Richard Baker - Swordmage

Darsi let her hands slide inside his robes and caressed him. “I interrupted your bath. The least I can do is to help you finish it.”

13 Ches, the Year of the Ageless One

Since it was still early when Geran, Kara, and Hamil returned to Griffonwatch, they sent to the kitchens for a small sack of food to take with them. They returned the buggy to its house and the horse team to the livery, since no roads led up into the Highfells, and the few tracks that did wind up into the hills and moors were far too difficult for a wagon or carriage. Instead they chose horses from the Shieldsworn stables and saddled their mounts. Kara kept a horse of her own in Griffonwatch, a big roan mare named Dancer that she’d trained for years. Geran chose a strong bay gelding, and for Hamil they found a small, sure-footed mare. Halflings generally found ponies better suited to them than horses, but Hamil had spent enough time around the larger animals to handle them easily enough despite his small stature.

An hour before noon they set off again. This time, instead of turning at the Burned Bridge, they followed the Vale Road north from Hulburg, keeping on the right bank of the Winterspear. The river was shallow and swift, rushing over a stony bed in a broad, braided stream that narrowed quickly as they headed inland. Farms clustered close by the southern end of the valley amid stands of birch and ash, but as they continued northward the farms grew fewer and farther between.

About three miles from Griffonwatch, the road passed through an old ditch-and-berm of earth, now grassy and overgrown. “Lendon’s Dike,” Geran told Hamil. “My grandfather raised it more than fifty years ago, back when orc raids in the Winterspear Vale were common.” He pointed toward the far side of the vale. “Lake Hul lies under the western hills there, so the earthworks run less than two miles.”

Hamil studied the old fortifications. “Seem to have had little use of late.”

Geran nodded. “Orcs haven’t come into the Winterspear Vale in numbers since my father was a young man. The Highfells make for good walls.”

A short distance beyond the old dike, Kara turned eastward along a cart track that ran past the long fieldstone cowsheds and hay cribs of an old dairy farm. The track petered out into a footpath and began to climb steeply up the side of the valley. Trees and brush thinned out quickly as they gained height, and soon they were picking their way through the steep meadows and mossy rock outcroppings of the hilltop. From their vantage they could see the broad path of the Winterspear all the way to Hulburg’s distant rooftops. Then they crossed over the crest, and they were in the Highfells proper. To the north a long line of low gray downs stretched off until they simply melted into the distance; eastward the rolling downs marched for miles until they began to climb up to meet the wooded ramparts of the Galena Mountains, perhaps twenty miles distant.

Raw, blustery wind whistled through the grass and heather, pushing the brush first one way and then the other. The sky was blue and cloudless, marked only by a distant earthmote drifting aimlessly against the wind. Hamil surveyed the view. “This is the so-called Great Gray Land of Thar? There doesn’t seem to be much to see.”

“Here, near the Moonsea, the moorlands break up into the steep glens and valleys that we call the Highfells,” Kara answered him. The wind blew her hair into her face, but she shook it off, paying no attention to the raw cold. “But if you ride a few more miles north or west of here, yes, you’d be in Thar.”

“How far does it run?” the halfling asked.

“From here west to the Dragonspine Mountains and the Ride beyond, close to two hundred miles.” Kara turned and pointed off to their right, where the mountains fenced the horizon. “To the mountains, not more than another twenty miles or so. Vaasa’s about seventy miles east of us, on the other side of the Galenas.”

Hamil waved his hand at the downs ahead. “And to the north?”

“For the most part, more of the same until you reach Glister, a hundred and fifty miles away,” Geran said. “There’s a shifting stretch of dangerous Spellplague-riddled changeland in the middle of the moor, and a couple of days’ ride past Glister there is a much wider stretch of changeland that runs for hundreds and hundreds of miles. All sorts of plaguechanged monsters roam those lands, and sometimes they come down into Thar. No one I know of has ever found out what might be north of that, but sooner or later I imagine you would run into the Great Glacier and snows that never melt.”

“And no one lives up here?”

“None but orcs and ogres, and their tribes generally keep to the northerly parts of the moorland,” Geran answered. “Shepherds and goatherds graze their flocks up here in the summertime, but other than that, the land’s not good for much. The soil’s thin and poor and doesn’t drain well. You’ll want to be careful of your mount-this isn’t good ground, and there are a thousand places where a horse can snap its ankle.”

The halfling silently absorbed the view for a moment. Geran could guess what he was thinking; the idea of so much land that was so wide, so open, and yet so desolate was likely foreign to his experience. Hamil had grown up in the warm forests south of the Sea of Shining Stars; the Moonsea’s northern shores must have seemed like the very end of the world to him. For his own part, Geran found the cold, clean air and long views bracing. It was a hard land, to be sure, but it was a simple land. The complexities and confusion of life held less of a grip on his spirit here.

He glanced over to Kara. Since her thirteenth summer, the summer when her spellscar had manifested itself, she’d found a refuge up in those barren and lonely places. Geran and Jarad used to come to the Highfells to savor the independence and freedom the wild country offered. But Kara had taken to spending as much time as she could in the wild land around Hulburg simply because there was no one there to shy away from the deformity of her spellscar. He’d long since learned that Kara’s spellscar was not dangerous, but all too many people around Hulburg-or any place, really-regarded the spellscarred with fear and suspicion. It didn’t surprise him to see that Kara had continued to seek solitude in the high country in the years that he’d been away from Hulburg.

They continued on, riding more east than north, keeping a cautious pace. No trees grew in the Highfells, of course, but in small hollows or sheltered spots, thick low gorse grew, and sometimes they found small shelters of fieldstone and turf in these places-lodges used by herdsmen in the warmer months. From time to time they came across sudden steep-sided streambeds, narrow and deep, or passed by old cairns and low, rounded barrow mounds. And on one occasion they rode along the rim of a sharp, steep-sided bowl of changeland easily two hundred feet deep, its sides made of glistening blue stone grooved with strange whorls. Geran remembered the place well; one summer afternoon in his fifteenth year, he and Jarad had explored the sinkhole by roping themselves down to its floor, only to find that its lower reaches were honeycombed by crevices where repulsive, silver-winged eel-like creatures laired. They’d had to climb back up with smoking torches clutched in their hands to keep the nasty things from chewing them to pieces.

Another half-hour brought them to the edge of a barrow field, a wide expanse of small burial mounds. The southern borders of Thar were strewn with the ancient tombs left behind by people long since lost to history. Hundreds of the mounds lay within a day’s ride of Hulburg. Sometimes dozens stood together within a few hundred yards of each other, and sometimes a single barrow stood all by itself, a dismal and lonely sentinel on the open downs. Geran had never learned why that was so.