The Chronicles - Book 1

The Chronicles
Book One
Chapter One

Winter came late to the Five-Peaks, but it came with a vengeance. Allen Alderan stared down the length of The Road, which was covered in at least four feet of snow. The Road wasn't actually its name; it was really the Antirock Pass , but as it was the only sizeable road running through the village of Gilder 's Hollow, everyone just called it The Road.

“Not going to be much traffic getting through this,” Allen said to himself as he stuck his staff down into the snow again until it hit the packed clay of The Road. Although the village's name officially was Gilder's Hollow, there hadn't been any gilder's there for quite some time; ever since the silver mines peted out a century ago. Now it was simply called the middle of nowhere by travelers, since they used the village as a half-way point between Charista and New-Load. New-Load they simply gave the appropriate name of “the end of the road” since it literally was the end of the road. No one would ever go there were it not for the even richer silver load that had been discovered there shortly after the vein in the hollow had been exhausted. Allen inwardly remarked on the genius of village naming in the Five-Peaks as he stared around him at the snow capped peaks of the five mountains that ringed the hollow. He pulled his staff out of the snow and marked the snow depth there, then checked in a few other places just to be sure that he had a pretty accurate measurement.

“Nothing coming through?”, a voice behind him asked.

Allen spun around to see that his friend Gabe had snuck up behind him unheard, as usual. Relatively used to being surprised by Gabe, Allen hid his shock with long practice and stared down the length of The Road. “No, anything that does try will end up a corpse before a few leagues are past. They could put skis on their coach, but there's not many a horse that could make it through this alive.”

“Ah well, looks like we got the day off” Gabe said half sullenly. An unexpected vacation day was always nice, but with no one stopping at the inn for the night, there'd be no one wanting to put their team of horses up in their stable next to the inn, or anyone wanting to get new horseshoes shod. Really, half the town was directly employed in looking after travelers, and the other half was employed in looking after the people who looked after the travelers. “We may as well head over to the inn and make sure that their brandy supply doesn't get too lonely.” Allen knew that his friend was more concerned with the inn-keeper's daughter Liandron getting too lonely, but he didn't say anything. Gabe liked to pretend that no one noticed his infatuation with Liandron, so Allen was all too happy to abide him in that. He was also all too happy to pretend not to notice that Liandron seemed more interested in himself than in his friend.

Having fought their way through the snow to make it to the inn's common room, Allen and Gabe had almost their pick of tables. The inn, whose official name was The Gilded Rose, but as with most things in town, it was simply called “the inn,” was much larger than you would expect for a village this size. However, since it served to house all traffic going along the road, it had been expanded a few times over since it was originally built. The inn was a three story stone structure that could comfortably sleep about 150 people, its hulking common room could seat about that many at once. However, as the room was almost empty, only one of the four fireplaces was lit. The few merchants who were trapped by the weather were all huddled in one dark corner, no doubt discussing how the snow was going to dig into their profits.

Liandron appeared out of the hallway leading into the kitchen with a plate of sausages and bread and two steaming mugs of spiced brandy.

“Ahh, you must have been expecting us,” Gabe said as he rubbed his hands together and was either savoring the steaming plate of food before him, or the proximity of Liandron as she set the dishes down.

“Yes, actually my father and I were watching you two struggle through the snow for what seemed like ages,” she said as she set the mug and plates in front of Allen.

Allen glanced out of the window and looked at the ditch he and Gabe had carved through the snow with their own bodies. “With how long it took us to get from next door to here, I really don't see any hope of anyone getting in or out of the hollow for a while.”

“That's all that lots been talking about,” Liandron said, motioning with her head to the cloister of merchants. “How much each day is costing them and will the snow slow down the silver mining. Like it snowed underground,” she added with a huff that displayed more of her temper than normal.

Allen sensed that between the merchant's usual way of looking at the folks of the hollow as some sub-human species since they didn't live in a big city, plus their being cooped up in the inn with nothing to pass the time but drinking, that Liandron had gotten more than her usual share of pinches. Glancing over at the merchants he thought he could still make out a hand shaped red mark across one of their faces.

“Well, let us know if you need us to give one of them a talking to,” Gabe threw in at once, sitting up a little straighter and puffing his chest out.

“Don't worry over it,” she said while glancing over at the merchant she'd obviously used hand-gestures with earlier. “At least they normally feel guilty and leave a big tip.” The merchant held her with an angry glare until Allen and Gabe glared back at him. He probably would have made a braver display had his guards not been dicing in the other corner with all of the other merchant's guards. But as they clearly weren't paying him any attention at the moment, he dropped his gaze and went back to sullenly discussing profit margins with the other merchants.

“See? Paper bears,” Liandron declared as she headed back to the kitchen, sure of her victory. Allen watched the disgruntled merchant follow her with his eyes and continue to stare at the door she'd left the room through. He decided that particular paper bear might not be ready to fold up yet.

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Half a dozen sausages and two loaves of bread later, Gabe was on his third mug of brandy and Allen was getting his same mug back from the kitchen where Liandron kept taking it to let it re-warm over the cast iron stove.

Allen tested how hot the metal handle of the mug was, then picked it up and took a sip of brandy.

“See?”, Gabe said as he set his empty mug on the table and wiped his mouth with his sleeve, completely oblivious to Liandron's grimace behind his back as she watched him. “If you just drink it faster you wouldn't have to worry about how hot the handle was.” Liandron swooped in with a new mug and a quick smile for Allen, the retreated back into the kitchen.

“Ahh, but then I couldn't count on using your breath to melt us a path through the snow,” Allen laughed as Gabe dove into the fresh mug. Gabe wasn't the largest man in the hollow by any means, coming in just shy of Allen's six-foot stature, but he was a bit heavier from having apprenticed as a blacksmith as well as being a stableman. Plus, the Constocks were just a sturdy breed of Folk. However, he could hold his liquor. It could be said that one of his more profitable lines of work was waging against the traveling merchants and their guards that he could out drink them. He almost always was able to, and never caught onto the fact that most of his wins were thanks to Liandron gradually increasing his hot water to brandy ratio.

Allen smiled at his friend's seeming obliviousness to his drink probably being more water than brandy by now, but he had to hand it to Liandron; her skill with spices did make it hard to tell that the alcohol level was any lower. This came in handy when some of Gabe's more paranoid drinking partners might have suspected collusion among the locals, justly so, and taken a swig out of Gabe's mug to make sure it was on the up and up. Once when Allen had walked into the kitchen while Liandron was pouring steaming water into Gabe's quarter-mug full of brandy, she'd merely smiled ad said “well, he can't look after himself, someone's got to do it.” That was normally the way the pecking order worked among the three of them. Since they were all twenty, their birthdays not far apart, and since they had grown up playing together, they had fallen into the standard sibling roles. Allen was the oldest and had always shepparded his little flock in a way that they never realized that they were being lead. Liandron tried being the older sister to all of them, but since it was widely known that Allen did what he wanted, how he wanted, and that nothing could dissuade him from that, she ended up directing twice the normal amount of care taking towards Gabe. But since he fell right into the youngest child mold, and a rather reckless youngest child at that, things seemed to work out fine. Allen didn't really know when Gabe had started liking Liandron, or Liandron had started liking himself, but he guessed that so long as it went on as it did now, more in thought than in action, that things would continue going smoothly. The only hitch in his plan was that Master Enmor, Liandron's father and the owner of the inn, thus the most powerful man in town, must have picked up on his daughter's feelings for Allen, because he always seemed to be grooming Allen to become his heir. He guessed that Master Enmor must have once had dreams of marrying his daughter off to one of the wealthy merchants that passed through town, but after seeing how their hungry eyes watched her as she served them, and how they spoke to her as if she must be mentally deficient because she was a small town girl, he seemed to decide that one of the local stock would be better. His pick would naturally be Allen, who was his daughter's age, well mannered and well liked by the townspeople. Plus he had successfully taken over running his family's stable, raising its profits along with himself when he was left orphaned at fourteen. Master Enmor's heart went out to the boy, half the town had offered to adopt him when his parents passed away, but he insisted on living in the same house he had always lived in and doing the same work in the stables he had always done. Over the past six years he had greatly expanded the capacity of the stables, as well as adding coach repair and horse shoeing. The town's blacksmith, Alvin Illips, had been glad to get rid of the tedious shoe-making, and he was also glad to get rid of his even more tedious apprentice, Gabe.

Yes, Master Enmor had indeed chosen Allen to wed his daughter, and that his daughter seemed to have had the same idea suited him just fine.