Near dawn Clovermead and Sorrel found a deserted watermill while trying to ford an ice-coated stream. Rime covered its plank walls, but the frosty mill seemed summery to them after their night speeding through the snowstorm. They made beds of the chaff and flour that coated the floor, untied their skis, and fell asleep.
Clovermead dreamed of Timothy Vale and buckwheat pancakes and mutton lunch and beating the laundry with Goody Weft. She dreamed of her father bringing a basket of apples to her room, she dreamed of him mopping the floor at Ladyrest, and she dreamed of him trussed up and slung over Featherfall’s back. Clovermead whimpered. She was afraid for her father and she was afraid for herself. She had never been so alone before, and she tried to dream of something else, anything else. Then she dreamed of an old granny bear walking in the moonlight, her fur mottled gray and white. The bear smiled at Clovermead and told her, Don’t worry, little one, it will all turn out for the best. Hush you, hush you, don’t cry. She sang a gentle, rumbling song to Clovermead till Clovermead’s fears drained from her and she woke with a smile.
The sun shone through the roof. An arrow of light pierced through a crack in the timbers and fell on Clovermead’s face. “That was a nice dream,” said Clovermead, yawning. “I don’t see why it should cheer me up so much, but it does. It will all turn out for the best! Oh, I hope so.” She squinted at the sunbeams. “The sun is high. Are adventurers allowed to be late risers?” Clovermead looked over to Sorrel. He was still asleep, smiling delicately as he dreamed. A light brown curl fell over his forehead. “And thus I discover that my rescuer is not as heroic as he claims,” said Clovermead sadly. “Heroes scowl ferociously in their slumber. I consider myself to have been rescued under false pretenses.” She yawned and stretched, and her stomach rumbled. “I wonder if Sorrel can cook? I mean, anything more than fried horse steak and hoof pudding and mane-and-tail pie, and other such delights of Tansyard cuisine. Perhaps he has brought dried horse jerky with him for the journey south. I hesitate to take the risk.” Clovermead rose and poked around the mill. A pigeon fluttered away from her nest in the rafters. Clovermead climbed a ladder and looked in, but there were no eggs.
“I am daunted, but I do not despair. Appetite will put an edge to my wits. Think, Clovermead! What would Sir Auroche do? Besides lament his hunger, that is.” Clovermead fell silent, pondering the wheres and wherefores of breakfast, and wondered ruefully if Waxmelt’s full meals had atrophied her ability to forage. Beneath the mill the cold stream slowly rippled, not yet completely frozen through.
“Fish!” Clovermead exclaimed. She ran down to the mill cellar and found a net, loose planks on the floor, and an old weir underneath. Clovermead peered down at the water swirling in a muddy cul-de-sac at the stream’s edge. Silvery glimmers darted back and forth in the murky water. Clovermead waited till she saw five flickers beneath her, then swiftly lowered the weir gate.
Clovermead dipped the net and came up with a wriggling foot-long trout. “I suppose I shouldn’t say so, little meal, but I feel most like unto a bear,” Clovermead said conversationally to the fish. “I wouldn’t say so at night, but I can’t feel so scared in broad daylight. Mind you, the comparison doesn’t exactly comfort me. Alas, alas, it should cheer you still less.” She cut the trout’s head off with her knife. The fish jerked once more and fell still. “I told you it was an ominous comparison, dear breakfast. Dear lunch and dinner, while we’re at it. Oh, oh, I’m sure that Sorrel is a growing boy who can’t be stopped from nibbling. He certainly liked Daddy’s stews back at Ladyrest. You won’t last us till tomorrow. Ah, little fish, the auguries are all so very dark. I prophesy massacre amongst your brethren. Woe, woe!” She dipped her net in twice more and came up with another trout and three perch.
The smell of roasting fish woke Sorrel. His nose twitched and his eyes flew open. The Tansyard gazed delightedly at the spitted fish above the fire Clovermead had lit. He sat up, drew in his breath sharply, and smiled helplessly. “Clovermead, you must pinch me. I want to know that this paradisial scent is not a dream. You would not be cruel and deceive a poor Tansyard?”
Clovermead giggled and pinched Sorrel hard. He yelped and swatted at her. Clovermead jumped out of range and handed him a bowl of river water. Catlike, Sorrel tasted it with the tip of his tongue first, then drank deeply. “Most delicious, Miss Clovermead. Fresh water and trout-taste were a delicacy of my youth. The first time I fed on them, I was a six-winter boy, or maybe seven-winter. In late summer we wandered on the north edge of the Tansy Steppes by those slopes of the Reliquaries where the mountain streams trickle into the grasslands. My father most bravely stumbled into the water, though he could not swim, and he seized a knee-high silver monster, a true flapper. Father struggled greatly and defeated it, and that night we ate cream-soft trout—strange, tempting water-flesh on a steppe boy’s tongue. I have not had fish more than three times since.” Sorrel licked his lips. “How much can we eat? I finished the biscuit I brought from Snowchapel yesterday morning, and I was too busy tracking you to get new supplies. I am very hungry.”
“We’ll split one fish,” Clovermead said. “The rest we save for later.” She cut into the shining scales with her knife and appraised the white flesh. “It’s ready,” she said, and prayed to Our Lady that she had remembered how long fish was supposed to roast.
Clovermead took the spits off the fire and cut the first fish in two. Sorrel speared his half with his knife, bit into scales—and spat them out. “Egh,” he said, wrinkling his mouth. “I do not remember water-flesh so.”
“You’re eating it all wrong, Sorrel,” said Clovermead. “Do it like this.” She scraped off the skin and scales and nibbled carefully around the bones.
Sorrel imitated her cautiously, then smiled in delight. “Ah, yes! Fishy-flesh should be just so. Dear Lady, I am in raptures! Lovely, Miss Clovermead. You are a heavenly cook.”
“Father’s much better than I am,” said Clovermead. She took a small bite. It wasn’t at all bad. Father would be proud of her when she saw him again and told him how well she had cooked on her own.
If I see him again, thought Clovermead. The comfort of her dream had faded in the clear day, and she almost cried as the realization of Waxmelt’s absence sank into her. She ate the rest of the fish in silence. Sorrel saw the unhappiness take hold of her, and he also kept quiet while they ate.
Clovermead swallowed the last bit of her fish and dropped the skeleton on the floor. Sorrel belched politely and licked his fingers. Clovermead turned to gaze steadily at her rescuer. He looked mild and sweet and harmless.
“What are you doing here?” asked Clovermead. “I didn’t have time to ask you questions in the rush last night, and then you were sleeping and eating, and I didn’t want to interrupt you, but I’d like to know how you happened to find us in the middle of the wilderness. I’m very grateful, you understand, but I’d still like to know what brought you after us.”
“That is a long story,” said Sorrel. “I do not know quite where to start.”
“Snuff said he was hunting you,” said Clovermead. Sorrel paused a second with his fingers in his mouth, then continued to clean them. “When he found us at Ladyrest. He said you were working for Chandlefort. I think that must be true. I heard you send Brown Barley there. What are you doing for them?”
Sorrel gave her a level, cautious look. “I chase prophecies,” he said after a bit. “A dubious task, yes? You never can tell which foretelling will come true the day after tomorrow, and which will take a thousand years. And even if you know it is about the day after tomorrow, they are most inscrutable. ‘A great empire will fall,’ you are told before a mighty battle, but which great empire will fall is not elucidated. ‘The man who has married his mother must be driven from the Horde and made blind,’ the seers command, the Horde Chief assents, and then, hoopla, it is himself who by strange coincidence is the mother marrier. It is all tragic, fated, ironic, unhelpful. And as we say in the Steppes, no seer ever made the future come more quickly. Miss Clovermead, do you know exactly why that bear-priest Snuff was chasing you and Mr. Wickward?”
“Father wouldn’t tell me,” Clovermead said. “He did something to make Mr. Snuff angry a long time ago, back in Linstock. That was why he fled to Timothy Vale. When Mr. Snuff found us again, chasing you, he wanted to get revenge on Father. We were able to chase him away”—she interrupted her story long enough to tell the details of the fight, with due emphasis given to her heroic feats of swordsmanship and to Goody Weft’s adroit use of a frying pan—”but we had to run from the Vale before Snuff came back with reinforcements from Low Branding. We were still running when you and Mr. Snuff found us, but I guess we didn’t run fast enough.” Clovermead’s brooch seemed very heavy against her neck. Her bear tooth was cool. She fancied it approved of her closemouthed suspicion of Sorrel.
“Is that so?” asked Sorrel softly. His eyes bored in on hers—and he blinked, shrugged his shoulders, and smiled. “Well and all, Miss Clovermead, I am sorry to have brought the ferocious Mr. Snuff upon your father’s hideaway. Snuff’s reputation in Chandlefort is very bad, very deadly. He is not a good man to have for an enemy. I wonder how your father got on his bad side?” Clovermead shrugged her shoulders just as the Tansyard had. He laughed. “You have grown a shell around your tongue, Miss Clovermead. Well, I am still talkative, and I will reward your silence with tales of derring-do. Chandlefort is indeed my employer since—for three years. I am a messenger boy for occasional and extraordinary purposes. Sometimes I am wanted to ride with words or papers or parcels, very swift, very inconspicuous. They also have Yellowjackets to do these things, but they are fight-fight boys, heavy and slow. I am Tansyard and we are the wind’s children.” Sorrel smiled ingenuously. “Besides, there may be spies among the Yellowjackets. So I am sent to carry most secret things. What I carry, what I do, I do not always know. That way is safer, yes?”
“Safer but frustrating,” said Clovermead. “I’d peek at any letters I was carrying.”
“Well and so, I will not recommend you to succeed me at my position,” said Sorrel. “Curiosity killed the cattle, as we say in the Steppes. As Our Lady ordains matters, I cannot read. I think that is one reason I have my job. Anyway, Miss Clovermead, my latest assignment is to ride to Snowchapel. A rush-rush prophecy comes from the nuns in Queensmart, uncalled for and dumbfounding. What exactly it says, I do not know, but they whisper around Chandlefort that a long-lost stolen something was not destroyed after all and can be found again. What is stolen? Who has stolen it? In Chandlefort everyone is strangely pursy-lipped. My curiosity is frustrated. I wonder, has your father perhaps told you something of this subject?”
Clovermead blinked her eyes most innocently. “Father was very uncommunicative. I blame him profoundly for my unconscionable ignorance.”
“He most assuredly should be censured,” Sorrel agreed solemnly. “Well-a-day, this prophecy flummoxes and perplexes. If this missing something still exists, where is it? How can it be found? The nuns of Queensmart say they cannot help us, they have done quite enough already. They advise Lady Cindertallow to seek out others of Our Lady’s Vision Meres. So messengers are sent out, quiet as can be. Snowchapel is the farthest of the Meres from Chandlefort, but its reputation is the best. It is a great compliment to his horsemanship that Sorrel the Tansyard is told to fly on the Snowchapel route—but carefully, so as not to attract attention.
“I go north. It is an unsettling journey. Bears follow me and I begin to suspect that Low Branding knows something of our news. I become fearful of being eaten one fine night. I ride Brown Barley very hard so as to escape my four-footed followers—and it is with great relief that I take a few days’ rest to teach a little girl sword fighting on a hillside pleasantly free of any animals larger than a sheep. It is a lovely interlude, attention avoiding, and a respite I need after a month on the road. Or so I tell myself. Perhaps I am a little irresponsible. My superiors have accused me of this flaw before.” Sorrel’s face turned pink.
“I don’t see that I’d be a worse messenger than you,” said Clovermead. “At least I’d get things to where they were supposed to go on time. Better to have your mail read than not delivered, I say.”
“You saw what passed with Sister Rowan,” Sorrel continued hastily. “I go most briskly on to Snowchapel and deliver my message. I expect to be given papers to take back to Chandlefort, but the Abbess comes back to me with a cry when she has looked in the Pool. She tells me, ‘The Innkeeper at Ladyrest is pursued by a bear-priest from Low Branding. You must hurry, Sorrel, to try to rescue him and his daughter—they have fled south. You must bring them back to Chandlefort.’”
Sorrel coughed and looked straight into Clovermead’s eyes. “The Abbess says, ‘If you must choose between father and daughter, save the daughter. Ask her and she will show you the reason.’ So off I rush and spend many long days—I will pass quickly over a tedious story of a miserably cold Tansyard struggling through endless blizzards. I finally find your trail north of the Tansy Pike, and then at the crossroads I see horsemen’s tracks coming north from Low Branding. I shiver with fear, I see you and they have loop-the-looped toward High Branding and back, and I follow you all most carefully on the Chandlefort road. The ambushers do not expect any lone, crazy-bold Tansyard to follow them, so I am soon in sight of the Low Branding brigands and lurk unseen quite close to them. Then at last they approach the sleeping Wickwards, I make my hasty skiing plans, and I throw most wonderfully accurately daggers and stones when their attack begins. I try to save both of you, but it cannot be done. So, you are rescued and your father is not. Miss Clovermead, why should the Abbess say to rescue you first? I do not think you have been forthright with me.” Now there was a trace of anger in his face. “There is something you should reveal.”
“I hate prophecy,” said Clovermead. “Father told me not to say anything. He had something that came from Chandlefort, and he gave it to me for safekeeping.” She reached under her sweater, untied the leather cord, and held the brooch out toward Sorrel. She hid the tooth in her hand. “I suppose the Abbess meant I should show you this.” Now it will come out, she told herself. Sorrel must know about the Cindertallow Ruby. He’ll look at this brooch and he’ll know Father stole both the brooch and the Ruby from the Treasure Room.
Sorrel reached out trembling fingers. He stroked the bee, the flames, the sword. He looked at Clovermead with astonishment. “Lady Above,” he said in wonder. “I think I begin to understand. No, no, it cannot be. I am wrong. I must be wrong.” He slapped his forehead. “That would be just like a prophecy—circuitous and unlikely.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Clovermead.
“I do not think I should tell you,” said Sorrel after a long minute.
Of course you don’t, Clovermead thought sourly to herself. No one will ever tell me just what is going on! No one, she repeated bleakly.
“I may be wrong,” Sorrel continued slowly. “Others should decide. You and that brooch must go to Chandlefort.”
“Must?” Clovermead lifted an eyebrow. “I don’t want to go. Father said I should avoid both Low Branding and Chandlefort. He said Chandlefort was better than Low Branding, but he didn’t make either place sound appealing.”
“Ah and so,” said Sorrel. He blinked rapidly, and his dagger was in his hand. “I am somewhat larger than you, Miss Clovermead, and I did not teach to you all I know of sword fighting.”
Clovermead wished her father and Goody Weft were there to defend her. She was afraid of Sorrel, she was angry, and the tooth spoke to her. I know how to deal with that jackanapes, it said. Let me speak in you.
It will all turn out for the best, an old white bear reassured her, but Clovermead would not listen to her foolish counsel. Speak away, said Clovermead inwardly to the tooth. She smiled as blood-thoughts entered into her and her fear drained away. The Tansyard is presumptuous, isn’t he? Trying to frighten me. Show me how to be powerful, tooth.
Clovermead roared. The sound boomed through the empty mill. Sorrel turned white and his hand shook till the dagger fell to the floor. When he had picked it up again, the tooth lay revealed in Clovermead’s hand.
“I have this,” said Clovermead. “You saw what I did with it last night?”
“I thought you had dropped it. I think it would be better if you had. Bear-priest gear is vile, Miss Clovermead. It fouls you to use it.” Sorrel looked at her mouth and her grinning teeth and Clovermead saw that he was afraid now. “Miss Clovermead, did you have fangs a second ago?”
“Perhaps.” Clovermead spread her lips savagely wide and bared her teeth. “If you’re in a rush to return to Chandlefort, I won’t detain you. But I prefer not to accompany you, Sorrel.”
Sorrel scratched his head and rose slowly to his feet. He showed his open palms to Clovermead and paced backward and forward a few times in the small room, carefully distant from Clovermead and her waiting, hungry tooth.
He is a lovely morsel, said the tooth. A nice plump prey, full of blood.
“And yet,” Sorrel said thoughtfully to Clovermead, “I do not think Lady Cindertallow will be happy when I confess to her that I have muffed up prophetic commands. She will think worse of all Tansyards if I fail, speak slightingly of their abilities, never hire any further steppe lads down on their luck, suggest to every lordling in the land that Tansyards are an idle, shiftless lot. I owe it to my people to bring you to the Rose Walls.”
“Go away,” said Clovermead.
“That is a harder command to enforce,” Sorrel said. “Unless you want to kill me.”
“You ran from a bear in the mountains near Snowchapel.”
“So I did,” said Sorrel. “I had stopped in a cave to rest, and a bear woke from its sleep and came out. Most naturally, I ran. How do you know?”
“I saw you in a dream at Ladyrest. Through the bear’s eyes. You ran like a rabbit.” Clovermead laughed.
“I was the usual coward,” said Sorrel. “Still, I will not go. I repeat, to make me go you must kill me.”
You would be safer with him dead, said the tooth. He looks delicious.
Clovermead sweated and trembled. “The tooth wants me to kill you. I don’t want to. I like you, Sorrel, when you aren’t pulling a knife on me and scaring me half to death. I just don’t want to go to Chandlefort. Please, go away before the tooth bites you.”
Sorrel made the crescent sign. His eyes were wide. “The tooth wants to kill me? Miss Clovermead, I entreat you in Our Lady’s name to rid yourself of that thing.” Clovermead shook her head and the tooth howled its joy. Sorrel retreated a step from her, then stood his ground, his eyes fixed on the tooth. “I do not think your bear-magic is all powerful, Miss Clovermead. It occurs to me, you cannot use it while you sleep. I am thinking of the possibility of sneaking up one fine dark hour and—thunk!—rendering you unconscious. Then I would truss you up and bury that tooth. The possibility seems most attractive.”
“I can ski faster than you,” said Clovermead. “You’d never catch up to me.”
“I learn most swiftly,” Sorrel replied. “Besides, you would not run that fast. Life is full of unfortunate coincidences, and as you speedily fled doubtless you would come across Mr. Snuff again. Then where would you be?” He wiped sweat from his forehead, but more sprang up. “Miss Clovermead, a compromise occurs to me. I could accompany you awhile southward and swear to Our Lady that while we traveled, I would not harm you or hinder you or make any effort to take you captive to Chandlefort.”
“Or I could kill you now,” said Clovermead. She could. She could. All she had to do was call on the tooth.
Do it, the tooth urged. Do it now.
“Then, kill me,” said Sorrel. “I will not run from you.” He stood and waited.
Hungrily Clovermead ran her tongue across her teeth. Her bear tooth throbbed in her hand. For a moment the world was red. She saw Sorrel bleeding before her, saw herself lean in to bite and crunch—
Dear Lady, no! Clovermead made a convulsive crescent over her sweater and prayed for the Light. She gasped out her thanks as the dark, murderous desires slowly receded from her. She put the cord around her neck again and thrust the tooth back into her shirt. Her heart was hammering. “Swear what you said earlier. Come along with me till we’re two days south of Chandlefort. Then you leave me free to go and you head back to Chandlefort. Is that a deal?”
“To this I swear,” said Sorrel. “It is not a very good deal, but I think it is better than none. We are travel companions?”
“We are,” said Clovermead. She stood up and firmly shook his hand.
He is so plump and full of blood, said her tooth.