Honor and Blood

That done, feeling a bit foolish for some reason, Tarrin turned west and started walking, a path that would cause him to skirt the stable and go out over a planted field.

"Wait a minute! Who are you? What are you?" the oldest called.

"A memory," Tarrin said, just loudly enough for them to hear, then he opened his stride and carried himself out of their sight, around the stable, before they could respond.

He really didn't know what else to do. He wasn't about to let the Trolls wreak havoc in the area, threaten that family, but he couldn't stay to hunt them down. So he created a safe place for the people to go, a place safe from the Trolls, where they could wait until it was safe to go home again. And he protected that nameless family that had made him feel better.

Of the two, the latter was definitely the most important to him.

To: Title EoF

Chapter 22

Miserable conditions.

Tarrin growled a bit as a rivuletof cold water fu

Aldreth. He had yearned for the place, dreamed about it, thought of it, for many months now, and finally, he had come back. He stood on the road to Watch Hill, shaking some of the water off of his large cloak, trying to figure out how he had gotten lost and ended up so far south of his home village. He had been aiming for his old farm, to pass through it on the way to Aldreth, to see what was left and remember good times gone by. It had to be the rain. It made him a bit listless, a bit unwatchful. He had been on the meadow path leading to the farm, but he must have accidentally turned onto the blackrock path instead of staying on the meadow path. The blackrock path led to a large black rock-hence its name-that rested about a longspan south of the village. His mind was so occupied with seeing things, he never noticed that he had made a wrong turn. He hoped his father never found out about this, he'd never hear the end of it.

It had to be the expectation of it. He had been looking forward to this for a long time now, and it had been the main motivation for crossing the Frontier as quickly as he did. He travelled in ten days what he thought would have taken him fifteen, because any time he was not sleeping, he was ru

The next time he killed a Were-boar, he had told himself, he wasn't going to make the mistake of biting it. Were-boars tasted horrible.

The second altercation was probably the more dangerous of the two. He had been moving in a straight line, using Sorcery to keep him on the path to Aldreth, and he had blundered into the home range of a pack of Were-wolves. Were-wolves hated Were-cats with a passion, and Tarrin's presence in their territory was noticed almost immediately. That pack of fifteen Were-wolves was on Tarrin's trail immediately, and it was only by good fortune that he realized that he had wandered where he shouldn't have been, and turned away so he could get out of their range as quickly as possible. Tarrin wasn't going to tangle with an entire pack of Were-wolves, not if he could help it, and certainly not on their home ground.

What made it dangerous and a bit a

What happened after that was probably going to get him into a great deal of trouble with Fae-da'Nar. The Were-wolves reached him and immediately attacked. Tarrin, who was already a

Tarrin grew a dim opinion of his Were cousins at that point. If all Were didn't like the Were-cats, that was fine. But if they were going to attack him, they were going to pay the price for their stupidity.

Nobaka. The Sha'Kar word for fool.

Outside of those two little adventures, the passage through the Frontier had been uneventful, and a little blurred. He was ru

The weather wasn't the only thing that had changed. The brown skin of his tan had steadily faded with the days under the forest canopy, away from the sun. He didn't look like an Arakite anymore, but he did still have a dark tan that made him look slightly bronzed, like an Arkisian with a light complexion.

The time in the Frontier hadn't been totally alone. Keritanima had been contacting him daily, and she kept to her new pattern of calling to him around noon every day to talk. Allia had also started doing that, but her calls came near sunset. It was good to keep in communication with his sisters, but there wasn't much that they could say through the amulets, because of the risks involved. It was usually little more than smalltalk, though Keritanima did pass on information through Je