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[Tyrana]: 64.Xaadn.Chapt
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It was dark when she opened her eyes. Everything hurt. When she closed them again, she drifted back to sleep. She may have dreamed. It was hard to distinguish dream from memory from thought from anything else. They ran together. They ran fast. Xaadn stayed in her semi-dream state for much longer than she had imagined. She stayed until the drugs filtered from her body. The drugs. When had Nalnsyr poisoned her? She didn’t remember. She was asleep that night, when he visited…
She finally became conscious and aware and fully awake several nights after she crawled frantically away from the ruined castle. Xaadn didn’t have any idea where she was, but there was a roof over her head, if a low one. It wasn’t especially warm, but there were blankets. As her eyes came into focus, Xaadn saw she was in some sort of large wooden box. Rims of dim light peeked under blankets hanging over the walls. Xaadn reached at arm’s length and lifted a blanket. The moon she could see was full, and on the horizon. She wasn’t sure of the others, but just that one cast enough light to throw her surroundings into view. From under the blanket, she saw she had to look through a bunch of trees to rest her eyes on the pitted orange moon. The ground was still covered with snow, which eerily resembled the surface of the moon itself. Orange light reflected off of the snow, making misshapen shadows around the trees, and making reflections behind Xaadn’s closed eyelids bright and violet.
Xaadn felt under the pile of blankets on top of her, and noticed she still had her sweater on, but now she was wearing trousers, and shoes. Her hair had been carefull pulled back and tied at the nape of her neck.
She was about to roll back over and rest her hurting self a bit more, when she heard the soft, familiar voice float in under the walls.
“Are you awake in there?” Someone knocked ligtly on the side of the box thing she was under. “I don’t know if you’re rested, but I do know you must be hungry.”
Xaadn kicked off a pile of rough quilts, and searched for an opening in the wall under the hanging blankets. There wasn’t one, just a narrow crack at the bottom of the wooden barrier. When she lifted the blanket hanging on her left, she found that it didn’t have a wall under it, that it lead to another blanker-swathe
“Find the latch, dear. Near the bottom, sort of in the middle of the side, there. Slide…”
Xaadn finally rested her hand on a large wooden lever. She lifted it up, and pushed. Hard. The wall flew open, and she tumbled out onto hard-packed snow. The old man laughed harder. Xaadn frowned.
“Come on now, that was funny,” he said, helping her up by her forearms. Xaadn looked behind her, and saw she was sleeping in an overturned sledge. The soft orange light from the moon mixed with the light from the fire the gentleman was not sitting in front of. The light spilled through the open door, casting a flickering orange rectangle on the pile of blankets and stacks of books under the sleigh.
“You’ve been sleeping for… eeehhhh…” Kitram scratched his head. “How does your calendar work, here?” He pointed. “That moon’s come up three times, but the twins over there have flown around the place six times already. And the little blue one has only peeked at us once.”
Xaadn’s head was light and airy, and her hands and feet felt tingly and numb. The only thing she could think to do was shut the door behind her. She turned swiftly, and nearly fell.
“You can leave that open, dear. It was open just a little while ago when I was reading. I shut it so you would be safe when I went to get food. Speaking of food!” He held out a steaming wooden bowl.
She didn’t remember the wet snow, the sharp rocks. She didn’t remember crawling, clutching the cylinder against her chest with one hand, feeling for the ground with her other. She didn’t remember crawling faster when the small castle exploded, sending fire far enough to singe the ends of her hair. She didn’t remember following the tiny handprints. Knowing them, loving them; trusting them to bring her anywhere safe. She didn’t remember following them down the rocky slop, didn’t remember poking her head through the tops of giant snowdrifts, just to ensure she could see the indents of their slight fingertips, pushed lightly around their tiny palms. She didn’t remember them leading her across the bridge. The bridge. Even if she had, she wouldn’t have recognized the bridge. She would have only recognized the gold shard, jutting sharply from one of the pillars. She would have recognized it. She may have even seen it. She may have. She didn’t remember.
“Flee, it’s hopeless. The snow is too heavy. We can’t even go back the way we came.” Kitram squinted through the blizzard, searching for anything recognizable as a house, a road, or even a tree. “Aren’t we supposed to be in a forest? It’s a wonder we haven’t hit anything. Can you see at all up there?”
Flee turned herself around so she could almost see the little elderly man bundled in the back of the sledge. The snow was falling so heavily, the moment he talked, the words seemed pressed back against his face, and then fell straight into his lap, and never made it far enough to be heard by her driver’s ears.
“Too much snow!” She yelled. Her voice was muffled and flat, but her strong lungs pushed enough of her voice for Kitram to hear.
Flee was an enormous woman. She was kind and pleasant, and very clever. She was easily triple the size of Kitram, her arms strong, and bigger around than the old man’s legs. He stood slightly above her elbow. A mass of thick black hair was brushed roughly back from her face, and ran in a braid down her wide back. Flee had a lot of everything but temper. She had served Kitram for a long, long time.
Nalnsyr’s men had been surprised at Flee’s size when she and Kitram arrived, but before they even noticed Flee, they were surprised at what was pulling their sleigh. The two creatures harnessed to the front resembled horses… in a way. Very large horses. Their hair hung long and course and grey, and grew nearly everywhere on their massive bodies. In the areas around their eyes were hard black scales, like on a reptile. Nalnsyr’s stable workers were taken aback by the animals’ feet, which had three thick, grasping toes protruding from wide hooves. What they were most interested in (and slightly frightened of), were the two hard circles just in front of the ears on the creatures’ forehead, where two great horns must have been trimmed off. Kitram, in good humor, referred to them as his horses, so that is what they were called in his presence.
The animals’ size and mild demeanors led to the suggestions of Nalnsyr’s men that they were the offspring of some lucky horse, and Kitram’s colossal driver. None of them laughed over this in anywhere but private, though, for fear of upsetting the towering woman with the wild green eyes, or her elderly counterpart, who was said to make deals with Satan.