In her dreams she trudged up hills or slogged through swampy coastlands, searching for the man she loved or for her eagle or for an answer. She wandered, lost and alone, and kept falling, falling, until she woke again with the cloak wrapped around her. She found herself in a new place, one she did not recognize except it was high and exposed and the stone ledge on which she lay glittered with a twisting pattern grown into the rock.
It was a Guardian altar, just like the ones before.
She had a headache as bad as if she'd been sucking sweet-smoke, drugged and dazzled for days, as good an explanation as any although how she had gotten up to a Guardian's altar she could not figure. It seemed she was only now truly waking up. Probably she had dreamed the entire journey to Copper Hall.
She felt thirsty and hungry, and she wanted clothing because the winds on the height chilled her. With the cloak clasped at her throat, she climbed a treacherous path down to the base of the altar, bloodying her feet and hands. She stumbled through sparse highlands forest and happened upon a shepherd's high pasture cottage, uninhabited in the cold season. Here she found a storeroom with old but serviceable tools and hunting equipment. She also found humble clothing, needing a wash that, she discovered later, hadn't gotten out all the clinging lice, and a stash of nuts and moldering nai to be pounded into a paste for a stale porridge.
The thing is, when you're not sure if you have become a ghost or
perhaps something more frightening, you are wise to choose prudence. When a winged horse lands in the highlands meadow where you are sheltering, where you are trying to make sense of what has happened to you, you don't chase it away. You investigate, because you are still a reeve in your heart. In a small bag hooked to the back of the saddle, you discover a modest offering bowl like those beggars carry, and a polished black stone. The offering bowl presents no surprises; it is just a bowl. But when you place the stone in your left hand to get a better look at it, a sharp pain strikes up your arm and a flash like lightning sears you.
When you wake again, to find yourself on the ground with dirt and debris covering you as though a storm has blown over you or days have passed, and that cursed horse slobbering across your face as it nuzzles you, then you discover that the stone has vanished.
But at night, you can call light from your palm.
Marit was weak, too exhausted to travel. She lived in the shelter through the cold season, gathering and hunting. Once she had gained enough strength, she cut herself an exercise staff to work through the conditioning forms taught to reeves.
The winged horse vanished for intervals that never lasted longer than a day. She never saw it graze in the meadow or drink from the cold stream, which made her suspect that it, too, was a ghost: the ghost of a Guardian's winged horse. The Guardians were dead and gone. She had herself seen the bones of a dead Guardian, the day she was murdered on the Liya Pass. Most likely this state of being betwixt and between was indeed the punishment she had received for walking onto a Guardian altar when everyone knew it was forbidden.
But at least Joss still lived. He had survived. That was her consolation.
2
A new year arrived with the heat and the Flower Rains. She prepared travel food. When she left, she traveled along animal tracks and footpaths through high, dry country unfamiliar to her. Walking was such a slow way of traveling, especially since the worn leather
straps of the sandals she had taken from the hut kept breaking. Yet if she walked in bare feet, her soles got cut and bruised.
The winged mare tagged after like a love-struck youth. When the path was reasonably smooth, she practiced riding. Except for that morning of its arrival, she did not see it fly.
Not until the day the bandits attacked her.
She heard them long before she saw them.
'We've been tramping up here for months and found nothing. I say we go back to Walshow. I'm wanting hot spiced soup from Shardit's kettle.'
'That's not all you're wanting from Shardit's kettle. Not that she don't dole it out to anyone with enough coin to pay the tithing.' Cruel laughter floated over the trees.
Marit paused on a mostly washed-out track where she was picking her way among stones and steep water-cut trenches. Reluctantly, she had taken the knife and the bow from the shelter, not liking to steal but knowing she couldn't survive without them. She shut her eyes, listening. The wind chased up the ridge through pine and tollyrake. She smelled a sweet-sour scent, like a festering corruption in flesh.
'Shut your ugly muzzle, arsehole. She's my wife.'
'We all know what she was before, heh heh. Didn't she get thrown out of the temple for asking for coin-?'
A scuffle broke out: the distinctive smack of fist against flesh; men egging the combatants on; feet scraping and sliding on earth; breath coming in bursts and gasps.
'Stop that!' A stouter weapon thumped heads. 'Cursed fools. Keep your minds on our task.'
'Yes, Captain. Yes, yes,' they said, but she heard resentment and fear in their voices.
'Move on out, then. Move out.'
'Captain! See there! Is that the one we're looking out for?'
Their tiny figures were perfectly visible where the path bent through a clearing a very long distance below, beyond earshot. Hearing them had distracted her from looking so far. But she could see them.
And they had seen her.
She swore under her breath, losing track of their voices as they
burst into activity, some racing up the path while others spread out to make a net of men along the hillside to capture her in case she tried to sneak past them. She had only seven arrows, and the knife was just a knife, the blade not longer than her hand.
'The hells!'
She began climbing back the way she had come. The horse blocked the track, lowered its head, and shoved her.
'Great Lady! You useless beast! Get out of my way.'
It raised its head and stared at her, affronted.
'I beg you, please,' she added impatiently. 'I can't fight them. I have to run.'
It unfolded its wings. They were astonishing, as pale as its silvery-gray coat and too fragile to lift such weight.
'Curse it.' She tugged her stolen pack more tightly on her shoulders and ducked under one wing to come up at the saddle from behind. The wings rose over the mare's shoulders, sprouting out of a deep barrel chest thick with muscle. She made awkward work of mounting but fixed her legs into the straps -
The horse leaped.
She shrieked as she lurched sideways, grasping the post to stop from falling as the mare beat with heavy wing-strokes into the sky. Then she started laughing with relief and nerves as they rose higher, and the men came into view. One loosed a single arrow, which fell harmlessly back to earth, although she wished it might loop back and stick him in the chest.
The mare's flight seemed snail-like compared with the effortless sail of her eagle. It passed through the edges of several promising thermals, but unlike an eagle, it did not catch them and rise. It flew no faster than a horse could gallop, its thin legs imitating the gait as if it were running along an invisible road. Slow, slow, slow. Below, the company continued its dogged pursuit, scrambling up the trail.
'We're in for it now,' she said to the horse, who flicked an ear. 'Cursed if I don't think they're out looking for me in particular, although why I should think so, I don't know. I must have escaped that woodsmen's camp after all. Maybe these are friends of theirs, or the very men from that camp in pursuit of me. Lord Radas might have put them on my trail. But the one man said Walshow. That
town lies beyond High Haldia, up in Heaven's Ridge. That's well to the north of the Liya Pass and far away from Iliyat.'
Above the trees, where they flew, she had a better grasp of the land around her. She knew she was no longer on the Liya Pass, and nowhere near the vale of Iliyat, where Lord Radas ruled. And she certainly wasn't anywhere near Copper Hall. She had seen country like this during the year she had flown her apprentice's circuit as a newly trained reeve: in the high mountain escarpments of Heaven's Ridge. Steep ridges and peaks dominated the northern and northwestern horizons, a wall to separate the Hundred from the dangerous lands beyond. She and the mare flew above the foothills, a wilderness known to reeves as a haunt of bandits and other folk tossed out of their home for criminal behavior; it was also the remote nesting territories where eagles mated and raised their young out of sight of human eyes.