DREAM QUEST

Chapter 4 : The City of Aldenmoor

The city rose out of the hills like something poured from gold and stone, and Daren stopped walking the moment he saw it.

Aldenmoor sat in a wide valley cradled by green hills, its outer wall built from pale, sun-bleached stone that caught the strange violet light of this world's sky and turned it warm. Terraced rooftops climbed the slope in uneven rows, red and brown clay tiles overlapping like fish scales, and threads of smoke rose from a hundred chimneys into a sky that, for once, looked almost peaceful — the twin moons faint and pale this early in the day, more suggestion than presence. A river cut along the city's eastern edge, wide and unhurried, spanned by three stone bridges thick with cart traffic and foot traffic and the general unbothered noise of people simply living their lives.

"It's beautiful," Daren said, and meant it.

"It's a target," Vasha said beside him, and didn't look nearly as charmed. Her eyes swept the wall, the gate, the hills beyond, with the flat, assessing gaze of someone who had long ago stopped seeing beauty without also seeing the angles an enemy might use against it. "Aldenmoor's peaceful by day. Has been for generations — good farmland, good water, decent walls. But it sits too close to the Thornwood's deeper edges. Comes night, things come down out of the hills." She started walking again, and Daren hurried to keep pace. "We're not here for sightseeing."

"I figured."

"Good. Means you've been paying attention."

They passed through the gate without trouble — a pair of guards in dull steel armor straightened when they saw Vasha's sash, the gold-and-crimson colors that marked her as one of Solenne's own, and waved the three of them through with the particular relief of soldiers who knew help had arrived and weren't about to question it. Lyset walked a step behind, robes shifting with their slow constellation-light even in daylight, eyes moving constantly over the rooftops and alleys with the same restless curiosity she'd shown since the golden chamber.

"Something's been hunting here," she said quietly, mostly to Vasha. "I can feel it in the wards. Whatever they had keeping the worst of the night out — it's thinning."

"How thin?"

"Thin enough that I don't love sleeping inside it."

Daren said nothing, but the easy warmth he'd felt looking at the city from the hilltop curdled, just slightly, into something more watchful.

The house they were given sat near the edge of the training yards, a small, squat building of the same pale stone as the city wall, with a low thatched roof and a single chimney that hadn't been used in some time, judging by the dust on the hearthstones. It had two rooms — a front room with a long wooden table, three narrow cots pushed against the walls, and a row of iron hooks for cloaks and gear, and a back room barely larger than a closet that held a washbasin, a small stove, and shelves stocked with dried meat, hard bread, and jars of something Daren didn't recognize but that smelled faintly of honey and herbs. A single window in the front room looked out over the training ground — and that, Daren thought, was the real point of the place. It wasn't built for comfort. It was built for people who needed somewhere close to fall asleep in, between fights.

"Home," Vasha said dryly, dropping her pack on one of the cots, "for as long as we're needed here."

Past the house, the training ground opened up — not the bare dirt circle Daren had half-expected, but a genuine stretch of forest, modest in size, threaded through with worn paths and clearings cut deliberately for sparring. Tall, dark-barked trees rose on either side, their canopy letting through dapples of violet-tinted light, and somewhere past the treeline, faint but audible, Daren could hear the steady murmur of moving water — a river, Vasha told him, that marked the forest's far edge and fed eventually into the wider river that wrapped the city itself.

"Quiet enough to train in," Vasha said, surveying it with clear approval. "Far enough from the city walls that you won't put an arrow through somebody's window."

"You say that like you're not confident in me."

"I'm not," Vasha said. "Not yet. Get the bow."

The bow, it turned out, hated him.

Daren would think that, more than once, over the course of the long afternoon that followed — that the bow itself had some personal grudge against him, some ancient wooden malice that made the string slip wrong against his fingers and the arrows fly anywhere except where he aimed them. Vasha had handed it to him without ceremony, a simple recurve bow of dark, oiled wood, a quiver of a dozen arrows slung over his shoulder, and pointed him toward a straw target propped against a tree some thirty paces off.

"Sword comes later," she'd said. "Everyone starts with the bow. Teaches you patience, teaches you breath control, teaches you what it feels like to commit to a shot before you ever swing steel at something that's trying to kill you."

His first arrow went wide by six feet and buried itself in a tree trunk with an apologetic thunk.

"Again."

The second arrow didn't even reach the target — the string slipped off his fingers wrong, and the arrow dribbled out of the bow and landed pathetically in the grass a few feet ahead of him. Vasha didn't laugh, which Daren appreciated, though her silence somehow felt worse.

"Your grip's wrong," she said, stepping behind him. Her hands — calloused, sure, smelling faintly of leather and oiled steel — adjusted his fingers on the string, repositioned his elbow, pressed two fingers flat against his shoulder blade. "Don't grip the arrow like you're afraid it'll run away. Let it rest. Your fingers are guides, not a fist." She stepped back. "Draw."

He drew. His arm shook by the time the string reached his cheek.

"Breathe out as you release. Not before, not after."

The third arrow hit the tree again, a foot from where the first one had landed.

"Better," Vasha said, which Daren suspected was generous. "Again."

They went on like that for hours. The sun — or whatever passed for it here, filtered violet-gold through the canopy — moved visibly across the sky while Daren's shoulders burned and his fingertips went raw against the bowstring, three small red welts rising where the string snapped back against unprotected skin again and again. Vasha corrected his stance, corrected his draw, corrected the angle of his elbow, the set of his jaw, even — at one particularly frustrated point — the way he was breathing, which Daren hadn't realized could be done wrong until she pointed out he was holding his breath through the entire draw like a man bracing for a punch.

"You're thinking too hard," she told him, somewhere around the fortieth arrow, watching another shot sail wide and clatter uselessly off a low branch. "Archery's not solved with your head. It's solved with your body, once your body knows what it's doing. Right now your head's fighting your hands. Let your hands win for once."

"Easy for you to say. You've had eleven years."

"I had eleven years of looking exactly as bad as you do right now, for at least the first one of them." She retrieved the scattered arrows from the grass without complaint, business-like, and pressed them back into his hand. "Again."

By the time the light through the canopy had gone deep amber, shading toward the strange violet dusk of this world, Daren had managed, twice, to actually strike the straw target — not the center, not anywhere near it, but the target itself, the wide outer ring, and both times he'd felt a small, unreasonable surge of triumph that Vasha had met with nothing more than a short nod and a "good, now do it on purpose."

He could not, by the end of the day, reliably hit anything. His shoulders ached in places he hadn't known could ache. His fingers were raw and faintly trembling. And when Vasha finally called an end to the session, telling him to eat something and rest, Daren felt something close to relief war openly with a deep, stubborn frustration that refused to entirely let go.

"You'll get there," Vasha said, not unkindly, slinging her own gear over her shoulder. "Nobody's good the first day. Nobody's good the first week. Eat. Sleep. We start again tomorrow."

Lyset returned from wherever she'd spent the afternoon — tending the city's thinning wards, Daren gathered, though she didn't elaborate much over the simple meal of bread, dried meat, and a thin, herb-heavy soup that the three of them shared at the long table that evening.

"You smell like failure and bowstring," Lyset told him, not unkindly, settling onto her cot.

"Thank you. Very encouraging."

"I'm not here to encourage you. I'm here to make sure you survive long enough to get good." She glanced at Vasha. "We'll meditate tonight. Renew the wards around the house, at least, since the city's are thinning faster than I like."

"Go," Vasha said. "I'll bank the fire."

Daren, exhausted in a way that went past his arms and shoulders and settled somewhere deep in his bones, didn't argue when the two women slipped out into the dark to do whatever quiet, focused work their meditation required. He collapsed onto his cot fully dressed, body heavy with the particular ache of new, repeated effort, and was asleep almost before his head found the thin pillow.

He didn't know how long he slept before the screaming woke him.

It came from somewhere beyond the house — distant at first, distorted by walls and distance, but unmistakably, viscerally a scream, the kind that didn't sound rehearsed or theatrical, the kind that came from somewhere primal and terrified. Daren sat up so fast his head spun, heart already hammering, the exhaustion of the day burned away in an instant by pure adrenaline.

A second scream followed the first, shorter, cut off.

Daren was on his feet and moving before he'd consciously decided to move at all.

He didn't wake Vasha or Lyset — some instinct, half-formed and probably foolish, told him there wasn't time, that whatever was happening was happening now, and every second he spent explaining himself was a second the screaming might stop for reasons he didn't want to think about. He grabbed nothing but the cloak hanging by the door and ran out into the violet dark, following the fading echo of sound through Aldenmoor's narrow, sleeping streets.

He found the source at the end of a lonely side road, tucked between two shuttered buildings, lit only by a single guttering lantern on a hook overhead.

He found the blood first — a wide, dark pool of it spreading across the cobblestones, black-looking in the poor light, already cooling. Then, further along, the rest of it: a city guard's helmet, knocked free and dented, lying on its side. A torn scrap of cloak. And worse, things Daren's mind shied away from cataloguing too closely even as his eyes, helplessly, took in every detail — the marks of claws raked deep into the stone of the nearest wall, a boot, abandoned and alone, that no longer had anyone attached to it.

Whatever had happened here, it had happened fast, and it had happened recently, the blood not yet fully dark, the air still carrying a faint, sour copper smell beneath the night's usual scent of woodsmoke and river damp.

Daren stood frozen at the mouth of the alley for a long moment, his stomach turning over, his breath coming too fast and too shallow. He had seen blood before — a cut finger, a scraped knee, the ordinary small violences of an ordinary life. He had never seen this. Two, maybe three people, gone, in the span of however long it had taken him to wake up and run here. Guards, sworn to protect a city that had trusted them enough to sleep soundly behind its walls.

The fear came first. Then, close behind it, something hotter.

Daren had never considered himself an angry person. His mother had often said, with a kind of rueful pride, that he took after no one she could name in his patience, his willingness to let small slights go rather than hold onto them. But standing in that alley, looking at what remained of people who had simply been doing their jobs, doing what they were supposed to do, Daren felt something close to fury kindle in his chest for the first time in his life — sharp, clean, and entirely unfamiliar.

He didn't chase whatever had done this. He knew, with the same blunt instinct that had pulled him out of bed, that he wouldn't survive the attempt — not yet, not with a bow he could barely aim and a sword he'd never been properly taught to swing.

But he walked back to the house with that fury still burning low and steady in his chest, and he did not go back to sleep.

He took the bow back out to the training ground instead, alone, the moons casting twin pale shadows through the canopy, the distant murmur of the river the only sound besides his own ragged breathing and the repeated, stubborn thunk of arrows finding trees, then finally — slowly, gradually, as the night wore on — finding the target.

He thought about the boot, abandoned in the alley, every time his aim drifted.

He thought about the blood, cooling on the cobblestones, every time his fingers wanted to give up.

Sometime past midnight his shots started landing closer to center than to the outer ring. Sometime after that, exhaustion finally outpaced fury, and Daren — still gripping the bow, slumped against the base of a tree at the clearing's edge, arrows scattered loosely around him like fallen leaves — slept.