“What have I done?” she asked, falling forward into darkness and Aldric’s waiting arms.
Part 4
Into the Kingdom of Lies
The years pass by like falling snowflakes. Individually, too many to count or discern in significance. Together, they form a blizzard; a white haze now blanketing the world outside this forest. Have I done the right thing? For the right reasons? I do not know, but as I age and my power wanes, the snow has become too deep to turn back on the journey I began so long ago.
I fear she is not ready. I fear I am not ready. I fear the world is less ready still.
When we lamented the departure of the wind, when we said it had abandoned us, we were but children stumbling blindly with hands raised to the sky, crying out in confusion and unable to see the truth. I have had many years beyond what was owed to me, many years to consider this question. Why did the wind leave?
It is she who has taught me the answer, taught me so much without knowing it. How ignorant we were, how deeply trapped within our hubris! We thought ourselves gods and became monsters of our own making.
The wind never stopped speaking to us. We stopped listening to it. It did not abandon us. We abandoned it, and this mistake could cost us everything.
Please, let her be ready.
-Ishkar Ankari,
a fool.
35
The Gates of Ka’veshi
“Steady now,” Serenthel said under his breath to Forfolyn, though also to himself as they neared the giant iron gates of Ka’veshi.
Forfolyn snorted and tugged at his reins, his big head bobbing next to Serenthel as they stood in the long line of people, carts, oxen and horses waiting to pass through the gates. Forfolyn’s large size and widely splayed antlers stood out as much as Serenthel’s forest green cloak, with its skillfully embroidered depiction of the Mother’s tree done in a silver thread that caught the early morning sun. Serenthel saw no point in keeping the cloak’s hood raised. If his attire and elk companion didn’t declare him as Elvan, then his pointed ears and long hair would do little to help the blind discern his origins. The open stares from those standing in line near him were to be expected from the children of Retgar, so he kept his own gaze aimed at the gate ahead in the hopes none would think to start a conversation. The hour was early, he was tired from walking most of the night, and he had yet to eat breakfast. Conversation with the locals would be tedious, as the Orynthians seemed to enjoy long-winded speeches in which very little of consequence was said.
In truth, he hadn’t intended to be thrown into the masses of human civilization so early in his travels. But, as the saying went, all roads in Orynthis lead to Ka’veshi. The metaphor he’d heard from a cloth seller in Havesh’kavar turned out to also be geographically correct.
After leaving the ruins of Fen’Nadrel, he’d begun the search for a silversmith that might be able to aid him in opening the mithril box he’d been gifted by the spirit wolf. The delicate craft of silversmithing held the closest hope for assistance given the lack of those skilled in mithril. Havesh’kavar had been a small farming village north of the ruins, with only a blacksmith who seemed more skilled in shoeing horses and yoking oxen than with the finer arts of metalwork. What men considered skilled, Serenthel had quickly surmised, would be what the Elvan labeled as camacyn’cref, or the first steps apprentices must take on their long journey towards mastering a craft. If he wanted anyone even remotely skilled in silversmithing, the cloth trader had told him, he would need to seek them out in Ka’veshi. So, here he stood, in a long line of people and animals, all waiting for the gates to open.
“What is taking so long?” he muttered to Forfolyn. The sun had risen to sit well over his shoulder, the breakfast hour quickly melding into early lunch.
“The gate is usually open by now,” a woman behind Forfolyn replied in a thick countryside accent that took him a moment to decipher. She had a basket at her feet, its shoulder straps well-worn and its top filled to the brim with softened flax fibers ready to be spun. “It’s the Spears flexing their authority, keeping us Brokenback folk from our fields and the Merchant guilds from their trades. I should’ve been done and back home by now. I’ll have to work past sundown to make up for it.”
“You should’ve been here three days ago,” a man ahead of Serenthel said while standing at the back of an empty cart. “Took me well past lunch to get inside. By the time I’d finished collecting manure from the Black Hands, it was time for supper! Had to fertilize crops in the dark, just so the Spears can piss all over the gate to mark it as theirs.”
“With us Brokenbacks caught downwind,” the woman replied.
Serenthel looked from the man to the woman then back again, trying to make sense of their words. Brokenbacks? Black Hands? Were they even speaking Orynthian? Perhaps his language instructor had left some words out, or the languages beyond the wall had changed, as languages often do.
Wait, he thought. The woman had mentioned the Merchant guilds. What was it he had read about Ka’veshi? Something about guilds and lines in the dirt.
No, not dirt.
“The paradunes refuse to settle,” the man retorted. “Meanwhile we hard
