Free Chains of Gold by Nancy Springer

strange.
    Neither of us had a plan. “Where are we going?” I asked once, over his shoulder as we rode.
    â€œI don’t know.” He laughed and nudged Bucca into a springing trot. “Folk think we are fleeing, but they are wrong,” he said. “We are two seekers questing together. We are looking.”
    â€œSeeing the size of the world,” I murmured. The vast world.
    I was coming to know Arlen better—a bittersweet reckoning, for one who had dreamed of heroes. There was little of the hero about Arlen, but much to love: the moods that crossed his face, his warm way with animals, his occasional mischief, his mouth that stammered slightly when he was heart-touched or distressed—there were a thousand expressions about his mouth. And for all our happiness and Arlen’s confidence I began to feel that he hid some deep hurt; something was bleeding within him, a wound that had not yet started to heal.
    â€œWhat is wrong?” I whispered to him, late at night, just before sleeping beneath frosty stars.
    â€œNothing.”
    â€œI have sensed in you—not sadness, exactly.…”
    â€œIt is nothing, Rae.”
    â€œLonn?” I asked softly, and I felt Arl shake his head, his hair brushing against my cheek.
    â€œI have wept for Lonn. Leave it, Rae.”
    It was true, we spoke of Lonn often. I asked again, from time to time, but Arlen did not tell me what ailed him, and I decided he could not, that he did not yet know the name of it himself.
    â€œElderberries,” he murmured once.
    â€œWhat?” We were riding, and he spoke away from me, so I had not heard.
    â€œElderberries.” He stopped the horse and pointed.
    Bushes clustered thickly beside us, and the black berries hung in bunches from every bough. Arlen reached over and plucked himself a fistful, and my skin prickled in protest.
    â€œThose are forbidden food!” I cried. The elder was the tree of doom and immortality, of death and the goddess; it kept its fruit throughout the winter. An infant laid in a cradle of elderwood would pine and die. The goddess only knew what would happen to a person who ate of the fruit of that tree. But before I could scream or stop him, Arlen put some in his mouth. There was a reckless look about those greenish eyes of his, almost fury.
    â€œI am not going to starve.…” Though in fact he was courting death. He swallowed, seeming pleased. “Rae, they are good,” he said offering some to me.
    They were, very good, filling and sweet. I ate them because he had. I wanted to share his fate, whatever it was to be, and some of that angry recklessness was in me also; what new punishment could be in store for us? We would defy it. We ate our fill—and no ill came of it. Even looking back, I can discern none. After that we ate of the elderberries whenever we found them, and they sustained us better than any other food we could find. But we had placed ourselves far from other folk with that act, and we knew it and avoided them when we could, as they avoided us.
    We traveled in this way for more than a month, heading mostly toward the north and east, away from the Naga and the seven holds of Rahv. There were two snowstorms; they covered our traces for a while and then caused us to leave more. The land grew more rolling between eskers, and more wooded, and even more sparsely settled. Nothing else changed.
    So the greater was our surprise when, rounding the curve of a hill one noonday, we found dug into the side of it a house of earth, a soddy, not a stone cottage or a walled garth but simply a soddy set beneath the copse, and out of it came a man in dark clothing. And when he saw us—we were already quite close, having come on him from around the side of the hill because of its forested top—he walked toward us instead of away from us, and he greeted us.
    â€œArlen, is it not?” he said. “And Lady Cerilla?”
    Arlen jerked Bucca to a