“Follow them,” Leith told the driver abruptly as the fellowship
swarmed around a curve and out of sight. The limo veered like a bus, rattling
the last shreds of lethargy from Pierce’s brain. Val pulled his lax limbs
together; straightening, he twisted to get the driver’s view of the winding
road ahead.
“What’s a slough?” he wondered. “Slow? Slog? Did you recognize them?” he
asked his father.
“Several of the crests. Niles Camden’s among them. Their leader. They seemed
to know exactly where they wanted to go.”
Pierce pulled a memory, a pointed sliver, out of the past days. “Knights of
the Rising God?”
“And up to no good,” Leith answered grimly, “in Severen’s name.”
Val pulled out his cell. “Let’s just find out what’s got their attention .
. .”
He regaled them for a while with an intermittent lecture involving tides,
grasses, worms, mud, microscopic crabs, and salmon finding their way back
home. “The great nursery of the sea,” he intoned, then was silent, causing
his brother and his father to pull their eyes off the road ahead to look at
him.
“What is it?” Leith asked.
“There is an island in the middle of the sluff. The slog.”
“Slough,” Pierce said.
“Slew. According to this article, which of course is suspect since Severen
only knows who wrote it, it was once, to ancient indigenous peoples, a holy
place. They believed, because of the positions of the moonrise around it, that
the island was the birthplace of the moon. It had attributes, this island. It
had powers of healing. Women came there to give birth. Small things left as
gifts have been found by archaeologists and picnickers. Painted clay beads,
bone flutes, shell belts. Fieldstones carved with pictures of objects used in
daily life, or birds and animals, were transported to the island and laid down
in shapes corresponding to the phases of the moon.” He glanced up at Leith’s
sudden shift. “Yes. That’s probably where the knights are going. They seem
fond of disturbing holy places. The site was most recently used, a century or
two ago, by prospectors who built an alehouse on the island to carouse without
complaints from the gentlefolk of Chimera Bay. There were rumors of a brothel
as well. When the prospectors moved on, and the structures fell down, the
island reverted to its former wild state.”
“Is it accessible?” Leith asked.
Val studied his screen. “It is . . . yes. By means of a footbridge, too
narrow for cars.”
“But not for bikes.”
“If they want to risk it. I wouldn’t. It looks pretty rickety to me.”
“They are risking it,” Pierce said, looking over the driver’s shoulder at a
distant span above silent waters surrounded by the gentle rise and fall of
thick, sprawling forests.
The driver echoed him. “There they are, sirs. And losing no time about it.
Sorry to be so slow around these curves. The limo doesn’t like to bend.”
A dark smudge moved across the span, which seemed cobbled erratically to begin
with, and gently dilapidated, swinging a slat here and there. One dropped off,
shaken loose by the powerful vibrations of well-kept machines. It seemed to
Pierce to fall a long way before it hit the water, causing a raptor to change
its mind and veer sharply out of its dive.
As he watched, a piece of high ground detached itself from solid ground and
shifted, as the road slewed, to reveal the water around all sides of it. The
bridge disappeared into the tangle of green near the top of the island.
The first of the knights vanished into it.
“What do they think they’ll find there?” Val wondered. “Gold the
prospectors missed? The brothel?”
“What do you think, sirs?” the driver asked. “There are a couple dozen of
them and, from the look of it, not much trouble they can get into.”
As he spoke, a streak of blood-red lightning shot up from the trees, made a
smoking blur of the uppermost branches. The driver braked hard, nearly tossing
his passengers onto the floor.
“Sorry, sirs,” he panted. “What was that?”
“Wyvern’s Eye,” Leith said tersely. “Step on it.”
The driver pulled up finally at the end of the narrow bridge. As he tumbled
out, Pierce heard faint cries across the water that might or might not have
been gulls.
“Are you armed?” Leith asked him. He had to think.
“Yes.” He touched his shoulder, where the knife lay in its hidden sheath. “
Since this morning.” He added, as another bolt of fuming red lit up the crown
of the island, “For what it’s worth.”
Val, standing still, his eyes narrowed at the island, said, “There’s a woman
’s voice among the birds.”
“Not again,” Leith breathed, and began to run.