Chapter 25: Silver Crag

The next few hours saw them take their leave of the arid plains. The winds weakened and were no longer as harshly desiccating, while the plants had turned brighter shades of green, unlike their drab pale cousins that dominated in the area around Utha.

By lunchtime, they had reached a literal break in the landscape, a gash in the ground a hundred feet wide and scrawling jaggedly through the earth in each direction as far as the eye could see. On the other side, grasses as tall as their knee grew amongst a network of rivulets that all threw themselves off the cliffside and into the chasm below. In the distance to either side of them, two larger rivers met the same fate. The whole scene was bathed in the soothing sound of falling water, though nothing could sooth Miro’s feelings about the bridge that was slung over the precipice – wide enough for a horse cart, though he was dubious about whether it was strong enough.

“On the other side lie the lowlands of the Deep Scar Mountains, though we won’t see the range itself for a few more days still,” Nydra said. “This is where all the water that comes from the Mountains through the Lowlands drains, which is why the arid plains are so dry. It goes through unseen underground tunnels and comes up a more than a hundred miles west, and forms the Lake Country.”

Miro paid little attention to the geography lesson, wondering what the point of the knowledge was if he was about to lose it all, along with the brain that contained it, into the darkness below.

Nydra must have noticed Miro’s gaze. “Oh, don’t worry about that thing. Sixteen years ago, I charged across it on horseback at a whole squadron of rebel soldiers desperate to cut us down from the other side, while your father pulled in a wall of water from behind them, knocking some of them off the cliffside.”

There was a sparkle in Nydra’s eyes as she said this, and the smile on her face told him that she was fondly imagining the scene play out across this bridge right now. Miro, on the other hand, focused on the part where she’d had a horse, a luxury that he was denied and that his legs had been grumbling about for days. First thing he would do when he would get far enough away from them that they would find it impossible to track him, would be to lie down without moving for two days straight.

Once they were crossing it, Miro realized that the most terrifying part about the bridge was not its shaky suspension ropes, or that every fourth or fifth plank was rotted through, or even the possibility that the damage it sustained in the skirmish sixteen years ago might have long-term effects on its safety, but rather that for this short hundred-foot stretch, he was retracing the steps of his father exactly; steps that eventually led to his father’s death and nearly to the death of the King himself. And Miro did not have a wall of water with which to protect anyone.

Trees were even scarcer in the Lowlands than they were on the arid plains, where soil was at least plentiful. In the Lowlands, the ground was mostly rocky, so most of the plant life were grasses growing between the stones and stands of shrub growing just taller than a person. Grazing livestock reigned here, including a four-legged creature with a tall neck that was covered in more wool than Miro had ever seen on a sheep. They looked so soft that he was tempted to run off and dive head-first into one of the animals. Any swaths of fertile land, which mostly appeared on the windward side of rising rock formations and along rivers, were crowded with rich green farms that sometimes climbed up terraced hills.

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Nydra had been right – by the end of the day’s journey, there was no sign of the Deep Scar Mountains on the eastern horizon. Their rest stop however was a town by the name of Silver Crag, which meant an inn, which meant having his own room, and which meant potentially exiting that room unseen in the middle of the night.

Not being particularly versed in the art of being inconspicuous, Miro’s attempts at pulling the wool over Bondook’s eyes had invariably ended in similar disasters to the chopping wood fiasco on his last day of living with his guardian. For this reason, it took Miro a while to settle on which approach to dinner was going to be more likely to cloak his plans to escape – acting like there was nothing at all the matter, or brooding in a corner like he truly wanted to do.

When their food had arrived, Miro took his plate and got up from the table. Only Nydra bothered to ask him where he was headed.

“If it’s okay, I’m going to eat by the fireplace. I don’t know if it’s the arid plains or Hima’s helpful life lesson yesterday, but I need to thaw myself.” There was little fibbing to this – he had been feeling miserable inside and out. It wasn’t that the arid plains were exceptionally cold, but the constant wind made it feel like the chilly air penetrated through to the core of his bones, and only a concerted effort could possibly make him feel warm again. Either that, or it was that Hima had encased him in a block of ice and now he was still slowly dying because she’d given his internal organs frostbite. Either way, simply being a fire mage had apparently given him no actually ability to stay warm, so the only proper treatment seemed to be the fire in the hearth.

He tried eavesdropping on his travelling companions’ conversation from his spot, but the din of the inn’s tavern was too loud, and in any case, things didn’t seem any livelier there than when Miro sat with them.

“You coming up?” Nydra asked as the three of them got up while the inn tavern was still busy with customers. “We have an early morning tomorrow,” she added, as if every one of their mornings wasn’t early and Miro needed a special reminder.

“I think I’ll just hang back for a bit.”

Hima spoke something under her breath by Nydra’s side, not a whisper necessarily, but the words were not loud enough to reach Miro.

“Actually, it may be safest for you if you turn in now. We don’t know much about this town, so, just in case.”

If Miro could appreciate anything, it was Nydra’s quick thinking to blame her overprotectiveness on a town that looked about as boring as a boiled turnip. She’d likely been through here sixteen years earlier and knew it well enough. What Hima knew though, was Miro’s seemingly natural ability to find trouble in the most innocuous of places.

“Fine,” he said with a sigh and got up to follow them to their rooms upstairs. Another thing he’d come to appreciate was that despite being told to keep a low profile, they had at least been given a sizable purse, which meant he would have his own room. It seemed to him then that the hardest part of the plan would be to not accidentally sleep through the night until morning and miss his chance to slip away under the cover of darkness.

He grumbled a “goodnight” to the rest of them, prompting a quick concerned look from Nydra, and closed the door behind him. The mattress called to him. They hadn’t stayed inside a dwelling since leaving Sgobor’s homestead – proper shelter sparse on the road through the arid plains and never coinciding with the natural breaks in their trek. Miro sat down on the edge of the bed, sinking into the straw. The blanket looked thicker than his sleeping sack. Maybe if he were to lie down for just a minute. No, that would be a bad idea, so he got up and paced in the corner of the room furthest away from the bed.