A Kind of Magic

Four

The wide, cobbled boulevards unfolding from the infinite, labyrinthine gardens encompassing King Alaric's castle-- a many floors high tower carved into a soaring, white rock formation looking unexpected and alien in the green flatland interspersed with towns and villages spreading around it in all directions-- were crowded with people despite the early hour. Apparently, the news of the quest for the king's heir had spread overnight. 

Giving a wide breech of the dragon shifter who loomed darkly at the head of the small group of riders, the people surged around the elf and the dwarf, touching their hands and feet, kissing the hem of the elf's lustrous black cloak, slowing them down, making Peregrine realise just how popular Leodhais was. If the elf managed to learn something practical during this quest, and Alaric's kid was a wise and level-headed girl, they might, after all, make a suitable royal couple, he mused. The elf was already loved enough to have a half human wife accepted as the queen. Peregrine sighed, Alaric was not perfect, but he was a wise enough ruler; it was a shame that he wanted to retire...

Gathering his rambling thoughts, he looked over his shoulder one more time to bestow a meaningful glance upon the dwarf, the only one of the two who kept an eye trained on him, and seeing that he pulled at his vain friend's sleeve to deliver the intended message to hurry up, Peregrine urged Shadow into a canter. He slowed down only when he heard the clatter of his companions horses' hooves behind him a long while later, far beyond the city.

"There was no need for this behaviour," Leodhais said smugly. "They only wanted to greet us..."

"They were slowing you down," Peregrine interrupted. "We are not here to take a walk around Alaric's kingdom to greet his loyal subjects. The king despatched us on a quest."

Leodhais sighed deeply, allowing the dragon shifter to hear his suppressed anger but said nothing. He let his horse fall back, preferring to ride alone and in silence to riding next to Peregrine and Gilderoy. The dwarf seized the occasion to ask the dragon precisely two more questions before he was told that that was enough, that he had reached the limits of the dragon shifter's patience, and was sent behind, to join his friend, while Peregrine pulled his plumed, wide-brimmed black hat lower over his eyes and pressed his heels into his horse's sides, urging him to move faster. 

Leodhais had never travelled much; spending hours on horseback wasn't his thing. The movement of his horse progressing across the vast, hypnotic plain-- fields morphing into pastures only to become fields again-- lulled him into a daze, making him observe the countryside and villages the dragon led them around rather than through as if they were a dream. He pulled the hood of his obsidian cloak up to shield his eyes from the blinding sunshine and allowed his horse to follow the other two without his interference. 

Gilderoy kept at Peregrine's foot, never quite giving up asking questions. His best friend wasn't the adventurous type, and that's why he had never gotten farther from the castle than his native province of Dwarfland, directly neighbouring with Elvenshire, which spread right beyond Alaric's gardens. And they were through both in the first four days of their journey, the rich provinces providing them with sufficient occasions of stopping for meals offered by friendly and welcoming elves and dwarfs, and spending the nights in luxuriously furnished inns.

But as the afternoon of the fourth day began to morph into evening and they found themselves in the middle of a seemingly infinite moor, Leodhais and Gilderoy started to exchange worried looks.

"Are we in Goblinica?" Leodhais, urging his horse to reach Peregrine's, asked.

"Not yet. I would have thought that your tutors told you that Goblins live in the Silver Mountains, a low mountain range spreading beyond the Black Forest."

"They did," Leodhais said, frowning. "But I can't see neither hills nor forests here, and I don't know what this place is."

"This is the Bleak Moor," Peregrine said, letting his eyes rest on a group of silvery-white unicorns grazing in the distance. He adored the creatures. "I understand that this place is of no consequence to the crown if they didn't tell you about it. Well, it's officially uninhabited and unimportant..."

"Officially?" Gilderoy appeared on Peregrine's other side, the long grasses yellowed and dried up by the incessant sunshine and winds brushing the sides of his pony, making him wade through the grassland as if it was water.

"Yes," Peregrine smiled mysteriously. "And seeing that it will be dark soon, it will be better to set camp here."

"What do you mean, dragon?" Leodhais asked. "Where's a town, an inn, a bed... Are we to sleep in the grass?"

"Yes?" Peregrine said. He jumped off his horse upon reaching a tiny copse of trees, their thin trunks twisted impossibly, their almost leafless branches grown strangely entwined, fashioned by the frequent winds, giving them an eerie, haunted look.

"But..."

"You can ride on if you wish, elf. Just keep going south, and I'll meet you in The Gate Inn in Draconia in a few days. But don't expect to find an inn or a village to speak of in the Black Forest; that's a werewolf, vampire, and centaur territory, avoided by most other creatures. And if you find one in Goblinica, steer away from it if you don't want to part from your belongings. The Goblins are not the most trustworthy beings, and they despise elves."

Having tethered Shadow to one of the trees, Peregrine took the bags and the saddle off his back, then gathered a few handfuls of the dry grasses and proceeded to rub his sides gently.

Leodhais stared at him, mouth agape, as if he couldn't believe that the dragon was serious until Gilderoy slid off his mount too, and came to pull at his leg, making him follow his example. 

The dwarf tethered the pony and the white horse to a tree growing next to the one Peregrine had chosen and set to unloading them even as he asked, "What did you mean by officially uninhabited?" He let his eyes wander across the sea of grasses, rolling and stretching in the wind that seemed to intensify even as the sun started to set, awakening his mind with the scents it was carrying which never reached Alaric's castle-- the perfume of the ancient pine trees of the Black Forest, the earthy notes of the mountains lying beyond, the intense smell of the peaty soils and swamps of Draconia, and, just barely there, the scent of the sea spreading at the end of the Kingdom of Silmarea.

"They did tell you that there are ghosts, spirits, and sprites living in Silmarea, didn't they?" Peregrine demanded even as Leodhais, finally overcoming his shock, moved to help his friend with the horses.

Gilderoy shuddered involuntarily. "They did. Those entities can be summoned by those who possess magic."

Peregrine nodded. "Summoned from where? Not the thin air, surely. The majority of them are invisible or almost, and so they live among us, in any part of the kingdom, without our noticing them. But most of them prefer the peace and solitude of this moorland."

Leodhais' shoulders quivered with a delayed echo of Gilderoy's shudder.

"And you want us to spend the night here?" he asked incredulously, his eyes scanning their surroundings carefully.

"They are harmless, elf, they don't care about us unless they are summoned," Peregrine replied, his words underlined by a deep hoot of an owl that made Leodhais jump. He spread a blanket on the grass which folded into a sort of a mattress under it, and without taking a bite to eat lay down to sleep, pulling his hat over his face after having wrapped the black cloak close around his body like a bat would fold its wings before taking a nap. "Sleep well, you two. This might be the last undisturbed night we get before reaching The Gate Inn in Draconia. The inhabitants of the Black Forest and Goblinica are not Alaric's most ardent followers."

The dragon said no more as the two friends shared a meal and improvised their own, surprisingly soft beds side by side, among the high grasses, and it didn't take long before the wind whispering through the infinite stems lulled them to sleep.