So, I'm repeating the first chapter because I went back and did a picture for it. The first Esmerlda pic I did belongs with the second chapter. Glad we got that straightened out. The story is becoming very silly indeed.
Chapter l
Clearly, the brachet had been a mistake. But when, on the third
lonely day of her quest, the little hound had popped out from behind the
Standing Stones of Glarn, Esmeralda had greeted it with joy.
“Hail, O brachet! Art sent to accompany me, mayhap as guide
and guard?”
The skinny brachet had fixed her with a penetrating gaze which
dropped at once to the leathern pouch at her side.
“Art hungered, little one?” Esmeralda knelt down before the
brachet and reached into the pouch. “Gladly will I share of my simple
provisions.”
Two wheaten rolls and a twist of dried venison disappeared,
and the brachet moved closer to nose at the pouch. Esmeralda reached out a hand
to stroke the dog—no, this was a bitch, to be sure. “What a pretty maid thou
art, with thy white stockings and elegant long ears.
The brachet had accepted the
caress with a philosophical sigh. There will be more food, she reasoned;
in time that fragrant bulging pouch will be at my mercy. The woman is desperate
for companionship. Look at her crouched there, cloak spread on the
ground, face imploring. If she had a tail, ‘twould be a-wag.,
The brachet had allowed herself a
tiny whine and, swallowing her pride with the last morsel of bread, had licked
the young woman’s hand. There, done and done.
~~~
“Come out of it, you wretched
brachet! Leave it, I say.”
Esmeralda’s feet hurt. Five days
of walking, three of them through this strange wood, five days of listening to
the brachet howl, five days of watching the sinuous brown body dart off into
inaccessible places. Five days of watching the crystal at the top of her staff
fail to respond to the rising moon as it should have done.
“When the crystal is set alight
by Selene’s beams, then must thou follow the path she shows,” the aged Sooth-Seer
had whispered. “Follow it even as an arrow from a bow if thou wouldst find the
dungeon where the true prince lies.”
Esmeralda drew in a deep breath
and limped ahead. Just a few more paces and she would be clear of these dark
trees. She could just glimpse a clearing ahead and sense, rather than see, a burgeoning
glow.
The brachet continued her
frenzied excavation at the base of a grandfather tree as Esmeralda stepped into
the moonlit glade and held aloft her crystal-topped staff.
Ch 2
The full moon winked from behind the
scudding clouds that fought to obscure it. Esmeralda stood waiting; staff
raised to head height. Her arm began to tremble, and she wished she’d taken her
mother’s advice and chosen a more slender support for the Enchanted Crystal.
“I can do this,” she whispered,
grimacing as the racing clouds briefly obscured the moon. Then, raising her
voice to be heard over the scrabbling of the brachet in the wood behind her,
she began the Chant of Invocation.
O Queen of the Night,
Guide thou my steps.
Avert thou from my path
Thy creatures of the Darkness.
Be with-
Arooooo! Aroooo!
The piercing howl of the brachet
interrupted the invocation, and Esmeralda whirled, her green cloak twisting
about her most satisfactorily. She had endured countless fittings and had
driven three sempstresses to tears with her insistence on a cloak that was not
only warm and, it goes without saying, beautiful, but also had pockets and was properly
swirly. What was the point, she had asked, irritably of the first
attempt, of a cloak that didn’t flow about its wearer, wrapping her in
mystery.
Adjusting the mysterious velvet
folds, she called to the brachet. “Do shut up, you miserable cur! I’m invoking
Selene here.”
Turning back to the moon, now
almost completely covered with clouds, Esmeralda gabbled her way through the
rest of the invocation, noting that the Enchanted Crystal was barely glowing
now and that the moonlit path before her was rapidly becoming a mass of dark
shadows. Just the place for Creatures of Darkness, she thought, and who can
tell if that interrupted invocation had even worked.
AROOO!
The brachet had ceased her
digging and, in the growing darkness, seemed to be looking meaningfully toward Esmeralda.
With a sigh of resignation, Esmeralda reached into one of the cloak’s capacious
pockets and withdrew the Torch of Night Seeing. Its slender metal cylinder was
capped by a lens and with a click of the Button of Power, a strong beam of
light shot toward the little hound. Esmeralda picked her way toward the brachet
and the excavation she was guarding.
“What is it, you idiot bitch?
The brachet nosed at something on
the edge of the hole. It glinted in the torch’s beam and Esmeralda gasped. A
heavy golden arm ring lay atop the mound of fresh dirt. The brachet nosed at it
again and barked impatiently.
There, you stupid woman. An idiot
bitch, am I? Here’s a portent for you.
Esmeralda played the light on the
armlet. Rubies winked at her and when she leaned to pick up the beautiful
thing, her fingers tingled as she touched it. She brought it closer to her face
and turned it about. In the torchlight, she could discern words engraved on the
interior. Strange words of no language she knew. Llowfo het hse god.
Her brow wrinkled in thought. Welsh
maybe? That double ll… But even as she studied the inscription, the
letters began to swim on the golden surface and to rearrange themselves.
Follow the she dog.
“Now
really!” Esmeralda stamped her foot. “This is Too Much!”
She was about to toss the armlet
back into the hole at the foot of the tree when she noticed that, though the
moon was still hidden by the clouds, the Enchanted Crystal on her staff was
pulsing with rainbow sparks. As she hesitated, the heavy golden arm ring twisted
in her hand and, to her horror, slipped over her hand and slid up her arm to
lodge above her elbow.
No amount of tugging would
dislodge it. And the brachet was moving off, away from the path shown all too
briefly by the moon.
Almost in tears, Esmeralda tried
to return to the moon path, but the ring would not allow it, painfully
tightening its grip on her arm with each step she took away from the brachet.
That’ll learn her, thought
the brachet (who’d been named Jenny but preferred to be called Destiny, if she
had to be called anything at all.) She wheeled about and set off through the
woods.
Weeping and cursing, Esmeralda
followed.
