by Gayle Greeno
Fastening her trousers, snugging her belt in a notch, she saw Cloud materialize at her feet, insolently kicking dirt over the urine-soaked patch of earth.
“I saw you. Vesey saw you.”
Forcing her mind not to respond, she skirted around the ghatt and trudged back to the placid, tapped Towbin on the shoulder since he studiously stared the other way, and headed toward Lokka. The yearning to have Khar by her side slashed sharp as any knife-wound, and she banished the thought from her mind. Why wish her fate on the ghatta?
The voice lanced her mind. “No, Doyce. Frankly, I doubt that you’ll ever see her again. Too bad for you, of course, and too bad for me-I’d have dearly loved watching Evelien dissecting the bond that you two have made. You should see her with her scalpel and probe in hand, the triumph of discovery glowing in her eyes when she dissects a new circuiting connection.”
Her head jerked as if slapped, and she could feel the blood draining from her face in panic at the casual skill with which he probed her thoughts. The misshapen medallion in her pocket seemed to burn like molten metal through the fabric to brand her hip, then cooled as icy cold as she felt.
“Later, Doyce, later. I’ll reclaim that which is rightfully mine later, never fear.”
Towbin shared a grimace of sympathy as he gave her a leg into the saddle, then lashed her feet together again.
The air hung heavy and damp with chill, the sky slate gray with unshed, wet snow. She could smell it on the air. Early in the season for it, but not impossible, not this far north. The very highest peaks on the next ridge already wore a pristine shoulder cape of white on the sheltered sides. It might or might not linger long, but it signified the first brief kiss of winter, tucking the earth to sleep, a fitting shroud for her as well.
The granite ridge they’d started across was barren except for lichen and occasional stunted, twisted spruce with a look of wind-whipped misery, their needles scant and tattered from continual battering against the bare rocks by mountain winds, an eternity of flagellation with no penance in sight. Again she thought of the Erakwa, of the gantlet, of how they could blend with the very earth, even here. How they seldom revealed themselves and yet always stayed abreast of the horses, hidden yet ranged all around them, their tireless, coppery legs pumping away, attuned to some perpetual earth rhythm she could not detect.
The sheltered slope they now aimed toward’bloomed richly luxuriant by comparison, with gnarled, sturdy trees, the lower trunks stripped bare from the weight of past snows and the desperate foraging hunger of elk and mountain sheep, but a lively green nonetheless, as if adversity spurred their growth in this relative pocket of safety. She longed to linger.
She rode, miserable, nails turning faintly blue as she clutched the pommel for security, then raised her hands and fumbled with numb fingers at the top button on her jacket and tried to tug her collar closer and higher. Lady knew, she despised the sensation of her legs dragging like useless appendages, rope pulling snug at her ankles, chafing and wearing the good, serviceable leather. Mintor would never have to worry about finishing her green boots, and somehow, now. in the midst of everything, she longed for them with all her heart—their promise of a future in which to wear them. With an effort, she stopped thinking about the boots, concentrated on poor Lokka, ragged and rough groomed, a bit gaunt, perhaps, but someone had obviously had a care to her in the night. That, at least, was something to be thankful for.
Growls and squalling sounds tearing from the panniers at increasingly regular intervals overwhelmed the steady clop of the horses’ hooves. It sounded like music to her ears for it meant the three ghatti had regained consciousness. She cast her mind out to ’speak them, but could make no sense of anything, their minds roiling, still muddied from the drugs. That they were still bound she had no doubt, or their rapier claws would have shredded the panniers like wet paper. No effort had been made to exercise or feed them, but then, there was no way to docilely walk a ghatt hell-bent on revenge. That Saam and Rawn and Parm still lived offered reason enough to rejoice, although it didn’t begin to compensate for the pang of loneliness she felt for Khar, abandoned or dead somewhere.
A scream raw with rage and frustration echoed from one of the panniers, and Georges Barbet rode beside the uneasy pack horse, wielding his cudgel against the basket, drubbing it like a drum until the horse panicked and veered. He laughed and dropped back into place, but his face spasmed with guilt as the basket heaved and shuddered, the lid threatening to spring free before the ties stretched but held.
They rode higher and farther north, past a glacial lake dark and dead gray as tarnished silver. “Bottomless, that’s the legend,” Towbin muttered at her, and she shivered with a jolt that disturbed and broke the pattern of regular shivers which ran through her body. An easy way to lose an enemy, sunk forever in those depths, but that, she decided, presented too easy, too humane an ending, and put it out of her mind. Morning stumbled toward noon, although there was little enough to see of the sun to prove it. The land lay encased by a domed sky-bowl swirled with pearly gray and whites, sometimes a pearly tracery of pinks or lavender like the nacreous interior of a sea mussel. The sun sporadically reconnoitered the cloud cover but could find no one place fragile enough to break through.
They rode, and still they rode. She willed her mind to wander blank as the sky, watching the action eddying around her through her own private haze. If an idea, a plan, broke through, it would be as welcome and unexpected as the sun. On a whim, she kicked her mind into action, looking for something to stir her interest and involvement in the scene around her. Then an idea floated her backward in time to the childhood game she and her sister had played on the long, endless ride to the twice-yearly weavers’ mart, the wagon laden with bolts of her mother’s woven cloth, the ox plodding and slow.
“You count the red cows on the right, Doyce, let your sister count on the left,” her mother had exclaimed, sick unto death of the whines and squabbles behind her.
So she counted Erakwa, hoarded both sides to herself to see how many she could spy, but their woodlore and skill let them weave in and out of the forested edge beyond the trail like smoke-wraiths. But patience she had, and time enough, and nothing else to do. At rare moments she rewarded herself by catching the glint of an eye or flash of a leg, a shadow too still to be cast by a tree, and by luck, the staring, perfectly outlined profile of an Erakwan, turning so that two dark, glittering eyes marked her passage.
Once they tarried long enough to water the horses and pass hasty dippersful to the prisoners, but neither she nor the others were untied or allowed to dismount, although she tried to cajole Towbin to let them. “Be thankful we’ve stopped moving,” he commented and passed on with the dipper. Vesey remained aloof at the head of the procession and looked back over them all, eyes gliding past her as if she weren’t there, but she knew she was lodged in his mind. Barbet stayed tick-tight to him whenever he could, and their perverted relationship soured the water she’d drunk. The scars on the right side of Vesey’s face glowed, reflected the subdued light, while everything else around absorbed it, swallowed it whole.
They continued on, even the horses weary and lacking their customary surefootedness; Towbin and Barbet whipping their steeds back and forth, up and down the line, exhorting, cursing, prodding prisoner and placid alike. She ducked a poorly aimed blow from Barbet and decided she didn’t care, frankly, she didn’t care at all, not a bit. Nothing mattered now. Whatever awaited her awaited them all at the end, and with eyes heavy, she slumped over Lokka’s neck. The warmth of steaming horseflesh curled itself around her, and the honest smell of sweat lulled her toward uneasy but necessary sleep. She grunted as the pommel platform cut into her ribs and she shifted, twisted from side to side. Why worry about sleep, she decided groggily, when she could wake into a nightmare whenever she opened her eyes.
She groaned in dismay when another horse shouldered hers, jolting her into wakefulness. Why had they halted? Why did everyone stare, transfixed by
a sight beyond her line of vision? Disoriented, she twisted her head, felt her body sliding sideways in the saddle until strong hands gripped her upper arm, dragged her upright until she found a firm seat. Whatever had attracted their attention, at least one person seemed unmoved by the sight, more interested in her well-being than in anything or anyone else.
“We’re here,” Harrap said in her ear, his bound hands still clenched around her arm. He nodded toward the right. “The end of our road.”
“Harrap, I’m so sorry,” she blurted before she could stop herself. “You’re too good and innocent for all this....”
He released her arm, kneed his horse away from hers so that he faced the same way as everyone else. “Nothing to be sorry about. We each choose our own paths from the infinity of paths the Lady offers.” She followed his glance, unable to credit what she saw looming in front of them. “We may have chosen imperfectly, but we chose as best we could. No shame to that. Making the choice is as important as following it through—it’s refusing to choose that’s a sin against the Lady and ourselves.” He chirruped to attract his tired horse’s attention, stepped him farther away. “I’d best get back before we’re seen speaking.”
The shell-like cloud dome had shattered, but the sky still lowered grayly, clouds with the density of carven marble creeping in solid, slow formations marshaled by the rising, knife-edged wind. Late afternoon, the short pause before the sun sank for the night, and now the light it cast forth spotlighted a large, low building nestled against the lowest south-facing shoulder of the soaring peak ahead of them. So near, very near, and if they could have flown, the distance would have been as nothing. But they had yet to negotiate the final path that zigzagged back and forth, scaling and reseating a fraction of the same steep grade, and each time creeping farther and higher toward the final goal—the Hospice.
It sat bathed in light, crouching massive and unadorned, with dark slits of windows that looked from this distance like bars on a cage. Built for utility, for the rigorous pursuit of scientific discovery, not for grace or comfort. Sharp peaked roofs angled to avoid holding the weight of winter’s continual snows. Chimneys sprouted up, squat and square in their ugliness, like giant pins thrust through the building to keep its precarious place on the mountain’s slope. One large round chimney soared high from the building’s center, a cloud of steam writhing from it to meld with the scudding clouds. Easy to identify as the central chimney for the boiler, designed to keep water constantly boiling hot for sterilization, the utter cleanliness required to facilitate accuracy in so many experiments.
The setting sun thrust a soft, hesitant haze of color against the brutally plain building: roses, violets, and lavenders, tenuous touches of dull gold washed soft against the harsh vertical lines now blending into the blue-grays of mountain bulk shadow-dusk. Its momentary enhancement and sudden, plangent beauty tugged at her heart until she contemplated what awaited them there. Not that she knew precisely what awaited them—except that they would never survive it. Vesey and Evelien would see to that.
Everyone but the prisoners had dismounted, scurrying, stripping the mounts of their tack, sending them off with new placids who had swarmed up from the lower stables as soon as they had ridden into view. Towbin’s practiced hand twitched Harrap’s mount to the side, the reins passed to a lackwit. Setting to work to untie Doyce’s ankles, he reached up at last and grabbed her waist, pulling her down.
Doyce sagged, then straightened. “Don’t tell me we have to walk up? Or crawl in penance?” A lame jest, more like prophecy in fact, and the idea had a certain poetic rightness to it. Ignominious it might be, but the thought of ending the journey under her own power rather than trussed to her horse seemed more dignified.
“Not quite. Or rather, not yet,” Towbin chided as he struggled to unknot her wrist bonds. “Now don’t try anything foolish. I’m responsible for your good behavior. Besides, there’s no place to run.”
The others were being untied as well, standing and stretching and flexing, coaxing life back into stiff extremities. With covert glances at each other, at their captors, they tried to assay the meaning of their halt.
“Look! Isn’t that Evelien riding down from the Hospice?” The crimson of her cloak had darkened to a deep blood color in the dusk.
Towbin squinted and gave a curt nod. “Aye. Vesey wants you all for a small meeting down here before you go up.” In wordless apology he patted her shoulder as she tucked a shaking hand under each armpit to force warmth back into blue-nailed fingers. She found herself liking the man, caught by circumstances almost as much as she. “There’ll be a bonfire, too, belike, and a chance to get warm and rest.”
Her glance strayed back to the trail and the moving figure, a maroon shadow now. “Why aren’t we going straight up?”
Towbin spat and his voice dipped low, choked with a smoldering anger. “Mayhap there are some things even he doesn’t do up there, that he thinks are better done down here, out of sight of the rest. I don’t know, but keep your wits about you. He’s waited too long for this by his lights.”
Doyce allowed herself to be herded toward a cleared area dotted with rough stone outbuildings near the base of the path. Placids and others darted back and forth, engaged in a variety of activities she didn’t bother to analyze, but she sensed they formed a tight, dense barrier around the central area, so that no one but the chosen could slip in and out with impunity.
At the far side of the circle, beyond the large, dancing bonfire in its center, Vesey commanded all he surveyed. Cloud rode on his good shoulder while Vesey gesticulated at an Erakwan of less than medium height but with a hard, muscled chest and shoulders and sturdy legs. The Erakwan said little but kept shaking his head negatively despite Vesey’s angry expostulations. At times his hand strayed to a red pouch dangling at his right hip and a copper band glowed against one wrist, its flash giving punctuation to his short, vehement rejoinders, body stiff and formal as if not quite acceding to Vesey’s authority. Doyce recognized the face, the face she had seen watching as she had played her little game. He had the air of the leader of the runners, those untiring guides who had hemmed them on each side throughout their journey. She wished she knew what thoughts were running through his mind.
“I won’t say it again!” Vesey’s voice rose petulantly, and he kicked at the dirt with his stubbed foot, pebbles flying, spattering the Erakwan. “You’ll all stay until I’m finished with you, until I release you. Besides, I think this might be salutary for you all to witness.”
The Erakwan seemed to understand the tone if not the exact words. Again he shook his head in negation, braids swinging, and turned to leave. Then he stiffened, and as if every muscle in his body were fighting it, his hand tore free from the red leather pouch and he swung back reluctantly. With an effort that bulged his neck cords, he shook his head again, lips pulled back from his teeth in a snarl. Fingers splayed and rigid, he forced his hand back down to his pouch, fingers groping, but Vesey’s face darkened with anger as the Erakwan fought to turn away again. He snapped back toward Vesey more quickly this time, yielding to some compulsive force he lacked the strength to gainsay.
Vesey reached out and tapped the pouch with his clawlike right hand. “You’ll stay. You’ll all stay and learn. Consider it another small tribute ... unless you’d like to pay a larger one. Another mind or two, another life or two.”
Without warning, the Erakwan struggled for balance, took a step back, then another, as if a support or a guy line had been severed. He corrected his misstep with a lithe move, then nodded grudgingly in Vesey’s direction and left unopposed. With a guttural shout he gathered his followers in silent numbers from the fringes of the woods, their copper-colored skin adding a final metallic circlet or rim to the wheel of people around the roaring fire.
No longer absorbed by the altercation, Towbin continued to move Doyce deeper, into the circle. A sense of relief almost beyond bearing shook her, left her heart singing as she realized she was being maneuvered
to where Harrap and Mahafny and Jenret sat, unfettered but close-guarded, to the right of the fire.
“Doyce!” Jenret’s yell soared high and boyish, relief cracking his voice into a higher register. He started to rise until Barbet, cudgel straddled between his hands, pressed it hard against the back of Jenret’s neck and he subsided into a sitting position, rubbing the bruise, blue eyes drinking in the sight of her. Despite the dirt, the aches, the exhaustion, Doyce felt herself desired in a way she hadn’t allowed herself to think about since Oriel’s death. And to feel it here and now left her in awe of the resilience of the human spirit.
As she ducked under the arm of the standing placid, her knees buckled and landed her amongst them with ungraceful eagerness. Too many hands to clasp, too many shoulders to pat, and too many tears, at last, to dry. And nowhere to escape from the look in those blue eyes however much she strove for self-control. Harrap tucked her like a fledgling under one large arm, nestled her close, then reluctantly released her to Jenret who drew her to him hard, his lips fiercely grazing her forehead, leaving a brief, burning sensation. He rubbed his stubbled cheek against the top of her head, and the gesture seemed more intimate, more full of intimations than she could bear.
“Let the child breathe,” Mahafny admonished as she reached for her turn, then stopped, face set, staring over her head. Evelien had breasted the outer fringe of the circle with her horse and was riding to greet Vesey, who met her with a long, low bow. She dismounted and Cloud pounced, an insolent strike at the flowing hem of her crimson cloak where it trailed the earth like a ribbon of blood. She laughed and bent to stroke his head, the ghatt quivering, rubbing up and down the length of her hand, marking her with his scent.
As if releasing its collective breath, the crowd sprang into action again, even the placids smiling, happy but unsure why. Vesey and Evelien stood in intimate converse, black-garbed figure and crimson-cloaked figure, her oval face tilted lovingly toward his, unflinching at the sight of scars and twisted, mutilated flesh.
