The Shield of Daqan by David Guymer

Author:David Guymer [Guymer, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: epic fantasy, sword and sorcery, fantasy
ISBN: 9781839080302
Publisher: Aconyte
Published: 2021-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

Part

Three

Chapter Twenty-Six

Andira Runehand

The Whispering Forest, South Kell

The trees grew taller, broader, prouder in the dark green crowns that they wore. Light became a rarer sighting, something smuggled on a gust whenever a breeze distracted their kingly gatekeepers and then taken away just as swiftly. Even the game trails left in the forest floor became narrower the deeper into the forest they went, crowded out by gnarled roots and deep drifts of ancient leaves. The rabbits and small deer that had made the trails showed themselves occasionally, utterly unwary of the spears and arrows of armed men, eyes twinkling in the gloom, before vanishing back into the dense undergrowth. Such trails however, though Andira’s pilgrim-soldiers were neither as light as rabbits nor as nimble as roe, were all that there was to follow. As such they walked in single file, slowly, miserably, every whipping branch drawing blood and every stinging plant finding bare skin.

The Greyfox went first, Sibhard after, then a long snaking file of pilgrim-soldiers, with Andira trailing a few paces behind.

The battle with the Greyfox and her warband had tested her. The night-long pursuit that had ended with the former bandit queen their supposed captive had exhausted them all. But Andira had looked to the sky then and judged it nearly dawn, and insisted they march on until dusk came again. If the Uthuk Y’llan had chosen to move on Kell, now of all times and after so many hundreds of years, then she could only imagine that Baelziffar would soon be readying his own final move.

There had been two nights since then. All of her people were as weary as she was now. Unlike the Greyfox herself.

The elf skipped along the narrow trail, in spite of the rope tying her hands behind her back and the occasional angry tug from Sibhard, leaping over roots, dancing over spider webs, maintaining a constant flow of chatter in at least three languages, as though this was a lark that she had come up with for her own amusement. Her vigor seemed boundless, and certainly not a thing that trifling inconveniences like mistreatment, exertion, or denial of sleep could dampen. Sibhard followed behind her with the attitude of an old man holding onto the lead of an exuberant hound. Too tired to pay as much attention to his own feet as he paid to the elf’s he suffered every cut and sting that the forest meted out to the other pilgrims twice over. With every furtive glimpse of the forest’s wildlife the Greyfox would straighten and pull, startling Sibhard out of whatever brief waking doze he had slipped into, to point and bemoan for the thousandth occasion the cruel destruction of her weapon.

It had been, she would colorfully declaim, a gift from her mother, a rare heirloom of the mysterious Latari no less, and each reprise of the same old back and forth between them brought with it an ever more grandiose and outlandish set of promises for some kind of replacement being offered to her in return.

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