Барб Хенди - Of Truth and Beasts

Chuillyon should have paid more attention to the fact that she’d trekked all over the eastern continent—even to one of the highest points in the world there. She was hardier and more tenacious than anticipated, and that admittance embarrassed him.

Shâodh crouched next to Hannâschi. “It is dwarven? You are certain?”

“Yes,” she answered. “Not a trace of mortar was used.”

His brows knitted. “So, they examined these remains and then headed straight south?”

Hannâschi merely nodded.

“Did you hear them say anything?”

“No, this area is too exposed. I could not get close enough, even by bending light and shadow.”

Through all of this, Chuillyon remained silent. Shâodh looked up at him, a slight touch of disgust in his usually stoic expression.

Shâodh’s demeanor was becoming an issue—not that Chuillyon entirely blamed him. The young one was loyal to the Order of Chârmun and to the guild. When given a clear mission, he would do anything to succeed. But they had no clear mission here except to tag along in secret without a known destination or ultimate purpose.

Only Chuillyon could feel the desperate importance of following Wynn, of finding out what she sought. That blind purpose had sunk into the core of his old bones. His fears of failing were not something he cared to verbalize for Shâodh. For now, he required assistance and obedience, and nothing less.

Hannâschi stood up. Back home, she often chided him for his methods. Out here, she never complained or tried to get him to explain their current purpose. But she was exhausted, and he knew it.

“On to the foothills?” she asked. “Once they are forced to go on foot, I might be able to get closer.”

Chuillyon nodded once, and Shâodh looked away.

With little choice, Chane spent the entire night helping Wynn search for some hidden entrance to a passage beneath the mountains.

To his silent relief, they found nothing.

He preferred that she head into the open range, aboveground, where he could better protect her. Let her look for the “fallen mountain” among hundreds of other peaks until she finally gave up and let him take her back into civilization.

Less than an eighth night before dawn, Wynn called a halt for the night, and they returned to their camp. After a meal of boiled oats, she sat near the fire and began repeating a ritual Chane had observed her doing more and more in her scant spare moments along this journey.

She and Shade would sit by the fire, and Wynn would open two or three worn, shabby journals. She placed them on the ground, and then opened a newer one directly in front of her. She would glance at pages of the old ones, write in the new one, and then close her eyes and touch Shade.

Once, he had summoned the courage to ask what she was doing. She had shifted uncomfortably and told him she was simply reorganizing her notes. His feelings toward her journals were so mixed that he did not press the point.

In nights past, Chane had recognized several of the shabby journals she copied from ... because he had read them. In essence, these were also copies. Wynn told him she had recreated some journals from memory after a number of them were lost in a snowstorm during her journeys with Magiere, Leesil, and Chap. One of their packhorses had been dragged over a cliff by a snowslide.

Of course, upon returning to Calm Seatt, she had lost all her journals, recreated or otherwise, to her superiors for the better part of a year. Now that she had them back again, she seemed to be using spare moments to recopy them yet again. Chane wondered why.

Tonight, Wynn had two journals that seemed even older lying on the ground. Their covers were faded blue. He had seen them in Wynn’s small stack but had not read these. She also had a faded brown one lying open that he had read. It was the one that covered her encounter with Vordana in Pudúrlatsat, when Chane had saved her from the undead sorcerer. The omission of his name in that particular journal still hurt him.

Chane moved toward her, as if to walk past. Wynn instantly took her hand off Shade, picked up the aged blue journals, and closed them.

“What are those?” he asked casually, as if they did not matter.

“Some older notes. When I was in Stravina with Magiere and Leesil, I managed to send Domin Tilswith a few journals before the rest were lost. He returned them to me later. I’m just copying and reorganizing.”

Same excuse. She appeared to be doing a lot of copying these days, but he did not press her.

“I am going hunting,” he said. “Shade can stay with you.”

She nodded, but waited until he walked away before resuming her task.

Chane did not go hunting. Instead, he slipped into the shadows of a small outcrop and stood there, hidden and watching her. Again, she laid out the three old journals. She would glance at them, write briefly in the new journal, and then close her eyes and touch Shade.

After a while, she was turning pages of the old journals faster than the newer one. As little as she wrote, she was writing less and less as she went on.

Suddenly, she turned the final pages of the two blue journals, and then the final page of the brown one he had read. She touched Shade for a long moment, sat straight, and sighed as if in relief.

“All right. I think that’s it—we’re done.”

Wynn stroked the dog’s ears and slipped the new journal into her pack, which rested a few paces from the fire. And then, to Chane’s shock, she picked up all three of the old journals and dropped them in the fire.

He wanted to shout at her to stop, but he braced himself to keep from running forward and kicking the journals out of the fire. Mixed feelings or not, those were her scholarly accounts! She could not have fit the contents of all three into the new journal now stored in her pack.

Chane did not know what to do and kept fighting his instincts to rush forward.

“Wynn, can you see to the horses?” Ore-Locks called out. “I will look for more firewood.”

“Of course,” she called back, and with one last look at the now smoldering journals, she walked away.

Chane waited only an instant more, until she was out in front of the wagon, where she could not see him. He dashed out of the shadows and grabbed the journals out of the fire, quietly stomping out their smoldering edges. Since he had already read the brown one, he quickly opened the blue ones—the oldest ones.

To his astonishment, he found numerous references to himself as he flipped through the pages. He was lost in trying to wrap his thoughts around this revelation.

Looking up, making sure she was still off with the horses, he quickly retrieved the new journal she had shoved in her pack. When he opened it, he found that he could not read it at all.

The symbols were dense, more complex than anything he had seen before written in the Begaine syllabary. The few he could discern by slowly deconstructing their combined letters and marks made no sense to him at all. Wynn had filled very few pages with these symbols, as if she had written condensed, encrypted notes—intentionally difficult to read.

Chane tucked the journal back into her pack, exactly as he had found it, and pondered this puzzle.

In her earliest work, she had included the stories of his involvement with her. Then, in her first rewrites, she had omitted him for some reason. Now that she was boiling all her journals down to encrypted notes—and far too few to hold all that she had originally recorded—she was burning anything readable.

He heard her humming, a little off-key, as she finished with the horses. She would return soon. A part of him desperately wanted to keep the three singed journals. The thought of a sage, his Wynn, destroying knowledge was like witnessing a fall from grace by one who truly mattered in this world. The thought of these journals burning felt like one of the last of Wynn’s connections to scholarly pursuits would turn to smoke and ash.