“We’ve no time to take him back to his village,” said Baglos. “We must find the Gate.”
“No. Going back would be very dangerous.” I wasn’t yet ready to explain the extent of my rock-headed stupidity.
“Then the boy must stay with us,” said D’Natheil simply, leaving Baglos with no argument and me relieved.
When I told Paulo that he was to accompany us on our travels until such time as we could return him to Dunfarrie, he stood at least a hand’s breadth taller. “But you’ll have to earn your keep,” I said, “and obey any one of us without question.”
“Whatever you want, miss. I promise.”
“This won’t be the safest road, but you’ve shown yourself resourceful in the past, and we’ll expect nothing less of you now. And most importantly, you’ll hear and see many things you can’t tell anyone, now or ever. Our lives and yours will depend on your silence. I think you know what I mean. Are you willing?”
Paulo grinned and ducked his head, probably the nearest he’d ever come to saying thank you.
“To start,” I said, “I think you’ll have to care for the horses. Baglos dislikes it very much, and I know you’re good at it.”
While I told Baglos what I’d said to Paulo, the boy flung his arms about the neck of my little roan and buried his face in the beast’s ruddy coat. Perhaps some good had resulted from all this.
* * *
By the time we were two days on the road to Tryglevie, the four animals were fast friends with Paulo. They nosed his neck and his pockets and his thin brown hands at every opportunity, and he had but to click his tongue and they stood ready for whatever he wished of them. I soon came to believe the boy was able to read the beasts’ minds as clearly as any J’Ettanne. On the third morning of the journey, as the boy gave me a leg up, I grumbled that the roan didn’t seem to be learning my commands very well. Paulo asked why I didn’t use my horse’s name, as that would make him listen better. When I said that I didn’t know the beast’s name and hadn’t had the time to think of one, the boy stared at me in scornful disbelief. “Name’s Firethorn,” he said. “Don’t know why you never figured it out.”
“And what of the Prince’s horse?”
“He don’t want a name just yet. He’s thinkin‘ on it.” I wasn’t sure whether Paulo meant D’Natheil or the horse. “The other one, now, he’s Polestar.” Appropriate for the horse of the Guide.
“And yours?”
Paulo flushed and gently stroked his horse’s neck. “Molly. She’s naught but a broke-down mare, you know. Just right for me.”
We rode onward into the west.
CHAPTER 28
Three days’ hard riding brought us out of the great forest and into the rocky foothills of western Leire. It was harsh country, afflicted with wild extremes of weather and dotted with poor settlements, suitable for little but grazing sheep. I could well believe such a place was the Writer’s home.
In his journal he had forever lamented the unpredictable weather and rocky soil that made it so hard to feed his family, he was forced to sell the talent he would rather give freely.
As soon as we left the forest, we began to inquire at every house and village as to the whereabouts of Yennet and the ruins that lay nearby. Villages the size of Yennet rarely appeared on any map, and even those who had heard of the place were vague about its location. One said it was directly northwest. Another said it lay just east of the great bend where the Glenaven met the Dun. Another said it was no ruined castle, but a nobleman’s quarry that adjoined the village. A traveling tinker we met at a roadside well seemed the most reliable source. He claimed to have visited Yennet. “Two years ago, that was. Wasn’t hardly anyone living there. Folks too poor even to have a kettle needed mending.” But he drew us a map showing Yennet about halfway in between something he marked as Pell’s Hill and a ruined castle from the times before Leire had a king. Pell’s Hill was likely an ancient barrow known as Pell’s Mound, a site Karon had always hoped to excavate.
We set out on the tinker’s route, still with no sign of pursuit. About twelve leagues west we were to watch for a fork in the road, the rightmost continuing west and north to join the main route that ran from Montevial all the way west to Vanesta. The less-traveled left fork, hardly a road at all, would bear slightly southeast to skirt Pell’s Mound, then angle straight south to Yennet.
The second day from the tinker’s well dawned overcast, and the thickening clouds glowered and grumbled as the morning progressed. Thunder rolled across the rocky fields, and at midmorning the black sky erupted into chaos.
Baglos was in the lead, hunched down in the saddle, his gray cloak pulled up tight against the lashing rain. Paulo on his Molly followed behind the Dulcé. Sometime near midday, the boy reversed direction and stopped, blocking the road and forcing me to stop in my turn. I yelled at him in irritation. “Keep moving, Paulo. We’ve no wish to be out in this any longer than need be.”
The boy had his huge cloak draped over him and his horse, like Isker women who rode to war behind their husbands, forbidden to expose anything but their eyes. Without poking so much as his nose outside his shroud, Paulo gestured toward a muddy rut that led off to our left into the rainswept meadows. The soggy landscape was dotted with sparse clumps of pine and birch trees, and massive, oddly shaped piles of granite poked out of the ground like the debris of a giant rock-boring mole. The rut was straight enough, one could imagine it might be a path.
“Good eyes, Paulo,” I shouted over the roar of the storm. “Catch Baglos and tell him we’ve found the turning. I’ll wait for the Prince.”
D’Natheil had lagged behind us all day. Indeed, from our first night out of Montevial, he had withdrawn almost completely from our society. He rarely spoke, and when we camped, he ate little and slept less, patrolling the nearby ground while Baglos or I was on watch, and taking the late watches alone when the rest of us were asleep.
More than half an hour passed until he came into view. Irritated at having to wait so long in the cold rain, I didn’t wait for him to join me, but waved and rode on up the muddy track, hurrying to catch up with Baglos and Paulo. With every step away from the main road, the track looked less like a road and more like a stream. The wind ripped and tangled my cloak, ensuring that no patch of clothing or skin stayed dry, and the gusts felt as if they’d come straight off of the snow-capped mountains to the southwest, making a mockery of my summer clothing. Soon the water and mud flowed from everywhere, and I was losing all sense of direction. As a girl I had delighted in watching storms rumble across the barren hills beyond Comigor. But turbulent weather lost a great deal of its charm when one had no three-foot-thick walls or six-hundred-year-old roof to keep it out.
Baglos halted in the middle of the open downs, Paulo beside him. Sheets of rain and lowering cloud obscured the view in every direction. “I can no longer assure you that we are on the path,” said the Dulcé when I joined the two. “I don’t know what to do.”
My hair stuck to my face and dribbled cold rivulets into my eyes, and my teeth were chattering so I could hardly answer. “How far is it from the fork to the village?”
“The tinker said half a day, but that would be in fair weather. And if we’ve strayed…”