Brokedown Palace by Steven Brust Read Free Book Online Page B

let us explain why it is that the path he had taken on his journey to Faerie was no longer there for his journey back. For thousands of years, water had been seeping into the flaws in the cliff face, slowly dissolving granite and making large cracks of the small ones. Few ever came this way; Miklós had been the last to use the path before it finally collapsed of its own weight and went crashing onto the ground at the base of the falls.
    The new cliff wall, while it had no path in it, was jagged and uneven. An experienced mountaineer would have had no trouble. Miklós, on awakening fresh the next morning, and with a day of climbing experience behind him, made his careful, painstaking way down the rest of the cliff to the pile of rubble and broken boulders at the bottom by afternoon.
    He spent the rest of that day there, at the source of the River, never quite dry because of the spray from the falls, but not minding. In the evening he moved off a short distance to where it was dry and built a fire. He ate a few more biscuits, then lay down next to the embers of the fire and fell asleep.
    He dreamt.
    In his dream, he saw the Palace that was his home. He saw it as he remembered it, not as it was. He saw jhereg flying around it, and he became aware that each time one flew near, it would take a bite out of the Palace, and he realized that soon there would be nothing left of it.
    When he awoke, he knew that he must set out for home at once. Yet he paused for a moment, delighting in the sun in his eyes, though it nearly blinded him.
    In all his bitter days in the land of twilight that men called Faerie, he had not been aware of how badly he had missed the
morning sun. Looking back to his time in Faerie, he realized that he had never really believed the sun would not appear. It had always seemed to him that the sky would clear on the morrow.
    He turned away from the sun. When the spots cleared from his eyes, he stared up at the height from which he had descended the day before.
    He was certainly safe from his master now. His master would not follow him—in fact, would probably not have considered following him in any case.
    It wasn’t, Miklós reflected, as if his escape had been difficult. The others he had lived with and worked beside had seemed to accept their lot, and he had been expected to do the same. There had never been anything to prevent an escape. Nothing except the difficulty of breaking patterns that, in only a few days, seemed to have become ingrained. And, as well, always the question of where to go, and what to do when he got there.
    But he could only take so much. Finally, one morning he had put his old clothes and a small bit of food into his pack and had walked away from the master’s fields and into the mountains he had come from. No one would miss him, that was certain.
    Miklós was going home. As for what he would do there, he’d know that when he did it.
     
    … AND HE WAS IN THE FOREST.
    It came up that suddenly. For a few hours after leaving the base of the waterfall, he was walking along a path through hard, rocky ground, with the River a distant, wavering line on his right. Then there was a blur ahead of him as he began to notice grass beneath his feet. Then the blur took shape, and then he was in the Wandering Forest—amid the hickory and the birch and the heaken and the oak—with the clean scent of growth all about him and cool wind in his face.
    He wasn’t sure why, but he moved away from the path. He walked through thickets and around trees, jumping over puddles and disturbing teckla that scurried and norska that hopped. As he walked, humming songs from childhood and listening to the chatter of the birds, he considered again what he would do upon returning.
    He would see his parents, of course. He realized with a sudden pang of guilt that they might have died while he was gone. Then he laughed to himself. He had hardly left the Palace of his own volition. Yes, he would see his parents, if they