The Seeker - Isobelle Carmody [17]
7
IT TOOK SOME time to reach the outskirts of Sutrium. I had forgotten the city was so big. The streets were completely deserted, and it was well into the morning before we reached the end of the town’s sprawling outer limits, but toward midday, the city fell rapidly behind.
I had lived in urban orphan homes now for many years, but the curved road parting the soft folded hills and gullies brought back clear memories of my childhood in Rangorn, far from the towns and the ever-present menace of the Council. I realized I had not lied to Jes when I told him I was almost glad. There was an odd sort of peace in having got the thing done at last. I thought of Madam Vega and reflected that Obernewtyn was bound to be less terrible than the stories.
It was not hard to forget fear and to surrender myself to the peaceful solitude of the carriage. The morning burgeoned into a sun-filled day, and between naps I watched the country unfold.
To the east of the road, we passed the villages of Saithwold and Sawlney, and beyond them to the north were soft woodlands, where from the window I could see the downs sloping gently to Arandelft, set deep in the forest. To the west of the road were the vast hazy moors of Glenelg.
The road curved down to pass on the farthermost outskirts of Arandelft, where slate-gray buildings were framed by cultivated fields flanked by bloodberry trees. More than twenty leagues away and closing the horizon was the Gelfort Range—the mountains Tor, Aren Craggie, and Emeralfel. They marked the border of the highlands, and as if to underline this, the road began gradually to incline upward.
We passed onto the low westernmost slopes of the Brown Haw Rises, hillocky and undulant—I was astounded to discover how much I knew of land I had never seen. My father had talked a good deal of these places. He had traveled much in the Land before he bonded with my mother. Sometimes he had seated me on his knee and shown me colored pictures that he called maps. He would point to places, tell me their names, and explain what they were like.
We passed a small moor, wetter and more dense than Glenelg, and I peered through the leafy eben trees along the roadside at the mist-wreathed expanse. There had been no moors in Rangorn, but I recognized this from my father’s descriptions. He had said the mists never went away but were always fed by some hissing subterranean source. He thought the moors were caused by some inner disturbance in the earth, yet another legacy of the Great White.
My mother had said good herbs always grew near the moors; she came from the high country and knew a great deal about herb lore. I thought of the great, white-trunked trees that had stood on the hillside around our house. Were they still there, though the house had long ago been reduced to ashes? I remembered my mother making me listen to the whispering sounds of the trees; the rich, shadowed glades where we collected mushrooms and healing flowers; and the summer brambles laden with fat berries, dragging over the bank of our favorite swimming hole. I thought of standing with my father and looking down from the hills to where the Ford of Rangorn met the onrush of the Suggredoon, and the distant, grayish glint of a Blacklands lake.
And I remembered the burning of my mother and father, in the midst of all the beauty of Rangorn. Perhaps that was what Jes remembered most, what had made him so cold and strange in recent times.
As the late-afternoon sun slanted through the window of the carriage, we halted briefly at a wayside hostel, and a new coachman came to take the place of the other. The hostel was just outside a village called Guanette, and I felt a jolt at the name. It made me think of Maruman, and I wondered if he had understood that I really was going away for good.
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