Iylaine begins to worry

Iylaine’s head bobbed up and down as her pony plodded on. She was too tired now to sit up straight, too tired to hold her head high.

She thought she had been making good time at first. Her pony had been full of spirit, and she had chosen to cut across the foothills rather than follow the newly worn wagon-​​path that ran from the King’s road up along the riverbank to the eastern end of the valley, and on up to the new castle. Her Da had said that it added hours to the trip, but the oxen and their wagons needed a flat road. With her little pony, she knew she could go straight through the foothills as her Da did.

Only… it hadn’t been as easy as she had thought. And now the sun was setting.

The sky was still a bright greenish-​​blue, but the clouds in the western sky behind her were lit from below with red and rosy light. It should have been pretty, but she was so tired now, and she was growing hungry. She had thought to eat supper with her Da, and so she had not risked taking anything from the kitchen. She had merely thrown on her wool cloak and mounted her pony and ridden off before anyone could notice her.

She had thought it would be easy – she would simply ride towards the familiar hill on the horizon, and keep always on her right the glittering river that curled through the valley bottom.

But she had found that the foothills were heavily forested in places, and she had to make long detours to avoid the little black lakes that often surprised her when she came over a hilltop. Oftentimes she couldn’t even see the river off in the distance to prove to her that she was still going in the right direction, and the pale afternoon sunlight that had filtered through the trees confused her, and made her doubt even in which direction the sun lay.

Worse, as she rode up and down and around the hills, she found that the horizon changed dramatically, and even when she came out of the trees, she could no longer see the man’s head and shoulder against the sky to show her where the castle stood. It looked almost as if she had entered a new valley that was not her own.

As she came into a clearing, she looked back to the west again. The sky was still blue, but the flaming clouds behind her had been snuffed out, and now there hung only tufts of dark smoke in their place. There was no more sunlight in the valley, and there were no more shadows to point her towards the east.

And she was hungry, and she was tired, and she was sore – and she was cold. It had been so bright and sunny all morning, she had not expected the wind to be so bitterly cold this evening.

She didn’t know how long she had been riding. The guard had said the sun would set in about four hours. So had she ridden for four hours? Had she passed the castle by? Suddenly she was afraid.