‘Well – I suppose you’re right about that. Only –’
‘I’m really in a bit of a hurry, friend. My nephew and I absolutely must get to Sulturn before the week’s out. Why don’t I just add three of these coins to cover any possible difference in value?’
‘I wouldn’t want to cheat you, ma’am.’ In a very real sense, I’d created the Sendarian character, and now it was coming back to haunt me.
In the end, the honest farmer and I settled for two extra coins, and I became the owner of a mottled grey horse named Squire. The good farmer threw in an almost worn-out saddle, and Geran and I prepared to leave. First, however, I had a talk with Squire, who hadn’t been ridden all winter and who was feeling frisky. I took him – firmly – by the chin and looked straight into his large eyes. ‘Behave yourself, Squire,’ I advised him. ‘Do your prancing and cavorting around on your own time. You really don’t want to make me cross, now do you?’
He seemed to get my point, and after a mile or so of getting used to each other, we settled into a rolling canter that literally ate up the miles.
‘This is much better than walking, Aunt Pol,’ Geran said enthusiastically after a little while. ‘I’ll bet my feet won’t be sore tonight.’
‘No, probably not, but some other part might be.’
Geran and Squire hit it off well almost immediately, and I felt that to be a good thing. The young prince was carrying a heavy load of grief, and his friendship with our horse helped to take his mind off that.
We reached Sulturn in two days, but I bypassed the city and took a room in a village inn rather than one of the more opulent lodging houses in Sulturn itself. I felt that it was safer that way.
We continued on toward the northeast for the next several days, and I spent a fair amount of that time giving Geran instructions in the fine art of being unobtrusive. To further that end, I dyed his characteristic sandy-colored hair black. It was just possible that Ctuchik’s Grolims might know that virtually everybody in the line of Iron-grip and my sister had the same color hair and they’d be looking for blond little boys. I also concealed the tell-tale lock in my own hair with some intricate braiding. If some Grolim happened to be searching for ‘a lady with a white streak in her hair and a sandy-haired little boy’, he’d look right past us.
As we approached Medalia in central Sendaria, the probing thought I kept more or less continually sweeping on ahead of us bore fruit. I caught a flash of that dull black color that identified an Angarak. It wasn’t the glossy black of a Grolim, but at this particular time, I didn’t want to encounter any Angarak, be he Murgo, Nadrak, or Thull.
I nudged Squire into a side road, and Geran and I bypassed Medalia and continued on toward the northeast along the back roads, avoiding Ran Horb’s highways entirely.
All in all, it took us about two weeks to reach Lake Erat. I concealed Geran and Squire in a thicket on the south shore of the lake along about evening, went off a ways, and donned white feathers. I wasn’t going to blunder into anything without looking it over very carefully, and owls have very good eyes in the dark.
The east side of Lake Erat was very sparsely populated in those days, and I soon located all my neighbors. As it turned out, there weren’t any foreigners in the area at that time, so I judged that it’d be safe for us to go through the barrier I’d erected and get inside the protective walls of my house. I flew directly there and advised my rose-bushes that I’d returned and that I’d be very happy if they opened a path for me. Then I went back to fetch my nephew and his horse.
It was almost midnight when Squire waded across the river just to the south of my house, and we rode on up to the edge of the thicket and on along the narrow path the roses had opened for us.
‘It’s a very big house, isn’t it?’ Geran observed a little nervously, ‘but isn’t it awfully dark?’
‘Nobody lives there, Geran,’ I replied.
‘Nobody at all?’
‘Not a soul.’
‘I’ve never lived in a place where there weren’t any other people around, Aunt Pol.’
‘We don’t want other people around, Geran. That was the whole idea.’
‘Well–’ He said it a bit dubiously. The house isn’t haunted, is it, Aunt Pol? I don’t think I’d like to live in a haunted house.’
I didn’t even smile. ‘No, Geran,’ I assured him. ‘The house isn’t haunted. It’s just empty.’
He sighed. ‘I think I’m going to have to learn how to do some things I’m not used to doing,’ he said.
‘Oh? Such as what?’
‘Well, we will need firewood and things like that, won’t we? I’m not good with tools, Aunt Pol,’ he confessed. There were all kinds of servants in grandfather’s citadel, so I never really learned how to use an axe or a shovel or things like that’
‘Look upon it as a chance to learn, Geran. Let’s put Squire in the stable, and then we’ll go inside. I’ll fix us some supper and then we’ll see about some beds.’
‘Anything you say, Aunt Pol.’
We had supper, and then I set up a pair of cots in the kitchen. We could explore the house and choose more suitable quarters in the morning.
The house had been untended for quite a long time, so there were cobwebs in the corners and a thick layer of dust over everything. That was intolerable, of course. Over the years I’d paid occasional visits to my former seat of power and I’d customarily tidied up with a wave of my hand. I decided that this time I’d do it a little differently. My youthful charge had just emerged from a crushing tragedy, and I didn’t want him brooding about it. He needed something to keep his mind – and his hands – busy. Cleaning the house from top to bottom and from one end to the other would probably keep us both out of mischief for quite some time. It would also avoid alerting any stray Grolims to our presence. At that particular time I wasn’t familiar enough with Grolims to know just exactly how skilled they were in the exercise of their talents, so it was better to be a little on the safe side.
I arose just before dawn and started preparing breakfast. My kitchen had been built to feed quite a number of people, so the stoves and ovens were very large. It seemed just a little ridiculous to heat up a stove bigger than a farm wagon just to feed two people, but it was the only stove available, so I laid in the kindling and piled on firewood that had lain in the wood-box for generations. Geran had been right about one thing, it appeared. He was going to be spending a lot of time chopping wood.