Kingfisher(52)

“Does she know that you’re with us? Heading north toward the coast highway? Does she expect to see you?”

Pierce shook the can, peered into it, looking for words. “I told her we were traveling north together. I couldn’t explain the quest—I wasn’t listening very well at the Assembly. She didn’t say much. She didn’t ask if we would be going as far as Cape Mistbegotten.”

Leith shifted. “She wouldn’t want to see me, but I’m sure she’d want to see you and Val. Maybe you could—”

“She’s a sorceress,” Val reminded his father. “We’re here with you. We’re on a quest, not a vacation. If she wants to, I think she could find us. Though she hasn’t exactly made the effort so far.” He took the can from Pierce, rattled it, his eyes wide as he gazed into it. “She left me with you and never looked back.”

“Maybe that’s why she let me go,” Pierce said abruptly. “So that I would find you both. She couldn’t come looking for you. She is too proud. And too—and too hurt. But now she knows that we are all together. Val is right, I think. She has her ways. If she wants to, she’ll use them.”

The driver’s voice came over the intercom from behind the closed glass partition between them. “Sirs, this is the last largish town before we start climbing. Do you want me to stop somewhere for lunch? Once we get into the mountains, no telling what we’ll find.”

They stopped.

In the midafternoon, surrounded by mile after mile of huge trees marching up and down peaks and valleys holding only hints of civilization, a glimpse of a door, a sign, an abandoned fuel station, the steadfast vehicle ran aground. One by one screens flicked off, lights failed, the car slowed, drifted. The driver, his cursing becoming audible, got the partition between them half-opened before it, too, stopped moving. A pickup careened around them, honking wildly. They were in the fast lane of a steep, curving, four-lane highway, rapidly losing power and fortunately on a downslope. The driver eased the limo across the road, avoiding the swift cars dodging to the left and right of them. It settled finally onto an unpaved pullout as a semi peeled around them, making a noise like an indignant whale.

The driver spoke to the dashboard. No one answered. He pushed this, flicked that. Val leaned through the partition, making suggestions, while Pierce tried a door, and Leith pulled out his cell.

The door opened, to Pierce’s relief, but the phone screen remained black.

The driver pulled off his crested uniform cap, threw it on the floor, then picked it up, put it back on, and turned.

“Sorry, sirs. I don’t have a clue what to make of this.”

Val looked at his own phone. “It’s a dead zone,” he said curiously. “Nothing tech works.”

“Everyone else is still moving,” Leith said tersely. He got out, roamed around the car with his phone.

“Sorcery, then.”

“Might as well be,” the driver said, exasperated. “This vehicle was thoroughly tested before the wyvern on its hood got a look out the garage door.”

He tried his own phone, then got out and waved at passing traffic until a Greenwing small enough to fit in the pullout behind the limo stopped. The driver bent down to talk to the young women in it. Val joined him promptly. Pierce got out, stood looking around, half expecting to see Heloise sitting on a branch above them.

Gigantic pillars of trees stood tranquilly on the steep mountain, maybe napping in the warm, golden light, maybe commenting in slow tree-thoughts on the grand vehicle that had hobbled to a halt in their shadows. In the distance between two high peaks, he glimpsed the sea.

A car door slammed; he glanced around to see Val settling in the midst of the young women in the little car. The car pulled back onto the road, sped away. Leith watched it, startled.

“They said they’d take him to the nearest garage,” the driver explained. “Their phones work fine,” he added bitterly, as Leith walked to the edge of the road, stood frowning at the Greenwing disappearing around a bend.

“I don’t like this.”

“They seemed very nice,” the driver assured him. “Students on their way back to the local college. I offered to go, but—”

“I know. An otherwise appealing young knight except for his brains. Or lack of them. He was the one who reminded me that we are on a quest. Sylvester Skelton said we must assume nothing.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” the driver said uneasily. “I thought—”

“Well,” Leith said, leaning against the limo beside the tiny bronze wyvern rearing on the hood. “You may be right. We’ll wait.”

The driver got back inside, tried rousing the engine again. Leith, his arms folded, brooded at the highway. Pierce went looking for a bush.

He walked farther than he intended, lulled by the soft breeze, the smells of needles, pitch, sun-burnished bark, the shadows and gentle whisperings of the immense trees. For the first time since he had left home, he feared nothing, anticipated nothing, just rambled without thinking through the quiet afternoon. A squirrel chided him; a bird sang briefly, then fluttered away, a streak of yellow against the green. He rounded a tree trunk that might have taken a couple dozen arms to span its girth. At the other side of it, he saw the sea again, the brilliant light across it that, in a tale, might have been the blazing wake of a vessel made of gold.