PART I
OF DRAGONS AND DREAMS
1
IDRILIA
"The unclimbed spire promises fame and glory to those who accept its challenge. Many set out. Few return."
—Tarinian Mountain Proverb
"Idon't like this, Idrilia," Gavon said from behind me when the trail narrowed to a goat path. "We should turn around."
I didn't dignify his comment with a response and kept going.
He wasn't even breathing hard despite the altitude, his years on the university rowing team having given him lungs like bellows and shoulders broad enough to block the wind. Usually, he used the first one to impress the ladies with his singing and the second to impress them with his good looks, but as it turned out, it also benefited him in the mountains.
He was the last one who should complain, even though he was right.
We'd just passed the first marker of the outer boundary, and the steep incline was becoming truly dangerous, but this waswhere the elusive Silver Princess had been seen, and I had no intention of stopping before I found her.
"Perhaps the goat herder was wrong about the location," Gavon continued his commentary. "Not that I'm surprised. I told you not to trust someone who couldn't even articulate directions and distance properly."
Gavon was such an elitist snob.
He was only a minor aristocrat, but his ego was big enough for a prince.
Not that my brother, who was a real prince and second in line to the throne, suffered from such an inflated sense of self-worth. But then unlike Gavon, my brother had nothing to prove.
"He was perfectly clear about the location of the Silver Princess," I said without turning back to look at my grumpy paramour. "The fact that the herder was dirty and smelly after spending weeks in the mountains with his goats doesn't mean that he didn't know what he was talking about or that he lacked intelligence."
"Then you must have miscalculated." Gavon caught up to me and put his hand on my shoulder. "Don't beat yourself up because of that. It happens. Let's just head back down. I'm tired of freezing my butt off on this damn mountain."
I adjusted the straps of my pack and squinted up the slope. The rock face above us was streaked with mineral deposits that glittered faintly in the auroral light, mostly iron and copper.
"I didn't miscalculate," I said. "The magnetic concentration readings from Professor Haldren's study indicated optimal conditions for the bloom between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred meters on north-facing slopes with adequate drainage. We're at thirteen hundred, which means that we are only at the start of the area with the perfect conditions."
"Perfect for goats," Gavon grumbled.
I didn't respond.
Behind us, the rest of the party spread out along the trail in a ragged line. Thirteen of us had made the push from base camp this morning, leaving six crew members below to tend the tents and the pack animals that couldn't manage the steeper terrain.
My lead guide had been against this last push past what he considered a safe zone, and his silence had grown increasingly louder the higher we climbed. The prudent thing would have been to listen to the guy who had spent half a century in the Tarinian highlands, but prudence had never brought anyone glory.
Some risks were worth taking.
"Your Highness," Jeffson called from behind Gavon.
I turned around to see my lead guide hurriedly overtaking Gavon to catch up with me. "We've just crossed the upper boundary," he said. "We shouldn't venture further."
The boundary.
As if the mountains had drawn a line and posted a sign.
In a sense, they had. The Tarinian side of the border range rose to middling peaks, relatively accessible and safe as mountain travel went, but the Elucian side soared into jagged, impossible heights.
No one who valued their lives went past the boundary. The Elucians didn't even bother with border guards on this side because the mountains themselves did the job for them.
