The Journey Home: The Ingenairii Series: Beyond the Twenty Cities (4 page)

“What are the Rangers?” Alec asked.

“The Prince wants the girls who were kidnapped here to be rescued and returned,” Tarry answered.  “We have an expedition of a dozen men set to leave tomorrow.”

“They’re chasing the Warriors?” Alec asked Andi.  She nodded agreement.

“Regular men, chasing Warriors,” he asked again, a note of scorn creeping into his voice.

Alec looked at Andi and nodded his head at the budding Ranger.  She reached her hand over and placed it on his
.  His name is Tarry
, she reminded him.
 
He is a good man, well-meaning.

Thank you
, Alec shared his thought with her.

“Tarry,” he said aloud, “it’s foolish for regular men to go after Warrior ingenairii.  None of you will come back alive
if you catch up to them.
”

“It may seem foolish to you, but it is unthinkable for the Prince to let a group of young girls be kidnapped from his city and left to suffer whatever happens to them,” Tarry answered with dignity.  “Better to make the effort and hope for the best than to let them be
made into
victims like that.”

Alec nodded his head.  “I understand the need to follow
,
to settle justice.  I’ve come all the way from the other side of the mountains to find one girl.  I’ll come with your group to help fight the battle that’s ahead.”

“And I’ll be with Alec,” Andi said aloud. 
Are you ready to go on a journey like this?

I traveled from the battlefield to John Mark’s cave after I woke up
from the lacertii war
, he replied.

“And I’ll go along too,” Amane spoke up, carefully not looking at Andi.

Tarry looked around the table in surprise.

“Amane, you can’t just go!” Casse cried.  “Our house will
be so lonely with you and Tarry
both gone.”

“I can fight, but even if they wouldn’t take me as a fighter, I’ll go as Alec’s squire, if nothing else,” Amane said, red-faced.

“This is the Prince’s Ranger squad,” Tarry protested.  “You all can hardly invite yourselves to join.”

“He’s right,” Alec admitted, as a clap of thunder outside startled them all, and heavy rain began to fall.  “The Rangers have their mission.  We may just happen to ride on the same route for the same purpose.”

Andi looked at the expression of shock on Tarry’s face, and the intense interest on Amane’s. 
Don’t push it any further for now
, she silently suggested.

Alec squeezed her hand in agreement.

“Ah, thank goodness for the blessed rain,” Casse spoke up, trying to be a peacemaker and steer the conversation to a different, safer topic.  “The gardens will be nice and fresh when we visit them this afternoon,” she spoke to Andi.  “Speaking of which, I’m going to go get ready.  Are you still coming?  Deirdre and Drake were so looking forward to meeting you.”

Alec looked at Andi
.  I’m supposed to go on a garden tour this afternoon.  It’s how I’ve filled my time while you’ve been unconscious
, she silently explained.

“Would you two stop doing that?  We feel left out of your conversations!” Casse said with exasperation.

Alec pulled his hand from Andi’s.  “Forgive us,” he said.  “I’m just overwhelmed by all that I’m learning today.  Of course you should feel free to go on your tour today,” he said to Andi.  “I won’t perish if you leave me alone for a few hours,” he told Andi.

“I can watch over Alec for you, if you want,” Amane told Andi.

“That won’t be necessary,” both Alec and Andi said at the same time.

“I’d feel better if someone were with him, especially since he just woke up after three weeks.  And if he has any questions about the Rangers or the trail the ingenairii took from Exbury, I can give him information,” Amane insisted.

Alec shrugged.  “Come along for a while if you want.  We can go to an armory somewhere and practice sword
work.”

“We’ve got an armory right here in our home!” Amane said brightly.

Andi stood to go, not pleased by the idea of Amane spending time with Alec, but not sure why.  She and Casse went to their chambers to get dressed, leaving Tarry and Amane and Alec alone at the table.

“I’ll go to the prince’s stable and make arrangements for the additional members of the party,” Tarry told the other two as he stood.

“Do you think it will be a problem?” Amane asked.

“Not when they find out it’s the two who have been hunting the kidnappers all the way across the world.  And they’ll take you too,” he kidded his younger brother with a tousling of his hair, and then was gone from the room.

Amane led Alec to the armory, and they put on padding, picked up the wooden practice blades, and began engaging in their motions.  “Andi is an extraordinary woman!” Amane said after a few momen
ts of wordless practice, as they cautiously moved about on the pads, swinging their weapons.  Alec was restraining
his efforts as it became evident that he far outmatched the young Old One.

“I have enjoyed having her here with us while she’s waited for you to recover.  She is an accomplished fighter as well as an attractive woman,” he said.

“She’s from Black Crag, trained as a guard there.  They’re the best fighters in the Empire,” Alec replied.  “They’re as good as the Goldenfields Guard, for that matter.”

“She’s
kind and
thoughtful too,” Amane went on.  “She keeps receiving invitations to go on tours of gardens.  Casse’s friends are the ones asking, but really their brothers ask them to, so that the brothers can get to meet Andi that way.  Even though she knows what she’s being asked to do, she won’t
risk seeming rude by
say
ing
no to Casse’s friends, so she gets dragged out over and over again.

“I can’t imagine that anyone would ever toy with her,” Amane said.  “For one thing, she’d cut them up with her sword!” he gave a nervous smile.  “But I’d hate to see someone toy with her affections if they don’t have honorable intentions towards her.”

“I agree completely,” Alec said, still holding back his sword work against Amane.

“I took the liberty of moving her belongings into your room when we found out you had recovered,” Amane continued.  “If you’d like, if it would make you more comfortable, we can simply have the maids transfer them back to her own room; it would only be for tonight,
anyway, since we’ll start our
journey tomorrow.”

Alec stepped back from Amane, and lowered his sword.  He’d had enough of the unproductive fencing.  And now that he knew that the practice session was only a ruse
the young man had sprung in order
to verbally fence over Andi, he was done.  He stood silently, making Amane nervous, and began to untie his pads, then walked to the storage racks without speaking and put his things away.

“You c
an have her things moved out,” Al
e
c
said as he headed for the door.  “If she wants them moved in, she’ll ask for it herself.  I’m going to go for a walk around the city,” he told Amane, and then he was out the door.

Amane went immediately into the manor house, where he found a maid
,
and cheerfully told her that Alec had asked for Andi’s items to be moved back to her room in the east wing.

Alec meanwhile, walked through the streets of the city, absently noting some of the wonders of the plants that were the fundamental character of the city’s feature, but mostly he let his mind chur
n unceasing
ly through the multiple issues that faced him.

He had apparently come tantalizingly close to capturing the renegade Warrior ingenairii.  He wondered what the battlefield had been like, what feature had betrayed him, to cause him to lose.  He’d defeated other ingenairii in his old life time, and he’d beaten the Ajacii in this one.  He knew what his capabilities were; if he had beaten all the demons he had fought, it seemed disappointing to him that he had failed to defeat these opponents.

And now they had a three week lead.  He shook his head.  He could travel with ultimate speed if he were traveling alone in pursuit of them; he could travel reasonably fast if he only had one or two companions; but in a group of twelve or fourteen or more, people who he feared and suspected were not trained, true warriors, the pace would be abysmal.  He needed a guide; he needed someone who could send him in the right direction, but that was all he needed.

Andi was a problem.  She was a Black Crag guard, and he’d be happy to have such as his partner in any battle.  What’s more, she was a Warrior ingenaire now!  He had to have her at his side, and he didn’t doubt that the two of them would be a match for any opponent they would face.  But he wasn’t going to cavalierly accept her assertion that she was his soul mate; he’d not thought of her in that fashion up to the last moment he remembered
, and he couldn’t force his heart to think of her differently now
. 

She was a Black Crag guard,
someone who had the confidence
of a person traine
d to battle.  And she was young
- of course, everyone was young
compared to him
, but at least someone like Salem had some experience of life, some sense of what had shaped them and some sense of what their shape was.  That wasn’t the Andi he had observed on the road through the mountains
, a girl who was impetuous and abrasive at times
. 

And she had a handsome nobleman obviously smitten with her, hoping for any sign of acceptance from her, actively fishing for clues as to how he could clear all obstacles from his path to her heart.  Yet she made her inexplicable claims about the
deep, Spiritual
ties between the two of them, and buttressed the credibility of her claims with the obscure facts she knew about him.  It all seemed impossible!

Alec felt adrift.  He wanted his memories back.  He wanted to know what to expect.
He wanted to know the contours of the ground he stood upon. 
He continued to wander, until he saw the shadows lengthening, then he turned and walked back to the great house he was staying in.  He was tired, he realized.  He had been tiring even before he turned around, the effect of his body having lain prone and unmoving for so many days.  When he returned to the home of Amane’s family he went straight to his room in the west wing, and laid down on his bed.  Within moments he was asleep, his mind still processing the unknown new world in which he found himself, dreaming uneasy dreams.

When he returned to the house, Andi was already there, alternately stewing and worrying about discovering that she had been evicted from his room.  She had gone there when she returned from another garden tour, discovered her things missing, and asked the maid what was amiss.

“Miss Andi, the Lord Alec asked that your things be sent back to your room,” the maid had told her.

Andi had been shocked by the action, but Alec was gone, and nobody knew where he had gone, so she could not ask him what he did or why.  She could tell where he was; as she had gone on her pleasant garden tour, she had discovered that she could once again find A
lec’s location through the mind-
connection they shared, or that she shared with him, a sad and empty one-way conduit of feelings and knowledge now.  When she returned to the house she knew he was not there.  She had sat in her room and stewed over the eviction, then gone to sit down
quietly
for an early dinner with Casse, Amane, and Tarry, as was her habit.

She felt Alec’s return while she ate, and she excused herself from the small talk at the table early, skipping dessert, to go talk to the man she loved.  But there was no answer when she knocked on his door, and when she opened it and entered the gloomy chamber, Alec was already asleep on his mattress.  She sighed, and pulled his boots off his feet, then left and returned to the dining room.

“What time will we leave tomorrow?” she asked Tarry.

“Mid-morning, or at least we are to be at the palace at mid-morning, and we’ll leave from there with the Rangers,” he answered.

“Alec is asleep already, so I can’t talk to him.  But everything is settled with the Rangers for he and me to go along?” she asked.

“And me!” Amane added in a cheerful tone.

“All three of you are officially expected to make the journey,” Tarry agreed.

“I’ll have Alec up in plenty of time.  Will there be someone who is in charge of everything?” she asked.  “Alec will want to find out how much intelligence we have for this trip.”

“We can talk while we ride tomorrow,” Tarry assured her, and soon thereafter they parted for the evening, Amane walking Andi to her room to bid her good night.

Chapter 3
– The Rangers of Exbury

The trip did not begin well.  Alec was lethargic when Andi awoke him, and in no mood to discuss her removal from his room.  “We were only going to be here one night anyway,” he echoed the reasoning Amane had given him.  “I slept all the way through the night as it is.”