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The ache in her back and her arms woke Stasya up. She felt as if she hadn’t slept at all, and in those first, groggy seconds, she wondered if she was back in the hospital at Tendria, and her entire trip so far had been a dream. But then she heard the sound of rushing water, and she knew the river was somewhere nearby. Her jaw ached for a second—not nearly enough to take her mind off the pain in her back. Just enough that she knew someone had used a spell nearby. She rolled over and saw Caedmon adding some more kindling to the small fire he had lit. It was morning. The sun was rising. And they were outside the city.
At first she had no recollection at all of how she had gotten there, or why she was feeling so terribly sore and tired. When at last she managed to sit up and got herself untangled from her blanket, she found that she was positively filthy. The ugly dress that the duchess had loaned to her the previous evening now hung in tatters from her knees down. There were mud stains everywhere, and other things that looked somewhat less pleasant than mud. Long, parallel streaks of greasy black ash marked where she had apparently wiped her hands. The smell was quite revolting, as well—like a toxic mix of shit and rotten, burned meat. She didn’t remember getting so dirty. If she had fallen down a privy, she would have remembered it. But then, she didn’t really remember anything at all.
The last thing she could clearly remember was standing with the other three hillichmagnars in Caedmon’s room up in the castle. They had been planning to use the ikke bewege spell to get out of the city, hadn’t they? She was sure that must have been the plan. She had never used that spell before. Maybe everyone felt groggy, achy, and sick afterward. Caedmon didn’t seem to have suffered any ill effects, however. Perhaps he was more used to it. She remembered that she was supposed to have gone with Ellard, and she recalled that she had been excited about that. But where was Ellard, then? And where, for that matter, was Pallavi? She tried to ask Caedmon, but the effort of sitting up had made her dizzy, and she practically fell over, back onto her bedroll, before she could speak.
“You had better get up,” said Caedmon. “We will be eating breakfast soon, and then we will have to start walking. We have no horses, I am afraid.”
Stasya made another, more successful, attempt to sit up. Where had their horses gone? Oh, yes. They had been forced to leave them behind at the Bocburg.
“Where...?” she croaked. She had intended to ask where Ellard and Pallavi were, but Caedmon understood her to be asking for their current location.
“We are five miles downstream from Leornian. Now that we have the fire lit, I think I shall make an inventory of our packs, to see what we still have. Would you care to help?”
Stasya was still feeling so groggy that it was a moment before she realized that Caedmon had asked her a question. Before she could even start to formulate a reply, however, Caedmon nodded and said, “Well, perhaps you need time to clean up first. Suit yourself.” And he wandered away, through a line of bushes, where Stasya could see two more bedrolls and a pathetically small pile of packs and bags.
She took in her more immediate surroundings and saw another bedroll and a neatly-folded blanket. So that was four beds, which meant all four of the hillichmagnars had gotten away. But where were Ellard and Pallavi, and why an earth couldn’t Stasya remember how they had gotten to this spot on the riverbank?
When she thought of Ellard, she remembered, or at least she thought she remembered, a few vague impressions from the night before. She remembered his hands on hers, and she remembered his voice. She couldn’t remember his exact words, but she could recall the tone. He hadn’t sounded like he normally did—warm and always half-joking. He had sounded quieter, sterner, and much more serious. She remembered his face, but only hazily, so that she wasn’t sure whether these were real recollections, or something that her imagination had invented to fill the troubling gap in her memory.
The first explanation that occurred to her was that she and Ellard had gone somewhere after leaving the castle and had had sex. They had been outside, and the night had been rainy, so if she and he had been rolling around on the ground, that would explain the mud and filth all over her dress. It might also explain why she was so tired and sore this morning.
But that didn’t explain why she couldn’t recall what had happened. Granted, Stasya’s prior sexual experience had not been extensive—in point of fact it had been virtually nonexistent—but she did not think she had ever heard that people lost their memories afterward. Her awkward tumble with Bryan, the baron’s son, at Atherton was seared indelibly in her memory, for example. So if she and Ellard had done more than that, if they had, in fact done so much that she was covered in mud and her back hurt, then why couldn’t she remember it?
There was one, rather awful possibility that she could think of, and it made her a little sick to contemplate. What if Ellard had used some sort of memory spell on her so that she had forgotten what they had done? But she didn’t think he was the sort of person to do that. And why would he have bothered? She couldn’t remember anything after leaving the castle, but she could remember quite well what Ellard had done in the archive. The memory made her a bit giddy, in fact. Why would he have needed a spell to take what she would have given willingly? It seemed very unlikely, and very unlike him.
From over by the luggage, Caedmon called a gruff, but friendly “Hello” to someone, and moments later, Pallavi wandered into the camp. Her long, black hair was dripping wet.
“I would really give anything right now for a towel. I always prefer it to warming and drying spells,” she said, approaching Stasya. “Good to see you’re awake finally. I tried to get you out of bed an hour ago, and you gave me quite a lesson in Loshadnarodski profanity. Horses featured prominently, which wasn’t really a surprise.”
Stasya blushed. “Did I really? I’m so sorry. I don’t remember that at all. In fact....” She was going to say that she didn’t remember anything since leaving the castle, but she wasn’t sure how Pallavi would react to that news. It might well cause the older woman to question her sanity. Stasya was already worrying that she might be going mad, and she didn’t think anyone else needed to worry about it quite yet. “In fact,” she said at last, “I was very tired last night.”
Pallavi set down a small, bloody burlap sack, and pulled two small rabbits out of it. “Care to help me skin breakfast?” she asked.
For as long as she could remember, Stasya had been helping to skin and prepare animals that her parents and older sisters caught, so she gladly agreed to help. Far from disturbing or upsetting her, the blood and the feeling of the still-warm flesh under her hands was a reminder of time spent at the campfire at home—those quiet times when everyone had work, which were some of the few truly happy times she could remember from her childhood.
“I probably shouldn’t tell you this,” Pallavi said, as she finished gutting her rabbit, “but do you know how I caught these two?” Stasya shook her head, and the older woman went on. “I used a summoning spell. Just like I was going to use them to send a message. I know, some people at Diernemynster think that’s not sporting, or that it’s cruel, or something. But I don’t see why we can’t use magy to catch food. Oh, dear. I’ve probably shocked you, haven’t I?”
“Um...no.” Stasya had been thinking about her memory loss, and had not been paying very close attention to what the other woman was saying. “I’m sorry, but who thinks that catching animals with magy is wrong?”
“People at Diernemynster,” said Pallavi, in a tone of voice that clearly indicated what she thought of such people.
Stasya entirely agreed with her. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. I’ve used magy to catch rabbits and squirrels lots of times. I wasn’t aware it was supposed to be wrong.”
“It’s not,” Pallavi assured her, “but that’s Diernemynster for you.”
When they had the rabbits skinned and ready for cooking, Pallavi suggested that Stasya might want to take a bath. “I normally would not comment on another woman’s appearance, and certainly not to her face, but you look dreadful, dear. And I still have a spare pair of trousers and a tunic you can borrow, although they are my very last spares, so I would appreciate it if you didn’t lose them.”
Stasya fetched the new clothes from Pallavi’s pack, taking care not to disturb Caedmon, who was now carefully doling out their food and tea rations for the next week. Just as she started to head for the river, though, Pallavi came up to her again. After checking to see that they were out of earshot of Caedmon, she pointed down a narrow path through the long grass and said, “That’s where Ellard went to bathe, if you’re curious.”
“I...I wouldn’t wish to disturb him,” said Stasya.
Pallavi winked. “Oh, I don’t think he’d be much disturbed to see you. And even if you don’t want to join him in the river, it will still be worth your while to go have a peek. He’s a very good-looking man, you know.” She wandered back to the cooking fire, laughing, and Stasya remembered why she had found traveling with the woman so impossible.
A day earlier, Stasya would have given serious consideration to joining Ellard in the river, or at least to trying to catch a glimpse of him naked. But now, when she thought of it, to her great surprise, she felt oddly ill. She had that same sensation that she had had back in the archive, right when he had kissed her—that feeling like she was in danger. This time, it didn’t seem fun or exciting, though. It didn’t make her weak in the knees or make her wish for him to put his hands on her. It made her want to find somewhere very private, curl up in a ball, and hide. It made her want to never see him again. But why should she have that reaction to him now? It was very odd, because she still liked him, and still desired him, but there seemed to be some part of her mind that was rejecting him.
In any case, Caedmon would probably want to start walking soon, so this wasn’t the time for dalliance, even if she had been inclined to do so. She went down a different path from the one Pallavi had indicated, found the river, and washed herself quickly and furtively. She washed out the awful, tattered dress, too, even though she would just as soon have thrown it away. As Pallavi had pointed out, they didn’t have a great deal of spare clothing, so they would need to save every bit they had.
All that day they walked along the river road, which was starting to disappear under the encroaching weeds and last year’s fallen leaves. Around noon, they ate lunch near three long boats that had been beached and burned to the waterline. “There was probably plague aboard,” said Pallavi. A mound had been raised near the largest of the three boats, and someone had put an anchor on top of it as a sort of memorial. Ellard looked very interested in the anchor, but Stasya declined his invitation to join him in examining it.
That night, they heard horses approaching from the east, and at Caedmon’s suggestion, they crossed a hedgerow to hide at the edge of a field. As they had feared, the riders were white-robed soldiers from Leornian, clearly out looking for them. “What do they think they could do to us?” wondered Pallavi, once the men were gone. As she pointed out, only someone who was desperate or suicidal would attack four hillichmagnars.
“Let them try to arrest us,” said Ellard. “It would afford us some amusement, at least.”
“I want to avoid a fight if at all possible,” said Caedmon. “The duke may yet come to his senses, and I do not wish to further alienate Myrcia from Diernemynster by killing Myrcian soldiers.”
Ellard grinned at Stasya. “It’s not like one or two here or there will make a difference.”
With an exasperated sigh, Caedmon said, “I seem to recall that you were quite eager to help the duke. Now you want to kill his men?”
“That was before the duke tried to kidnap Stasya.” Ellard looked at her so intently that she had to look away, embarrassed.
The next day, she woke up again with her back and head sore, and mysterious mud stains on her clothes. Before anyone could see her in that state, she ran down to the river and washed as much of the mud off as possible. “I really am going mad,” she thought. Once again, she had a vague memory of having been with Ellard. She thought she could recall walking to a nearby village and standing in the churchyard with him for some reason, but it was so indistinct that it might have been a dream.
Later, they had to hide from soldiers again, and this time, Pallavi and Caedmon ended up under one vast rhododendron bush while Stasya and Ellard ended up under a different one five yards away. “You seem to have been avoiding me,” said Ellard.
“That’s not true,” she said, even though it clearly was.
He pointed out, quite accurately, that she often walked beside either Caedmon or Pallavi, but if he tried to walk beside her, she would slow down or speed up. She very nearly asked him what had happened the night they had escaped from the castle, but she knew she would sound insane if she admitted that she was losing bits of her memory, so she held her tongue, and assured Ellard that she was not angry at him or trying to avoid him.
Several days after leaving Leornian, they reached the southern end of the bridge that led across the mighty Trahern to Keelweard. The great city, center of the shipbuilding industry along the Upper Trahern, was surrounded by a double wall on the land side. But along the river, there were dozens of docks and shipyards. Almost all of them, Stasya noticed, were empty. No doubt some ship owners had tried to flee the plague. She wondered if the burned ships they had passed were from Keelweard, and how many other sailors had fled the city, only to find that they had carried death with them.
Just as at Leornian, the way across the bridge was blocked by soldiers. These men were not dressed in white, but in homespun gray, and they were wearing odd, baggy hoods over their faces. Presumably this was supposed to protect them from infection, but Stasya and the other hillichmagnars thought it looked like a much less efficient design than Alwin Garnett’s strange bird masks. They had a much better barrier than the old toll gate on the Aldred Bridge, however. Someone had piled dozens of barrels and boxes, and then bound them together with rope and chains. The road was well and truly blocked, and it would have taken a fairly powerful detonation spell to move the barrier aside.
When Caedmon approached the blockade, he barely managed to say his name before one of the gray soldiers pointed a crossbow at him and told him to leave. “Perhaps you did not hear me correctly,” said Caedmon. “I am Caedmon Aldred. We are hillichmagnars. And we wish to speak with your duke.”
The soldiers all burst out laughing at this, and the officer told Caedmon he could go back to whatever madhouse he had escaped from.
“I really grow tired of this sort of thing,” muttered Caedmon, pulling up his sleeve. He produced a small ball of blue flame and floated it over the gray-cloaked heads of the soldiers. They stopped laughing, but the officer became no more encouraging.
“I will send a message to the duke,” he grumbled, “but I wouldn’t count on any sort of welcome.”