MALIN DRASWIST IS TOO YOUNG. With the advent of the new king of Cardina and the control of the state relinquished to Synketros, a covert organization bent on harnessing power, things took the turn for the worse. When soldiers start a siege against t...
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2412, Iclis 14, Reshpe
The wheels rumbled along the length of the Magic Road. Malin frowned underneath the wide-brimmed hat sitting atop his head. They didn't really need to go back this far, but if they were to sell the idea, they had to. But putting Malin in clothes leagues bigger than him and gluing bricks at the end of his boots to make him taller—and by extension, according to Pilqen's logic, older—was pushing it. He looked nothing like an adult, yet he's still the one sitting in front of the cart, holding the reins to a pair of dagrinis as if he knew what he was doing.
A small voice coming from the shutter behind his head whispered. "You are doing great, Mal," Ela said, amusement laced around her tone. His friends were probably laughing their cheeks off inside the cart, maybe even going as far as recruiting the rest of Ela's unit in their fun. That's just great. He shouldn't have proposed this plan, in the grand scheme of his dignity. "If you want to switch, Pilqen's available."
"Hey!" Pilqen's voice replaced Ela's gentle tone. His voice streaked past the shutter and bled out as a muffled string of words past the cart's wooden walls. Rathas hissed in urgency. Something rumbled and thudded inside the cart. That seemed like a crate knocked over.
Malin blew a breath. If they weren't caught on their way to the Temple, it's either they're really good at sneaking into places they shouldn't be or the Civil Guards were dumber than Malin thought them to be from the start. Success didn't fall on him. It depended on how long his friends could keep their mouths shut inside the cart.
He gave the reins a quick flick, urging the dagrinis to quicken their pace a bit. The faster this thing was done, the better. He has had enough of the chaos and uncertainty of this whole endeavor. The sunlight streaming from the edges of the forest's canopies poked his eyeballs at random intervals. He was glad for the brimmed hat. At least Rathas had the best sense among them and pilfered one from a noble's closet.
The past few days, while Ela and some children from her unit moved to locate the other people the Temple took in, Malin, Pilqen, and Rathas went out to procure everything they needed for their first and last attempt at fooling the Civil Guards in order to get back to the High Priestess. Malin had no problem procuring a cart; he just went to the trader's square and won it through a bet on a game of karavag. At that moment, he was grateful for all the afternoons his father forced Malin to play with him. Malin never realized it'd be useful later on in life.
Pilqen's story on how he got the dagrinis was wilder. It involved grappling with a graspel and saving the herd from one in the forest but the boy's probably exaggerating. He wouldn't put it past Pilqen, but there might have been a graspel and Malin wouldn't be able to handle disbelieving his friend over his biases.
Nevertheless, Malin had to commend Pilqen about how docile and agreeable the animals he got. Otherwise, Malin wouldn't have been able to pass off as a legitimate cart driver, having only read tomes about the practice once. There was a huge difference between knowing how to do it and doing it for real.
