Part I
Clouds raced across the sky and Velessa shivered, tugging on her jacket. Autumn was truly underway with its brisk winds, but Vel was in no mood to appreciate the red and gold splendor of Westwood Forest. After autumn would be winter, she glumly noted, and the roads would be slick with ice and snow. And she would be trudging those same roads, slogging through the cold to deliver messages from one fat merchant to another—all of them obliviously ensconced in their warm homes.
Ah, if only for the good old days, she mused. Catonia and Aldenbar had been at war for fifty years. As the fourth daughter to a watchmaker, she had been sent off to school once she had been weaned with the hopes that she would become one of Catonia's war engineers. Unfortunately, those hopes were dashed due to her miserable efforts at mathematics. She had shown an aptitude for the arts of defense instead so rather than an engineer, she was trained as a guerrilla fighter. Once she was out of training, she was immediately dispatched to the field. That work, however, lasted only two years. Catonia and Aldenbar were now at a truce.
Vel grimaced. Back then, she couldn't even contemplate an era of peace. The war was her career. And now, she was reduced to disguising herself as a boy just to get some work as a messenger. If only she had become an engineer! Then she would have been able to stay in her native Catonia getting steady work to rebuild the war-torn country.
The road heading south through Westwood Forest to Tarsica's capital city of Garren was a pleasant, even walk. Tarsica was one of Catonia's other neighbors, a strange country rumored to be still wild—not in the sense that the inhabitants were all barbarians, far from it in fact—but a place where odd things still happened. Magic. The king of Tarsica was rumored to be the latest in a line of wizard-kings and that magic ran in his blood. Of course, there was no such thing as magic—as everyone said aloud—but a lot of people couldn't shake the feeling that Tarsica was a bit unusual and perhaps that was why the country had never seen any wars of its own in its recent history.
But whether the king was truly a wizard, no one could really say. He had disappeared a month before on some mysterious errand leaving the throne open for the Duke of Corona to take over as "regent." As far as Vel could tell, though, the change in rulers didn't affect the people of Tarsica much on the surface. The sleepy villages and hamlets that she had passed on her journey didn't seem duly alarmed that the king was nowhere to be found. There was talk about it and no one actually said anything, but she could sense a tense undercurrent running beneath the words.
She brushed those thoughts aside. Tarsican politics was none of her business unless for some inexplicable reason the country decided to go to war with Catonia. All she had to worry about at the moment was to deliver the message she received from a merchant in her homeland to another living in Garren. And to stay on the road. Westwood Forest appeared benign, but who knows what sort of creatures might be lurking in the trees.
The road wound around a bend and as Vel contemplated on whether to stop at an inn at the evening or to conserve her meager stash of coins by camping out underneath the night sky, a shouted curse from her right broke through her reverie. A stout figure in a black traveling cloak was waving a piece of parchment in the air and kicking a withered old tree stump in fury. Vel's first instinct was to ignore the man. But the war was over and there was no one else on the road. Perhaps the fellow traveler was in dire straits.
"Excuse me sir," she called out. "Are you in any need of assistance?"
The stout man kicked the stump one last time before turning to her. Upon walking closer, she noticed that the man was bald except for the tufts of gray hairs coming out above his ears. His chubby face gave him a suspicious beady-eyed look. The man grinned when he noticed that she had been speaking.
"Yes, as a matter of fact, I do need some assistance," the stout man said. "I've accidentally lost my tinderbox down this darn tree stump. I was about to go retrieve it myself—I've got the rope all ready and everything—but I've discovered that I can't even fit through the hole!"
"You lost a tinderbox down a tree stump?" she said bewildered. Vel finally glanced at the tree stump and noticed that it was indeed hollow and the dark hole vanished into the bowels of the earth. A rope had been secured around the stump with the other end dropping into the hole.
The stout man nodded vigorously. "The tinderbox was an old family heirloom that I got from my grandmother. I would be so thankful if I got it back—why boy, I think you're small enough to get down there."
She looked at the hole doubtfully. "I wonder how far down it goes."
"Oh, not far, not far," the stout man said. "There might be some other things down there of course."
"Other things?"
"Dog-spirits and gold coins and such," he said dismissively. "The forest is full of them. I mean, you can just ignore the dog-spirits and the gold coins are real enough if you want them."
"Gold coins?" Well, if Tarsica had magic, she thought, it wouldn't be too far-fetched to think that a treasure was hidden underneath the forest. And if she had even a fraction of a treasure, she would be very well-off indeed. She put down her sack with her belongings and took hold of the rope.
"Sure, if there's gold down there, you can probably take all you want," said the stout man. "I just need that tinderbox."
Vel raised an eyebrow. That was the first that she had heard of anyone prizing a tinderbox over gold. She would have to think about that. So she put a foot on the side of the stump to brace herself as she proceeded to climb into the hole.