“You’re fortunate that it wasn’t one of the pits we’ve seen in some of these side passages,” said D’Natheil. “And we’re fortunate also,” he added, before the Dulcé could reply.
“Bless you, my lord. You should leave me. I’ve caused nothing but difficulty.”
“I don’t think the Heir can proceed without his Guide.” D’Natheil displayed remarkable patience. “You will fulfill your mission, Dulcé.”
Baglos bowed his head, but not before I noted that his expression was quite at odds with his demeanor. His shame and apology sounded quite sincere, but he was not at all flustered. His almond-shaped eyes were sharp, and his face filled with determination and sorrow. I had always considered the Dulcé a simple, shallow man who wore his feelings and beliefs quite openly, one whose oddly constrained intelligence obscured nothing but a good heart. Yet in that moment his expression carried such conflicting stories that I began to think that perhaps he was more complex than he seemed. Though determined to continue this journey, he was afraid of its ending.
Well, so was I, I thought, as I watched the Prince help Baglos to his feet and boost him over the tall step in the rock. More so by the day. How could a man change so rapidly as D’Natheil? I could no more envision the Prince striking Baglos as he had once done than I could imagine myself embracing Evard.
Polestar was nowhere to be found. The Prince tried to summon him as he had the previous day, but after a quarter of an hour with no sign of the beast, we dared wait no longer. He insisted that Baglos ride the chestnut. Baglos protested, vowing unending humiliation. After what I’d seen of his private feelings, I wondered at his true sentiments.
Two more hours of slow progress and I felt a slight movement in the dead air. I lifted my face and hurried my steps. In a few moments more, the Prince allowed his light to die, and ten steps later we stood on the southern doorstep of Mount Kassarain, inhaling cool, thin air. We laughed and made jests about adventurers who feared caves or made wrong turns or stumbled off steps. Pursuit and uncertain destiny were momentarily forgotten in our delight at being in the open.
We stood high on the mountainside, overlooking a lush meadow of rocks and flowers, laced with tumbling streams, a green gem set into the harsh framework of the mountains. At the meadow’s eastern end the streams converged into fretting rapids that vanished into a bottomless, blue-white vista of gentle forested hillsides. To the west a faint track traversed a grassy slope and led deeper into the heart of the rugged peaks. But on every other side the grass yielded to boulder-strewn slopes and barren cliffs that offered no passage. We let the horses graze for a while.
Soon, D’Natheil was ready to press on. Urgency and excitement burned in his eyes as he peered into the west. “It’s there, ahead of us. I feel it.”
I climbed onto Firethorn. Baglos mounted the chestnut behind D’Natheil. The path led us from our high perch down through the flowered meadow, where blue, yellow and white blooms stood higher than the horses’ knees, and then across the velvet slope that funneled us into a narrow, grass-floored valley. Though easy and pleasant at first, the valley trail quickly became so steep and rocky it was difficult to pick out a good path.
Banners of wind-driven snow flew from the highest mountaintops, filmy white trailers against the intense blue of the sky. The air grew colder and thinner. By early afternoon the cold wind gusting in our faces made it impossible to distinguish the swirling banners from the clouds gathering over the icy peaks.
Another hour and D’Natheil halted in front of a short wall of massive boulders that stretched the width of the gorge. “We’ll have to leave the horses,” he said. “A foot trail hugs the wall on the right, but the beasts won’t be able to manage it.”
I didn’t ask him how he knew. His movements and words were abrupt, and I found myself looking over my shoulder, expecting to see our empty-eyed pursuers bearing down on us. If Baglos and I didn’t hurry, the Prince would go on without us. I dismounted, pulled my cloak tight about me, and made sure the journal was in my pocket.
“What should we carry with us, my lord?” asked Baglos. He, too, was anxious.
“Don’t burden yourself heavily, Dulcé. Food and drink for a day. I don’t think it will be a concern beyond that.”
The Prince rubbed Sunlight’s head and spoke to him softly. When I declared myself ready and Baglos had shouldered a small pack, D’Natheil slapped the horse’s rump and the beast trotted back the way we’d come, Firethorn close behind. “They’ll go back to the grass and wait for you,” said D’Natheil.
“Paulo isn’t the only one who communicates with horses,” I mumbled as we started up the steep rock stair. I couldn’t say why I felt so resentful.
An hour’s difficult walking brought us out of the gorge onto open, gently sloping tundra, surrounded by spires of ice and rock. It was as if we had stepped back a season. Everything was huddled to the windswept earth. No trees. No growth of any kind stood taller than a finger’s height. The afternoon had turned gray and bitterly cold. We came to the crest of the modestly rising ground, and before us lay an ice-bound lake, ringed with sheer cliffs. There was no going any farther.
A gust of wind billowed D’Natheil’s cloak as he looked out over the gray lake. He said only, “I think we have arrived.”
CHAPTER 33
No hint of green could be seen in that ice-bound vale. Rather a thousand shades of gray and white lay one upon the other, as if the artist who had painted that particular canvas had forgotten to dip his brush in any other region of his palette. Massive stones lay jumbled about the water’s edge, and behind them steep, ice-clad slopes of crumbled rock footed jagged cliffs that soared straight into the iron-hued sky. A faint tread wound from where we stood through soggy tussocks to the lake shore, skirting granite slabs that stood two and three times D’Natheil’s height. It was hard to imagine anyone, man or beast, coming willingly to such a desolate spot. How could it be the refuge of the J’Ettanne? No life existed here, only rock and ice, dead water and silence.
The fifth clue was the most obscure of all. Though he cannot see it, the hunter knows his prey, for it speaks to his heart whether he turns right or left.
Nothing in that landscape spoke to the heart; nothing beckoned or charmed or seduced. The wind off the lake whined through the boulders, nosing at our cloaks like a mournful dog. I wrapped the scratchy wool close about my face and tried to remember it was summer.
Willing my blistered feet to take a few more steps, I joined D’Natheil and Baglos on the rubble-strewn edge of the lake. There was nowhere else to go. No passage, no trail. Nothing but cliffs and rocks. Journey’s end. I was so tired that I could not rejoice in the stopping, and so uncertain that I could take no satisfaction in the accomplishment. “Where could we have gone wrong?”
“We’re not wrong,” said D’Natheil, his voice hungry. “Can’t you feel it? It’s like the heat shimmer that rises from the desert.”
I felt nothing but my feet. “Are you saying that what we see isn’t real?”
“Not at all. It’s just there’s much more than substance here—layer upon layer hidden behind what we see. I’ve never felt such a concentration of life.” Was it anticipation or dread that dropped his voice to a whisper and colored his skin like burnished copper?
I wrenched my eyes away, sank to the ground in the lee of a rock, and wrapped the damp tail of my cloak about my freezing ankles. “I still don’t understand the fifth clue.”
“It’s doesn’t matter. The Gate is here.”
He was right, of course. And the fifth clue was no more obscure than the others. From somewhere high in the encircling crags a white-tailed hawk screeched the doom of an unlucky rock-mouse, the lonely call reflected once, and then again, and then again from the rocks, a perfect triple echo. Then, from somewhere beyond the three reflections of the hawk’s cry, a thousand other birdsongs teased at the edge of our hearing, the songs of birds that had never known this pocket of ice and snow: flamboyant birds of deserts and jungles, sweet singing birds of deep forests, majestic birds of the ocean’s edge, larks and pipits and magpies and loons. Indeed, enchantment existed here. And abundant life.