Throwback Thursday ~ Allaigna’s Song: Aria by JM Landels

Gleoran, though not as busy as Werrancross, is a large enough frontier town that Rhoan and I decided it was worth the risk of finding an inn for the night. It no longer felt safe to work as travelling entertainers, so we kept to ourselves. Even though I was of Brandishear blood and had spent a year and a half in its capital, I felt alien in this town. The language was the same, and the customs were the same; under the treaty, Brandishear and Aerach might as well be the same nation. And yet I felt a vast ocean, not a mere sandy desert twenty leagues wide, separated me from my homeland.

As we sat in the low-ceilinged common room of the inn, our heads held low beneath the false ceiling of smoke, I found myself fingering my pendant again, longing to turn it over, gaze into a pool of fresh water, and see if I could hear Angeley’s voice calling me.

But I let it drop back inside my shirt, conscious in the dark room of its pearly pink glow and suddenly frightened of drawing attention from the other tenants of the room, or from the Mage Guard. I remembered clearly how much more present those black-robed policemen of all things arcane were here in my grandfather’s realm than back home in Aerach. I didn’t think so small a magic as this would call their notice, but I couldn’t be sure. And the Mage Guard were more active in border towns.

I could feel Rhoan’s question before he asked it. I’d been waiting for it for days.

“So where next?”

Why ask me, I wanted to say. You’re the adult. I’m just a child. I so dearly wanted to turn responsibility over to him, or to anyone. But I was barely a child, despite my unfinished form. I was old enough to be betrothed, to have killed a man, to have taken my fate into my own hands. I might as well shoulder the full responsibility. Till now I had been running from the lies my mother had told me, from the life demanded of me, and from the life I’d taken. It was time I started heading to somewhere.

Wandering the countryside and hoping to stumble upon my father wasn’t working, and I wondered that I’d ever pretended it might. I needed someone who had travelled the borders and knew the Ilvani, and I berated myself for not having thought of her before. I recalled her words to me:  “If you ever have need of me, you have but to ask.” I had forgotten that promise for years. She could be stationed anywhere, but she was in the Ranger corps and eventually could be found. I looked up into Rhoan’s eyes, wondering how he would react, and wondering too why he’d never asked this of me himself.

“We’re going to find Rhiadne.”