Read Online Mage Quest - Wizard of Yurt 3 by C. Dale Brittain - Free Book Online

of visibility, but I hoped the bandits, riding fast, wouldn’t notice it until it was too late.
    “Wizard!” caled Hugo. There’s only a little tea left! Do you want some?” I hurried over to the fire, indeed wanting some.
    Shortly afterwards, we packed up the tents and started south again. Dominic had a lump on the back of his head but insisted he was al right. I kept glancing over my shoulder, wondering when someone would folow us along the road.
    We had climbed up the far side of the valey, perhaps a mile away, when the sound of distant voices was carried to us on the wind. I puled up my horse and looked back.
    There were several groves of trees in the valey, but I thought I could tel where we had camped last night Just visible beyond was a splash of scarlet, though we were too far away to pick out any details. The distant voices, shouting and screaming, faded away. I laughed and hoped that it had indeed been the bandits.

    II
    Spring advanced rapidly as we moved south. The woodland flowers disappeared as we moved into kingdoms where the trees had already leafed out. Here, too, the hils were a different shape than the hils of home, the rooflines of the houses different, the very style of clothes worn by the people working in the fields different from those worn by the vilagers of Yurt. To al of us and especialy to Dominic, the newness and variety was a heady experience in itself.
    After a month of traveling south on less-frequented roads, we finaly picked up the main pilgrimage and commercial route that ran from the great City down toward the Central Sea. We stopped at our first pilgrimage church, a smal dark structure that seemed little visited even though it stood close to a busy road. But it had vivid and complicated stone sculptures, about which Joachim read to us from the bishop s guidebook.
    “The saint here miraculously cured thousands of a disease whose name is no longer remembered. It has been forgotten because the saint cured it out of existence.” Hugo lifted his eybrows ironicaly at me. From the sculptures, it looked as though the disease was thought to have rotated men’s heads around backwards.
    After two days of jostling with other travelers on the road and another night in an inn—we got two beds this time—we left the route for the detour to visit Joachim s family. We headed through fields and meadows swathed in fresh yelow-green toward the manor where his brother lived.
    We looked at each other criticaly that morning. After a month of travel, we were al grubby, as wel as leaner and browner than when we left home. That is, al except the chaplain himself: He had somehow managed to keep himself tidily shaved and his clothes relatively unwrinkled.
    “Looking forward to someone else’s cooking?” I asked Ascelin as we lowered ourselves delicately into a stream which, even under a sunny spring sky, felt cold enough to have ice in it. I tried without much success to work up some lather to wash the smel of woodsmoke out of my hair.
    He plunged his head under water and came up snorting and laughing. His dark blue eyes contrasted sharply with his tanned face. I passed him the soap. “I should ask al of you that question.” We had decided, the third day out, that Ascelin was by far the best camp cook and had made him prepare the suppers ever since. He could even make passable biscuits over the fire. “Anytime you want to take a turn
    —”
    “I wanted to ask you something,” I said as we dried ourselves off and tried to shake the wrinkles out of the only clean clothes we had left. “I’ve been wondering about this for a while. Why did you and the duchess show up at the royal castle just as the king was about to announce his quest?”
    Ascelin puled a shirt over his head. “Didn’t Diana tel you? Sir Hugo’s wife had caled her that morning.”
    “Sir Hugo’s wife—”
    “He’s Diana’s relative as wel as the queen’s uncle—just a more distant relation. His wife was, of course, very