The Druid Queen - Douglas Niles [84]
"Not now! I told you, I'm not opening up these saddlebags until we stop for the night!"
Their course took them very near Codsrun Creek. Since his meeting with the faerie dragon, Tristan's concentration had remained uninterrupted and intense. Yet as the hours and then the days had passed, he grew increasingly perplexed by the confusion which had overtaken him.
Coupled with this mystery were the facts that he still didn't know: How many days had he been riding? How far off his track had he ventured? And what had caused his disturbing lapse in reason?
Always as he rode, he scanned the surrounding brush, studied each neighboring hilltop and tor, searching for sign of a gray body. But the wolves had disappeared, as far as he could tell, from all the world. At night, he listened carefully, but no more did their song rise to the stars.
"Hey! What's that?" wondered the spritely dragon, raising his narrow snout to sniff the air. "I smell a swamp!"
In another moment, Shallot's gait faltered, and Tristan saw that the ground before them grew tangled and thick with vines, enclosing brambles, and dense, thorny underbrush. The war-horse slowed to a walk, then finally halted altogether, unable to proceed through the thicket.
"It is a swamp!" declared Newt, rather unnecessarily. The air had become fetid and dank. Flies rose around them, buzzing through the humid air, coming to rest on human and horse alike.
For a moment, Tristan was puzzled. He'd had a mental picture of the Codsrun flowing all the way to the sea, and now the stream itself slowed to a brackish backwater, meandering among reeds and lilies, apparently stopping in its bed. But then he remembered: He'd sailed through the Strait of Oman many times and had never seen the mouth of that splashing stream. He did remember a stretch of marsh, however-a dank fen, actually-that covered much of the shoreline near Codscove. The stream, he deduced, must spread out and form the marsh.
But was the fen to the west or the east of that coastal town? This was the crucial fact now, and the king wasn't at all sure of the answer. Still, a sense of motivation propelled him, and he didn't want to allow this terrain to slow him down.
Which way was it? He tried to remember, all but gritting his teeth from the force of his cogitation. Finally the best he could do was to guess, his mind teased by a variety of memories, none of them certain enough to give him any degree of confidence.
"We'll go east," he announced, his voice more firm than his mind. "In another day, we'll get to Codscove."
"What do you want to go there for?" Newt whined. "It's a town, isn't, it? There's just a bunch of people there. No meadows or trees or fun stuff like that."
"A fishing town," Tristan said calmly, knowing that, besides cheese, the bounty of the seas and streams was Newt's favorite repast. "Why, I wouldn't be surprised if there were whole racks of cod and salmon drying in the sun… outdoors, where everyone can see them."
"Say, that's right, isn't it?" Newt agreed, perking up. "You don't suppose they'd mind if one or two-No, of course they wouldn't! I don't eat that much! How long did you say it would take to get there?"
Tristan chuckled silently, suspecting that the faerie dragon, if he was truly hungry, would pose a serious threat to the season's catch. The inducement worked well, however, as Newt clambered up on the pommel, eagerly looking around Shallot's broad head, tiny nostrils quivering for any advance warning of the destination.
They rode easily, skirting the fringe of the swampland and passing along the same type of open forest that had surrounded them for so much of the ride through the vale and Winterglen. A light breeze wafted through the woods, and the scents of flowers and ferns filled the air, overpowering any lingering stench of the swamp.
In the end, Tristan's estimate proved remarkably accurate, a fact which he found considerably reassuring. They passed