Finally reaching higher and safer ground, they had to stop for sheer weariness. They made a fire out of dried reeds that they braided into sticks, and for a time some of the men were busy dressing and cooking the birds, while others looked after the horses.
Sindérian woke, cramped and shivering, to a misty grey world, and sounds of the camp stirring back to life around her. She sat bolt upright, realizing with a shock of dismay that like everyone else she had drifted off to sleep almost immediately after eating. If there had been any discussion of who should stand watch, she could not remember it.
Scrambling to her feet, she made a hurried survey of the camp and was relieved to see that all were present and unharmed. No one looked any the worse for a few hours of sleep. And though Faolein had not returned, she had not really expected to see him again so soon.
On this morning there was no breakfast, just saddling up the horses, tightening their girths, then forcing cold, stiff limbs back into the saddle again. As the company set off, mist continued to rise from the ground in veils, wreaths, and twisting serpents.
It smelled like an ordinary fog, Sindérian decided, sniffing the air. It felt like one, too. Yet her intuition told her it was no such thing, even if she could sense no immediate harm in it.
After an hour’s ride, the trail simply ended at a wide expanse of ominous, dark water. Prince Ruan said he could just make out the other side, but the keen-eyed scouts could not, defeated by the fog and distance. Faced with acres of cattails barely able to keep their heads above a scummy surface, not even Ruan wanted to attempt to cross.
“Perhaps we went astray among the pools and quagmires yesterday,” Prince Kivik suggested. “Or maybe we missed a fork in the trail, riding after dark.”
They turned and backtracked for about a mile until one of the scouts, beating back the high grass, uncovered another path branching off from their own, which no one had noticed before. It was even more narrow than the one they had followed and was probably only a game trail, but it did head roughly south.
At first it seemed to be the right choice; the trail ran more or less straight, and much of the time on high, firm ground. The fog lifted. A faint salty breeze blew in their faces, promising a glimpse of the sea before nightfall. Then they came to a place where the path divided—or two trails met—presenting them with the choice of three different directions. After some consultation they chose the right-hand turning—only to be disappointed a mile or two later when the path brought them up short at a particularly nasty-looking bog.
By the time they had returned to the fork they were all missing Faolein, and his ability to soar aloft and take accurate bearings. Overhead it was bold, bright noon, and suddenly no one could remember which way was south.
“We will stop here a while,” Kivik decided at last, “and wait until the sun gives us back our sense of direction.”
Long before evening, everyone knew that they had been riding in circles most of the day. Trails had divided, looped, run into each other, ended at streams or at standing water, sometimes just ended for no reason at all. The one thing that no path ever seemed to do was bring them any closer to finding a way out of the fens.
Even knowing that she took a risk in doing so, with Ouriána’s powerful High Priest not far distant, Sindérian had twice been desperate enough to extend her senses outward and ahead, trying to discover what awaited them farther down a trail—and each time she had succeeded only in becoming disoriented.
In a maze like this one, she thought sourly, a person might go mad with frustration, with the winding trails and the endless gurgling and trickling of the waters.
Then, quite suddenly, she understood—truly, she must have been addled not to see it before! She drew rein and fell back, letting the others ride past her, before she dismounted.
She stooped down by one of the sluggish streamlets. Scooping up a handful of water, she raised it to her lips. It was brackish, definitely brackish. To anyone else it was only water, but to a wizard it was more, much more: it tasted of salt and seaweed, sharks and shellfish; it carried more than a hint of ocean depths, for it was almost three-quarters seawater. There was water here that whales had swum in and ships had crossed—the very same water that she and her friends had nearly drowned in not so many weeks ago.
A waxing moon and a high tide. She sat back on her heels, grinding her teeth in vexation. And channels and currents and arteries of seawater running through the marshes, mixing with the fresh water.
But most of all it was the aniffath, Ouriána’s curse. Every last bit of ill luck that Sindérian left behind when she had travelled inland, it was all flowing back to her the nearer she approached the sea, carried on those same currents of brackish water. And now the others are caught up in it as well, simply for riding in company with me.
She knew the spell might release them eventually; she was reasonably confident it would. It might even lose its grip on her in a day or two, when the moon decreased and the tides lost a little of their force. It would not be the first time she had somehow managed to survive in spite of Ouriána’s ill will.
But long before that happened it would be too late; the Furiádhin would have reached the coast, where they could buy, steal, or conjure up a boat. They—and Winloki with them—would have already set sail.
16
Winloki stood on a low bluff overlooking the sea, watching the waves advance and retreat, fascinated by their constant motion. Winds swirled around her: that from the land pushing her forward, that from the sea cold and stinging with salt. Beyond her vantage point there was nothing but air and water so far as the eye could see. She felt as if she were balanced at the end of the world, on the edge of forever: behind her everything she knew, directly ahead an unknown and unfathomable future.
When she turned to look over her shoulder, back toward the land, she caught another tantalizing glimpse of a tiny town situated across the narrow inlet: an irregular line of gabled roofs, stacked-stone chimneys, and untidy storks’ nests, partly screened by sand dunes and dune grass.
A party of guards and acolytes had been dispatched to replenish provisions and to look for a boat capable of carrying fifteen people in reasonable comfort and safety across the channel. Though hardly more than a fishing village, this was the largest settlement they expected to find within hundreds of miles—and in all likelihood the last little bit of Skyrra and the Skyrran people Winloki would ever see.
Her wish to be there was so intense, she could almost smell the woodsmoke and boiling cabbage, hear the washerwomen gossiping over their soapy cauldrons and the creaking of cart wheels in the streets.
The winds blew a lock of red-gold hair into her eyes, fluttered the ragged skirts of her gown. When she reached up to brush the hair from her face, she felt a familiar tug on the silver chain joining the manacle bracelets, constricting her movements, preventing her spells—most of all reminding her that she was a prisoner. Time and again she had tried to break the bracelets or force them open, but as delicate as they looked, they remained impervious. Nor could she ever learn the knack of removing and replacing the chain, no matter how many times she saw Camhóinhann perform that action.
She glanced at the armored youths standing to her right and left, her guards, her shadows: Marrec and Efflam, Lochdaen and Kerion. They were, she had learned during these last weeks of captivity, simple men and not unkindly, pledged to the temple in Apharos since they were boys of fourteen or fifteen, in order that their families or their villages might gain dispensations, with no choice in the matter at all. One might call them prisoners too, except that they had no desire to better their situation. They worshipped Ouriána, so far as Winloki could tell, with a pure and simple faith, but her white-haired priests they feared and obeyed—and no amount of proximity could lessen that fear or call that obedience into question.