Chapter Four: The Town of Delmar

Kirei stared at Tanus, bewildered. “If you were Jericho all this time, why didn’t you just say so?”

Tanus swallowed. Could he really do this? The was the first test.

“Just think,” he said. “Just think of how you would react if some stranger came knocking at Ambi’s door asking for Kirei. Wouldn’t you want to know motives?”

“Honestly, how many people come to Ambi in the first place—?”

“Not many people come to Arrena, either,” Tanus pointed out. “But you’re here, and I’ve been to Ambi. So that makes us even.”

Kirei smiled. “I suppose so.” She looked Tanus up and down, from head to toe. “So...you’re the Jericho I’ve heard so much about.”

“That’s right,” Tanus said, bowing. He had broken out into a sweat. He hoped she didn’t notice. “Jericho Tabour,” he said again, “I'm at your service.”

Kirei grinned, clapping her hands together in delight. “You mean you’ll help me?”

“Are you kidding? Of course I will.”

“Oh, thank you!” Kirei hugged herself and spun in a happy circle. “When can we leave? Tomorrow? I'm sure we’ll need to stay overnight in your village to give you time to pack—”

“No!” Tanus said, panicking. There was no way could his family find out what he was doing! Just the mention of Jericho’s name was painful to his mother.

Kirei was staring at him. “Why not?”

“I—I left this morning. Said my goodbyes and packed my bag.”

Kirei blinked, surprised. “What for? Are you a prophet, as well?”

“No! I run—I take journeys through these woods all the time. To maintain spiritual peace.”

“Spiritual peace? Really?”

“Whatever you want to believe,” Tanus mumbled.

“What?”

“Uh, I said, ‘Whenever you want to, let’s leave,’” Tanus said, correcting himself.

“Well, I only just got here, but I suppose we can leave if you really want to,” Kirei said. “Are you sure you don’t even want to rest a moment first?”

Tanus cocked an eyebrow. “You think our enemies will stop and rest?”

Silence.

“Didn’t think so. All right, let’s go. Wait. Where are we going?”

“North, up the shore,” Kirei told him. “To the seaside town of Bromacia. It’s a two day journey from here, on horseback.”

“You have a horse?” Tanus asked. He had never seen a real one before, but he couldn’t let her know this. “Where is it?”

“I couldn’t bring a horse into a forest with trees this thick. I left her by the place where the stream meets the forest’s edge.”

“I know where that is. Follow me.”

“Are you sure you don’t even want to say goodbye to your family?”

Tanus pause, shifting his weight from one foot to the other but not moving.

“I’ll send a message to them after we get to Bromacia,” he said finally. “Only two days...anyway, I don’t want to go back.” If he did, his resolve would break. And his secret would be out.

“Well, if you’re sure...”

Tanus grabbed his bag, and led Kirei up the sloping forests, using the direction of the stream to guide him. He kept up a steady pace, but had to pause several times to let his new companion stop and rest. She was embarrassed, and kept reminding him that the trip down had been a lot easier, and she wasn’t used to hiking, anyway.

Tanus, after hearing this for the fourth time, decided there had to be something better to talk about. He stopped again to let her sit on a fallen log, and while she was catching her breath and getting ready to deliver her speech again, he asked, “So what’s in Bromacia, anyway?”

“Oh, everything,” Kirei said, with her eyes closed. “Haven’t you been? You had to have passed through it when you visited Ambi.”

Oh, right, Tanus thought, giving himself a mental kick. He’d heard of Bromacia...his brother had told him stories of it. So had some other villagers.

“It’s a very large town,” Kirei continued. “Lots of different kind of people live there. The trade is really good, and you see all types coming in and out, from other lands, from across the seas...”

“Right, right, I know that. What I'm asking is why we need to go there.”

“Well,” Kirei said, getting to her feet and starting up the trail, “I have a friend there. You know Bromacia’s the nearest village to the Palace of Ambi...the other girls and I were always going in to do things. One day we met this old wise man, who offered to read all our fortunes for a silver coin apiece.”

Tanus whistled, and he jogged to catch up with her. “I hope those were some good fortunes.”

“Well, that’s the weird part,” Kirei said. “We, uh, weren’t exactly short on money, so we handed it over. And he read us our fortunes...he told each and every one of us something that would happen to us in the near future. For instance, he told one of the other girls that she would meet someone new soon. A month later she was telling us about her new boyfriend, and a year after that, they were married.”

“It was probably a coincidence,” Tanus said.

“That’s what I thought too!” Kirei said. She was smiling. “But another prediction of his was that another girl I was with would meet on old friend three days from then. And sure enough, she did. Eventually, all seven predictions he gave out that day came true.”

“What did he tell you?” Tanus asked.

“He told me that I would find something important that had been lost for a long time,” Kirei said quietly. “For the longest time I was so mad that mine was the only one that didn’t come true...but in the end, he was right. I went to see him after I left Ambi and asked him where to find you. I told him his prediction had come true, and that I needed to know where Jericho was from.”

“And he told you?” Tanus asked, eyebrows raised.

“He certainly did. He told me exactly, ‘The person you need is in Arrena.’ He told me how to get here, and so here is where I came. And he was right again!”

The person she needs? Tanus thought, as they paused to let Kirei rest again. I'm not the one she needs at all. Her wise man is all wrong. She came here looking for a hero, not his brother.

x-x-x

After another twenty minutes of walking, the trees began to thin, and then they disappeared entirely. When Tanus and Kirei reached the edge of the forest, Kirei immediately stopped to rest again, but Tanus hesitated. He barely glanced at the green field before him, before he turned backwards to look at his village, nestled safely in between two mountains, surrounded by the trees Arrena Forest. It was barely visible now; tree branches grew outwards, covering their homes from view, and only precious few could be seen in small clearings here and there. Tanus could see the ocean beyond them, could see where the trees thinned out on the other side of the forest and gave way to the beach.

He had walked that beach, explored that forest, even hiked a short distance up one of those mountains, but he had never been out this far before. He had seen this green field he was standing in, but only from the safety of his trees. He had heard of the world outside his forest from other villagers who had gone to see it—from his brother, too—but he had never seen it for himself. And now he was leaving it, and not telling a soul where he was going.

He felt a hand touch his arm.

“Jericho?”

Tanus jumped; he was not used to hearing his brother’s name spoken aloud, especially not so casually. He looked to his right and saw that Kirei was studying him with a mildly concerned look on her face.

“Are you sure you don’t want to go back?” Kirei was panting as she spoke, still winded from their hike up from the valley.

“I'm sure.” Tanus forced a smile. He turned away from his village and looked at what lay ahead.

The first thing he saw was the horse. It was a magnificent thing—solid white, with fine hair on both its mane and tail, with an embroidered blanket thrown over its back. It wasn’t tied up, but instead drinking peacefully from the stream flowing down into the forest, and it didn’t even looked up when Tanus took a hesitant step towards it.

“You didn’t tie him up,” Tanus said, stunned. He was still marveling at the horse, the first he’d ever seen. It looked so powerful—but it was beautiful, too. “Won’t he get away?”

“No, she wouldn’t run from me,” Kirei told Tanus, correcting him on the horse’s gender. She walked over to the horse and gave it a affectionate pat on its neck. Tanus took another hesitant step after her. “She’s very intelligent.”

“She looks intelligent.”

Kirei laughed. “She looks like a horse! You’re acting as though you’ve never seen one before.”

“Hey,” Tanus said, becoming defensive, “I live in a place where there aren’t any horses. I don’t see them often. Besides, this one is...different.”

Kirei laughed again, but it sounded forced. Tanus had now taken a few more steps towards the horse, and was close enough to reach out and touch it, although he didn’t dare.

“Don’t be silly,” Kirei said, noticing with unease that Tanus’s eyes were on the blanket. “She’s just a regular old horse.”

“Well, she’s white—”

“Still, that’s just her color, it’s not—”

“—but that blanket looks kind of odd, too,” Tanus said. “Kinda lumpy. You must be a bandit after all. Have you got her saddlebags full of stolen gold?”

“No,” Kirei said, eyes wide. “She wears it to keep warm.”

“But it’s warm right now.” Tanus reached out and grabbed the blanket. “She’s probably hot. You should take it off.”

Before Kirei could stop him, Tanus had pulled the blanket downwards. It slipped off of the horse’s back, and Tanus, shocked at what he was seeing, let it fall to the ground, his mind too dazed to remember to tell his fingers to keep their grip.

Jutting out elegantly from the horse’s front legs were two long, white, feathered wings.

“I haven’t seen too many horses,” Tanus said, voice very quiet, “but I know that most of them don’t have wings.”

“They don’t,” Kirei said, shifting nervously. “Well, she lived at Ambi, it’s no wonder, but—I couldn’t just leave her there! You didn’t see what Eve was doing to that place! And—and the blanket was over her—I didn’t even know about the wings until after we escaped...”

Tanus’s eyes were still focused on the horse. “So she flies?”

“Er...no.”

Tanus shifted his gaze to look at Kirei. She blushed.

“I’ve tried everything,” Kirei said, shrugging helplessly. “She hasn’t flown for me. I—I asked the wise man, and he said she’d forgotten how. She’s still quite fast, though—and she’s very smart, and very strong.”

Tanus reached out hesitantly and stroked the soft feathers of the horse’s wing. She looked over at him, but did not jerk or make a sound.

“We’ll both have to ride her,” Kirei said. “The journey to Bromacia will take two days, but we can stop and stay the night at Delmar. That’s what I did on the way here.” Tanus had no idea what Delmar was. Another village? “Riding would normally take longer, but this horse is incredibly fast.”

Ride? I didn’t think of that. He had never ridden a horse. It didn’t sound hard, but...

“I’ve never ridden before,” he admitted. This held with his story. Jericho had once told him that he had only ridden a horse once, and hated it so much he had walked everywhere after that, no matter how far he had to travel.

“How did you get to Bromacia?” Kirei asked.

“I walked.”

“You walked to Bromacia?” Kirei asked, eyes wide.

“Sure,” Tanus said, shrugging. He swallowed. Here came the next lie. “I walked to Ambi, too.”

Silence.

“Do you mean to tell me,” Kirei began slowly, “that you crossed the Crenshaw Plains, the widest part of Fishtail River, the entire town of Bromacia, and scaled the Horsewing Mountain Range all by foot?”

“Um...yeah, pretty much.”

“That is amazing. You did all that and you can’t ride a horse?”

“If I could ride a horse, would I have done it by foot?”

“I suppose not.”

Tanus shook his head and sighed, and turned his attention to the land before him. The field.

The Crenshaw Plains, Kirei had called them. They seemed almost familiar to her, but Tanus had only gazed at them from his safety net of trees. As much as he wanted to see the world, he had never had much desire to go further than the border of his forest when he was looking at that wide, open space. It almost frightened him. It was nothing, but a wide plain of grass, all the way out to the horizon, save for the stream that was next to them. It was like going down to the beach and looking at the ocean, and wondering how on earth a boat could sail on it—there were no landmarks, no trees or rocks or—anything. Nothing looked any different from everything else. What if they got lost? There weren’t any trails. There were no landmarks. There was no way to check the trees for moss and see which way north was. There was just that endless stretch of flat, green, land.

Kirei had been utterly lost in a place that Tanus could guide her through with his eyes closed. Now the roles were reversed. The field seemed huge and endless, and only she knew how to get them to the other side.

How did Jericho even do this? And by foot, alone?

“I'm done resting, if you’re ready,” Kirei said. “Er, since you’ve never ridden, you should just get on behind me and try to hang on tight enough so you don’t fall. I can go over the finer points of it later.”

“Is that safe?” Tanus asked.

“Of course it is,” Kirei said. “Most people will tell you you’re safer in front, but it’s not true. Would you like to get on first, or shall I?”

“Uh, ladies first,” Tanus said. He helped Kirei toss the blanket back over the horse, and then watched Kirei on. He didn’t realize how high it was until he nearly fell mounting the horse. He had to try it three times before he was able to climb behind Kirei, but the horse was very patient. He was sure most horses would have kicked him by the time he had finally settled himself on its back.

“Comfy?” Kirei asked, amused.

“Sort of.”

“All right, now grab my waist.”

Tanus did, feeling very awkward. Kirei wanted to laugh at him, but she didn’t.

“Think you’ll be okay?”

“Uh, yes.”

“Then let’s go! Hyaa!” Kirei’s feet gently nudged the horse’s stomach, and it took off like a shot, eager to run.

Tanus let out a cry of surprise. Kirei hadn’t been exaggerating when she said the horse was fast. He saw at once why Jericho might hate this—it was weird to move without being the one to walk or run. It was fast, but also bumpy. He forgot his awkward grip on Kirei’s waist at once and held on for dear life as the horse sped through the field, following the stream.

It was a long time before the horse grew tired and slowed a little, and by that time Tanus’s arms had become stuff from hanging onto Kirei so tightly. He loosened his grip as the horse slowed, determined to get used to it, and Kirei, sensing that he was finally relaxing, started a conversation to help pass the time.

“So when was the last time you visited Bromacia?” she asked.

Tanus knew the answer to this question, without having to think over the past.

“Four years ago,” he replied.

“Wow! That’s a long time. What made you stop coming?”

Tanus didn’t answer.

“Jericho?” Kirei asked, twisting around to look at him.

“My village was attacked by demons,” Tanus said softly. “After that I thought I’d better stay and protect it.”

“Oh, that’s awful,” Kirei said. “Was anyone hurt?”

Tanus felt as if someone was pressing on his chest, hindering his ability to breathe.

“Just one person,” he said.

“That’s good, then,” Kirei said, with a smile. “Could have been much worse.”

I doubt that.

x-x-x

It wasn’t long before they reached the place where the Arrena Stream met Fishtail River. The stream, Tanus knew, was actually a tributary, but he had always thought the actual river would be about the same size. He was very wrong—the river was wide, and the water flowing down it was moving very quickly. He stared openly as they continued to follow this river upstream.

“Yeah, I know,” Kirei said, misinterpreting his look. “We got here really fast. We’ll get to Delmar in no time. Riding is much faster, eh?”

Tanus could only nod. He was trying to mask his mild case of culture shock, and felt that anything he said would give him away.

The ride to the village was a quiet one. Both Tanus and Kirei were growing exhausted of staying on the horse’s back (although the horse seemed a little tired, at best), and they both wanted the trip to end. This, of course, made the last stretch of the day’s travels seem longer than it really was, which drained them further. They didn’t feel like using their energy to speak, and so they simply watched silently as the sun began to sink below the horizon, turning the sky various shades of orange. It wasn’t until the sun was almost completely gone that Kirei spotted the village on the horizon.

“Look, it’s Delmar!” she cried happily.

Tanus squinted into the setting sun. He couldn’t see it, but he believed her. As the village grew closer and the sun finally vanished for good, he was able to see a cluster of homes built around another tributary running off from Fishtail River. Kirei didn’t stop, but instead directed the horse straight into town. Tanus looked around for the first time at a village that wasn’t his own.

Delmar was about the same size as Arrena, but their buildings had been constructed differently. He couldn’t put his finger on what made them look different, but they did. Another thing that seemed odd to him was that there weren’t very many trees. There were no winding paths from one home to the next. It was closer together, but all out in the open. What if bandits came or demons attacked? They had no natural shelter.

He was jerked away from his thoughts when at last the horse came to a halt. Kirei slid off the horse, and Tanus followed her. It only took Kirei a moment to regain her senses after being on the horse for so long, but Tanus wobbled unsteadily and had to hold onto the horse to balance himself.

“You stay here until you get your legs in working order,” Kirei said, amused. “There’s a trough over there where you can leave the horse. I don’t want to keep her tied,” she said, noticing the look Tanus was giving her, “but it’ll look strange if we don’t. I’ll loan some rope from inside while I pay for our night’s stay.”

“Did you need me to help?” Tanus asked. “We don’t really use money in Arrena, but—”

“Oh...no, I'm from Ambi, remember? I’ve got more than enough to take care of it. You just try to get your legs to walk with you again, all right?”

“All right.” Tanus watched her go inside. He was exhausted, and just a little homesick. What was Ashi making for dinner? Was Remus still thinking he would come back the next day for lunch? Had his aunt tried to track him down for fetching water again?

Tanus pushed the thoughts aside and stretched. His legs were steadier now, and so he walked around the inn, looking around. He made a full circle around before stopping to rest again.

“Good evening.”

Tanus jumped. The words weren’t directed at him, but the voice had startled him. It was a man’s voice, gruff. He turned to the source of the voice and squinted, trying to make out what the man looked like in the dark.

He saw the silhouettes of two people. From their broad shoulders, Tanus guessed that both were men. Their voices were distant, and as he listened, trying to hear what they were saying, their tones turned angry.

It wasn’t long after that that one man turned towards the other, and let his hand fly out towards the other’s stomach. Tanus gasped, and the man who had been hit cried out, falling to his knees. The man who had hit him turned and ran.

Tanus, feeling it would be unethical to just stand there, rushed to the mans side. As he got closer, the man fell from his knees to lying on the ground face-down. Tanus had never seen anyone react so strongly from being punched. Concerned, he knelt by the man and turned him over.

“Are you okay?”

There was no answer. He felt something wet on his hands. Blood, he realized, with a jolt of horror. His eyes grew wide and traveled to the man’s stomach. The blood was thicker there, and still flowing even as he stared in mute horror.

Tanus realized now that this man hadn’t been punched in the stomach at all—he had been stabbed, and he was unconscious. And Tanus, a complete stranger in the town of Delmar, was sitting right at the scene of the crime.