“And in reality, you are sending him to—what?” I looked up. Circles, I thought. Ymmen said that we people run around in circles for no good reason.
Abioye licked his lips nervously. “I’ve managed to make contact with various people around the court of King Torvald the Seventh. They know the predicament, and the stakes. I haven’t been obvious, but my missives will be understood by the right people as signs of what my sister is up to…”
I sighed. There was no guarantee that we’d even find this Stone Crown that Inyene was so desperate for. I hope we don’t, I thought grimly. “Well, you’d better send a guard with Aberforth and your shirts and your letters, my lord.” I said the last two words delicately, as there was still a tense air between us about our different stations. I had saved his life, and I had held his bleeding chest together as Montfre healed him—but the rest of the time, in front of the other guards and the rest of the slaves and workers, Abioye had to act every bit of brother to the new ‘Queen’ Inyene. It was weird, and it put me on edge around him sometimes.
“The Plains are a dangerous place in the daytime as well as at night, and if we want your letters to reach the right eyes, then you’ll have to make sure that Aberforth survives the journey,” I said seriously. “You could send Homsgud,” I added with a wicked grin, even though I had meant it as a joke. “Although, you’d better not. Who knows what that meat-brain would think to do out in the Plains without someone to keep him in line.”
“Ha, yes, I’m afraid you’re right.” Abioye rolled his eyes and groaned. “Unfortunately, there are only a very few of the guards and staff here that I know and trust personally… Inyene was adamant that we travel with her handpicked guard.”
“Wonderful. But at least it’s not—” I started to say, before stopping myself.
Dagan Mar, I finished silently. Why couldn’t I say the man’s name? Was it because every time I was about to, I remembered the sickeningly soft thud as the Lady Artifex’s dagger had found his heart? Was it because I remembered the smell of his sweat in my nose and the terror that radiated through me—and the last, hateful little look in his eyes before I had seen the life fade from them?
“Narissea,” Abioye said softly, regarding me with a serious frown. He had killed that night, too. Two of Inyene’s guards who were willing to help Dagan Mar’s attempt to kill Abioye—and me. How does he know that Dagan’s poison hasn’t spread to others of the guards that he’s trusting with his life? I thought.
“It’s fine,” I said, a little harsher than even I had intended. “It’s a new day. The sun is up, and we have a long march ahead of us.” I nodded to the last table, where the map that I had found in Lady Artifex’s shrine was splayed, with candles and flagons and a gold cygnet ring weighting down its ancient vellum.
The map clearly depicted the Plains—there was what my people called the Sunset Mountains—or what the Three Kingdomers called their World’s Edge mountains—running down the western edge of the map and before which stood before a vast expanse of territory—my home, the Plains, I thought. There were stylized clumps of trees, ridges and gorges here and there, as well as the fingers of rivers running across the savannahs.
I looked at the map and realized that I had never seen the vast realm of land like this before. I frowned and bit my lip in concentration.
“I think we’re here.” Abioye tapped at the near western edge, just a few finger breadths’ out from the mountains. “And over here…” he murmured as he swept his to just past the center of the map where there was the thinly red-inked word ‘Vault’ with what looked to be a smudged circle above it. “That has to be where the Lady Artifex buried the Stone Crown, right?”
“I guess…” I was unconvinced. There were many strange places in the Plains—places where we were told to stay away from, especially at night. Standing stones and ancient ruins of the folk who lived in these lands before us, some of which had tunnels that shot down into the earth like perfectly constructed wells. We Daza had many stories of reckless travelers and entire hunting parties who had disappeared when they went near those eerie places—never to be seen or heard from again.
The problem was, that we Daza knew our landscape through its stories. On one side of my village began the Sea of Mists—an area of land that was low even by Plains standards, and where the dense fogs and damp airs clung to the ground to form sometimes an unsettling haze, or sometimes an impenetrable barrier. That was the breath of the first dragon, or so my stories told me, which still lay on the ground. And when that first dragon turned, her first footstep was so heavy that it caused the ground to shake, and for rocks to spill from the nearest mountains, which told me that there was a ‘path’ of sorts—a causeway— of rockier land that ran through the center of the Sea of Mists, fording the river at its heart.
These were the ways that I understood my landscape—how could I make sense of this bunch of scribbled pictures, with no stories telling me how each place connected to the next?
But then there were elements on the map that seemed a little familiar. That straight line running through the wavy ones—could that be a path, a track—the causeway through the Sea of Mists? And then there was another squiggle, not very far from where Ahioye had indicated where we were was a drawing of a standing sentinel rock, one with what appeared to have a hooked beak, and beside it the words ‘The Crow’.
“That could be the Broken Thumb,” I murmured. There was a standing, wind-carved rock not too far from the edge of the Plains which my people believed was the last digit of a dismembered giant, with his thumb forever jutting out at an angle that looked surprisingly similar to the angle of this Crow’s ‘beak’.
That would make sense… I squinted at the map, looking not at the names, nor the distances, but instead at what the images reminded me of… Yes, that straight line that moved between the banks of sinuous blue ribbons — the blue ribbons would be rivers, right? And that straight line had to be the causeway, wouldn’t it…?
“My little sister!” Ymmen’s voice flooded through me, making me gasp and step forward.
“Narissea?” Abioye reached out a hand to steady my shoulder.
“It’s Ymmen,” I said. The dragon’s worry was palpable. What’s wrong? I threw the thought towards him.
“There is a storm coming. Fast from the north. It smells of rock and dirt—” I could feel through our bond the stretch and pull of the dragon’s muscles as he fought the rising winds. He must have flown farther ahead of us, scouting the area where we were to travel.
“And Montfre? Tamin—are they with you?” I meant the young mage whom I had helped escape from Inyene’s indenture, as well as my god-uncle, Tamin, who had been drafted as a slave of Inyene’s mines too—before we had both fled.
“They are at the Stand-of-Trees-with-rabbits,” he said, using his own dragon form of map-making; a picture of a copse of spindly Plains trees, standing on the top banks of an extensive, sandy rabbit warren. I recognized the trees as a place that the expedition had passed just yesterday.