But to find him, if ever, she faced a chartless reckoning. Save for a few clues, she stared, at a whited map. The documents and a reference to New York City on a note from Professor Tolkien were about all she had to go on. In maps of old, such unfilled regions were wastes where monsters thrived.
No matter. Mel’s backhanded encouragement had spawned the idea of taking a trip. She could make it happen or just slink away and surrender.
She searched for the Borunda handbag, wondering if her one unrevoked credit card would finally just dissolve this time, like some prop from
She fished out the credit card and called to check the balance. There was two hundred left on the credit line — not enough. She remembered a clutter of papers on the roll-top desk. She rushed to it, rifling through slots filled with junk. She found a drawerful of aging bills, shocking in number and combustible in their yellowed brittleness. Finally, she found the envelope with the AMTRAK logo, just as she remembered. It was a voucher for travel to Anywhere, USA. She scanned the fine print until she got to the expiration date. She stared at it like it might change.
She swept it up with poetic flourish and sat down with her computer, Googling for AMTRAK.
She made the reservation and organized her bags. The valise, all the documents, the few clues to her grandfather, these would go with her. The rest was incidental. One backpack and a roller bag held all the overflow.
Standing there at that unexpected, six in the morning, deep-breath moment, she wondered what Ara would do. Would she have embarked on this sudden and uncertain journey? Cadence sat down and opened the valise and pulled out one of the scrolls. She unrolled it and looked at an expanse of sweeping, rune-like writings, as unintelligible as the fissured bark of trees — trees that might once have stood in the trackless depths of ancient Mirkwood itself. Scanning rapidly down the scroll, she came across annotations in antiquated English written in a tremulous hand. Etched on the thin leather, next to the runic language, was the now familiar riddle:
Another turn and a couple of loose pages un-spiraled from their hiding place in the scroll. They were well presented, carefully penned, and readable. She sat down and began to read out loud: “It was, Oruntuft said, a time of great—”
“Haste!” cried the Bearer. The hoof beats of warhorses, powerful and relentless, were already upon the road as it turned from the village gatehouse.
A ragged, chill dawn greeted them. They stood in the lane before the inn, confused, swords drawn, a pale light, like red forge-flames, suffusing their razor-sharp blades.
The Woodsman knelt down and examined the hoof prints. “Steel shorn, with a great point in the front. Only the steeds of the Wraiths,” he spat, took a breath forced upon him by fear, and continued, “have … have their hooves armed such, and bear these runes and tri-faceted nailheads.”
The halflings looked down at the print, saw in its relief the cruel pattern.
One of them turned and gazed dazedly at the east. Another bent over, looking at more hoof prints. The Bearer stood still, closed his eyes, and smelled the terrible reality of this new day. He could feel the raw edge of his life sundered forever from his past. His faithful friend hovered near, looking about with sword in hand, fearful and vicious at the same time. How dare they!
If any others watched — and there were some, both evil and fair — the halflings, with the Woodsman kneeling nearby, were painted in stark tableau. The light of this morning was harsh and unforgiving, casting their faces and clothes in orange and purple. They were wrought in brilliant hues upon a break-of-dawn canvas of deep, textured grey. In the background, the ruined East Gatehouse, now a pyre of fire and smoke, lent a mocking counterpoint.
“Where is she?” he asked to the air about him.
As always, the other halflings hesitated.
“Are there others of your company?” interrupted the Woodsman. “Speak now! We must stay together or perish by the swords of these enemies one at a time. Have you no loyalty?”
The Bearer looked to the gate. “She insisted on staying there.” he said, pointing. The gatehouse was ablaze now, the barriers broken and cast down. A plume of smoke, pink and grey, rose into the lightening sky. The air smelled of smoke.
At that moment, the innkeeper came running up, all sweat and terror, and began to ramble between gasps for breath. “They … took her … grabbed her … up … like a doll”
The Bearer grew still, and then sank to his knees. He pulled his small sword where he fell, and double- handed, stuck it deep into the earth.
The harsh judgment of the wizard—“Do not take this woman!”—echoed in his ears. Why had he not paid heed? He listened again to the now hollow wisdom that had guided him — that Ara, alone among the halflings, knew from experience the woods and Outlands. That she alone possessed the conviction and resources to guide them through the world they were about to venture into. A world beset by war and the conflicts of wizards, men, elves, dwarves, orcs, perhaps even the six-armed brudarks.
Whatever he might say to please the wizard or his dear cousin, how could he, a normal, perpetually hungry halfling, deal with such demands? And so he had chosen Ara to accompany them, to be his confidante and resource. He had even shown her …
He looked up. The dawn’s chill raced and swirled about them. They had left their homeland, and everything it had meant, forever. This new day contained creatures of terrible power, creatures whose greatest passion (or, at least, greatest command) was to kill them.
An eddy of dust filled his nostrils. Bitter. It was a taste little known to halflings. The Bearer, for perhaps the first time in his young life, tasted the bile of despair, borne out of the certainty of a long journey ahead that had now gone very bad from the beginning.
The Woodsman rose up. The same morning chill brought the approach of autumn to his nostrils. Despair he also knew but seldom acknowledged. So ingrained was it in his being after those many years that he bore it like a battle scar from the long past.
The ruby red and deep gold leaves of fall in the northlands swept about them, chattering down the lane in a current indifferent to the cares of mortals.
Going on to nowhere.
At dawn, Cadence paused one last time in the Forest, standing in the small screened-in porch that had served as her grandfather’s bedroom. Everything was in order. Slanted light played through the creek side oak trees at the back of the building, splaying in odd patterns on the bed like a waving sea fan, highlighting squares of cloth cut from gentlemen’s suits, pajamas, blue jeans, all stitched together in a frayed depression-era quilt. An heirloom, perhaps? A forgotten pattern to forgotten family ties?
On the chest of drawers, next to an old leather jewelry box bearing someone else’s initials, stood the only thing in the room that didn’t look second-hand. It was a faded picture in a wooden frame, probably from J.C. Penny’s or Sears or some other department store photo emporium. As always, Cadence picked it up and studied the subjects. Posed against a stock blue-neutral backdrop, they stared out at her with startling familiarity. It was hard to believe, but there it was, frozen in an incongruous moment as rare as an alignment of stars: her mom Helen, her dad Arnie, and a baby with a pacifier.
In the distance, another world away, she heard a dog barking and a car horn honking out on the road.
