Not far from the warden’s cottage, he heard a distant whinny and followed it until he found a horse tied to a broken tree. He had seen the creature once before, with his father’s escort. It was likely Shenn’s mount; the saddle was richly made, the horse well groomed. He pulled himself up onto it, gripped the reins, and with a kick bid farewell to the hunting reserve.
Ren traveled north toward Feren, following an uneven trail, hoping to catch sight of the forest but finding only sheer cliffs he could not scale and rocks too ragged for his horse to climb. More than once he got lost and had to double back or follow a different path. Later, the terrain grew so dense and rocky he had to free the horse and continue alone on foot, heading north and looking for the Rift valley. Soon after, he spied the deep but slender rift. The great gap marked the edge of the desert, a dark gulf from which mountains rose to form the granite face of the Feren kingdom. The sides of that gulf were jagged, the edges cracked like dry desert mud. He traveled the rim, skirting the deep ravine. The gap was often wide, always impossible to traverse. He found a spot where the Rift narrowed and a bridge spanned the gap. Long lines gathered at the passage. From their tools, he guessed the men were craftsmen. A lumberman with a pair of axes walked alongside Ren and a woodworker of some type with a pack full of chisels walked ahead of him. Something was happening in Feren, a gathering of some kind, an affair that required a great number of tradesmen.
He overheard a gray-haired man talking about a set of chambers that would be under construction for the new queen of Feren. From what the men said Ren gathered that the king of Ferens was marrying in a few days’ time.
“Who is the king to wed?” Ren asked absently, not really caring about the answer.
“A Harkan girl, Kedi?” The gray-hair scratched his head, uncertain of the name.
Kepi. My sister. Kepi is engaged to the king of the Ferens. Ren wasn’t certain what to think about this revelation. He did not know if she was friend or foe. Was she Merit’s ally? Or was she allied with his father and would she assist him?
The workers kept up their banter. “Kepi’s her name,” said a man whose skin and hair were darker, possibly Harkan. “I saw her once in Blackrock, cloaked atop her horse. They say she’s a wild one, always riding out at night.”
Ren listened closely, but the shouts of the Feren soldiers on the bridge drowned out the rest of the conversation. If Kepi hid from her family, if she ran from them, perhaps she was not allied with Merit, maybe she was more like him and maybe she would aid him. A queen could be a powerful ally, but that wasn’t all he cared about. He still wanted a family. If his father was gone and his mother had left them, if his elder sister was his adversary, Kepi was all he had left. She was his last chance at a family, so he decided to seek her out when he reached Rifka. I need to know if she truly is family—if she’ll welcome me.
Ren crossed the Rift valley with a band of woodworkers, staring down into the depths of the chasm, smelling sap from the freshly cut wood. Soldiers guarded the bridge and the pathway, directing the tradesmen, making certain no one strayed from the trail.
“When is the wedding?” Ren asked aloud.
“Three days,” he heard someone grumble. “Three days to make the platform, three months to build the Queen’s Chamber—we’ll be lucky if we get any sleep.”
Little by little, as morning passed into afternoon, as the mountain pass gave way to a deep valley, he entered the Gray Wood, where Ren encountered a sight he had heard about, dreamed about, but never seen—the blackthorn trees of legend, thousands of years old, more massive than any structure on Earth. Soon there were no more stones at all, only a cathedral of ancient trees and the soft underbrush, and the smell of wet earth and plants growing in the moist, rich soil protected from the sun by the thick canopy overhead. He passed carpets of small white flowers shaped like stars, great fragrant bushes of honeysuckle, of jasmine. Ren passed berry patches bursting with ripe fruit and stopped to stuff himself, leaving only seeds for the birds. He stumbled on a patch of wild onion and stopped to gather the plant, tying the green tops together and hiding them in his tunic. It was marvelous, he thought, to be in a country where wild things grew, where the desert had not shriveled every living thing. A green country, and lush, so different from the deserts of the south.
Soldiers at their back, Ren and the woodworkers came upon a great village where hundreds of slaves gathered between stacks of blackthorn logs, sawing, stripping bark, carving pegs and holes that would all be necessary to create the great house for the queen. There was a second village, he heard, where the king held the Cutting Day ceremony, but Ren didn’t know where it was or how to reach it. The men here were prepping the wood and sending it to the caer, where a second camp took up the finer work. An enormous undertaking. No wonder they needed so many men. The Ferens had slaves, but they lacked craftsmen. Ren hoped he could pass as one.
“You,” barked a foreman, pointing his whip at Ren. “Yes you there, runt. Where’d you come from, boy?”
“From the Wyrre,” Ren said. He knew his pale hair would appear strange to the Feren’s eyes. “I was born in Barham, but I grew up in the mountains near the Rift valley,” Ren lied—it seemed easy enough. “I’m just here to split wood.” Ren labored to conceal the accent he had learned in the Priory.
“Another fluke from the south? What’s wrong—did your island sink?” He motioned toward the saws. “See that you get out of the way when the trees fall, boy.” With that he let Ren pass. There was work to be done.
Ren picked up a bucksaw and joined the others. He relished the moist, fragrant scent of the forest, so unlike the desert, where the air was dry and lifeless. Alive with sounds and smells, the forest moved always around him—the men cutting, sawing, swearing, hoisting. He was getting more used to being outside now, and yet sometimes when he would wake in the morning with nothing but the sky overhead, he would have a moment when he was not certain where he was, if he was even alive still. If the world outside the Priory was real, or if the sun beating down on his head was the face of Mithra, welcoming him into some other life. But then he would breathe in and out, and feel hungry, and his legs would ache, and he would know once again that he was alive. Alive and usually in urgent need of taking a piss.
The soldiers fed Ren cakes of crushed potato and strong amber, and he felt for the first time how good it was to work, how useful work was to the mind of a man.
All that day the glade filled with the sounds of sawing, of nailing. The scrape of wood, the ring of iron, the voices of men telling stories to pass the time. Ren listened to all of it. They might tell a story of the former king’s son, Adin, if Ren were careful enough and paid attention.
“Seen the Harkan yet?” one of the grunts asked.
“The wildcat? The witch who killed Roghan?” Another spat. “What he wants with that bitch the gods only know.”
“Thin as a board and as hard to nail,” someone said, and laughed.