stone to the tree line," came a melodic voice from the side and above. Brynn looked up to the top of a boulder lining the rocky trail to see a figure far more diminutive than she. Belli'mar Juraviel of the Touel'alfar, her mentor and companion, looked back at her with his golden eyes. His hair, too, was the color of sun-light, and his features, though angular, with the high cheekbones and pointy ears characteristic of all of the Touel'alfar, somehow exuded gentleness.
Brynn glanced back once again toward the land that had been her home.
"Keep your eyes ahead," Juraviel remarked. ?Andur'Blough Inninness is no more to you than a dream now."
"A pleasant dream," Brynn replied, and Juraviel grinned.
"They say that memories often leave out the more terrible scenes."
Brynn looked at him hard for a moment, but when he started laughing, she understood his meaning well.
Indeed, there had been many hard times for Brynn in Andur'Blough Inninness, under the tutelage of the often-stern elves, including Belli'mar Juraviel - though he was considered by his kin to be among the most kindhearted of the people. Particularly Brynn's early years in the valley had been filled with seemingly impossible trials. The elves had pushed her to the very limits of her physical and emotional being, and often beyond those limits - not to break her, but to make her stronger.
And they had succeeded. Indeed they had! Brynn could fight with sword and bow, could ride as well as any of the people of To-gai, who were put on the back of the sturdy ponies before they could even walk. And more im-portantly, the Touel'alfar had given her the mental toughness she would need to hold true to her course and see it through. Yes, she wanted revenge on Tohen Bardoh - indeed she did! - but she understood that such per-sonal desires could not supersede the greater reason for this journey. She would hold fast to the course and the cause.
Juraviel left that part of the discussion right there, and so did Brynn, fol-lowing the elf's gaze to the sloping stone facing he had indicated. Brynn frowned, not thrilled with the angle.
"Diredusk will have trouble navigating that," she stated. She looked back to her pinto pony, who stood calmly munching grass and seemed not to mind the saddlebags he carried, full of foodstuffs and bedrolls for the pair.
Juraviel nodded. ?We will get him through. And once we cross under the canopy of the trees, the ground will be softer under his hooves and the trail will slope more gently."
Brynn looked down to those trees, rows of evergreens neatly defined by elevation, and frowned again. The ground down there didn't look very level to her.
"We will be out of the mountains soon enough," Juraviel said, seeing her thoughts clearly reflected on her pretty face.
"Sooner if we had gone straight to the east, then turned south," the iras-cible Brynn had to say, for she and Juraviel had spent the better part of the previous week arguing about this very topic. Considering what Brynn had been told about this mountain range, which ran more north-south than east-west, they certainly could have gotten to flatter ground more quickly by heading to the east.
"Yes, and then poor Diredusk would be running swiftly until he dropped from exhaustion, or until the goblin hordes caught up to us. Or until he mired down in the mud," Juraviel said, again with a chuckle. That had been his argument from the beginning, for the lands immediately east of the mountains were far from hospitable, with goblins and swamps and great areas of muddy clay.
"A Touel'alfar and a ranger, afraid of goblins," came Brynn's huffing reply.
"A Touel'alfar wise enough to know that danger is best defeated by avoid-ing it altogether," Juraviel corrected.
"And a ranger too proud and too stub-born to recognize that her body, though hardened by our training, is not impervious to a goblin spear! You have heard of Mather, uncle of Elbryan, great-uncle of Aydrian. 'Twere goblins that struck him down."
Juraviel started to turn away, and so Brynn took the opportunity to stick her tongue out at him. He looked back immediately, catching her in the act, and just sighed and shook his head, hardly surprised. For surely Belli'mar Juraviel was used to such playful behavior from this one, named by many of the Touel'alfar as the most irreverent - and irresistible - of any of the hu-mans they had ever taken in for training. Brynn saw the world differently from most