Fistandantilus Reborn - Douglas Niles [57]
“Maybe I should just let you go,” he reflected aloud.
“You’re probably going to be a lot more trouble than you’re worth.”
The horse’s ears came forward at the words, and as Nightmare started to crunch another apple, Danyal felt a strange kinship to the animal. He knew he would be even more lonely if the steed was to run away, so he shook his head and laughed ruefully.
“I guess we’re stuck together, the two survivors of Waterton.”
It still didn’t seem real when he thought about it, and so he tried not to do so. He wondered about the trail he would walk tomorrow, though these thoughts were troubling, too, because they led, inevitably, to the dragon that had flown away into the north.
When darkness descended, the lad pulled his blanket over himself and fell asleep, only to toss and turn anxiously. His dreams were troubled by images of fire, of giant crimson wings and a killing maw. Interspersed were episodes in which he saw his mother or the rest of his family, only to have them snatched cruelly away by some force over which he had no control.
He awakened before dawn, shivering despite his blanket, and feeling a powerful gnawing in his gut. It was a hunger that could not be addressed by apples, and he made his way to the stream as the first tendrils of light reached upward from the eastern horizon. Before half the sky had paled he had three nice trout. He built a fire at the edge of the grove and felt the warmth of the flames. Cleaning and splitting the fish, he speared the fillets onto sharp sticks and grilled them over the fire.
By the time the sun had risen into the treetops, he was well fed, warm, and dry. He changed the muddy poultice over Nightmare’s wound, relieved to see that it had begun to heal nicely. Finally he took the tether in one hand, his fishing pole in the other, and started along the streamside trail.
Before the sun reached its zenith, he knew he was farther from home than he had ever been before. The valley here looked much the same as it did around Waterton, though he noticed that the stream had more frequent stretches of frothing rapids. The weather remained warm and sunny, for which he was grateful, and at times he would walk for a mile or more without remembering the horror that had driven him onto this trail. He would lose himself in a sense of adventure, the confidence of the fisherman that, just around the next bend, he would find the ideal pool, the perfect fish.
But then the memories would return, and he plodded forward under a melancholy that was more oppressive than the heaviest overcast, borne down by a weighty depression as dispiriting as any drenching shower.
The sun itself seemed to darken in the sky, and Danyal found himself slowing, stumbling, biting back the lump building in his throat. At these times, it was Nightmare that kept them going, the big horse leaning forward, hooves clopping at a steady pace, the tether in the boy’s hand tugging him along, keeping him from a state of utter collapse.
That night he camped in a grove of cedars, again eating fresh trout with a couple of his apples. He built a small fire before falling asleep and, aided by the windbreak of the evergreens, spent a more comfortable and restful night than he had previously.
On the third day of his trek, the ground began to rise noticeably. He had seen no settlements, no sign of humankind or any other race of builders, in the time since the wrack of his village had been left behind. Now the distant mountains rose as a purple mass to the north and east, and in places he saw long, white snowfields and glistening white cornices draped across the lofty alpine ridges.
In the late afternoon of this day’s trek, he came around a curve in the upstream trail and was startled to find that the waterway was spanned by an arched bridge of gray stone. Releasing Nightmare’s reins, he scrambled up a slope of broken rock to stand upon a narrow, rutted cart track. The horse kicked and sprang, following