Summerfall Read Free Page B

frustrated look into the trees. “No doubt he’s already sent someone out after you. Do you know how silly I’ll look, to have taken this long to notice you?”
    Rinka flashed him a hard, smug smile. He wasn’t yelling at her, as she’d imagined he would, but talking down to her, as though she were a child, and that riled her. It wasn’t her fault he’d been careless.
    “Father can be as furious as he likes,” she said. “I’m not afraid of him.”
    “I’m sure he told you how dangerous this is. He wasn’t joking, Rinka.”
    “Garen, I know the danger, and I crave it. All my life I’ve yearned to travel to the human country. To see Erstadt. To see any human at all! Father wants to protect me, and he has done so all too well. I’ve had a narrow life. I hardly know anything about my kingdom other than what I’ve experienced in Geschtohl. Am I to live out the rest of my years there, sheltered and coddled for centuries, without ever seeing anything of the world I love?”
    “But why do you love them?” Garen pleaded, a sullen note souring his voice.
    “Because it’s my destiny,” she said simply.
    He laughed. “Rinka, there’s no such thing.”
    “The humans think there is. Some of them, anyway. And I like the idea. It’s poetic. I feel the weight of it when I think of humans. I feel the weight of purpose unfulfilled.”
    Garen brushed the hair from her face, and Rinka allowed him that, though her instinct was to smack his hand away.
    “You are a foolish romantic,” he said at last.
    “And you are going to help me. Aren’t you?”
    “Yes.” He sighed again and rubbed his face. “Do you know, it’s actually rather perfect? Stanzya didn’t want to come but she didn’t know how to refuse the Council. We could send her home to the shore, and you could take her place.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe I’m saying these things.”
    As he spoke, Rinka felt a surge of rightness sweep through her. She felt ready to take to the skies. “Don’t you see, Garen? It is destiny. I was meant to join you after all.”
    Garen shook his head, and then began talking through how they would word the letter to Kaspar: Stanzya had fallen ill, Rinka had graciously volunteered to serve on her behalf, and yes, of course Garen would ensure nothing would happen to her—even though, Rinka pointed out, she was capable of taking care of herself. But she allowed it; anything to placate her father. When they returned to the faery camp, they drafted the note and sent it off with one of their attendants.
    Once this was done, Rinka felt a sudden great affection for Garen’s rational, newly humorless self. She felt a sudden great affection for everything . She gazed far to the north, where she thought she could see the luster of Erstadt’s white towers in the moonlight.
    I will be there soon , she thought. And then she imagined sending her love winging through the night sky to Erstadt, like a bird to its nest, like arrows to their mark, like a prayer to the seas.

3
    SURROUNDING THE CITY of Erstadt were miles of farmlands, spotty woodlands, and tiny villages, connected by a network of first dirt roads and then roads of white stone nearer the city itself. It was fertile country here, not as temperate as the faery lands in spring, but still pleasant.
    Not so pleasant, Rinka was devastated to discover, were the humans who watched their progress.
    Oh, some of them were fine enough. The occasional child would see Rinka smile and bashfully return it with his own before ducking behind his mother’s legs, and not a few young ladies arranged themselves more becomingly when they caught sight of Garen in his coat and bretzhenner ’s collar. But for the most part, the reactions to the faery retinue were . . . disgruntled. Frightened, wary. Vaguely insulted, as if tolerating the presence of faeries were onerous.
    “Quite the welcome,” Garen muttered, inching his horse closer to Rinka’s.
    “Can you blame them?” said