But not for long — no horse could breathe properly lying flat on its side, not for any length of time, and the pressure of the mare’s stretched-tight abdomen on her diaphragm cut her air supply even further.
I looked to Etch, and he was already scuttling on his knees toward her belly and holding out his hand for the first waterskin.
“Wet her down,” he said, pouring the skin over her rounded side. “Don’t waste it.”
“To bring the fever down?” Terris asked, pulling the stopper from another skin.
Etch talked while he poured, as much for the mare’s sake as for Terris’s. “Don’t know why ropeweed brings a fever. Asked a vet once, he didn’t know either. He did say that what kills the horse is that sheet of stuff across the windpipe. Exudate, he called it. If we can keep her cool, she’ll get enough air to keep going while the ropeweed works its way out.”
“I thought there was no cure for ropeweed poisoning,” said Terris.
“That’s what I thought, too. But I saw a midwife once use anneth like that on a neighbor kid with diphtheria. Said she managed to save ’em once in a while, unless the fever got too high. Few years later this little stud colt of mine got into some ropeweed and in between cursing myself for it being my own damned fault, I tried it.”
He wadded the blankets around the mare’s belly and adjusted the folds to catch the water. “It seemed to me it wasn’t the fever that killed, at least not horses, it was the pressure on the breathing muscles. Actually it wasn’t me, it was my — my wife who had the idea of wetting him down like this.”
“And the colt lived?”
“Through the ropeweed. Broke his own fool neck the next year.”
“So what did the vet say? Did he report it back to the academy?”
“Ha! Told me I had to be wrong, it couldn’t’ve been ropeweed. That’s what he said. But I think, you know, he was scared of telling anyone...”
The men’s voices blurred. I sat back on my heels, the empty waterskin hanging like a clammy shroud between my hands. My bones turned to sand, my heart to smoke.
I was ready to give up, let her die. Not even fight to save her...
...the way I didn’t fight on the funeral mount, until it was too late...
I dropped the waterskin and buried my face between my knees, my hands clawing at the back of my head. The memory beat at me with leathery bloodbat wings, the reason I must never cry.
I thought to myself, shouting it through my mind, Remember Avi! Remember the way she held you. Remember how the dreams faded, until there was only her. Think of her now. Think of her needing you now. Think of the hardest knife-form you ever learned, with only a hair between a live blade and your skin. Think of the time you jumped halfway across that clearing — ’Kardith’s Leap,’ Derron still calls it...
I lifted my head. Etch and Terris were pouring the last of the water over the mare’s dappled hide. I watched her breathing, not normal yet, but slower and deeper. I realized with a start that it had been only been a moment that I curled up here, trapped in my own pain. Neither of them had taken any notice.
It’s remembering that’s made me crazy like this, all tears and no steel.
Then it must be as if I never remembered. Avi’s life depended on it. Avi’s life...and now what else?
Chapter 20
I dreamed, floating through uneasy shadows. Gradually, as if a mist were lifting, the images came clear...
Below me, the trail twisted downward into icy shadows, sloping along the eroded gully. I tripped and fell to my knees, shredding the leather of my stolen breeches, scrambled to my feet and forced myself to run, to not look back. Terror drove me like a whip. Every pebble, every withered stalk leapt up to trip me. I stumbled again. The makeshift pack jerked and slid across my shoulders. It tore open the scabs beneath my shirt and I felt the hot, answering blood down my sides, but no pain.
No pain, and yet I was screaming as I heaved myself to my feet and down the trail again. Screaming, cursing, anything but weeping, for never again must there be tears, no never again...
Then suddenly I was standing, panting, in a little flat space, powdery steppe dust beneath my feet. I saw palm cactus laden with fruit, and a jort beside the sink-well. The stitched felt drape swept aside and a man emerged — my stepfather, ruddy with health, not withered as the water plague had left him. He smiled at me, his eyes like sunlit honey...
One by one, my older brothers followed him from the jort. They crowded around me, touching their soft bearded cheeks to mine, lifting my pack from my bleeding back. Their fingers were cool and gentle. They stepped aside as my youngest brother approached, holding a swaddled baby.
My son.
I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak. A feeling, so deep I couldn’t tell it from pain, shook me to my roots.
My son, my son.
My eyes blurred over the curve of his cheek, the tiny perfect fingers lifted toward me. My breasts ached. I reached out my arms to him...
o0o
And then I was sitting up in my bedroll in our camp on the gravelly rise. Dawnlight flooded the eastern sky. My arms were crossed on my chest and my fingernails dug into the flesh of my arms, hard enough to draw blood. I drew the cold damp air into my lungs, one heaving breath after another. My cheeks were dry.
They are dead. They are all dead. The priests — Mother damn them — say dreams are omens. If that is so, then it must mean I will die soon and be with them.
But I had not stayed alive all these years to become a priest-ridden fool. Not now.
My fingers curled around the hilt of the long-knife, the knife I slept beside every night on the Ridge and every night since Pateros was killed. The knife that saved the gray mare’s life.
The dream means whatever I make it mean.
o0o
High above me in the ashleaf branches, a covey of songbats began their mating chant, twitter, twitter, click! SCREECH. If I weren’t awake already, I would be now. It took only a moment to scrub my teeth, run a comb through my hair, and pull on my boots. Moving silently through the camp, I doused the fire and set a pan of water to boil. I chewed on a piece of dried mutton as I walked to where the horses were tethered. The gray mare, on her feet, pricked her ears at me.
I hummed to her and stroked her neck. Her coat felt rough but cool. No more fever, no risk of lung-rot from lying down too long. She breathed softly through her nostrils, taking in my smell. The cut Etch had made in her windpipe was still partly open. Later, when the light was stronger, I would trim the anneth-sealed edges and stitch them together.
I saddled the brown gelding, who’d carried lightest, and strapped on my bedroll and saddle bags with enough food for three days. The brown was a nervy beast, head like a rat and about as much brains. He shuffled around, snorting as if he’d never seen a bridle before.
Behind me, Etch sat up, legs crossed, big hands resting on his knees. His boots, set neatly beside his bedroll, were upside down to keep little dark-crawling things from setting up housekeeping overnight. I couldn’t tell how long he’d watched me with dark, intense eyes.
I glanced up at the sky, bright blue along the eastern rim of hills. “You awake enough to hold the mare for me while I sew up that hole?”
He rolled to his feet, having slept dressed as we all did, and ran his hands over the shadow on his cheeks where the suppressant stuff the Laurean men use was wearing off. With his barrel chest and his hair all rumpled, he looked a little like one of those berry-bears from the Inland Sea forests. He’d look nicer with a beard, I thought.
“Give me a chance get something in my belly,” he said, “and I’ll do it myself.”
“She’s mine — ” I started to say and then bit my tongue. It wasn’t me that knew what to do for her last night. This was no raw boy to order around, this man Etch, and I owed him.
“You got any surgical supplies?”
I shook my head. “Just my sewing kit and silk thread. It’s what I’d use on myself.”
“I’ve got some curved needles that work real nice. I’ll show you how to use ’em and we’ll be done in half the time.”
A few minutes and some dried apples later, Etch unrolled his kit and showed me the steel needles, curved and straight, the scissors, one pair taper-pointed, the other blunt. All of them were wrapped in butter-soft leather to keep out the damp. I wondered how a man like this, who ran someone else’s stables for a living, could afford such fine metal.
“They were my...wife’s,” he said as he threaded two of the curved needles with silk and put them and one of the scissors in the hot water. “My late wife’s. From her mother. We’d hoped...our son would have used them.”
Wife...son... He spoke the words with an odd hesitation, as if he’d forgotten how to pronounce them. They hung in the air between us.
My bones ached wordlessly, for there were no healing words for me.
The water came to a boil. We watched the roiling surface and the white steam curling. Carefully Etch drained the pan into a second vessel to save the clean water and took out the scissors.
As I held the mare’s head, I watched how he worked in close to her, so close she couldn’t see him as a thing apart from her own body. I wanted to ask him about his son. The telling would be a terrible and healing thing. But then he would ask about mine.
Mother-of-us-all, no wonder you never answer me. Only last night I swore I would never again dream, I would never again remember. My promises were a sand-viper’s molted skin, a ghost shell hiding only their own emptiness.
But Etch knew nothing of my broken vows. He moved in rhythm with the mare’s breathing as he wet the hole with anesthetic disinfectant and snipped away the anneth-scarred edges. A little fresh blood flowed from the wound. She smelled it, snorted, tugged against my grasp.
Etch took one of the needles and held it with a pad of folded gauze. He turned his body so I could watch what he did. The needle curved through her living flesh, out again, the triple-weight silk pulling the clean edges together. Stitch, stitch, knot and tie off. The rhythm of his hands was like a spell.
“Your turn,” he said, deftly transferring his grip to the mare’s halter.
The end of the needle was slippery, even wrapped in gauze. The tip slid through the cut borders, a brief tug as the bulge of the eye and doubled thread passed through, then I looped it into a knot. Etch watched, letting me find the sense of it without comment. When I finished, the trimmed edges lay smooth against each other. A few months and new hair, white probably, would cover the scar.
When I looked up from the sutured cut, Etch had already turned away and was cleaning his needles and scissors, carefully replacing them in the kit. I patted the mare, who now looked thoroughly bored with the proceedings, and noticed Terris sitting up, watching.
His eyes shifted from me to the brown gelding, ready to travel. “Are you leaving us now?”
I scowled at him. “Wake up what’s left of your brains, will you? The mare can’t travel yet, and there’s things to do.”
“What things?” he asked, eyes sharp.
“Things I got to do.” I stumbled through my reasons, how I had to deliver the sealed messages even if I meant to go on with the search. “There’s a team of Rangers, friends of mine, that camp a couple of hours’ ride from here. They’ll take the packet to the fort for me.” I couldn’t bring myself to say that then I’d no longer be a Ranger.
“You think you can find us again in this?” Etch jerked one shoulder back at the thick forest leading northeast to the heart of the Ridge.
It was all I could do not to scream at him, You I could find in a sandstorm. It’s Avi I can’t find.
Terris ran his fingers through his thick black hair, getting longer now and falling in his eyes. “You’re right, Kardith. You must finish what you’ve promised.” Something in his quiet voice pierced me to my bones. I had expected relief that he would still have me as a teacher and guide. I had not expected compassion. But he, too, had left behind a life.
“We’ll go with you,” Terris said. Beyond him, Etch nodded.
For an instant, I pictured them standing at my side, lending me their strength as if they were my brothers. I felt cold and shivery, knowing I could never let myself take what they offered. I shook my head and muttered, “I have to do this alone.”
o0o
Darice and Meygrethin had set up a base camp their first year on foot patrol, a good three miles north of where they were posted. We’d passed the night and the ale skins here, the four of us, when Avi and I were on our way to a farther patrol. I remembered the place, hidden from the easy approaches, like a little cove in the shadowed outcropping of pink granite speckled with lichen and tendriled air-plant, and the little spring that never failed. It was like stepping back into another world, approaching their empty camp.
I spotted the rocky overhang and pulled the gelding to a halt. Smooth and quiet, I slid from his back and began circling the camp. I stopped to listen for all the sounds that should be there. I tested the air for any taint of blood or burning, leather or flesh. All seemed as it should be, the pungent forest smells, the coolness of the spring-fed dell. No spoor of deer, not this close to camp, nor of wolf either. I moved closer, a few gliding steps, then froze and listened again. Still nothing.
Now I saw the stones of the fire pit, placed so that any traveler chancing so close would think the formation natural. No sleep rolls, no packs of supplies, no bags of grain hanging from the nearest branches so the night scavengers couldn’t reach them.
But there, by the edge of the fire pit, a patch of moss scraped bare...
“Come out, Darice!” I called. “I see you!”
“Kardith!” Darice came rustling out of the bar-brushes behind me, tall and blond and hero-handsome. Grinning, he slapped my shoulder. On my other side, Meygrethin rose up from a mass of giant ferns. Her movements were spare and focused. She smiled back at me, that quick shy smile of hers.
“What happened in Laureal City...” Darice said.
“...any news?” Meygrethin murmured, meaning help for Avi.
“Too much, none of it good.” Straight and hard, one Ranger to another, I told them how Pateros had died.
“In Montborne’s arms...” Darice said, as if looking for someone to blame.
“Gods.” Blinking hard, Mey ran her fingers through her hair. She almost never spoke on her own.
Darice put his arms around her. Like me, they had taken their oaths at Pateros’s hands. Seeing them like that, I realized that more than time stood between me and that day in the plaza. There was Esmelda and Montborne, the goons and the ropeweed, Etch...and Terris. I was no longer a Ranger, first and only. I didn’t know what I was. But these people were still my friends.
Darice roused first. “Rest now, some coffee if you want it,” he said to me. “I’ll bring...” He tipped his head toward the brown gelding.
“Hunh!” I snorted, following Meygrethin down into the camp. “You could leave him out there, for all I care, that nitbrain disguised as a horse, just so my gear’s safe!”
A few minutes later, they had a pocket-sized fire started in the stone pit. I inhaled the savory, precious odor of coffee.
Everyone thought they were lovers, gorgeous Darice and Meygrethin — flat-faced, flat-chested, hardly speaking except to finish his trailed-off sentences. But they were something else, just as Avi and I were something else. I knew that now.
I also knew I must go on with this search, this thing I was caught up in, dreams and all.
We sipped the coffee, scalding on the tongue, they from their carved sheep’s-horn cups and me from mine. The warmth spread outward from my stomach and then faded. No one said anything. I wiped out my cup with bar-brush leaves and stowed it with my other gear. Then I took out the packet of papers and handed it to Meygrethin. She chewed her lower lip as she read the inscription, then glanced at Darice and shook her head.
I stood up and shrugged out of my Ranger’s vest. The leather was worn along the sea
ms and soft with the heat of my body, but that would soon pass. The pockets were empty. I’d taken out everything I had a right to last night. I folded it and put it down on the mossy ground in front of me. I put the packet on top of it.
Meygrethin stared at me, her bark-brown eyes wide. Darice’s were narrow and tight. “No,” he said. “The papers, all right, we know you’ve got to go after Avi, we know...but not...”
“Not,” said Meygrethin, “leave the Rangers.”
“I could die,” I pointed out.
She shook her head. “Not the same.”
“Yes, it is,” I said, but not in the way she meant.
There was a pause, a moment of impasse. Darice got up, arms folded over his chest, hands shoved in his armpits. He paced a few feet from where we were sitting.
“I need your help!” I cried. “If you won’t give it, I might as well throw these in the fire right now and to hell with Derron and the company!”
I snatched up the packet, but I wasn’t at all sure I could destroy it. I reminded myself it came from Montborne, it could have things in it I would be glad to burn. But it was a thing of trust, not from Montborne, but from Pateros. From Laurea.
I remembered the old shepherd’s voice, clear and strong through the fever-soothing rain: “Safe, you’re safe in Laurea.” And all these years I’d been the one to make Laurea safe. That was why I had to finish this final mission. Terris had seen it rightly.
Darice took the packet from me, as if he were afraid I’d make good on my threat. “We’ll bargain, then. We’ll carry the papers to Derron, if you...”
“Keep the vest,” added Meygrethin.
I hesitated. “What will you tell him?”
Darice shrugged. I’d heard him spout the most unbelievable addle-witted nonsense when he didn’t want to lie outright, with Meygrethin acting like she understood every word. And he was right, Derron would believe what he needed to believe. After all, he’d sent me clear to Laureal City to keep me safe from Montborne’s threat of handing. I’d been so angry when I left, I didn’t see it.
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