[Nano novel] Chapter Four: Beginning it is the hardest part.

For all his good intentions, Taliesin did not sleep well that night; he tossed and turned, and dreamed of dragons.  At the very end of his dreaming, he seemed to come almost fully awake, yet his body was still unmoving; and he saw, with startling clarity, a woman of extraordinary beauty, with long red hair and pale skin.  She seemed sad, distant, untouchable.  Taliesin tried to go toward her, to move in some way, but he could not - and the urgency grew in him that he must reach her, that he was the only one who could help her - and then he awoke, sweating.  He lay for a moment, his heart pounding in his chest, trying to work through the feeling of helplessness that gripped him just before the dream-state ended.

He breathed deeply and tried to relax back into his blanket, but the air was cold and he was now too alert to be able to find that warm sleepy place again, and besides his makeshift pillow had put a decided crick in his neck.  At least the sun was coming up, so he would not be awake for hours before there was anything to do.  He glanced over at the old magician's bed, tucked into the corner by the southern-facing window; he was still asleep and faintly snoring.  His words from the night before: You are the only one who can find the rainbow's end, echoed confusingly in his mind.  He wished he had a day, a week maybe, to take it all in, to find for certain his place in all of this.  He felt as if he had no time, that he was already running far behind - although far behind what, he did not yet really know - and yet his understanding of his present circumstances, with all its actions and consequences and meanings, was still so incomplete.  Most of all, he was tired of feeling that he was a victim.  He wanted some measure of control or he would end up exploding in anger, or crying helplessly like he had the night before.

Walking was the one thing that cleared his head, so that is what he decided to do.  As noiselessly as possible, he pushed aside his blanket, pulled on his shoes, and tiptoed to the door.  There was a heavy coat hanging on a hook next to the door, and he hesitated just a split second before he took it down and put it on.  Surely Tristan would not mind - he had no proper outer wear, after all.  And he would only be gone for a little while... less than an hour, certainly.  There should be no problem.

The door creaked slightly as he opened it, and he winced - glanced at the slumbering magician, who did not move at all - and then slipped outside without another sound.  Closing the door carefully, he breathed in deeply, savoring the instant sense of freedom.  A walk would really be a good thing right now.

The early morning air was cold but clean.  It smelled entirely of grass, trees, and a little wood smoke from the cottage's small chimney.  Beyond the cottage, away from the road he and Andrew had traveled down, was a long stretch of level plain that was covered almost entirely in long grasses.  He decided to walk through them and see how far he could get before he felt he should go back.  A small warning popped into his mind, but he felt at least reasonably confident that the grass would help hide him if he were to hear any dragons flying over.  Of course, if there were smaller ones, maybe they wouldn't be as loud.  But even if he ran the risk of being eaten by a dragon, loud or quiet, he didn't care at this point.  He just needed to walk.

He had to walk rather slowly, because there was no path through the grass.  He feet left large dents on the vegetation, and there was a light dew on the ground that he was also disturbing.  Looking behind him once, he noticed that his path was almost ridiculously obvious to anyone who cared to look.  One thing he had never learned how to do was to hide his tracks, but that was probably because he had never needed to sneak around before.  He had always gone where nobody else went, which took the potential for being followed completely out of the equation.

As he walked, he let his mind just wander where it would, reliving the past day and a half, mulling over Tristan's confusing yet illuminating words.  He wondered what Andrew was doing, what Tristan had meant by saying that Francis' service was done.  What service was he paying, and was he the strange midget that had first met him?  He supposed that the men at the camp were Tristan's guard.  He wondered why Tristan lived so close to the Wood, when he might be happier to be around other people rather than be lonely.  Perhaps Tristan preferred to be alone.  Would it be like that for him, after he had been here for decades?  Would he give up and acclimate?

No, he decided firmly.  He stopped walking.  "I will not stop," he said out loud, and the sound of his own voice was unexpectedly loud in the stillness of the morning.  He had been walking with the sun rising on his right, and when he started out it was still below the horizon.  Now, half of its brightness was shimmering at the edge of the plain, although now Taliesin could see some low hills further toward the sunrise.  He turned and began toward them.  Hills were good for sitting on and thinking, and he felt like doing whatever it was he wanted to do right now anyway.

It took him longer than he expected to reach the hill he was aiming for, and the sun had fully risen by the time he walked up its gentle slope and plopped down on the top.  The sunshine warmed his back as he relaxed and breathed deeply, clearing his mind as best he could so that he could finally grasp some kind of clarity. 

He closed his eyes and tried to remove everything from his conscious thoughts, but things kept popping back in.  The street he grew up on.  Moonlight streaming through his bedroom window, where he used to stay up late and read.  Birthdays, Christmas, his favorite movies.  Songs he listened to when he was thirteen.  The smell of a hot latte in a coffee shop, with the aroma of freshly baked cinnamon rolls in the air.  There were too many memories intruding on his mind to keep at bay, so instead he let them wash over him.  He lay back, eyes shut against the white-hot light of the sun, and relived for a while some of his most vivid memories.

The first time he had learned how to ride a bike one-handed... he had been riding all day, up and down the same dirt road (that was the only road his mother would allow him to ride on without direct supervision), and as he was coasting down a hill, hair flying out behind him, wind rushing past his ears, he had an inkling of what to do - some intuition that told him that if he balanced just this way and leaned a little bit that way - and he let go.  For almost an hour, he gloried in his new ability to ride with no hands.  He even found that he could ride up hill that way too, if he got up enough speed.  He tried some turns, some curving back and forth in the road - and that was his ultimate undoing, because at the moment he took his most daring curve, a big red pickup truck came roaring up the road toward him.  His heart leapt into his throat and the only thing he could remember really doing was swerving away from his certain imminent death by being squashed into the truck's massive grille, and wiping out in the loose gravel at the edge of the road.  He flew off his bike and hit his head against a small tree, and lay there, confused and terrified and bleeding from scrapes on his arms, legs and face.

After he limped home, he tried to get into the house quietly so he could clean himself off before he was found, and he nearly accomplished his goal.  Until his father found small blood spots on the pristine white carpet of the stairway to the second floor.  Only two tiny spots, barely noticeable.  Pinpricks of red.  That day was also the day of his worst beating.

He shook his head then, willing that memory away, because even thinking about it made him feel the hurt again, the hurt of being punished for something you didn't mean to do, and the hurt of cruelty being done to you before you are old enough to realize how cruel it really is.

He was long past crying over that time in his life, even though it was still near enough in his past to feel like the present; but that did not stop him from feeling cold inside now and again.  Cold and hard, like someone was squeezing his heart until it could not beat.  Almost involuntarily, he breathed in deeply and felt the steady thump of his heart actually beating, keeping a rhythm even though he was usually completely unaware of its constant functioning.  The sun was getting higher, and he felt then that it was past time for him to start back.  There was no way he would work through all the complications of his life in one morning's walk... not even the comparatively smaller complications of the past day and a half. 

The walk back went more quickly than the walk out.  He must have been walking more slowly when he had left, he mused.  Perhaps he was not as brave about this new place as he was leading himself to believe.  He scanned the sky in all directions, but saw nothing, not even clouds.  The dew had all but evaporated from the grass now, and the remaining moisture did little to dampen his feet as he followed his footsteps back through the crushed grass. 

As he stepped into the cottage's little yard once more, he wondered what all the little holes were from.  Crouching down, he inspected one closely - there was an acorn in it.  He looked in another hole - there was an acorn in that one too.  Sitting back on his heels, he laughed out loud.  He had never noticed a squirrel digging holes in a yard to hide nuts and then neglecting to cover them up.  This must be an odd kind of squirrel.  Whatever kind of squirrel it was, however, it must be asleep still, because Taliesin could not see it anywhere.  At least he was safe from flying acorns this time.

The door swung open noiselessly this time, which he noticed because it had been creaky when he was leaving.  A magician's house was surely a place of odd happenings, if nothing else - but he had only his love of books to draw out any sort of information on real magicians.  He might be terribly mistaken. 

Tristan was busy poking the fire and, from the smell that greeted Taliesin as soon as he stepped in, making coffee.  There was a little blue metal pot buried half in the coals on the side of the little hearth, and steam was coming from the spout at the top.  Coffee had never smelled so magnificent and delicious as it did just now.  Tristan looked up from his fire.  "Aha! Went for a walk, did you?"  He had a mischievous sort of gleam in his eye, which made Taliesin nervous.  "If you had gone in the afternoon I am sure you would not be back here."

"What, is that when the dragons are out?"  Taliesin asked, feeling foolish.  "Or are there other things I should know about?"

"Well, you obviously know how to accept a mistake when it's made.  I like that in you, boy," said Taliesin, and the twinkle now seemed slightly less dangerous.  "Fortunately for your little excursion, dragons sleep in the morning.  There are nocturnal dragons and diurnal dragons, but they are almost never out in the morning.  The only reason you will ever see a dragon out right after the sun rises is if it is wounded and could not get back to its eyrie as quickly as normal.  And believe me," he said, taking the pot out of the coals ever so carefully with a thick pad of cloth, "you do not want to meet a wounded dragon."

With that, he took two mugs from another shelf - the tiny cottage did not seem to be able to hold so many shelves on its small walls, but somehow it did - and poured them both full of steamy, dark, rich-smelling coffee.  Taliesin was sure that he had never wanted a cup of coffee as much as he did right then, but he burnt his lip just tasting it and had to wait several long minutes for it to cool.

Tristan stood up with his coffee.  "Walk outside with me, boy," he said.  He ambled toward the door, which swung open, silently again.  Taliesin was just slightly nervous again, but he followed the old man outside with his own very hot cup of coffee.

Tristan walked out toward the dusty road, stopped at the edge, and gestured toward the north.  "The great city of the king is that way."  He turned and looked meaningfully at Taliesin, who nodded but was not quite sure what the old man was getting at.  "We will begin our journey after breakfast."

"We - what?  We're going there?  Is there someone - " Tristan interrupted him.  "I will explain it all on the way, but I can only say to you now that you must do exactly as I say.  We will leave soon, and we will not stop until we have reached the next town, which we should be able to reach by the evening."

"What about dragons?  Aren't we going to be in danger?"  Everything the magician had said since the day before was beginning to seem like it was contradicting itself.

"I am Tristan the Magician, boy," he said, and drew himself up straighter.  "My powers are not so weak that I cannot hide two men from the clear quick eyes of the greatest dragon alive.  Now, finish your coffee - we have preparations to make."