Lark's Quest: The Complete Story (The Deeds of the Ariane) Read online

  Lark's Quest: The Complete Story

  (The Deeds of the Ariane Novellas #1 - #3)

  by

  Barbara Cool Lee

  •••

  About This Story

  A tale of silk, sorcery, and romance....

  Ten years ago she was Lark, the tiny slave girl who witnessed the massacre of the royal family.

  Now she is Lark y Ariane, the most powerful—and hated—of the Silver Isle's magical warriors, whose skill with sword and sorcery make her unbeatable in battle.

  Ten years ago he was Raven yr Griffon, the idealistic boy prince who became a hero to the poor when he championed their secret religion of equality and peace over the nobles' faith in wealth and power.

  Now he is Raven the Innkeeper, a bitter and crippled young man who believes in nothing, and wants only to be left alone.

  When they meet, they—and the Silver Isle—will be changed forever.

  Copyright

  Lark's Quest © copyright 2012 Barbara Cool Lee

  All rights reserved. Except for the use of brief quotations in a review, the reproduction or use of this work in whole or in part in any form whatsoever is forbidden without the express permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, and settings are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, names, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Charity

  10% of the earnings from this book are donated to Second Harvest Food Bank. A complete list of charities receiving donations is kept updated at Barb's website, http://www.BarbaraCoolLee.com.

  Dedication

  As always, for Mom, my co-writer. :-)

  Table of Contents

  (Readers who have read the first novella in the series can begin at Chapter Five.)

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Epilogue

  CHAPTER ONE

  A quest. All the old tales began with a quest.

  The mild-mannered nobody seeks the sacred toenails of the mystical hedgehog because the gods demand it.

  As Lark recalled, the mild-mannered nobody's reward for this was usually enlightenment or great fortune.

  Her reward so far had been two chicken heads won in a tessera game, and a hole in her best boots.

  She was feeling less mild-mannered by the minute.

  "I've seen him," said the grizzled old peasant. Of course he was old and grizzled. The last seven she had questioned had been old and grizzled, though she had enjoyed a spate of young and fair before that. This one had never been fair, and she was beginning to doubt he had ever been young.

  "You've seen him?" she prompted, remembering that patience was a virtue, and wringing the necks of the dimwitted was not.

  She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. The hole in her left boot made a marvelous squishing sound as her foot sank farther into the mud.

  The old man's hut was on the edge of some God-forsaken village two months into her latest journey from the capital city of Chÿar. She didn't even know the village name, not that it mattered. This was another false lead, like all the others.

  She hated this part of the Silver Isle. Tall woods crowded in all around, dripping wet and trapping fog beneath the low-hanging branches. The blue silk moths that thrived on this damp coast floated lazily in the still air all around them.

  The man's hut was made of the same dark wood as everything in these parts, and moss trailed down from the green-slimed tile roof. The air smelled of ocean and woods and mildew.

  She missed the Silver City. She missed sun, and warmth, and dry air on her face. She missed the city's great terraced mountain, its ribbons of green rice paddies framing the intricate canals patterning the valley floor. She missed the soft music of the court musicians, and the delicately spiced food, and the hot baths in sweetly scented water. She must face it: she missed being at the top of the world, both literally and socially.

  But this was her allotted task, so this she must do.

  She looked down at the old man slouching on his stool, and she pondered again the difference between an abstract defense of the rights of the peasant class and the reality of slogging through the muck and filth and fly-infested villages at one with the common folk.

  The old man began to snore.

  She prodded him with her boot, but gently, and he snorted awake. His eyes were rheumy, and he looked confusedly at her, as if he had been sleeping for hours, not moments.

  "You've seen him," she prompted again. "The boy called Raven."

  "He's a man now," he muttered. He looked at her warily, noting as if for the first time her glittering silver cloak and the sword sheathed at her side.

  "I mean him no harm, Old One," she said carefully. "Do not be afraid."

  He gazed through those rheumy eyes at her. "I am not afraid of you, My Lady. You cannot harm the likes of him."

  "Really?" She heard the amusement in her own voice. She could harm anyone she wanted to, most of all some unnamed peasant in a poor village. She watched him steadily, and soon enough his gaze broke from hers and he looked down at the muddy ground.

  "I will tell you what you want to know, Lady. I saw him a fortnight ago."

  Her heart sank. Of course he had no fear for this Raven-named man's safety. A fortnight ago. He could be anywhere by now. She was too late, yet again. "Then he has moved on?"

  "Fear not," he said. "You can find him at the sign of the Black Bird during the full moon."

  She closed her eyes. She had wasted time chasing yet another myth. "The full moon?" she said sarcastically. "I thought he only appeared in spring, with the new leaves on the sacred Ma trees. Or when the wolves howl in the mountains and the sun sits low in the sky. Or when a girl-child is born on the summer solstice." Dear Lord, she was really trying to learn patience. Really she was.

  She opened her eyes. The old man looked at her blankly, blissfully unaware he had ruined her week. She gave him a faint smile and a copper coin that would feed him for a month. "Thank you for your trouble, Old One." Respecting her elders was also a virtue she should cultivate.

  She turned her back and started off down the muddy road to her next destination.

  She had taken two steps away when she heard, "I always see him during the full moon. That's when I take my crops to market at Rïal."

  •••

  Two days later, Lark followed meekly behind a boy half her age as he climbed the path to the cliff above the Black Bird Inn in Rïal.

  At the top of the cliff a young man stood still as stone, staring away from them, out toward the sea.

  "Raven?" the boy said when they were only a few paces away from him.

  The man remained still, his back to them. His right hand held a walking stick of dark polished wood, which rested lightly on the ground, not bearing his weight.

  He was tall, not quite as tall as the pale-skinned foreign devils who haunted the far southern coasts in their great ships, but certainly too tall to have starved as a child.

  His cloak swept the ground in a dark tweed of grayed-blue silk, the color of the fog, or the sea. The muted color of his clothing
signified that while he belonged to the merchant class, and so was permitted to wear silk, he was not of a high-caste family. She wondered about that.

  Her own outfit was not silk at all, since she now wore the garb of the typical low-caste peasant. Her undergown was of stained, rough-textured tweed, and her overgown was black wool, so old the dye had faded with endless washing into a muddy gray-brown. The fabric was heavy, and smelly, and it itched. The thick fabrics felt unbearably hot, making the sweat run down from her armpits, even though the wind on this exposed clifftop whistled around them.

  The wool of her tattered cloak rustled around her. She hated the feel of it. At least the rough-made shoes she now wore had no holes in them.

  The mists drifted all around them now, obscuring the view of the water. The boy had told her the man came up here on the cliff every week around this time to watch the fog roll in from the ocean. This time of every week was the peasant God's sabbath eve. Perhaps that was just a coincidence.

  Her palms sweated with the tension of keeping silent. Still she watched the man's back.

  Despite his clothing she could see he had been of the aristocracy. Even from the back she recognized the type: straight as a bamboo pole, with squared shoulders and head held high, aloof. Ignoring them. Expecting an obeisance, possibly. Well, she would do what was necessary—though kneeling in the wet grass did not suit her. Nor did it suit him, she would guess. She would bet a coin of pure gold this man had bent his knee to few others in his life. She dared not ask herself who may have knelt to him.

  His hair was long, and rumpled by the mantle, and must have once been as black as her own, black as the raven for which he had been named. But while her own hair was still black as any peasant's, his hair had turned to a pure silver that on one as young as he clearly betrayed a noble parentage.

  From the back it was hard to tell his exact age. If his exact age turned out to be twenty-two years, three months and—she calculated quickly—eight days, then he could be only one man. And then what would she do?

  She rubbed her palms on her gown and waited. Still nothing from him. The torn edges of her cloak were picked up by the wind, and they fluttered around her, making her feel like a fool. She didn't like fluttering clothing. She didn't like this masquerade. That patience was not her best quality she had been told on more than one occasion, but she was practicing this week. As she had practiced last week. And the week before. She took a deep breath and tried to act the part of the stoic peasant girl.

  If he would only turn to face her she could end this charade and move on to her next task. Once he faced her, surely then she would know if he was who she sought.

  Her ragged gown was causing an itch between her shoulders. She ignored it. And still the man didn't move. Finally fed up, she made a sound of impatience and the little boy beside her looked up, shocked.

  She had forgotten her place. He was the owner of an inn. Not a particularly important position, but certainly one that would earn him respect in the tiny, remote village below them in the valley. While she—well, today she was a seeker, nothing more. It was her duty to wait in silence until the man above her station deigned to speak to her. She bowed her head in apology.

  "My Lord Raven," the boy tried again. "It is important."

  "Yes, My Lord Raven," she said. "It is."

  At the sound of her voice he finally turned.

  As he turned, his left hand grasped the black-handled sword in a worn leather scabbard at his right side, the swirl of his cloak exposing the weapon for the first time.

  "I am busy," he began, but then something in her expression must have betrayed her, for he took a step toward her, drew the sword, and leveled it at her throat.

  Quite an impressive display of bravado for a crippled man standing alone at the edge of a cliff, she must admit. She considered commenting on his flair for the dramatic, but she held her tongue.

  She was herself unarmed, which under normal circumstances would hardly stop her against one man—but these were not normal circumstances. She had not journeyed through this Lord-forsaken land to kill her quarry. Until she knew if this was truly the man she had spent her lifetime pursuing, all the advantage was his.

  So she kept silent and watched the polished blade hover close to her throat.

  She didn't look up at his face, but concentrated on the blade itself, praying that her reflexes would be quick enough to step aside before he moved the sword tip one finger-width forward, into the great vein at her throat.

  The sword was of plain steel. Lethal-enough stuff, but hardly a rare weapon. It was straight and thin and polished sharp on both edges. A common stabbing weapon. Nothing impressive. Of no better quality than the scuffed leather-wrapped scabbard that had held it. Patience she might not be an expert on, but swords she knew. This was a cheap sword, at least by her standards.

  But she noticed his stance was better than the weapon. Though any modest innkeeper might carry such a blade, he wielded it with an expertise that belied his allegedly humble origins.

  No one outside a noble castle would have spent a childhood in the kind of training that allowed him to hold the weapon rock-steady at her throat without the tiniest movement. And left-handed, no less.

  No one was trained to fight left-handed. It was bad luck, at the least, and awkward at best.

  And yet there he stood, holding the sword from the weak side and looking far more dangerous than any man she had ever seen. She doubted not a moment that she stood an eye-blink away from meeting her maker.

  The steady blade, and his cool silence, were oddly calming, reassuring her that he had the weapon well in hand and that the sharp blade was in no danger of slipping.

  She stopped holding her breath and took her eyes from the sword to really look at him full-on for the first time.

  He half-smiled, and lowered the weapon slightly to watch her take in the sight of him.

  It took all her self-control not to gasp. She was shocked out of her bravado—not for the reason he must be assuming, but for her own.

  Was this the man who had haunted her dreams for ten years? Maybe. Good Lord above, maybe.

  He was neither too old nor too young. The silver hair made him resemble his father even more than he had as a child. She ordered her heart to stop pounding.

  Other men had hair that paled to silver while still in their teens. Other men held themselves with that air of pride that made them stand out from the lesser men around them.

  But no other man had that face.

  True, it wasn't the face she had memorized ten years ago. No, his face was not the face she had expected. Though it had been a lifetime, still she pictured a lanky, smooth-skinned boy with a mop of unruly black hair and eyes bright as polished jasper.

  This face did not belong to a boy. A lock of his hair half-covered the left side of his face, but it didn't fully conceal the black patch over his eye, nor the thin scar—from a sword?—that ran down that cheek to betray the source of his half-blindness.

  Yet even with the patch over his eye he couldn't hide the high cheekbones, the one vivid brown eye looking at her with such cool intelligence. Surely those were the familiar features etched on coins of gold, but rarely seen on a living being?

  He held the sword in his left hand, and the walking stick in his right, and waited calmly for her to finish staring at his disfigurement.

  She realized she was being rude. And worse, she was obviously unafraid of him. What peasant girl would be unafraid not only of such a scar, but of such a swordsman? She was not playing her part correctly. She bowed her head, and tried to get control of her thoughts. How should she start?

  He took care of that for her. "What do you want?" His voice was smooth, and its tone held some barely concealed amusement.

  "I want you to stop pointing that sharp sword at me—My Lord." His accent was clearly that of the coastal area, but was there some other undertone to it? Something familiar? Or did she only imagine it?

  He smiled, and lowered th
e sword, seeming unsurprised by her very unpeasant-like answer. "You looked like you were going to attack me."

  Attack him. Now that was ironic. "How could I attack you?" she asked innocently, gazing up at him. He was over a head taller than she—and she was tall for her age. This man was definitely not the average bent-shouldered peasant innkeeper.

  He laughed. "You had a look in your eye—reminds me of a kitten I once had. It used to beat up my hunting dogs regularly." He sheathed the sword, and the tension eased. "The innocent-looking ones can be the most dangerous." The smile still lingered.

  The laugh changed his face. Where he had looked forbidding before—the angular features and aristocratic air making him more imposing than attractive—the smile revealed the curve of full lips, and the sparkle in his eye. She took a half-step closer before coming to herself and stopping.

  His grin took in the little boy as well. The boy had kept back until now, obviously wary of the tension between his master and the stranger, but now he chuckled at Raven's joke. Lark wondered for a moment if the child could be his. How old was the little boy? Could Raven possibly have fathered a child at the age of... thirteen or so? She hadn't even considered that possibility. A child would complicate matters considerably.

  "Isn't that right, Mouse?" Raven rumpled the boy's hair. The boy looked up at him with a frankly worshipful stare. "Now, girl, I assume you have a reason for walking all the way up here...."

  "She's here about the job, Master," Mouse said. Master. Not "Sire." That small title could make all the difference.

  "The job?" He looked her over shrewdly.

  She forced herself back to the present task. She could hardly just barge in here and start questioning him—especially given that he was as masterful with the sword as he'd just proven himself to be.

  Now was the time to use her newly acquired patience.

  "I would be a good worker, My Lord," she mumbled. Humility. That was another virtue she should work on.