At least his threat let me sleep but when I woke up after a few short hours, I felt no more rested than if I’d stayed awake for days. My belly hurt and my mouth was so dry that I could spit dust balls. Poor Arian looked exhausted, she was sitting up against the pile of saddles, blankets and a pack I hadn’t noticed before.
Another one had been under me and when I pawed cautiously through it, I found foodstuffs for the horses, a fire striker and dry cakes that looked like my own journey cakes–ground corn baked with wheatberries, cranberry, apples and oats. In a pinch, you could feed them to yourself or your horses to keep them going when food was tough to find or you didn’t have the time to hunt on your own.
I tried one small bite and my stomach screamed for more. As I pushed in the pieces with trembling hands, crumbs splattered my face and chest, yet when the dry cakes hit my stomach, it had no effect on my hunger. The minute I stopped chewing, I was hacking it back up in the same condition it had gone down.
“It won’t let you eat or drink, Toby,” she said quietly. “The curse. It’s very powerful and won’t abate until the King himself releases it. You must return and beg for his pardon.”
“No.” I wiped my mouth. “My mother told me stories of your people when we were alone. She said that the Elassa were great bargainers and always came out on the best side of any deal but that they always left an avenue of escape, if only the victim was smart enough to find it. I thought she was telling me fairy tales from the old world, like Grimm and the Aeneid. Now, I recognized them for what they really were–tales of her home.” I paused, brushed off my bronze tunic minus the fancy embroidered vest. “He said flesh of an animal, fish, and fowl. Does that mean I can eat worms and bugs and things?”
“Tell me what he said again.”
Obediently, I recited the curse, as it was ingrained on my mind. “No flesh of beast, no fish nor fowl nor seed be found upon this soil that will support thee. No water, wine, ale or fruits of man or earth may thin thy thirst until thee takes it from my hand. The air will weigh upon thee as if falling from the Fire Mountain’s heart until thy knees bend at my feet and mine hand smite thee on the heart. So cursed are thee by the King of the Elassa.”
“He doesn’t say anything about the milk of beasts,” I added. “Do you think I can drink that?”
She shook her head sadly. “That would be considered a fruit of the earth or man or flesh of beasts,” she said. “Cows eat grass which they produce as milk. Fruits of the earth.”
“There has to be something,” I said in despair. “There is always a back door!”
“Perhaps we will find it if we ask a wizard,” she suggested rising to kick out the fire. She packed up the gear, saddled the horses and even helped me get on Diomed. I felt absolutely useless, I was unable to do anything but breathe.
“It’ll be all right, Toby,” she said, kissed me and mounted from the ground in one lithe bound.
We found the trail and continued on. The trees change to alder, elm and beech with slower, broader rivers that I knew at one point we would have to ford. It grew more open and we could see fields below us, crawling with farmers plowing the fields under and readying them for sunflower and wheatberry, oats and wheat, four of the main grains produced in the Caladienne valley. If we were near Tenesk as I surmised, then these would be convict labor for that city had been founded by convicted felons and was where the Oldland government sent those it did not want. Rebels, rabble-rousers and freedom fighters. No one left the city for the simple fact that you could become a rich man there if you were violent enough, crazy or just plain mean. And it was surrounded by an entire garrison of bored Dragoons whose main object in life was to track down escapees.
“Is this on the way to a village?” She asked, her eyes searching the fields and the plowers.
“Tenesk must be close. It’s not a place where we would be safe or welcome. The city is inhabited by felons and criminals who would fleece us, sell our bodies and eat our horses.”
“Eat our–? Why?”
“Because no one is allowed to own anything that could help them escape the city. There are smaller communities further down the pike where we could get what we need and not risk our lives. The Pearls of the Pease.”
“Pearls of what?”
“Pease. The Pease River comes down from the Caladienne Glacier and there are forty-eight small villages and towns built around the banks forming a near circle with Tenesk as the center clasp. Like pearls on a necklace, each a day’s ride from the next. We can ride along the river and choose one.”
“We don’t need anything, I packed enough for weeks. Head for your home, Tobias. I will hunt when we get low on fare.” I nodded and cut across the hill towards the thick woods, never hoping to see the road to town again.
We rode into the twilight of the trees and the going was easy, firm footing with needles and moss underfoot. Birds chattered as we disturbed them and we saw other abundant wildlife–deer, giant elk, foxes and woodchucks, porcupines and brash black squirrels. Tiny, white-striped chipmunks that scolded us from the tops of fallen tree trunks.
Fresh skunk cabbage, trout lilies and May-apples were poking their noses out of the leaf mold; the air smelled of spring and I almost enjoyed it. Until it turned to lead in my chest. I coughed and it rattled, startling both horses and Arianell.
She stopped, cast about on the ground and paused, laughing ruefully. “I thought to find you some horehound for your cough but it would do you no good,” she sighed.
“Horehound?”
“Yes. It is a wild herb that is used to dampen coughing, and for sore throats. The woods are full of natural remedies.”
“Tell me more,” I said interested. To the sound of the horses’ quiet footfalls, she told me of the plant life in the glades, dales and swamps that aided both men and Elassa.
“Ginger, good for aches and pains of arthritis and sprains. Willow bark will take down fevers and pain. Poppy, a potent painkiller. Chamomile you know, will help you sleep and calm you.
“Boneset, Tansy good for breaks and Arnica is wonderful for bruising taken both internal and externally.”
“Snakebites?” I asked.
“The poison must be stopped from spreading as you know. Sucked out if you catch it early enough. Feverfew after, foxglove to keep the heart from faltering.”
“Is that what Belgrave did?” I asked morbidly curious. “When I woke, I thought I was dead and in heaven. I called him God.”
She laughed. “That must’ve pleased him. He used magic on you, Toby. He spelled your blood and removed all of it, cleaned it of the poison and put it back inside you. As you saw, the poison had almost reached your heart. If it had, not even magic would’ve saved you.”
I shuddered. I hated snakes. Thank goodness that they were rare and rarely seen. We rode in silence after that, stopping to rest and let the horses eat while I watched in envy.
When I saw that she had not eaten, I said something. “Arian, eat. No point in you going hungry,” I told her and she nodded. Reluctantly she had two of the cakes and a small piece of hard cheese, drinking from a wineskin. She was half ashamed at her hunger and after one envious stare, I turned away to give her some respite from my own longing glances.
After a while, the stomach pains dulled to a mild cramp that I could ignore. She spent only the barest time eating before we were back mounted and climbing the ridges into the true mountains. If I looked up, I could see the snow caps that covered the Peninines, the first of the line of mountains that made up the Caladienne range and split the old world into two continents, traveled across the sea as mountaintop islands and then continued on as the range called the Great White Fangs of the Newlands.
The old land was not connected to the new save through that underwater range and not something we could ride around to return to Cayden’s Valley. If we were where I suspected, it would still be easier to ride to a Bay City, take the ship to the port city Aberden and sail home.
I let my head rest on my chest and half-closed my eyes yet when I did so, I heard his voice drawing me back to his side like a siren call that was hard to ignore. “Shut up,” I muttered under my breath and twisted to let a low-hanging tree branch sweep across my back.
Diomed stopped and snorted. There was a sudden cessation of sounds in the forest and he was bolting even before Arianell said anything. We ran, scattering in different directions as men on light, agile horses dressed in the woodland green and brown of the Emperor’s Rangers attempted to box us in. On the flat, no one could keep up with Diomed, Beau or the mares yet in these close thick woods it wasn’t speed that counted but agility.
Although my father’s horses were trained to respond to neck reining and subtle shifts of your seat, it required a fit rider to stay on. I was not fit or agile enough and I barely missed the first two low-hanging limbs. When Diomed leaped a four foot high, three foot wide fallen trunk, I barely managed to hang on. Black spots hovered in my vision and I was gasping for breath, a loud wheeze that you could hear over the Rangers’ shouts, horses’ hooves and bodies crashing through the trees. I couldn’t steer, I was hanging onto Di’s neck wishing desperately that his mane had grown out long enough for me to twine my hands into it. I could see two of the Rangers merging on my left side and another trio to the right when the farm horse we called Tripper charged in and knocked the two of them over. I swear he grinned at me before he veered off to come around the other side. I saw one of the Rangers take aim with his musket and screamed a cry that brought all the horses to a frenzy.
“No!” Before my disbelieving eyes, he shot poor Trip. Like a falling tree, the great workhorse slowly toppled over to land with a finality that shuddered the forest floor. Diomed bolted forward downhill and I felt him gather himself to jump an upcoming tree and rock wall.
I could not get set for it, my body went sliding off to the side, I flew head over heels, landing on my shoulders and would have screamed if I could’ve found the breath. All the air in me was knocked out and I struggled to suck in anything.
Diomed stopped and came back to me. I waved him away. In desperation, I found a stick and hit him, something I had never done to him before.
“Go!” I sobbed, able to expel air but not bring it in. He looked at me and just before I nearly passed out, I threw a rock at him, hitting him in the shoulder. He squealed and ran, reins and stirrups flopping. I saw his heels kicking just before the leaves came up and my face crushed them.
The three riders reached me, jumped off and one of them dug his fingers under the arch of my ribs lifting them, forcing air in my lungs. When that didn’t work, he pinched my nose and breathed into my mouth. I was close enough to see his pale brown eyes under thick serious brows. He had wrinkles at the corner of his eyes from squinting into the sun or laugh lines. I hoped they were laugh lines, I hoped he was not one of those Rangers with an exaggerated sense of their own importance and thought he was above the rest of us. Those men would not treat prisoners kindly.
I felt more than saw others join him. Heard them ask what he was doing. His answer was, “Breathing for him. He stopped and was turning blue before my eyes. I can barely get a breath of air into him. Anyone have any stim–kaff?”
Someone placed a spout in my mouth between breaths and dribbled in hot liquid. Immediately, it came back up and I choked. My coughing was too much and I slowly strangled, held in his arms as he struggled to keep me breathing.