“Go on, then,” Ilna said with a brusk gesture. She ignored the longing expression Alecto gave the bread.
The slope was covered by mountain laurels, with widely spaced hardwoods where the soil was a little deeper. The shrubs weren’t thorny, but their branches interwove in a tangle. Alecto picked as good a route as Ilna could imagine, but it was still hard going.
They paused in the notch. Water dripped from between layers of exposed rock, pooling in a hollow beneath before dribbling down the other side of the ridge. Alecto drank. Ilna tore the remainder of the loaf and gave half to her companion before she knelt to drink in turn.
Alecto was looking north when Ilna straightened, wiping her mouth. The direction they’d come from was wild enough, with only the narrow track—hidden from up here—to show the hand of men. On the far side there was even less to be seen. Enormous chestnuts and pines, bigger than anything Ilna had seen in the managed woodlands of the borough, stretched to the horizon.
Alecto swore bitterly and shivered. Ilna looked at her with a frown of surprise.
“I understand you not liking the city,” she said. Indeed, Ilna hated cities almost as much as the wild girl did, and for the same reasons: too many people, too much stone. “I thought you’d be pleased to be back in the wilderness.”
“This?” Alecto said harshly. “Trees like this are as bad as buildings! Where’s the pastures, where’re the farms? This is…”
She didn’t have a word to finish the sentence, but her tone dripped with despair. Gently, really trying to help, Ilna said, “It’s all part of the pattern, Alecto. Here the forest, there the sea…and the farms and villages woven through them, every strand in its place.”
Alecto looked at her with loathing. “Your patterns!” she said. “You and those fools in the temple there! You bind people, and they bind the Pack. You’re just the same as they are!”
“Do you think so?” Ilna said. Her voice was a cold whisper, completely without emotion. She put the remainder of the loaf back in the bosom of her outer tunic. “I think we’d better go on now, mistress.”
“I don’t like this place,” Alecto muttered as she started down the north slope. That was her idea of an apology, Ilna supposed.
She didn’t need to apologize. Alecto was part of the pattern, just as Ilna herself was. Ilna could only wonder—she didn’t assume, not when it was something good—whether the Weaver of the world’s pattern was as skilled as a mortal might wish.
Instead of going down into the valley, Alecto led them to the west along the slope of the hill to their left. Ilna couldn’t see any sign of a trail, but the wild girl gave every evidence of knowing what she was doing. Ilna didn’t like her companion, but Alecto’s skills were as real as Ilna’s own.
Dead leaves and pine straw covered the ground so thickly that there was almost no undergrowth except where a mighty tree had fallen. The slope was steep, often a perfect diagonal, and the patches of visible soil were rocky. Despite that, the trees were of a grandeur beyond anything Ilna had seen or imagined.
She smiled faintly. Her brother would love this forest; wood was to Cashel what fabrics were to her. Of course, Cashel would be planning the best way to begin cutting these giants down.
“They don’t come this way often,” Alecto said, speaking loud enough to be heard without turning her head. “Once or twice a year is all. Like peddlers coming through Hartrag’s village, but here they were going down to the city, not coming up from it.”
“Are you following the track with your eyes?” Ilna asked. “Or are you using your art?”
“It’s all one,” Alecto replied. “It’s just finding the path, however you do it.”
Ilna scowled, but when she thought about it she decided that Alecto wasn’t refusing to give a straight answer. To her, it was all the same. Alecto was no more sure of how she found the path than Ilna would know how she recognized a neighbor at a distance too great for eyes alone to make out features.
It was that talent that had taken Alecto into the dreamworld without a wizard in the waking world to put her there. The skill the Pack used in hunting down their prey must be similar.
Ahead of them was a narrow gap; a slab of rock had split, and the halves had tilted apart. Ilna stopped. When Alecto looked back at her, Ilna pointed, and said, “It’s on the other side of that. The place we’re looking for.”
Alecto scowled. “How do you know?” she asked.
Ilna shrugged. “The pattern,” she said. “It all connects here.”
Alecto sniffed. She led the way between the sheer walls of rock. On the other side, straggling across the steep slope, was a village of timber houses and a temple with fluted stone pillars.
Sharina lay with her cloak as blanket and ground sheet, looking at the stars. Tenoctris slept soundly on the sand beside her, her breath whistling in an even rhythm. Sharina was too weary to sleep, but the chance to stretch out at full length was a blessing she wouldn’t have appreciated even a few days before.
The royal fleet had beached on a ragged circle of coral sand. Much of the nameless atoll would be underwater at high tide, but the vast array of ships and men was only halting here for a few hours. They’d crossed half the Inner Sea; they would cross the remainder before they got a real rest.
Sharina could have slept under a sail spread on spars, but the night was mild, and she saw no need of shelter. The force carried no unnecessary baggage: King Carus alone had a small tent for privacy. The rest of the assembly thought that was because he was their leader; Sharina and Tenoctris knew it was because the king’s nights were tortured. Morale might have suffered if the troops learned the truth.
Driftwood fires spluttered at a dozen points around the sand. Most of the oarsmen weren’t sailors but rather laborers recruited from Valles and the countryside. Among the thousands were many to whom the warmth and sparkle of a fire was more important than sleep.
The Blood Eagles who guarded the women and Carus in the tent beside them stood quietly, leaning on their spears and watching the night. These men had replaced the detachment who’d been on duty earlier; the strain of shipboard was as great on the Blood Eagles as on anybody else, so even they needed a chance to relax before boarding the vessels for the next stage of the voyage.
Carus shouted inside the leather tent. Sharina heard the sring! of his blade clearing the scabbard. The side panel bulged as the king thrashed against it.
Sharina jumped up. The guards had heard also, whirling with their weapons ready.
“I’ll handle it!” Sharina said to the officer who stood with his sword drawn, reaching for the tent flap with his left hand. “Tenoctris!”
The tent could have slept four if they were good friends, but the roof was too low even at the center pole for Sharina to stand upright. There wasn’t much light in the open air—the waxing moon had just risen—and the tent walls were opaque. She opened her mouth to cry, “Your highness—” and Carus had her throat in his big left hand.
A speck of wizardlight glittered in the air, then burst. A faint azure haze clung to the struts that supported the corners of the roof; under the present conditions it lighted the interior as well as a lamp would have done.
Carus relaxed his grip and wiped his hand on his tunic. “Sorry,” he said with a wry smile. He shuffled back from the flap. “Come in, won’t you? Tenoctris—”
The old woman peered into the tent past Sharina’s shoulder.
“—you come too.”
He sheathed his sword with a movement Sharina couldn’t follow even though she’d watched him do it. She wondered how the king had been able to draw the weapon in the dark confines of the tent.