The Chained Adept (1-4)

Chapter 17

CHAPTER 17

Despite her best intentions, Penrys knew her manner was still uncomfortable when she thanked Zandaril for his party the night before. When she tried to divert him by teasing him about his throbbing head, she could feel his concern and puzzlement, and pushed it away, returning to their professional discussion of the day before about how Veneshjug had been using the power-stones.

He went along with her and they were still arguing about it inconclusively when they crested yet another low ridge.

Penrys stopped in mid-rebuttal, stunned. Below them, a quarter of a mile away, rolled a brown river, wide and unstoppable. The bluffs were cut cleanly through for its passage, as if with a gigantic knife. Small wooded side streams snaked into it on both sides. There was no settlement here.

“Well?” Zandaril said, looking with satisfaction at her stupefied expression.

“You were right,” she said. “It’s big.”

He beamed proudly as if he’d created it himself. “And this is just the south branch, and well upstream. You should see it at Yenit Ping where it enters the sea. The Endless City is perched well above, and still someday they will have to move it when the Junkawa eats away at the land and makes Pingmen Bay even bigger.”

“No town here?”

“There are big streams below here, two of them, and that’s the last of the biggest towns. Only smaller towns upstream. This is low water—the spring floods fill the channel.”

Penrys blinked and re-evaluated the landscape. The ridge she stood on bounded one side of a large, level plain, and a companion ridge ran along the south. The river flowed down the middle between them in a broad braid of meandering channels, but it wasn’t difficult to envision it spreading out smoothly all the way from one side to the other. That’s how that flat ground was created, in the middle of these low rolling hills. No wonder no one built here.

“Is the ground solid, d’ya think?” she asked.

“This time of year, I think you can go right to the bank in most places, if you’re careful. It’s all dirt, this land, all the way down. No rock until the mountains, almost anywhere.”

Penrys wanted to get a closer look, but they were expected to stay close to the column. “Is Chang going to cross it?”

“If we were just a merchant train, no—he wouldn’t have to. The road through the gorge takes the left bank, as it flows—that’s this side. But if we have to fight our way in…”

Penrys had marveled over the efficiency of the one river crossing she’d seen, the wagons driven through a ford and helping to break the flow for the herds swimming downstream. The troopers swam, too, clinging to their horses’ manes, and everyone else either did the same, or found a place in one of the wagons.

In retrospect, that now seemed an insignificant stream, shallow and fordable. How would you cross this with a supply train?

“Is there a bridge?”

“Only ferries, until well within Wechinnat, on the other side of the Gates.”

She walked her horse back up a few yards so she could see down the other side of the slope. The column was clearly aiming for a point further upstream.

“Can’t we go take a look at it?” she said.

“Tired of walking, are you?” Zandaril replied, with a gleam in his eye. “Let’s see what that new horse of yours can do.”

He pointed his black mare at a diagonal down the slope and took off. Penrys was left behind, and then she pulled herself together and followed. When they reached the flat they stretched into a smooth canter, keeping a sharp eye out for burrows and holes that could trip up their horses.

She laughed with the exhilaration of speed. They kept the easy pace for a while, until she judged they had come as far on the flat as the head of the column on the other side of the ridge. When she cast her mind out to check where they were, relative to them, she picked up two people on her own side of the ridge, near the river, and spun her horse in a quarter circle to find them.

Zandaril followed. *What?*

*People. Kids.*

She found them where a small stream wandered in from the north. A small copse of water-rooted trees hid them, but she trotted straight at them. She already knew they weren’t the Rasesni she was looking for, and one was very young.

She felt the older one’s fear and pulled up several yards away. Zandaril trotted up behind her and stopped.

A dirty Kigali boy, not yet full-grown, stood up from his hiding spot below the stream bank. He had a toddler by one hand, and the other hovered close to his belt knife.

This wasn’t the Kigali army Tak Tuzap had hoped to find. The man was clearly a Zan, both by his turban and his robes, and the way he sat his horse as if born to it was unmistakable. He didn’t know what the woman was, and when she called to him, her accent was strange. But he’d heard merchant trains before, and the noise in the distance sounded like it might be an army. Now that he’d met them, would anyone listen to him?

Gailen held his hand and half-hid behind his leg, and stared at the woman from there, fascinated. He was embarrassed by her clothes, a mix of what he’d found her in, cleaned, and a cut-down shirt from her father’s pack.

The woman dismounted and tossed her reins to the Zan. She glanced at Tak briefly but focused on Gailen.

“Hey, little one, what’s happened to you?” She kept her voice low and her approach calm. “What’s her name?” she asked him.

“I don’t know, she won’t talk to me. I’ve been calling her Gailen, ‘Sunshine.’”

“I’m Penrys, and that’s Zandaril,” she said, keeping her eyes on the girl. “We’re with the column just over there.” She pointed north.

“I am Tak Tuzap, minochi. We’ve come out of Wechinnat.”

“Through the gorge?” the man said, with a tone of amazement.

Tak nodded. “Three days ago.”

He stood there in his muddy rags with a little girl waif and drew himself up to his fullest height, an inch or two shorter than the woman.

“I want to see the man in charge. I have things to tell him he needs to know.”

Zandaril bit the inside of his cheeks to avoid any suggestion of humor and nodded soberly in reply to the boy’s demand. “I think our Commander Chang will want to speak with you,” he assured him. “Can you ride? It’s not far—we can go double.”

Tak Tuzap hesitated. “We have two packs.”

“Show me,” Zandaril said, and he dismounted. He looked over at Penrys and caught her kneeling in front of the child and murmuring something softly.

“If you’ll hold the horses, I’ll get the boy’s packs tied on,” he called to her.

“Let’s go see the horses,” she said to the little girl, and she picked her up and tucked her on her hip. The child clung to her as if she’d always been carried that way.

When Penrys came up to take the reins for both horses, she told him, “She’s scared, hiding. Something bad happened.”

“The boy’s not her family, so I think you can guess…” Zandaril said.

She nodded. “I’ll carry her.”

“The packs, too,” he said, as he saw the boy struggling with two backpacks, one larger than the other. “I’ll take the boy.”

He opened the two packs and rebalanced the contents, moving some of the metal cookware to the smaller one so that they weighed roughly the same. Then he tied them top-to-top together so he could drape them over the rump of Penrys’s horse and fasten them to the saddle tie-downs as a single unit.

Penrys handed the child to Zandaril so she could mount and, before the little girl had time to protest, took her back again and curled one arm around her, holding both the reins in the other hand.

Zandaril mounted his own horse and reached one hand down to swing the boy up behind him. “Wrap your arms around my waist and hold on,” he told him.

He looked over at the child fused to Penrys’s hip, a leg on each side, and smiled fondly.

“What?” she said.

*You look like you’ve done that a thousand times. You must have children.*

He felt her anguish, as sharp as if he’d slapped her.

*And are they wondering where I am, three years gone?*

She shut him out and turned her horse away.