by Nancy Kress
She flung back her head and squeezed her eyes tightly shut, trying to pull back her hand, but it would not come. Her whole body screamed to move forward into the circle, and no lashing of her will would make it draw back. Kirila cried out despairingly, and suddenly there rose in front of her the bannered vision of the Tents of Omnium, brave with tapestries and pennants and singing color, firmly pegged to a grassy, sunlit plain. She cried out again, and tore her hand free from the circle.
There was a deafening screech, like the scream of furious half-baked black birds swarming from a steaming pie, and then Kirila was tumbling through primal darkness, screeches and wailing palpable entities all around her, until she fell bruised into the gray morning forest beyond Rhuor, holding her scorched left hand in her right and weeping as if her very soul were in the burned and blistering fingers.
Chessie crouched beside her until she stopped sobbing, which took only a few moments. Her face became blank and gray, and she looked around her without curiosity, the tears already dry on her calm cheeks.
“What happened?” she quietly asked.
Chessie blinked, unbelieving. “I was going to ask you!”
Kirila looked around again with the same calm blankness. Beyond them Rhuor lay quiet and orderly in morning mist. A farmer was silently hitching a cud-chewing ox to a wagon, and a little boy threw grain to the hens with slow, dreamy circles of his small arm. Smoke curled lazily from the stone chimney of Polly Stark’s neat, thatched-roof cottage.
“Kirila,” Chessie said urgently, “we can’t go back in. There’s a sort of invisible barrier around the whole clearing and we can’t get past it anymore at all. At least,” he added with reluctant honesty, “I can’t.”
She said nothing, watching the village a moment longer, and then turned her head indifferently toward the forest. Gray, bare trees rose from gray grass. Lying at her feet was a small knife, faintly familiar, which she picked up and turned over and over. Dull bits of rock were incomprehensibly set in an iron-colored hilt.
“I got it last night,” Chessie said, watching her, “when everyone was away from the village. It was in your room.”
Kirila nodded quietly, then lay the dagger back on the grey grass and looked at nothing, her face calm and blank.
A growing panic seeped through Chessie. He took a few steps along the forest path, making a great show of prancing away; Kirila didn’t follow. He laid his head in her lap, feeling like a bad imitation of a unicorn; she neither pushed him away nor reached toward him. He was tempted to bite her arm to arouse her, but after some thought, decided against this, and eventually concluded that what was needed was an unarguable show of authority.
“Come on,” he commanded sternly. “Follow me,” and was more than a little surprised when she did. He wondered if perhaps he could have been a military king, like Arthur, and stirred the depths of men’s loyal souls as he rode before them into battle.
He led her along the path to his thicket, glancing back every few seconds to make sure she was following. In the deep recesses of the tangled thicket, he had assembled an amazing jumble of objects, all stowed under a waterproof tarp, and now he drapped them out one by one and laid them at Kirila’s feet. There were a thick blanket, a muddy bottle of wine tightly corked, a metal pot, some pieces of flint, a lot of badly tangled string, one of Polly Stark’s nightgowns from off her clothesline, two towels, a comb with three teeth missing, a pewter spoon, several bits of soap with tooth marks around the edges, half of a wooden rake, some well-chewed bones, a fired clay cup in which a spider had spun a temporary web, and a rolling pin.
“All stolen,” Chessie said with satisfaction. “One of my finest sleight-of-paw performances. I wish I could have gotten a bow and some arrows, but there just wasn’t the chance. Still, you can make snares.”
Kilira gazed indifferently at the untidy pile.
“Pack it up,” Chessie ordered, “And let’s get started.” He danced impatiently, bristling with leadership.
“All except the rake,” he added as an afterthought. Kirila packed it all up, her movements automatic and detached in the detached, black-and-white forest.
He led her in a wide circle around Rhuor, and then west, making for that town Polly Stark had once mentioned, where they might be able to buy a horse. Kirila followed him quietly, speaking only when asked a factual question, carrying out Chessie’s orders for setting up camp, fashioning snares from the tangled string, soaking her charred fingers in cold water, all with neither mistake nor interest. Over the campfire Chessie kept darting little sideways looks at her still, gray face.
The following day was much the same.
On the third day, after much hard thinking in which his burnt-sugar eyes were almost lost in thoughtful ridges of purple fur, much sighing and shaking of head and tail, much subvocal muttering that kept the local wildlife uneasy for miles along the forest trail, Chessie launched his campaign.
He walked backward ahead of Kirila, facing her, and as they traveled he chanted heroic epics, full of fierce giants and sword-edged battles and colorful heroes with six-syllable names that bristled with prickly letters like “k” and “g.” He told elaborate jokes and outrageous riddles that made full use of assonance, alliteration, rhymes, metaphors, similes, hyperbole, onomatopoeia, synecdoche, and off-color puns. He did skits—the one of St. Agnes developing an allergy to sacred lambs was especially good—and imitations of prominent local kings. He cavorted like a puppy (which he had never been), even once achieving a frantic double back-somersault. He recited lists of the musical names of wild flowers. He chanted of lions and unicorns and wigyns. He sang tender ballads of trysting lovers, mythical beasts all alive-o, and parfait gentle knights, at least one of whom was, as a direct consequence of all that gentleness, mercilessly seduced and abandoned by a heartless fairy. Whatever was colorful or robust or vital, whatever would stir the heart or the eye or the foot (he also barked military marches in 4/4 time), Chessie laid out in front of Kirila, as the unknown relatives of his alien canine body laid ducks and quail at the feet of those who tamed their loyal hearts.
Kirila let it all wash over her. But around noon she suddenly cried out, “But they were kind and honest people!”
“Yes,” Chessie agreed, and began a spirited ballad about an exiled prince and his dastardly half-brother who had seized the throne. He was presently steering by the theory that offenses against any royalty are always resented by other royalty. Resentment would be a beginning; he would settle for resentment. His throat was beginning to feel husky. Two hours later Kirila said, “They did have something—some link to something more. It was real!”
Chessie interrupted his rendition of “The Siege of Dunmartin” long enough to say, “Real but fatal,” before chanting hoarsely on, marking time on the choruses by swishing his tail.
They made camp under a winter sky ostentatious with glittering stars. Chessie was explaining, in a whisper one degree moved from laryngitis, the bizarre and little-known sexual rituals of the Themitral dragon, when Kirila said quietly, gazing into the fire with calm eyes, “There was more real magic—living, human magic—at the Quirkian Hold, Chessie, than there was at Rhuor.” Chessie gave a long, grateful sigh, put his head in Kirila’s lap, and instantly fell asleep, exhausted.
●●●
She said nothing the whole next day, which they spent crossing a trackless grassy plain, moving west. But Chessie noticed that she looked around her a little more, with a faint puzzlement and a sort of tentative possessiveness, like a man revisiting a childhood city. Twice she smiled when Chessie sang especially funny ballads, and once absently hummed a few bars of “Bonny Mary Hawley,” half a tone flat.
Little by little, color was slowly leaking back into her world. The nightly campfire became sepia, then russet, then burgundy, and finally scarlet. The early winter plants, holly and evergreen and mistletoe, stopped looking like dried versions of themselves that stood on somebody’s undusted hall table, and began to look real. The sunny days
felt warm on Kirila’s bare head, and the cold nights chilled her hands and feet. Small birds resumed individual identities: clowning rooks and belligerent crimson cardinals and sly mockingbirds like petty con men who can’t get sufficiently organized to pull off a really big heist.
Chessie finished his whole repertoire, and started all over.
Once, as they were looking for a likely place to make camp, a falcon soared overhead. Kirila stiffened and her face became gray.
“Look what I found in your pack last night,” Chessie said. He looked up at her steadily, her dagger in his teeth. He had been expecting this.
Kirila took it mechanically, turning it slowly over and over in her hands. One of the pewter pebbles was missing from the gray iron hilt.
“It was only a merlin, anyway!” Chessie said desperately. His voice quivered. She looked up at the circling bird, and suddenly, all at once, she saw that he was right. It was only a merlin—a muddy-footed brown merlin barely out of pert pendicular markings, listlessly searching for a slow or careless mouse for supper. She looked back at the dagger and it sparkled a little in the light of the setting sun, the gleaming gold set with rubies and emeralds and one empty, gentle-sloped depression, like a placid lake where a volcano once erupted long ago. She laughed softly and stuck the dagger in her belt.
●●●
That night Kirila freed her hair from its tight bun and combed it loose with Chessie’s stolen comb. The two of them sang around the fire, harmonizing in as many as four unintentional keys on the same drawn-out note, and she taught Chessie the names of several of the constellations turning slowly through the sky overhead. Neither of them considered the fact that the hunting merlin might just as easily have happened to have been a jer-falcon—at least, they did not consider it aloud. But Kirila thought of it, just once, and cut herself on the image. It seemed to have an unexpected sharpness. like a blade concealed in her mind, and to be made of dismayingly durable material.
Twelve
“I think it’s a bad idea,” Chessie said stubbornly. “I said so before and I’ll say so again. It’s a bad idea.”
“I know you said so before! I heard you,” Kirila replied. “Everything along the road for the last mile heard you.”
She was washing her hair beside the road they had stumbled across a day earlier. It was a real road, rutted with wagon tracks, not just a forest foot trail. The weather was too cold for hair washing; it was, in fact, the last few days before the winter rains began, and the wind from the west was heavy with the wet smell of the coming storms. Kirila had made a fire and heated water, and she was trying to keep the water at a suitable temperature, avoid getting soap in her eyes, and hurry the shampoo along before the sun regretted its feeble winter appearance and retired behind the long gray clouds.
“We should wait until we get to Castle Reyndak,” Chessie insisted. “From what that farmer said yesterday, what can it be—three, four miles beyond the Inn? You don’t know who is likely to be at an Inn as isolated as this one.”
“You don’t know who’s likely to be at the Castle, either. And I don’t want to walk three or four more miles if it’s not necessary, if there’s a chance of buying a horse at the Inn.”
“But I told you, Kirila—the place looks dangerous. And it’s right on the river—probably full of sailors. Waterfront bars are always dangerous. You’re just not being reasonable.”
Lately she had begun to puzzle him. The gray, detached stillness was gone from her, and she was again eager and interested. It was true that at times she fell into silent reveries and a new brooding thoughtfulness appeared on her face, and at first this had alarmed him and he had held his program of ballads and chants in constant readiness, moving his lips in silent rehearsal. Covert observation, however, had convinced him that she always came out of these sessions by herself, and he had decided that they were new but not dangerous, and that she had them under some sort of control.
But then the periods of thinking had begun to alternate with a feverish reckless bravado, during which she bragged about the warriors—she barely restrained herself from saying “other warriors”— in her family who had been able to triumph over various physical and spiritual risks. One, for instance, a certain Corial Len who was a great-uncle by marriage, had craftily avoided an enslaving romantic entanglement with a Witch while simultaneously learning all her spells, and had used them to start a successful chainmail-and-used-armour shop during the Sixty Years’ War.
Now Kirila opened one eye, peering at Chessie from under soap-slippery hair.
“What’s bothering you lately, anyway? You never seemed so concerned about my being in danger before!”
“You haven’t been in any!” He thought this over a moment. “Physical danger, I mean. And that’s a rough-looking place—you haven’t seen it yet, Kirila. And you are a woman. And it doesn’t seem necessary.”
“Ah, but they won’t know that. And it is, in my opinion. And you only did in the dark, from the outside on one brief scouting trip.” They had quite suddenly developed this ability to carry on several simultaneous conversations and understand each other in all of them, but neither noticed it. “And I am armed.”
“Barely.”
“Adequately!”
She finished soaping her hair and dumped the rinse water over it. The water had gotten too hot while she and Chessie argued, and Kirila shrieked and cursed and danced on one foot while Chessie blandly offered to teach her a few new oaths if she planned on shampooing often. After the long red hair was rinsed, she braided it tightly and tied the wet braids on the top of her head, covering them with a sort of laborer’s cap she had made from a corner of her gray wool cloak.
“If you think that makes you look like a boy—”
“Wait. I’m not done.” Tying her long divided skirt around each ankle with pieces of the stolen string, she shoved the bunchy fabric into her boot tops so that the string didn’t show. A rancid-smelling mixture of boiled walnut shells, which had been simmering on the fire and discoloring their only cup, she smeared on her face and neck, after cautiously testing its temperature with the tip of one finger. The rest of the cloak had been torn and tied to make a rough, baggy tunic, and this she pulled over her head and left unbelted. It tented over her from neck to knees. Pulling the makeshift cap low over her forehead and ears, she adjusted her dagger, sticking it into the belt she wore under the tunic so that it was accessible through a rent in the gray fabric. She clenched her fists, the left one discolored with burn scars and both of them with dirty, torn fingernails. Finished, Kirila scowled forbiddingly at Chessie.
“There. Now do I look like a boy?”
Chessie walked slowly all around her. “Not,” he said fastidiously, “one I’d like in my inn.”
“Well, that’s good. You said it was a rough place.”
“Kirila, you don’t sound like a boy. Not even a young one. You flutter and gush and trill.”
“I do not!” she cried, stung.
“Well, no,” he admitted, “you don’t. But you don’t sound like a boy, either.”
“How’s this?” she asked, dropping her voice two octaves and barking gruffly. It tickled her throat and she broke out coughing.
“Now you sound like a bullfrog with pneumonia.”
Eventually she achieved a voice that Chessie said might fool exceptionally dim people who had been away from any human contact for two years and who never heard her speak more than five consecutive words, and they started out for the inn.
Kirila had been picturing an inn such as stood a few miles from Castle Kiril, on the great road that meandered south through increasingly populated kingdoms and duchies and fiefs until it reached the sea. That inn was a solid and mellow haven built of warm light-colored stone, with broad wings encircling the courtyard. On summer nights, minstrels played in the court, competing with the crickets. But this small northern inn was a different matter; she wouldn’t have recognized it as an inn at all if Chessie hadn’t slunk around the night
before and overheard its identity. It consisted of one low building of rough-hewn logs, from which rose a field-stone chimney with several chinks missing. To one side stood an open-sided shed in which a few horses stamped listlessly on dirty straw, to keep warm. In back a rotting dock extended into the river, which was broader and deeper than at the bank near Rhuor where Chessie had dragged Kirila from the water.
They still had not learned the river’s name.
“I’m surprised there’s a need for an inn here at all,” she said, eyeing the weed-grown wagon track that was the only visible road. It climbed a wooded hill beyond the inn and disappeared. “There can’t be many travelers coming this way.”
“The custom probably comes by water.”
“From those few hamlets and little ox-farms upriver?”
“No, from downriver.”
Kirila squinted out over the dark smooth water. “But why would they come here, against the current? There’s nothing here.”
“Precisely. Smugglers prefer to go where there’s nothing; it greatly simplifies their lives.”
“Smugglers?” She looked with interest at the river. Malfeasance at Castle Kiril had consisted of undramatic disputes over cornfield boundaries and sales of oxen. “What do you suppose they smuggle?”
“How should I know? Silver plate, stolen jewelry, spear-running, kidnapped infant princes—it could be anything. Kirila, I really think we should leave. This could be dangerous. And stop swaggering like that; remember your fourth cousin Leofort died in that foolhardy border raid.”
She ignored him, studying the horses huddled under the rickety shed. There were a roan so sway-backed he looked like an inverted camel, a mare the color of dead leaves, and an ancient gray pony with burrs in his tangled mane.
“That mare doesn’t look too bad,” she said thoughtfully, stifling a flash of regret for the young charger left in the Quirkian Hold. “She’s not built for speed, but her chest looks sound and strong. What do you think, Chessie?”