The Seventy-Ninth Prince by Patricia White

Author:Patricia White
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Fiction Works
Published: 2012-08-16T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

A cold wind began harrying them shortly after noon. It was soon joined by clouds, dark, cold-looking clouds that threatened rain or snow. The fruits of the berry vines and nut trees were left behind, along with the green of sheltering trees. Heads bent, they trudged doggedly onward through a grayish, dusty, stone-hard land. They stopped only briefly when they sighted the cluster of grave mounds—each marked with its broken arm band and a gleaming crown.

“Nine more. What killed them? Do you think it was the Renegade?” Kendal asked, fear giving the final question a hiccup for a punctuation mark.

She wanted to say, “Probably their own idiocy,” but instead she said, “Wild animals, maybe, or bandits, or border guards. Who knows. The flood drove people out of their homes and into the wilds. The must be lots of desperate men hiding in these hills.”

The words were in her mouth, but Molly had enough sense and grace to stop before she added, “And some of those people worship other gods. Gods who like a little outlander blood mixed in with the prayers and petitions.”

“Oh,” he said, moving a little closer to her as they walked on. It was a long time before he asked, “Are you afraid?”

“Not of outlaws,” she answered.

“Of him then? Of Talon?”

Sighing, she nodded, but it wasn’t entirely true. She wasn’t exactly afraid of the wizard. She was far more afraid of the promise she had made, the promise to give the silver-and-ebony rod to the Renegade, and then to kill him. Even the thought made her stomach lurch, bile come up into her mouth, and her dirty hands tremble on the rowan staff. The magical object she was using for a walking stick.

The Seventy-Ninth Prince sighed in turn, but there was nothing more to be said. They walked on in cold, gray, wind-whipped silence until late afternoon, until the path they were following ended at the brink of a steep-walled, yawning abyss. The bottom, if there actually was one, was hidden in thick, blue-black shadows, and the far side was nearly lost in distance, mist, and cloud.

Shoulders slumped, weariness coming back to claim her, Molly looked at the impassable canyon and wanted to weep. “Damn and blast,” she said.

“We can go around, find another way.”

“No! We have to cross the . the . ” unable to think of an epithet strong enough to express her feelings, Molly sputtered into glowering silence.

“That’s ridiculous. What makes you think this is the only way?”

Reaching into the pocket of her skirt, she pulled out Dynki Wyrde’s magic rod and held it up for his inspection. Hoping Kendal wouldn’t ask how it spoke to her, because she had no real explanation for the whispering in her blood, her bones, the secret places in her soul, she said, “This. It knows the way, and the goddess-damned thing will make certain that we go where it says. Right now, it says we have to cross that . ”

His long, thin face greenish beneath

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