Page 33 of Into the West

Delia glanced up and down the bank again, and suddenly, as if a candle had been lit in her mind, she realized why Endars kept saying, “We wouldn’t want to settle here.” When her attention had been on hunting or target-shooting, she truly hadn’t paid a lot of attention to the land beyond the bank; that was just the backdrop to what she was doing. But now she got a good look at the land, and what she saw was not promising for farming. The soil seemed to be sandy clay. The trees were some sort of oak, but not as tall as the trees back “home,” as if they were stunted from lack of nourishment. The underbrush was weeds mixed with some kind of leathery-leafed evergreen, and the horses showed no interest in sampling it. The only thing that the horses showed any interest in were the tall grasses that grew where the forest ended and the riverbank began. Stones peeked through the soil . . . a lot. You could certainly raise goats here, and maybe sheep, but cattle would starve, and horses wouldn’t prosper.

And as for actual farming? Well, she was anything but an expert, but she didn’t think much of the seed the expedition carried with them would grow well here.

Endars let his eyes wander over the bank, though they had an unfocused look to them. He shook his head. “This area floods every spring when the snow melts. Not a good place to stop when that happens, much less a place to settle.”

“Good thing it’s not spring yet, then. Not waiting to see if he’s right,” Ivar replied agreeably, and jerked his head at Delia. “Don’t go out of sight. This kind of forest all looks alike once you get inside it, even to me.”

Delia went back to the barge for her weapons, and collected Venidel. He had a great many skills in a great many areas that had nothing to do with magic. Sadly, Venidel’s many skills didn’t include anything to do with combat, fighting, or hunting, but Delia sensed that Ivar intended for Venidel to be the one looking for suitable browse, while Delia watched for trouble.

Venidel had a pocketful of bits of colored yarn—imperial stringettes, often used by the Army for marking where a path was—and whenever he found something he was sure would be good for the horses, he marked it with a bit of yarn. “Let’s start here,” he said, stopping a couple of furlongs past the last barge. “I’ll go beat my way into the forest. You shout when you can’t see me.”

She nodded, and they worked their way downriver until the barges looked like toy boats, and the horses no taller than the first joint of her finger. By this time Venidel was covered in some kind of tiny burrs or seeds, there were twigs in his hair, and he’d ripped the right knee of his trews. And yet, he was uncommonly cheerful as they walked back along the riverbank, which here was just about wide enough for two horses side by side in harness. “How are you going to get those sticky seeds off?” she asked.

“Oh, I know a spell,” he replied, and stopped for a moment. He crossed his arms, furrowed his brow with concentration, and barked six unintelligible words.

The seeds all flared up, hundreds of tiny, instant flames, and disappeared. She gaped at him. He brushed the ash off, nonchalantly, and winked at her.

“Now, if I was to go home and look for a wife, that’s a trick that would impress the kind of girl I like, way more than hovering in midair would,” he grinned, in a reference to what Endars had said about “flying.” He motioned to her to come on.

She thought about saying something like “Well, it impressed me,” but that would imply she was Venidel’s kind of girl . . .

I don’t know how to act around a boy my age who isn’t a servant. Or a girl my age, for that matter. She suddenly felt awkward and tongue-tied. Not because she wanted to impress Venidel, but because she simply didn’t know what was the safe thing to reply.

So much of her life had been spent solely in the company of adults, usually ones old enough to be her father. And even when Kordas and Isla took her in, that really hadn’t changed. There weren’t any families of rank near enough to make casual visits, and Kordas hadn’t encouraged anyone to visit the manor except at Midwinter. Given how many mages he had been hosting and all the other secrets he had been hiding, that probably had been a good idea. She could handle herself in conversations with older people, even really elderly ones. But it left her feeling very awkward around someone like Venidel.

Would he take such an answer as flirting? Wary now, she just asked, “I take it that lady-mages are unimpressed by floating in midair?”

“The ones I know would laugh at the idiot who thought it would impress them,” he told her with a snort. They both were silent for a moment, navigating a patch of slippery stones with the potential to dump them in the cold, cold river. “I’ll be glad when we’re in one place at last again and have a home. We can even have a proper Mage Circle, and maybe a school where I can get formal lessons. We couldn’t have that back in the Duchy. The Emperor’s mages would have noticed that big a concentration of power.”

“How many of you are there in the convoy?” she asked curiously. “All I ever knew about were all the ones living at the manor.”

“Mages and apprentices together? Dozens. Way more than anyplace else in the Empire except the front lines of the wars, and the Imperial Palace.” He nodded at her start of surprise. “For three generations now, the Valdemarans have been hiding mages who were pacifists, just didn’t like the way the Empire works in general, or managed to get on the bad side of an Imperial mage and were hoping to find a place to disappear into.”

“I always thought most of them were living at the manor . . .” She faltered.

“No. Oh, no. Most of them were scattered in nice, comfortable little cottages around the Duchy, acting as hedge-wizards and herbalists. Now they’re scattered all through the convoy, with people they already knew.” He glanced over at her. “Once we’re settled, with this many mages? If we can find a nexus of ley-lines, we’re going to be able to do amazing things. We’re going to have a real city much faster than you’d ever believe is possible.”

She wrinkled her brow with a sudden thought. “Is that why you are all having such a hard time keeping up those shield-things? No nexus of ley-lines?”

“Not only no nexus—that’s where two or more ley-lines meet and cross—but no ley-line at all right now. This river meandered right off the ley-line that was where we planted the Gate, and none of us have been able to find one within easy reach.” He shrugged again. “Power is everywhere, but it’s like water. Back in Valdemar we were on a strong source, like a river, that bisected the Duchy, with a small nexus where three lines met under the manor itself. There was a big nexus of seven lines back at Crescent Lake, or we never would have been able to link Gates so far apart. Right now . . . the Power is there, it’s always all around us, but it’s like a misting rain. It’s hard to gather enough to get a good drink out of it, much less do anything that requires a lot of energy.”

Those words sent a chill down her back, and she glanced at him sharply. Because so much depended on being able to use Gates—

“But what if there’s no ley-line where we need to go?” she blurted, her voice tight with anxiety.

“We can store power in things, and we have, for just that reason,” he said reassuringly. “In the Gate uprights themselves, just for a start.”

Oh, idiot. This Plan has been decades in the making. If Kordas’s grandfather didn’t think of that, his father would have, and if he hadn’t, Kordas or one of the Six would have.

Venidel suddenly raised his head and sniffed. “Oh my word. I think I smell roast goose.”

So did she, and her mouth watered. No matter how many times she had it, she never got tired of goose. And if the footing had been any better she might have challenged him to a race.

But that would have been an exceptionally bad idea on these rocks. Best to save the bad ideas for when they really needed them.

“What do you like about all this the best?” she asked instead, which seemed a safe topic with no potential flirting traps embedded in it. And it proved to be, since he was still rattling off all the reasons he loved doing the scouting when they arrived back at the camp.

Delia deeply appreciated the presence of Bay on the roof of their barge. The soft sounds of him alerting and looking around, perhaps getting to his feet and lying down again when whatever had alerted him proved to be nothing, was one of the most comforting things she could think of. It reminded her that there were two beings, Bey and Amethyst, who could be relied on to call an alarm if anything approached that wasn’t a rat or an owl.