Glass Thorns - Elsewhens (Book Two) by Melanie Rawn

Author:Melanie Rawn [Rawn, Melanie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Fantasy, General
ISBN: 9781781166635
Google: mFi_BgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Titan Books Limited
Published: 2013-02-19T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

Even if Mieka had been able to phrase the questions, there was no one to ask about the happenings of the night. There was no sign of the old man the next day. (“Kin”?) Neither Fairwalk nor Wordturner remembered a thing. The little man with the silver badge scurried the other way when he saw Mieka coming. And the expression in Cade’s gray eyes discouraged conversation. If not for his bumps and bruises from that wild retreat back down the steps, Mieka might have thought he’d dreamed the whole thing while under the influence of some especially cryptic variety of thorn concocted by Auntie Brishen.

But he hadn’t dreamed it.

He would remember those screams until his dying day.

Whatever those water-things were, there was no suggestion that they even existed by daylight. They might have been taken someplace for a feed, or mayhap they were sleeping. And there would be no chance to investigate further tonight, even if he’d been able to gather the courage to do so, for the passengers and all their belongings were loaded into coaches for the last part of the journey to Gref Jyziero.

In a way, he was relieved. Thinking of those things plunging through the river current, dragging the barges behind them—it gave him the weirds. As much as he tried to tell himself it was no different, really, from horses hitched to a carriage, he knew it was very different. He didn’t know quite how, but it was. Cayden would probably have been able to explain it. But Cayden wasn’t talking. For the whole long, jostled, cramped, miserable journey, Cade didn’t say much of anything to anybody.

During the next four days it was like being back on the Winterly. They were rousted out of bed at dawn, chivvied into the coaches, allowed out at lunching, and repacked until dusk. Then they ate dinner, got sorted into beds at taverns or inns (in the Archduke’s case, the nicest house in whatever town or village was privileged to host the delegation), and did it all again on the morrow. Through it all, Cade took refuge in books, thought, and gazing silently out the window. Never much of a reader, Mieka had long since discovered that attempting it while in a moving coach made him sick to his stomach. All the things he could think of to think about were annoying, upsetting, or depressing. And once he’d seen one lakelet, manor house, grove of trees, or glimpse of distant mountains, he’d seen them all.

Besides, this place made him jittery. It was too big. The river was too wide. The fields were too vast and the trees were too tall. It was all familiar, even the mountains, but on a scale that unnerved him. The roads stretched out to infinity and the sky was just too damned blue. He reminded himself time and again that he ought to be collecting impressions to use as backdrops for future plays, but he couldn’t keep his mind on his work, either.

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