“Did you have someone in particular in mind?” his father asked.
Relam thought for a moment, then a dangerous idea came to him. “Oreius.”
Narin’s eyes widened and the king drew back, looking at his son shrewdly.
“You would go to a sword master who has not taken a student in many years and ask him not only to teach you how to plan battles but also to travel with you and advise you on a mission to wipe out sixty or seventy bandits?”
Relam hesitated for a moment, then made up his mind. “Yes.”
His father nodded slowly. “All right,” he said, leaning forward again. “How soon will you leave?”
Chapter 15
Relam left immediately for Oreius’ house, after getting directions from Narin. The guard commander wanted to send palace guards with the prince, but Relam declined firmly. Based on his talks with Tar Agath, he did not think that Oreius would take kindly to a princeling showing up flanked by intimidating guardsmen, ready to intervene should the old warrior try anything.
The old warrior lived along the river, a little way past Tar’s training ground. As Relam set off into the city, wrapped in a hooded cloak to conceal his identity, he reveled in the freedom of not having guards with him. Then, he remembered the task that lay ahead and tried to refocus and prepare for the encounter.
By the time Relam reached Oreius’ house, a two-story structure of stone and freshly painted wood, he still had no idea what exactly he would say to the old warrior. No argument seemed safe enough, no plea seemed likely to keep him out of the Furnier River.
“I’ll just make it up as I go,” Relam muttered to himself as he stepped up to the oak front door. A large silver knocker framed a small peephole at eye level. The prince hesitated briefly, then grasped the knocker and slammed it against the door several times, listening to the sound echo in the house.
Relam stepped back smartly and waited, expecting the door to fly open and the old man to thrust his grizzled head forward and demand to know what he was doing. The prince wasn’t sure how to answer such a question, but he was ready to get this encounter over with.
The only problem, was that Oreius did not come to the door.
Relam knocked again, starting to feel rather foolish, wondering if Oreius was even home, or if the house was empty. Most of the windows were covered by drapes, but there was a gap between two curtains that allowed Relam to see part of a sitting room. The space was in nearly complete darkness though, and as far as Relam could tell the rest of the house was the same.
The prince put his hands on his hips and contemplated the closed door, thinking. If Oreius wasn’t here, no amount of knocking would summon him. But if he was here, where was he if not in the house?
Then, Relam remembered the garden that Tar had mentioned, the one which put the palace gardens to shame. The prince looked around and quickly identified a gravel path running around the side of the house and along the high stone wall that separated Oreius’ property from his neighbor’s. Relam took a deep breath, then stepped onto the path and strode quickly and confidently around the side of the house.
The structure was far deeper than he had expected, the sides stretching towards the river even longer than the front facade. Finally, Relam came to a wooden gate that blocked his passage and filled the space between the fence and the house completely. He tried the latch and was surprised when the gate swung inward, creaking slightly.
“He’s a trusting sort it would seem,” Relam muttered to himself. Then, he pushed through the gate, closing it behind him, and turned around.
Nothing about the ordinary construction of the house could have prepared Relam for the sight that met his eyes. The house was not as large as he had thought. Rather, it was U-shaped, the wings only a single story for most of their length and rather narrow, most likely a single room wide. The space between the arms was filled by a merrily splashing fountain and several low flowerboxes, set in a perfectly symmetrical pattern around the fountain. Precisely laid paving stones filled the gaps between flowerboxes and fountain, creating a series of smooth, unbroken paths.
There was nothing remotely symmetric about the flowerboxes themselves, save for their rectangular shape. Their contents were not organized in any which way. Instead, a dozen species of flowers grew side by side, their stems and blooms drooping over the sides of the boxes and tangling around each other in a surprisingly picturesque mess. Bees droned lazily from flower to flower, tending the blossoms.
Beyond the end of the wings the ground sloped gently downward to the river. There were no paving stones filling the space here. Instead, there was a single gravel path that originated at the center of the paved garden’s edge and ran straight as an arrow towards the river. About five meters along, it split in two and ran in a slightly squashed ring whose bottom edge came up against the stone edge of the river.
Massive shade trees grew on the outside of the ring, their branches swaying gently in the breeze. Between the rustling branches and splashing fountain, Relam quite felt like he had stepped into another world, leaving the busy capital city behind. Birds and squirrels darted among the branches, chattering at each other as they intruded on their neighbors’ space. The inside of the gravel ring was lined with more flower boxes, spaced at regular intervals, their unorganized mass of blooms spilling over the walls just like the
