The Final Quest (The Parsival Saga Book 3) Read Free

through the tangles, finally coming out, farther back, into a rolling field of dried grasses and tuftlike clumps of brush and spread-out lines of coppery cypress that seemed to flicker up into powdery sky, like flames.
    “Well,” he said, at length, leading them on in a wide circle that he reckoned would bring them back to the valley road a mile or so beyond the raiders. “We’ve become wild creatures enough. All of us.”
    Alienor had pulled back her hood. Red-gray hair glistened in the steady, heavy sun.
    “Water flows, husband,” she said, “the nearest way it can.”
    “Well, it don’t please me, woman,” he answered, “put it any way you like.”
    “How far is it, father?” the girl, Tikla, wanted to know. She was keeping pace with her slightly older brother, who was whipping a willow switch at tall, stooped sunflowers as he walked.
    “I would restore to them,” Broaditch said, peering alertly around, “their lost childhood … Aye … and my own lost everything else too, had I the power.”
    “Father?” she repeated.
    “Not far, child.” Frowned and murmured. “No more than eternity away.”
    “Your father,” Alienor put in, “has come to riddling like a mystic hermit since we found him.”
    “It was this hermit, woman, did the finding.”
    “Oh?”
    “Aye. Right enough. And were not easy as finding shit in a cowbarn.”
    “A sweet comparison.”
    “Well, just, anyway.”
    “Oh? And were we not where we were when you come upon us you’d not have found us.”
    He frowned and smiled and shook his head as if struck.
    “Woman,” he said, “there’s no denying that, I think.”
    “So, were it not for where we chose to be you’d have missed us.” He couldn’t tell how amused she actually was. She always could sound a little fierce.
    “No question,” he murmured, peering around.
    “So,” she said, with a twinkle of triumph, “without our help you’d not have done the thing at all.” She smiled then.
    “I found nothing quite the same,” he said, and she glanced at him, faintly unsure of his full meaning.
    “Do you mean to forever hold that little business up to me?” She was almost coy.
    “Little business.” He brushed the grayed hair back from his sweaty forehead. “A springtime bud in winter, more like.”
    “What? Winter? You say I’m come to that? Hah. Oaf.” She cracked her knuckle into the side of his head. “Oaf. So you make a hag of me already?”
    “Well, well, autumn then, woman.” He was grinning now, faintly. “In any case, finally you admit it in full.” He wasn’t sure himself how much it actually mattered to him. But not knowing bothered him, suspecting bothered him.
    “Ah, do I indeed, Broaditch?”
    “I’m hungry,” said Torky.
    “We’ll eat soon,” she assured him.
    “That long-faced chap, that Lampic,” Broaditch was saying, “he showed his thoughts in his eyes.” Spat and pursed his lips. “His squinty eyes,” he amended.
    “And what do thoughts come to?”
    “The turnip comes from the seed.”
    She chuckled, reaching down into the foodsack now, tilting it over her shoulder.
    “Broaditch. At our time of life? You act like a young swain jealous of his first love’s every look.”
    “Well, well …”
    “I might profit from this mood had we time and place at hand.”
    He stopped again. The weedy grasses here reached nearly to Torky’s face. His sister was over her head.
    “Sit down, everybody,” Broaditch said. “We wait and see what we see.”
    “What’s in your mind?” Alienor asked. He shrugged. She frowned. “There’s nothing to be done about those folk. No sense to think on it.”
    He nervously thumped the spearshaft into the soft earth.
    “I hate these things,” he said.
    “I know,” she said.
    “Mama,” Tikla asked, sitting crosslegged, braiding a few long, yellow-green strands of grass, “can I have water? I’m hot.”
    “Stay in the shade,” her mother responded.
    “I’m sick of having to see these