… A pause while she stood sick, vomiting a little down her front. The pain was so great that it drove her out of herself, took all of Patience Nearly-Lodge Riley, and left only a stranger standing.
… It was this stranger who rearranged the awkward arm, no matter how the woman screamed and wept. The stranger set the left wrist back into the branch's fork, forced it firmly… then paused to consider the angle necessary, the turn and twist necessary, the force necessary to leave the left arm's shoulder-joint no place to go but together.
That decided, the stranger allowed Patience back in – crouched stunned for a moment by her agony – then leaped again.
Grinding, and a surprisingly loud clack as what fit, fit.
Calling "Ohhh… ohhhh," Patience turned slow circles away from pain, then sat hunched on thick spruce needles, rocking back and forth to comfort herself as she would a child. A ferret seemed to cling to her left shoulder, chewing its way to the bone. Chewing at the bone, tearing tendons with its teeth. As if that. As if that…
With hours passed, it became only a deep drumbeat of pain, rhythmed with her heartbeat. Patience had sliced a wide strip of her greatcoat's hem free with her scimitar's edge, knotted the cloth into a sling one-handed… and carefully tucked her left arm angled in to rest.
Then, there was only the long night left to get through, until less pain might allow the concentration for Walking-in-air. If that proved not possible, then ground-walking the mountains' forest and stone would have to be the way north and east, and pain beside the point.
It was surprising, how familiarity dealt with fear. Just as he'd become weary of being frightened as the king had pursued him, so Baj became weary, after another day, of fearing falling.
Soon enough, he clambered along the mountain ridges fairly fast, and kept up – or almost up – with the Persons. Not that all these heights were airy, uncertain footing along granite cliffs. These mountains were so soft – anciently worn, according to Richard – that often their ridge peaks were rounded, rich with evergreens and even drifts of berry bushes here and there, though only tiny buds showed on those, and spring leaves hardly bigger, but a dark and bitter green.
Nancy no longer had to call, "Keep up!" and seemed to Baj to be relaxing from whatever annoyance she'd appeared to nurse the days past. She traveled on in her swift pacing way – more lightly than lumbering Richard – paying no attention that he could see to even dangerous passages, where only solitary sailing birds circled alongside possible slipping… to certain falling, and death.
When – on scree slopes – Baj went to all fours for a WT yard or two, as Richard and Nancy went more often, he could still feel a tenderness in his bitten forearm, as if a tip of one of the girl's fangs had touched the bone… An odd sensation – and, for what reason he couldn't have told, Baj had the most sudden yearning for Pedro Darry's company. How Pedro – still handsome, still a rake at forty years and more in his leather, lace, and satins – how he would have laughed, standing balanced on a precarious boulder. Thrown back his head and roared with laughter at Baj scuttling along behind small portions of bear's blood and fox's blood, with a measure of weasel circling somewhere behind.
"What in the Lady's name have you been up to?" Then, more laughter, observing Who'd-been-Bajazet – grimy, sweat-stained, sparse stubble unshaved – climbing the cliff-faces like a nervous squirrel, his rapier's scabbard-tip tapping the stone behind him.
How sweet that laughter would sound, if it brought Pedro to life again, to stand beside him. No better company in desperate circumstance than that merry swordsman… What had Mark Cooper said at the lodge, those moments before the dagger went in? "Darry killed three of our people…"
And Baj – climbing a merely steep stretch at last – could see it. A stone hallway, tapestries lifting a little along the walls as the river wind blew through. Then steel's bright sounds, bright glances of light along sword-blades flashing. Sad the Cooper man who first met that smiling face over sharp edges, bitter points. Sad the second man… and the third. They would have tried to turn him, get past him in the corridor to strike his back.
The fourth man must have managed.
Charm and laughter, all gone to spoiling dirt. And their complicity in that theft of life, only the least of Boston's robberies.
Baj climbed faster, until he saw Nancy's worn leather pack bobbing just ahead. Loss, it seemed, made strength.
He caught up and went beside her for a while – made the mistake of trying to help her over a great fracture in the stone, and received a satirical grin for it, and no thanks as she bounded up and over. It was in that sort of motion her mixed heritage was plain, that and her vulpine odor, as if an elegant vixen had been changed by some Warm-time wizard to a girl.
She climbed without his help, but Baj still kept up with her, so they traveled side by side for a while. At the next fracture – quite severe, as if a side of the great crest had broken – she stepped behind him, put a narrow hand on the seat of his buckskins, and with startling strength shoved him up.
When he got to his feet, she climbed past with that same grin. The long jaw, its sharp white teeth, seemed made for it, as foxes smiled at lost hounds casting.
"Thank you," Baj said, and kept on. It was surprising how even the early-summer sun burned down at these heights, so he wished he had a hat. Hats not common on the River, where the wind made fun and blew them away…though ladies sometimes secured them under their chins with bands of far-southern silk. It came to Baj as he threaded through a stand of stunted spruce, that he might not – almost certainly would not – see the Kingdom River again. Not feel the rainy winds that drove down its current in the short-summers… not feel the savage sleet that blew as Lord Winter came down from the Wall.
No care by Floating Jesus any longer, uncertain as that had proved to be. No songs of the fishermen sounding on lamp-lit evenings on the River, as they lured the salmon to their nets. No girls chased laughing through Island's glass-roofed gardens. No comfort of the grand company of civilization close around him. Now – and likely forever – wilderness, risk… and loneliness, save for odd companions.
Richard led them down-slope at last, down from their third long wearying ridge. "Off the crest," he rumbled, "and safer." Downhill, Richard went as any human, any "Sunriser" man might have gone, standing upright, but with heavy swaying to his gait, the double-bitted ax held casual over his right shoulder, its edges gleaming above his bulky backpack's fur.
They found Errol a considerable way down the mountain's side, squatting waiting by a small rock spring in evergreens. The boy had built a neat stack fire of twigs and weathered fallen wood, and seemed to be waiting for a starter spark.
Baj and the Persons came down to it, unloaded packs, cloaks and rolled blankets. Baj set down bow and quiver, dug out his tinderbox – struck flint sparks into its fine floss, blew those bright, then took a burning tuft and tucked it into the tinder.
… Supper was smoked boar; the first cuts off the last ham – though dry, edges fire-charred – still very fine. Richard and Nancy sat at the fire, ripping, chewing from their chunks; Baj slicing from his, with Errol gnawing a distance away. It was surprising how quickly one great ham had gone already…
Finished, Baj left the fire to pee – and downhill, off to the side of that cover, found a small pond a spring had made in a cup of stone and weedy turf. The setting sun shone off the still water in reflected red and gold, that then rippled slightly as the first of evening breezes came cool through the mountains… From this pond, Baj could see over pine and hemlock to more mountains marching north and east, their immense sunset shadows leaning one against the other. The air came into his lungs clear as iced vodka… so they ached a little, but nicely.