Wandering Lark by Laura J. Underwood Page A

upon the High Mage. Her expression softened at the sight of Etienne.
    “Well, come along. I shall be quite pleased to see the expression on his face when I let you visit him.”
    Etienne was willing to bet it would not be a pleasant look.
     
    Gareth followed the trail of Ronan’s magic until he came to the ruins of a broch. There, he discovered the marking on the ground around the menhir. The magic he had been trailing stopped there. As if it had stepped into the stone itself.
    “By the Silver Wheel,” he muttered as he knelt to study the marks more carefully.
    There was no doubt in his mind that Ronan had made this. Ronan’s essence was everywhere. Gareth saw that the cardinal points were ancient elemental runes, but the other marks—he had to admit he had never seen their likeness before. Even as he touched them gently with his fingers, hoping not to obliterate them, he could sense that magic had been used here. Magic of an ilk too ancient to understand. He frowned.
    He had only encountered such magic in one place in his travels through the Great Ranges. Beyond them and to the east, lie the mythical lands of Garrowye. Gareth drew out the brass farthing and looked at it carefully. His mind crawled back to a time before Fenelon was even conceived. Gareth had begun his travels through the Great Ranges as much to escape his own father and the harridan to whom he was then betrothed as to satisfy his curiosity about what lie beyond the known world. He had not even married his second wife, the lovely Sive Mulryan. The mother of his children had yet to be born.
    Since the ranges had never been fully explored, or even partially explored, he had chosen to try and find a way through. Many a false trail dead-ended in canyons or just twisted back in a circle and brought him to the place he started again. He had studied all the old texts he could find. There were a few remaining bits of parchment that had been brought through the Great Ranges by the Haxon priests and scholars who eventually settled in Ross-Mhor. He knew from those and from his studies that the Haxons had been led along a long trail that wound under as well as between the mountains, a trail known only to the Stone Folk and the Hidden Folk of Haxon lore. Determined as he was, he made several trips, but always failed.
    But there was the one time that he got lost. Then he had fallen into a ravine and been carried along by a river that forked into two, and the rushing water forced him down one path that threw him into a cavern hole. How long he traveled underground, he could not say, but at length the river tunnel spat him out into another gorge. Most of his supplies were gone, and he had barely managed to get out of the frigid waters alive. But his accident had given him a glimpse of what he had sought, or so he thought, for the riverbank that he was forced to follow was definitely some sort of trail. And it took him out of the mountains, going northeast, and into a green valley.
    There, he found the remains of a village that looked to have been destroyed by a slide. Strangely, there were no bodies, but then, some of the stone and sediments had settled enough to indicate that this tragedy took place long before his own birth, likely at the time of the Great Cataclysm, if not before.
    What he had found was a marker stone with a picture of some sort of hammer wielding figure. Thunor. This had been a Haxon village he thought. But then, he had found other things. Stones bearing writings he could not read. And a sense that some magic resided in the place. Ancient magic he could not comprehend.
    Ancient magic that prevented him from finding his way back. For as soon as he gated out to civilization, it was as though his mind lost that little bit of awareness. A mageborn had to have been to a place, or be given knowledge of it, to gate there. What he found, when he tried to return, was that some magical barrier kept turning him away. He even tried finding the place where he