Abioye saw me looking at the pendant, which was now dormant. He nodded. “Yes. And thank the Stars I have it!” he said hotly.
Abioye knew how much I hated the mechanical dragons. And he was the one to first tell me how dangerous they were in his sister’s hands—that she would never stop until she had retaken the throne of Torvald for herself and crushed anyone that dared stand in her way.
“I know just what you are going to say, Nari—and yes, I think we do need the mechanical dragon. At least until we have the Stone Crown—the Red Hounds are still out there!”
“But Ymmen has bought us a day or two—” I tried to point out. I had already told the lordling about Ymmen’s attack on the Red Hound caves. It would take them time to regroup and gather their courage to dare to attack again, now that they knew that there was a mighty black dragon on the loose.
“They’ll come back,” Abioye said, and of course—I knew that he was right.
So, although I was pleased to see the rest of the Daza on the other side of the wagon wheel and tent walls of their little fort—I couldn’t quite let their joy fill me. We had lost so many already, and we still had so far to go. I tried to content myself with handing out the bundles of dried and fresh herbs that Tamin had picked, and the Coffa root in particular was very well received.
“Here,” said one of the Daza women, offering me something in payment for the Coffa root. This was Tiana, a usually stern-faced, reserved sort of woman who was a handful of years older than me. Like me, she also wore the brand marks that Inyene had inflicted on those of us Daza who had the audacity to try and escape. She only had one branded mark though, while I had four. In her hand was a woven grass and stone bracelet, the simple sort that all Daza make as children. It made me cough just to see it—that Tiana had gone to the effort to make it during our expedition, even though she was still a slave. “No, you keep it,” I said. After all, the Coffa root and the healing herbs weren’t really my gifts. They were Tamin’s. But the woman looked hurt, so I quickly folded my hand over Tiana’s own, enclosing her bracelet-gift inside her own palm, “Make me one when we are free,” I said confidently, just as a shout interrupted us.
“Get those walls taken down!” Whatever Tiana might have said in reply was interrupted by Homsgud and the other guards returning. What followed was a frantic few hours of packing away everything that we could and doing our best to fix what remained of the wagons. Since I had been gone, the guards or the Daza had apparently managed to find some of the escaped ponies—who had probably wandered back of their own accord, I thought—as ponies are not fools, and know who will feed them!
In the end, we managed to make up three wagons out of the parts of five old ones and had the horses to pull them. We packed the tents and the very scant bags of grain and supplies hauled from the sands, and there was still a lot of room for whichever of the guards wanted to feign illness or injury.
Ugh, I thought irritably, as it was left to the Daza to walk alongside the wagons—even the injured Daza!
But it felt good to be moving again, I thought. To feel the Sousa winds on my face, and to feel the Plains through the soles of my feet. We walked into the hot afternoon, stopping only to rest the ponies and take water from the streams that we crossed.
And by the time the sun was setting in the distant west, I could see a heavy haze like a blanket appearing before us, with the melting curve of a low causeway disappearing into the fogs.
We had reached the Sea of Mists.
Chapter 12
The Sea of Mists
“We cross,” Abioye said, and his voice was as hard as steel.
Our caravan of wagons and tired Daza sat on the last rise of stable Plains ground, looking across into a sea of pink and red mists. The setting sun was no more than a brighter patch of flame in the murk. The mists are thick tonight, I thought, with a shiver of apprehension—one which I knew was shared by the other tribal folk.
“There’s blood in the air,” I murmured, quoting a piece of tribal lore that I had just remembered about this place.
“What?” Abioye looked at me with a sharp glance.
“It’s what the Souda say when the Sea is like this.” I nodded to the crimsons and pinks. “It’s taken as an ill omen, and a sign that the Sea shouldn’t be entered.” Although I knew it to just be a saying, I also knew that there was wisdom behind it. If the mists were dense now in the early evening, then they would only be worse through the night—when we would barely be able to see the land before our feet.
“Hmph.” Abioye shrugged, his glance returning to the thick mask of fogs ahead of us. “You know that the Red Hound will be coming for us, and we’ve only been traveling a day. They have horses—”
Possibly our horses, I could have pointed out, but decided this probably wasn’t the time to add to the woes of our expedition.
“—and that means that we need to put more ground between us and them,” Abioye said.
“Ymmen can harry them,” I muttered under my breath to the lordling. “We can rest for the night, surely… The Sea might be clearer in the morning—” We had walked a little way ahead of the others, to the edge of the rise where the Plains grasses stopped, and where the ground swept downwards and was replaced by thicker reeds and the hummocks of marsh grass. The land would be wet down there, wet and precarious for anyone on foot.
“Or it might not,” Abioye returned. He sounded frustrated with the situation—which was something that I could understand, at least, but not the enmity that he appeared to be throwing at me. What had I done wrong?
“I’ve made up my mind, Narissea. We cross. Tonight.”
“Abi—” I started, before the heavy tread of one of the guards approached from behind us, and I immediately bowed my head.
“Sir?” the guard said gruffly, and I realized that he was holding a bundle in his hand, wrapped up in his cloak. And it moved. I watched as the guard gingerly unwrapped his cloak to reveal the worried form of a gray pigeon, its head twitching back and forth. “A message, from the Keep.” It was then that I saw that one of the bird’s legs was fitted with a heavy-looking metal tube like a splint, which it held awkwardly. I thought it must make it awkward for the bird to fly—not that Inyene would care, would she? My mood lowered.
Abioye didn’t say anything, but I saw the tremor run through his body as if he had been stuck by a pin. He made no movement to take the bird or the message; instead he just snapped at the guard. “Well? What does it say?”
“Oh—uh, I didn’t want to take the privilege of reading it, sir…” the guard said awkwardly, and when it was clear that Abioye wasn’t going to even touch the bird or the message from his sister, the guard carefully manhandled the bird (earning worried hoots from the poor thing) to unstop the metal tube and tease out a scrap of parchment. He tried to unfurl the paper in one gloved hand, and was clearly having difficulties—
“Oh, give it here!” Abioye said irritably, snatching the paper out of the man’s hand.
Why is he being like this? I thought in alarm. Something had changed in Abioye since that morning after the sandstorm, since he had gone out looking for vengeance on the back of the mechanical dragon. I glanced at the distant shadow of the metal form of the beast that stood still and watching over the caravans—like a curse.