The Messenger

said, “we timed it right anyway. We’ve run out of food.”

For five days after spotting the mountainous horizon rising to the south they had steered along a rocky coast of exceptionally barren and apparently uninhabited terrain. The rugged skyline rose steeply only a few miles inland from the shore, and the edge of the land was in most places a high cliff of jagged, weatherworn stone. Kerrick had taken Cutter into a few narrow inlets, but even there the shore had been rocky and treacherous. Since the regular rainstorms had resulted in the water barrel remaining comfortably full, the elf had elected to keep sailing while searching for a more promising landfall.

At last they had come upon a strait of deep water extending between two rugged shores less than ten miles apart. Here they had veered south, hoping to find anchorage.

Now their search was rewarded, in the discovery of this bay on the eastern shore just inside the bottleneck. Kerrick studied the forest, confident they would find game-deer, pheasant, or rabbit-somewhere in the woods. His belly rumbled, and his mouth watered at the remembered taste of grilled meat. He checked his bowstring and arrows. Unwilling to leave the powerful talisman behind, the elf tucked his magical ring into a small pouch inside of his belt. Ready at last, he stood in the stern and looked for the most promising spot to begin the hunt.

The trees were barely half as tall as the pines that grew so commonly in Silvanesti, but their color was lush, and the ground showed mossy meadow and fern-bedded dale. A stone’s throw away was a stretch of sand beach, backed by trees that looked especially inviting.

“How are you getting to shore?” Caroltop asked, frowning.

“ ‘We’re going to swim,” Kerrick replied.

“Good idea,” the kender replied cheerfully. “Except, who will watch the boat?”

“Don’t you know how to swim?”

“What kind of question is that? Netfisher practically means ‘swimming,’ in kenderspeak! But I think I could do some pretty good fishing right here, just in case your luck as a hunter is the same as your luck as a sailor.”

Kerrick opened his mouth to reply when he realized that he wouldn’t mind spending a few hours by himself. The kender, surprisingly enough, had proved a companionable shipmate, and of course, he had saved the elf’s life. However, Coraltop talked a lot, even when he didn’t seem to have anything noteworthy to say.

“All right. Why don’t you drop a line in the water, and I’ll have a hunt in the woods. Tomorrow we’ll put both together and have a feast.”

The elf tied his weapons and clothes into a nearly watertight bundle inside his oilskin, and slipped over the gunwale and into the chilly, slightly choppy water. He felt the cold instantly, but it was an invigorating sensation, and his spirits lifted as he tugged his floating garments along behind him and stroked toward shore.

A minute later he emerged onto the smooth, grainy sand, shivering in the breeze. The morning sun was up, but it was barely a blur low on the horizon. It seemed to offer little heat, so rapidly the elf donned his moccasins, woolen shirt, and leggings. He left his leather cloak behind a tree at the edge of the narrow beach strand, and quickly strung his bow.

Ready, he turned to wave goodbye at the kender, but Coraltop wasn’t anywhere in sight. Kerrick sighed.

“You’d better catch a few fish if you want any dinner,” he muttered irritatedly, suppressing his urge to shout only because he didn’t want to startle any nearby game. He readied an arrow against his bowstring, relished a deep breath of cool pine-scented air, and stepped into the woods.

“That cloud across the gulf-do you notice how it’s lingered there all day?” Moreen asked worriedly, as she and her two companions made their way along a ridge that ran parallel to the shore, perhaps a half mile inland.

“Yes, as if a part of the far shore is obscured,” Bruni noted. “It goes away when the wind blows, then comes right back.”

They were far enough north, now, that the opposite side of the gulf had come into view across the passage that Strongwind Whalebone had called the Bluewater Strait. They could see the shore when the fog and drizzle lifted enough, during the few hours of daylight. No more than ten miles away, they observed a rugged landscape of coastal bluff and steep mountains looming on the far side of the water.

“There-now the sun’s hitting it. What does it look like to you?”

“It’s a kind of wall!” Tildey said quickly, “and a tower, there on that hilltop over the sea. It’s some kind of citadel!”

“She’s right,” Bruni confirmed after a moment’s scrutiny. “A big one too, to show up so well at this distance.”

“I think that must be Brackenrock,” Moreen said, a knot in her stomach.

“The steam is coming from caverns below the city?” mused Bruni. “It makes sense to me. You were right!”

“No, I couldn’t have been more wrong!” She was thinking of Strongwind’s map, the fact that this ancient ruin had not been displayed there, and now she thought she understood why.

“It’s way across the water, isn’t it?” Tildey said quietly.

Moreen slumped down onto a rock and nodded bleakly. The truth was in plain sight: The citadel, the mythical place where the chiefwoman had hoped to find safety for her tribe, was miles away, way beyond any map, on the far side of this impassable bay.

“If we still had the kayaks …”

Bruni’s voice trailed off and Moreen bit back her sharp retort. Not only had the ogres broken up all the tribe’s little boats, but they had slashed all the sealskin shells when they abandoned Bayguard. It took a skilled builder the better part of a year to make a kayak, and one kayak could only carry one person, perhaps with one small passenger. That was no solution for the entire tribe.

“What about an ice crossing?” Tildey ventured, tentatively.

“After the Sturmfrost?” Moreen couldn’t keep the scorn out of her voice. She wondered to herself: How many of us will even be alive, after the assault of that first, lethal blizzard?

“Well, there’s no point in going back to Bayguard,” Bruni said. “Let’s keep going north somewhere. We might find that woods that you remembered. We have to be getting close. Being in a forest is better shelter than camping out here on the tundra.”

Moreen nodded stoically and let her friends hoist her to her feet. Her mind drifted. She pictured Gulderglow, with its high walls, heat-producing coal, stockpiles of food. The Arktos could survive the winter there, although Strongwind had made the price of that shelter very clear. Still, paying that price was better than starving, wasn’t it? Or leaving infants and elders outside where the Sturmfrost would certainly doom them? Suddenly the mantle of “chief” felt very heavy on her shoulders.

The three continued to make their way along the crest of a ridge toward a low hill. When they finally came over the hill, they stared in awe. Before them stretched a whole valley green with trees, lush evergreens spilling like a dark carpet across the miles of level ground between them and more rugged elevation. Down below was a small expanse of water, a sheltered cove. The surface was gray, streaked with gentle waves.

“This must be Tall Cedar Bay!” Moreen announced with relief. “I’m sure of it.” The memory of her long trek by kayak with her father, the only other time she had seen this protected inlet, came flooding back. This was more wood than she’d ever imagined, a treasure of fuel and building material. So their journey hadn’t been in vain, after all.

“What’s that?” Bruni asked ominously, pointing toward an object bobbing near the shore. “Another ogre ship?”

Instinctively they dropped to the ground, staring at what was clearly some kind of modest-sized watercraft. Unlike a kayak or galley, it was distinguished by a long pole rising straight up from the center of the deck.

“I don’t think ogres have boats like that,” Moreen said. Her heart pounded with sudden excitement, and her mind whirled. Perhaps Brackenrock wasn’t unreachable after all! “Let’s get down there and look.”

The chiefwoman pointed to a nearby ravine, a shallow-sided cut in the ridge that would allow them to descend with good cover. One by one, the three Arktos she-warriors moved in that direction and started down, working their way toward the suddenly ominous-looking beach fringed by woods.

Almost immediately Kerrick had found a game trail, a narrow track of dirt amid the pine needles and brush