gnome. In any case, she ignored Hallas’s question. But Fluffy Cloud answered him.
“Wait a little while, and you’ll understand everything.”
There was nothing for it, we had to wait. I spotted two little blue dots in the branches of the nearest tree.
“Look, Kli-Kli. A forest spirit.”
“I saw him ages ago. He’s looking after this section of the forest.”
“But where are all the others?” Eel asked. “There were far more of them in Zagraba in September.”
“Hibernating. They’ll sleep until spring now. They’ve left lookouts to keep an eye on the forest.”
“That’s bad luck for the lad,” I said, sympathizing with the forest spirit. “Now he has to hang about here all winter.”
Just then a small round sphere radiating a steady golden light flew out of the forest and landed on Sunpatch’s shoulder. On closer inspection, the sphere proved to be a huge firefly. But it wasn’t its size that surprised me. I’d never seen fireflies in late autumn. According to all the laws of creation, the insect ought to have died long ago, or hidden itself away in some cranny; it shouldn’t be flying around the forest like some holy hermit’s lamp. But this one obviously cared nothing at all for the laws of creation. Or maybe it just hadn’t had time to study them yet.
“Now we can go to the water. Everything’s ready,” Sunpatch said, setting out confidently toward the river. The firefly gave more than enough light for us to see the path.
“Just as I thought!” Hallas muttered when we reached the river’s edge. “A boat! I hate boats!”
“It’s not a boat, it’s a raft,” Kli-Kli contradicted the gnome.
“What’s the difference? Boat, raft, ferry, ship, or tub? I hate everything that floats.”
The raft was large, and there was plenty of space for all of us. Eel, Lamplighter, Egrassa, and I took up the poles, and the dryads, the goblin, and the gnome stayed in the center. Hallas immediately started feeling sick.
The elf untied the thick rope holding the raft by the bank, and then we had to strain a bit, heaving on our poles, to get our new means of conveyance out into the middle of the river.
“How did a raft happen to be here?” Lamplighter asked, leaning hard on his pole.
“No doubt the dryads arranged it,” I answered the warrior.
“What difference does it make how it got here? The important thing is that it did. And whether the dryads arranged it or Sagra sent it to us, I couldn’t care less,” Eel said, pulling his pole out of the water and laying it carefully at his feet.
I lifted my pole up, too, and the raft floated on. The bottom was too deep to reach now, so there was no point in straining myself anymore.
When it was light, the firefly soared up off Sunpatch’s shoulder and flew away, buzzing, toward the forest. The gloomy, morose trees towered up on both sides of the river as if some giant was trying to squeeze it in a tight embrace. The Iselina was far narrower here than it was near Boltnik. The current carried us along at a brisk rate, so fast that the water at the stern seethed furiously.
Soon the already cloudy sky was even more overcast, and after another two hours or so it started spitting rain. It wasn’t a very pleasant day—stuck on a raft in the middle of a river with water pouring down from the sky, too. We huddled up under our cloaks, but that couldn’t save us from the cold and the damp.
“The last rain of the year,” Kli-Kli said with a sniff.
“How do you make that out?”
“We have a nose for things like that, Mumr-Bubr. If I say it’s the last, then it’s the last. Cold weather’s already on the way.”
“It’s been cold for ages,” Hallas objected. “I can’t even straighten up in the mornings.”
“That’s nothing,” Kli-Kli said dismissively. “But now it’s really going to get cold, and if anything falls from the sky, it’ll be snow.”
“You’re a real expert, Kli-Kli,” Eel laughed.
“Of course!” the gobliness agreed, then squinted up at the leaden sky and sighed sorrowfully.
“The river trip is almost over, Hallas. We’ve reached the boundaries of Zagraba. We’ll be in Valiostr tomorrow morning,” the elf reassured the gnome.
“If we don’t drown first,” the gnome grumbled.
The gobliness started whining. “Can’t we light a fire? We’ll be traveling all night!”
“What fire?” Mumr asked in amazement. “In rain like this? And we’d have to row to the shore, there’s no timber here. Or are you thinking of lighting a fire with your cloak?
18
The Margend Horseshoe
“Are you certain there aren’t any orcs here, Egrassa?” Lamplighter asked the elf.
“Yes,” Egrassa replied, but he kept hold of his bow.
That made me feel a bit nervous—and the others, too. We were used to trusting the dark elf’s instincts. And right now Egrassa was tense and focused, as if we were about to be attacked at any moment.
“What makes you so sure?” Kli-Kli asked.
“You heard the flinny say there weren’t any orcs near Moitsig, didn’t you?”
“But when was that? From Maiding to Moitsig is five days’ riding. The orcs don’t like horses, but they’re quite capable of covering the distance in that time. It’s a long time since we saw the flinny, so I wouldn’t be surprised if everything’s changed ten times over by now and these lands are teeming with Firstborn.”
“Don’t talk disaster,” Hallas told Kli-Kli good-naturedly. The gnome was walking in front of me.
“I’m not talking disaster, I’m just feeling a bit anxious.”
“Then stop whinging, or I won’t hear when an orc creeps up on you,” the gnome advised the gobliness.
Our group lapsed into silence. We were all too busy looking for any signs of possible danger, and the conversation petered out of its own accord.
Early that morning, our raft had landed on the left bank of the Iselina. It was no more than three hundred yards from there to the edge of Zagraba. The dryads were the first to disembark from the raft, then they waited until we were all on the bank and led the group on. Early in the night it had stopped raining, and in the middle of the night there had been a light frost, so now the ground and the tree trunks were covered with hoary rime. The rare puddles were covered with a crust of ice.
A few more minutes, and we were out of Zagraba. Ahead of us a hilly plain stretched out for as far as the eye could see, covered with open woodland. Our group was on the southern border of Valiostr.
The dryads exchanged a few words with Egrassa in orcic. Then they nodded to us without speaking, glanced for a brief moment at the bag with the Horn in it, and walked away into the forest. I thought I saw bushes and the bare, leafless trees part to let the Daughters of the Forest pass.
Egrassa straightened his silver coronet and led us out of Zagraba in silence. After we’d gone about five hundred yards, I couldn’t help looking back. It wasn’t likely I would ever see the legendary forest again.
Zagraba was a dark, silent wall behind us. It was quite different now from the land teeming with greenery that I’d seen from the battlements of Cuckoo, and it certainly didn’t look anything like a golden kingdom of autumn any longer. Just an ordinary forest, even if it was a big one. November had devoured all its colors. No wonder the elves and the orcs called it the gray month.
We had a very real chance of running into Firstborn now. In the two hours since we left Zagraba, everything had been quiet and peaceful. There was no indication that an army of many thousands had passed this way—there weren’t any tracks on the ground apart from our own. Egrassa was leading the group along the river, and by his reckoning we should soon reach Moitsig, which stood on the left bank of the Iselina. We couldn’t avoid the city, because we needed horses (I could just imagine how the prices must have soared once the war started) and news of what was happening on the borders of the kingdom.
This war had come at a bad time. Even if we stood firm and the Firstborn didn’t drive us back to the Cold Sea, the losses would be too great, and the army might not recover from the blow in time for spring. Our only hope was Artsivus and the Order. Maybe they would be able to do something with the artifact and then the Nameless
