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The pathway back down the mountainside was uncomfortable, hard on their feet, and caused Villid to feel irritable for no reason.
“You know, I’d rather climb up a mountain than down one,” he grumbled, as he stumbled on several pebbles for what felt like the thousandth time. Acotas scrambled ahead of them, whinnying as his hooves slipped now and then, sounding just as annoyed as Villid felt.
Aya didn’t answer. She wanted to ask about what had happened in the city with the human merchant, Mical. Seeing Villid agitated like this, though, she was reluctant to ask him.
It was worrying her, and she could tell it was worrying Villid too. Clearly he had come to some realisation, or assumption, that the scrolls – the ‘Blood scrolls’, as Mical had called them – were more important and valuable than a bag of gold. And the fact that he’d begged them not to give them to Shavon… it was all very strange and unsettling.
She was about to voice her opinion when Villid spoke first. “Our map is in the bag on Acotas’ left side,” he said. “Let’s find this old temple of yours.”
Aya was ahead of them, and the closest to Acotas. She stopped the horse and rifled in the bag for the map. Rolled up, the scrolls looked almost identical. She unravelled a
few before finding it. Opening one scroll, she suddenly gaped down at it, hardly daring to believe her eyes.
“What’s wrong?” Villid asked, and moved to stand beside her, where he looked over her shoulder. The scroll didn’t seem to bear anything particularly shocking. The parchment was printed in neat, curled characters that Villid couldn’t read, with some unremarkable drawings of various buildings and trees.
“This…” Aya whispered. “This is ancient Elvish,”
She continued to stare at it, her eyes wide. “Can you understand it?” he asked her cautiously.
“Not all – it might take me a while,” was her reply. She felt her heart thump inside her chest and she started to shake with excitement. Old scrolls, in Elvish, of all things. Elvish history had been lost years ago, and in the midst of war, her ancestors had fled to the eastern forests before establishing the village. This scroll was older than the wars themselves, when
Elves meant something in this world.
“I want to keep this,” she said, rolling it up tightly and tucking it into her front tunic pocket. Villid didn’t stop her. He saw how excited this was making her – and who could blame her? Xentar, his homeland, boasted a huge library full of texts and documents of Tyran history. Aya had been from a village, where stories were told by word of mouth, not documented like these. And storytellers had ways of unintentionally warping and changing fact into fiction.
“Anyway,” Aya said, patting her tunic for no particular reason, and trying to calm the rapid delight rising in her chest. To find a scroll older than her village, perhaps holding all the secrets that her ancestors had to offer – it was inconceivable.
“Aya,” said Villid softly. “The map?”
She nodded, and continued rifling through the sack tied to Acotas’ saddle. It wasn’t long before she found it, folded and stuffed unceremoniously at the bottom of the bag. She pulled it out and flattened it on a nearby rock.
The red blotches of ink leading from various human villages stood out bold on the aged parchment. The old
Elf temple hadn’t been marked, but the map was useful for seeing where they were, and where various rivers, towns and forests sat. The eastern forest on the far right of the map had been virtually untouched; Aya’s village was nowhere to be seen. Clearly whoever had designed the map hadn’t been aware of her village.
“The Seer wasn’t supposed to tell us anything about the outside world,” Aya said, as she and Villid examined the map together. “But as her servant girls,
she trusted us. We always agreed that if anything happened – famine, or any reason where we’d
need to leave the village – we would meet in this old temple.”
Villid found himself slightly surprised. So the
Elves had been somewhat prepared for disaster, even if it was in a clumsy and disorganised way.
“She said it was one of the first temples in Theldiniya,” she continued, when Villid didn’t answer, “where the Seers would communicate with the Dragons.”
Even as she said it, she felt a small glimmer of hope dare to shine in her mind. Lyliana would be waiting for them now. Perhaps she was praying to the Dragons as she waited, and they were helping her, protecting her, and giving her answers. Aya felt guilty for ever doubting that the Dragons existed. They’d help. There would have been a reason for that terrible night in the village. All they had to do was get there.
“The old temple is south-east of here,” she said to Villid. Steering Acotas downhill and in a southerly direction, the ground eventually evened,
leaving the cliffs and rocks behind .
The land stretched before them once more, and they were surrounded by trees and fields. Aya took a look behind them, where the mountains stood, the narrow pathway barely visible and shrouded in
a thin mist. It was strange to think that a hidden city lay inside, safe from the outside world, protected by magic.
They climbed onto Acotas, and followed an old path, where a forest lay several miles ahead. The ground beneath them was levelling from the crude gravel to smooth dirt and patches of grass. Behind them were the mountains, and around them were fields and hills which dipped and rose like waves on the sea.
Aya found it peaceful, but Villid felt as if the hills were watching them – that Darkma or night prowlers could attack at any moment. He didn’t relax until they’d entered the group of fir trees ahead of them, where the thick branches shielded most of the summer sun. It felt cool beneath the trees, but also dry; Villid took a leather pouch filled with water from the horse’s back and shared it with Aya, before pouring some into a big bowl for Acotas.
“We’re on course,” Aya said, pointing her finger at a small group of sketched trees on the map. “We should be out of this forest before nightfall.”
The fir tree branches swayed above them, rustling gently, and the grass around them was moist and felt fresh. Acotas chewed it interestedly. The forest was beautiful, and Aya was reminded achingly of home. It had given her great comfort to know there were still
Elves other than herself, even after all these years of being taught that her village held the only E
lves left. She wondered why the
Elves in Fort Valour hadn’t heard the news about the Tyran’s attack. Was the city so separate from the outside world that they didn’t hear about important news?
Slits of light shone through the leaves as they travelled through the quiet trees. Acotas snorted now and then as leaves and twigs crunched beneath his black hooves. Eventually, they found a spring of water and Acotas drank hastily. Aya and Villid washed, drank and refilled the leather pouch, and soon they had set off again.
“Look,” said Aya quietly as they made their way through the thick trees. “What’s that?”
If Aya hadn’t seen it from that angle, they would have missed it altogether. They approached a large, rocky hill, where Aya had spotted a gap in the stone between the branches of the trees. “There!” she said, pointing upwards. “Is it an opening?”
Villid looked; a few feet up the hill, there was indeed an opening in the stone. H
e climbed up the rocky, uneven wall, grabbing the ledge with his hands. He pulled himself up powerfully, his muscles straining as he lifted himself to the top of the ledge.
His shoulders and torso disappeared from sight as he climbed into the hole, until Aya could only see his legs
.
“Is there anything up there?” Aya called to him. No answer. Suddenly, Villid’s heavy boots disappeared into the hole.
“Villid?”
No answer. Aya got off Acotas and approached the rocky hill, not taking her eyes off the hole that Villid had wriggled into. “Villid?” she asked again.
His head suddenly appeared from the hole. He was grinning.
“It’s perfect,” he said. “Moss floor, high ceiling – and you can hardly see the entrance from outside. Shall we stay here for tonight?” he suggested.
Aya was tempted. The last several nights, they had been anxious, and something always happened to drag them out of bed before the sun came up. She was exhausted;
perhaps she hadn’t realised it before, but the thought of a cosy moss floor out of reach of night prowlers or worse, made her seriously consider stopping.
But Llyliana and the other servants were waiting for them. They had already kept them waiting for a long time. The temple was protected by the Dragons’ magic, it was true, but it wasn’t impenetrable. They couldn’t waste another moment.
Aya shook her head. “We have to get to the temple,” she said. “The others need me.”
Villid understood. The day was still young, and they would cover many more miles today without stopping. But the cave had been perfect – he, too, was tired of disturbed nights, not to mention the worried thoughts that kept him awake when they could finally rest properly. But Aya was right – the Seer had been waiting for them at the temple for too long. They couldn’t waste more time.
Villid never told Aya, but he couldn’t help doubting that the Elf Seer would be at the temple at all. He cast his mind back to the night in
the tower, when he had chased Shade up the steps and into the top room. Aya had saved not only her Seer, but other servant
Elves too, and whilst the others had been panicking, she had taken the initiative and made sure they escaped. How did Aya know that the Seer had made it to the temple? They hadn’t had horses, a map, or even weapons. How did she know they hadn’t gotten lost, or even been killed before they’d left the forest?
He glanced up at her as they continued through the woods. She was sitting on top of Acotas, frowning ahead, her long hair tied back with a strip of cloth, her too-big tunic hanging slightly from her body. Aya wasn’t stupid, he knew. She probably had the exact same thoughts and worries that he did. But if Aya felt the same about Llyliana as Villid had felt about his Seer, he could understand her feelings completely. If there was even a glimmer of hope that Llyliana and the servants were alive, then she had to cling to it.
Villid removed a short dagger from his belt and marked large crosses on trees. “So we can find our way back to the cave.” he explained. He wouldn’t easily forget the large, mossy cave hanging safely from sight of things like wolves and other forest creatures. It was almost too good to be…
A snapping twig. Villid whipped round. “What’s wrong?” Aya asked in surprise.
Villid felt the same uneasiness as he had outside the wood – that they were being watched. Aya pulled gently on Acotas’ reins and the stallion stopped. The wood was silent – too quiet, almost. A bird chirped quietly above them. The fir trees around them rustled quietly in the breeze, and the slits of light illuminated broken logs and bracken on the ground.
They suddenly heard a loud rustle on their left, and Villid jumped, pulling out his sword. “Who’s there?” he shouted.
A red squirrel bounded out from behind a bush and darted amongst some twigs, making a loud rustling noise at it went. It stood for a moment, nose twitching, tiny paws scrabbling in the earth, before bounding up a tree and out of sight. Villid sighed with relief and sheathed his sword.
“Let’s carry on.” he said, feeling somewhat foolish, although unable to shake the creepy feeling that unfriendly eyes were on them.
The sun blazed down on them as they exited the forest; it would still be several hours until dusk. The rays were
almost suffocating after the coolness of the wood. They had entered into what looked like a valley. A downwards slope of green greeted them, and long, twisted pathways, either made or natural, it was hard to tell, zigzagged along the hills and through the valley. Puffy clouds scraped the peaks of the mountains that towered either side of them, speckled with black and gold. They could see a flowing river, which ran down a hill, into a copse of trees, and out again, through the valley and out of their sight. Aya sighed as she gazed upon the beauty in front of them. The valley was lonely, somehow, but felt oddly right, as if they were for sure heading in the right direction. They saw the forest they had just ventured through on their map.
When Villid was a boy, he had been sent on the journey all Tyran adolescents were sent on, returning only when they had captured creatures for the arena, and explored enough of Theldiniya to know the landscape, and to understand more about their enemies, the Darkma. Villid had only
seen the sea once, at where he believed to be the north-west of his homeland, Xentar. It was north of the heart of the Red Wars. He had managed to track down his brother, Swift, and they had journeyed together for weeks, knowing that there were no Tyrans around to stop them. They had ventured north, studying the local beasts, the uncursed of which had been wild, but virtually harmless. The ones cursed by the same black magic the Darkma had
, however, had been similar to night prowlers – all teeth and poisonous blood. When Villid and his brother had reached the vast ocean, it felt like they’d reached the end of the
Earth. The black, wild sea, waves crashing on the rocks, forked lightning striking the water on the horizon. Villid could still remember the salty spray, the cold breeze, the rocks on the nearby land that he and Swift had thrown into the ocean, drinking their fill of the madness of it. That was the only time Villid had seen the ocean, though he had read about sea creatures and vast blue seas countless times on scrolls and in
books. The way the valley dipped in a reverse arch was like a parted green sea, cliffs and rocks jutting out of the surrounding mountains.
They followed the valley pathway. The mountains were so tall that they almost had to strain their necks to try to see the tops. The peaks were covered with mist. As they ventured along, away from the woods and deeper into the valley, the summer sky slowly turned grey, and the sun disappeared behind the clouds. Aya shivered and wrapped
a cloak around her shoulders.
Villid climbed onto Acotas. It had been so hot before that he was reluctant to let the stallion gallop. Now, however, the temperature was dropping, and the sky threatened rain. Villid dug his heels into Acotas’ sides and the horse cantered along, his heavy hooves thundering on the grass. Aya clutched onto the front of the saddle with one hand, map in the other, excitement rushing through her as they sped along the lonely valley. She loved to ride, and now they were riding for the sake of it, not because they were being chased -
it felt exhilarating. They galloped through the hills until they reached the riverside, where a large waterfall roared down the side of the hill. They approached it, where fresh, cold water gurgled along the mountainside. Acotas drank from the stream, and Aya and Villid slid off him to do the same. Villid walked a way up the river until he was just beside where the waterfall
ended, and the water gushed, where he was sprayed with a cold mist. He suddenly thrust his hand into the water, and pulled out a squirming fish as long as his forearm.
Aya stared at him in amazement. Villid gave her a
smile. “Let’s eat.” he suggested