• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

He rode out the next day with Austra in the carriage and three spare horses. He didn’t bother to find z’Acatto to say good-bye.

The road took him west across the flat yellowing grass of the Mey Ghorn plain. Clouds scudded across the sky like fast ships until near sundown they piled up and blotted out the stars. The air was wet and cool and smelled like rain when he went to where Austra lay and fed her some porridge and watered wine. She seemed thinner.

“The Sefry will know what to do,” he assured her. “Mother Uun will have a cure.”

The rain came gently enough, and he lay there listening to it on the canvas until sleep at last folded him into her blanket.

He woke to the morning songs of birds and realized that the sun was well up and he had lost time. He felt guilty for sleeping at all when every bell counted. He gave Austra her morning meal and ate a bit of dried meat. He found the horses grazing and brought them back to the harness. He settled onto the seat and started out.

It had been a long time, he realized, since he had been alone, his time in the wine cellar at Dunmrogh aside. He wasn’t technically alone now, but for all intents and purposes he was. He’d once spent a good deal of his time solitary, and he understood now how much he missed it.

What sort of man am I? he wondered. Anne was dead. Austra was well on her way to joining her. And yet, somehow, part of him was excited to be in the quiet of his own thoughts, with no one questioning him, with nothing to do but watch the road.

“Anne is dead,” he murmured aloud. He remembered his first sight of her, bathing in a pool in the wilds around the Coven St. Cer. She had become so completely a part of his life, that the thought that he would never see her again seemed not only wrong but fundamentally impossible. They had survived so much together, and for what? For her to die now? Had any of it been worth it?

But of course, no matter what one survived, death was always coming. There was no winning that game.

By noon the road was winding gently downhill, and the occasional malend could be seen turning its sails in the distance. He stopped to feed and wash Austra and let the horses go to water. He was just about to start off again when riders appeared on the road ahead.

He looked about, but it was all open fields. If they were enemies, there wasn’t much he could do.

Oddly enough, the impression he had was that the horses he saw were mounted by giant mushrooms, but as they drew nearer, he saw that they were Sefry, wearing their customary broad-brimmed hats to keep the sun from their dainty skins.

When they were even nearer, he recognized their colors as those of Anne’s Sefry bodyguard.

He watched them come, wondering what they could possibly be up to. Having failed their mistress, were they now on their way to cast themselves into the eastern sea?

He counted forty of them and wondered why he bothered to do that. Weren’t these friends? If they were, why did he have such a strange feeling in his belly’s abyss?

And why were they flanking him?

He drew the horses to a halt. One of the riders came forward and pulled down the gauze that hid most of his face, revealing Cauth Versial, the leader of Anne’s guard.

“Cazio,” Cauth said. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“Yes,” Cazio replied. “Fancy it.”

“You’ve heard the news?”

Cazio nodded, noting from the corner of his eye that the Sefry were continuing to surround him.

“It was a terrible shock.”

“I would imagine,” Cazio said. “To have the person you were supposed to be protecting murdered in plain sight with you all around her. How could that happen?”

“I’m sure if you had been there, things would have gone differently,” Cauth said.

“I’m sure of that, too,” Cazio said.

“Austra is in the wagon, I take it.”

“Why would you think that?”

Cauth sighed. “Time is short,” he said. “I won’t waste it bantering with you. I’ve seen you fight, and I imagine you’ll probably kill a few of us if you choose to, but there’s no reason it should come to that.”

“Why should it come