For days they followed Gilrain over steep-sided ridges, across ledges, and up trails that were breathless and dangerous, often leading to the edge of some fall or landslide. Then their guide was forced to turn the black mare around and lead them some other way.
“Another dead end. Is it possible we’re lost?” Prince Ruan challenged him on one such occasion. His temper was even more explosive than usual, because earlier that day he had caught Sindérian standing heedlessly balanced on the very brink of a sheer precipice, looking down with the slack expression and dull, unseeing eyes of a sleepwalker. When he gently and wordlessly reached out and led her away, she had not even reacted to that—which was so unlike her, it unnerved him more than anything.
“Things change here in the heights; it is never the same two years in a row,” Gilrain threw back over his shoulder. “In the winter there are avalanches; in the spring, mud slides. I haven’t been this way for many seasons. But if you think you can lead us better than I can, you’re welcome to try.”
Sindérian watched this exchange with a listless eye. More and more she felt detached from the others, isolated by her own misery.
On Midsummer’s Day, the hinge of the year, they passed by the site of Éireamhóine’s now-legendary battle with six of Ouriána’s warrior-priests.
Ascending by a parallel trail, Sindérian looked out across a great gulf of air and shadow to a sheer rock wall, riven with thousands of fissures and crevices, where half the mountainside had been ripped away. There was a jagged ridge above, like rotten teeth, and an immense cairn of shattered stones below—beneath which, she imagined, the bodies of the three Furiádhin who had perished were buried so deep the survivors had not even attempted to recover them.
Riding through the magical barrier was like passing through a sheet of cold water; it made her flesh tingle and her vision blur. At the same time, the ward seemed to shatter into a rainbow of brilliant colors: vivid blues and violets; stormy greens; yellow, vermillion, and tangerine; a deep, pulsing crimson.
It was light, she realized, light so pure and intense that creatures of the Dark could not pass through. The few minutes that it took the chestnut gelding to cross were agonizing and exhilarating at the same time. She felt all of her petty faults and doubts and fears exposed, all artifice, all pride stripped away; she felt as naked as an infant fresh from the womb, and as helpless.
And then it was over, she had reached the other side, feeling alive in a way she had not felt since Saer, drawing deep breaths and trying to regulate the thunderous beating of her heart. Looking around at her companions, their dazed faces, the sidelong glances they exchanged, she knew that they, too, had experienced something profound.
It was an unusual ward that affected the unmagicked. She wondered what Éireamhóine had been thinking when the avalanche came down. What was in his mind, there at the end? She knew that a dying wizard could sometimes seize the moment, could twist events in such a way that his or her death might serve some good or useful purpose. But this could hardly have been Éireamhóine’s intention, as vast and beautiful and miraculous as it was. Warding the Cadmin Aernan could have been no part of his plan—far less could it have been the intention of the three dying Furiádhin.
Summer awaited the travelers on the other side of the mountains: a summer gracious with wildflowers in the windy meadows above the pinewoods.
They were still many thousands of feet above the plain, on the shoulders of Mineirie, and they had still a long way to go before they reached the lowlands. Yet east of Gwinémon the sunlight had a different quality, being warmer and brighter. Even the air smelled fresher and felt softer on the skin.
And though Sindérian’s nightmares continued, they were every night less vivid, less intense, and she found it easier and easier to forget them during the day.
They were dreams, that was all. And whatever their origin, they could not make her do anything she did not want to do. Anyway, it was dreadfully presumptuous to imagine that she had been singled out.
It came as an ugly shock, then, to look up and see the black wings of the wyvaerun darkening the sky once more.
It can’t be the same, she told herself, as the creature wheeled and dipped in the thin air. No spy sent by Ouriána could possibly cross Éireamhóine’s ward.
But two wyvaerun, solitary, searching, each met by pure chance in the wilderness? That was too much coincidence; it was simply impossible.
Her horse stumbled in a rabbit hole and almost went down. Sindérian tore her eyes away from the sky, tried to focus her attention on the trail ahead. She reached out and gave the gelding an absentminded pat on the withers, but her brain continued to worry at the problem.
Could there be a second spy, she wondered, waiting for us on this side of the barrier, ready to take up where the other wyvaerun left off?
Her head began to ache with all of the dire possibilities that opened up, and the mountain air felt a little colder. Supposing that every move they made, every decision they reached had been anticipated in advance? Supposing that their enemies knew exactly what they would do, long before they did it? And for the first time, when she thought of Gilrain an unpleasant doubt insinuated itself. What if he was not as friendly as he seemed? What if Prince Ruan had been right from the very beginning?
But that was sheer nonsense. The Ni-Ferys had had ample opportunity to betray them before this.
I said I would never let Prince Ruan’s prejudices influence me, she reminded herself. And I would be a fool to break that promise now. And yet—and yet Gilrain was suspiciously eager to attach himself to our party. We never asked him to guide us through the mountains; it would never have occurred to us to do so. He was the one who offered, and in such a way that we could hardly refuse.
The sun was declining in the west, and a cool wind was blowing when Sindérian and her companions came to a place where the path descended in wide stony ledges like a broken staircase. They dismounted and led the horses down. On reaching the bottom, they found themselves in a hollow fringed with dark pine, where the grass grew long and green, and water pooled in a little rock cistern among mosses and ferns.
Though it was early to set up camp, the place seemed so sheltered and welcoming that Gilrain proposed they make an exception, and the others agreed. They unsaddled the horses and left them to graze in the sweet grass, while everyone hunted up deadwood and pinecones to make a fire.
As the men began preparing supper, Sindérian wandered over to the tarn to bathe her hands and face.
The water was deep and cool and mirror bright, reflecting the light-drenched white mountain peaks behind her, a bright blue sky with scarcely a cloud in sight. But there was something else in the water: a face so coarse and sallow, a person so altogether unkempt, ragged, dirty, and wild that it took her several moments to recognize her own reflection.
With a gasp of dismay, she bent closer to the glittering water, staring at the unwelcome image—that thorny, disreputable-looking female, with her thin face, broken fingernails, and ragged dark hair—worse: the creature had a sly, unsteady, almost wicked look about her that filled Sindérian with despair.
Did you really think Éireamhóine’s barrier would wash away ALL your sins, you who have failed everyone you ever loved? And what little remains to you, you’ll lose that, too. Have you not seen it? The end of the world you know, and the triumph of Ouriána—where we all take new bodies and grovel in the dirt at her feet.
Was it even worth living in a world like that?
And yet there were so many ways that offered release: the pool, the knife—and a healer knew just where to strike—she could even halt her own heartbeat with little more than a thought, though that would be a perversion, before which, even in her present state, she quailed.
The pool? To slip quietly down beneath the cool waters and be gone before anyone missed her; it would look like an accident. Only perhaps one of the men would notice after all, and pull her out too soon. It seemed that the Prince, in particular, was always watching her, always spying on her.
The knife, then. It would be swift and certain.
With a wondering terror at her own resolution, she was sliding the blade out of its sheath on her belt, when something else about the reflection in the water drew her attention, distracting her from her purpose.
It was the wyvaerun, flying lower than she had ever seen it before. Even worse, it was the same wyvaerun, the one that had followed them all of the way from Hythe, for it was impossible not to recognize that slightly erratic flight, one wing stroke shorter than the other.
And now that she saw the creature so close, she could see the reason for that peculiarity: under the left wing, where something was lodged, something that might have been the shaft of an arrow, or a bolt from a crossbow, except that it glittered almost like glass—
A sudden rush of blood to her head made her all but swoon. The world turned dark for a moment, and all she knew was the loud hammering of her pulse.
And when her vision cleared, when she turned to tell the others what she had seen, Sindérian saw something else, something that sent a cold jolt of panic right through her: Gilrain fitting an arrow to his bow, pulling it back to full draw, aiming—
“Hold! Hold your fire!” she cried springing to her feet, giddy with joy and sick with apprehension all in the same moment. “Don’t loose that arrow, whatever you do.”
To Prince Ruan, watching her cover the distance between the pool and the camp at a dead run, then arrive flushed and breathless to hang on Gilrain’s arm, her eyes blazing with excitement and her whole body shaking with the wildest agitation, it seemed that Sindérian had lost her mind.
“Your sight is much keener than mine,” she panted, looking from the Ni-Ferys to Ruan, then back again. “Tell me what you see—” She swallowed hard, struggled to catch her breath, and went on, “—tell me what you see, in the hollow under the left wing.”
The Prince tilted his head back, shaded his eyes with his hand. At first, he saw nothing remarkable. But then, as the wyvaerun turned in a wide arc exposing its breast to the setting sun, something dazzled his eyes with rainbow colors, refracting the sunlight like a shard of glass or—
“The shaft of a crystal arrow…it might be,” he said, beginning to catch a little of her excitement.
The words were scarcely past his lips when Sindérian dropped Gilrain’s arm and was on the move again. Flinging herself back toward the path they had so lately descended, she began to scramble from ledge to ledge until she reached the top. Once there, she ran out along a rocky outcrop, gathering up her skirt and plunging fearlessly ahead, stopping only when she came to the very brink.
And there she stood, with her dress, her cloak, and her dark hair all in motion, dangerously balanced at the windy edge, utterly reckless of her own safety. She called out in a high sweet voice that seemed to echo from mountain to mountain:
Watching and listening down below, the Prince hardly dared breathe. If she was wrong in what she had guessed, the great raptor could easily swoop down and tear her to shreds before anyone else could come to her rescue. If she was right…But it hardly seemed possible that she could be right.
The wyvaerun was circling again, it was coming back. Now it descended in a terrifying rush of oily black wings and gleaming scales, its snakelike tail curled over its back, its knifelike talons extended. But it stopped just inches from her face, batting wildly.
The air around the bird shimmered and the wyvaerun disappeared: in its place, a blue-grey peregrine falcon hovered on the lucent air. Then, as lightly as thistledown, as gently as a breath, it landed on Sindérian’s outstretched arm and tucked in its ragged wings.