“Oh, thou art truly the most noble of souls, Master Bayard and Master Galen!” Agion exclaimed. “This I cannot—indeed, would not—deny. But by similar token, Archala and my elders are—well, they are Archala and my elders. It is to them that I owe my allegiance, my promises.”
“Just what was your promise, Agion?”
The big centaur frowned at my question and scratched his head in a gesture that reminded me, disturbingly, of Alfric.
“As I recall, Master Galen, ’twas in these words exact. That I should ‘Never let either—the Knight or his squire—stray from your sight until you have returned them to the custody of the elders.’”
Perfect.
“So you promised simply not to let us from your sight until you returned us?” I called down at the centaur, who had wandered away from the platform to a nearby vallenwood, from which he was stripping leaves.
“Yes, Master Galen,” he called in reply, stuffing a handful of vallenwood leaves into his mouth.
“Then come with us.”
Agion swallowed. “Come with thee?”
“Come with us?” Bayard clanked to a stop upon the platform.
“Why not? You’ve heard of leaving the letter intact, haven’t you, Agion?”
“Yes,” he said hesitantly.
“For you see,” I continued, “if you come with us, Agion, you haven’t broken your promise. There may well come a time—no, there will come a time, without a doubt—when our innocence is clear, even to the most mistrustful of judges. But until that time, we have business. Which includes a tournament in eleven days’ time, at which,” I nodded masterfully at Bayard, “our presence is expected.”
It left Agion struggling for purchase. He folded his arms and, lost in meditation, pawed the wet ground of the clearing with his right foreleg. His was a dilemma I could only imagine, and my heart went out to him in his denseness and good intentions.
Agion bought my argument. He nodded his head vigorously, his dumb face breaking into a dumb grin. He kicked suddenly, startling several of the nearby goats.
“I see, Master Galen! If I do not return to the elders without thee, I have not broken my promise! So my best choice is to go with thee!”
Castle di Caela was still some way from us. We would travel south by southeast, cross the Vingaard mountains at a path Bayard remembered, then continue over the southwest shank of the Plains of Solamnia, fording the southernmost branch of the Vingaard River and stopping midway between the ford and Solanthus. It was a week’s journey as the crow flies.
Unfortunately, none of us were crows, and we would be hard pressed to make up for the time we had lost while mired among centaurs and satyrs and Scorpions. Ten days, Bayard figured it, and that was with good weather and no distractions.
Astride Valorous, dressed only in a cloak and a muddy tunic for the long road, Bayard led us free of the marshes. Riding uphill into clearer and drier ground, we reached what I thought was a little knoll, but turned out to be a leveling off of land, a rolling countryside stretching east eventlessly except for a patch of woods here and there and except for the road upon which we were riding, still muddy from yesterday’s bout with rain. It was a pretty landscape, but dull.
Looking back upon the swamplands we had just left, I preferred what lay ahead to the tangled and entangling mystery behind us. I had never seen the countryside before me—never been this far from home. Looking back I noticed that the swamp was changing, but not with the rapid growth that had been a source of wonder and irritation during our stay in its midst. For now the swamp was browning, graying at its edges. I knew it had something to do with the Scorpion’s disappearance, but I also felt as though our leaving was bringing autumn to the country.
Nor was the swamp all we were leaving. I thought of Brithelm standing on the platform, waving goodbye to us as we left the bare central clearing of the swamp. He had decided to stay in his hermitage—there among goats and mosquitoes—to settle in and think upon the grandeur of the gods.
I wished Brithelm no harm, though I was mightily glad to be rid of him. He was foolish and exasperating, but probably the pure best of a sorry bunch of Pathwardens, myself included. The problem was that the world couldn’t take a pure best. Both my brothers were better off swamped, and in the way fate had swamped them. Still, I recalled the farewells, as my visionary middle brother stood dangerously near the edge of the swampy platform, surrounded by goats, watching the three of us ride away.
“Don’t look at things directly, little brother, for insight dwells in the corner of the eye,” he shouted, a last piece of advice for the road.
“What does that mean, holy man?” Agion called back, but Brithelm had turned his back on us and entered that ruinous cabin.
At my last view of Brithelm, before he stepped through the ramshackle door into shadow, he had drawn something silver from his pocket and placed it to his lips.
Huma’s dog whistle.
From the surrounding greenery, goats converged on the shack.
I turned, sentimental and a little sad, on Agion’s back toward the front of my journeys—the east, the future.
“That’s better, Galen,” Bayard said, and I had no idea what an earbending lay ahead of me. “It’s better to look ahead of you than behind you, for behind you are quagmires and quicksand that may swallow your very best intentions.”
What was this? Did he know about Alfric? I kept quiet, prayed silently that the honor he so treasured would keep him from guessing—or even believing—that I had bogged my wretch of a brother. But no, it was a little philosophy to begin his long and intricate story, filled with usurpers and violence and going without and man’s inhumanity to man. There were times that it bordered on interesting, and times that I wished I had Agion’s talent for shutting things out entirely.
This is how it went.
“The third chapter of the Book of Vinas Solamnus, the great text found in its entirety only in the Library of Palanthas, concerns itself with the fortunes of the di Caela family—a history from the time they came mysteriously from the North, through the gates of Paladine, from the time that the founder of the line, old Gerald di Caela, joined with Vinas Solamnus, adding his name to the earliest and proudest list of Knighthood.”
Along with the Brightblades, who were also early and proud upon that list.
To which the Pathwardens were latecomers, I knew. Bayard was far too polite to mention that fact, but we had been instructed early and well as to how our not being one of the dozen or so Old Families would influence our lives.
“So the family thrived in honor and in prominence for a thousand years and more, until some four hundred years ago the title—the di Caela, if you will, the paterfamilias—fell to a Gabriel di Caela. It seems that old Gabriel had three sons. The eldest was named Duncan, if my memory serves, and the youngest son was a Gabriel also. But it is Benedict di Caela, the middle son, who stands at the center of this dark and troubling story—by accident of birth disinherited.”
Agion leaned forward as he walked, rubbing his knotty hands together and smiling. “In most of the old tales,” he offered, “there is a peculiar blessing that comes to the middle son. He stands to inherit little, and ends up with the best inheritance of all.”
“But what we are hearing is history, Agion,” I interrupted, “in which the middle son is most likely the passed over, the dumped upon, unless something untimely happens to the Duncan in Sir Bayard’s story. What is more, it’s usually the youngest who is most blessed in the stories, least blessed in the actual workaday world.”