Free Through the Wildwood by M. R. Mathias

then. It’s a good ways off and I thought you needed the rest.”
    Vanx nodded his thanks. “Let me go piss, and then we can go get a better look at what’s riled you.”
    While Vanx relieved himself, the eerie memory of Gallarael’s dream voice crept back into his skull. Had she reached to him across the empty space? While many Zythians were clairvoyant to a small degree, very few, if any, humans could manage to project their thoughts without the aid of magic. He remembered eating some bread covered with spoiled butter once. The fever dreams had plagued him for two days and nights. His stomach roiled and he vomited profusely after eating it. Gallarael’s dream image was burning up. Did it represent her feeling her own fever breaking? She’d called him a Zythian too. Did she know? Did her mother suspect?
    Lacing his britches up, he sensed more than heard movement in the darkness. His eyes sought the sensation, and then found for the briefest of moments a sight that stopped his heart cold. A wolf, poised to bound away - but it was no ordinary wolf. This wolf was saddled like a horse and one of the dark-skinned Kobalts sat in the rig glaring at him. Reflexively, he blinked and the image was gone. There wasn’t a wavering limb, or even a rustling leaf, to indicate if he had imagined the sight or not.
    Trying not to alarm Trevin and the others, he eased toward the lookout tree. He stopped and grabbed a second quiver of arrows. Trevin was hunched over Gallarael and Matty was rousting Darbon for his turn. Vanx hurried his pace, and with no concern over his companions seeing his true Zythian grace in action, he literally ran up the tree trunk like a scrabbling squirrel. In less than a heartbeat he settled himself in the branches and started to scan the distance in search of the fire. What he saw, though, nearly caused him to tumble out of the tree.
    Trevin’s fire was there, just where he estimated it to be, flickering like a tiny jewel in the night. What had Vanx grasping for reason was the three score other twinkles of firelight he could see. They were all around them, and just out of the range of human sight.
    They were surrounded. Knowing this gave credence to his vision of the wolf-riding Kobalt. Vanx was certain that if they were aggressive, they would have attacked already. What wolf-riding Kobalts would do to a peaceful group of travelers was the question now. Be it good or bad, he had no doubt they would soon find the answer.



The king saw the wizard and the wizard did speak
    “You might be a king, but your kingdom is weak.”
    Wrong said the king, for I’ve a wizard too
    now out of my castle with the sorry likes of you.
    – The Weary Wizard

“S he’s alive, my lady, but barely,” Orphas, the spiritual advisor to Duchess Gallarain, told her.
    He was hunched over a melon-sized sphere that formed a flawless crystal, at a small, three-legged table in the middle of a dark, candlelit cellar. The room seemed like a cavern to Gallarain, and it smelled like hot steel. The amber glow of the crystal before Orphas shone upward onto his elderly face, giving him a sinister look. The sharp widow’s peak of his polished silver skull cap and his high-collared crimson robe lent to the eerie image. In truth, he was no spiritual advisor at all; he was a wizard, and so far, one of the most honorable men Gallarain Martin had ever met. She conveniently overlooked the fact that he dishonestly paraded around as her spiritual advisor and had been sent there by King Oakarm himself to spy on her husband. To her, those particulars made him seem even more wise and mysterious, like some scholarly well-traveled uncle figure. Why he had revealed his true identity was a mystery to her, but she was sure that it had a great deal to do with the fact that Gallarael was King Oakarm’s illegitimate daughter.
    “Barely alive?” Gallarain gasped. “What do you mean?”
    “She’s not conscious, my lady, but alive.” Orphas looked at her