THE WOMAN: V

Serroi sat beside the sleeping girl, drifting in a mindless ease until she found herself on the verge of falling asleep. Disturbed nights had left her with a weariness that was like an ocean pressing down on her. She sighed, got to her feet, walked with quick nervous steps to the rock pool. She stripped and plunged into the clear snowmelt, gasping with shock as her warm flesh dipped under the surface. She paddled about until the last wisps of sleep and nightmare dissolved and her blood was thrumming through her veins.

Turning onto her back, she floated, gazing up at a sun that was low in the west, bisected by the top of the cliff. The cup was filling with shadow; night was close enough to call the shuri. She flipped over and paddled to the cliff wall with the carving of the Maiden. With water sluicing from her body, she climbed the crude ladder of foot and hand holds hollowed into the rock, though the holds were small and made for hands and feet differently shaped. She placed her hand over the Maiden’s stone fingers where the stone was worn smooth by many other touches, smiled as warmth tingled into her fingers and flowed along her arms to fill her shivering body.

“Creasta-shuri.” She sang the words in her husky contralto, paused to listen to the echoes playing with the sound. “Meie of the Biserica I am.” She sang slowly, twisting her tongue around the gutturals painstakingly learned many years before. “Guidance through the mountains I ask. By the pact between us I ask.” She waited again until the echoes died and the warmth faded from the stone fingers, then dropped back into the pool.

She paddled across it and pulled herself out, shivering and muttering as the cooling air touched her. Hastily she snapped her blanket roll open and dropped to the grass, rubbing briskly at herself with one of the blankets until her body glowed. When she was dry, she pulled on her tunic and skirt, then sat down beside the gently snoring Dinafar to wait for the shuri.

Though the vale swam in dark blue shadow, the top third of the eastern cliff shone gold long after the sun disappeared. One star, then another appeared, pin-pricks of silver in the darkening blue. As the gold finally melted away, the sky grew thick with furry silver points. She began to wonder if the shuri would come at all. Nothing is holding. She shook her head. I can’t waste another day here. When she closed her eyes she could see Tayyan scrawled in her blood. She wrenched her mind away from that and began thinking about Domnor Hern. She remembered him as she saw him one day walking toward the women’s quarters, laughing up at the much taller Morescad arrogant and stone-faced beside him. The Domnor was a pudgy man with constant laughter in his grey-green eyes as if he found the world more than slightly absurd. He ate too much, played with his women too much, enjoyed himself too much in too many ways. Lybor called him a pleasure-sated fool. Serroi shook her head. I don’t know. The Mijloc goes along well enough under his hand. Better him than Lybor and Morescad. Will he believe me when I tell him what Tayyan and I heard? It’s crazy, the fools, thinking they can use a Nor, even a cheap street Norid. Calling up a demon to take over Hern’s body. Do they think no one will notice? Maiden bless, Floarin will tie the pair of them in knots if they try to get rid of her. And Tayyan’s hurt, maybe dead because of that numb-brained nonsense. With considerable effort she subdued her anger and bent over Dinafar.

The girl was scowling in her sleep, her snores little more than soft whistles, her hands closed into fists. Dinafar, Serroi thought. Outsider. She looked down at her own hands, at the matte olive of her skin, sighed. Outsider. When she touched one of the fisted hands, Dinafar moaned in her sleep and pulled the hand away. Serroi rubbed at her eyes. At least my mother loved me and saw I had food and clean clothes. To teach a child she’s lower than dirt! She thought of Dinafar crouching over the pile of supplies, at once defiant and hopeless, struggling to find a way out of the trap she was in. I didn’t want you with me, she thought. I still don’t. What am I going to do with you? Take you with me to Oras and get you killed too? Maiden bless, I’ll find a way to send you south. You’ll find friends there, loyal friends, not oath-breakers. Oh damn damn damn. She felt a pricking behind her eyes, forced the tears back. I’ll weep for you later, Tayyan. If I have to.

The blue shadows deepened to indigo as clouds gathered overhead, rolling across the star field until only a few sparks were left. A shadow in shadows came whispering across the grass and stopped in front of her, the whites of its eyes glistening unsteadily as they shifted from her to the girl sleeping beside her.

“Haes angeleh, Shuri,” she murmured, then sat without moving, waiting for the shuri to speak.

“Hasna angelta, Meie.” The voice from the shadow was low and burred, the tone questioning. “Why you shurin call?”

She considered the quality of the voice, decided to use the male affix. “Shurid, out of my need I call.” She spoke slowly, gravely. It was important to take care. Shurin were a proud and touchy people—and formidable enemies when they chose to be. Nervously she passed her hand back over her hair, pushing wind-tousled strands off her face. “We two—this child and I—the Kapperim seek.” She dropped her hand onto Dinafar’s shoulder, felt it move away from her touch. “A double hand of deaths do I owe them. This of shurid I ask, a safe and quick journey through Earth’s Teeth.”

The shuri was silent. He stood very still, his only movement the shifting of those large round eyes, Serroi to Dinafar and back, until Serroi began to worry about her assumptions—was the shuri in female phase after all? She let herself relax when the shuri bowed its furry head. “The pact between shurin and meien sworn is, Meie. Value for value, in the pact it is.”

Puzzled and wary, Serroi echoed the shuri. “Value for value. Has Biserica ever denied its debts?”

“Moongather a nyok’chui has called from Earth. A den has it made at Kabeel water. The glishnacht without water wither. The season-mother among the first he took. The kitunahan no water to the glishnacht bring. Wam’toten, our children of this year, in fear and hunger, in thirst to me do cry. Season-father I be. The season-mother he knife take; he trap set; he eaten is.” The husky voice trailed off, grown even thicker with the intense grief that shook his small form. Urgent as her own need was, she could not deny the shuri’s need. In the pact it was. She looked down at the girl stirring in her sleep, smiled ruefully. Another problem, another snag. She shook Dinafar awake.

When they rode out of the cup, winding through the treacherous slit with its tumbled rocks and precarious walls, the storm clouds were massing overhead, coming between moongather and earth. The wind pressed her clothes into her skin. tried to lift her off the saddle. She glanced back, wondering how Dinafar was making out. The girl was bent low over the macai’s neck, sensibly presenting little surface for the wind to catch hold of. Serroi laughed to herself. She does learn fast little mongrel.

She felt an easing of the sorrow that oppressed her. The simple fact that she was moving forward, on her way back to the city, was sufficient to quiet her pain for a while. As always, the storm outside stirred her blood and helped to ease the storm inside. She moved easily in the saddle, settling into the macai’s dip and lurch, feeling as if she rode the dipping and swaving wind. not touching the earth at all. Lightning flickered turning the world into patterns of black and white. Flat blacks flat whites, hard and bold, like the designs her mother used to weave into belts and deocrative strips.

As she followed the dark shadow scrambling along a crude trail, she laughed aloud, seeing again the plains where she was born, plains far to the north of here where some nights were passages long in summer-deep. She could feel in her bones the creaking rocking cart that was her cradle and her home for the first years of her life. She remembered running like this with her chinin, running through wild thunderstorms beside the slow flood of the herd and, remembering, felt a sudden rapture wanted to lift her head and howl like a chini at the wind and the rolling clouds.

The shuri leaped onto a boulder higher than his head, perched there while Serroi hauled the macai to a stop beside him, euphoria blown out of her like weeds before the wind. Coldly alert, she waited for Dinafar to come up beside her. The girl was beginning to manage the macai with some skill, but Serroi saw her shifting cautiously in her saddle. It would take more time before she was completely at ease on macaiback.

“Meie.” Answering to the shuri’s call, she turned back. He raised a hand, pointing ahead toward the swelling breast of a mountain. “Nyok’chui down and around me, Meie. Best the macai left here be. Or he come and eat.”

“Shurid, I hear.” She slid off her mount and beckoned to the girl. Switching back to the mijloc tongue, shouting to be heard over the wind, she cried, “Dinafar, stay here with the macai. Please?”

Dinafar nodded. She slid stiffly from the saddle, almost falling as her knees buckled under her. Serroi caught her and steadied her until she could stand. “You all right, Dina?”

“Oh yes, just stiff.” She stumbled to a rock and sat down. “Wait here?” She pushed her dark hair back. The next flash of lightning showed her as an old woman with heavy, weary lines in her face. “Alone?”

Behind her Serroi heard the rasp of the shuri’s claws as he fidgeted on the rock. She pushed her hair out of her eyes. “Not long. And I won’t be far. You’ll be safer here.”

Grains of grit danced over the rock and pinged into them; the wind was heavy and damp, driving unsteadily against them. Serroi touched the girl’s cheek, then followed the shuri.

Around the curve of the mountain the wind was softer. She knelt on the mountainside, leaning forward tensely, searching the flickering darkness below. In the narrow flat where one downslope ended and an upslope began a small round pool caught the last glimmers of light from the sky on its dancing surface and scattered it in sparkles of silver that raced across the stone and lit a round patch of blackness in the hillside. The Den.

The shuri touched her arm and pointed. “Nyok’chui.”

Serroi sucked in a breath and let it trickle out. “I see.” She straightened, pulling three arrows from her case as she came erect. Eyes closed, she slid her fingers along the shafts, remembering with her body the characteristics of each, weight and balance and soul.

When she opened her eyes again, the air was thick and black around her and the pool below had lost its glimmers. The wind tugged at her hair, plucked at her body in erratic gusts. She sat and pulled off her boots, stood again, working her feet into the coarse soil until she felt the earth below a part of her blood and bone. She stripped off her tunic.

His fur fluffed about by the wind, the shuri watched her with grave curiosity but he said nothing more, simply waited for her to do what she’d been trained to do.

Serroi dropped the tunic and raised her arms over her head, twisting and turning, letting the wind coil around her, taking the rhythm of its rise and fall into her body. When she knew it like her own breath, she smiled down at the shuri. “Air and earth,” she murmured. “Earth my body lifts and air my shafts.” She looked past him at the faint splotch of darkness on the far slope. “Come soon?” She touched—very lightly—her eye-spot, felt the tremble in it, then focused mind and body downhill, sensing a stirring in the blackness of the hole.

“He out come when he hunger feel. He shurin at water take or at homeplace.” The shuri was a small sad lump of fur. “Soon come. Three days he not eat. Hungry.” A shrill chittering sound was his version of ironic laughter. “Want a shuri snack,” he said.

Serroi chuckled, surprised by the black humor of his words. Still chuckling, she strung her bow and tested the pull, lifting it, then letting it fall. She nocked one of the three arrows and thrust the other two delicately into the soil beside her right leg. As the Nyok’chui began dragging its bulk from the hole in the slope, she straightened again to stand, knees slightly flexed, her bared skin drinking in the wind, tasting its patterns. She held the bow loosely, watching the great Worm ooze slowly from the earth.

The Nyok’chui’s head was a snarling mask with a coarse mane standing out around his hairless face, each hair like a wire, sparks leaping from one to another like small bolts of lightning until his head was ringed with blue-white light, pulsing and eerily hypnotic. The first section of its body was a broad barrel-shaped torso, supported by six double-jointed legs that ended in massive talons like those of some great bird of prey. As the Worm inched farther and farther out of the hole, the segments became more and more rudimentary until, near the end of the scaled body, the legs were little more than stiff stubs. When completely out, the Nyok coiled the tail in wide, sloopy loops and raised up his foreparts. The front pair of talons, flexible as human fingers, batted the air in slow curves; the lightning halo about its head lit up the adamantine claws at the tips of each of these powerful pseudo-fingers until they were a glittering jeweled threat with even a kind of beauty to them. Between talons and tail, it was as if the beast held several natures at reluctant truce under its various skins. Eyes glowing red, it swiveled to stare up the hill at her. Once again it pawed the air, opened its cavernous mouth, roared a challenge at her.

Serroi strained to see. Conditions for shooting could hardly be poorer with the uncertain light and the erratic wind. She shut her eyes, willed the unfamiliar change and opened them again in the uneasy night-vision she seldom used; she saw them in stark outlines, greenish black and green-tinted whites with little fine detail but a massive sense of solidity.

The Nyok’chui began flowing up the hillside toward her. Over the snapping of the small lightnings about its head she heard the burring hum it used to pacify its usual victims; she fought off the hum-induced lethargy, centered herself once more, lifted the bow, drew the string back, waited.

Sensing her resistance, the Nyok reared, roared at her.

She loosed the arrow, brought up the second, nocked it, pulled, released. Brought up the third, nocked, pulled, released.

The first arrow drove into the inside of the Worm’s mouth. The second pierced the right eye, driving through the bulging sac of jelly into the brain beyond. The third socked home into the left eye.

The Nyok’chui roared its agony, writhing, biting at the arrow its curved teeth couldn’t even reach, swallowing and swallowing the gouts of blood that poured from a pierced artery. It would not die. With two arrows driven into its brain, with a third in its throat bleeding it to death, it would not die.

Serroi cupped her hand a moment over her eye-spot, closed her eyes and switched off the draining night-sight. Ignoring the noises from the struggling Worm, she unstrung her bow and laid it aside, then settled onto the cold, gritty soil, the storm winds tearing at her. She pulled on her boots and her tunic, then sat still, waiting as the Nyok’s struggles lessened and finally ceased.

A few large raindrops splatted down on her head and shoulders. The night was velvet black now, the wind more erratic than ever. Lightning flared, struck below her. The circling winds brought her the sweet strong odor of burning flesh. The dead beast, she thought. The worm. She rubbed at her nose. I’ve heard … what have I heard … something … something. The shuri fidgeted beside her then started moving downhill. Absently she noted his departure while she continued to dig for the elusive memory. The Worm of the Earth. The many-souled Worm that crawls through the living rock. Worm. Eye. She touched her throbbing eye-spot. Yes. That’s it. The inner eye, dead and alive. “Tajicho,” she breathed. Maiden be blessed for this gift. In a frenzy of excitement she scrambled to her feet and raced downhill to the coiling pile of dead worm. In the intermittent flashes of lightning she could see the shuri dancing in triumph on the Nyok’s head.

She stumbled and slid the last few feet to rebound from the cold rubbery flesh, shuddered, then began climbing the coils until she reached the collapsed mane. The coarse hair was long and thick, more like copper wire than hair. Even with the Worm thoroughly dead, the mane had sufficient charge left to send tingles through her body as she pulled herself up onto the domed skull. The shuri stopped its dance and jumped to a lower coil where it crouched, watching her with bright-eyed curiosity.

Nerving herself, she knelt on the broad snout and drove her grace blade into the web of sinew and nerve between the bulging eyes, trying to avoid looking at the translucent orbs bleeding a greenish ooze that bubbled around the fletching of the arrows. While she worked the shaft ends tilted and dropped away, the wood burned completely through. Serroi shivered and kept more carefully away from the fumes beginning to boil up from the eyes.

In a complex of nerves, nesting in a special hollow in the skull, she found an egg-shaped object small enough to fit comfortably in the palm of her hand. The unripe focus of the Nyok’s power. She cut carefully around it and worked it loose, then scraped at it, freeing it as carefully as she could from the fragments of flesh and sinew.

She wiped the knife on the coarse hair then slipped it back in its sheath. Fingers closed tight about the eye, she raised herself slowly onto her feet and stood balancing carefully on the Worm’s head, feet half-buried in the mane, the draining charge still strong enough to nip at her.

“Meie?”

She glanced down and saw the shuri. “Shurid, dangerous it be what I next do, but it I must do.” She pointed. “Up the hill. Go. Wait.”

When the lightning showed him halfway up the hill, she looked down at the dull bloody thing in her hands, trying over the chant she hadn’t used for fifteen years, letting the words and rhythm focus her mind and will.

Remembered pain was a sudden sharpness distracting her from needed concentration. The chant brought back too vividly the sweetness of the early days in the tower, days like a paradise gone forever. She looked up at the clouds, sighed, then tightened her mind about the chant. Singing the words into the storm wind howling about her, whipping her hair into a wet tangle, shuddering against her body, she held the eye above her head and called the lightning down to her. A bolt flashed beside her, struck at the Worm’s head. The reek of burning hair and charred flesh wheeled around her. She sucked in a breath, spat it out, called again.

A great jagged streak struck at the eye; her body quivered with shock and pain. She fell to her knees, started sliding down, bumping helplessly from coil to coil of already rotting flesh until her head slammed against stone and she knew nothing more.

She woke on the earth beside the Nyok’chui, her body sore as if her bones had been wrenched apart then allowed to snap back into place. She was bleeding from abrasions on arms and knees, a burn on one cheek. But the eye was still clutched in her hand. The shuri crouched anxiously beside her. She smiled at him as soon as she noticed him, but winced as the muscle pull hurt her seared cheek.

The eye was warm in her hands. When she opened her fingers it nestled in the curve of her palm, a new-made crystal with a soft orange-amber glow at its heart. She touched it with her other forefinger, smiled as it resisted being separated from her palm. “Tajicho,” she whispered. “Ser Noris, my Noris, you taught me this.” Tears blurred her eyes. “Do you like what you made, my Noris?” She wiped her eyes, sat back on her heels, exhausted by her ordeal.

Tajicho. Twister. Talisman of immense power, it was keyed to the person who made it, useless to anyone else. It twisted spells, turned them back on the spinners unless they were unusually agile: more than this, it wiped its master from the world as far as the Norim were concerned even the most powerful of them—except perhaps her Noris. No magic mirror, no beast-eve. no demon could see her even if she stood in front of it. This Ser Noris had taught her and in so doing had given her a weapon against him. how potent she couldn’t tell. For a moment she wondered about the coincidence of the Nyok-chui turning up just now, wondered if this were some part of his torturous schemes, then she shook herself out of her dismals, irritated at herself for falling into futile speculation. She tucked the crystal into her money sack where it clinked musically against the small store of gold coins, moved fingertips over the small lump, lifted a corner of her mouth in a one-sided smile. “Finished this be,” she told the shuri.

The rain began coming down hard. Lightning still flashed, though less often. Serroi’s hair was plastered against her head. Her leather tunic and divided skirt were treated with the juice of the nu-frasha herb that grew high on the slopes of the Biserica valley: they shed water a long time, staying supple and comfortable after many a soaking. The rain beaded up off the surface of the leather and funneled into her boot tops until she sloshed as she moved her feet. She was cold and desperately tired as she collected her bow, clipped it to its strap, and followed the shuri around the mountain to the flat where Dinafar waited.

The girl was huddled against the crouching macai, soaked through. Her head lifted as she heard them coming. Eyes wide in her drawn face, Dinafar said, “That roar?”

The Nyok’chui is dead.” Serroi bent and took hold of the girl’s cold hands. “Come, it’s time to move on.” She tugged gently, helping Dinafar struggle up. She stood silent, pulling her waterlogged skirt away from her legs while Serroi urged the reluctant macain back onto their feet.

After shoving Dinafar into the saddle and slapping the bulky skirt into a modicum of order, Serroi swung up into her own saddle, wincing at the contact with the cold wet leather. “Shurid!” She shouted to be heard above the storm noise. “Ride with me so I don’t lose you.” A tardy flash of lightning showed her the water streaming off the shuri. The upper layer of his fur had changed under the rain to a sleek, water-shedding surface that glistened like brown glass. Water sluiced off the coarse skin of his face and divided around the blunt muzzle with its wide-set nostrils and perpetual smile. She felt his small three-fingered hands close about her ankles, then he walked up her body until he was perched on the saddle ledge in front of her.

With the shuri guiding her, with Dinafar silent behind her, Serroi rode up and up, winding, twisting, sometimes having to dismount, and struggled up impossible slopes and over unstable scree. She coaxed the macain on, whistling and cooing to them, stroking them into moaning content with her eyespot after they’d managed some difficult task. The rain fell, endless and cold. The wind tugged and battered at them, drove gusts of icy water into faces or backs as it shifted continually in sinuous currents funneling through the mountains.

The hours passed in noise and weariness. Overhead, the clouds began to tear apart, letting a glimmer of moonlight through. Once the breakup began, it spread quickly until the slopes were darkly visible. In a moment of comparative calm Serroi heard Dinafar gasp; she glanced back and saw the girl looking down at the perilous track, eyes wide with horror.

The track they followed was littered with loose rock; it hugged the side of the mountain, falling off on the right into an abyss so deep its bottom was lost in shadow. The girl was swaying in the saddle, close to the end of her endurance. “Dina!”

Dinafar’s head came up slowly, her face a mask of weariness, her eyes gleaming liquidly in the strengthening light.

“Hang on a little longer,” Serroi shouted. “A little longer.” The wind caught the words and shredded them but she saw Dinafar nod and try to straighten her back. Satisfied, Serroi turned and rode on.

The hours passed, cold endless hours. They left the abyss behind and slid steeply down into a narrow crack, the walls on either side rising higher and higher as they twisted deeper into mountain-heart. Seated in cracks that branched off on either side, groups of shurin watched them move past, large round eyes greenly phosphorescent. Equally silent, perched like a furry lump in front of her, the curve of his back fitting against the curve of her front below her breasts, the shuri began humming, his song transmitted through bone and flesh to her. He had led them through the worst of the peaks and across the divide, through the secret paths of his people. Once this crack was negotiated they’d be well on their way to the gentler slopes of the landward side of the Earth’s Teeth.

They wound on and on. The straggling Dancers hung low behind them, gifting the stone with triple shadows, lighting the way with their deceptive cold glow. Serroi glanced up and saw dark silhouettes cutting across the starfield. Five black not-birds with long narrow wings and oversized heads circled high over her.

She began shaking, then remembered the tajicho and grew calmer. They were traxim, demon-servants of the Nearga-nor. Flying eyes. She touched the lump in her money sack and felt its warmth through the thin leather. She smiled. It was working as it should, sheltering her from dangerous eyes. The traxim went away without seeming to notice her.

The wind dropped abruptly, freeing the crack for a few moments from its whine, freeing the riders from its continual battering. Serroi shifted wearily in the saddle; a little apprehensively she looked over her shoulder. Dinafar was lying against the macai’s neck, her arms circling its thin neck, her hands locked together. She shook her head. Hang on, Dina, she thought. We can’t stop yet.

They rode out of the crack into a steep descent and into a predawn wind that helped pull the wetness from their bodies. By the time the eastern sky showed a pallor near the horizon and the peaks behind them had caps of crimson, Serroi was dry and only a little cold.

The shuri held up a hand. When Serroi pulled the macai to a halt, he climbed down her leg and crossed a few paces of bare earth to a pile of rock. He perched on top of the pile and looked about. In the dawn light she could see that the reddish fur around his blunt muzzle was stippled with white. He was growing old, not many seasons left for him as season-mother or season-father.

As if he read her thoughts the shuri nodded sadly. “Next year season-mother I be, Meie. For me the last of seasons.”

“My sorrow, shurid. I intrude.”

“The right you have. With three arrows the season for me you have won.” He stretched out a thin arm and pointed to the glow in the east. “A Stenda hold there. Half-day riding. The Stendam to Oras have gone for Gather, though two be left for watching hold and stock. The hold they leave each morning and each night they come back to sleep within walls. No closer than this go I.”

“By the pact then, peace between us be, shurid.”

“By the pact peace be, Meie.” The shuri sketched a gesture of respect, then scurried past the macain and vanished among the rocks behind them.

Serroi looked up at the thin scatter of paling stars. The traxim were gone. Touching the bulge in her money sack, she smiled then sighed as she rode back to Dinafar.

Still damp, the heavy skirt was plastered against the girl’s legs; as she lay along the macai’s neck, her face in the spongy frill, violent shivers coursed along her thin body. Serroi lifted a hand, dropped it. Dinafar didn’t need encouragement. A fire, some hot cha, those wet clothes off, sleep, those she needed. Serroi sighed and swung the macai back around so she could scan the ground in front of her.

Though a thick band of trees obscured much of the slope, she glimpsed a shimmer of water winding in a narrow line. Without looking back again she kicked the tired macai into a slow shuffle toward the stream, the other beast following close behind.

She followed the water to a grassy clearing, stopped the macai and looked about. Because the soil was shallow and stony only grasses spread their matted roots here, holding the small space free of trees and brush. She slid off her macai, stretched, yawned, bent and twisted her aching body to work some of the stiffness and soreness out.

Dinafar groaned and pushed herself precariously erect, face flushed, eyes glazed.

“Dina?” The girl swayed; her swollen lips trembled but she couldn’t speak. “Dina, lean over like you did before.” Serroi sang the words past the barrier of Dinafar’s exhaustion. “Loose your hands, little one, let go, let go, I’ll catch you, let go.” She kept up the quiet chant as she watched the girl’s fingers begin to uncramp from their hold. The drooping body swayed, then dropped like a stone into Serroi’s waiting arms. Serroi felt the cold clammy skirt slap against her, felt the fever heat in the girl’s body, the shivering cold in her hands. She lowered her gently onto the grass then stripped off the sodden clothing, ignoring Dinafar’s weak scandalized protests. She tossed the clothing aside and ripped the blanket roll from behind her saddle, snapped the blankets open, tossed one blanket aside and wrapped Dinafar in the other.

That’ll do you for a little, she thought. She glanced at the weary beasts who were already grazing. You later. She trotted into the shadow under the trees, searching for down wood.

Half an hour later Dinafar sat blanket-wrapped, sipping at cha laced with pyrnroot from Serroi’s weaponbelt. The fever glaze was gone from her eyes, the flush from her cheeks. She cradled the cup in her hands, her eyes on the macain busily cropping at the grass close by. “Hadn’t you better tie them up, Meie?”

Serroi prodded at the skirt she was holding up to the fire. “They won’t go far. Anyway, I can call them back easily enough.” She flicked a finger across her forehead, smiled as the girl’s eyes widened, tossed her the skirt and followed with the ragged blouse. “Warm enough?”

“Umm …” Dinafar yawned suddenly. “You put something in the cha?”

“A healing root. Do you mind?”

“No.” Dina yawned again and fumbled at the blouse and skirt, her eyes drooping lower and lower as she pulled the clothing over her thin body, blushing repeatedly at having to bare herself. Serroi carefully looked away, made uncomfortable by the girl’s embarrassment. She thought about the crowding of the Intii’s hall, remembered the prudery of her parents. Intimacy and prudery. Perhaps the second is born of the first. When she turned back, Dinafar was slumped on the ground, snoring a little. Serroi moved around the fire and stood looking down at her. She never complained. I wouldn’t want to make that ride myself if it was my first. She knelt beside Dina, straightened her crumpled limbs and shifted her onto the second blanket. She smoothed the long straight hair back off the girl’s face then tucked the other blanket around her. “Sleep as long as you need.”

She stood and stretched, the morning light brightening around her. In the east, above the treetops, a few last shreds of dawn lingered, but they were fading rapidly. She yawned, sat watching the fire as it died to a few coals, then snuggled down on the grass, dropping into a deep sleep.

She was startled out of sleep by a hoarse yell and rough, strong hands that clamped her wrists together. She stared up into a grinning face, then was dangling in midair as he held her out at arm’s length.