Road of Dreams

Synopsis

They left Loshev at dawn with Dwayne alongside, crossed the ancient bridge one horse at a time past a survey crew who reckon a proper repair will take years, and turned south, ninety miles to Forven at an unhurried pace.

Dwayne had fallen into cooking and camp-tending without being asked, and at the first fire he thanked them for the keep and offered to work with them again, for a cut. Mikhail raised the thing they were circling: they will have to go back to that keep, and what can he tell them. He told the safe version. He had guided a crew up-river, two Hafuwë brothers among them; Kithul had gone that way earlier and never come back; the goblins were waiting, and they were coordinated, one of them carrying a proper sword and giving orders. The crew scattered. A voice calling for help turned out to be bait. He ran, found one body, buried it, and does not know who else lived. That night he thrashed in his sleep, and the lullaby Mikhail played to settle him did no clear good.

In Forven the guard captain Kiras Hallo had her command permanently, and the prisoner talks were leaning Loshev’s way: Forven will not hand men to Haudh-Gwenn after what that city did in the slaving. Cazzik is held tight; the one who slipped the net is a bard, at a university south of Meshtes. Koa thought her worth watching for the company she kept, Mikhail thought that no way to treat anybody, and neither moved the other. With the captain’s help they finally squared the Tillermen roster against their own notes.

Mikhail caught the courier route through town. Danil had done the work he asked: midnight milk is a hallucinogen, badly addictive and illegal in Peredhel, and a soured variant of it puts a man under for hours he experiences as decades: some wake with a language they never learned, most wake ruined. Neither matches what happened to Aldo. Kadero sent a well-thumbed book on sacred geometry and a note saying he was owed three gold.

They had come away certain there was more in it than he had said, and left him a few nights before asking again. There had been more than goblins: humanoids with swords, a man and a woman among them. And Dwayne had loosed at a shape in the dark, and has come to believe it was one of the Hafuwë brothers. I think I may have been part of the problem. Koa answered with his own (a dying man in Haudh-Gwenn who opened three throats while Koa was too slow), and between them they got Dwayne to agree to the Chantry before he takes any more of their work. The lullaby that night put him properly under.

Harad, then several days more to Westwood, and the party’s first look at land they had owned for months. Aubrey at the one tavern was territorial and unimpressed and served them soured wine as a joke, warming only slightly on working out these were the men who ended the slavers. Their plot adjoins Landor de Bellun’s estate. At dusk they found a heap of moved stones over a tunnel mouth; Aldo and Dwayne walked the far end and put it together: two or three miles planned, from here to the Crack, dug on Beltran’s coin and abandoned the month his operation came apart. That night Mikhail played the tavern’s music night with the village council in the room, and left with coin, Aubrey’s respect, and leave to play there whenever he likes.

Sixteen miles on, Aldo heard a bowstring and Mikhail a bird that was not a bird. The first arrow nearly finished Dwayne; Aldo put one archer out of a tree dead, a second dropped wounded, and Koa rode the last down and took him without killing him. The captives talked: two gold apiece and new bows and boots from a man named Whent, lately of the Haudh-Gwenn guard, who had word of their movements from someone in that city keeping carrier birds. Five more waited by the river approach.

The Crack was unrecognizable: scouts on tree platforms, a guard at the cave door, hunting parties coming in. Edrick and Leon met them, and the war-council reached an ugly conclusion: the word went out of Loshev, or possibly Forven, from somebody who watched them leave. They moved the training indoors and went after the second crew before dark, leaving their escort behind at dusk to walk into the trees.