Chapter 5. Journey To Sartheon

We travelled through the night, through the next full day, and arrived at dawn the morning after.

The Greymanes didn’t need rest. They were a northern breed, built for endurance over speed, and the stories said the old kings used to ride them for weeks across the frozen marches without stopping for more than water.

Ours pulled the carriage at a steady pace that never flagged, and the only times we stopped were at checkpoints along the road, where Gowyn stepped out, presented our documentation to whoever was manning the passage, and climbed back in without a word.

Gowyn was polite enough about all of it, but he just wasn’t particularly interested in being here, or in me, or in whatever I was experiencing on my side of the carriage. I could tell. He sat across from me with a book open on his knee, reading by the light of a small mana orb he’d conjured above his shoulder, and he hadn’t initiated a conversation since we left the estate.

He would have answered if I’d asked him things, because I was his charge and he was Aridis, so duty was duty. But there’s a difference between someone who wants to talk to you and someone who will tolerate it, and I’d read enough books about human interaction to recognize which one Gowyn was.

So I kept my mouth shut and watched the world go by.

It was better than every single book Nana Serre had ever brought me combined, and it wasn’t close.

The forests came first. Old ones, dense and enormous, nothing like the tidy rows of cherry trees on the estate grounds. These had trunks so wide they looked like they’d been growing since before the kingdom had a name.

Pale blue and green lights drifted through the undergrowth, pulsing rhythmically like breathing, and the whole forest floor moved with it. Nana’s books had called them wispmoss and said they glowed softly. But I found that statement to be flawed.

They glowed so strong that I could see every root, every fallen branch, every insect crawling across the bark of the nearest tree, all of it washed in blue and green, switching back and forth with each pulse like the forest had its own heartbeat.

I wanted to press my face against the glass forever, but my body had other ideas. Years of enforced sleeping schedules had done their work thoroughly, and when my usual sleeping hour came around, I was out, which was annoying because the scenery didn’t care about my bedtime. But I’d learned a long time ago that fighting the schedule only made me useless the next day, so I pulled my cloak around myself, closed my eyes, and the rocking of the carriage did the rest.

I woke at dawn to a completely different landscape, and that became the best part of the whole journey.

The forests were gone. We were moving through open hills, golden-green in the early light, dotted with tall grey wardstones arranged in circles and lines along the ridges.

A flock of something passed overhead that weren’t birds, exactly, because they had four wings each and left trails of faint silver light behind them as they flew. I sat up straighter and watched them disappear over the hillside, and I reached for the journal I’d been keeping since I was seven.

I opened to a fresh page and wrote down the four-winged birds, the wardstones, the wispmoss, the shape of the hills, the colour of the light. Ah, all of this was so fascinating.

We ate at the regular hours. The carriage had been provisioned with travel rations, meat, bread and a single enchanted canteen of water.

I was eating while watching a river slide past the window, wide enough that I couldn’t see the far bank, and something massive broke the surface near the middle and sank back under without a sound. River monster!

I wrote that down too.

We also passed through a market town where the smell of cooking meat came through the carriage walls and made my stomach fold in on itself. I saw a stone bridge that spoke to us in a grinding voice before it let us cross, and Gowyn leaned out of the window and answered it in a language I didn’t recognize, and I wrote down what the words sounded like phonetically so I could look them up later.

Sometime in the afternoon, the ground on either side of the road became water.

The road itself stayed flat and solid, but everything flanking it was a still, clear sheet no deeper than a few inches, stretching out to the horizon in every direction.

The sky was reflected in it so perfectly that it looked like we were travelling across the surface of the sky itself, the clouds beneath us and above us at the same time, the carriage suspended between two identical heavens.

I could see the Greymanes’ hooves striking the road ahead and the small ripples their steps sent out across the water, and in the distance, shapes moved beneath the surface, slowly drifting like fish but too large and too graceful to be fish.

Spirits. I’d read about them. They were everywhere in the old parts of the world, wherever the barrier between our side and theirs ran thin, and they came in more shapes than anyone had ever managed to catalogue. The general wisdom was to leave them alone unless you were a summoner seeking a contract for their services, because spirits could be generous or cruel depending on their nature, and you didn’t always know which kind you were dealing with until it was too late.

The ones out here, though, the riverlands dwellers, were supposed to be harmless. Friendly, even, if you were kind to them. And they were everywhere once I started looking.

One of them, a wispy thing that looked like a floating scarf with two dark eyes, drifted alongside the carriage for a few minutes, keeping pace just outside my window. I held very still and watched it, and it watched me back, and then it lost interest and floated off into the trees.

I drew as many of them as I could in the journal.

Gowyn didn’t look up for any of them, though. I suspected he’d made this journey before.

I slept again that night at the usual time, and when I woke, it was just before dawn, and the air inside the carriage was different. Buzzing with mana so dense I could feel it prickling against my skin. We’d crossed into Sartheon’s territory while I was asleep. Gowyn’s book was closed on his knee, and he was looking out the window.

The road had widened. Other carriages with different crests were joining from side roads, and we moved in a slow procession through a valley carpeted in purple and white wildflowers. I could see passengers in other carriages leaning out of their windows, looking ahead.

Then the valley curved around a hillside, and I saw it.

Towers against the dawn sky, more than I could count, lit from within by lights that weren’t fire, rising out of the landscape like they’d grown there. Sartheon Academy.

I closed my journal, sat up straight, and felt every hour of sleep I’d gotten settle into my bones like fuel. I was so excited that my hands were shaking slightly against the leather cover of the journal in my lap, but Gowyn was sitting right there, so I kept my face still, my breathing even and looked out the window the way an Aridis was supposed to look at things.

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The carriage rolled on toward the gates.

“Young Lord.”

I looked at Gowyn, who had straightened in his seat, his book tucked away somewhere I hadn’t seen him put it, and his hands were resting on his knees.

“We will be arriving at the gates of Sartheon Academy within the quarter hour. From this point, I would advise you to prepare yourself accordingly.”

My heart was hammering. I could feel it in my throat, in the tips of my fingers, in the soles of my feet against the carriage floor, so I just nodded, because I didn’t trust my voice to come out at the right pitch.

The procession had thickened around us. Carriages bearing house crests I recognized and plenty I didn’t were merging from side roads and falling into a long, slow line that stretched ahead of us along the valley road.

Behind us, more were arriving, the sound of hooves and wheels on stone blending into a low, continuous murmur that filled the morning air.

I could see banners mounted on some of them, bright colours snapping in the breeze, and through the windows of the nearest carriage, a girl about my age with red hair was adjusting her collar while an older woman fussed over her from the opposite seat.

We moved forward in the line for another ten minutes or so before Gowyn leaned toward the window, assessed whatever he saw, and turned back to me.

“From here, we continue on foot.”

The driver brought the Greymanes to a stop. Gowyn opened the carriage door and stepped out first, then held it for me, and I picked up my bag, slung it over my shoulder, and climbed down onto the road.