Elise shook her head, whipping her braid furiously around. “I don’t want to. And you can’t make me. If you can leave, so can I.”
“If I end up with half the whelps following me…”
“Let’s go now. I’m pretty sure I saw the whelplings organizing a search party for you.”
“They kind of like me, don't they,” Hail said sadly with a pang of guilt at leaving their sweet faces behind.
“Everybody adores you. Especially Bryn. He didn’t cast you out, did he?”
“He did.”
“What did he say, exactly?”
Hail did not repeat what Bryn had said exactly, because that would have undercut her he cast me out narrative and given way to a he told me to stop putting everyone at risk, so I left, narrative. Which was, of course, far less generally flattering because it made her sound every bit the petulant whelp she no longer wanted to be.
“Let’s go.”
“Yes. Let’s have an adventure! Let’s seek out new lands!” Elise squealed with glee and clapped her hands and generally carried on in an upbeat way which completely undermined the entire brooding demeanor Hail had been working on as she walked toward the gates of New Rahvin.
“Where are we going?” She asked the question as if it had not been asked already.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t have a plan?”
“I wasn’t planning on getting cast out, Elise.”
“Oh right. I forgot we were saying that.”
Hail stopped and turned a very unimpressed gaze on Elize. “Did Bryn send you to spy on me?”
“What? No! Of course not.” Elise was working very hard on appearing to be innocent, which meant that she was quite likely lying. The only argument against her being a spy would be the fact that Bryn would never put Elise in danger, and there would be danger on the journey. Stepping outside the gates of New Rahvin was widely considered to be akin to requesting to be robbed, raped, and mauled. There was a not too small part of Hail which was surprised Bryn was letting her leave and face all those horrors on her own.
She understood why, though. Bryn looked after the young and the defenseless. He had plenty of those to hand, and she had outgrown his care. He would not sacrifice the others to save her, and she would not allow it even if he would. This was a mutual parting. A proper parting. The fact that it was painful only spoke to how important it was.
“Fine. Let’s go.”
“How are we going to kill the wolves? You know. The ones outside? The ones that are probably going to try to eat us the very second we walk out those gates?”
“I’m not worried about that.”
“Oh, you’re going to use magic, aren’t you,” Elise said confidently. “That’s why Bryn told you to leave, isn't it. He hates magic.”
“He does.”
“I wonder why? There must be a reason.”
“There probably is, and we’d know what it was if he bothered to explain himself, and didn’t act like he’s the final arbiter of all decisions for everybody within a five mile radius of him.”
“But what do you think the reason is? He must have one.”
“I don’t know. Maybe he had a bad experience with it. Maybe a fire spell blew up in his face. Maybe he’s just prejudiced. Maybe a wizard scared his mother when he was a baby. There are so many possible reasons.”
But she did know. At least a little. She knew that he believed it was dangerous, and that she was dangerous.
They were at the gates of New Rahvin now, the town having passed them by in their stream of conversation. The big ones, with the solid wood which stood three times as high as any man of any size. They would have been impossible to move if not for the perfect weighting of their mounts, which made them swing open easily, or would have, if they were shut. But they weren’t shut. They stood open, because there was no point shutting what hardly anybody dared bother to approach anyway.
“I never get tired of this view,” Elise chattered merrily as the Welt was laid out before them in a great sweeping plane.
The town of New Rahvin sat on a plain at the middle of Mount Eternal. At the base was Old Rahvin, which had mostly fallen into the ravine. Some old houses still remained. Some said that they were haunted, but Hail had decided that there was more likelihood of them being inhabited by bandits.
From New Rahvin, one could see almost all the way to the wild sea in the east. There were plains and crops and villages all laid out dotted across the region, and at the very cusp of what was visible, Entigon City. Seat of utter bastards, so Bryn would say. Hail intended to visit there. There was a small college of magic open only to men, but she figured that was a rule that would probably inevitably be broken by someone someday and it may as well be her.