R. Salvatore - Bastion of Darkness

Brielle’s upraised hand calmed him.

“You know of her?” Bryan asked hopefully.

“With what ye telled me, I can find out more,” the witch explained. “Take yer breakfast alone.” She pointed to the evergreen. “I’ll be back to ye afore the sun crests.” With that, Brielle was gone, disappearing into the brush so quickly that Bryan blinked many times.

He did as she asked, moving to the spruce tree and finding a most delicious meal set out for him, and though he was too worried for Rhiannon to feel hunger, he ate well, realizing that he would soon need all of his strength. And how he marveled at how much of that strength had already returned! As the morning passed, the half-elf began to feel much more himself. His legs soon steadied, his head cleared, and he felt as if he had spent a year at rest, eating well and training easily.

The only things that tempered the near euphoria were thoughts of and fears for Rhiannon, and Bryan knew that if she did not return to him, his health would fly away.

Brielle came back to him late that morning, her face grim, her gait slow and even awkward. Bryan ran up to meet her, took her by the shoulders, then lifted her chin so that she looked him in the eye.

“No,” he breathed.

“She’s not dead,” the witch whispered, seeming so very old suddenly, the twinkle in her green eyes flown away. “But she’s been taken.”

“The wraith?”

Brielle nodded. “And Thalasi, I’m fearing, for me divining telled me that Mitchell put out for Talas-dun, and likely he’s there already.”

Talas-dun. Morgan Thalasi’s black fortress. The name hit Bryan like a heavy stone, a name known by every person in all Aielle, a name synonymous with the deepest terrors and the greatest evil.

Brielle straightened and pulled from Bryan’s supportive grasp. “I canno’ go after her,” the witch said bitterly. “Me magic forbids me leaving Avalon at this dark time, yet how am I to abandon me daughter to the clutches of Morgan Thalasi?”

“I can go out,” Bryan said with a determined growl.

Brielle nodded, for Bryan’s sake not daring to disagree openly, but she understood the futility of it all. The brave young man was no match for Mitchell, let alone Thalasi, and certainly no match for either of them in that dark place, in Talas-dun.

“By all the precepts of me very existence, I canno’ go out from me wood,” the witch said. “For if I did, then suren Thalasi’d come a’calling, and Avalon’d be taken down, and all the world’d know a deeper pain.”

“Deeper than the pain Brielle now feels?”

Her green eyes narrowed as she looked at him, and he understood that, in the witch’s estimation, no pain could be deeper than the one that now tore at her heart.

“You said that I am not in your debt, and though I offer you my sincerest gratitude, I accept that premise,” Bryan said suddenly, taking on haughty tones that surprised the witch, a demeanor she would have expected from one of King Benador’s knightly warders, perhaps, but not from the half-elf.

“And as such, I am not bound here,” Bryan went on. “And so I choose to go, at once.”

“And yer destination?”

“Is my own to pick,” the determined half-elf replied.

“Not so hard to guess,” Brielle said.

“Then if you know me so well, dear Brielle, you know, too, that I must go to the west, to Talas-dun, to the court of Thalasi, to hell itself if need be, in pursuit of Rhiannon.”

“Ye love her,” Brielle stated.

“More than I love my own life,” Bryan replied without hesitation, and the words felt so good as he said them, a confirmation of truth, an admission that he knew he’d have to make again, to Rhiannon.

Brielle spent a long while studying the young half-elf, her perceptive gaze reading his body language, reading his heart. After a few moments, she began to nod slowly. “Ye’re going after her, though I fear ye’ll find the road too dark. I’ll not try to slow ye, though I’m thinking that one who might help might be returning to me soon. And I’ll not try to stop ye, for I know that I could not, not if I showed to ye the truth o’ Talas-dun in all its splendid wickedness.”

“Not if you showed me that I would have to wrestle Thalasi and all his minions bare-handed,” Bryan replied.

“And if ye die?”

Bryan shrugged, as sincere a reply as Brielle could ever have asked for.

“Ye get yer rest, Bryan o’ Corning,” Brielle instructed. “I’ll gather yer sword and armor-I been mending both-and bring them to ye afore the morrow’s cold dawn.”

Bryan’s expression became tentative, and Brielle read it easily. The half-elf feared any more delays, feared leaving Rhiannon in Thalasi’s clutches for a moment longer. “I’m not fighting yer feelings that ye should go off at once,” the witch said. “But know that if ye go unprepared, then ye’ve got no’ a chance o’ e’er seeing the black castle. Ye give me the one night and I’ll help ye, I promise, and I’ll get ye a horse that’ll run swifter than any ye’ve known.”

That last promise quieted any protests from Bryan. “I fear that I have tarried too long already,” he said. “But I trust in your judgment and in your word.” Indeed Bryan did, for he, like everyone else, understood that Avalon’s horses were the greatest in all the world, both in speed and in heart, and it was common knowledge, too, that none could rope or ride such a beast without the blessings of the forest and the lady who guided and guarded it.

In the morning, true to her word, Brielle returned to Bryan leading a small, well-muscled chestnut mare. Saddlebags bulged with supplies, and Bryan’s fine sword was set through a loop on the side of the saddle, his elven-crafted armor and shield strapped atop the seat. When he took down that armor, the young half-elf’s eyes widened indeed, for the mail had been interwoven with ribbon, green, laced with gold thread.

Bryan put a quizzical look over Brielle, who only smiled and nodded, all the assurance the half-elf would ever need.

“Ye’ve got food enough to take ye across the world and back,” the witch explained after helping Bryan to don his armor. “And take heart that yer metal shirt’ll block most any blow,” she added, “excepting, perhaps, the horse-bone mace of the wraith, and I’m not for knowing what terrible weapons Morgan Thalasi will use against ye.”

The value of such a gift from the witch of the wood was not lost on Bryan. He started to bow, then changed his mind, stepped forward and kissed Brielle lightly on the cheek. “I will bring her back to you,” he promised.

Brielle could not speak past the lump in her throat. She reached into her pouch and produced an amulet: an emerald set in silver and hung on a thread of vine. She looped it around the half-elf’s neck, drawing his attention to the green gemstone, turning it up so that it glittered before his eyes.

“Ye know that I’m with ye,” she said cryptically, and let the amulet hang low once more. “Don’t ye ever be forgetting that.”

Bryan nodded and kissed her cheek again, then, without hesitation, he swung up onto the saddle and kicked the mare into a quick canter.

He was out of Avalon soon after, riding hard to the west. That western edge of the forest did not border the rolling green Calvan plains, though, but met with the land of Brogg, the Brown Wastes, the desolation of Thalasi. This was the wildest edge of Avalon’s perimeter, a place untamed, and thus, a place always guarded.

The ever-vigilant rangers of Avalon, watching the lone rider gallop out of the forest, were more than a little confused and suspicious of his passage. Lord Bellerian, father of Belexus, leader of the proud warriors, was back into the deep forest soon after, calling out at the top of his lungs for Brielle. He found her after midday, and was surely relieved to see that she was unharmed. He questioned her about the slender rider, garbed in the fine armor of Lochsilinilume.