Just then he stumbled, nearly pitching her over his head. One of the raiders had gotten in his way. Flashing hooves tangled in something soft that screamed, then they were past, still charging toward the endangered mares. Some had been separated from the herd and were being driven through the gate into the orchard. Bel was with them.
Here was the outer wall. The colt didn’t bother with the gate. Jame nearly broke her nose against his neck as he leaped, then almost pitched forward over his shoulder as he landed. Trinity, she needed practice at this even more that he did. In no way yet were they a team.
They wove through the orchard, Jame lying flat to his neck to avoid being swept off by a low branch. Windfalls swished and slipped underfoot.
Beyond lay a pasture, then the forest, now throwing up its boughs while autumn leaves fled before the storm’s approach. Steadier than the lightning flashes was a trail of fire snaking from the north southward. It could have been caused by a lightning strike, but Jame doubted it. Here came the last person on Rathillien whom she cared to meet, and they were racing straight toward him.
Bel burst out of the trees, the stolen mares wild-eyed on her heels. They swerved, squealing, at the sight of the rathorn, but he ignored them, turning sharply to run beside his foster-dam. Jame thought she heard shouts ahead in the pasture, and screams behind in the forest. Which call to answer first, hill or hall? Hall, dammit, and they mustn’t see the rathorn. She slipped off the galloping colt’s back, and fell flat on her face. This time, it did indeed feel as if she had broken her nose, but nothing worse.
As Whinno-hir and rathorn sheered off at a tangent, she ran toward the sound of battle.
A large figure rose up before her and struck, so swift a fire-leaping kick that Jame felt it breeze past her chin as she sprang back out of range.
“Brier, it’s me!”
“What’s going on, lady?” demanded Brier Iron-thorn, looming over her. “That Caineron”—Gorbel, no doubt—“told us precious little except that you needed us. Who are we fighting?”
“I suspect not whom we’re supposed to think. How goes it?”
Brier made a gesture of disgust. Lightning revealed her short dark-red hair plastered to her skull and water dripping off her chin. “It’s a right mess. We were under fire before we knew they were there. Two of us got hit.”
“Who?”
“Anise and Erim. Anise looks bad.”
Another figure charged them, giving a rathorn battle cry cut off as Brier swept his feet out from under him. Dar rose, spitting grass and dirt.
“You could just say, ‘friend,’ ” he protested.
“You didn’t exactly give us a chance.”
“Where are they?” barked Brier. “Report!”
“No point in shouting at me, Five. They seem to have shot their bolt, or rather their arrows, and melted away. I doubt if we’ve caught one of them. There were just too few of us.”
“I ordered Vant to send everyone he could.”
The cadet didn’t meet her eyes. He himself seemed close to tears. “Vant said it was all in your imagination. And he laughed, Ten. He laughed!”
Jame felt the stirring of cold rage, but she mustn’t give in to it. Not yet. There remained the hills.
“See to our wounded,” she told Brier. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
Ignoring the big Kendar’s attempt to stop her, she turned and sped into the forest, toward where she had heard the screams. Fire winked between the trees and spat as the rain came down more fiercely. Not far in, she came on a scorched circle. Within it lay bodies blackened and contracted with heat so that they seemed to shriek silently at the pouring sky. So much, at least, for the would-be mare thieves.
Amidst them, one moved. Blind and deaf, it crept forward, shedding charred bits of itself as it came. The terrible head turned from side to side. The mouth, driveling flames, opened.
“M-m-mother?”
“Here.” Jame opened her arms to him, and he fell apart in her embrace.
“Are you happy?” she demanded of the drenched landscape. “Burnt Man, this was your son, more than I will ever be. Earth Wife, he called to you, not me. Eaten One, blessing on you for ending his agony. Falling Man, hear my call and scatter his ashes!”
But the boisterous north wind still blew, flinging all that remained of the Merikit boy into her face, then sweeping him on southward with the storm farther and farther from home. Fires hissed out under a veil of rain. Charred figures crumbled into the tossing grass.
Jorin emerged from the darkness, chirping anxiously. She held him as he nuzzled her face, grateful for the instinct that kept the ounce out from underfoot when he could only get hurt.
“You have more sense than I do,” she told him.
His soft fur comforted her, wet as it was. How long ago today had begun, how much had happened. She wanted a moment’s peace to gather herself, to put it all together before it overwhelmed her, to breathe in the warm, wild scent of Jorin’s fur.
So many had been hurt, one way or another: Narsa, Timmon, Bear, the Commandant, Graykin, the hamstrung geldings, Bel, and now two of her own ten-command—how badly, she couldn’t yet bear to think. What kind of a god did they serve who could allow such wanton misery? Where were those three faces turned, if not toward the people they had bound together and set on this painful course? The compromised god-voice aside, the only evidence of the Three-Faced God’s existence on Rathillien lay in his temples, mindlessly generating power, managed (or mismanaged) by Kencyr priests whom no one trusted.
On the other hand, there were the Four, whom she suspected had come into being with the activation of the Kencyr temples some three thousand years ago. Nonetheless, they seemed to be Rathillien incarnate.
. . . two of their Merikit servants senselessly slain; an unknown number of hill-raiders; Sonny Boy, whose death she could still taste on her lips, feel in the charred grit between her teeth . . .
Did one expect the elements to be kind, or cruel, or simply indifferent? When called upon, did they hear? Earth Wife, Falling Man, Eaten One, Burnt Man—they had all been mortal once, subject to love and hate, capricious as any human. So they still seemed to be. The Earth Wife was the most approachable of them, yet even she would apparently do nothing to prevent the Merikit from starving that winter, though she knew where the problem lay.
And what about her, Jame?
“As we are, so you may become,” the Earth Wife had once said, a mortal transformed—in Jame’s case into the third face of her detested god, That-Which-Destroys.
So, where did responsibility lie?
Much of today wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t been involved, both with the hills and the hall, with Rathillien and Kencyrath. Was that what she was, a bridge between the two? How could that be the role of destruction, unless to bring ruin on both? Was everything, somehow, her fault?
Then came the crowning irony: nowhere in today’s chaos could she see the hand of that ultimate evil, Perimal Darkling or its servant Gerridon. Maybe the shadows weren’t necessary. Kencyr and hillman alike seemed to be doing just fine on their own when it came to messing things up.
Jame realized that she was shivering violently. Icy rain had soaked her coat and was running into her eyes. Moreover, she was curled protectively around an increasingly restive ounce.
A voice called her name, or rather her titles: “Ten! Lordan! Where are you?”
She wasn’t ready, but it was time to answer, and to face the day’s hardest test.
Erim met her in the field between the forest and the orchard.
“I’m all right, Ten,” he said in answer to her anxious question. He held up a torn sleeve with the glimmer of a white bandage beneath. “It barely grazed me. But Anise . . . ”
Rather than hear, not wanting to, she led the way back through the orchard to the gate. There two figures emerged from the downpour: Mint and Dar, lowering elk-horn bows rendered almost useless by the rain.