Fool's Quest
“So I read it, too,” I replied. I swung back up into my saddle. “Be wary!” I warned the others. “Shine said some of the mercenaries were still prowling in the area. If you see them, we need to take them alive. I need to talk to them.”
Sawyer gave a tight nod and his partner grunted an assent. A small part of my attention noted that both of them were standing a bit straighter. They exchanged satisfied looks. These two, it seemed, might take a bit of pride in accomplishing a task. Possibly salvageable.
The trail was easy to follow. I focused on that and pushed Fleeter to move as quickly as she could go. The deep snow was trampled but it was not a well-broken path. I kept my head up and watched the encroaching forest for any sign of the mercenaries. Twice Riddle and Lant moved off to inspect other tracks we sighted. Each time they found only deer trails. I wondered if a terrified Shine had only imagined the Chalcedean trackers as she had the ghost in her room.
The forest became denser. Here evergreens towered and laced their branches overhead to steal the afternoon’s graying light from us. The snow was shallower but the trail was still plain. We followed it up a slope, weaving among rocky outcroppings and ducking under leaning trees that had grown at angles among the stones. Under these giants, there was little underbrush.
“Fitz!” Lant called and I pulled Fleeter around, thinking he had seen danger. Instead he leaned down from his mount and brushed snow from stone. “There was a town here once. Or something. Look how straight this stone still runs.”
“He’s right,” Riddle confirmed before I could even speak. “Most of it’s buried in earth as well as snow. But look there. The trees lean in, and it’s narrowed, but that might have been a road at one time.”
“It would make sense,” I said, and turned Fleeter back to the trail. Old structures. In the Mountain Kingdom we had often found standing stones near Elderling ruins.
“I smell old smoke,” Riddle declared, and just then Sawyer cried, “There are more tracks over there, sir. Looks like they’re headed in the same direction we are!”
I threw caution to the wind and urged Fleeter on. She surged up the steep trail in powerful bounds, and suddenly an abandoned camp was before us. Hasty shelters of branches and evergreen boughs surrounded a blackened place where a small campfire had burned. “Stop!” I called to the others. We dismounted and Perseverance stayed with the horses as we moved forward more slowly. I quested with my Wit but felt no others near. If there had been Chalcedeans stalking Shine last night, they were here no longer. I squatted down to peer into a temporary shelter built of pine boughs. Someone had huddled in there. That was all I could tell.
White coat, pale skin, pale hair. Dead. Sprawled on her back in the snow, the only color a bit of blood coming from her mouth. Riddle and I crouched over her, our heads close together. I slid a hand under her neck and lifted. It wasn’t broken.
“That’s a hard grip to get or maintain,” he said. “I’m impressed.”
I nodded. Chade’s daughter. Cup the back of the neck and drive the pinching fingers in hard to crush the windpipe. No air, choking on her own blood. Not the quickest death in the world nor the quietest, but it had done the job.
I let her fall back into the snow and stood. And there it was, right before me.
I’d seen the looming block of stone but not recognized what it was. The big tree that had grown up beside it had nearly toppled it. At the edge of the camp, the stone leaned drunkenly, one face of it touching the snow that had banked around it. Lichen had begun to encroach on the stone’s edges. I approached it slowly, as if it were game to be stalked. Lant and Riddle followed, but my two Rousters stood by with Perseverance as if they could sense danger.
Someone had recently swept the snow from the uppermost face of the stone. A hundred questions pelted me. How had the Servants known this stone was here? Were they Skilled, to be able to use it? Did they know more of that magic than we did? I’d been told there were no Skill-pillars in this area. How was it that the Servants knew of this and we did not? All useful questions, and the answers would have undoubtedly been even more useful. But pondering them now was a waste of time.
“Do you know where it goes? Do you recognize the rune?”
“I do.” It was one of the few that I knew very well. “It goes to a crossroads market beyond the Mountain Kingdom. On our way to find King Verity we followed an Elderling road and came upon it. It’s not far from where we found the stone dragons sleeping.” I recalled the place well indeed. Both the Fool and I had briefly fallen under the spell of that place. The memory stone there was strong, and he had seemed to become someone else, a long-ago White who had passed that way, a poet or jester …