Straying From the Path
“Thank you, Your Highness, but no. The road calls me.”
The Dreamer left the marble chamber, the palace, and found the road leading out of the kingdom. The princess’s grandchildren would hear stories of this day.
Out of sight of the palace, she stopped, folded Falla’s skin, magically tanned and cured, and tucked it deep in her rucksack. Also in the sack: a change of clothes—skirt, shirt, tunic, and stockings; a wool blanket for sleeping; a water skin and some travel fare; and a book of poetry and ballads, a last gift from her father. She loved books.
She walked with the sack over her shoulder and a straw hat on her head, and became a common traveler, a scholar on the road between libraries. The librarian’s daughter.
Years ago, when she still lived with her father, a librarian to the King of a now distant realm, Elsa used to sneak into the royal stables after supper to feed carrots to the horses. She went in the evenings, when the place was quiet, after the animals had been fed and the grooms were away eating their own suppers. The grooms didn’t like her disturbing the royals steeds.
Her favorite was the spotted mare, the familiar of the King’s Wizard. She looked like a court jester, brown spots of all shapes and sizes splashed over her white coat. After the first time Elsa gave her a carrot, Falla always waited for her, head leaned as far out over the door t
o her stall as she could manage. After such a greeting, how could Elsa stay away? Falla let Elsa scratch her neck, her ears, the spot between her ears, where she couldn’t scratch herself. The mare sighed and let her lips quiver with pleasure. When Elsa looked into the mare’s large dark eyes, to try and learn what the animal was thinking, Falla rested her muzzle on Elsa’s shoulder and breathed warm air on her neck. And Elsa, tears in her eyes, thought: How wonderful to have this large, warm creature trust me.
For ten years now, since she was fifteen, Elsa traveled where the roads led her and did not mind the way. She appeared at the front gates of castles, palaces, cathedrals and guild halls when she was needed, as if she’d been called. Sometimes, messengers on winded horses found her, begged her to come with them even as they panted for breath. Life or death might depend on the dreams she had when she wore Falla’s skin.
Sometimes, though, she lived for herself. She went to Brewersville for its festival because she wanted a mug of fresh cider.
Anonymously, she bought her mug from a vendor set up with a dozen other tents and stalls in the large field outside the town. Musicians played, local folk who brought out their instruments perhaps twice a year, but made twice as merry because of that. In the center of the ring of wood and canvas merchant stalls, a crowd danced the ground to dust. She took her cider to a quiet spot, a tree with a view of the crowd but outside the paths of travel, outside notice. She sat with her back to its trunk, her pack at her feet, and rested.
She had begun to find it difficult to talk to people.
She would go the whole day without speaking to another soul, except to say thanks to the folk who sold her food and drink. She’d leave the town before nightfall, sleep on the open road, far from people. The music drew her, but she couldn’t bring herself to join the dance. She wasn’t sure she could open her mouth without prophesying, even to laugh with the crowd.
“A pretty girl like you should be smiling on a festival day.”
The figure spoke as he moved to block her view of the field. He might have stepped out of a ballad in the book, he looked so much the part of a rogue. Young, he had just a shadow of a beard and short, dark hair, a firm jaw and cocky half-grin. Worn leather boots contrasted with fine leather breeches dyed gray, and a leather jerkin opened over a loose linen shirt. He wore a knife at his belt, a pouch over his shoulder, and stood with his arms crossed, considering her.
Dumbly, she stared. She stood apart, a seeress, a legend, and she had long since stopped thinking of herself as anything like pretty.
“Tell me, what is the matter?”
She had to remember words and took a deep breath before speaking. “Thinking dark thoughts, I suppose.”
“May I join you?”
“In thinking dark thoughts? How could I stop you?”
He sat beside her in the grass.
“I am Conrad. You are?”
Being flirted at, and the novelty of it startled her. “Elsa.”
“Elsa. Very good to meet you.”
She didn’t have a clue what to say next. She’d spent her childhood in libraries and her young adulthood wandering at the whim of a haunted horse skin.
He rescued her from a confused silence. “Will you dance with me?”
She grinned at him like he’d sprouted mule’s ears. “Do young men always come right up to women and ask them to dance?”
“Yes, they do. You must be from a strange kingdom, if you’ve never before been asked to dance.”
The kingdom Elsa came from was not much different than this one, which was part of the reason she’d stopped here to rest. But the road between this one and that was a long one, and she frowned thinking of it.
Sensing the change in her mood, Conrad urged more gently. “Come, dance. Just a round or two. It will distract you from your troubles, whatever they are.”
He stood with a noble flourish, bowing as he offered his hand. His eyes were alight. His smile seemed honest. Elsa took his hand, and suddenly could not remember the last time she’d touched another living creature. She’d missed the warmth, the blood.