The Tales of the Wanderer Volume One: A Book of Underrealm (The Underrealm Volumes 4) Garrett Robinson (poetry books to read TXT) 📖

knocked their knuckles once on the table. “It is settled, then. The day has worn on too long for us to go now. I will arrange for you to be quartered here in the keep tonight, and we will set out first thing in the morning.”

“You are too kind,” said Mag. “But we have lodgings in the city.”

“I would rather not have to seek you out,” said Tuhin lightly. “And besides, you are servants of a Rangatira. It is only right that we should house you while you visit our domain, as well as spare your coin.” But they had a careful look in their eye, and I wondered if they wanted to ensure we did not try to investigate the fortress on our own.

“Then I suppose the matter is settled,” I said, just as amiably. “We thank you for your help.”

“Of course,” said Tuhin. “Let us get you to your rooms. Our servants will rouse you before dawn, and then we shall all see what may be done about your weremage.”

We set about retrieving our things from the Ugly Squirrel, and Oku was allowed within the keep walls to bed with the other hounds they kept. But as we set about readying ourselves for another night’s rest, I found myself wondering whether Tuhin’s presence by our side would be a help, or if they might inadvertently keep us from the end of our long hunt.

It takes a special sort of person to be a ranger like Tuhin. One must be a fighter as well as a tracker, and able to survive alone in the wilderness for weeks on end. I never wanted to be one. Not because I lacked the skill—I was better in the wilderness than most, and a good archer, as well as a passable swordsman. But I did not want to fight for my mother, to be another soldier serving at her command. As a consequence, my mother thought I was rather useless, and that was the only quality she could not forgive in a person. She doted—as much as she ever doted—upon my eldest sister, Romil. And she tolerated my middle sister, Ditra, because Ditra at least tried to play the part our mother demanded.

When I was young, it was hard for me to tell how much of Ditra’s demeanor was an act, and how much was genuine. She could adopt a hard-bitten, stern manner when she wished to please our mother. When she was following orders, she would grow stone-hearted, cold, even ruthless.

But I knew another side of her. She was kind to me, and to others, when not under my mother’s eye. She was assigned several retainers close to her own age as she grew older, and she grew to love many of them—or at least to bed most of them. I was not supposed to find out, but I did, though Ditra swore me to secrecy.

It happened when I was fifteen, and Ditra would have been … oh, she would have been about nineteen? I had woken after a nightmare. I had such dreams often in my youth, though never after my wending, which tells you something. In any case, when I woke up frightened in the night, I would creep down the hall to Ditra’s room. Never to my mother’s, certainly never to Romil’s.

And so there I found myself, creeping along the hallway in the thin moonslight pouring through the windows—when suddenly, the door to Ditra’s room opened.

Out came her retainer, cloaked in shadow and little else. I could scarcely see her in the darkness. But she saw me, and she fled at once as if in terror. I stood staring after her, and only after a moment did I realize that Ditra now stood in the doorway. She was clothed in a thin robe, one hand on the door’s edge, red upon her cheeks and a scowl upon her face.

“Do not say a word,” she whispered in the dark. “Not one. If Mother finds out, she will put me in the stocks.”

“Mother would never do that!” I protested. But Ditra gave me a long look, and I wilted under it. “I mean … well, obviously, I would never say anything in the first place.”

“Good girl,” she said, because none of us knew any better in those days, least of all me. “A bad dream?”

I nodded, though I had almost forgotten why I was there. The nightmare was fading. “A small one. Do not trouble yourself over it.”

“Oh, come in,” she said, opening the door wider. “But sky above, please pay attention in the future, will you? And if you should come to my room, and my door is closed, knock before you open it.”

“I will,” I promised her.

“Very well,” she said. “Tell me what you dreamed.”

I entered her room, which smelled sweet, and told her all about the dream, which I do not remember now. And at last I fell asleep in her arms, and felt just a little safer than I had before.

That is what a ranger should be. It is why I always thought Ditra would be an excellent ranger, if she had not had to serve my mother. But it is why I never thought I would be a good one. Because Ditra could always make me feel safe, but that was not a gift I felt I could give to anyone else.

A ranger’s first duty is always to keep their people safe. Or at least to try, even when faced with threats against which they are powerless.

On the same night that Mag and I conferred with Tuhin, there was trouble in my homeland of Tokana.

In a small village north of my family’s stronghold in Kahaunga, a woman named Whetu and her husband Paora had just put their children to bed for the night. They were sharing a cup of wine before they, too, went to sleep. They rested in wicker chairs in front of