The Journey Home: The Ingenairii Series: Beyond the Twenty Cities (5 page)

“But you could have asked me first, or told me directly, instead of having a servant do it for you,” Andi protested.

“Perhaps so, but it’s over with now, and we need to go see this group of Rangers we’ll be riding with,” he dismissed her concerns.

The four of them left at mid-morning, after a long, tearf
ul departure with Lord Shaln,
Lady Rooney, and Casse, full of promises to be safe.  When they got to the palace they waited, for no apparent reason, with the rest of the entire assigned squad, a time when Alec’s hopes for the group
began to si
nk downward.  The members of the squad were all sons of nobility, accomplished in riding and hunting and fencing, but not a one of them had served in any guard or military service.  They were content to wait until after the Prince finished his lunch and came to make a speech for their departure, and then they were off.

Their pace was slow, and Alec was disgusted to see that they brought no extra horses to carry supplies or provide replacements or rests f
or the mounts they rode
.

They ended the first day just after sundown in an inn in a small town, and Alec forcefully bullied the leader of the group, Iar, into explaining the route they were taking, and why.

“The kidnappers are known to have gone north to Villadest and Stanless, then they were said to have doubled back to Otterby,
” Iar explained slowly, as if he
was stating the obvious. 
“
They’re going to have to pass through Birnam Forest on their way to Mor
iado
c, which is supposed to be the last of the Twenty Cities they’ll visit before they disappear into the wilderness lands,” he explained.

“So we’ll head straight to Birnam and cut them off there.  We’ll have the advantage in the forest, since we have an affinity with plants,” he said, which Alec agreed sounded like it could have some logic.

“Can we travel any faster?” Alec urged.  “If we’re planning on an ambush, we need to make sure we get there first and we get there in time to be prepared.”

“We’ll wear out our horses if we travel too fast,” Iar again seemed to state the obvious, as his companions Cal and Lib nodded agreement.

“Which is why we should have brought replacement horses with us in the first place,” Alec smacked his fist down on the table in frustration.

“This interview is finished,” Iar said, folding up his map, not ready to tolerate subversion from an uninvited member of the party.  Alec stewed over the foolishness of the group, and chose to sleep with the horses, in the hayloft above the stables.  He wouldn’t allow Andi to join him there, his frustration and exhaustion and lingering confusion over his lost memories driving him into isolation, and so she sat at the table in the inn as the center of attention of all the other members of the Rangers until she left for her room.

Alec isolated himself for the next two nights as well, as the Rangers made adequate, but just barely adequate, progress on the western road towards Birnam Forest.  The wood had a reputation of being haunted, something that the gardening Old Ones of Exbury alternately laughed at and speculated might work in their favor, given their plant powers.

On the fourth night of the trip the group swerved off the main road to take a shortcut around the city of Bracken, and wound up staying in a smaller, cruder village tavern than they had stopped in to that point.  Alec again left the group immediately after d
inner to tend to the horses, treat
ing their coats, sores and hooves, while Andi drew appreciation from the local ruffians in the tavern to the point that she fought one down to the ground using her Black Crag training alone.  Her standing among the rest of the Rangers rose even higher, and the next morning, it was the only thing that Alec heard tal
k about, having missed the dust-
up entirely.

“She beat the lights out of that goatherder!” Tarry told Alec as Alec brought the saddled horses out of the stables to help expedite the departure of the group.

The little interaction that Alec had engaged in with anyone to that point was Warrior training with Andi while they rode.  “I think she’ll be the one training you!” Cal had jibed Alec as he mounted the horse Alec had ready
following Andi’s skirmish
.  The training made no sense to anyone but the two ingenairii; the Rangers could not fathom that soft talk and mental exercises were training of any value.

“So you put a man in his place?” Alec asked innocuously as they took their location in the rear of the squad.

“It’s not the first time, and won’t be th
e last time,” Andi responded.  Throughout the trip s
he’d had no interaction with Alec of any real depth beyond the ingenaire training
, as he withdrew and walled himself off from the rest of the world
.  She could sense his feelings, and she knew that he was feeling frustration, impatience, and worry.  He was feeling everything but affection for her, she knew, and she strained to keep from bringing it out into the open, in a situation in which she could only hope that time would make him appreciate her, or restore his memories of her.  She could not shake him out of her mind,
depressing as she found his spirit to be,
and so she could only hope for a change in him.  And as the days went by, and they grew further removed from the day of his reawakening, her hopes for some miraculous, delayed restoration of his memories faded.

She developed a pattern of spending her mornings with Alec, training in how to manipulate and maximize the Warrior power, and then in the afternoons she rode next to Amane, speaking with him, appreciating the comfort and attention he offered.  In the evenings, although she was attended to by every other Ranger, it was Amane who she chose to sit next to at dinner, and it was Amane who comforted her and bolstered her as she grew morose over the disappearance of Alec’s affections.

“We won’t be a couple Andi,” Alec finally told her directly as they rode together.  “I will help you with your energies, I will be your comrade in arms and your friend, but my heart does not call me to love you.”

“But that is all my heart does to me!” she cried so loudly that the heads of others in the group turned to look at them, and saw the tears streaming down her cheek.  “My spirit does nothing but tell my heart about your moves and your feelings
,
and it remembers your memories and reminds me of what we used to share, Alec.”

He looked at her with sympathy.  “We used to, I understand and accept that, Andi.  But whatever person you knew me to be, a little bit of that person is gone, the part that would make me care for you.  We have to accept this and live together as companions on the road – nothing more,” he finally told her bluntly, then rode apart from her as she rode to see Amane and be comforted.

Two days later, they reached the last village before entering Birnam Forest.  They reached the village in late afternoon and stopped for the night.  “I’m going to go take a look at the for
est,” Alec
told Iar as the others left their horses at the stable.  “I want to see what it’s like; I’ll be back later this evening.”

Iar felt no loss in seeing the moody foreigner ride away, and promptly went into the tavern to join his friends in a drink.

Alec rode along the road to the forest, a narrow route that seemed to see little traffic, and he tried to make sense out of how he could have gotten into such a dismal set of circumstances.  He had a saddlebag full of supplies, a sword and a bandolier, along with a bow and arrow, and he was tempted to leave the rest of the Rangers behind to set up his own ambush in the forest.  He reached the outskirts of
the woods as its growing shadows stretched
to extend eastward into the middle of the next field over.  The trees were vast, and the depth and size of the growth he could see persuaded him that he would be better off waiting for the group to enter in the morning.  That and an uneasy sense of something that was familiar but disturbing; there was something about the forest that was, he could only come up with one word to describe it, haunted.

He turned and followed the road away from the forest, until total darkness descended, and he exercised his Light abilities to show him the road back to the tavern.

The next morning, as the group
of Rangers left their lodgings
the
y
laughed among themselves over the rumors in the village – the night before a light was alleged to have entered the village, a light that had to be a ghost wandering down the road from the forest.  Alec smiled, more at the ignorance of the Rangers than the superstitions of the villagers, and stayed silent as he sat on his horse and waited for the others to saddle up.

“How large is this forest?” Alec asked Tarry as they horses finally started to leave the village.

“We only know hearsay,” Tarry replied.  “None of us leave Exbury very often, and not to go very far.  We are Old Ones, and our talents are needed at home, so we’ve never been here.  But we are told that nearly a full day is needed to go
all the way
through
it
.”

“What is the haunting like?” Alec asked.

“They say there is an ancient curse; that if you stay on the road you will not be harmed, but if you leave the road, the witches will get you,” Tarry answered, and he smiled at Alec.  “Have you ever fought a witch?”

Alec shook his head.

“This is getting close to the boundary of the Twenty Cities, so I suppose anything could possibly have crossed into our lands, but there’s no other place where witches are rumored to exist,” Tarry explained.  “I think it’s just a dark, lonely woods where people get spooked and imagine the worst.”

They entered the forest soon thereafter, sticking to the road they were on, one that would intercept the main north-south road from Otterby to Moriadoc, the road the ingenairii were reputed to be on.

“If we cut straight west, we can reach the southern end of the road in the forest, and wait there for the kidnappers,” Cal urged Iar.

Alec looked at the thick forest, and thought about the troubles that could come from trying to ride through the
pathless wilderness, but kept his
tongue still, knowing that he had little influence on the group.

“Lib, take the front,” Ian said.  “I hate to admit that you’re the strongest, but you are.  Let the trees in front of us know we’re coming through, and ask them to clear the way.  When you get tired, let me know and we’ll send someone else up to give you a rest.”

They went to the left, their horses leaving the firm surface of the road to step into the soft loam soil of the forest floor.  Alec watched with interest from his spot at the rear of the group as there seemed to always be an obvious and open path in front of them, while he noticed as he turned that there was no evidence of a clear line behind them
after they had passed through
.  Exbury’s Old Ones seemed to have an effective means of working with the plants of the forest, he conceded, and he relaxed slightly.  They rode without problem throughout the morning, until they reached a wide brook, where they decided to pause for a midday meal break.

Everyone was off their horse, and scattered in many directions, when there was a loud crashing sound in the distance, and then a chorus of screams.

“It must be the kidnappers!  Come on!  This is our mission!” Iar called faintly, and charged into and through the stream, his sword drawn as he led five other Rangers into the forest.

“No wait!  The screams came from over here!” Cal said fervently, and he and two others ran in the opposite direction, back towards the area the Rangers had traveled through already.

Alec stood with his sword drawn, uncertain which direction the voices had called from.  Three of the Rangers, plus Amane and Andi, and Alec, remained close to where the horses were tethered.  Alec had his Warrior powers fully engaged, trying to find any clue to understand what could be happening.  He looked at Andi, and jogged over to where she and Amane stood with swords drawn.  “What do you sense?” he asked her.

She shrugged.  “I cannot tell.  There are no clear sounds or clues,” she said, as her head swiveled around.

Alec felt an impulse to call upon his Spirit energies.  He dropped the Warrior ability, causing Andi to look at him sharply as she felt the change in his spirit, then he grasped his Spirit powers, and closed his eyes to focus on the perceptions that flowed into him.

There was malevolence, a strong pocket nearby, and it
seemed to extend
tentacles of evil in multiple directions.  There was a familiarity to the energies that powered the malevolence, and he sifted through his memories and understandings, trying to pinpoint what he felt.  It was closely akin to necromancy, he realized with a twang of sorrow and fear, as he thought about the black depths he had dabbled in during his long fall into depressed isolation, many decades prior.  There was something in the forest that was in communion with spirits of the dead.

“What is it Alec?” Andi asked, feeling a shadow of the anxiety that blossomed in Alec.

He opened his eyes, and looked to the north.  “It is something I don’t completely understand, but there is a power that is using the energy of the dead to do something.  Whatever it is, it’s not over there or over there,” he pointed in the directions the two groups had run in.  “It’s out there,” he pointed north, addressing Andi and Amane.