“I don’t think we can discount the possibility.” Arissen Belloruus paused, seeing the look on his face. “So I am asking your sister to take personal responsibility for your safety. She will choose a handful of others to help her.” He looked at Simralin. “After Tragen, it will be difficult to know whom you can trust. You couldn’t even trust me until now. I realize that. I gave you every reason not to. But we have to start somewhere.”
“I’ll take care of him,” Simralin promised.
The King gave her a fleeting smile. “I know you will. You will take care of each other. Better than I was able to take care of Erisha.” He shook his head. “I still can’t quite make myself believe that she’s gone. I keep waiting for her to come home.” He rubbed at his face, hiding his eyes. Then he straightened abruptly, exhaling. “I have difficulty imagining what is happening. To leave the Cintra, after all these years. After decades. Centuries. To be threatened like this. To know what lies ahead. Or, more correctly perhaps, not to know, but to be able only to speculate.”
He trailed off. Then he took Ordanna Frae’s arm. “Come with me, First Minister. There are preparations to make.”
Kirisin and his sister watched them go. For a moment, neither spoke. Then Simralin took her brother’s arm. “Come on. Let’s go. Dawn is six hours away. We need to get some sleep.”
Together they stumbled lead–footed from the room.
ELEVEN
LOGAN TOM drove the Ventra 5000 southeast into the mountains for what remained of the day after leaving the Portland area, following the two–lane road upon which Trim had set him. There were opportunities to take other roads, but the owl kept to the one they had started out on. He flew ahead, frequently cutting cross–country over fields and through forests, leaving Logan to assume that he would be met again somewhere down the road, which he always was. His hesitation about following Trim, so pronounced when he had first discovered that the owl was to be his guide, had given way to a grudging reliance. He supposed he would have been uneasy about following anyone, owl or human; his natural instinct after all these years on his own was to trust no one. But there was no one with whom to argue the matter, and Trim seemed set upon their course, so Logan quickly accepted the inevitable and went where he was led.
When darkness began to set in, they were at the foot of the big mountain he had spied earlier while crossing into Oregon over the Columbia. His maps identified it as Mount Hood. It was a massive rock, and the road led right up one side and into mountains that stretched beyond it to the south, so Logan knew he was going to face some rough traveling before the night was over. Stopping for sleep didn’t seem to be in the owl’s plans; he kept flying ahead, taking Logan higher and deeper into the chain, past Mount Hood and into the tangle of peaks beyond. Progress was slow, the roads narrow and winding and frequently littered with debris of one sort or another. In some places, the pavement was so badly split by crevices or collapsed beneath sinkholes that Logan had to drive the Ventra off road to continue. But the Ventra was such a beast that it surmounted obstacles almost effortlessly, its big wheels, high chassis, and powerful engine giving it the ability to do everything but climb trees. And Logan wouldn’t have bet against that.
When it finally got too dark to go farther safely, Trim winged his way back to Logan and settled on the Ventra’s roof. Logan pulled over, climbed out, and checked to be certain of the owl’s intent. Trim regarded him from the roof with saucer eyes, and then took flight. Logan watched him fly off a short distance and roost in a nearby tree. When the bird showed no signs of doing anything more, Logan climbed back inside the Ventra, shut down the AV’s engine, locked the doors, set the security alarms, settled back in his seat, and drifted off to sleep.
He woke to the sound of the owl’s soft hoot and a scrabbling of its talons on the Ventra’s metal roof. Sunlight was pouring down out of a cloudless sky, the day bright and clear. From the position of the sun, he guessed it was nearing midday. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes, ate and drank a little something, turned the Ventra’s engine back on, and set out once more.
This day’s journey was rougher and more protracted. They left Mount Hood behind early and moved into high desert country where the landscape was bleak and empty and the road frequently disappeared beneath sand and scrub. Flat stretches were interspersed with hummocks and ravines, with dry washes and ridges so rocky that they looked like dragon spines. The country was volcanic, dotted with cinder cones and awash in cinder dust and lava rock. Cactus littered the terrain in vast clumps; everything else that grew was stunted and wintry and edged with thorns or razor–sharp bark. He drove the AV around and over and through it all, letting Trim show him the way, keeping clear of places where the sand and grit looked uncertain, as if covering sinkholes and crevasses that might drop him into a black pit.
Sometimes, he found himself navigating through ravines so deep that he could not see beyond the rims save for where the sky domed overhead. He had to trust to Trim in those situations, unable to determine with any accuracy even which direction he was going. Everything took a long time, and the hours rolled by without any noticeable progress. One section of the land looked pretty much like another. Off to the west, distant and remote, the chain of the mountains stretched parallel to his drive, their dark barren peaks cutting sharply against the sky, their rock a wall that locked away whatever lay beyond. There was an alien quality to those mountains that reminded him of his encounter with the spirits of the dead in the Rockies, and he found himself hoping that he would not have to go into them in order to find the Elves.
Elves. He thought about them the way he thought about the spirits of the dead–as insubstantial as smoke, as ephemeral as mist. He could not put faces to them, could not give them features, could not imagine their place in the world. Memory of the dead faded with time; of Elves, there were no memories at all. He might try to believe in them, but it would take an encounter with one to make them come alive.
He stopped and ate once during the day’s long drive, pulling off into a barren flat where the horizon stretched away into tomorrow. The emptiness was depressing, a warning of the world’s future. He tried not to think about that future, about what the Lady had told him, but he might as well have been trying not to think about eating and drinking. It was an unavoidable presence in his life, a reality that rode on his shoulders like a weight.
He switched his thinking over to Hawk and the Ghosts, wondering how they were managing without him, left to make their way east to where the boy would become leader of a tribe of children and caregivers, of strays and castoffs, and of creatures once human but no longer so. The boy and his children, Owl would say. He couldn’t quite picture this, either. But he knew it would happen because that was the task that the gypsy morph had been given to do.
And he would go with them.
To someplace new and different, to a fresh beginning.
He shook his head. He was twenty–eight years old, and he had lived almost his entire life traveling a single path, engaged in a single struggle. He could not imagine the sort of change that lay ahead. He could not imagine his place in it.
Sunset came and went, and still Trim led him on. Stars brightened the night sky, and because there was no competing light from anywhere on ground level he was able to keep track of the owl’s flight and find his way. The terrain had flattened out in the last hour or so, the road winding through low hills, closing on the mountains west. Within an hour of darkness pushing the last of the light below the horizon, he had left the highway and was driving along a singletrack road that was rutted and grown thick with weeds and scrub. He was in the mountain chain by now, the peaks dark pinnacles against the night sky. The Ventra worked its way steadily ahead, climbing and descending by equal turns, following the road he had set it upon, an old logging road, he guessed. Complete concentration was required in order to avoid the larger obstacles that might cause trouble even for the Ventra, so he was unaware of time passing as he drove.