Gales' End

The main road through the Queen’s Gale was wide at some points, and narrower than the woodlands themselves at others. Bulbous green roots ripped the gravel out from one side of the trail to the other, some two feet thick. Fen could vault over them easily, but Moxi had to painstakingly scale over each of the larger ones. It was made no easier by her hesitance to even touch anything within the Queen’s Gale. The palaces of some tyrants were less treacherous.

Long, dark vines hung over the trail like bead curtains, with all different colors of little flowers covering them. Fen held one vine down in her claws, muttering, “Deep Lily, Dragonleaf, Daggerbloom…” She picked a red one with three sharp, bladelike petals and stuffed it into her backpack, “Cobblers’ Flower… Useful if either of your shoes are damaged.”

“What about the other ones?” asked Moxi.

“That one is brightly colored, the one next to it is very pretty, and the third one cures stomach aches.” Fen thought for a second, then picked the Daggerbloom as well, “Might want that one, actually.”

Moxi ducked through the vines, “Well, I don’t get belly aches!” She said proudly, “So, we could best leave it behind.”

“You don’t?” Fen blinked. “T-that’s amazing, Moxi! It actually can be really dangerous to get sick while out in the wilderness because you’re not at your best, and you’re more easily distracted, and there’s all kinds of monsters that would try taking advantage of that.”

“She does…” I whispered to Moxi, “I promise you, she does.”

“Well, she said she doesn’t…”

Moxi called back, “What was your last life like, Kitty?”

“Last life?” Fen snorted, “I mean, I had a dream just like everyone does on Sevenday, but it’s just a dream. It’s not like there’s really a whole other world out there! It’s a story that the Administrator tells us, so that he can help us be better people in the real world.”

I looked back at the vines as we passed them, “Really?” I thought out loud. I imagined all the people I knew and loved in that dream, and that were Fen to be believed, they were all false. My mother’s love in her last life. Death telling me I could go back there. Were it just a dream, then how could he offer that? And, if it was, all the feelings of it were real despite it. I pressed my lips together, “Well, what was the dream about, Fen?”

“It’s real!” Moxi yelled, “It’s real, it’s real!” Her fists curled into balls at her sides, and she bent over slightly.

Fen’s tail swung back and forth. She pressed her claws around the thick trunk of a tree as the trail curved narrowly around it. “It means a lot to me, anyway. The dream had a lot of things that I learned a lot from. It made me smarter and more careful and all these other things. But, I’m Fen, not some human called Pauline. I’ve been Fen my whole life, and that’s what matters. Who was your dream about?”

“I was Countess Amelie d’Andure, the second niece of the king, himself! I was to be married to a prince, and then I’d have been Princess Amelie, but…” She looked away, “Prince Tark was nothing he was promised to be. I ran away, I don’t tell anyone this, but I ran away, and I sold jewelry to live comfortably in the countryside. It was never as luxurious as home, and I always wished I could have just come home. When Prince Tark found me… I denied him again, and he sent me here. I wish I could go back to that world, all knowing as I am now, and take my revenge.”

Fen’s ears twitched, “Isn’t it better that’s just a nightmare? In mine, I had been Pauline Longcourt, that was my name later in life. I’d been born in an untouched border town that we called Kinnipo. The invaders called it New Dark. They gave me the name Pauline in my dream, and my own people had called me Gauley. I was taken by them when I was thirteen, and I didn’t come back to Kinnipo, to New Dark, until I was thirty. My childhood home on top of a grassy hill had been toppled and replaced by a palace for some viceroy, so I broke in, and I shot the viceroy with an arrow. As soon as I was captured, I was banished into the jungle: to fend for myself, as they said. Fend for myself with my ankles and wrists tied together. T’was but a nightmare, and this life is not.”

“Yeah, wouldn’t you want to get back at those people, too, if you could?” Moxi snorted.

Fen’s shoulders rose, pressing against her cheeks. She scowled, then took a slow, deep breath. “Never. Even if it were real, I don’t want to see the people of that world outside of a dream. What use is it? What use are they? I already care more for the both of you, anyway.” She kept walking, this time a little more briskly. Her tail dragged against the gravel and roots under her feet.

I held onto the rough, green fabric of her uniform’s shoulder, “I wish you both could have seen the world I came from. There were buildings half as tall as Mount Addor pointing straight up into the clouds, and there were all kinds of things that don’t exist in this world, but there were only humans, and there was no such thing as magic. I was a schoolteacher, and I died in an accident.”

“There were mostly elves in the world I came from,” said Moxi, “I was almost three hundred years old when I died.”

“I wouldn’t have guessed you were the oldest person here,” I said.

“Well, yes, I look very young and pretty!” Moxi flicked her drill-shaped golden hair back at me, “Besides, three hundred was very young for an elf. I was hardly any older than a sixty-or-seventy-year-old human! Indeed, I’m older in total than my mother in this world.”

Fen ran ahead to a much brighter part of the trail, then pointed out between a gap in the trees to the south of us. The south tip of the Queen’s Gale bordered a steep cliff, and beyond the edge of the trees we could see the sun properly for the first time in some hours. It must have been three in the afternoon now, or later. “The trail down should be around here somewhere…” Fen sniffed at the air, “And, weren’t you the one who had that weird Sevenday celebration last year, Moxi? The one where…”

“Leave it…” I muttered. All of Tinborough had informally agreed not to talk about that day. A dragon, of all things, had come to visit her Sevenday and it got terribly drunk, and that was the least of things that went wrong.

“Well, well, well!” Fen dashed ahead, stopping at the very top of a steep trail that curved all of the way down into the valley below, narrowly cut between two rocky cliffsides. “It’s this way. And, if your Sevenday was last year, Moxi, that makes you eight. A bit younger than your mama, I’d say.”

Fen went down one step at a time, lowering her body as much as she could to keep control of her balance. Her tail stuck out behind her. It wasn’t so steep that one slip would send somebody rolling down to the bottom, and there were enough little ledges and things someone could stop themself on, but a fall would be terribly unpleasant all the same. Moxi reluctantly sat down and slowly scooted herself down the hill inch by inch. I switched intermittently between flying on my own, seeing no trouble in the steepness, or sitting on Fen’s shoulder as I had been before. The cliffs on either side of us had patches of green across them, trees growing at forty-five-degree angles out over a three-hundred-foot drop.

Here, the gravel was replaced by brown dirt, and anytime Moxi could stand to brush off her dress, she did. “Why did the main road get blocked?” she whined, “We wouldn’t have had to go all this way! Why did I even go along with this stupid thing? The capital? What’s the point?”

“I’ve heard the Sapphire Capital is beautiful, and there are eleven princes who all live there,” I said.

“I’ll look like a heathen by the time we get there! Like a villain! A complete and total urchin!”

Fen scratched the claws of her feet into the trail, looking down toward the bottom. “There’s still all kinds of monsters along the southbound road, and there’s big caves we could get lost in. You’ll look all dirty if we even get to the capital at all without getting lost or eaten or falling off a cliff.”

“I’d rather be eaten than have my clothes all ruined,” Moxi looked away.

“Really?” Fen blinked, “Dirty clothes are the sign of a successful adventure, you know?” She took a deep breath as she stepped onto the flat ground at the bottom of the valley. Here, the road curved back west, and we could finally see the southbound road, where it had been blocked by the mudslide, up ahead. I looked back up the way we’d come down, and there was the Queen’s Gale and the South Gale to its east.

The grass in the valley was brown and tan, with only little bits of green between its strands. The highest of it was as thick as reeds and brushed against Moxi’s elbows. It was trimmed along the road. Although the route down from the Queen’s Gale was hardly used, it connected to an east-west road that went around the Gale Parks entirely toward Nox Mountain and shining Glibbridge by the sea. So far above were the Gale Parks now, the furthest edge of Tinborough. Fen and Moxi continued toward where the roads connected by the rushing Gale River.