Page 5 of Chained Knight

She was racking up a lot of those for Future Ari. In the present, though, there was that strange road—ruler-straight, though it occasionally rose a few fractions and dropped afterward in gentle swells.

Maybe she should see where it led.

5

NOTHING FAMILIAR, EVERYTHING REAL

She’d hikedin wet boots before, though not in clothes covered with landslide mud. Each step made a soft squishing, almost lost between the stealthy movement amid the trees and a whispering breeze. The forest’s grey pillars pressed close, but no roots dared crack or heave the road’s surface.

Which was odd, but no more than the rest of this. Ari was just glad the swelling in her throat was going down and her eyes had adapted to starlight.

A road by definition went between places, so she would eventually getsomewhere. With her luck she was probably taking the long way, but she was committed now. It felt good to walk, even with the chafing; occasionally, faint silvery light bloomed on one side or the other, casting long shadows across yellowish stone blocks. She caught a glimpse of more pearl-cabbages once, standing with her toes on the road’s sharp stone lip, and decided more botanical observation could wait for daylight.

Whenever that would happen. And another thing—there was no sign of the storm, the topped mountains, the hollows, oranything approaching normal vegetation. She almost mutteredwe’re not in Kansas anymore, but she had no terrier to talk to and dear God, she shuddered to think of what Mike would do to a pet of hers. The Hardisons didn’t even have a cat, Wanda prized her expensively fake antique furniture too much.

He won’t hurt anyone ever again. Grim, squirming satisfaction popped up inside her chest before being swiftly strangled; it wasn’t right to feel that way after…

After killing someone. Ari couldn’t even say she hadn’t meant to do it, because the moment she lunged for the gun on the nightstand—for the past few months, he’d taken to habitually setting it there when he got home—she’d known one of them was going to end up shot.

The only surprise was it hadn’t been her. She’d bucked the statistics, for once.

After an endless while of trudging along, she realized the trees were thinning. A faint rushing had replaced sleepy nocturnal birdsong; Ari also discovered the stars were winking out as grey mist rose, creeping alongside her. Still, she was almost startled when the forest decided to pull its arms away.

Ari halted, staring. The urge to rub at her eyes like a revivified Disney princess returned with startling intensity, struggling with sheer wonder; she outright gawped.

No moss, no grass. Instead, bare dry dirt stretched from a fringe of trees, making a softly undulating plain. A flat ribbon of paving arrowed ahead, taking a slight curve before ending at a soaring dark shape with high sharp pinnacles, the only hints of color a few brightly glowing… well, they looked like tall narrow windows. The chiaroscuro was fantastic, depth and weight given to every shadow—if an artist could capture even half the scene’s complex shadings and values of grey the acclaim would be instant.

For the umpteenth time, Ari’s lips shaped a wonderingwhat the hell. The creaking intensified, and when she glanced away from the castle—it had to be, the golden-glowing window shapes were incontrovertible evidence, if merely a rock formation it was a damn uncanny one—she received another shock.

The trees were… moving? Thickening? Spindly saplings at the forest’s edge swelled as the mist tiptoed among them, and the slight creaking sounds were their branches unfurling more fan-leaves. A deeper shadow-tinge inched down the hill, making its own subtle noise; nearby, Ari could see small blades poking up through dry dirt.

Grass, or something else? It certainly looked vegetative. She was deeply glad to be standing on stone, and weighed whether the castle-shape was likely to be something equally bizarre.

Or perhaps harmful.

Nothing had hurt her so far. In fact, the pond’s water seemed to have helped more than a little. Maybe she should’ve taken that bath and done some laundry as well.

Where the hell was her backpack? And where, in God’s name, was she?

Ari realized she had set off down the hill only because her boots still made soft damp sounds, though she wasn’t as soaked as before. Mud dried, flaking free—she wondered about bacterial contamination, and how the people here would react to her appearance. Unless it was just a weird rock formation, which meant she’d have to start worrying about food, fuel for a fire, and the means to strike sparks.

She should have been shivering, teeth chattering. Instead, her soaked clothes were cool but not chilling. Maybe liquid dirt was good insulation.

So far, nothing seemed truly dangerous. Of course that was no indication, and she hadn’t quite ruled out hallucination yet.Nor had she ruled out another possibility—the lightning strike had been massive, the landslide no joke.

If she was dead… well, was this hell? Ari was sure an agnostic who had shot her husband wouldn’t qualify for the place upstairs, and if this was the devil’s country, so far it was proving a lot nicer than the big white house on Hardison Hill. She wasn’t even hungry yet, and hadn’t had to step off the road for a pee break either.

The castle could prove to be worse than Mike and his parents, but Ari still plodded toward it.

There was nothing else to do, really.

The mist kept pace, and so did swiftly growing grass. Now she wondered about the sounds in the trees—critters like the little golden-eyed not-possum, or something else?

Before she was quite ready the castle loomed close, a towering wave of dark stone. It had snuck up on her, or she’d made far better time than expected. The place was massive, but the road led straight to an opening.

More precisely, it stopped at a lowered drawbridge over a dry ravine which had clearly once been a moat. The light had strengthened with the mist, but no dawn took this long.

At least, not where she was from. Ari studied the drawbridge—massive dark timbers, long metal chains bowing under their own weight, each link longer than she was tall—and the aperture it was meant to protect. An inner gate had been there once, now shattered by some unthinkably violent artillery.

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