“No. I’m going with you. Wherever it is. Do you know yet? What’s happening?”
“At the moment we’re trying to get away from the Sheep-faces. Anything else can wait. That’s them you can hear buzzing away down in the valley. We aren’t trying for the main pass, because that’s pretty exposed over the top, and we think they’ll have those kite-men up, but there’s another little one they mightn’t spot.”
Nightmare flooded back. The throbbing from the Valley was no longer drowsy. It was the purr of the monsters who would find her in the end.
Ribek’s voice, ordinary, calm, faintly teasing, dissolved them.
“Hungry? There’s raisin cake.”
“Ung…don’t know.”
“That means you need raisin cake.”
He was right.
“Why aren’t we flying?” she mumbled between the delectable mouthfuls.
“Because their magician will be on to us the minute Saranja puts Rocky’s wings on and they’ll start following us all over again. We’re hoping that if we can get a bit of the mountain between us and them before she does it that might damp the effect and perhaps we’ll shake them off here. You agree?”
“Ahng,” said Maja, startled out of the returning nightmare, simply by being asked, and then deciding he was probably joking.
“I hope your leg’s better,” she said.
“A bit,” said Ribek, sounding surprised in his turn. “Saranja cleaned it out at the mill and put a new bandage on. She knows a lot about wounds. Rough lot of thugs she’s been living among, she says.”
Maja was bewildered. She wasn’t used to being talked to like this—wasn’t used to being talked to at all, in fact, apart from when her mother took it into her head to tell her one of her stories. Otherwise at Woodbourne she’d been talked at—told what to do, or not do, or how furious the speaker was with somebody else. If she hadn’t been there, they’d have told the cat. She liked this new experience, but she didn’t know how to cope with it so she didn’t say anything. The path twisted and began to climb back the other way, and then twisted again. And again. After a bit she settled into a light doze, in and out of sleep, reliving bits of her dream that hadn’t been a dream.
“Was there a big yellow cat?” she mumbled.
“Monster,” said Ribek. “His mother was killed by a fox and our old bitch finished suckling him, so he’s got it into his head he’s a dog. He won’t let another dog through the gate. He’ll see foxes off too.”
“And an owl on a shelf?”
“Woolly. My pet owl when I was a kid. My grandfather stuffed him for me when he died.”
And green plates and bowls on the dresser, she thought, and the steady, peaceful rumble of the millstream over the weir. A place to belong. She fell into a pleasant daydream of living at the mill, deliberately replacing the purr of the monster with the sound of the weir.
The path zigzagged to and fro, steeper now, and the trees on either side almost all pines, gloomy and mysterious. Even gallant Rocky had begun to plod, but Saranja still strode ahead, apparently tireless. There wasn’t much to do or look at, so Maja settled back into her daydream, less satisfactorily because she didn’t know enough about the real mill to make the dream one solid. She’d have to ask Ribek. At last the steady rhythm of Rocky’s stride fell still. They had reached the end of the trees. The dazzling light from beyond, bright sun glittering back off a vast white sweep of snowfield, made her screw up her eyes. Through a haze of tears she could just make out somebody—Saranja—out in the middle of the dazzle, shading her eyes as she gazed back over the treetops. She waved to them to come on up into the open.
“All clear, far as I can see,” she said. “I want to give Rocky a bit of a rest and a feed. You go on ahead with Maja and we’ll catch you up.”
It was only when Saranja lifted her down that Maja realized she was wearing someone else’s coat, a bit too big for her, but very warm and comfortable.
“One of my nieces lent it to you,” said Ribek. “You’ll need it over the top. We’ve got other stuff in the saddlebags. Ready, kid? Off we go. One child and one cripple set out to conquer the mountain.”
He led the way out of the woods and along the edge of the forest to the right. After a little while he turned up across the snowfield. It was last winter’s snow, almost as hard and slippery as ice with daily thawing and freezing. Maja couldn’t see any sign of a path, but before long the snowdrifts began to rise on either side of them and they were walking along a little valley that soon became almost a canyon with ice-sheeted black crags poking through the snow on either side. The footing was rough and treacherous and Ribek was limping heavily, sometimes just taking a single step, and pausing, and leaning on his stick and leading off again with his hurt leg. Maja worked her way up beside him and put her arm round his waist and did her best to help him along.
“Thanks, kid,” he muttered, and plodded grimly on. Saranja and Rocky caught up with them just as they reached the top of the pass.
“You don’t look too good,” she said.
“Cold’s got into it a bit,” Ribek answered. “Maja had to carry me most of the way.”
He was such a lovely man, Maja decided. He was only joking, of course, but still, when his leg was really hurting him, he’d found a way of saying thank you to her.
“Good for her,” said Saranja. “We’ll get you back on Rocky soon as we’re off the ice, and we’ll get his wings back on him first good place we come to.”
The slope down wasn’t so steep, but still horribly slippery in places. Maja stayed with Ribek, helping him best she could. Saranja hurried ahead with Rocky, tethered him at the edge of the trees, and came back and took Ribek’s other side. Together they heaved him into the saddle, where he pretty well collapsed.
The downward path was much like the one they’d climbed, twisting through pines, and then ancient deciduous trees, which reminded Maja of the forest behind Woodbourne. The air grew warmer. They came to a large, open glade, with a stream tumbling through, and halted.
“Put me by the water,” said Ribek. “It’ll tell me soon as the Sheep-faces cross the ridge. And I might be able to tickle a fish or two for lunch, if you get a fire going.”
“I’ll want one anyway,” said Saranja. “Much better deal with your leg using warm water. Maja, dear, see if you can find us some dry stuff for firewood.”
(Maja, dear…Amazing. Unbelievable.)
Half an hour later Rocky was grazing contentedly at sweet mountain turf, Maja was nursing a good steady blaze with a small iron pot balanced over its heart, Saranja was carefully cutting a mat of blood-soaked bandages away from Ribek’s leg, while he lay face down at the edge of the stream with his left arm trailing in the water. Even as Maja watched he swung it up out of the water, something silvery arced through the air, and there was a plump fish flopping to and fro on the grass. Saranja reached out and grabbed it, reversed her knife in her hand and whacked the fish firmly, just behind the head, with the heavy hilt. She dropped it back on the turf, where it jerked a couple of times and lay still. She went back to Ribek’s bandages as if she hadn’t done anything clever at all.
Maja realized she was still a bit afraid of her cousin, though she used to look after her and try to protect her when she got the chance, in a way Maja’s mother had always been too feeble to do, and her aunt too bitter. Saranja was so strong and certain, so tireless and brave. But deep down inside her, banked and controlled and hidden, Maja now sensed something else. She knew it from twelve years of hiding from it at Woodbourne, raging like a brush fire on the surface of everyone’s life there, her uncle’s day-long, week-long, year-long fury, and the midwinter bitterness of her aunt’s response. It had never crossed Maja’s mind to wonder why Woodbourne was like that. It just was, and always had been, ever since she could remember. And somehow it was all her fault.