Chapter 153: A Nice View
Simon’s recovery was slow, only compared to everything else he’d been through. He was used to healing or dying almost immediately, and there had been only a few instances where he’d been forced to actually let his body mend, the most notable of which had been ages ago when he’d fought with the orcs. There, he’d been afraid of scrambling his brains with the wrong healing spell, and he’d been forced to spend weeks in bed, letting the concussion heal on its own.
The view from his sickbed in Rivenwood wasn’t half so lovely as his view from the palace’s guest room, though, and the Queen was much nicer to him than the shrew that saw only Simon’s evil aura and not the man behind it. He paused for a moment to try to remember the village wise woman’s name but found that he couldn’t. He was still glad that he’d saved her, of course, but happy not to think of her most of the time. Still, Simon wondered what she might say about him with his steadily improving aura.
Though he enjoyed time to think about this and other topics and frequently used a borrowed hand mirror to ask questions of it from his growing pile of notes, Simon was back on his feet in less than two weeks. There was simply only so much laying in bed he could take. Those first steps were halting, and only across the room to use the chamber pot or to go outside and stand on the balcony, taking in the sea air and the commanding view of the ocean that surrounded the city on three sides.
What it didn’t show him was the volcano, though. Simon was unsure if that was on purpose or a happy accident, but the one direction he most wanted to look in, he couldn’t. He didn’t dwell on it, though. He could tell from the smell of the air and the manner of servants that it wasn’t still erupting. So, if there was no danger, everything else could wait.
The Queen continued to visit him often. It wasn’t daily. She was a busy woman. Still, every two or three days, she would come to his room and bring him a book to read or an expensive piece of fruit to savor. Whether she was attempting to subtly remind him of his place in the pecking order with these luxuries or just giving him rewards worthy of a hero, he couldn’t say. That’s just the way she was. One moment, she was so dignified that she bordered on the formal, and the next, she was just a woman, and the illusion of formality fell apart as she laughed at some joke or beamed when she saw him standing for the first time.
She was a canny woman, though, and even when she was being friendly or even flirtatious, she was still probing him and looking for answers to her questions. What was he really doing here? How did he really slay Brogan? How did Simon know to slay the giant if he didn’t know who that was?
Simon’s protests and memory lapses only went so far, but eventually, he got enough information about the cursed land of Ionia to make up a suitable story. As they talked, she told him of how her great-grandfather, Andus, carved out a vast country from these rocky slopes by killing or sealing away each of the monsters that plagued it. “He stole the north from the harpy queen and sealed away Brogan the burning to build Ionar, among other terrible beasts. For a generation, everything was perfect until the curse.”
Apparently, an oracle had prophesied that his reign would spell only doom for the world and that every time one of his progeny got married, one of the monsters Andus sealed away would return to torment his descendants. It was a crazy story, and Simon was extremely skeptical, at least until the Queen said, “No one was really sure it was true until my mother remarried, almost 50 years after her father’s death. She fell to love, despite all the warnings. That’s when the basilisk returned and destroyed the city of Ozioptin.”
A chill went through Simon at those words. He’d never known the name of the city, but he’d been there before. He’d been there longer than he’d ever been anywhere else. “Ozioptin?” He asked, his mouth suddenly dry. “Could you show me that on a map?”