Free Silent Hall by NS Dolkart

out late the next morning, traveling southwest along a well-worn dirt road. Phaedra sold much of her luggage before they left, and now traveled with a pack slung over her shoulders. Even so, she was a very fast walker. Criton had never walked so far before, and he soon began envying the others for their shoes. Bandu didn’t have any either, but her feet were hard and callused, and she didn’t limp when the pebbles dug into them. He considered letting his feet revert to the scaly claws he had been born with, but then everyone would see. It was bad enough that Phaedra knew – he was lucky she hadn’t denounced him.
    Four-foot limped along beside, occasionally baring his teeth at Narky. Apparently, Narky was not yet forgiven for teaching Bandu how to burn a wound.
    â€œA wolf shouldn’t travel on the roads,” Narky told Bandu. “What if we run into some other travelers? Remember what happened on the boat?”
    A short argument ensued, and they were all quietly relieved when Bandu agreed to take Four-foot and follow some distance behind them, staying off the road.
    â€œYou walk, we hunt,” she said darkly, and when Phaedra asked if she would get lost without them, replied, “Four-foot can smell you.”
    Whatever he had hoped, traveling only made his thoughts darker. This was what Ma had wanted for him: a life outside her house, going wherever he must to find the dragon kin that he longed for. In Ma’s stories, the hero usually had a long and arduous journey on the way to fulfill his final goal. Criton’s journey was only just beginning, but he felt it couldn’t get much worse than it already was. His mother was dead – wasn’t that arduous enough?
    He walked in a haze, even as the scenery should have fascinated him. The birds, the trees, the sounds and smells of the country – all were unfamiliar to him. He felt he ought to learn about these places, even though he didn’t terribly care. Ma would have expected it.
    They entered a forest whose scent was pleasant, if a little overpowering, and he decided to ask his companions about the trees. Thus he learned from Hunter that they were called guardian trees, and that the finest warships were made of their wood; he learned from Narky that they poisoned the ground for fruit trees and tukka trees, which were harvested for gum; and Phaedra told him a story about a soldier long ago who had transformed himself into a tree so that he could forever guard his love. His head filled with new information, Criton refrained from asking any more questions.
    Another mile, and the road ran beside a brook, with a fen on one side and the woods on the other. It was a charming spot, really, with all the mystery and romance that lack of visibility can bring. It reminded him of how Ma used to let him look out the window on foggy days, so that he could imagine that the mist concealed his real father coming to reclaim his son.
    A man stepped out of the woods in front of them, raising a hand to halt their approach. He was a tall man in his twenties – about Criton’s height, in fact – with a long sword at his side and a grim expression on his face. Half of his upraised arm was covered with a tattoo of a boar.
    â€œRight, then,” he said, very matter-of-factly. “Let’s have your weapons on the ground first, then your valuables. Nobody makes any trouble, nobody dies, yes?”
    There were some other men visible now as well, two in the fen and three in the woods, standing with bows ready. Narky swore and put down his crossbow, but Hunter hesitated. He was clearly considering fighting his way out of this. Criton shook his head.
    When he was still a boy playing at dragon-finding, Ma had used to laugh and warn about bandits on the road. Something about the way she had said it made him imagine the bandits as grinning buffoons who could never really stop a boy with dragon’s blood and a dream. But these men were