Edgar and Cassima arrived at the entrance to the cave almost at the same time, Edgar running like the wind while Cassima stiffly walked.
"Cassima!" the prince panted, slowing as he neared her side. "What happened?"
Cassima was bent over and clutching her left arm, breathing heavily and trembling slightly.
"It was…" she gasped, "It was like a dragon, but with no front legs…"
Only one creature Edgar knew of fit that description.
"A wyvern?"
"I suppose…I was over by a waterfall and it bit me…here…"
With a shuddering inhalation, Cassima relaxed her grip on her arm and showed Edgar a small pair of punctures midway between her shoulder and her elbow. The skin around the marks was turning an angry shade of purplish red. Fear and pain swam in Cassima's green eyes as she gazed pleadingly at Edgar.
"I need help…" she rasped.
Terror seized Edgar and jangled his nerves.
"Quickly," he said as confidently as he could, "Let's go into the cave and find a place where you can rest, Cassima. That wound looks serious."
Edgar approached her, put a hand on her shoulder and hurriedly led her inside the cave. The cave was completely barren except for the typical stalactites, stalagmites, pebbles and boulders, but on either side of it were two large rock slabs that were almost identical to beds in terms of size and shape – they certainly weren't going to be the same in terms of comfort, however.
Cassima lay down on one of the slabs while Edgar examined her wound. It sickened him to look at it. He didn't know much about medicine (and his brief stint as a physician's apprentice hadn't contributed to his knowledge of the subject, either), but he did know that if something wasn't done about Cassima's bite soon, she was going to sicken and possibly even die…and he was the only one who could help her.
"I'd better find something to help this thing heal," he declared. "You stay here until I come back."
Cassima grimaced.
"Yes…please," she breathed. "And hurry…"
Edgar bowed gently to her.
"I promise you I will," he said.
The sky was darkening rapidly with the approaching storm as Edgar stepped out of the cave, bringing a premature dusk to the tropical land. The prince tried to gather his thoughts – the venom in the wyvern's bite was what was hurting Cassima, so he had to find some way to draw it out. A magical poultice would probably work, provided he could find something that would serve as one.
Since the south end of the plateau appeared to be wyvern territory, Edgar elected to return to the rock mound at the north end. There he found the shattered remains of the clay bowl he had carelessly let break lying beside the basin. The water in the basin was rippling again, and there was no way Edgar could see the mosaic on its base again without magically changing the course of the waterfall, something which he had neither the time or desire to do.
He examined the mound again. Growing out of it was a thin, sickly tree with a large, bulbous growth enveloping its trunk. A light flickered into being in Edgar's head. With a touch of magic, he could make a blob of sap into a decent poultice, and that growth looked as if it was holding a good deal of sap. Unfortunately, it was considerably out of reach, and none of the magic he tried on it seemed to work. If only he had something sharp to poke a hole in it with that could reach up that high…
Edgar then realized that he did have something that was not only sharp in places, but perfectly capable of reaching the growth as well.
"Hey Scrimshaw? Are you awake?"
An irritated grunt from his hood revealed that the pygmy griffin hadn't been awake until Edgar started talking to it – how Scrimshaw managed to sleep through that horrible incident with Cassima, Edgar had no idea.
"Could you do me a favor and peck that swollen spot on that tree open?" Edgar asked. "It shouldn't be any problem for someone like you."
Scrimshaw snorted angrily.
"Please?" Edgar asked. "I promise I won't bother you again today."
The griffin chirped hopefully.
"Of course I'm telling the truth," Edgar said. "Now come on. Peck it open."
Scrimshaw fluttered out of Edgar's hood and flapped up to the slender tree. Finding the growth Edgar had indicated, the little griffin hammered fastidiously at it with his sharp beak. Soon, a tiny trickle of sap began to flow.
"That's it! Good boy, Scrimshaw," Edgar said.
Looking quite pleased with himself, Scrimshaw launched himself off of the tree's nearly horizontal trunk and once again swooped into his "nest."
Sap was now dripping readily from the tree. Unwilling to get his hands full of the sticky gunk, Edgar looked around for something to hold the sap. He soon found just such an object – one of the fragments of the bowl he had broken. It was large, rounded and just the right size to gather all the sap he needed. He held it beneath the dripping, syrupy liquid and let several large drops collect on the clay shard. Once he had gathered as much as he could, he withdrew the shard and began making his way back to the cave.
As he was walking, he noticed a small wet spot on his sleeve. It wasn't the sap that had made that spot, however. Several more spots began to appear on his clothing and on nearby stones as well. It was starting to rain.
Cassima cringed in pain as the bite on her arm throbbed unceasingly. She had become too weak to clutch it any longer, and it had become too tender to touch. She wasn't going to let it kill her, though. It couldn't kill her. She had survived too much to die this way.
She hadn't withstood enslavement by an evil wizard, imprisonment by a mad vizier, cold mountains, burning deserts, deep seas, numerous near-assaults by agents of a sorcerer that made Mordack seem like a sniveling adolescent and too many unpleasant murderous foes to count just to be snuffed out by the bite of an antisocial two-legged dragon.
She rubbed her wedding ring furiously. She had to pull through – Alexander's life depended on it. Rosella's too. If she failed, they would never be born, and she would still be a slave to that fiend on that miserable island off the coast of Serenia – and who could say what the repercussions of their sudden nonexistence would have on the rest of the world. It was a thought almost too horrible to contemplate, but Cassima was willing to think of anything to take her mind away from the horrible pains that were plaguing her.
What sort of effect was this wound having on her child? Did she really want to think about that? If she had known she was gravid two days ago, would she still have volunteered to find Shadrack? Would she have been able to go through with her mission knowing that she was putting two lives in peril instead of one?
And even if she did recover from this injury, how was she going to defeat Shadrack? He wasn't in this land, and there was no one here to tell her where to go next. Edgar's idea of combining their pendants seemed like a good one, but what if it didn't work? What would they do then?
These thoughts were still chasing each other inside her head, like crazed serpents racing after their own tails, when a sound near the cave's entrance made her turn. The sky outside was dark and gloomy, and in her agony, she hadn't noticed that it had started to rain – thick, wet sheets were drenching the grass outside. Standing in the mouth of the cave, dripping with moisture, was Edgar.
Although he had hurried back to the cave as fast as he could, the rain proved to be quicker than he was. He shook his head, trying to shake the damp out of his hair and failing miserably. Not only did hair this long tangle easily and get snagged even easier, but once it got soaked, it took a very long time to dry completely. Edgar squelched over to the slab where Cassima lay and looked concernedly at her.
"Did you find something to cure my wyvern bite, Edgar?" Cassima breathed.
"I hope so," Edgar replied. He took out the pottery shard with the sap on it.
"Hold still," he said gently. "I'm going to put this sap on your arm. It should help to draw out the venom."
Cassima shifted so that her injured arm was within Edgar's reach. He carefully began applying the sap to the bite, which had turned a sickly blue by now. Soon, he had covered the entire wound with the thick, sticky ooze.
"How is…how is sap going to help?" Cassima asked weakly.
"By itself, it won't," Edgar explained, "But this should make it work…"
He lifted a hand and held it just above the bite. A soft glow emanated from his palm, and the sap soon began to grow brightly as well. After a few seconds, he removed his hand. Cassima looked down at the sap to see that it had turned a bright, transparent green.
"It's a magic poultice," Edgar explained. "It should help draw out whatever that wyvern had in its teeth and make the wound itself better as well."
"I hope so," Cassima said, sounding a little woozy. "How do you do that, Edgar?"
Edgar looked at her, then at his hands.
"How do I do it?" he repeated. "I don't really know. I mean…how do you pick out one person's voice in a crowded room or find a single pebble on a sandy beach?"
"I just…I just focus my senses and concentrate with all my might until I succeed," Cassima said after a moment of contemplation.
"That's more or less how I work magic," Edgar shrugged.
"Wow…" Cassima said softly. She relaxed on the slab, staring at the cave's ceiling, her only movements the rise and fall of her chest and the blink of her eyes. Edgar watched her closely, praying that his magic had worked, listening to the patter of the rain outside.
He had never imagined that this bold, ambitious woman would ever be in a situation where her life was in his hands. Until now, he had only been wandering through one land after another, steered by fate and Cassima's words. Even now that his objective was clear, he still felt as if he was aimlessly wandering through this journey with no destination in sight. Cassima seemed to know exactly what to do and where to go on their quest – without her, how could he possibly hope to conquer Shadrack?
Cassima suddenly sighed and turned in Edgar's direction. Though she still seemed quite weak, the brightness had returned to her eyes.
"I don't suppose you found anything to eat when you were looking for water, did you?" she asked with a wan smile.
"No," Edgar said, "I didn't find anything edible in this land…but in Etheria, I found these."
He pulled out the colorful fruits he had picked that morning on one of his homeland's outer islands. Cassima took two of them gratefully and began to eat them slowly but deliberately. Edgar was too worried about her to eat any himself, though the queen's condition did seem to have improved – if only slightly.
After Cassima had finished the first fruit and had gotten halfway through the second one, she sighed again and looked at Edgar with the saddest look he had ever seen on her.
"I'm sorry," she said.
"It's all right," Edgar said soothingly. "If I had gone to the south end of the plateau, I probably would've been bitten by that wyvern, too – "
"No, no, not that," Cassima said. "I'm sorry about this afternoon – when you were watching me change and you got distracted by something…I thought you were making the distraction up."
"You what?" Edgar asked, surprised.
"I thought you made up that demon-like thing you said you saw just so you could look away," Cassima sighed. "When I saw the wyvern, I knew that you didn't – you must have seen the wyvern passing overhead. If I hadn't been so convinced that you were lying…perhaps you could have warned me about the wyvern being up here…then maybe I wouldn't have…"
"It's all right," Edgar said, feeling just as distraught as Cassima looked. "I probably shouldn't have tried watching you change in the first place. It's over anyway. How are you feeling now?"
"Better," Cassima said, glancing at her wound. "I think we should both get some rest, though. There's another ledge over there that you can sleep on."
Edgar glanced over at it and exhaled deeply.
"Uh…are you feeling all right, Edgar?" Cassima asked. "You look a little flustered."
Edgar started to walk away, not looking at Cassima.
"I'm…I'm…"
He suddenly turned around and began restlessly pacing the cave.
"I just don't see what the point is anymore!" he exploded. "We've both gone through so much, but what if all our troubles are worth nothing? We've both just been mindlessly stumbling through one fiasco after another, wandering aimlessly through all these worlds, venturing through…"
"Adventuring," Cassima said. Edgar stopped pacing and stared at her.
"What?"
"We're not venturing anywhere. We're adventuring. No quest ever has a straight path to its destination, and the one we're on is no exception. It's just like the journeys that Alexander, Rosella and their parents went on when it all boils down."
"So what are you saying?" Edgar asked, sounding much less frustrated now.
"Even if we don't accomplish what we set out to do, we can't say we didn't have a good try," she said firmly. "Everyone in Alexander and Rosella's family has had a try at adventuring. It's our turn now. Goodnight, Edgar."
She turned away from him and pulled out a bundle of clothing – the same outfit she was wearing when she and Edgar first met. She placed the bundle beneath her head, adjusted it, then became still. Edgar quietly walked over to the slab of rock that was to be his bed, unfastened his cloak and shooed Scrimshaw out of his hood. The little griffin angrily flapped up to a small rock ledge and began to settle himself up there, while Edgar stretched out on the slab with his rolled-up cloak beneath his still sodden head, listening to the drumming of the rain. It was a long time before he finally fell asleep.
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