He flinched as though he had been slapped, although she had spoken in an entirely pleasant tone. He hurried out, carrying the lamp. Thunder rumbled among the crags, and the air felt charged, ready to snap and spark. High in the air, almost out of range of his vision, a fireling winked into existence and vanished, and then a second, and ten more, and after that more than he could count, like kinfolk come to weave a new child into the heart of their clan, chanting the greeting.
He stopped to stare, but they were already gone.
Eiya! Never for him a child called from beyond the Spirit Gate to join father and mother; he must be content as an uncle, and unaccountably he wept as he trudged the long dirt path to the fire pit, where flames blazed and the wind caught sparks and sent them tumbling. Away up in the mountains, lightning flared, and thunder boomed, and as he hooked the pot off the tripod, rain washed over the valley, cleansing everything in its path.
'Why do you follow me?' asked Kirit.
'I'm the hells unlikely to follow them.' Downstream along the bank of the River Istri, Mark indicated distant lights sweeping northward through the sky out of the Toskala.
'They are looking for us,' said Kirit. 'It is safer if we do not travel together.'
'You don't trust me.'
The girl shrugged.
'I thank you anyway,' continued Marit, 'for not joining them. I'm not your enemy, Kirit. But I have a cursed good idea that they're headed back to their camp, to see if Hari has woken. To give him his staff. Then they'll be after both of us.'
'He will betray us?'
I like him. But that doesn't mean we can trust him.'
'Or that I can trust you,' said the girl. 'Do not follow me. Maybe you are their spy.'
'I'm not,' said Marit more with weariness than heat. 'But I'm not going to debate that now. At the turn of the next month -
when Lion falls into Ibex – I will walk the shore of the Salt Sea where the spine of the Earth Mother cradles the birthing waters.' The girl stared at her, devoid of emotion. 'If you don't know of it, you being an outlander, the Salt Sea lies northwest beyond Heaven's Ridge, where the gods cleft the Hundred from the lands beyond. When a new reeve finishes her first year of training, her circuit of the land, that's the last place she visits: to lay an offering of flowers at the Earth Mother's womb. You'll know the place when you see it.'
'You go back to them, now?'
'I am not one of them, Kirit. Surely you saw they meant to destroy me. If you won't trust me enough to ally with me, then what if they find you in the end? Five, to judge one. They're after you now, just like they're after me. And most likely they're after the envoy, wherever he's hiding. As for me, I'm going to find my staff.'
Reeves patrolling over the Liya Pass had once commonly met at Candle Rock to exchange news and to replenish wood for the signal fire kept ready in case of emergency. But the fire-pits were half filled with dust and debris, the white stones that had once ringed the hollows tumbled out of line. Under the craggy overhang, spiders and rock mice had made comfortable homes in the depleted woodpile.
What a bright day that had been, Joss waiting for her, him so young and her so eager. Where had that young woman gone? What we have lost we can never get back again.
Marit stood where she and Joss had so long ago shared the embrace of the Devourer. With the setting sun behind her, she looked east toward the ridge of hill held by the hierarchs to be sacred to the Lady of Beasts, to whom she had served her year's apprenticeship as a girl of fifteen. Ammadit's Tit could be mistaken for no other landmark.
Out of habit, out of respect, she cleared the stones, raked out the fire pit, and shifted such wood as was still usable into a new stack, splitting kindling. You had to leave things as you would hope to find them.
Herelia had been closed to reeves for so many years that she doubted any reeves chanced the Liya Pass in these more dangerous days, for fear of being ambushed, as she had been twenty years ago.
Nor, in the circuitous route she had taken over many days and nights flying up here, had she seen much traffic on any of the tracks or roads in these parts. The land appeared quiet and orderly. Subdued. Probably it was. But looks could be deceiving.
In the gray light before true dawn, she flew Warning along the high ridgeline to the black knob of the Tit. The Guardian's altar tucked on a shelf of rock below the summit glittered with the first sparks of sunlight. She'd had a hard time maneuvering Flirt onto the ledge, but Warning simply galloped as on a ramp down to earth. Mark dismounted, and the mare trotted across the labyrinth, seeking the spring.
Now, the gamble, the sticks tossed, the game set in motion.
She set her right foot on the entrance, and her left. She named each turn as the woman wearing the cloak of night had taught her: Needle Spire bright with the morning sun; Everfall Beacon; Stone Tor; Salt Tower beside the Salt Sea; Mount Aua; Highwater stream; the Pinnacle; the Walshow overlook; Swamp Bastion; Horn Vista; the Dragon's Tower; Thunder Spire; the Five Brothers; the Seven Secret Sisters; the Face on the Kandaran Pass, where night still shadowed the Spires. A hundred and one altars sacred to the Guardians wove through the land and, together with the Ten Tales of Founding, held the garment together.
The Rocky Saddle. The Eagle's Talon. Haldia Overlook.
She tasted blood, a faint lingering taint. One of the others had stood at Haldia Overlook recently, was maybe even walking the labyrinth ahead or behind her. She pushed on. Unlike the last time she had walked this labyrinth, no voices whispered at her ears; no man's figure greeted her as she stepped into the hollow. But instead of being blinded by a flare of light, spun halfway around and thrown by the altar's sorcery to the peak of the knob, she simply halted beside Warning, who watered unconcernedly at the pool.
Marit knelt, dipped her bowl, and drank deeply. Rising, she ran a hand over the soft stubble of her hair, still and always the same length as the days when she'd kept it cut short because that was the fashion reeves wore.
You think that you are dead, but you are living. It is others who tell you you are dead, and you believe them, and by believing them you corrupt the strength the gods pour into their chosen vessels.
Yet why then did her hair not grow?
Sometimes you had to go with the evidence.
She walked back to the rim of the ledge. Remarkably, the rope she'd left here twenty years ago swayed in the morning breeze, still fastened above. She gripped the rope in a hand and tugged as hard as she could, and cursed if it didn't hold. Amazing how indestructible good hempen rope proved to be.
She curled up the trailing end of the rope and knotted it in a cradle around her hips. Climbing up on the ledge, she leaned backward into the air and, hand over hand, worked her way up the knob, pausing at intervals to rest with the rope looped up tight around her body. Arms and legs aching, she scrambled the last rugged slope up to the summit where a metal post had been hammered deep into the rock. The frayed remains of banners streamed around her: blood-red, black of night, heaven-blue, mist-silver, fiery-gold-sun, earth-brown, seedling-green, twilight-sky, and death-white. The cloaks of the Guardians.
And she laughed, because there it was. The metal post was hollow, like pipewood, and cursed if someone – maybe the handsome man with demon-blue outlander eyes set in a brown face -hadn't simply slipped a sword in at the top, the hilt peeping up above the blustery rumble of sun-bleached banners.
Never in her life before had Mai enjoyed isolation, but after the birth she was content simply to rest on a pallet in the cave, seeing no one, food and drink and cleaning arranged by Priya and, later, Sheyshi. The baby was very small, but he seemed healthy, nursing and sleeping and eliminating. He rarely cried, and sometimes she sat outside on a pillow by the pool and cradled him in her arms as spray off the falls cooled her back. Probably she should not expose him to the moist air, but she felt an inexplicable kinship with the falls, as if it had soothed and comforted her during the final stages of labor when those eerie strands of light had filled the cave. The valley, too, was very beautiful, and its high walls cradled her, the crags and mountain peaks looming like stalwart guards. In this place, she was safe.