I’d planned to leave any decisions about my life and the Academy for the morning after whatever party or parade the local notables insisted on throwing for us. The Jan’Tep don’t have parades, but Ferius said those kinds of grand gestures make people feel good about themselves. Reichis figured it would be a good opportunity to pick a few rich people’s pockets. Me? I just wanted to enjoy a long luxurious sleep in a proper bed – with silk sheets and actual pillows.
Comfort. It’s not for everybody, but I sure don’t mind it.
I’d just settled into a nice warm daze when I felt a hand on my arm. For just a brief second I thought it might be Seneira, but before I could even decide how I felt about that, I heard that annoying frontier drawl half whispering, ‘Rise and shine, kid. Time for me to vamosey on out of here. The road’s calling.’
‘“Vamosey” isn’t a word, Ferius,’ I grumbled, shrugging off her hand and turning to nestle deeper into my pillow. ‘Nobody “shines” in the middle of the night, and the road isn’t calling. It’s asleep, like everybody else.’
Even as I tried to force myself to drift into unconsciousness, I waited for whatever clever reply she had in store for me. When none came, I sat up in the bed and rubbed at my eyes. When I opened them again, she was gone.
‘Wha’s up …’ Reichis muttered, stretched out alongside me in the bed, front paws reaching out as if he’d been dreaming of chasing falcons in the air.
I didn’t answer, because it suddenly occurred to me that during the past few weeks I’d said a lot of rotten things to Ferius; I’d given her any number of reasons to part company with me. Now that we’d dealt with the shadowblack plague, maybe she was ready to be free of me and this had been her way of saying goodbye. She hadn’t said it was time for us to vamosey – whatever ‘vamosey’ was supposed to mean. She’d said her.
I jumped out of bed, dislodging Reichis and earning me a loud hiss followed by him suddenly jumping into attack position, front claws out and sleepy eyes opened wide. ‘Who’s out there? Who’d dare interrupt the sacred dream sleep of a squirrel cat? Show yourself, dead meat!’
‘Relax,’ I said, hurrying to slip a shirt over my head and putting on my trousers. ‘And get your stuff.’ Reichis’s ‘stuff’ consisted of his bag of stolen shiny objects, which I noticed was considerably more swollen than it had been when we’d first arrived.
‘We leavin’?’ he asked, looking mournfully back at the bed. Then he looked up at me and I could see in his eyes that he understood. ‘Or just saying goodbye to Ferius?’
‘I …’ I stuffed my own few belongings back into my pack and slung it over my shoulder before putting my boots on and sticking Dexan’s hat on my head. ‘I don’t know, but come on.’
He snatched up his little velvet bag in his teeth and leaped onto my shoulder.
I raced through the hallway and headed for the stairs as quietly as I could, trying my best not to wake anyone. As I passed by Seneira’s room, I paused for just a second, wondering if I should sneak inside and gently wake her to say something.
‘Creepy,’ Reichis warned in my ear.
I guess he had a point.
Down the stairs and out the back door, I found Ferius leaning against her horse, arms folded across her chest and a trail of smoke drifting up towards the starry sky from the red dot of her smoking reed. ‘Were you really going to leave without me?’ I asked.
She didn’t reply, but nodded towards the barn, where a second horse was saddled and ready to go.
Reichis sauntered over and leaped up onto the horse’s back, sorting himself out to lie on his preferred spot just ahead of the saddle and muttering a warning to the poor animal that he better make it a smooth ride.
I hesitated, looking back at Seneira’s big white house and the promise of good food and effusive praise that the morning would bring. More importantly, her father’s offer of a life at the Academy pulled at me. A place to live, a chance to study and a purpose that would let me see myself as something passably noble: Kellen, defender of the Academy. Okay, I’d work on the name some other time.
And what did Ferius have to offer? Long winding roads and convoluted frontier mysticism; hard living and a future that had no clear direction; no promises of who I’d be or what I would become. The choice should have been easy, and yet … it wasn’t. Maybe it was because Ferius had saved my life so many times, or because some of those ridiculous lessons of hers in dance and music and swagger were finally sinking in. Mostly, though, I didn’t want to say goodbye, because, crazy as she was, Ferius Parfax was the strangest and most daring person I’d ever known, and if I stayed behind, I was more sure than I’ve ever been about anything in my whole life that I’d never meet anyone like her again.
As if she could sense my indecision, Ferius dropped her reed to the ground and stamped it out with the heel of her boot before mounting up on her own horse. I walked over and stared at mine. ‘Well?’ I asked Reichis. ‘You reckon we should follow her into even more mayhem?’
‘Don’t give a shit,’ he mumbled, nestling his head in the folds of the thin, furry gliding flaps that ran between his front and back legs. ‘Sleeping.’
Ferius was already on the move, so I put a foot in the stirrup and hauled myself up to the saddle.
Once I caught up with her on the road heading out of town, I asked, ‘Why did we have to leave in the middle of the night? Those people were going to throw us a parade or something.’
She kept her eyes ahead of her. ‘Yeah? What would that have been like?’
‘I don’t know,’ I grumbled. ‘Nobody’s ever thrown a parade for me before. I guess it’d be a lot of people cheering for us and telling us how great we are. Seneira’s father said they had some kind of ceremonial plaque or sculpture they give to those who’ve done great deeds for the Academy.’
A sliver of a smirk settled itself on her lips. ‘Well, when you put it that way … it sounds even more boring than I thought.’
‘What about Seneira? We never said goodbye!’
It seemed like a pretty good counter-argument. I mean, why would you leave before even settling things with someone you cared about? But Ferius just asked, ‘What were the last words she said to you?’
I thought about that for a second. ‘I think she said, “You’re a better person than you think you are.”’
‘Yeah. Kid, those sound like pretty good parting words to me.’
The simple truth of that settled on me like a cold, lonely night. Seneira had her own life to live now; a future full of fine and important people, of diplomatic missions and vital trade agreements. Someone would come into her life who wasn’t an itinerant Jan’Tep outcast with a bounty on his head and a curse around his left eye. Someone who could share a proper life with her. Someone who wasn’t me.
Seneira had said goodbye.
‘Besides,’ Ferius went on, ‘you really want to carry some big-ass plaque in your saddlebags from here to Gitabria?’
‘Gitabria?’ Just the word on my tongue felt uncomfortable. And dangerous. ‘That’s where we’re going?’
‘That’s where I’m going, kid. Dexan’s journal showed most of the Academy students who’ve gone home with those darned worms in their eyes come from there. Those kids need seeing to before whoever’s got the other half uses them for whatever magical shenanigans they got planned. Best put a stop to that nonsense before it gets troublesome.’ She finally turned to look at me. ‘Fancy raisin’ some hell with me?’
Shenanigans. Nonsense. Troublesome. She made it sound like nothing more than children being quarrelsome instead of what it really was: a consortium of deadly Jan’Tep mages, with a plot that could stretch across the continent and the means to destroy anyone who got in their way.
Ferius kept staring at me, even as our horses settled into a gentle walk along the sandy road, waiting for a reply. ‘Well, kid? You decided what you want to be when you grow up?’
Behind the glib words was the question that had been eating me up inside ever since I’d fled the Jan’Tep lands. All I’d aspired to was to get away from the people who wanted me dead, to find somewhere safe or some path I could follow that would ensure I didn’t have to be afraid any more. More than anything, I’d wanted someone to tell me who I was, and what I was going to be. I looked down and was surprised to find Reichis, eyes open, watching me, waiting.
‘My whole life I’d planned on being a Jan’Tep mage like my mother and father,’ I said. ‘To spend my days learning and crafting new spells with my people, maybe even to become a lord magus one day. That life is gone forever, isn’t it?’
‘Reckon it is,’ Ferius said.
‘And I probably won’t become a proper Argosi like you, will I?’
‘That’s up to you …’ She held back for a moment, then said, ‘But I’m guessing not.’
‘And Dexan was the only other spellslinger I’ve met, and he turned out to be a liar and a thief.’
‘Hey!’ Reichis growled. ‘Don’t go insulting liars and thieves.’
My horse shook its head, nearly dislodging Reichis, who proceeded to chitter a number of rather nasty threats in its ear. Our mount promptly reared just enough that I had to hang on to the saddle and Reichis went tumbling to the ground, before the horse stopped and waited politely for the squirrel cat to hop back up. Apparently certain rules were being established.
I found my gaze drawn to the sand, the quartz so pure it reflected the night sky above us like a giant map of the stars; an infinite number of lights, each one a guide to a different destination, not one of them demanding I follow it to the exclusion of all others.
‘Guess I’m always going to be part Jan’Tep,’ I said finally, ‘even if they never want to be part of me.’ I felt something in my chest that had been tight for a long time finally start to ease. ‘Reckon I’ll be part Argosi too. How else am I going to keep up with my dancing lessons?’
Ferius grinned and brought her horse closer to mine. ‘Gonna make a passable musician out of you too.’ She unslung the little guitar from her back and handed it to me. ‘Go on, kid, play us something grand.’
I stared at the thing. ‘How? You haven’t taught me how to play.’
‘That’s cos I’m hopin’ you’ll figure it out on your own.’
I let go of the reins and strummed a couple of opening chords I’d seen Ferius play in the past. The resulting noise was pretty awful, but I kept on trying anyway. ‘I figure I’ll need to be part spellslinger, since some folks keep insisting on trying to kill me.’
She nodded. ‘That’s fair.’
I was about to try a tune on the guitar when I felt a tap my knee, and I looked down at Reichis, whose expression was making it clear I was in a great deal of personal danger. ‘Yeah,’ I finished up, ‘I’ll probably have to learn to be part squirrel cat too.’
‘Damned straight,’ he said, curling himself back up to go to sleep. ‘If I leave things to you two morons, we’ll just keep risking our lives and end up with nothing to show for it.’
‘What’d he say?’ Ferius asked. When I translated, she said, ‘Well, not nothing. Kellen got himself a nice new hat.’
Reichis opened one feral eye and looked up at me, then closed it again. ‘Guess it is a pretty cool hat.’
We rode slowly but steadily all through that night, the stars above us and the glistening sand below. I would bungle various chords on the guitar while we took turns singing – even Reichis. We made up preposterous songs about our adventures, sometimes cheering each other on, sometimes, like when Ferius sang a soft, whispering lament for Revian – a young man I had hardly known but whose death was burned into my soul – I even cried, almost as if I was a decent human being. Mostly, though, we laughed at our own exploits, because when you thought about it, the three of us had to be pretty much the craziest bunch of lunatics the Seven Sands had ever seen. Somewhere in that long night of song, of laughter, of tears, I somehow found myself.
My name is Kellen Argos. I am the Path of Endless Stars.