Metamancer: Book 1 of the Skeltouch Saga by William I Zard

Author:William I Zard [Zard, William I]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9798988663171
Publisher: Zmancy Books
Published: 2023-07-25T04:00:00+00:00

4.9

Brother

The next three days rained, and there was nothing for Johnny to do but hang around the house. It was hard not to mope. He spent some time doing chores and helping Al just to keep busy. Try as he might, he could not avoid his fear that somehow it was Alfyra who had been caught. He was always jumpy and tense and not very pleasant company. Several times he had to apologize for snapping at people. Luckily, they all assumed he was upset about the situation with Master Percy. And he would have been, but all he could think about was the possibility that Alfyra had been captured. He knew there was no reason to believe it was her. She was not the only elf in the woods. In fact, according to her, there were a few hundred elves, but he still could not stop his fear from gnawing at his gut.

On the morning of the sixth day after he was expelled by Master Percy, Johnny woke early. The sun was just barely causing a glow in the east, and the stars still shown clearly overhead. It was a cold day with a northwest wind that made the tree branches sway, but thankfully it was not rainy. He quietly dressed in a warm tunic and wool-lined breeches. He was ready to go before the sun made it over the horizon.

“Too soon,” he whispered quietly to himself. “I don’t want to make this trip seem any different from previous trips into the woods.”

Now that he could go into the woods any time, he didn’t want the established pattern to stand out. To disguise this trip, during which he hoped to meet Alfyra, he had spent the day before yesterday in the woods, even though there was no hope of meeting Alfyra.

Although he hadn’t slept well, he was way too anxious to go back to bed, so he pulled a chair up to his window and spent the more than half of an hour watching the sun rise. He normally left just as the sun rose, and that pattern he would keep consistent so that this day seemed no different from any other, should his parents hear him leaving.

After leaving at the normal time, Johnny was extra careful to leave as few tracks as possible and made sure to move silently at all times. Tensions might be high among the elves too. At one point he heard someone coming up the trail. Absolutely silently, he ducked off the road and hid behind a fallen log. The man had jingling traps dangling from his pack and pelts of several large fur weasels hanging off one side, obviously too fresh to be packed away yet. The trapper passed by him, entirely unaware of his presence.

To further obscure his track, he also made some false turns onto other routes and then left the trail and doubled back wherever he could do so without leaving a trace. He hoped that even an elf would have trouble following his trail.

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