CHAPTER 5
All of this commotion, and I had not yet traveled ten miles from home.
Scarcely ten miles east of the family moat house lay a swamp that extended forty or fifty miles north and south—I didn’t know how far for sure—and circled back upon our property until the moat house and almost all our holdings were bordered by marshlands. ’Warden Swamp was a lucky accident in the recent Pathwarden past, rising up quickly and unexplainably about a century ago, named for us, though the country folk shortened the name, as country folk will. Though we looked on it with mistrust and with fear, daunted by the rumors that things grew too quickly there, that strange, half-rotten things lurked in its heart, the swamp conveniently surrounded the Pathwarden estate and protected us from the hostility toward Solamnic Knights that had arisen in Ansalon following the Cataclysm.
You all know the story regarding the Fall from Favor. The people of Solamnia, of course, decided that the Knights had known the Cataclysm was coming for years but had been unwilling or unable to warn everyone. This popular sentiment became the excuse to waylay every Knight who passed through their particular part of the countryside.
Nonetheless, it could have been worse for our family during all the noise and persecution. First of all, we never lived in Solamnia proper, where most of the trouble was; we were slightly to the west in Coastlund, protected by our remoteness and, as it turned out, ringed by ’Warden Swamp. Although many men were eager for Knight-bashing, few wanted to go out of their way or cross dangerous terrain to get their bashes in. So the swamp had been our good fortune—my family’s and mine.
Which is not to say that you’d ever have caught me near the nasty place, with its snakes and crocodiles, and bandits only a little less cold-blooded and a little more human than the reptiles. Until now, I’d always done my best to avoid it.
I awoke on horseback, or so it seemed. For I was draped like a dirty blanket or a saddle, face-down over a broad, dappled back that smelled of sweat and horse. The ground rushed by below me, and the wet afternoon wind whipped across the side of my face.
I shifted my position and tried to sit up in the saddle. But there was no saddle to sit up in. Instead, a rope was bound tightly about my wrists and a strong hand pulled at my hair, restraining me. I twisted, tried to kick against restraints—against the hand, at least—but found no rider where I had every right to expect one.
Then I remembered the men-horses crashing toward us through the bushes and the undergrowth. I raised myself as far as I could and looked straight into the burly back and shoulders of one of the creatures.
I was draped across what appeared to be a centaur, headed for swamps and for torture most likely.
Had they taken him prisoner? Or worse, had he simply backed away and given me over to them while I lay in a faint underneath the vallenwood? Draped across my captor, I sulked bitterly and awaited the trampling that surely would follow. I pictured the man-horses rising high upon their hind legs, brandishing weapons and pummeling me into fodder.
The one who carried me stepped lightly, smoothly for a creature of such size—more graceful, even, than a horse, perhaps because all of that muscle and speed and balance was guided by an intelligence at least equal to that of a human. It was a combination of that natural grace and evidently of knowing the territory, for we moved quickly and impressively toward our destination.
Whatever that destination was. It grows tiresome not knowing your whereabouts.
But maybe whereabouts was the least of my worries. Only minutes after I woke, my captor stopped on a rise in the swamp amidst cedar and juniper and aeterna and other evergreens I could not identify. He stood there, breathing only a little heavily, waiting for someone or something, while I tried to scramble into a more comfortable position.
I shuddered. The light in this clearing was shades of green. And menacing. With all those cedars surrounding us, it smelled like a good place to die. The smell of swamp, the faint smell of sweat, and the stronger smell of horse sank beneath the clean odor of evergreen, like when you put soiled clothes back in a cedar chest so the smell sinks into them, so the clothing doesn’t smell like you have to wash it—a boy’s trick that usually keeps you from having to bathe as well.
After a brief look around the clearing, my captor seated himself, sliding me down his back and onto the moss-covered ground. The moss was thick and soft; still, the tumble jarred me some, and I lay face-down for a moment, recovering my senses before I scrambled to my feet.
The centaur stood over me in a dodging green light, holding a scythe at least seven feet long and as big around as one of my legs. Escape was out of the question.
“We wait until thy master joins us, little one,” the man-horse rumbled. He offered no leverage—no margins for disagreement.
“Are you a centaur?” I asked finally, breath recovered and mud and evergreen needles brushed from my face.
“It is the name used by thy people,” the centaur replied distractedly, staring down a wide path of broken branches and underbrush, expecting arrivals, evidently. I followed his eyes briefly and watched the path cover itself. Watched the brush bend back, the standing water settle and calm on the path itself, watched—
The vines grow back? Reeds growing out of the water?
I marked it off to the tricky light in the clearing and the knock I received when I dismounted. Now the centaur was looking straight at me again. Escape was still out of the question.
His eyebrows bristled, dappled brown and white like his back. He was young—only a year or two older than I, if centaurs measured their years as we did. “I thought you were fables,” I murmured, and glanced about the rise, looking for passages small and narrow into the swamp and … Safety? Among crocodiles and quicksand and diseases?
Maybe I should take my chances with the big spotted fellow before me. After all, anyone who said his thees and thous sounded a little less like a murderer to me. If he was young, he might be stupid and easy to manipulate.
It’s a safe rule to go by, and Agion was no exception to it.
For that was his name, though at the time I couldn’t have cared less. Once he was sure that we were alone for a while, my new companion became talkative, almost breezy. Quickly I received his life story: he was no celebrity within the centaur ranks, but was young and considered a little slow and awkward by his company. “Indeed, watching over you is the first real duty my elders have given me in this war we’re in,” he stated proudly.
“War? Wait a minute, Agion. What’s this about a war?”
The big creature paused, blushed.
“I might have said too much. My companions will tell thee what thou needst to know, when the time is fitting and proper.” He trotted to a corner of the clearing, peered back into the leaves and mud and darkness. Behind him the moss and grass crushed beneath his hooves grew back readily, unnaturally. I couldn’t get used to it.
“Agion, you don’t dangle statements such as that in front of whoever’s listening, then drop the subject entirely. It’s just not done outside of a swamp somewhere. Civilized people don’t hint when it comes to disaster.”
Agion frowned. “I’m sorry I let fall such news, young sir, but that is my nature, I fear. The others tell me that I squeeze things so hard I drop them.” Suddenly he brightened. “Though they say I am good-hearted.”
Were all centaurs such simpletons? I dearly wished for cards, for seed money. This was another Alfric, without the malice and with two extra legs. I lay back on the grass, which had grown about an inch since I was deposited there.
Despite what Brithelm had said on our seemingly long-ago walks through the courtyard, apparently some of the rumors about this place were true. Something was strange about the vegetation that altered and grew underfoot. I sincerely hoped it was harmless. Meanwhile, I tried the first of my strategies—a simple and direct one, but who could say there would be time for long explanations?
“If you are good-hearted, Agion—and you seem to be—then maybe you should think of this. I don’t know anything about any war—where it’s taking place or what the sides are, or how not to run into it, even—and here you’ve dropped this torch on the tinder, as they say. I have been separated from my honorable master—by the way, where is he?—and isn’t it kind of your duty to put my troubled thoughts to rest—dismiss the suspense and all?”
Agion walked a few steps down a trail, ducking to avoid the low branches of a pine. He turned about, ducked the branches once more, and returned to the clearing, tracking mud and weeds across the dry ground. Though pulled from their roots, the weeds continued to grow.
“Well? I mean, you’re the one who brought the war up, Agion.”
“Nor should I have done so, little friend.” He squinted down still another pathway into the swamp, as I marveled that he could call me “little friend” after such brief acquaintance, and especially when I would have gladly sold his organs to the goblins for the information he was bent on not giving me. “Now where are they?” he asked impatiently, fidgeting with the enormous, wicked-looking scythe.
“Relax, Agion,” I offered. “You look like a painting of Equestrian Death wielding that thing. Sure you have the right clearing?”
“Passing sure,” Agion replied. “They said to meet at the second outpost if it had not overgrown since we met here this morning and … by the gods, I’ve betrayed even more secrets to thee!” He slapped his forehead with a blow that would have left me simple-minded. I had to gain his confidence quickly, before the others arrived. I stood up, walked slowly towards him, talking all the way.
“I don’t know where we are, what the second outpost is, or why they wanted to meet here in the first place. You’ve captured a real blank slate here: I know nothing about the war, what it’s all about, or what damn side the damn centaurs are on, if you’ll excuse my waxing profane and all, but it’s dreadfully frustrating to hear all of this talk about a major world event and not have the foggiest idea as to …”
“Th’art rattling, little friend,” Agion cautioned me, raising his scythe in a gesture I mistook for anger. “I think it might be of use for thee to rest thyself a moment, recover thy breath. I can tell thee nothing until suspicion is lifted from thy countenance.” Casually, he sliced branches from the pine tree beside him, so that he could pass under. The branches grew back.
“And what is my countenance guilty of, Agion?”
“Spying, little friend. Had thou been in Solamnic armor, like your friend, we’d have held thee as a prisoner of war—no more. But concealing thy colors is like to spying in wartime.
I stared woefully up at Agion, who looked down on me with not a little sympathy. A lark sang briefly in the bushes to my left, whether “left” was south or north or whatever. Though the rain was lifting, the situation looked glum and soggy.
“Ah … pardon me, Agion, but what’s the common punishment in these parts for spies?”
“My folk seldom wax dramatic, little friend,” the centaur smiled. Then his big face darkened, the spotted eyebrows bunching into one thick line of hair above the bridge of his nose. “For the most part, we drown the poor souls. Take them by their poor little ankles and dangle their poor little faces in pools or in brooks. Facing upstream, of course.
“We suspend them there ‘until they pay the full price for their intrigues,’ as the elders say.”
A pretty grim use of Coastlund’s waterways, if you asked me.
“Does that apply to the young ones, too?”
Agion nodded. “As far as I know. Mind, I’ve never seen a spy put to death, young or old.”
“Does it apply to those dragged unwillingly into espionage—say, those who really have nothing against centaurs, but become spies when it’s a choice between that and death?”
“As I said, little friend, I’ve never seen the putting to death. Nor have I seen any trial where such things are brought to counsel. Truly, I cannot answer thee.”
“Then perhaps you’ve heard things, Agion. Like what is done with someone who informs in a case such as this. Suppose someone were to reveal a network of spies—from mere lookouts and agents among the peasants who live nearby, on up to the ringleaders, some of whom you may already have taken prisoner? And suppose this very cooperative person does so for the promise that his head will not roll when heads roll, or drench when heads drench, if you understand me?”
“I am sure if thou hast such a promise from the elders, thou art safe from harm,” Agion proclaimed seriously. “But if thou were to uncover a network of spies, thou wouldst betray some of thy friends, no doubt?”
He paused, cocked his head, looked at me curiously.
“That is, of course, if the other two are friends of thine.”
The other two? Friends? I knelt, pretended to pick up something from the ground—a blade of grass, a rock perhaps. I was pretending not to care, though the curiosity was great and I was stringing out my nets blindly, hoping that somehow Agion would stumble in.
“So you caught us all, then? I mean, all three of us?”
The centaur’s mouth was off and running before his brain awoke.
“Only the two for the time being. Thee and the Knight thou servest, though he was much more difficult to bring to ground, judging from the fact that my companions are late in joining us here.
“As for the third, he escaped us up the road. He was the one we saw first, but on open plains too near that Solamnic moat house and at such a distance that we could not hope to capture him. So we found the two of thee, hoping that perhaps all three would be together when we overtook the Knight himself—that the lookout thou settest so cunningly a mile at thy rear would betray thy whereabouts in the hurried attempt to warn thee.”
Agion gave me a puzzled look. I nodded for him to continue. I was thunderstruck by the news of a third spy, but determined not to show it.
“Else the armor might well have been hidden,” he said, “for we had intended to watch thee only, until we heard the Solamnic talk with the militia. Then we had to close with thee, to search thee for what we suspected we would find—and did.”
For now I was sure someone was following us.
I remembered the dark recesses of the library, the movement of dark wings.
Who else could the third man of Agion’s story have been?
So what if I escaped these four-legged kidnappers? Who knew what other forms of mayhem awaited me?
Had Bayard not entered the clearing at that moment, escorted by half a dozen centaurs, I might have tried to strike a bargain with Agion, offering him money, land, half the moat house to escort me safely back to Father’s disfavor and a place of honor in his dungeon—damp and dark and infested with bullies, but safe from scorpions, at least.
Apparently Bayard had not come easily. One of the centaurs nursed an arm in a sling, another a bloodied nose. Nor did Bayard look much better himself—the right side of his face swollen and discolored, his left hand bleeding and clutched in his right, which had little else to do, the centaurs having tied his wrists together. His wrists were burned by the tightness of the ropes.
Without ceremony, the centaurs pitched him to the floor of the clearing, then encircled us both. Lying in a bruised heap on the ground, Bayard smiled ruefully up at me and staggered to his feet.
“It is here and now thou wilt answer for thy conduct, Solamnic,” one of the centaurs proclaimed—a burly specimen whose skin was dark and weathered like a cypress tree. His hair was white, also, but unlike Agion’s, white with age and if not with wisdom, at least with a certain badlands cleverness. Swamp-smart, you might call him.
Apparently the old fellow was the leader. He looked as though he were accustomed to being answered.
But Bayard had been jostled a little too much, it seemed. There were cracks showing in his courtesy as he rose to his full height and faced the old centaur.
“For my conduct it is easy to answer, sire. It is that of a Solamnic Knight when he and his squire are attacked without warning—and I might add, without reason—by seven folk who are supposed to be allies of the good and the just. That’s my answer, sire—quite simple and direct, I grant you, but when your men ambushed me, I assumed we had passed beyond formal introduction.”
I believe the old centaur smiled.
“So thou doest admit,” the old fellow asked, “thy allegiance to the Solamnic Orders?”
Despite my gestures, my throat-clearing, my elbow in his ribs, Bayard answered as he had before—in all honesty.
“ ‘Admit’? Nay, I proclaim it, sire! For despite what you have heard, the Order still stands for principles noble and true in a time unprincipled. Stop elbowing me, Galen!”
“And the armor?” the old centaur asked, staring me down with his wild green eyes, glittering like emeralds on leather.
“The armor is mine,” Bayard maintained, “though stolen from me briefly days ago, and worn by one for whose crimes I cannot answer.” He folded his arms across his chest and awaited the centaur’s response.
“Sir Knight, if thy testimony stood against only what I have heard, by my troth I should be inclined to lenience. But there is the matter of the satyrs, and in that matter the testimony of mine eyes is witness against thee, and the eyes of my brothers have also looked upon thy misdeeds.”
“Satyrs?”
Bayard looked at me in puzzlement. I shrugged. What did I know from satyrs?
“The satyrs!” the old centaur continued. “The goat-men!”
Several of his traveling companions nodded roughly in agreement, shaking their manes in a most menacing fashion. Bayard paused, then spoke frankly.
“I promise you, sire, that I know nothing of what you call ‘satyrs.’ Indeed, the very word is new to me. And I promise you that I had never raised my hand against you or your people, until you rode out from hiding a brief while ago upon the road.”
The old centaur inclined his enormous, shaggy head, whispered to the bloody-nosed captain at his right, and the two of them galloped off to the far edge of the clearing. Two more joined them shortly—to my relief, neither was the one whose arm Bayard had disjoined in the recent struggle, for I was sure that whatever was to be done to us was soon to be put to a vote. A lively discussion began, but I could hear nothing from where I stood.
I could do nothing from where I stood, either. So I reached into my pocket, sat down, and cast the Calantina. The grass was ankle high by now, and I had to brush it aside to read the dice.
Six on twelve: Sign of the Goat. I consoled myself that the virtue of the goat was that he could survive just about anywhere under just about any circumstances. I hoped that applied to swamps and captivity, because I saw us staying here awhile.
“What do your tea leaves say, Galen?” Bayard whispered, seating himself painfully beside me.
“They say that sometimes the whole truth is a foolish thing to tell, sir,” I lied. “But then, you’ve told me you don’t believe the Calantina, anyway.”
The centaurs who were left to guard us seemed more informed than we were. Two of them inspected us from a distance, brandished their clubs, and grinned maliciously. Only Agion remained friendly, and it was fairly obvious nobody was listening to him.
“Don’t worry,” he encouraged me, as he picked several of the small, glittering nuts from the blue-needled branch of an overhanging aeterna tree and dropped them into his mouth. “Archala never delivers punishment unjustly.”
Of course, that did nothing to lighten my worries. Far better that this Archala not deliver punishment at all, for I did not care whether he disciplined justly or unjustly, as long as I escaped intact.
I considered telling Bayard about the third party—the man the centaurs had seen following us a mile or so back down the road. But what would I tell Bayard about who I thought was following us? What would I tell him about the honey-voiced man who scaled the moat house on a mission of burglary?
To be quite honest, I had no real desire to clear my conscience before the centaurs turned me up by my ankles and drowned me for espionage. Sometimes the whole truth is a foolish thing to tell. So we sat there in silence, Bayard rubbing his bruises and I thinking frantically of ways to dodge judgement. Any judgement.
But since nobody was moving or scuffling or breaking branches, the sounds of the swamp resumed—the weird songs of unfamiliar birds, now and again the bellow of a bullfrog or the whirring sound of an insect, for these animals had come from hiding when the rain had stopped and the sun had emerged. Around us the air was warmer, but still terribly heavy and humid. Though you could not see the plants growing—not really—you could look away from one and look back in a matter of minutes to find it larger … or what you thought was larger.
It gave me the jumps.
I thought of what Gileandos had said about ’Warden Swamp: something that grows so rapidly grows like a boy; therefore it cannot be trusted, pointing to it on the map as it stretched for miles south of the moat house. Of course, stories had come to us through the peasants, stories of animals who had grown to unnatural size or changed unnaturally and roamed the recesses of the swamp. There was talk of legless crocodiles, and huge carnivorous birds, eyeless because they no longer needed eyes in the swamp’s green darkness, moving clumsily but swiftly among cedars and among cypress trees by leaps and lunges, their wings useless in a country covered by branches and leaves.
There was talk, of course, of the man-eating flying fish.
Now, there may not have been a great deal of truth to such stories, but other things were undoubtedly true. I knew them firsthand. For we had lost peasants, servants, and on occasion a visitor or two in the dark hollows of the swamp. Indeed, a band of visitors—a party of five dwarves from Garnet who came to visit Father the summer I was seven—had reached the far edge of the swamp when they decided to lie down and pass the evening in safety before continuing a journey they figured would be too dangerous in the dark. They awoke the next morning to find themselves surrounded by swamp, which had reached out to cover them in the night.
Two of their party were missing, and though Father combed the outskirts of the swamp that afternoon and again the following morning, combed it with servants and torches and dogs and shouting, we never heard what befell those dwarves, nor anyone else who strayed into the swamp and lost his way.
Such events brought about healthy respect, even a fear, for the green swath Gileandos had marked on the map in his study, the spot he enlarged every spring as the marsh swallowed the countryside.
That night we slept fitfully. Several times I woke to see Bayard pacing at the edge of the clearing and at the edge of the light from our small fire, his hands clasped behind him as though they were tied together. There were no stars visible beneath this canopy of leaves and vines, so the night was dark without and within.
After finally getting to sleep in the early morning, I awoke to see Bayard crouching over me, looking down upon me pensively.
“Sir?”
“Galen, if tomorrow brings some form of … severe punishment …”
For a second my spirit soared. I hoped devoutly that my companion’s innate nobility would compel him to bear the weight of that punishment, no matter how severe, and find a sly loophole by which he might send me unscathed back to Father. However, his nobility compelled him toward other things.
“If that severe punishment does come, I shall rest easily knowing you did not misunderstand something I said.”
“Yes, sir?”
“About the Lady Enid.” He slowly began to stand.
“About your betrothed, sir?”
“Yes. And that’s it. For you see, the Lady Enid isn’t really my betrothed.”
“No?”
“I mean, I’m not engaged to the Lady Enid or anything.”
I had been wakened for this?
“But you said you were ‘supposed to marry her.’ ”
“But not engaged,” Bayard emphasized, then turned to face the opposite end of the clearing, where another small fire glowed and where the centaurs still deliberated.
“It’s more like destined.”
I was awakened by a rough jostling. I started to shout to the servant, to Alfric, to whoever it was to begone and leave me until a reasonable time—say, well after noon. But I looked up through the dusky green light into the stern and bearded face of a centaur, and remembered my bearings and my manners.
Bayard stood between Agion and the centaur whose arm had been injured in yesterday’s struggle. My bearded companion fell in behind us as Agion took me by the shoulder, as the injured centaur took Bayard by the back of his tunic, and as we were half-carried, half-led to the opposite end of the long clearing, where judgement awaited.
Our escorts deposited us at the feet of Archala and the other centaurs with whom he had taken counsel.
The fellow whose nose Bayard had bloodied in the scuffle was a herald of some sort. He scowled at us, wiped the blood from his upper lip, and started to speak.
“All things stand against thee,” he proclaimed, in a honking voice transformed, surely, by the sorry state of his nose. I would have found the honking funny, would have laughed, no doubt, had the message been other than that all things stood against me.
“The armor, we fear, is terrible, strong evidence,” he stated. Then he paused, and you could tell by the look on his face that he was delighted that someone who had altered his nose was liable to search and seizure.
“And yet,” the herald continued with what was obviously the bad news for him, “Archala persisteth in the old laws, according to tradition, according to his wisdom. For he saith that thy words arise from an honest heart and countenance unfeigned.”
It galled the others to no end, I could tell, that the jury was still out. Except Agion, who watched the proceedings in admiration from a distance.
“Nonetheless,” brayed the herald, clearly favoring his nose by now, “nonetheless, the question of the satyrs, of thine alliance with the satyrs, troubles us all.”
“No more than it troubles us, Master Archala,” Bayard interrupted, looking past the speaker and addressing the old centaur himself. “Especially since, as I said before, we know nothing of these satyrs or goat-men or whatever you call them. Nor why you suspect our alliance with someone we do not know.”
“I need not be reminded that thou hast spoken to the issue already, Sir Knight,” Archala replied, smiling patiently. “Of course, thou wilt understand why we remain … in doubt of such explanations when among the ranks of the satyrs—indeed, in a position of command as we saw it across lines of raised weapons—rode a knight dressed in the very armor thou carried upon thy pack mare when first we met thee on the road.”
Bayard started to protest, but Archala raised his enormous hand, signaled for silence, and continued.
“But thine armor was stolen. As thou sayest. It was away from thee briefly. As thou sayest. Within which time, of course, the thief could have taken up with our enemies.
“As thy story would have us believe. Surely, Sir Knight, thou canst see why I refuse to hang the fate of my people on the breezes. Still, our verdict as to thy guilt or innocence awaits the test of seven days and seven nights, during which thou shalt stay with us, under our watchful eyes and guard. Perhaps by then we shall see how thy presence within our midst affects the satyrs.”
Well, Archala’s judgement pleased no one.
The centaurs stood behind Archala, obviously more than ready to grab us by the ankles and find the nearest source of water. I’d have bet a fortune that Agion would be our guard, as nobody else wanted the job.
Bayard was sure we would be found innocent, for the simple and foolish reason that we were innocent. Naturally, he was furious at the delay, for the tournament at Castle di Caela began in scarcely more than two weeks’ time, and any suitor absent from opening ceremonies … well, one doesn’t stand up a rich man’s daughter.
Even so, I admit I was surprised—even though nobody else was—when Bayard offered to mediate between centaur and satyr.
“Mediate?”
Archala blustered at the offer, that wise and tolerant smile gone almost immediately, replaced by one I didn’t like nearly as well. “I suppose thou wouldst want to negotiate a peace settlement with them?” he added ironically.
“In fact, sire,” Bayard responded, “a peace settlement may not be possible without you. Perhaps I could set the groundwork—a temporary truce, for instance—and then you and your counsel, and the leader of the satyrs and his counsel, might meet in a neutral spot …”
“Archala, we have respected the old ways quite long and quite faithfully,” the herald interrupted, his nasal voice suddenly brittle and cold. “If thou hast designs …”
But Archala raised his knotted hand, and the clearing was once again silent.
“Surely thou art not so foolish,” the old centaur began, addressing Bayard, but then stopped, turned slowly away from us, muttering strangely to himself.
Bayard and I glanced at one another in puzzlement. Bayard started to speak, to ask what was troubling Archala, or so I suppose.
But it was at that time that Agion offered to guide us to the camp of the satyrs—as “an emissary of peace,” he claimed, adding, too, that he believed Bayard’s story.
Archala ceased muttering and stared at the big innocent.
“But that is just what the Solamnic wants, Archala,” the herald bleated. “An escort to his own lines and to safety!”
“But what if I’m telling the truth, Archala?” Bayard implored. He had no intention of missing the tournament.
Archala thought about it.
“Leave the boy with us, Solamnic,” urged the herald, “as surety of thy good intentions.”
“Absolutely not!” Bayard exclaimed. “This is my squire, and as such he belongs with me, not with you as hostage to your fears and mistrust.”
The herald snorted and bristled, but Bayard stood his ground. A half-smile spread over his face, and he regarded the huge and menacing creature with an indifference that danced on the edge of contempt.
For a long time nobody spoke. Something shrieked far back in the swamp—a small animal, a bird perhaps—and the pools around the clearing rippled as even smaller creatures sought safety in the waters and the deep mud.
Then, Archala raised his russet arms and nodded at Bayard. The herald sputtered, but an icy glance from the old centaur stilled his clamor.
But for the life of me, I could not find a way out of the proposition as they set me on Agion’s back and the two of us rode beside Bayard and Valorous out of the clearing, in search of the satyrs, the light becoming greener and greener around us until even my hands looked like leaves.
Behind us the vines were reclaiming the trail.