She turned to a page from the valise, all spidery scrawls. She got the feel of it and read:
My Dearest Amon,
The harvest moon begins to fill and we have not seen each other. Remember the glade?
Your wizard came today, and he sat me down with my father and my mother. He said you will be going— leaving! And that I must simply wait for your return. I remained quiet, though he looked very directly at me. I did not tell him of our plans, or of my knowledge of your precious, the gift from your cuz.
I will see you by the waxing moonlight at the Catpaw Bridge. I will not fail you, and we shall be together.
My love, Ara
P.S. My father draws forth a group of the most stalwart of our village. “Trouble in the south,” he says.
So, Cadence thought as she shook the page in delight, Ara had a lover!
For the next few hours the mystery of Ara kept unspooling. The tale slowly assembled itself from the brittle scrolls and battered pages. One historical account revealed a chilling secret:
Horse and Rider
The father of Aragranessa, Achen, was keen to instill in his daughter the wisdom and lore of the wild places. “Wild”, of course, being a term reserved for the relatively close and relatively safe woodlands surrounding their home village of Frighten.
True, in those woods known locally as Portic-wud, the Sanctuary Wood, vagabond creatures might wander down from the North, and travelers on errands untold were known to camp. Even elves were whispered to pass beneath their boughs. Yet her skills were competent to detect and avoid trouble.
Ara’s vision was renowned as particularly keen. Her father’s early test of this was to direct her gaze to a special point in the vast starsprent vault of the night sky. “Look for the Horse,” he said, “for its yellow color like the steeds of legend.” As she saw the yellow point of light and described the arrangement of other nearby stars, he said, “and what, if anything, does the Horse bear?” She stared hard at the twinkling sky. “A Rider,” she said, “it bears on its back a most faint and tiny star!”
Thus Ara passed the most acute test of eyesight known to halflings.
One last question she had for her father that night, and she made him proud in the asking. “Will my sight give me the vision to see truth and honor as keenly as you?”
To this tale must be added another. The very year in which she spied the Rider, she came late to an edge of the Sanctuary Wood. The most subtle of movements caught her eye. With worthy stealth she approached, and saw what at first appeared to be a gathering of animals. Creatures roughly her own size, upright standing, but with faces akin to badgers and ferrets and wolves. Even as she watched their faces shifted into a common pattern of dark, acute eyes over long noses. All held up by pointed ears. She knew she was seeing what few, perhaps no, halfling had ever seen — a gathering of elves. Perhaps even Dark Elves.
They seemed unaware of her presence. She crept even closer and heard the indecipherable music of their native speech, punctuated by high, sharp whistles. Their conversation grew more intense, as if arguments were brewing. She thought she heard one of them say “an-ginn”, an old world, used by elder halflings to mean “source”.
Then she froze as all the elves grew quiet and turned their heads toward her at once. They regarded her as if she were sitting in the village square on a dunce high chair with a ridiculous dunce hat.
One spoke to her in her tongue:
“For your subtle woodcraft, a reward. You may tell of this secret, for none will believe your wild boast and every retelling will filch more of the good name of your house. For your uninvited presence, though your understood none of what you overheard, a price. All things have consequence. This is your tithe: every unselfish step you take hence, every worthy deed you undertake, shall each draw your fate closer and more certain. Your good acts will only dim the memory of your passing. Put all others before you, unsparingly risk your life, and your tale will all the more certainly be erased and forgotten for all time. Go now!”
Ara fled in fear and confusion and never told a living soul, save her Mum.
Cadence found herself leaning forward, clutching the last page. She took a breath and eased back. So, she thought, Ara and I each have a burden. Hers was a secret curse that doomed her for heroism. I’m lucky. I’m just chasing a question mark. No one’s out to de-res me …
“I don’t think,” she started to say out loud.
The connection of long journeys now seemed almost palpable. She reached over and got her grandfather’s journal and opened it, picking out a passage that seemed to be notes from another east-to-west-coast hopping of freight trains. It described pure old- time hobo-style traveclass="underline"
Grand Junction. June 14, 1980
Worked at a diner next to the rail yard. It was called, simply enough, “EAT.” The sign stuck up on the roof in flashing red neon. So I think now that “the Eat” or “Eat at the EAT” must be a national chain targeting the raunchy and low-down spots. A kind of niche. Anyway, this one had only six counter stools. No tables. One person running the grill, waiting tables, busing, doing dishes — the whole thing. Got my standard job. It always works. He paid me to clean up the garbage out back, cut up some boxes. Got five dollars and eggs, taters, toast and coffee.
It’s hot. Laid up in the cool of some big abandoned icehouses next to the rail yards. They’re basically big wooden boxes, five stories tall, made up of foot thick timbers. No windows. You could fit a basketball court inside each one of them.
The man at the EAT said these things used to hold ice for the fruit transport. This valley is world-famous for its peaches. It got that way cause of the icehouses. The railroads and the orchard people figured out that you could get big, fresh, ripe, sweet peaches to streets in New York or Philadelphia in three days if they were iced down.
So, before air-conditioned boxcars came along in the fifties, those icehouses, made of foot-thick wooden beams laid tight into big boxes fifty feet tall and a hundred feet on each side. No windows, one little door. They were the way they stored up ice supplies for the late summer harvest. That’s all over now. They’re just sitting there. There’s still plenty of ice in them at the bottom and the corners. 15–20 feet thick. Ice maybe 50 years old. Just outside the open door its 108 degrees, easy.
Anyway, I lay up all day watching them make train. They use a hump yard. That’s a little hill the tracks go up and over. The switch engine pushes cars up the incline, they unloose the coupling, and the car goes careening down the other side.
The rolling cars are switched to different tracks. You can hear them shunt over. Then they crash into the couplings of the cars waiting there. That’s makin’ train, and that’s my custom ride. All day, all night. Cu-Chang. Each noise echoed 10 or 20 times by the cars jamming together down the line. Kind of like music.
Course I got my own music. Right here in my teeth fillings. Only I can hear it. Although once I had little Arnie put his ear next to my open mouth and he could hear it too. Tonight its playing K-O-M-A Oklahoma City! 50,000 Watts Serving the Heartland! (“Playing tonight at the National Guard Armory in Elk City, Spider and the Crabs! And at the Fairgrounds Pavilion in Olathe, it’s Ray Ruff and the Checkmates!”) The other day it was K-E-E-L Shreveport dishing up southern fried top 40.