The snow boiled and bubbled, white fire spitting out, birthing out animal shapes, more animals like the fire born in the old woman’s hut. The animal shapes, eyes glowing amber gold, ruby gold, sungold, dance the round dance, exuberant, elegant, elegiac, mute voices chanting soundless song, the earth replying with sonorous bell notes to the touches of the dancing feet.
One by one, as the spiral of the dance tightened, the animal shapes dropped away; the ghost dancers dropped away with them and sank into the land to wait. Yes, wait. That was the feel. A tension, an explosion of terrible patience. They were waiting…
Tuli blinked, dazed, wet her lips, stared at the dying fire, moved her shoulders, surprised at the ache in them, and looked down to see the fire born curled like a bit of shaped light in her lap. She moved again, her legs had gone to sleep and the biting aches and nips of twitching muscles made themselves known, moved without thinking of the beast lying in the hollow of her lap. It made no sound when she jarred it, but adjusted quietly to the new hollows it filled, lifted the pointed head and gazed at her from alert and eerily knowing gold-amber eyes.
“What are you?” she said.
“What?” Rane looked up. She scrubbed her hands hard across her face, straightened out her legs, drew her knees up again. “Time we were for bed.” She got to her feet, moving more laboriously than usual, stumbling as a foot caught on one of the layered pelts, catching herself with one hand pressed to the stone wall close beside her.
Tuli reached down to touch the shadow beast. For an instant only she felt a sort of resistance, then her hand passed through it to rest on her thigh. She jerked the hand up with a sharp exclamation, startled and rather frightened. The beast’s eyes seemed to twinkle at her, its mouth opened in a cat-grin. She felt a chuckle bubble in her blood, its laughter injected into her veins. She scratched delicately behind a glassy ear and laughed again, her own laughter this time.
Rane blinked at her. “You’re overtired, Moth, getting silly.”
“Not me,” Tuli said. She started prodding very carefully at the red-black outline. “Ajjin, what is this? Do you know?” It cocked its head, sharp ears pricking, and grinned that curling grin at her and she grinned back, feeling giddy and very happy. It was warm and heavy and alive, no matter if her hand slipped into it like a finger poking through the skin on hot milk.
The old woman stirred. She looked at Tuli’s lap and smiled. “Soredak,” she said, her husky voice soft and filled with wonder. “In your tongue, a fireborn. A channel of power.”
Rane frowned. “What are you talking about?”
Ajjin chuckled, but she said nothing more, only shook her head.
Rane thrust impatient fingers through her straw thatch. “We have to leave early,” she said. “With the norit vanishing like that, they’re like a wasps’ nest stirred up. If the weather’s right for them, they’ll have a dozen traxim up, the other norits, I mean. Ajjin, Gesda’s provisions should hold you till your son gets back from the hunt. Have you messages we can carry for you? Or is there aught else we can do for you? Favor for favor, my friend. To keep the balance.”
Tuli enjoyed the feel of the warm softness of the beast on her thighs and began to accept that Rane could not see it, would not believe it was there even if told of it. The ex-meie was excluded from almost all of what had happened here. She felt a sadness that this was so, and a touch of pity that the woman she admired so much must for some reason be excluded from this wonder. She looked down at the beast. “Ildas,” she whispered to it. “I’m going to call you Ildas.” She smoothed her hand over the curve of its side and back, slanted a glance at Ajjin, met her eyes and knew suddenly that there were going to be very few who could see her new companion and that his presence was part of the changes to come. Changer’s moon. She turned round to Rane and knew that their time together was coming to an end. She’d expected to cling to Rane long after this probe was finished, she knew that now, and knew also there was no hope of this, that she and Ildas would move in another direction to other goals that did not include Rane.
Ajjin rocked gently on her haunches. “Ah-huh, ah-huh,” she said, not the guttural double grunt of assent everybody used, but more like the drumbeats that opened a dance. “Oras,” she said. “Debrahn the midwife. My son’s wife’s elda-cousin. The feeling comes that Debrahn has troubles.”
“We won’t be there soon.” Rane sounded more than a little dubious. “It’s a tenday of hard riding if we were to go straight there from here, and we won’t do that, we can’t do that. It’ll be a passage at least before we get to Oras. At least, Ajjin.”
Ajjin nodded. “There is no pressing, only an uneasiness. Debrahn lives in the hanguol rookery. Not a place of power.”
“To say the least. Well, if she’s kept her head down…”
“There are calls she must answer.”
“Healwoman?”
“The training but not the name. She was one who left before the time was complete. Mother died and father called her home.”
“But she still keeps the covenants?”
“For her, that is not a matter of choice.”
“Then she won’t be willing to leave with us.”
“There will be something for you, so I feel.”
“What we can, we will.”
Ajjin smiled. “For you as her there is no choice.”
“Except to win the battle coming and hope such as she can stay alive.”
“You will have help. Hern comes.”
“You saw that?”
“Last night I looked for my son and found Hern. He brings strangers to the mijloc. Fighters with ways that clash with ours and weapons of great power; they carry with them the seeds of the change-it is they, not the Nearga Nor, that bring the end to us-I who walk on four legs and two, the child your friend who has magic of another sort. Our time is passing, not yours, Rane; you’ll find them much like you and fit well with them.”
“You’re full of portents and prophecies tonight, old friend, and I don’t understand a word of them.”
“You never did, that’s why you’ll fit so well into the new age, good friend. The magic fades, it fades, ah well-get you to your beds, both of you before sleep takes you here.”
They rode in silence over the white fields, a gray sky lowering over them, fat, oily clouds thick with snow that dropped a sprinkling of flakes on them and kept the traxim from spying on them. They followed the river a while until it began pushing them too far east, then risked riding onto a bridge road; a ford was far too risky in this cold and the watches at the bridges far more apt to be huddled over mulled cider and a warm fire than keeping an eye out for fools trying to travel in such weather.
The bridge was unsteady, moving to the push of the water in a way that so frightened the macain they wouldn’t budge from the bank. Ildas leaped down from Tuli’s thigh where he’d been perched with confident serenity since the ride began and ran a weave across the rickety structure, battered into a dangerous state by the violent storms of the Gather and the Scatter. Hern had kept norits employed to see that the bridges and the roads were maintained, but Floarin had other priorities. It was one more wrong to mark against her. But after Ildas had spun his invisible web, the span steadied and the stones knit together more firmly, their macain relaxed and crossed the bridge at an easy lope.
Rane lifted an eyebrow at Tuli, but said nothing.
The tar hedgerows began not far from the river, restricting their movement to the twisty country lanes, piled high now with snowdrifts-and more snow promised from the clouds overhead although they seemed reluctant to let down their burden and the fall held off day after day as they angled toward Oras, spending most nights either camped out of the wind in the thick groves that dotted the landscape or creeping into empty outbuildings of the winter-settled tars whenever they were reasonably sure of being unobserved. They visited a tar here and there, Rane collecting reports from men or women whose anger lay like slumbering geysers under a very thin skin of control. The farther north they got, the more depressing the tars were, the tie villages were more than half empty, always children crying somewhere, signs of hunger everywhere even among the more prosperous villagers in the scattered small settlements dotted among the tars. Rane grew tense and brittle, scolding Tuli about her delusion-which is what she called Ildas-telling her it wasn’t healthy to carry the tricks of her imagination so far. She could not see, feel or hear Ildas and was deeply troubled by Tuli’s persistence in playing with him, talking to and about him. But Tuli watched the little creature jig about, listened to him sing his soundless tunes, laughed as he ran on threads of air, turned serious when he mimed the presence ahead of traxim or patrols out on sweeps from the villages, guards and Followers after food thieves and vagrants. For three tendays they traveled across the mijloc without serious trouble, only the niggling little things, the cold, the meager unsatisfying meals, the depression from constant reminders of the misery of the mijlockers, the floggings they’d watched in villages, the hunger in men’s faces, the pinched look of the children. Twice more Rane left Tuli in empty outbuildings, hidden with the macain and instructions to wait for no more than three hours then get away fast and quiet if Rane had not returned. No noncombatants in this war, Rane told Hal while Tuli listened not understanding. She did now. She was Rane’s insurance. She was able to take care of herself so Rane wouldn’t have to worry about her and she wasn’t more urgently needed elsewhere, so she was available as backup. Rane liked her well enough, that she was sure of, didn’t have to fret about. But the ex-meie didn’t really want companionship, despite all her assertions to the contrary; if she hadn’t needed backup she’d never have brought Tuli with her no matter how much she liked her. Tuli found these thoughts cold comfort, cold like everything else these days, but comfort nonetheless, and she settled down to prove her competence and deserve the trust Rane was showing in her.