“I fully expect to discover firsthand whether or not they were
true!”
The night crept by, filled with silence, blackness, and a sense
of impending doom. But morning arrived without incident, the
mist lifted, the skies brightened, and the friends found that they
were safely in the middle of the lake pointing north. Relaxed
now, they joked about their own and the others’ fears, turned
the boat east again, and took turns rowing while they waited for
a breeze to come up. After a time, the mist burned away alto-
gether, the clouds broke up, and they caught sight of the south
shore. A northeasterly breeze sprang up around noon, and they
stowed the oars and set sail.
Time drifted, and the skiff sped east. Daylight was disap-
pearing into nightfall when they finally reached the far shore
and beached their craft in a wooded cove close to the mouth of
the Silver River. They shoved the skiff into a reed-choked inlet,
carefully secured it with stays, and began their walk inland. It
was nearing sunset by now, and the skies turned a peculiar pink-
ish color as the fading light reflected off a new mix of low-
hanging clouds and trailers of mist. It was still quiet in the forest,
the night sounds waiting expectantly for the day to end before
beginning their symphony. The river churned beside them slug-
gishly as they walked, choked with rainwater and debris. Shad-
ows reached out to them, the trees seemed to draw closer together
and the light faded. Before long, they were enveloped in dark-
ness.
They talked briefly of the King of the Silver River.
“Gone like all the rest of the magic,” Par declared, picking
his way carefully along the rain-slicked trail. They could see
better this night, though not as well as they might have liked;
the moon and stars were playing hide-and-seek with the clouds.
“Gone like the Druids, the Elves-everything but the stories.”
“Maybe, maybe not,” Morgan philosophized. “Travelers
still claim they see him from time to time, an old man with a
lantern, lending guidance and protection. They admit his reach
is not what it was, though. He claims only the river and a small
part of the land about it. The rest belongs to us.”
“The rest belongs to the Federation, like everything else!”
Coil snorted.
Morgan kicked at a piece of deadwood and sent it spinning
into the dark. “I know a man who claims to have spoken to the
King of the Silver River-a drummer who sells fancy goods
between the Highlands and the Anar. He comes through this
country all the time, and he said that once he lost his way in the
Battlemound and this old man appeared with his lantern and
took him clear.” Morgan shook his head.’ ‘I never knew whether
to believe the man or not. Drummers make better storytellers
than truth-sayers.”
“I think he’s gone,” Par said, filled with a sense of sadness
at his own certainty. ‘ ‘The magic doesn’t last when it isn’t prac-
ticed or believed in. The King of the Silver River hasn’t had the
benefit of either. He’s just a story now, just another legend that
no one but you and I and Coil and maybe a handful of others
believe was ever real.”
“We Ohmsfords always believe,” Coil finished softly.
They walked on in silence, listening to the night sounds,
following the trail as it wound eastward. They would not reach
Culhaven that night, but they were not yet ready to stop either,
so they simply kept on without bothering to discuss it. The woods
thickened as they moved farther inland, deeper into the lower
Anar, and the pathway narrowed as scrub began to inch closer
from the darkness. The river turned angry as it passed through
a series of rapids, and the land grew rough, a maze of gullies
and hillocks peppered with stray boulders and stumps.
‘ “The road to Culhaven isn’t what it once was,” Morgan mut-
tered at one point. Par and Coil had no idea if that was so or
not since neither had ever been to the Anar. They glanced at
each other, but gave no reply.