The Seal of Karga Kul_ A Dungeons & Dragons Novel - Alex Irvine [43]
They traded with the elves before leaving, and the elves cheated them mercilessly, reserving their most ruthless bargains for Lucan. He had his eye on a pair of boots since his had been badly torn in the bridge fighting. “Oh, these boots are powerful,” the elf cobbler said. “You will move silent as a cat and your enemies will think you are a shadow.”
Lucan bought them, cursing the cobbler and the entire race of elves as he paid the exorbitant price. “This is more than your share of what we’ve won thus far. It puts you in debt to us,” Biri-Daar observed.
“Oh, fear not,” Lucan said, putting on the new boots. “I’ll work for my keep.”
Five horses and tack for the long trek ahead of them, plus replacements for gear that had worn out or been broken on the trek so far—oil, torches, flint and steel, fresh waterskins—took all the gold they had. They rode away from the elf encampment feeling cheated and still feeling the cloud of Iriani’s death. Paelias, seeing them approach the road, spurred his mount to meet them. “Let me guess,” he said. “They told stories about me and then swindled you at market.”
“You were watching,” Kithri said.
“No,” Paelias said. “That is what they do. The elves of these woods don’t like me because I come from the Feywild and they don’t like the Feywild. The other eladrin don’t like me because I like this world a little too much. Probably you voted among yourselves that you don’t want me along. That’s fine. I will ride with you for a while. You can’t stop me unless you want to fight, and if we fight it will end badly for all of us. So. Let us ride. Yes?”
The five survivors of the battle on Iban Ja’s bridge looked at each other. “All right. Yes,” Biri-Daar said after a long moment. “You may ride with us for a while.”
BOOK III
THE CROW ROAD
They emerged from the elves’ forest the next morning. The country around them was still wooded, but more sparsely. Sunlight reached the ground there, and the air was heavy with the scents of alpine summer. “Now we’re on the Crow Road,” Lucan said. He pointed up to the trees that lined the road, and Remy saw them: crows standing sentinel, one in the top branches of each tree.
Mindful of the story he had heard about how Iban Ja’s bridge had gotten the way it was, he asked, “Are those crows or ravens?”
Lucan laughed. “Most people can’t tell the difference. These are crows. But you’ll see ravens along the way. You’ll see just about everything if you travel the Crow Road from one end to the other.”
“And what is at the other end?”
“Well, that depends. Either you get off before the end and work your way through the Lightless Marsh to … this sounds strange, but there’s a place where the Lightless Marsh isn’t lightless anymore. That’s the best way I can explain it. You get to that place, and you realize that you have somehow re-emerged into the world from wherever you were before. Which, if you’re traveling the Crow Road, is everywhere. And anywhere.”
“And if you don’t get off? If you see the Crow Road through all the way to its end?” Remy pressed.
“Well,” said Lucan slowly, “then you reach the Inverted Keep.”
“The Inverted Keep?” Paelias looked amazed. “Really? I understood that to be a legend.”
“Most people in the Dragondown would say the same about Iban Ja’s bridge,” Lucan said. “But they are both real.”
“Most of them would also say it about the Crow Road,” Keverel added.
Paelias nodded and scanned the treetops for more crows. “True enough. Yet here we are.”
“Is it called the Crow Road because crows sit in the trees?” Remy asked. “They do that everywhere.”
“It’s called the Crow Road …” Kithri started, then stopped. She looked at Lucan.
“What?” he said.
“You tell the story,” Kithri said. “If you don’t, you’ll just complain about how one of us does it wrong.”
In the years before Arkhosia and Bael Turath put their stamp on the world, a great and now forgotten empire arose in the highlands between the Blackfall and Whitefall rivers. So long ago