Finding Heathcliff

Twenty-Four

Astrid woke up long before sunrise, feeling as if someone, whom she had been clinging to the entire night, had just left.

She sat up, observing her hands, still partly closed into fists. What had she been dreaming about? she mused, closing her fists around handfuls of her blankets. Pressing the warm fabric to her chest, she reached out towards the closest lamp and pulled at its string.

The too-bright and steady light made her blink even as it flooded the pillow which lay next to hers, revealing an imprint. Of their own volition, Astrid's fingers caressed its outline, before her hands brought the pillow to her face. The world around her seemed to vanish for a moment or two as she inhaled the faintest scent... of incense that seemed to linger within the pillow, and hover in the cool darkness around her. It... couldn't be... but it was. How? Why...?

She jumped guiltily, dropping the pillow at hearing a knock on the door,  followed by Orion's voice, "Astrid, it's time to get up."

Sighing, she walked towards the door and let him in, then smiled as he enveloped her in a bone-shattering embrace as if he had missed her.

"Did you sleep well?" he whispered in her ear, his warm breath caressing the skin of her neck making her feel weak in the knees.

"Hmm... You?" Astrid asked, leaning into him, her arms wrapping around his waist out of a life-long habit, without her mind's permission.

"I sleep better when I have you close," he murmured, punctuating his words with a long, deep kiss, scattering all her thoughts momentarily. "But now we must go, Izar and the others are waiting for us, our breakfast is ready."

Nodding her understanding, she took the bag of clean clothes he brought for her and vanished into the bathroom to get dressed, leaving Orion to pack her saddlebags.

Astrid felt sad to leave Lady Alioth and Lord Acrux after breakfast; she liked the friendly, childless, middle-aged couple. They felt very different from her uncle's handpicked courtiers. Without hesitation, she accepted their invitation to visit again on their way back, while she let Alioth envelop her in a brief hug. Astrid could sense kindness and understanding emanating from the woman, making her suddenly miss Arabella. 

Later, as they continued on their journey, Astrid found out that Lord Acrux didn't keep his technology to himself like her uncle.

It was Izar this time who volunteered the information, telling Astrid and Orion, with a light of admiration shining in his dark eyes, that Lord Acrux with his mills produced enough electricity for several households, and lady Alioth ran a small hospital, and a school.

Astrid wished they had had more time to visit those places, there were very few schools in Eurovea. School attendance hadn't been compulsory for over a century, and the nobles' children were privately tutored as Astrid and Orion had been.

Adding school education to her growing mental list of things to change and improve, Astrid decided that once she was crowned, the prohibition of the use of technology would be the first thing she would abolish. If used well, and available for everyone, technology would positively change the lives of many inhabitants of the kingdom, it would mean more schools, hospitals, and orphanages, and after those basic and essential needs would be covered, she could start thinking about paper mills, book printing, and so many other things she had read about in old novels.

It took the small group of riders four more days to reach Vesper, three nights spent, to Orion's joy, under the tents, where no one disagreed with their sleeping arrangements.

Both the countryside and the people they met changed gradually the farther they travelled from Starling.

Once they left the Starfall Forest behind, Astrid noticed more animals crossing their road, or watching them silently from the groups of trees scattered in the fields and meadows. Suddenly, there seemed to be pairs of white doves everywhere she looked.

People living in this part of the country, whom Astrid saw working in the fields, or met in the villages the road led them through, looked less like Orion and Izar, and more like Rigel, many of them were fair-haired and bright-eyed, very different from the people who had surrounded Astrid as she grew up. Their affinities seemed to shift from Orion to Astrid-- most of them eyed Orion suspiciously, just like the people they had met before used to consider her. It bemused Astrid, Orion wasn't used to such treatment and didn't like it.

There were more signs and hints of a partly hidden use of technology everywhere. Nothing as grand and elaborate as Lord Acrux had, but simple washing and dryer machines which did not require electricity to work, and running water brought into the houses from cisterns placed on the roofs, or drawn from wells by inconspicuous windmills, were normal in many households, Rigel told Astrid.

The morning after they reached Vesper, six days after they had set out on the journey, Izar and his three men said their goodbyes, wished Astrid good luck with her mission, and turned back, taking the same road which had brought them to the small town.

"Lead the way, Rigel," Orion told their only remaining guard, observing the youth carefully, making Astrid feel embarrassed for his open mistrust.

Rigel inclined his head in a polite bow of understanding and directed his horse towards a narrow cobbled lane, quitting the town in the opposite direction than the rest of the guards had chosen.

"You should have let me hire some men," Orion complained in a low voice, but Astrid only shook her head in response, determined to ignore him.

They had had that argument several times over the last few days, but just like Rigel, and even Izar before, she thought that no amount of money Orion could offer would buy the blind loyalty of people living this far from Starling. It was safer for them to continue on their journey alone, trying not to attract attention to who they were.

The week that it took them to reach Vega, felt even longer than the week they had spent travelling from Starling to Vesper.

It didn't help that it started to rain the second night after they had parted with their guards, and didn't stop for days, nor that the fields and meadows they had ridden across after having left the Starfall Forest turned into unreliable marshland, or that the proximity of the fast approaching Black Night was making them feel nervous.

However, just as Rigel had promised, they reached his home the night before the Black Night day.

Astrid was too exhausted to notice the man wrapped in a black cloak observing her silently from the copse of trees growing behind Rigel's house, which stood at the outskirts of Vega, or feel too happy for the dark-haired, middle-aged woman who gasped in surprise before she pulled Rigel in an embrace when she opened the door to them.

"Rigel... my Rigel..."

The woman repeated her son's name a few times, caressing his fair hair, his smiling face, as if to make sure that he was real, before he pushed her gently to the side, making space for Astrid and Orion to walk through the doorway.