Perhaps it was no more than a spark of his imagination, seeing her face streaked with blood and dirt, hearing her pulse hammering through his own chest. Seeing her turn toward him for the briefest instant, as if sensing his presence.
He blinked, all traces of the image gone. Kardith was staring at him, the hand holding the comb paused above her head. He made an apologetic gesture. “I was thinking of Avi, wondering what she’s like now. I was only nine when she left. I remember her the way a child remembers, but it’s my real sister — the woman she’s become now — that I’m going after.”
“I misjudged you, then.” Kardith put down her comb. “I thought you just wanted to get out from under your bitch mother.”
Terricel flinched as if she’d struck him. “As if I didn’t care what happened to Avi! As if...as if...”
He couldn’t go on. The truth was, he thought savagely, she was right. For all his fine words, Aviyya was no more than a boyhood memory and a vision he could just as well have invented, like the stories about his father. The truth was, all his life he’d been looking for something that was his, truly his, and wherever he’d looked he’d found Esmelda’s shadow. Now, when he could stand it no longer, when Gaylinn was gone and Laureal City a crucible, his academic career, whatever there was of it in the first place, finished, now he’d finally found something Esmelda wouldn’t do, a place she couldn’t go. It could be Avi or anyone, alive or dead. What difference did it make if it got him out of her clutches?
It makes a difference. Avi is alive, and there is a bond between us....
“If I am running away,” he said slowly, “or if I don’t know what the hell it is I want, isn’t it better I’m trying to find Avi, rather than getting into drunken fights at The Elk Pass every night? Whatever’s happened to her, whatever she’s become, she’s still my sister. There are ways we understand each other, things we’ve been through together. Don’t you see? No one else can know what it was like, growing up with Esme. Or why Avi had to leave, why I — why I have to leave.”
“That’s something Avi would’ve said.” Kardith’s amber eyes had gone dark and opaque. “If you didn’t love her, too, I would hate you for being so like her.”
Chapter 16
Terricel sat bolt upright, gasping and shivering. His dreams, uneasy visions of figures mounted on black horses and Esmelda facing Montborne across a table on which sat a silver bowl, vanished instantly. Kardith stood over him, holding the bedcovers that she’d just yanked off.
“Don’t wear your clean shirt,” she said, and left him to wash, change back into his traveling clothes, and repack in the dark.
He swung his legs over the side of the cot and tried to stand. White lightning shot through his knees. His hip joints seemed locked in a vise. But he’d be corroded from here to hell before he’d let Kardith find him sitting in his underwear, hunched over like a helpless old man. His breath caught in his throat, but he managed to get to his feet and straighten up. Then, gritting his teeth and grunting with effort, he pulled on his pants.
He found her at the entrance to the kitchen, her saddlebags slung across her shoulder. She was sipping coffee and discussing weather conditions with the innkeep. From the brightly lit kitchen came the clatter of pans and the aroma of baking bread. He thought of Annelys’s new loaves, warm and fragrant, and his stomach rumbled hopefully.
“Pay the woman,” Kardith said.
Terricel dug in his money belt for the modest sum the innkeep requested.
“What about breakfast?” Terricel asked.
“I’ve eaten, thank you.” She turned and strode through the empty common room and out the front door.
Terricel followed, feeling as if his wits as well as his tongue were wrapped in cotton batting. It was barely light enough in the yard to see his breath as a whitish plume. The stableboy, clear-eyed and smiling, led out the saddled horses.
Terricel’s stomach went clammy at the prospect of sitting on anything, let alone a horse. He knew that if he said anything, she’d use it as an excuse to go on without him. He fumbled with the straps to secure his travel pack behind the saddle. And it would be my own damned fault.
Terricel’s muscles twinged and ached as he settled himself on the horse’s back and adjusted his feet in the stirrups.
The sorrel gelding arched his neck and pranced. Disgustingly Cheerful, that’s what I should call you.
As they proceeded along the dirt road, the sky grew lighter. Twitterbats and morning crickets whirred and chirped. Ground squirrels chattered from the underbrush. The gelding settled into a reaching walk, head swinging from side to side as if marking musical time. The gentle movement loosened Terricel’s legs and back. He couldn’t decide if his buttocks had gone numb or Kardith’s liniment had worked some magic, and he didn’t care. Things were not as bad as they could have been. For the moment.
Terricel’s spirits lifted and he looked around with new interest at the grassy valley that rose gently into another set of hills. As far as he could see, they were alone on the road.
Kardith reached into her saddlebags, drew out a packet wrapped in oiled cloth and handed it to him. Inside he found two buns, steaming hot and stuffed with cheese and spicy real-meat sausage, a large green apple, and a glass bottle of coffee. Numbly, he stared at the food and then back at Kardith.
“Did you think I’d make you go all morning without breakfast?” She laughed out loud. “Ay Mother, you did!”
Smiling despite himself, Terricel tore into the first bun. The tangy melted cheese swirled over his tongue. The second bun he ate more slowly, along with the coffee, followed by the apple, which he chewed right down to the seeds. He threw them along the trail, hoping one of them might germinate. It would be nice to ride by here some day and see a tree he’d planted. He took a deep breath and arched his back, hearing the joints of his spine crackle. The air was crisp and scented with dew-wet grass.
“I may have been half-asleep when I came down,” he said, “but I didn’t see any sign of the man on the black horse.”
“Neither did I,” Kardith said. “And anyway, he couldn’t go on pretending to be an innocent traveler once we reach Kratera Ridge.”
“Why? Aren’t there people who travel through there?”
She shook her head. “And nobody lives there, either. We Rangers mostly keep the northers from breaking through, but even they aren’t crazy enough to lay claim to the Ridge.”
“I wonder why not. They’re always after new territory. At least, that’s what we were always told in Laureal City. Is the Ridge barren, then?”
“Barren? No. It’s not farming country, true. There could be hunting and woods-farming, except there’s something... Not hostile, just not... I don’t know. I never cared — it was enough to be a Ranger and alive after the Brassa mess. I had better things to do than worry about seeing things out of the back of my eyes.”
“Seeing what sort of things?”
Kardith tightened in her saddle, sending the gray mare into a nervous jig-trot. “Places that aren’t quite...” She laid one hand on the mare’s neck and quieted her down. “Never mind about the Ridge. It’s just the sunlight playing tricks, that’s all.”
Terricel did not think that was all, but he looked down at the braided leather reins in his hands and kept quiet.
“You think I’m bats, don’t you?” Kardith said with sudden heat. “Bats-crazy Ranger, off on a fool’s chase, spookier than a barnfowl in a kennel? And now I’m seein’ things in the woods? That’s what you think, isn’t it?”
“I think you love Avi enough to make a fool of yourself if it’ll save her.”
Kardith glared at him with eyes gone white and lips compressed into a tight, unreadable line. She pulled the mare to a halt and swung down. “Now we run.”
“Run?” Terricel stared at her, half-disbelieving.
She gave him a withering look, took hold of the mare’s hackamore, and started jogging, the mare trotting beside her.
Terricel hesitated
for an instant. Then he kicked his feet free from the stirrups, jumped down, and scrambled after her. Scrambled because the road, which had seemed so smooth from horseback, was strewn with stones, twigs, and erosion runnels. He tripped, stumbled, kicked himself, swore and tripped again, but somehow he kept up.
The gelding ignored his antics and bobbed along contentedly behind the gray mare. Terricel’s initial burst of energy faded and his breakfast sat like a lump in his stomach. Sweating and panting, he noticed Kardith holding on to the mare’s stirrup. He grabbed on to his own and found that it steadied him. It did nothing, however, for the fiery pain that crept into his lungs and leg muscles. He tried to relax as he ran but every pounding step sent new spasms through his diaphragm. He grabbed the stirrup with both hands and leaned his weight on it. The catch in his side eased, but he couldn’t stay long in that position without tripping over his own feet.
How long were they going to run? Ahead of him, Kardith kept the same relentless pace with no sign of flagging. Was she made of iron? He clenched his teeth, his breath hissing between them, and swore he’d fall over dead before he asked her to slow down for him.
“How are your feet?” Kardith’s voice jolted him out of his thoughts. He hadn’t noticed her drop back to run beside him.
“My what?”
“Any blisters?” The Ranger’s cheeks were flushed, her coppery curls slicked to her skull.
He stared at her reddened, sweaty face. “I don’t...think so... Not sure...yet.”
“Good!”
“I didn’t think...after yesterday...there was...any...new place...to hurt...but...I was...wrong.”
“Nothin’ wrong...with your sense...of humor.”
Terricel kept running. Although it seemed they ran for hours, in reality it was only for a half-hour at a time, alternated with riding. It didn’t take too many repetitions before he learned to settle into an even pace, his shoulders relaxed and his knees taking much of the jarring shock. His thighs and chest would ache and burn each time, but he knew it wouldn’t last forever. And he understood, without having to ask, the point of constantly changing the way he used his muscles. Running was a very different activity from riding, and he couldn’t know which he’d need once he got to the Ridge.
o0o
They slept that night at another inn, smaller and emptier than the first. Although there was no sign of the man on the black horse, they avoided the public areas. In their single room, Terricel ate a surprising amount of the unsalted bean and potato stew before applying Kardith’s liniment to an entirely new set of sore muscles and falling into a dreamless sleep.
The next morning made Terricel’s previous agonies seem like mere twinges. Somehow he managed to climb on his horse without screaming. They left the main road, which swung south toward Haycarp, and took the smaller, northeastern fork. They passed that night in the barn of a small farmstead. Here Kardith bargained and Terricel paid for a sack of coarse flour, some salt-cured mutton, and additional grain for the horses. The farmer, looking pleased to have a little unexpected cash, added a loaf of stale bread and a double handful of last year’s dried apples.
They led their mounts into the snug-walled barn and Kardith turned on her pocket-sized battery lamp. A sturdy horse, little bigger than a pony, and two milk-sheep stood tethered along the far wall, contentedly chewing. The air was warm with the heat of their bodies and sweet with the smell of alfalfa hay. With a sigh, Terricel threw himself on a pile of bedding straw.
“No matter how tired you are, you always take care of your horse first,” Kardith said sternly. “And since you have so much of your misspent youth to make up for, you can do both of them.”
Biting back a curse, Terricel heaved himself to his feet and in a few moments was deep in learning how to take off the horses’ gear, pick out their hooves for stones, and check for minor injuries. The gray mare snorted and tossed her head as he slipped off her hackamore.
“Why do you use this thing instead of a regular bridle?” he asked Kardith.
Kardith picked up a handful of straw and began plaiting it into a thick strand. “See the scars around her mouth?” she said without looking up.
Terricel saw the mare, her ears pinned back along her lathered neck, her eyes white-rimmed. Ropy, red-streaked foam hung in threads from the shanks of the steel bit. He heard a man’s rough voice cursing as he yanked on the reins. Whip leather cracked the air like a split of lightning. The bright smell of the mare’s blood mingled with the stench of her terror.
Quickly Terricel thrust the images from his mind. The gray mare was watching him, nostrils wide as goblets. He murmured to her as he had to Etch’s mare and held out a handful of the dried apples. She sniffed his open palm suspiciously, her ears twitching. Then she gathered up the fruit in a single mouthful. Her lips were soft and nimble against his skin. He patted her neck and laughed when she nuzzled his chest for more.
Kardith shoved the plaited straw into his hands. “This is called a wisp,” she said. “You use it to rub your horse down. Like this — ” She grabbed his hands and demonstrated with a grip powerful enough to make him wince. “Hard! It helps both circulation and digestion.”
“Mine,” he muttered, “or the horse’s?” But he bent to the task with a will, leaning all his weight into each stroke until his arms and shoulders ached as much as his legs.
o0o
Over the next days, Terricel began to adjust to long periods of riding, until he no longer felt uncomfortable in the saddle. The road dwindled into a trail, snaking up through steepening hills. What farms they passed looked poor, the pastures dry and rocky. For long distances they rode or walked over terrain too rugged for a trot. Scrub gave way to scraggly groves of softwood-ash and willow, weedy marginal trees, and finally to forest.
As long as they’d been passing farms and pastures, the land had looked familiar to Terricel. He’d traveled through similar country on picnics with friends or visiting Gaylinn’s family in Raimuth, in the fertile valley along the Vision River. But the woods were another experience entirely, something almost alien. The trees and underbrush vibrated with colors he’d never seen before, hues of green so deep they looked almost blue. The air was cool and tangy with the odors of wild herbs, fungi and years of dense, moldering debris.
The trail, winding up hillsides and down clefts where tiny swift streams bit deep through the sandstone, often seemed to Terricel to be little more than a product of Kardith’s imagination. As the gelding slipped and scrambled, Terricel developed new skills in the saddle.
Kardith pointed out the signs of animal and human traffic, dangers from fire and mud slide. She told Terricel about the medicinal uses of rosemarie, bat-bane and feverfew, the deadly ropeweed that could kill a man in only a few minutes, the soapy, cleansing root of the corrisenth, the edible greens and tubers. Gradually Terricel began to recognize some of the things she showed him.
Kardith nodded her approval of his selection of a campsite, a fairly level clearing on top of a little rise, yet surrounded by thick, low bar-brushes to give shelter from wind, with stones and dry wood for a fire. He unpacked the horses, watered them from the creek that rushed through the gully to the west, and spread out grain for them on their saddle blankets.
“Leave the tent,” she said. “It’s mild enough, and you should get used to the feel of the forest at night. Let’s see your fire.” She watched him build it as she’d described earlier, then rearranged the whole thing and proceeded to cook dinner.
Terricel sat down and pulled off his boots, inspecting them for wear. “Tell me,” he said, “do I stand any chance at all?”
“Chance, he asks? Hunh!”
“So I’ve learned how to unsaddle a horse and to pick a site for tonight. That doesn’t mean I know what I need to.” He put the boots back on.
Kardith handed him a plate of panbread laced with
salt-mutton. “Want to know what I think? What I think doesn’t matter. You want to go running back home? Fine. There’s the tr
ail. You want to find Avi? I’ll teach you what I can. Like I said, what I think doesn’t matter.”
“I had no idea how much I didn’t know.”
One corner of her mouth twisted upward. “That’s half of what you’ve got in your favor.”
“What’s the other half?”
She shook her head. “You don’t have another half. Not yet, anyway.”
Chapter 17
Nothing, there was nothing. None of the normal night noises Terricel had learned to listen for — no high-voiced twitterbats, no moonflies, no small creatures grubbing about in the undergrowth. He lay motionless in his sleeproll, straining for a trace of whatever jarred him from sleep. Above him, outlined by the starkly silhouetted branches, Harth’s twin moons floated serenely in a haze of their own milky light.
Yet something had woken him, perhaps the unnatural silence. He lifted his head for a better look. Then he froze as his ears caught a hushed crinkle of dry leaves underfoot.
A whispered voice, male and harsh, cut through the darkness. “...both asleep...”
Terricel slowly lowered his head and tried to think — anyone with honest intentions would have hailed the camp openly. What should he do?
A weapon, he needed a weapon! His single-edged utility knife was stowed in his travel pack with the rest of his gear, for all the good it would do him. Yet he had to take some action. What action? Leap up and confront the intruder with his bare hands?
“It’s the boy we’re after,” said a different voice. There were at least two of them, then.
“Better take the Ranger out first.”
Kardith! Terricel’s eyes darted to the spot where she’d laid out her sleeproll. He could just make out a long, rounded form. It looked natural enough, but he sensed it was only wadded blankets. Kardith herself was somewhere close, waiting and watching.
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