whatever, and I sure didn't do it more than once to get multiple
pictures.
 
Its just like drawing a
picture of someone with a pencil and paper, but the machine can do it
instantly."

Confusion
reigned on his face.
 
He glanced to
Brendan, who stood guard in the doorway.
 
“Why did you not tell us all this before?”

She
laughed bitterly.
 
“I was afraid
some of the things I'm carrying might be a little too confusing for you and I
didn't want to freak you out.
 
But
I tell you what," she ruffled through the pile on the desk, spreading out
the contents for her companion to see.
 
"Help yourself.
 
Search
to your heart's content.
 
You won't
find anything magic in here or unholy or worth stringing me up from the nearest
tree."

Adrien
sighed.
 
“I don’t know what is
normal and right in your land.
 
But
that book is dangerous here.
 
If
someone else finds it, we’ll all hang for witches.”

“No
one would have known about it if you would have stayed out of my things.”
 
She started stuffing her belongings
back in her bag.
 
“After all we’ve
been through, I don’t believe you don't trust me because of a book."
 
Adrien leaned over her to level his
eyes with hers.

He
said carefully,
 
"Above all
other concerns I must protect my mission.”

“Adrien,”
she paused.
 
“Fuck you and fuck
your mission.”
 
She angrily pushed
him out of her way.
 
Brendan jumped
back to leave her space to storm out of the room and slam the door shut behind
her.
 

Chapter 34

Brendan
knew his friend well enough to avoid any contact with him until the next
morning.
 
His warring companions
had claimed both of the chambers in the hold, so he was left to sit guard duty
alone out on the deck.
 
When the
few rays of light overflowed the horizon, he knocked on the door to Adrien’s
chamber and offered a few bites to eat.
 
As expected he was ignored, so he entered anyway, greeting his friend as
cheerfully as he would any other morning.
 
Adrien glared his way from the wooden bench he had used for his
bed.
 

“We
dock at the next town and set her ashore,” Adrien announced brusquely.
 
He refused the offered meal with a wave
of his hand, so Brendan chose a chair and started eating.
 
When his friend didn’t respond to his
announcement, Adrien added darkly, “I’ll not travel with anyone I can’t trust.”

Brendan
raised an eyebrow at this.
 
“When
did she ever speak a mistruth to any question we asked directly of her?”

Adrien
blinked rapidly in surprise, and turned to face his friend.
 
“You support her then?”

“She
never hid her … differences from us, Adrien.
 
We are using her knowledge in our quest, so I don’t believe
we can punish her for her skills now.”

Adrien’s
eyes darkened as his brows drew further down.
 
“I expected your support.”

“You
have it,” Brendan reassured him.
 
“And you have Elenna’s, if you weren’t too stubborn to see that.”

Adrien
rose to his feet to pace angrily.
 
“Her support?
 
She told me…”

Brendan
nodded with shared disapproval.
Allè-dôn
ians
in general were uncomfortable with unpleasantly frank or foul language, and the
offensiveness grew commiserate with higher levels of rank.
 
“I've never thought to hear that word
spoken in a feminine voice, and certainly not in that manner.
 
But she is not one of us, Adrien.
 
As much as both of us like to forget
this, she is a stranger with different ways.
 
She did have a right to be angry at you; you should not have
searched her belongings..”

“You
saw what she had in her bag!” Adrien exclaimed.
 
Brendan nodded, blanching slightly at the memory.
 
Adrien noted his pause and pushed his
argument.
 
“What kind of place
could she have come from to make things such as that? Should this not cause
natural suspicion on my part?”

“Suspicion,
perhaps,” Brendan replied slowly, “but not distrust.
 
Elenna has stood at our side in battle; if she meant to harm
us or our quest she had satisfactory opportunities before now.”

Adrien
wrapped his arms around himself, and chewed his lip in the same manner he had
all of his childhood.
 
The pictures
had frightened him, he would freely admit, but more frightening was the
realization of how strange Elenna really was.
 
He wondered how someone so different could ever truly fit
into his world.
 
He wondered of his
own judgment of letting a stranger become a central player in his plans; he
wasn’t sure how she had become so necessary to his designs.
 
This realization, that somehow Elenna
had come so close to him, he had to admit deep in his own heart was the most
frightening thing of all.
  
Brendan left him then, seeing that Adrien was now thinking deeply about
his actions, and went through another attempt to salve the angry woman across
the hall.
      

Somehow
the small crew managed to sail the rest of the day and dock in a secluded small
village without Adrien and Elenna exchanging a word.
 
They avoided each other completely.
 
She stayed in the hold for most of the
time, fiddling with the climbing equipment or staring out the porthole at the
passing landscape.
 
He manned the
helm from dusk until dawn, leaving Brendan as night watchmen as he ate his
dinner alone in the captain’s room. Any important messages were relayed through
Brendan, who played peacekeeper the best he could.
 
He and Elenna shared their evening meal in the common room,
then sat together on deck in animated conversation.
 
If Adrien noticed the cheerfulness of their interactions, he
keep his feelings private.

Their
distance didn’t abate when they returned to land.
 
While the men arranged for the supplies she specified,
Elenna roamed the town, analyzing possible routes through the mountains from
multiple vantage points.
 
The fore
hills were gentle enough, rolling gently until they buttressed the first cliffs
of the range.
 
From what she could
see, these were easy enough for their first lessons.
 
Her eyes could pick out plenty of cracks and crevices in the
surface for a novice climber to easily scale.
 
Above this cliff was a rocky slope, leading to a narrow pass
between two peaks, which were low enough to avoid snow cover.
 
She had no way of telling what they
would face on the mountains’ hidden side, but this was the best place she had
seen so far in their sailing past the range to make their attempt.

They
had sold the boat as soon as they had landed.
 
This village was too small to rate its own station of
monsters, but the villagers feared invasion soon.
 
Most of the people had fled into the hills to hide.
 
Only a few families and the blacksmith
had remained.
 
He had searched his
neighbor’s abandoned houses for any remaining valuables, hoping to find enough
to buy his and his family’s passage to a safer land.
 
He gladly traded his workmanship on their needed gear for
the boat without any questions on their background or destination.
 
They stayed in the abandoned inn for
the nights of their visit.

When
they had bought, acquired, or made all of the necessary equipment, they set off
on foot from town towards their chosen approach.
 
Each carried leather packs they had created from old
saddlebags.
 
Elenna had insisted on
carrying a leather pack as well as her own pack, worried that too-heavy baggage
would effect their novice climbing skills.
 
She still guarded her backpack zealously, although Adrien
had seen each of the items inside and seemed to have lost any urge to examine
anything closely again.
 
Summer had
arrived early, but she also insisted on bringing warm clothing for their
climb.
 
The heavy clothing was
nearly unbearable in the warm moist air of spring, but she wouldn’t let them
abandon their heavy leather shirts, knowing they would be needed at the higher
altitudes.
 
Adrien had insisted on
bringing all of their weaponry, which Elenna spent hours trying to balance
evenly on their packs.
 
She had
never tried to climb with this much weight before, and a heavy metal sword was
not easy to balance on her pack.
 
Food was the most massive supply to carry; they would be on light
rations during the climb.
 
Water
was her greatest fear, since she couldn’t guarantee they would find another
supply until they had reached flat ground again.

Finally
they were ready to make their attempt.
 
They were starting with a pile of tailings at the very foot of the
nearest mountain, which hopefully would serve as a good place to learn some
basic skills.
 
They spent the first
day as climbers scrambling up among the loose rocks of the base.
 
Adrien grimly followed her directions
without acknowledgement.
 
Brendan
kept his eyes on the next move, refusing to look up at the huge granite mass
towering above him to the blue sky.
 
They stopped as the light began to fade on an area of gentle slope wide
enough for them to stretch out and make a fire.
 
Each was tied for safety to each other's harnesses, with one
end of the rope attached to a nearby tree in case anyone rolled too far in
their sleep.

The
next morning, with arms and legs aching from the novel exercise, they reached
the first vertical rise of granite.
 
Most of this morning was spent learning how to find good grips.
 
Elenna would climb ahead, set up a
safety rope at the first likely spot, and watch as her companions picked their
finger and toe holds in the rocky wall.
 
Slowly they rose above the tree line of the surrounding hills.
 
Every hour of climbing, the men grew
more confident, though they never could match the grace of the young woman
swinging unconcerned from ledge to ledge.
 
For Elenna, this was almost like being home.
 
She tried to show Brendan the incredible view of the forests
of Angor during breaks, but he would shake his head at her enthusiasm and keep
his eyes on the solid rock ahead.
 

They
reached the crevasse she had spotted from the village, and were pleasantly
surprised to see it had a gradual rise to the pass at top.
 
This they could hike carefully, though
Elenna insisted on keeping all attached to the safety rope in case of
falls.
 
The rocks were different
here, she noted with growing enthusiasm.
 
Often she stopped the party to pick at a strange colored stone or an odd
formation as they passed.
 
A couple
of finds made her shake her head in confusion, and pocket the object for later
consideration.
 
Once she stopped
the men to point to an interesting sight.
 
They had found a fault in the rock that ran vertically up the
mountain.
 
The angle was steeper
than they had seen all day, but was the easiest route they could find.
 
They could see the peak of the mountain
far ahead, with the pass they sought hopefully reachable by the end of the day.

Elenna
paused and pointed down.
 
“Look, a
cave,” she said.
 
Adrien glanced
without real interest then fiddled with his pack to try to rebalance its
weight.
 
Brendan leaned over for a
closer look.
 
“What is that in
there?”

“What
do you see?” Elenna asked.
 
She
peered again.
 
Brendan moved closer
to point at something catching his attention inside the cave.
 
As he stepped, he stumbled over a loose
stone.
 
Adrien reached out his arms
to steady his friend and as a result lost his own balance.
 
With a started gasp he slid over the
side of the crevice and tumbled down the slope.
 
Brendan leaped for his hand as Adrien slipped down the
smooth granite towards the cave.
 
Elenna pushed Brendan to the floor of the fault, screaming for him to
hold on.
 
They grabbed at holds in
the rock as Adrien reached the length of his safety rope and jerked the line
tight.
 
They held on, leaving
Adrien to grab frantically for any hold in the smooth surface. He managed to
find a finger hold to seize tightly.

“Lord
Son!” Brendan called out panicked, as he sprawled against the rocky surface of
the fault.
 
Adrien yelled back that
he had a hold and was safe.

Elenna
ordered him to hang on. “We have to get some slack in the rope so we can tie it
off somewhere.
 
He won’t be able to
climb up using us as counterweights.
 
Adrien, you have to hold on for a few minutes!” she bellowed out.
 
Cautiously she crawled backwards
towards Brendan.
 
“Look around, is
there anything that can support his weight?”
 
He glanced around.
 
Behind him an old tired tree clung to life in the thin rocky soil.
 
Elenna loosened her safety harness to
fasten on the tree.
 
She prayed
silently that the tree could hold his weight, and motioned for Brendan to
loosen his harness.
 
The tree bent under
the pull of the rope, but held. Elenna and Brendan leaned over the fault wall
to see their companion clinging on about fifteen feet below.

“Are
you hurt?” Elenna called down.
 

“No,”
he answered grimly.
 
“I can climb
up.”

Elenna
studied the rock.
 
It was a smooth,
sheer face; climbing would be impossible.
 
He would have to climb up the rope to reach them.
 
“Be careful.”

“So
I intend.”
 
He tugged
experimentally on the rope.
 
It
still held.
 
He took a deep breath,
then began his climb.
 
Slowly he
heaved himself up the rope.