Their choices were few—north through Brandar Pass into Shaymir, back into the western hills, or down across the open moors, south or east, and in either direction there was a river barring their way. But beyond the southern river lay Bodmer Forest, and that was Kieran’s country. They would find shelter, and allies. If only they could outrun Sif’s army to get there.
They snatched perhaps an hour or two of sleep, long after midnight; Anghara had found it hard to rouse from an exhausted slumber when Kieran gently shook her awake in the dark hour before dawn so they could ride on. But she insisted on Kieran riding his own horse; riding double would only wear out the horses and slow them down.
The moors around Miranei itself were an extension of the mountains at its back—mostly high, flat country. But the land folded itself into gently rolling fells as the small company rode south and east. They drove the horses hard, but they’d had to slow down a little once they gained the fells; they could ill afford an accidental toss or a lame horse. They paused for a moment at what felt close to midday, to give the animals a brief respite; the sun was warm upon their upturned faces, and the horses were already lathered with effort. The ground rose before them, first gently, then increasingly steeply; they were in the lee of the bare slope of a hill, not very high in its own right but looking as though it might command an unimpeded view of the surrounding moors. And there was an illusion of greater height, imparted by the presence of a tumble of huge granite boulders crowning the hill. At least one of these, too obviously shaped to be natural, looked as if it had once been a Standing Stone. Anghara’s eyes were full of this. What Kieran saw was different. A vantage point.
“From up there,” Kieran said abruptly, “we would know.”
“Yes,” Anghara agreed. “We would know.”
There was something still of power on the hill’s broken crown, something which clung to the hill like a barely visible mantle. Perhaps it was this that held Kieran back, despite his earlier comment. His companions sat their mounts in morose silence, one or two casting their eyes back the way they had come. They knew without doubt they were being followed—having Anghara with them, how could they not be—but they didn’t know by whom, or how many. The hill could tell them. But the hill first had to be climbed; and none of them seemed to have the inclination to do it.
In the end it was Anghara herself who swung down from her mount with a decisive motion. She staggered and almost fell as aching legs, weakened by the punishment of this hard ride so soon after her long incarceration, set up a clamor of protest. She caught herself on the pommel of her saddle and stood with her head bowed for a moment, gathering strength; then she let go, tossing the reins of Melsyr’s horse to Adamo, who caught them more or less automatically.
“We have to know,” she said, turning to Kieran, her eyes defensive. “And I am blind. I may as well look with other sight.”
“And if anyone’s watching, they’ll know exactly where we are,” said one of the men.
Kieran reached a decision and swung off his own horse. “We’ll both go,” he said.
“Madness,” said Adamo. “Now if we lose you, we lose you both.”
“For the sake of all the Gods, then, hurry! My bones tell me they can’t be far behind,” said Charo, chewing his lip.
Anghara was still weak, looking more frail and transparent than ever, her eyes bruised with great dark circles which bit into the pallor of her cheeks. Something gave her strength, though; she turned and strode up the incline without looking back, leaving Kieran to scramble after her. He reached her in two or three long steps and frowned.
“You’ve changed,” he said. “In Feor’s classroom you were always the cautious, careful one. I don’t remember you being this impatient, this rash. First bearding Sif’s army on the open moor, now this. What are you trying to prove?”
“It is Sight that drives me,” she said, “the Sight that is gone from me. You, who have never had to live with it, cannot know what it’s like to lose it. It’s like I’m missing half my soul.” She shivered. “This place is…there’s something about this hill. Even blind, it touches me. It is a dark feeling…as though something…died…and yet, I welcome it. Even that. It heals me while it wounds me.” Her eyes glittered strangely as she stared up at the tumbled stones. “I have talked with the Old Gods, Kieran. There is real power in Kheldrin.”
“I cannot understand you when you talk of those things,” said Kieran. It had taken severe self-control not to snap again at the mention of that alien land.
“No,” she said, not looking at him, smiling into the distance. “You’re human.”
“So are you, damn it!” he said, goaded to anger.
“No,” said Anghara, softly but emphatically, remembering an echo of a God’s voice—al’Khur had called her something…what was it? A name of power. Inhuman power, great enough to have shackled a God’s will. And he had said…he had said she would claim it. “Once, perhaps, I was. No longer. Even blind, no longer.”
Their last few steps to the hill’s summit were taken in silence. Snow still lay in the crevices of the huge boulders. Anghara’s foot sank ankle-deep into a pile hidden in the cool shadows underneath the stones as she scrambled onto one of the lowest and crouched there, slowly sweeping the horizon with eyes shaded under her hand against the bright midday sunlight. Suddenly her hand dropped from her face into a pointing arrow in one graceful motion.
“There. Look,” she said, keeping her voice low although there was nobody to hear her except Kieran. “They are too far to see what standard they bear. But it is Sif. Only he could lead so many, so soon. They’ve sent out an army, Kieran. If we cannot outrun them, we are lost.”
Kieran swept his eyes from the distant cohorts of men who hunted him, staring at the empty, winter-gray moors with something like despair. “Back,” he said at last, but his voice was flat, and there was no hope in it. “Back to the horses. I don’t know where we can run that he can’t follow, but I will not wait for Sif to simply pluck me like a trapped pheasant. I plan to give him as much trouble as I can.”
But Anghara sat back on her heels and turned steady gray eyes on him. “Take the others, and go for the forest,” she said, very quietly.
He whipped around to face her, not knowing whether to be angry or simply baffled. “And you? What of you? You don’t think I’d just leave you for him, do you? I didn’t snatch you from Sif’s dungeons to hand you back to him on a silver platter!”
“I’ll make for the coast,” said Anghara, with only the briefest of hesitations. “There will be a ship at Calabra that will bear me.”
“You would never make it,” began Kieran, and then the import of her words struck him. “Calabra? Where would you go? Kheldrin?”
“Would you set me on the throne in Sif’s place, Kieran?”
“I wanted to find you, to make sure you were safe,” said Kieran, after a slight hesitation. “I did not think beyond that, not in detail, but yes, that is what I would do.” His eyes blazed with love and loyalty. For the men he led, Anghara’s name had been a symbol, a word to conjure light with when Sif’s darkness became too great to bear. For Kieran, a part of her had always been, would always be, the little foster sister to whom he had once given his cloak in the rain. If she were a queen, that was something over and above this—but when Kieran had ridden the length and breadth of Roisinan, keeping Anghara’s name alive, it had not been Anghara Kir Hama he sought. It had been a little girl he had once loved.
“I came back to claim Miranei,” Anghara said, with a brittle laugh. “It was time, the Gods said. But it isn’t time, Kieran. Not yet, not now. Would you let a cripple rule Roisinan?” Something swirled in her eyes for a moment—pain, wrath, madness—then it was gone, but Kieran knew what he had seen. He shivered suddenly, not from the cold, from a prescience that was bone-deep: she was wounded, and Kheldrin was the only place that could heal her.
He fought the knowledge; it went against everything he had always believed, but he knew it f
or truth, and at last he squared his jaw and met her eyes. “You’ll never make it,” he repeated. “Calabra of all places will be watched. But there is always Shaymir.”
“Shaymir?” Anghara repeated, genuinely puzzled for a moment, and then her face cleared with comprehension. “You mean the mountains?”
“The Khelsies come. Somehow,” Kieran said, shrugging his shoulders.
“But I don’t know the mountains,” Anghara said slowly. “I don’t know the way.”
“If there is one, it can be found,” he said steadily. It struck a chord with her, as though she had heard the words before; and then she remembered. It already seemed like centuries ago, but al’Tamar had said it to her beside the ocean at the foot of Gul Khaima. Paths can be found.
“As for the mountains…you won’t be alone.” Kieran reached up to the boulder on which she was still perched, and swung her down to the ground beside him. “I will be with you.”
5
In retrospect, Kieran almost wished Anghara had argued harder. Or that he had listened. The trek to Kheldrin had always sat ill with him; but the closer they came to their goal, the worse he felt about the whole thing, even given that strange, soul-deep knowledge which kept telling him Kheldrin was the one place she would find healing. Yet even so…the closer they drew, the stranger Anghara became. Kieran glanced across the campfire where she lay sleeping restlessly, her bandaged arm folded across her belly, and frowned, crushing between suddenly savage fingers a sprig of Shaymir desert sage he had been rubbing against his palm. The sweet scent of the herb lanced him, as always; it acted like a drug, cracking open sealed memories with the ease of magic. This time, with Anghara lying there before him, the memories were recent.
Sif. Miranei. The army on the moors.
Once Anghara had made up her mind, back by the hill crowned with the Standing Stones, there had been no real discussion. Adamo had taken her decision better than Kieran had expected.
“Kheldrin?” he asked quiedy. “Was that where you’d been hiding all this time?” He rooted in his horse’s saddlebags, digging for something which had migrated to the bottom, and hauled out the small package of Anghara’s an’sen’thar finery he had rescued from the inn in Calabra. “Is that where these came from?”
Anghara received the bundle and sat staring at it for a long moment before lifting her eyes to meet Adamo’s. “Yes,” she said, and her voice was oddly emotionless, flat. “That’s where these came from.” I wonder if I will ever have the right to wear them again… an uneasy thought, brushing the surface of her mind. Unspoken.
Charo had had to be almost forcibly restrained from adding himself to the party which was to go on to Kheldrin, but eventually it was Anghara’s word that held him. “Stay,” she’d said. “Raise me an army for you to lead.”
After that, it was only a question of trying to figure out a way to make Sif abandon the chase long enough for them to slip away. As usual, it was Adamo who thought up the means, and Kieran who pieced together the plan.
“Isn’t Ram’s Island close hereabouts?” Adamo had asked speculatively.
It had taken Kieran less than a second. He clicked his fingers. “The boat.”
“What boat?” Anghara asked. She had yet to mount Melsyr’s horse again after coming down from the hill. She stood leaning against it, her eyes half closed.
“There’s always a boat hidden there. The island’s midstream, too small and overgrown to be of any interest to anyone but a bunch of brigands like ourselves,” said Charo with a limpid grin. “It comes in useful in emergencies.”
“Let’s go,” said Kieran. “It’s only for a little while longer, Anghara. Can you manage?”
“I’ll have to,” she said; but she spoke through clenched teeth and it took her three tries before she could regain her saddle. After long months in a tiny airless cell she was exhausted. Kieran and Adamo exchanged worried looks behind her back—but that back, once she’d managed to remount, was straight. She was asking no favors.
They rode like the wind, aware they were leaving a broad trail for Sif to follow—but the subterfuge Kieran had in mind would start later, and Kieran had nothing against Sif’s knowing his quarry had made for the river. There was little chitchat as they pushed forward. Night caught up to them, and, like the night before, they paused for only a few hours before moving on. They rode most of the next day, until the exhausted horses began to flag, keeping just a step ahead of Sif’s army, with only the low hills denying the hunters a clear sight of their quarry. Twice Charo and another man circled back; twice they returned with splashes of fresh blood on their clothes, and riding fresh horses. Anghara had taken one look, and forbore to ask for the details; of course Sif would send out scouts, fast riders who would be able to shake free of the bulk of the army and chase after the fugitives on swift steeds. It seemed few of these men would live long enough to return to report to Sif.
But the dispatching of a few scouts was not enough.
“We’ll never make it,” one of the men muttered, as the sun began to sink on their second day out. “We’ll kill the horses first.”
For answer, Adamo pointed ahead, where sunlight glanced off something bright and lanced into the eye. “Water,” he said economically.
Here the River Hal made a shallow loop northward, wending its way through the hills, and it was this loop they finally gained in the dying hours of their second day as fugitives. The horses snorted and pricked up their ears, scenting water.
“Don’t let them drink too much,” Kieran said, easing his own horse close to the bank and slipping off its back, glancing swiftly up- and downstream. “Where is the island?”
Charo gauged the lay of the land with a quick, experienced eye. “It’s upstream,” he said. “Not too far away. Which horse is the least winded? I’ll go for the boat.”
“He’ll have to swim out for it,” said Adamo, before Anghara could ask.
If she could have asked. By now she was drooping like a scythed flower; it was doubtful she could have lasted much longer on horseback. In Adamo’s opinion, it was already miracle enough she had managed to stay with them thus far.
“Perhaps it’s just as well you’ll be taking to the water,” Adamo said to Kieran in a low voice. “She’ll need a rest before she will be able to ride again. Given a choice, she should have been taken from that thrice-damned dungeon straight into some goodwife’s feather bed, and fed herb infusions and chicken broth until she got her strength back.”
“Instead she gets this crazy escape, a wild ride across the fells, and is dropped from the spit into the fire,” said Kieran with a grimace. “If only Sif had got back a day later…we wouldn’t have had to run like this. There would have been time.” He stirred, glancing back over his shoulder uneasily to where two of his entourage had gone to keep an eye out for Sif’s forerunners, then threw a restless glance in the direction Charo had vanished. “Come on. If the horses have had enough, let’s follow Charo.”
They found him sitting beside a small coracle drawn up on the shore, his sword naked on the ground beside him, pulling his boots on. Hearing their approach he’d reached for the blade and then relaxed as he realized who they were. Beyond him, some distance away, a dark blot in midstream, bathed in dark shadows; it was already twilight, with a pale moon riding a sky still bright with traces of sunset.
He’d glanced up with a smile, some crack at the ready, but before he had a chance to speak one of the rearguard came galloping back on his exhausted gray. “It’s too close, Kieran,” the man said as he came to a shuddering halt a handspan away from Kieran’s own horse.
“Where’s Keval?”
“Dead,” came the shocking response. Only now did they register the dark stain on his tunic, the way he sat with an arm folded painfully against his ribs. “There were six this time. We did for four, and I think we wounded number five, but Keval paid for that—and number six is on his way back to Sif even now. I hadn’t a hope of catching him, not even if I’d taken one of his
friends’ horses. Whatever you’re planning Kieran, do it now. My guess is that you have perhaps an hour before Sif falls upon us.”
Kieran slid off his horse, tossing the reins to Adamo. “You take care of him for me,” he said. “Come, Anghara. It’s time we were away.”
It looked as though he’d simply gone over to help her down from her own beast, but it was painfully obvious to Adamo, who was watching closely, that he lifted her bodily off the horse, and that if he had not she would have fallen. Kieran supported her firmly but unobtrusively the few paces to the boat, and lifted her inside.
“I’ll be right back,” he said.
“Kieran…” She’d reached out and caught the edge of his sleeve, eyes wide and ringed with bruised purple circles, shocking against the pallor of her face.
“What is it?” he asked, turning back.
She’d glanced back past him at the three who waited beyond, her gray eyes filled with tears. “Kieran…don’t let anything happen to them…”
She might have turned seventeen, but Kieran suddenly, heartbreakingly, saw the nine-year-old Brynna Kelen in her face, and something in him rose now, as then, to stand over her and shield her from harm. Unexpectedly, surprising even himself, he bent forward to kiss her lightly on the brow. “It will be all right. Wait for me here.”
Charo had pulled on his boots and gone to stand with the other two waiting in the moonlit twilight. Three of them. Not enough—surely not enough…Sif could reach out and crush them without trying. But then Kieran squared his jaw and strode across to the waiting men.
“I want him to think we’ve all crossed the river,” he said quietly. “Once across…there’s three of you, seven horses. Split up three different ways—Adamo, you take care of Sarevan for me, the rest of the horses go with only one of you—perhaps Sif will think that the biggest group…We’ll see. Ditch the uniforms, for all the Gods’ sakes, as soon as you have a chance. Rendezvous at the forest base, but only once you’re sure you’ve shaken them. Go to ground somewhere first, if you have to. Those who lived through the obliteration of Rochen’s camp are bound to do the same. Link up with whomever you can—and then go, spread the word. We will return. And when we do, we’d better have an army at our back.”
Changer of Days Page 8
