Chapter 5: The Road North

Miro awoke to a boot nudging him in the side, which was a far better alternative than a bear sizing him up for a quick meal, so he had little choice but to count his blessings. Breakfast was as predictable as it was disappointing and accomplished the impossible task of making him long for Bondook’s cooking.

In the bluish dawn light, he could better appreciate the beauty of the forest. Majestic conifers stretched into the sky over a floor of pine needles and moss and at least five different birdsongs reached his ears from unseen vocalists hiding in the branches above. All in all, it was an idyllic scene if he ignored the mana-cles that bound his hands together and silenced a core part of him, while his captors ate something that no human being should have considered to be food in preparation to continue to drag him somewhere they refused to elaborate on. Yes, Miro decided, he definitely missed Bondook more than he ever thought was possible.

He was partly vindicated when the riders realized that now that Miro had limited arm movement, he was that much more useless when it came to mounting a horse. It took both of them some grunting, pulling and pushing to get him up into the saddle. Once up, Miro looked down, assessed the height and the softness of the needles, and caused himself to slide off the horse and drop like a sack of potatoes onto the ground. The fall knocked the wind out of him completely, and there was a moment where he thought he might not be able to inhale a proper lungful ever again, but seeing the look on their faces as they stood over him made it worth it.

They repeated the little song and dance of getting him up there a second time. His left side, shoulder and hip were sore, but he had one whole unscathed side remaining. This time he waited for them to mount their horses too, and just as they were about to ride out, he closed his eyes, shifted his weight to the right, and dropped again. This time, there had been a rock under his thigh, and he groaned when he landed, eliciting no sympathy from the riders. Instead, the woman ground her teeth, and pulled out her sword halfway out of its scabbard.

“If you think you’re in pain now, then wait until you see what I can do with this sword,” she said. “Are we going to have any more problems?”

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Miro shook his head, still grimacing from the pain in his leg and was then subjected to his roughest handling yet. Slightly delayed and significantly more annoyed, the riders found the road and resumed their journey through a land that continued to astound Miro with its beauty. Sometimes they would crest a hill and two or three lakes would be visible to him below, each with its own unique shade of blue or green or anything in between. This particular road steered clear of most populated areas, but sometimes Miro would spot an outcropping of houses on the shore, little columns of smoke rising into the air, boats sitting serenely on the water, the figure of a child skipping along a narrow wooden dock. The sun’s golden rays peaked over the mountains, which helped Miro get his bearings a bit better and confirm some of the suspicions he’d harboured since the previous day.

“I may not know much,” he started, breaking the silence for the first time that morning, which made the shoulders of the male rider noticeably sag, “But I know that the Capital lies in a generally westerly direction from my village, and we’ve been mostly riding north with a slight veer to the east. So where, exactly, are we going?”

“Haven’t you heard of the saying?” The rider responded, not bothering to glance back, “The more you know, the less you sleep?”

“Well last night I slept on the forest floor with weevils attempting to make a nest in my right nostril, so I can’t see how I could sleep any worse.”

He was met with a familiar silence and so Miro directed a throaty moist sigh into the back of the rider’s neck.

It was nearing noon when they reached a fork in the road. One path continued to wind near a large lake they’d been straddling the shores of for the last hour, while the other, narrower and darker, would have taken them higher into the mountains. Much to Miro’s dissatisfaction, the horses took the dingier left path.

“Listen, I know that my opinion counts for less than that of the horse’s behind, but why do I have a feeling that we don’t want to be going in this direction?”

At that, the woman up ahead barked a short command and raised her fist, and both horses took off at a considerably faster pace, though well shy of a full gallop.

“Well thanks at least for confirming it.”

“Shh!” So much force was put into that command by the male rider that Miro decided not to even breathe loudly until they were on the other side of the pass.

Miro hoped they were through the worst of it. It had been almost an hour and the terrain started sloping downwards again, though the woods pressed heavily from both sides of the road. On the woman’s command, the horses stopped, breathing heavily as she looked around, her eyes fixed on the trees around them. Miro couldn’t hear anything. Not even the sound of birds. Only a suffocating silence that was broken by a quick hiss from the woman, and both horses took off at full speed.