Free Son of the Hero by Rick Shelley Page B

his attempts to serve us. We were seated and served our first steins of beer before we knew what was going on. I was surprised that Timon was given beer, but nobody else was. Timon certainly didn’t object. He took a sip and smacked his lips.
    The beer was good even if it was just cool, not cold. Supper was a thick, gritty stew served in large wooden bowls. The bread was gritty too. I didn’t know if the grit was dirt or poor milling. I was too hungry to get overly fastidious. The stew meat was some kind of game; I didn’t ask what. But there were also potatoes, carrots, and loads of onion. The bread was in flat, rounded loaves like hamburger buns for the Jolly Green Giant, thick-crusted and chewy. Sopping up gravy was the best way to eat the bread.
    Except for Timon, we emptied our beers quickly even though the mugs must have held more than a quart, and the landlord brought a second round. And a third while we dredged up the last traces of gravy from our second large bowls of stew with the last crusts of bread. It was a satisfying meal.
    The landlord asked if we wanted lodging for the night. Rather than approach me directly, he asked Lesh, who looked to Parthet, who looked to me.
    “We have to travel on, I’m afraid,” I said. “There’s still sun in the sky. But this has been an excellent meal, most satisfying.”
    The landlord’s head bobbed up and down at the compliment, but I think he was just as happy to see us move on. He was a nervous sort, and we were obviously not his usual trade. Parthet asked how much we owed, then dug a BIC pen and a three-by-five spiral notebook from some recess of his clothing, wrote out an IOU, and signed it. “The magistrate will make sure you get your money,” Parthet told the innkeeper. “By the way, we expected to see him. Is he out of town?”
    The innkeeper cackled and nodded. He started to explain but changed his mind after a glance my way. Whatever the juicy gossip was, we weren’t going to hear it.
    I felt more loaded down than ever as we walked back to the courtyard. Two and a half huge meals in one day, probably more food than I ate in a full week at college. A burger and fries or a couple of slices of pizza for lunch, maybe a decent supper three nights a week, junk food taken on the run the rest of the time, with a snack thrown in whenever my stomach complained that it was empty-that was my school diet.
    Our horses had been fed and groomed. They actually seemed eager to get started again.
    Past Nushur, the road tended to head northeast rather than east. I spent a few minutes studying the map that Kardeen’s clerk had prepared. Nushur was marked, and so was the road’s change of direction. The map didn’t show every nip and tuck, but it had the general layout fairly well. Varay east of Nushur got decidedly seedy-looking. The trees were shorter and scraggly with gnarled, knotty trunks and vegetation that looked wasted, more like the heat of summer than the bloom of spring. For long stretches, the road became a single trace scarcely wide enough for a rider, with branches hanging low enough over the path to be a serious hazard.
    “You sure we didn’t miss a turn or something?” I asked.
    “This is the road,” Lesh said. Since dinner, he had cut back on the number of lords and highnesses he used. “It gets better a ways ahead, as I recall. Another four miles perhaps.” A long four miles. A couple of times Lesh and I had to dismount to lead our horses through the worst spots. The afternoon wore on.
    “We should make camp before it gets dark,” I said as I remounted at the end of the worst of the worst stretches.
    “That would be wise,” Parthet said. He hadn’t needed to dismount for any of the bad patches. “I need light for my camping magics.”
    “Camping magics?” I asked.
    “There are a few things I can do to make a camp more comfortable, but I have to be able to see to do them.”
    Two hours later he decided that we had to find a spot soon if he was