Lillandra

It was a warm day, and his armor was stifling, and the injuries he had incurred as he had fought his way up the Nightfall still troubled him -- he had bruises all over and his gambeson was crusted over with dried blood -- but he ignored the discomfort, just as he had before, and pressed on.

The river looked cool and inviting. It would have been nice to strip out of his armor and go for a swim -- he desperately needed a bath -- but he couldn't risk it. The Night Queen might take the opportunity to try to escape, or to cast a spell on him while he was without his sword.

Lillandra looked almost equally uncomfortable, however. Her black-leather outfit was more suitable for a Velonese winter than a sunny summer day in this mysterious land, and within a few minutes she was sweating. Her pale skin, too, looked likely to burn under this sun.

But she didn't complain; in fact she said nothing, as they crossed sandbars, climbed over fallen trees, and marched through the woods adjacent to the river.

Arai found his thoughts drifting back to the events leading up to his confrontation with Lillandra at the Nightfall. Had Grizz and the Steelmen managed to capture Fort Drakness? What had happened to Lord Pierce? Arai's men had had to cut through an army of monsters to get to Hammersvik; had those monsters been dispatched? Had Vex managed to hold off the Night Queen's guards? Was he still alive? And what about Odo and Maya?

He needed to get back to the capital as soon as possible.

Unfortunately he had no idea how to get there. He had absolutely no idea where they were. Nothing about this rugged, forested landscape looked familiar to him. There were some high mountains to the southeast, but they couldn't have been the Frozen Mountains, or the Crymorte of Arliel's Holy Empire. He wasn't familiar with this river, either. Velon had no significant rivers apart from the Tuv, which flowed out of the glaciers of the Frozen Mountains, and this was definitely not the Tuv.

Where the hell were they?

He kept a careful eye on the witch as they made their way upriver. He had no idea what she was capable of, and he wanted to be ready in case she tried to cast some spell. She couldn't hurt him with her magic -- not directly, anyway -- but she could escape him, conceivably, by growing wings and flying away, or transforming herself into a wolf or a bear. She could trick him with illusions, summon up a monster, or, for all he knew, open up a portal to hell under his feet. He would have to be very, very cautious around her.

She made no move to attack him, however, nor to escape, as they trudged onward. She didn't speak, either, for the first few hours, but finally surprised him by volunteering, "I think I might know how we got here."

He was so startled to hear her speak that it took him a moment to reply. "Oh?"

"One of the zemi affixed to the Staff of Night allowed me to teleport from place to place. It was called the Eagle's Wing. I called upon its power just as you were about to strike me with your sword."

"You were trying to flee?"

"I meant to transport myself out of the room," she said. "To Fort Drakness, perhaps. Your sword must have cancelled out the spell, however, or caused it to malfunction, and we ended up here instead."

"But where is here?"

"I told you, I don't know. We're obviously not in Velon. The spell could have transported us to the other side of the world for all I know. We're just lucky we didn't materialize underground, or on the rim of a volcano, or in the middle of the Bastide Sea."

"Can you get us back to Velon?" He didn't trust her to cast any spells at all, but if it was possible...

"You threw the Eagle's Wing into the river, along with the Staff of Night," she said. "But your sword probably destroyed the enchantment in it anyway."

"And you can't make a new one?"

"I could, but it would take a long time. Five years, perhaps. It takes an enormous amount of magia and a great deal of patience to create sophisticated zemi like the Eagle's Wing."

Arai wasn't a sorcerer, but he knew about magia -- this was the substance sorcerers drew out of the air in order to cast their spells. It was also the substance out of which monsters were born; in areas where concentrations of magia were extremely high it occasionally coalesced into horrible malformed things, such as harpies, ape-men, and even dragons. Though they resembled animals, these creatures were entirely magical -- they did not eat, sleep, or reproduce, and unless they were destroyed, they were effectively immortal. Lillandra's pet dragon Catalyus, for instance, had been terrorizing Velon for a hundred years.

"It took you five years to make that thing?" Arai asked.

"It took five years to gather the magia for it. Of course I was sleeping for most of that time."

"I don't understand. How could you do anything while you were sleeping?"

"I gathered the magia in one of my cauldrons. I didn't need to be awake for that part of it."

"You need a cauldron to do magic?"

She looked at him sullenly. "You're just full of questions, aren't you?"

He quieted down. It didn't make any difference to him how she did her magic, after all; he was just curious.

They continued on. In addition to the heat and discomfort of his armor, his stomach was beginning to gnaw at him as well. He realized, belatedly, that they might be hundreds of miles from any kind of civilization; that they had no food and no supplies; that the weather could turn at any time; and that these woods might be full of bears, or wolves, or wyrms, or, if they were very unlucky, possibly even monsters. They might have to build a shelter of some kind before nightfall. Arai was a swordsman, who had spent most of his life traveling with his father's mercenary company -- he was used to roughing it, but he wasn't much of an outdoorsman, nor was he a very good hunter.

He was a fair fisherman, however -- his father's house had been situated on the banks of the Tuv -- and he could see some fish jumping in the river. He would have to construct a fishing pole, of course, and find some bait, and something he could use as a hook...

But how could he do all this, while also keeping an eye on the witch?

His situation, it suddenly occurred to him, was much more precarious than he had realized.

They followed the river for perhaps five or six miles, clambering over various obstacles, wading through boggy areas, and swatting at mosquitoes and deer flies, which buzzed incessantly around their heads. Arai finally brought them to a halt when the sun began to dip below the trees, its red-orange light filtering through the canopy. It would be night soon.

He had been dreading this. He was tired, and he needed sleep, but how could he sleep, while still keeping watch over his prisoner? She might try to escape in the night, or worse, cast some spell on him while he slept.

He could simply kill her, he supposed, and be done with it. He was worried about Odo and Maya, but if the Night Queen managed to escape him, she might regroup with Lord Pierce, use her magic to run the Steelmen out of Velon, and reclaim power, undoing everything that Odo and Maya had fought so hard to achieve.

He couldn't bear the thought of his friends remaining as statues forever, though. He remembered the expressions they had been wearing, just before the Night Queen had cast the spell: Odo was furious; Maya was fearful. He couldn't just leave them like that; he had to help them.

And although the Night Queen was a tyrant, and a murderer, and although he knew intellectually that she deserved to die, she was currently wearing the form of a teenage girl, and he didn't particularly relish the idea of slitting her throat. Killing her in battle would have been one thing. Murdering her in the night...well, that felt different, for some reason.

Not that he was about to tell her any of that. "We'll make camp here," he told her bluntly. They had come upon a clearing about fifty feet from the river's edge, carpeted with blue bellflowers.

She nodded and sat down on the trunk of a large, fallen tree. Arai gathered some stones from the shore, used his sword to break up some tinder, and set about making a fire. Lillandra didn't offer to help, but that was fine with him; he didn't want her wandering off.

He got the fire started just as the sun sank below the horizon. After a moment's consideration, he took off his armor, rubbing the spots where it had chafed, and sat down cross-legged in front of the fire, with his sword propped up against his shoulder.

It felt very odd, sharing this fire with the woman he had sworn to kill. No doubt it felt odd to her as well. She studiously avoided making eye contact with him; she kept her eyes firmly fixed on the crackling fire.

"You'd better not try anything tonight," he warned her. "I'm a light sleeper."

She snorted, but said nothing in response.

"Do you still have no idea where we are?"

She shook her head.

"What about those mountains back there? Did they look familiar to you?"

"I've never left Velon. The only mountains I've ever seen are the Frozen Mountains, in the north."

"You've never left Velon?" This was a little surprising. Though he was only twenty years old, Arai himself had been through most of the statelets that made up Arliel's Holy Empire -- his father's mercenary company had made a good living fighting down there -- and he had visited a few of the cities on the western edge of the Queendom of Elent as well. That he was more widely-traveled than a hundred-year-old witch struck him as a little strange.

"No," she replied. "What reason would I have to leave?"

"You've never considered spreading your evil to Velon's neighbors? To the Free City of Camarro, or Cyrille Major, or any of the other states within the Holy Empire?"

"Spreading my evil?" She snorted at that. "I'm not interested in conquest. I never have been."

"You conquered Velon."

"I did what I had to do," she said. "Nothing more, nothing less."

"You're a monster."

She said nothing in response to that; she merely sighed and looked away. "What are we going to do? We're lost. We have no horses, no food--"

"I'll try to catch some fish tomorrow."

"And then what?"

"And then we keep going," he said stubbornly. "We're returning to Velon, and as soon as you reverse the spell on Odo and Maya, you're going to pay for your crimes."

"Odo and Maya?"

"My friends," he said. "The ones you turned to stone."

"Ah."

"You'd better not try anything tonight," he warned her again.

She gave him a glare, then laid down near the fire, her head in her hands, and closed her eyes. Arai, wary, watched her until she fell asleep. The anger, bitterness, and hostility in her face disappeared as sleep overtook her, and Arai found himself surprised at how perfectly ordinary she looked. She didn't look like the Night Queen, the terror of Velon; she looked like a seventeen-year-old girl.

He watched her carefully for some time, in that flickering firelight, before finally drifting off himself.