Chapter X

We walked our horses out of the stable yard, then trotted through the streets. Both of us had bundled our hair up
under yesterday’s last belated purchase, a pair of the usual
knitted caps. Therkon was wearing my cloak, half-concealing Hvestang’s sheath, I was wearing a sulky expression and my shirt. The seal-fur was crammed with our other impedimenta in Therkon’s saddlebags. He had, by chance or skill, picked the livelier horse. Mine, which he claimed had acted like its friend in the stable-yard, was the slug content to trail along.

It was so early that the crier might have just begun his rounds, and in any case few people were abroad. Errand boys, housewives sweeping steps, lambs or pigs coming to market, the occasional wood or vegetable cart. Therkon wove expeditiously among them, I bumped along behind. The glances we caught were at best briefly curious. Lords’ men, they said, on some errand. Better left alone.

Unlike Grithsperry, Jurrick has an inland wall, and of stone, if low. With a gate. It was open, but I saw with a bump of the heart that it also had guards.

Women did not seem to bear arms in the Isles. Two men, in leather vests and some sort of steel and leather warcap, with at least a sword apiece, were lounging in the little roofed shelter just beyond the gate’s iron-shod right leaf.

I sought desperately for a diversion, a shield of some sort, any sort, even another sounder of pigs. Therkon gathered his horse up with a kick and made straight for the guards.

“Clettri farm,” he called, at the limit of hearing range. His shoulders had sunk a little and his chin jutted. He sounded dour, sullen, thoroughly Outland, and exasperated to the point of wrath. “Which way?”

They both came out of the guard-house, half-surprised but not alarmed. Two understood in another lightning flash that they knew the horses. As Therkon had gambled that they would.

“Attric got you exercising his ‘charger’?” The first sounded mild, but he had a suspiciously straight face. I did not know enough about horses to gauge if he was jesting, but whatever Therkon did with his own face, both men laughed.

“New, are you?” The second one asked.

“Hired yesterday.” Therkon had dropped his voice three or four notes and turned his accent to something Two claimed was broad Delta. “The lord said, Clettri farm. A message. Take the horse.” In one brief twist his shoulders conveyed resignation, irritation, a professional verging on insult at the quality of his mount. “Where in Dhe’s name do I go?”

Dhe? My heart hit the roof of my mouth, but to my complete shock both men nodded. “Outland, eh?” the second said. “This far south?”

“The Empire.” Therkon said through his teeth. “No wars. Less troops. No pay.”

The outrage reached even to me. The men nodded again, somehow eager, in a way Two at least recognised. Provincials identifying a sophisticate. Amateurs encountering something that might be a professional. And a simmeringly irate professional. Not a safe man to tease, let alone balk.

“Your lad there?” the first one did ask, the tone making it mere formality. “He along for the ride?”

Therkon glanced once over his shoulder. The look said, from a more than professional scorn: If he lasts so long.

They both laughed again. I deepened my sulk. The first man stepped to Therkon’s stirrup and began pointing beyond the gate.

* * * *

The first part followed the rutted track that passed as Jurrick’s main inland road, and by the Mother’s grace, it topped a ridge within the first half mile. Halfway down the dip beyond, Therkon glanced back. Then he let his horse drop to a walk, and let out a great, shaky sigh.

“How,” I breathed, kicking my own horse in speaking-range, “did you know to do that?”

“I didn’t.” He actually wiped his forehead. “I’ve never had to.” He tried to laugh, or something like it. “Sheer terror? It just—came.”

Sheer terror? Pure invention, at the very least. Of course he had never had to go under-cover, even in training. Deoren would never dream he might have to do it without help. “Clettri farm? Where did that come from?”

“People talking. Last night.”

So he had listened in the taproom, again. “But. The lord’s name.” In retrospect, my hair had begun standing up. “If they hadn’t said it, what on earth would we have done?”

“Found something else.” He scraped up a half smile, though his hand trembled on the reins.

Small wonder, there was still a trip in my own pulse.
Daring, inventive, but beyond reckless, to try such a ploy without warning, untrained. Nevertheless. “To claim yourself Outland, a soldier. And the accent. That was smart. Where on earth did you get that?”

“Harvis. The army commander, when I was a boy. He was Delta bred. For the rest.” A jerky little laugh. “I just reversed Skatir.”

A discharged veteran, but Dhasdeini rather than Archipelago. I nearly laughed too. I came near patting his back, more in wonder than congratulation. Strategist, Two called him. I had never expected a tactical stroke like this.

“Well, it worked.” I did not add, despite being past dangerous. I glanced up the road. Grey gravel and pot-holes, rushes in the ditch, a low skyline ahead. “How far is this farm, do you think?”

“Ten miles? Maybe more? And westward.” He pulled a face.

“We’d best try for supplies, then.” As he gathered his reins I kicked my slug again. “Pretty soon.”

* * * *

We both knew we must have food for the hills, and find it while the Clettri-farm story would hold. We slugged the horses past one, then another farm-house, tree-bedded in their clusters of folds and pens and out-buildings amid green pastures and the threadbare green of rising grain. Three times Therkon proposed, “This one.” And three times Azo’s training, Two’s instinct, something, answered, “Not yet.”

The track branched and branched again, hemming us among ploughland between drystone walls. The fourth choice was
smaller than some, with trees on the hill below it, masking the road. By this time the farm folk would be mostly about their
business, even fewer witnesses. “This one,” I said.

By the time we regained the road I almost had Two, at least, under control. As Therkon turned his mount westward, I could keep myself to a mere, “That was—That was—!”

“My lady.” He gave me an apologetic glance. “Deoren would say, Hide under the lamp. I only thought . . . it worked at the gate?”

“At least she didn’t set the dogs on us.” I could feel that a laugh would get out of control. “It worked at the gate, to claim we were Attric’s hire, yes. But out chasing us—!”

“She will know soon enough.”

“Oh, yes.” When he began to repeat the crier’s notice I had nearly fallen off my horse. But, Two insisted, we would dodge off this track no later, whenever the real hunt brought the truth. And to claim patrol-duty let us ask for food that would last: bread, cheese, but also cured bacon, flour, oil. And about passes and tracks. However perilous that instant when the white-skinned but weathered farm-wife had checked. Stared. Then said, “Aye, ye’re outlanders, I was forgettin’. Aweel, ye can ward the foothills, but there’s no passes,” she nodded sharply, “up there.”

I squinted sidelong to the jaggedly looming horizon, rising now with every stride of my horse. “Did she mean, no passes at all?”

He gave me a swift glance. “There must be passage. For deer, for rock-scramblers, if nothing else. We will find a way.”

He did not have to finish, we must. He glanced behind, and added, “At least, there will be no trouble with tracks.”

The clear morning had begun to cloud before we passed Jurrick gate. Now the eastward farmland was disappearing under a steadily darker curtain of rain. We could take the second track, not the one we had told the farm-wife we would try. Turn the horses loose up beyond the settled land. After that, trust our cloaks for shelter and the weather to obliterate our traces, and walk, with the saddlebags over our own shoulders. Into the hills. In the rain.

* * * *

It did not get truly bad till dusk. We loosed the horses after the rain reached us, sometime not far from noon. By then the track had climbed onto open hillsides of bracken and that sullen green ling Sickle had grown, pressing deeper and deeper between crags that beetled over us as the valley closed. High crags, stacked and fractured sometimes as Rack Head had been, sometimes worn down through three or four kinds of rock, grey or black or cinnabar red, weathered to chimneys and flying buttresses, and more and more often, a precipice only flies could scale.

By the time dusk came we had found the boulders as well.

Amid the ling, smaller stones had threatened toes and ankles, especially in the rain, but up the valley the ling ended and earth rose like a cresting wave. Now we faced crevices, crannies, foot-catching narrow spots between slippery, bulging boulder-faces. Naked, massive stone.

We might have made a quarter mile, through the battle to find and conquer scaleable places amid our dangling bags and
entangling cloaks, before the light began to fade. As we panted atop the latest monster, I caught Therkon’s cloak and gasped, “Need to stop!”

If we went on in the dark we would break our necks: he did not have to be told. His hooded head swung to and fro, scattering drops as the seal-furs shed rain like glass. It was not denial. He was seeking any possibility of shelter. Of protection against the cold.

My own scratched and battered hands were already almost numb. I tilted my head to peer through the hood-drips. Dark, glistening rock faces, jagged and crenellated all the way to the cloud. Grey cloud, wisping close over us and twining through their battlements, steadily shedding rain. But now there was a draft behind us, a whistle and rustle in the boulder-field. The wind was rising too.

The best we managed before full dark was a kind of slot between two leaning boulders, close against a cliff. It did face cross-valley, cutting down the wind, and its top was narrow enough to stop most rain, leaving the base just wide enough for two people to edge, single file, inside. And then huddle in our cloaks with the thankfully retained saddlebags under us, to extract, finally, the bread and cheese and my wrist-knife, and amid the drip and splatter of water and the rising wind-howl, swallow the first real food of the day.

We also had a short but fierce skirmish over who went
furthest in. Therkon won, mostly because I dared not shout, You’re likelier to catch pneumonia! Nor, I’m troublecrew, I’m supposed to protect you! So it was he who had his back in the outer opening, while to get him in as far as possible I was banging my elbows on the rock at every move.

When we had managed, the final straw, to catch the only drinkable water by putting our cups out for raindrops, he said ruefully, “My lady, this may not have been the best way, after all.”

“It was the only way,” Two said.

“Two thinks so?” I felt his side relax. “I thought—no. I did not really think. It just seemed what we should do.” A sudden little pause. “I did wonder, why you, um, agreed so easily.”

I had fussed and fretted over his fecklessness too often, too visibly. I was glad of the dark. But Two had given me the answer to that as well.

“Two says, you’re the strategist. You see the big plan. We’re troublecrew. We just have to make it work.”

“Oh!” He might have been flattered. He was certainly surprised.

“But I wondered.” It had nagged me in the fleeting pauses from necessity, all day. “Do you think it was your plan? Or can—it—turn people too?”

More silence. Silence so long the wind went through an entire cycle of rising scream, squeal, skirl and fall. While the rain pattered unrelentingly, and my longbones measured the encroaching nether cold.

Then he said, almost under his breath, “I have wondered that.”

“Two,” I swallowed hard, “Two can’t say. Insufficient data. But surely: if there was a plan, and it did go wrong at Rack Head. Everything since then couldn’t have been, uh, set up?”

More silence. At last he said, “The chain would be so long. Nouip’s gifts. Hvestang’s past. My—attack. The Tolla, perhaps, yes. A good guess that we might escape, a possibility we would try that ship. But that Frotha would take us? That horses would be at the inn?”

“Maybe it can only push where there’s a, a weak spot? Like Hvestang?”

“That would seem sensible. But,” he moved sharply, “who is to say what is sense in this? Or what it considers sense?”

No-one, if Two could not. Cold comfort, even shared. But talking was better than consciously waiting for the cold to penetrate, for muscles cramped in position to complain, for mind to trace out the still-unexpended span of night.

And better, far better, than the treacherously rising awareness of his side and flank and hip crammed so tantalisingly close. The memory of that velvet skin, the present, tangible human warmth.

“At any rate,” he said, and for a moment I heard the crown prince who had also led an army, who would have been expected, however minimally, to support and reassure his troops, “we made our own choice. And whether that was helped or not, we are going south.”

* * * *

Talk lapsed after that. Eventually weariness must have won out, and I dropped asleep. Because I know I had been dreaming when I came round with a strangled shriek and limbs flying upright from the black about me, not lightless air and darkened earth but water, black water, welling, rising, still and soundless as death, black water reaching to engulf me, knowing what it sought . . .

Something had my arm, noise was in my ears, a voice. All that stopped Two sparking was that known, familiar voice. “Chaeris. Chaeris! It’s all right. I am here. You are safe.”

My lungs still wheezed for air. I clutched frenziedly around me, my knuckles struck rock, my other hand met cloth, hair, flesh.

“Oof.” I think I had hit him in the mouth. But the sound rallied me. We were on Phaerea, not the Aspis, in the rocks, far inland, at night. And I had just punched my charge, my troublecrew trust.

“I’m sorry, sorry—”

“Not your fault.” His hand found mine, closing on it lightly enough to keep Two quiet. He did not have to say, That was a dream? I did not have to ask, You were already awake? But some things are too much to bear alone.

“It was like, at Nouip’s house.” I could not control the shudder. “She said, Water. Black water. Only rising round me. Like—like Aspis. Belowdecks.”

“That is over. A memory.” His hand shut hard on mine.

“Yes. Yes.” I tried not to shut my eyes on the night’s unbroken but earthly black, the wind’s keen, the pattering drops of rain.

In a moment he said, very softly, “But?”

“But,” it broke out like water spurting through those started planks. “It wasn’t just water. It knew. It thought. And it was l-looking. Looking for me.”

His hand clamped this time like a vice. He did not speak. He did not have to. But once begun, I had to go on to the end.

“At Nouip’s house, it was like something Two sees. A, a projection. I was awake. But th-this time—it was a dream.”

A time when my mind would have no defense.

The rest simply would not come out. Does this mean it’s getting closer? Does it mean the thing is more aware? Getting close in more ways than one?

Therkon stirred, then began to rub my hand between both of his. “It’s night. And cold. And cursed uncomfortable. If not as bad as Aspis.” His own voice skipped away from that. “With wind. And water. The noise, the wet. Small wonder you dreamed.”

“You think I was just remembering Aspis?” I could not keep the disbelief, the verge of disillusion, from my voice.

There was another stretching quiet. But in the end, for all the temptations, he did not fail me. He sounded flat, and very tense, but he said it out.

“No.”

Cravenly I thought, I wish I’d never asked. I wish I’d let him try to fool us both. Oh, Mother, I wish I could crawl over there and hide in his shoulder like a baby, like I did at Nouip’s house.

And in that brief memory of muscle’s weight and warmth under my cheek, I felt the almost imperceptible vibration in his fingers. Not a tremor, something less controllable.

He was shivering.

“Fry it.” To flee into concern for another was more than a relief. “You’re cold, I knew you’d be cold there, you’re too far out in the wind—Are you wet? Let me change places. If you get pneumonia, what will I tell the Empress?”

“My—Chaeris.” Surprised, almost enough to be amused. “I am not wet. The furs are better than a tent. I am not wholly feeble—”

“But you are in the wind there—”

“If you get pneumonia, what will I do?”

A Dhasdeini man, who could never let a woman shield him, rather than shielding her. More fragile than I, after the storm and his stomach’s damage. But this time, I had a face-saver to use.

“I live in the mountains. I’m used to it.” I took a handful of fur and gave a little pull. “Either you come further in, or I go out.” I let the silence add, Which will it be?

He sighed, audibly. But he had read that silence too.

I shoved my own bag to the cleft end, we tangled and un­tangled feet, trying to dovetail the baulky masses of cloak-wrapped shoulders and legs. Two pressed infuriatingly with memories of how much closer two people could get if they both straightened their legs and lay side by side, sharing cloaks. Shut up! I told her,
maddened by the recall of his shoulder, his body against me, at Nouip’s house, on Evva beach. I’m not getting any closer. I won’t! I can’t!

Then it struck me that he too was holding back. And with greater shock, that it might not all be misguided Dhasdeini courtesy.

“Two.” My voice had gone so small that in a new wind-flurry I could barely hear myself. “Two won’t spark. She’d never—”

Hurt anyone in this situation. Least of all you.

I felt him move again, an almost ungoverned jerk. Then, rougher than he had ever spoken to me, he said, “I am inside. This is close enough.”

I could find nothing to answer that. It hurt too much.

* * * *

I woke cold through, despite the cloak, hams bitten despite the saddlebag by unrelenting pebbled stone. But I woke because, with a skill taught me on Aspis, I had felt the weather change. Before my eyes opened I knew the rain had stopped.

The wind had dropped too, in volume, in pitch. And Therkon had slid over, or fallen over, in sleep. He was half lying next to me, his breathing sleep-steady, his head’s full weight against my cheek.

If I don’t move, I thought. His shoulder was under mine, slack-muscled but solid, his hair in silky strands against my face. He was snoring a little, and bristle roughed my collarbone where his jaw had displaced my cloak. It was miserably cold, just creeping into light. But if I don’t move, I told myself, I can make a dream from things Two knows. That we’re in a Tower room of Amberlight, garnished with rich cloths and furs, warmed through by qherrique. That I’m a Head and he my husband, we’re in the big men’s-quarters marriage bed, and we can stay like this, if I choose it, every morning of my life.

Was it a minute, or five, or a yearning century? Before Therkon gave a snort and a grunt and either from a weather signal like mine or just bent muscles’ complaint, came awake.

With another snort as he jerked his head away, coming almost upright on a gasp and a smothered “Dhe—!”

“I told you,” I could not help it, “Two wouldn’t spark.”

The pause fell between us like a cataclysm. I could have bitten out my tongue. He—I could not tell what he felt. But the words were more than stiff.

“My lady. I beg your pardon.” He started to struggle with the gear. “It will not happen again.”

* * * *

We each sortied into the rocks. Tried to tidy ourselves up. Carved up the last bread, both probably silently cursing the lack of fire for hot food or even water. As we donned our packs I could bear the other chill no longer. It came out whisperingly small, but it came.

“I’m sorry. I only thought—it would be better—warmer—”

He turned round with a jerk. His hair was in elf-locks as on Aspis, his face stubbled, his new clothes the predictable wrinkled mess. But of a sudden the rigid expression melted away.

“My lady.” Two steps and he had my hands. “I do beg your pardon. It was nothing to do with you. It was . . . No matter what it was. Forgive me. I did speak truth in one thing. It will not happen again.”

He found a smile for me. A true smile, as he would have given me on Aspis. He still looked a perfect ruffian, but the sudden,
redoubtable barriers in those eyes had gone.

So at least we confronted the boulders in something like the accord of yesterday.

The moraine finally topped somewhere in mid-morning. Puffing, sweating despite the wind and cold and prevailing damp, we looked out the through the low V of sinking cliffs. Into another unrelieved landscape of boulders, rising to a perfect boar’s chine of jagged, unbroken rock.

“Blight and blast it!” I gasped.

Therkon heaved at his pack. In a moment his eye turned westward, and I knew his thought.

“We’ll have to find another gap, or whatever this was. Work sideways, through that mess.” The pack dragged at my own
shoulders. “Oh, Mother. Do you suppose, at least, there’s water? Anywhere?”

And again, the Mother answered. The wind gusted along the hillside, bringing a faint tinkle and gurgle. Somewhere to the west.

It was a little spring, a freshet, perhaps, falling out of a
boulder interstice like a city tap. Cold, pure, fresh. Best of all, dropping into a tiny rock oasis: ling, some bracken, a spindly white-barked tree.

We had gathered twigs and dead wood and sacrificed some precious tinder, Therkon had unearthed the new little cooking pan, I had dug out ingredients for pan cakes, before the next
calamity struck.

“Flour. Oil. Water. Salt, if you have it. I’ve watched mess-cooks make them.” Therkon actually scratched amid his mare’s nest of hair. “But the proportions—!”

And to invade Shia’s kitchen would have been more than my life was worth.

We cooked bacon, in the end.

* * * *

What I would have given, by sunset, to see that little bay again! We had kept westward, taking the spring as the Mother’s sign. By sunset we might have made two miles, or maybe two and a half. Every inch was a giant’s labor of prospecting a
possible route, then climbing it. Then, blocked again, having to cast, and search, and scramble, for a further advance. Not counting the back-casts, the simple dead-ends, from which I had begun to think we would never escape.

Sheer exigency, if not gravity, had pushed us steadily downhill, deeper into the boulder maelstrom, lower under what, on our side, had become cliffs again. There was no shelter. There was no water. The sky greyed, the wind probed and prised at us, and the jagged skyline beside us had never showed a sign of breaking in the length of the day. The sole blessing was that it did not rain.

We were in the bottom of the dip when the light finally began to fail. My feet were bruised to the bone, my thigh muscles felt to be falling off their bones. The pack had cut my shoulders to infuriation point. My eyes ached, my head ached. Every fiber of me ached to simply fall down, give it all best, and expire where I lay.

Therkon was staring up at the next impasse. His hood was back, his shoulders bowed. He looked as tired, as disheartened, as near the end of his resources as I felt. The only comfort that remained, perhaps, was to share our misery.

I took a step closer. I did not have to ask, Do you see anything? It was his turn to lead: he knew I would wait for a suggestion. That when he found it, he would speak.

I stood still, close behind him. Then, without thought, almost without volition, I leant my head against him, somewhere between his shoulderblades. And like the most water-hearted child, half-whispered, “Will we ever get out of this?”

I felt his breath catch. His muscles clamped. I was past caring if he took offense. But in a moment, the tension changed. He drew in a long breath and spoke.

“We will get out.” His head lifted, ever so slightly. “We will find a way. However long it takes.” Softly, so softly, with that steel-cored resolution I had heard on Aspis’ deck. “We will come through, my lady. We will not let ourselves be stopped.”

For the sake of Azo, and Verrith, and Deoren. And the Empress. And Dhasdein. And Iskarda.

And perhaps, for Nouip, and Frotha, and the Isles, as well.

I leant my head a little harder and shut my eyes. He set himself to sustain my weight. It seemed natural to slide both arms around him, as round a tree, a column, a support. But trees do not have their own hands, that closed, warm and firm however grazed and bruised, over mine.

Two can only guess how long it was before we both shifted, drawing breath again. And he let go, and I stood back, and he turned about and said quietly, “For today, this is far enough.”

We mixed flour with water from our bottles, added salt to the paste and ate it raw. We drank half the remaining water. Then we curled up at the boulder foot, on the only half-flat place in sight, and he put his arms around me, and I fitted myself into his side as if he were one of my fathers, an uncle, a friend like Tanekhet. I was far too tired even to have listened, had Two brought up thoughts of anything else.

* * * *

It took a good hour to unkink next morning. But as I sipped the last breakfast water, Therkon, trying to tie his hair back, turned sharply and said, “The sun.”

It had topped a skyline behind us, and the overcast had not yet come right down. Light streamed over the boulder-field, sharpening the salients with rose and gold-leaf, deepening the shadows to cobalt and velvet grey. Highlighting the western horizon, between the right-hand cliffs and jagged spines of range crest, opening a ragged but golden-edged door of celestially pale sky.

And suddenly Therkon grabbed my arm.

“Under the wall there! By the hedgehog.” We had christened the massif in exasperation the day before. “Do you see there, Chaeris?” He almost shook me. “It’s a gap!”

A slot, a mere crevice, at that distance. But if nothing more, it offered a goal. A possibility. A hope.

We were half the day getting there, struggling over the same old obstacles in the same maddening way. Tired out, now, bellies starting to rumble. Bruised, as well as weary. But struggling on, between awareness that we had little resources left, and the lure of that chance.

We reached the foot of our landmark buttress with hope stopping our throats. Both of us stared upward. Neither of us dared to say, It is a low spot. We just scrabbled and scrambled yet again, up between two more enormous boulders to the flattened third between. Panting, rising, to stand on top.

Then I yelled. Therkon whooped. We held on to each other and laughed like maniacs.

Because ahead of us, long slopes of ling, shields of pocked,
naked rock stretched down and out and round to our left about the prow of the massif. And beyond that, rugged, sometimes wooded hills fell green and russet and occasionally golden toward a half-world of shimmering blue sea.

* * * *

“Oh,” Therkon said.

“The Mother blight and blast it!” I cried. “From top to foot!”

We had near broken our necks scrambling cavalierly over the last downhill boulders, we had found water on the first open rocks. There was fuel in the adjoining ling. We mixed flour and water in slapdash proportions till one lot would hold as cakes, and then we ate, sprawled out in what passed for midday sun.

Lumbering afoot again, we found what the rock-shields had hidden. Our first unskirtable cliff.

A hundred feet, Two estimated, from top to foot. Not sheer, or even stacked rock like Rack Head, rather a fall of earth-faults and rock outcrops with a brief glacis of scree beneath. Obviously descendable, with care and stubbornness, but one final obstacle we had not thought to meet.

In a while Therkon said, “I think I can get down that.”

“We can both get down it.” Every troublecrew instinct fired to life. “But not in cloaks and packs.”

He opened his mouth. Shut it again. “You mean, drop them over the edge?”

“I mean, lower them on the rope.” We had fifty feet of light line, a final security buy in Jurrick. “I climb halfway down, you put them over. I tie the rope there and lower them the rest.”

“You?”

He broke off. Gave a little grunt. You would think so, it said. And, You have named yourself troublecrew. You will not, you cannot let yourself sit up here and watch me take the risks.

“Have you climbed,” he enquired sternly, rearguard action, “round Iskarda?”

“I have.” Yes, on beginner’s work, with Azo or Verrith or someone else, and a firm hand on the safety rope. But it had to be more than Deoren had ever allowed him.

He gave me a long stare that became resigned halfway through. Then he crouched on his heels and began prospecting the cliff face. “You will at least allow me to work out the way.”

“I’m expecting it,” I said, and unfastened my cloak.

The edge was shaky, old crumbling sandstone under earth and grass, but Two exhumed a score of memories for dealing with bad sandstone in Amberlight. What matter those were from a mine? I persevered, slowly as I could manage, heeding Therkon’s directions. Despite this final hold-up, it was almost bliss to move without a pack.

Astonishingly soon I heard him call, “Far enough, Chaeris.”

“You are near halfway down,” he added, when I looked up. “Find a tie-stay and I will lower.”

We made one drop of it: the two packs, laced together, cloaks bundled between, Hvestang buckled atop. He had carried it on his back the last three days, but he had more sense than to try to wear it now. I settled myself behind a sort of stone-hedge outcrop. When the bundle arrived, I had found a handy belaying rock.
After it all bumped safely among the scree I called, “Now you come down.”

While he was where he could keep at least token guard. We did not have to speak that either. I heard him make a little dry noise before he began to climb.

And when he had settled into my temporary fort, I stood up and stretched sore and bruised limbs in anticipation and added the final caution. “Wait till I’m down.”

It was partly the sandstone. Old, crumbling, and toward the bottom, damp. And partly the weathering that had undercut the cliff so even Therkon did not notice, and partly the chimney, as Two says real climbers call it, that she knew how climbers would descend, and that looked faster than spidering sideways to find the next properly inclined place. It was perhaps twenty-five feet to the bottom. If I told Therkon, he would argue and dispute and demand I tie the rope on, wasting even more time. I braced my boots against one side and my rump against the other and started down.

Fifty heartbeats later the chimney-side gave way.

* * * *

Two recalls everything going very fast though what memory I have is slow. My boot’s sudden sickening slip. The fall’s foresight coursing pure terror in vein and nerve. A sudden gyre of revolving rock and sky and the searing knowledge I would land face down and then a lightning dazzle of white.

The world resumes as if coming awake. Fingers sting. Nails broken, where I must have clawed the stone. Black and white flashes, eyes reclaiming light. Shadow, pattern, place and objects coalescing round me to a frantic, familiar voice.

I managed words, eventually. The world was dizzily remote, and the indrawn breath hurt, but I got out, “All right.”

The voice stopped. Resumed in an undertone. Profanity and prayer mixed. Something touched the upper of my two shoulders. The other seemed bedded into the ground.

“Did I break—”

“Keep still. Dhe fry you, you’ve no business being alive.” His voice shook. Gratitude’s wrath. “I don’t dare move—where do you hurt?”

“Fingers.” I shut my eyes to get the signals clearer. Two had memories of disabling blows, injuries far worse than this, but these damages had been imprinted on my own, original flesh. It had never encountered such a shock.

But now Azo’s training revived. Eyes shut, I tested hands. Arms. Toes in boots. Cautiously, whole feet. Legs. Bruises screamed on a thigh, a hip, the lower shoulder, I wanted to rub six places at once. But bones came first.

Hands would move. Arms. Head—

“Don’t move that!”

“Have to—find out.”

I opened my eyes again. Rock confronted them, inches away. Mossed, lichen-stained, fallen rock. And rock that might this
moment have been cracked apart.

“Everything where you fell . . . Two blew it up.”

“Wha—”

“Two blew it up.” His voice was shaking now too, the hand back on my shoulder as if to confirm I was breathing flesh and blood. “Pieces went up like—chips. You’re mostly on bare dirt.”

“Oh.”

It would make sense later. My head rang, blood was seeping from somewhere into my mouth, but Two insisted that was no more than consequences of a mild impact. I was awake. Therefore I was not concussed. I could sit up if I chose. I took in a whole breath.

The world went round in a black kaleidoscope. I had to keep very still till it came back.

“Think . . . cracked a rib.”

I could just whisper. I heard him spout a new gush of maledictions: I knew he was thinking, what if it’s worse, internal damage, liver, spleen, heart?

“Two says. Inside. All right.”

I heard him move. He had sat back on his heels, shaking too now, down to the indrawn breath.

“Chaeris. You reckless, Dhe-forsaken idiot—”

With a more than human effort, he cut it off. When he spoke again it was, if not the hatchet man, at least an approach to the crown prince.

“You landed on your side. Two says things inside are all right. Does your head hurt? Your neck?”

“Feels . . . all right.” I had to speak in very small sips. “Neck . . . try.”

His breath hissed but he kept quiet. I moved my head a fraction, then carefully, further, to and fro. Tried flexing whole limbs. He first protested and then helped me, eventually, to straighten out. Then, even more carefully, with a pack under my head, to turn on my back.

The cliff was a half-dozen yards behind me, the circle of shattered stone well out in the scree. I had either fallen wide or bounced, and I did not care to find out which. The bruises yowled in flesh’s complaint, there was a gash up the outside of my right arm, that had torn my precious shirt. And with every breath my body informed me more and more clearly: I had cracked or broken at least one rib.

“I don’t dare touch.” Therkon was still kneeling beside me, more frantic now I had him in full view. “Gods, that I never bought physic, even bandages. Poppy syrup . . .”

I think he almost wrung his hands. Then his head went up. His eyes swept wildly once to and fro, and he started to yank at the gear scattered about.

“Let me tie that up.” He meant the gash on my arm. He wrenched clothes from his own pack and I almost flinched at the rip of cloth. Not, I wanted to wail, another new shirt! But he was doing a masterly job of bandaging, spitting orders as he worked. And seeing them carried out.

“Put my cloak over you. Yours under. Put your head on your pack. Drink this. You still have the knives?” He checked that for himself. His other hand shot somewhere behind me, he yanked Hvestang to him as if it were a rotten stick. “Chaeris, you must keep still. Do you hear? You are not to get up, you are not to try to walk.” As if I were truly his troublecrew. He had ordered Deoren about just so. “I will bring help. You are to wait. That is all you are to do.” An anguished check. I could see, What if there are wolves? flash behind his eyes. He said harshly, “If anything comes—you have the knives. But I will be back. On Dhe’s name I swear it. I will be back here by dark.”

He sprang up to buckle Hvestang on. Then of a sudden he plumped back beside me and whipped something from his inner coat pocket, pushing it into my pack. “If you are troublecrew,” he was trying valiantly for lightness, “you should ward this.”

The jewel pouch. I had just time to recognise the shape and shade of it before he dropped a sudden fleeting kiss on my forehead and leapt up like a literal deer. I heard his feet receding, thud and crunch and reckless slither, down the lower slope.

* * * *

Two can reclaim very little of the next few hours. I think,
despite the plaints of minor damage, including what I found was a bitten left cheek, that shock and the previous days’ effort overwhelmed me, and I actually fell asleep. Or at least dozed, roused ever and again by the ribs’ scream when I tried to move naturally, or draw in a full breath.

When I woke fully the passage of time spoke from my stiffened wounds. Even in the warmth of the furs, I could hardly bear to move. Until I craned to read the colour of that distant patch of sea, and realised, with a hop of the pulse, that it was nearing dark.

And Therkon had not come back.

He will come, I promised myself. He said, by dark, and he keeps his word. Even if he doesn’t find help, if he can’t find anything at all, he’ll measure by the sun, and turn back when he knows he must. He’ll be here by dark.

Except if he lost his way. If he tripped, fell, injured himself in the hills, if he did meet a wolf, some other hazard, outlaws, bandits, just an unwary step on an unknown path and he’s lying out there now, truly incapacitated, with a broken leg?

Or unconscious. Unable, if scavengers found him, even to resist.

Impetuous unschooled lunatic, he had left his pack, his cloak, the saddlebags, food, water. If he fell or disabled himself, how would he survive the night?

I did some pungent cursing, envenomed by fright and helplessness. Crazy chivalrous Dhasdeini, to rush off with nothing but an Outland accent, a princely manner, Hvestang and a few coins in his coat. We knew nothing of the south, but Frotha had said “pirates.” What if he walked straight into such hands? And with no ward at all?

It was the worst moment, till then, of my young life. Not simply the physical pains, the friend’s, the more than friend’s loss, the knowledge of failure and mistake. Worst was that so much was my own fault.

If I had not let him go. If I had not tried that chimney. If I had not been so cocksure as to do it without the rope. If I had thought to make him take at least his pack. Amid Two’s more and more frightful scenarios the indictments seared like blazing brands.

But one attempt to push the furs off enforced the bitterest truth of all: I could hardly move. I had two packs and Nouip’s cloak, all our possessions and food as well as the gemstones, and I could not carry them. I could not even totter off down hill to search for him. On the mere chance that he was close, and that I could find him, I could not hazard all that in the dark.

After a while I did get up. Hauled, cursed, battled my impedimenta round me, up against the cliff. Drank more water, warned by Two of the drain that follows wounds and shock. Sacrificed one of my own shirts, to girdle my ribs, so I could at least trust an unwary breath.

After that, I crawled out to hunt deadwood in the outliers of what would have been our first Phaerean wood. Then with
bitter, bitter guilt I used our flint and tinder to light the first sticks. Settled Verrith’s knives beside me, and braced myself to pray out the night.

* * * *

That is the only time in over seven hundred years of memory for which Two refuses to retrieve anything at all. My fragmentary human recollection tells me that it seemed an eternity, as you might expect. That I wept a great deal of it, as you might also expect. That, even more predictably, every bone and muscle in my body pained, but not so badly as my conscience or my heart.

By the time the sky paled, less predictably, I had a plan. I stirred up the last coals left beyond the packs. Heated my last
water to drink. Pushed, with travail and trial, both packs in against the cliff, tied the last flour and the water bottles up in Nouip’s cloak, made a sling, and got it on my back.

Walking was possible, however the ribs panged. Azo had long since taught me to track, and Therkon’s trail was blatant, skids, heel-prints, crushed tuffets, overturned stones. Downhill straight as water. I cut a withy for staff among the first saplings, and shuffled into the wood.

The trees were writhen and scrawny, from aridity, I thought, as well as wind. The tracks led me among them, except for some reckless bound or spring I could not match. And where he had leapt across the little pool of seep that started a brooklet, I stopped to drink and fill my bottles amid the croziers of new spring fern.

Straightening up, I heard the shout.

Below me. No great distance, perhaps just beyond the wood. A man’s voice, a clear and carrying Halloo.

For one wild instant my heart leaped. And dropped again. Therkon’s voice I would have known anywhere.

But if it was human, it was help, however dubious. I braced both hands on my shirt girdle and produced a breathy wail.

They came bounding up into the wood like the proverbial hounds on a scent. Two young men, muscular and fit as trouble­crew, with farmers’ sunburnt, weathered faces under the
ubiquitous knitted caps. And they were trackers. The leader had run his eyes right to me along Therkon’s traces before he jerked up his head and stopped.

In a moment he said, “You’re the girl.”

My heart almost jammed my throat. But caution or joy alike, there could only be one answer. I managed to whisper, “Yes.”

He scanned me, a hillman’s quick expert check. The face was frank enough, broad cheekbones, open, curious expression, pale skin bearing a healthy flush. He was barely breathing hard, though his sleeveless jerkin and rolled shirt-sleeves bore leaf and twig wrack as well as sweat.

“Aye, y’r brother found us.” No doubt my face had been an open book. “Tumbled out o’ Kjelfield spinney flat on his face.” The accent was thick as Nouip’s, with a slight but different drawl. “An’ near as short o’ words. But he tell’t enough to follow.” He made a brief gesture behind him. “Skeag ’n me back-tracked.”

No huge task, from what I had done myself. But the corollaries were pressing away my breath. “M-my brother. Is he—where is he?”

He should have been back with if not before them, if he had not been able to do it last night. Had Two’s worst projections become reality, had he fallen, slipped, injured himself?

“Nay, lass.” The first one was beside me. “He found us in ane piece, did ye not hear? No thanks to the track he took.” Another glance back. “We had him to the house, but he was aye beside himself about ye. An’ we’ve no healer ourselves, m’cousin’s off down-coast. So we fed him, and lent him a field-coat. And he was off, down to Ve Pool, before yestreen eve.”

Ve Pool. A southern town. A port? Frotha had mentioned it. He had gone after a healer. He could not have come back in the time. “He, he asked you to come up?”

The pause, their faces, made my tongue dry in my mouth. “It’s far to Ve, Ve Pool? He could not come back?”

The silence was worse than their looks. I took a step forward, nearly losing all control and bawling, What is it, what’s happened, what do you know?”

“Ve Pool,” the first said in a hurry. “It’s a way, aye, but we tell’t him the healer’s house.” He took an audible breath. “If he made haste, an’ he did haste, we thought, he’d be back before dark. So. We waited.” He gave me a hangdog look. “’Till t’was too late to start.”

“So,” Skeag picked up, in a matching accent but a note or two deeper, “we were away up here the morn, soon as we could track.”

Forgive us, both faces said, for the delay, for leaving a stranger injured and alone in wilderness we at least know well. Then Skeag worked his shoulder, and for the first time I noticed the packs both of them bore.

“We brought what we thought handy. An’ right glad, to see ye up o’ y’rself, an’ this far to the fore.”

Oh, Mother, some distant voice was crying. O, Mother, O Dhe, O Lord of the River and all the other world-gods, let it not be true. Let it be a story, a misunderstanding, a mistake.

My lips were cold. I seemed to fumble the words. “But he—my brother.”

The first one took me lightly but firmly by the arm. Only when Two did not spark did I realise I was swaying on my feet.

“He went,” he said quietly, “to Ve Pool. He knew his way. An’ he’d find it, if he found us.”

“Then what—how—why hasn’t he—”

There was pity in that look, and something more.

“T’would be the will o’ the gate-watch—an’ mebbe t’lord
Stokka—that he’s not come back.”