Tales of Ethshar

some other sort of magic, would be able to locate her!

An hour or so from home he stopped for a rest, sitting down on the thick carpet of pine needles between two big roots and leaning back against the trunk of the tree he had just marked.

He had worked up an appetite already, but he resisted the temptation to eat anything. He hadn’t brought that much food, and would need to conserve it.

Of course, he would get some of his food from the countryside, or at least that was what he had planned. Perhaps he could find something right here where he sat.

Glancing around he saw a small patch of mushrooms, and he leaned over for a closer look — he knew most of the local varieties, and some of them were quite tasty, even raw.

This variety he recognized immediately, and he shuddered and didn’t touch them. They might be tasty, but nobody had ever lived long enough to say after eating them. Illure had told him that this particular sort, with the thin white stem and the little cup at the bottom, held the most powerful poison known to humanity.

He decided he wasn’t quite so hungry after all, and instead he took a drink from his water flask; surely, finding drinking water would be easy enough! If he kept on heading downhill, sooner or later he would find a stream.

Far more important than food or water, he thought, was deciding where to go. He had talked about going all the way to Ethshar, but that was hundreds of miles away; no one from the village had ever been to Ethshar. Surely he wouldn’t really need to go that far!

He looked about, considering.

His home, he knew, was in the region of Srigmor, which had once been claimed by the Baronies of Sardiron. The claim had been abandoned long ago; the North Mines weren’t worth the trouble of working, when the mines of Tazmor and Aldagmor were so much richer and more accessible, and Srigmor had nothing else that a baron would consider worth the trouble of surviving a winter there.

Sardiron was still there to the south, though.

To the west lay unnamed, uninhabited forests; he did not want to go there. True, beyond them lay the seacoast, and there might be people there, but it would be a long, hard, dangerous journey, and he knew nothing about what he might find there.

To the southwest the forests were said to end after about three days’ travel, opening out onto the plain of Aala. If Srigmor were part of any nation now, it was part of Aala.

He had never heard of any magicians living in Aala, though. He tended to associate magicians with cities and castles, not with farms and villages, and Aala had no cities or castles.

The Baronies of Sardiron it would be, then.

His grandfather had visited Sardiron once, had made the long trip to the Council City itself, Sardiron of the Waters. If his grandfather could do it, so could he.

He stood up, brushed off pine needles, and marched onward, now heading almost directly south.

6

Streams were harder to find than he had thought, and not all were as clean as he liked; after the first day he made it a point to fill his flask at every opportunity, and to drink enough at each clear stream to leave himself feeling uncomfortably bloated.

His food ran out at breakfast the third day, and he discovered edible mushrooms weren’t as common as he had expected — though the poisonous ones seemed plentiful enough — and that rabbits and squirrels and chipmunks were harder to catch than he had realized. Skinning and cooking them was also far more work than he had expected it to be; the hunters and cooks at home had made it look so easy!

He almost broke his belt knife when it slipped while he was holding a dead squirrel on a large rock as he tried to gut it; he felt the shock in his wrist as the blade slipped and then snagged hard on a seam in the rock, and he held his breath, afraid that he had snapped off the tip.

He hadn’t, but from then on he was more careful. The knife was an absolutely essential item now. He wished he had had the sense to borrow another, so as to have a spare.

He had made good time the first two days, but after that much of his effort went to hunting, cooking, eating, and finding someplace safe to sleep. He dropped from seven or eight leagues a day to about four.

He had expected to find villages, where he could ask for food and shelter. He didn’t. He knew that there were villages within three or four leagues of his own, and assumed there were more scattered all through Srigmor, but somehow he never managed to come across any. He saw distant smoke several times, but never managed to find its source.

By the third night he was very tired indeed of sleeping on dead leaves or pine needles, wrapped in his one thin blanket. Even in the mild weather of late spring, the nights could be chilly — so chilly that only utter exhaustion let him sleep.

Late on the afternoon of the fourth day, though, his luck finally changed. He saw a break in the forest cover ahead and turned toward it, since such openings were often made by fallen trees that rotted out and became home to various edible creatures.

This opening, however, was not made by just one fallen tree. Rather, an entire line had been cleared away, and the surface below was completely free of debris. It was a long ribbon of hard- packed dirt edged by grass, with two shallow ruts running parallel for its entire length, and Wuller realized with a start that he was looking at a highway.

His spirits soared; checking his bearings from the sun, he set out southward on the road, certain that he would find other people to talk to within minutes. In his eager confidence, he did not worry about finding supper.

The minutes passed, and added up into hours, as the sun vanished below the trees to his right, while he encountered no one at all.

At last, long after dark, he gave up. He found himself a clear spot by the roadside where he unpacked his blanket and curled up in it, still hungry.

Despite his hunger, he slept.

7

He was awakened by laughter. He sat up, startled and groggy, and looked about.

An ox-drawn wagon was passing him by. A man and a woman sat on its front bench, leaning against each other as the woman giggled.

“I like that, Okko!” she said. “Know any more?”

“Sure,” the man replied. “Ever hear the one about the witch, the wainwright, and the Tazmorite? It seems that the three of them were on a raft floating down the river when the raft started to sink...”

Wuller shook his head to get the bits of grass and leaves out of his hair, stood up, and called out, “Hai! Over here!”

The man stopped his story and turned to see who had called, but did not stop his pair of oxen. The woman bent quickly down behind the bench, as if looking for something.

“Wait a minute!” Wuller called.

The man snorted. “Not likely!” he said. The wagon trundled on, heading north.

With a quick glance at his unpacked belongings and another down the highway to the south, Wuller ran after the wagon, easily catching up to it.

The driver still refused to stop, and the woman had sat up again, holding a cocked crossbow across her lap.

“Look,” Wuller said as he walked alongside, “I’m lost and hungry and I need help. My village is being held hostage by a dragon, and I...”