I sat there on the rock, trying to shrug off the demon god’s claws, when suddenly the gray mare gave a strangled cry, a sound no healthy horse ever made, and staggered sideways. The hobbles jerked her forelegs and she went down like a sack of meal in the waving yellow-green stalks. Before she struck the ground, I was on my feet and scrambling, my heart pounding.
I yanked the knot on her hobbles and the rope came free. She pawed the matted roots, trying to rise. The other horses startled and moved a short distance away.
The mare kept pitching and throwing her body from side to side, but she couldn’t get her hind legs under her. Her breath came in labored grunts.
I grabbed her mane as if we were on the trail together. “Up! Come on, that’s the way! Get up, damn you!”
Then my eyes focused on her taut, rounded belly, the way her muscles wouldn’t work right and the green-flecked slime dripping from her jaws. The trefoil leaves of ropeweed.
Ropeweed.
I fell to my knees at her side, my fingers still twisted in her mane. Her body was hot like a stove, fighting the poison.
No use. Ay Mother, it’s no use. An hour, maybe, for a strong horse like her. Ten minutes for a man. Better, far better, it should have been me.
She was the finest horse I’d ever owned, she’d been with me clear across Laurea and the Ridge, she’d never balked at anything I asked of her, and what man could say the same? She carried me and Avi three days without a hitch, when that randy gelding got snake-bit and we were cut off from Derron with northers lurking behind every bush.
I remembered how she was when I bought her, bridled but not saddled, nose up in the sky, hip bones like knives, oozing scars all around her mouth. I paid the horse-trader his price and he took it, his eyes all the while glued to my long-knife. I walked up to the mare, slid my hand along her sweating neck, dropped my forearm knife into it and slit through the headstall straps. The trader gasped as it hit the paddock dust — long shanks, doubled chain, spur-edged clapper.
You can come with me now, I promised her. Or I’ll take you back to the Border and set you free. Either way, you’ll never wear that thing again.
The mare tossed her head, ears pricked, eyes never leaving me. I turned away and felt her muscles tense just before my fingers slipped from her. I didn’t look back, not even when I stopped to slide the gate latch open. There she was, nose at my shoulder. I took a handful of her mane and she came with me, silk and shadow.
My fingers were still laced in the coarse gray-frosted hairs. I couldn’t get them loose.
She stopped struggling to get up now, forelegs bent in front of her, head high, breathing as hard and deep as if she’d just galloped halfway across Laurea. She had heart, this mare, but the ropeweed already had her. There was no hope, except that the end would be quick.
Ropeweed. Mother-of-us-all, ropeweed!
If I hadn’t been so lost in my own worries, if I’d had half the sense of a headless twitterbat...
And she was gone now, as good as dead.
“What the hell?” Etch and the boy. I couldn’t read their faces, strangely blurred. All I thought was they must have heard the mare cry out, even as I had.
Shit, what do I care what they heard?
“What’s wrong with her?” Terris asked.
Etch jerked a tendril of ropeweed from the mare’s mouth and held it up in front of his eyes as if he couldn’t believe what he saw.
I wanted to hide my face against the mare’s neck, now while I still could. But why should I have that right, I who had failed her? I lifted my face, naked to the sky and the gods and the eyes of men.
“It’s ropeweed. My fault...” I couldn’t hear my voice — did I whisper or shout those damning words?
Etch whirled, turning his broad, tight-muscled back, and for an instant I thought he was too sickened to look at me.
“Water!” he bellowed at Terris. “All of it — and a couple of blankets! Now!”
Terris took off for the camp faster than he’d ever run in his life.
Then Etch was practically on top of me, his face huge and distorted, red. His sweat had a rank male smell that shrilled along my nerves. I flinched as he roared at me, “I asked you, woman, have you got any anneth?”
I stared at him. Anneth was the root of a plant, frost-loving and pale orange, ground into a fine powder and used to prevent deep cuts from closing too soon and festering underneath. It was a thing no knife fighter could afford to be without. But why would he want it? And why now, when the time was so short? He must have been crazy.
I pulled away from him, wanting to scream, Get away, so she can die in peace.
He grabbed my shoulders, his fingers digging deep into my flesh, and forced my eyes to meet his again. “Give me your knife, then get the anneth.”
What for? When she has only minutes left...
...and when the bloodbats wheeled closer and closer, so I too counted the last moments of my life...
“Harth damn you, woman, I’m trying to save her!”
I saw his face as I never had before. No longer ugly, but surging with a passion I couldn’t put a name to. I saw such pain and loss behind his eyes, it was like looking into a nightmare mirror of my own and I had to turn away.
My knife. I touched the hilt, warmed by my body heat as if it were a living part of me. There was never been a moment since I’d strapped it on that it had not been worth my life. But it was the mare’s life at stake now, seeping away with each straining breath. Her proud head bent, chin almost touching the ground.
I slipped the knife from its sheath, reversed it, and handed it hilt-first to this man I barely knew, then sprinted for the camp and the anneth.
I ripped open my saddlebags and clawed through the layers of clothing, bandages, medicines, for the little alabaster jar of pale orange powder.
By the time I raced back, the mare had lost the strength to keep her head up. In the few minutes I was gone, she’d stretched out flat, legs extended as if she were already dead. Only the quick light ripples along her ribs told me otherwise. Terris was there before me, taut and silent.
Etch crouched beside the mare’s head, crooning to her. My long-knife lay on the matted grass beside him, the tip of the blade dripping red. He’d cut an opening in her windpipe and was holding the lips apart with his fingers.
“Anneth and water,” he said. “Make a thick paste. Hurry.”
Terris shoved a waterskin at me. I unscrewed the jar, dribbled in a little water and mixed it with my fingers. It felt gritty.
“Now smear it all around the opening here.”
I knelt beside him, tucking one shoulder underneath his so I could reach the mare. His arms were practically around me, his breath warm along my neck. Blood and thick, sticky mucus coated my fingers as I slathered on the paste. An instant after he drew his hands away, the exposed tissues frothed up with the gluey coating. Probing upward with my fingers, I felt a membrane of the stuff, which had already closed off her breathing passage. Only the hole cut by Etch and now prevented from closing by my anneth kept her alive.
But not for long — no horse could breathe properly lying flat on its side, not for any length of time, and the pressure of the mare’s stretched-tight abdomen on her diaphragm cut her air supply even further.
I looked to Etch, and he was already scuttling on his knees toward her belly and holding out his hand for the first waterskin.
“Wet her down,” he said, pouring the skin over her rounded side. “Don’t waste it.”
“To bring the fever down?” Terris asked, pulling the stopper from another skin.
Etch talked while he poured, as much for the mare’s sake as for Terris’s. “Don’t know why ropeweed brings a fever. Asked a vet once, he didn’t know either. He did say that what kills the horse is that sheet of stuff across the windpipe. Exudate, he called it. If we can keep her cool, she’ll get enough air to keep going while the ropeweed works its way out.”
“I thought there was no cure for ropeweed poisoning,” said Terris.
“That’s what I thought, too. But I saw a midwife once use anneth like that on a neighbor kid with diphtheria. Said she managed to save ’em once in a while, unless the fever got too high. Few years later this little stud colt of mine got into some ropeweed and in between cursing myself for it being my own damned fault, I tried it.”
He wadded the blankets around the mare’s belly and adjusted the folds to catch the water. “It seemed to me it wasn’t the fever that killed, at least not horses, it was the pressure on the breathing muscles. Actually it wasn’t me, it was my — my wife who had the idea of wetting him down like this.”
“And the colt lived?”
“Through the ropeweed. Broke his own fool neck the next year.”
“So what did the vet say? Did he report it back to the academy?”
“Ha! Told me I had to be wrong, it couldn’t’ve been ropeweed. That’s what he said. But I think, you know, he was scared of telling anyone...”
The men’s voices blurred. I sat back on my heels, the empty waterskin hanging like a clammy shroud between my hands. My bones turned to sand, my heart to smoke.
I was ready to give up, let her die. Not even fight to save her...
...the way I didn’t fight on the funeral mount, until it was too late...
I dropped the waterskin and buried my face between my knees, my hands clawing at the back of my head. The memory beat at me with leathery bloodbat wings, the reason I must never cry.
I thought to myself, shouting it through my mind, Remember Avi! Remember the way she held you. Remember how the dreams faded, until there was only her. Think of her now. Think of her needing you now. Think of the hardest knife-form you ever learned, with only a hair between a live blade and your skin. Think of the time you jumped halfway across that clearing — ’Kardith’s Leap,’ Derron still calls it...
I lifted my head. Etch and Terris were pouring the last of the water over the mare’s dappled hide. I watched her breathing, not normal yet, but slower and deeper. I realized with a start that it had been only been a moment that I curled up here, trapped in my own pain. Neither of them had taken any notice.
It’s remembering that’s made me crazy like this, all tears and no steel.
Then it must be as if I never remembered. Avi’s life depended on it. Avi’s life...and now what else?