Haydon, Elizabeth - Symphony of Ages by Haydon Elizabeth

Author:Haydon, Elizabeth
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf

In one fluid movement that belied her age, the ancient Kith soldier rose, drew, and crossed the threshold to the doorstep of the inn, where foredawn had turned the sky to the smoky gray that signals morning is nigh.

“Halt and declare,” she called sharply into the gloom.

The men were behind her a moment later. They peered through the doorway, drawn as she was, searching the semidarkness for the sound that had summoned her attention.

At the crossroads a horse stood, dancing exhaustedly in place. Atop it a rider, bent with strain, was struggling to remain upright in the saddle.

“Help me,” called an old man’s voice. “I am Brann, from the village of Dry Cove on the northern seacoast at Kyrlan de la Mar. I seek the soldiers of the king.”

“Jarmon, bring me a lantern,” Hector ordered.

He stepped out into the cold gray air, watching closely as the rider slid from his mount, took a wobbly step, then collapsed in the center of the roadway. As the rider dropped, the horse took several steps

away from him, which Hector took to be a sign of its poor training or the rider’s lack of skill. Once he had the lantern in his hand, he signaled to Anais to wait with the boy and the woman, then beckoned to Cantha and Jarmon to follow him.

“What do you want?” he called as he approached.

“I—I seek the soldiers of—the king,” the old man wheezed again.

Hector held up the lantern to better illuminate the man in the roadway. He was human, by the look of him in the shadows, and aged, with white hair that hung around his wrinkled face like dry leaves hanging from a dormant tree.

“I am Hector Monodiere, in the service of His Majesty, Gwylliam, High King of Serendair. What do you seek from me?”

“Your assistance, sir knight,” the man croaked, waving away the water flask that Jarmon held out to him.

“The Sleeping Child is awakening.”

“I well know it. What would you have me do about it?”

The old man’s eyes, bloodshot with exhaustion, held a desperate light that was visible even in the gray foredawn. “There may be a way to contain it—or at least to stem part of the flooding that is sure to come in its wake.”

The three companions exchanged a glance, then Jarmon spat on the ground.

“Madness,” he muttered as Hector reached behind the man’s shoulder and helped him rise. “You rode all the way from the northern coast to tell us this? Why did you not flee with the rest to high ground in the east, or into the High Reaches?”

In the lantern light they could better make out the man’s features. As they had seen a moment before, he was human, dark-eyed and aged, though much of that aging had clearly come from the hardship of life in the northern clime, a rough seascape of rocky beach and heavy surf where only the stoutest of heart continued to ply the rough waters near the Great River’s mouth. He was dressed in the tattered oilcloth garb of a fisherman.

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