The young Adept alternated between picking out the path a few stumbling steps ahead, then halting for endless moments to scan the torn, churned vista before them, using the quarter-staff to sweep the ground before his boots.
Several times he muttered softly, extending a hand, and Eydryth saw dark violet light flare from his fingertips, coalesce into a slender arrow of brightness, then wind its way along the ground before him, vanishing ten or fifteen paces farther on.
If he can thus mark the true path for us, then we will be able to escape this maze, she thought with relief.
But soon she realized that using his Power to indicate their direction was wearing dangerously upon her companion. Each time he called up the violet arrows of light, the lines around Alon’s eyes and mouth deepened, the skin over his cheekbones grew tighter, until he seemed naught but a gaunt, greyed shadow of the man Eydryth had known. Sweat made runnels in the dust on his face; his thin shirt clung to his back, dark and soaked.
The songsmith fought back a surge of pity, reminding herself coldly that it was he who had led them into this peril in the first place. With a small, distant portion of her mind she was shocked by her own callousness, but she angrily hardened her heart as she placed one foot before the other, over and over again.
Onward they toiled, their pitifully slow progress made even more halting by their frequent stops while Alon determined the correct route. Overhead the sickly-hued sky never changed; heat pressed down on them like a muffling blanket. Thirst soon became a torment.
The travelers had three water flasks between them, hardly enough to last them even one day’s hard journey, considering that Monso must needs share their supply. The only water they had encountered within Yachne’s blighted land lay in muddy, scummed pools of such rankness that no creature could safely drink from them, or from springs that bubbled hot from the bowels of the earth, emitting eye- and throat-searing fumes.
After a time that went unmeasured except by Eydryth’s increasing thirst, pain from her wrenched ankles, and general misery from the will-sapping spell lying over the ensorcelled land, Alon halted. “Rest awhile…” he rasped. “Water…”
Slowly his knees folded and he sank to the ground, where he sat unmoving, shoulders bowed, head hanging with exhaustion.
The songsmith halted, too, then took out their packs of food and water flasks. She held out the container to Alon, who stared at it, his eyes so reddened and dulled with weariness that he seemed scarcely aware of what it was. “Here,” she said, steadying it as she removed the stopper. “Water. Drink, Alon.”
Catching the scent of water, the Keplian whickered softly, nostrils flaring. The Adept looked down at the flask, then took a deep breath, awareness returning to his gaze. He shook his head, then handed the water back to Eydryth with the ghost of a courtly flourish in the gesture. “You first, my lady,” he said, in that harsh, barely understandable whisper.
Unable to summon breath or wit to argue with him, she did as he bade, feeling the stale, warm liquid trickle down her throat like the finest of chilled wine from a High Lord’s table. Running her tongue over cracked lips to catch the last drops, she handed the flask to her companion.
But still Alon did not drink.
“Here, fellow…” he said, tugging the Keplian’s lead so the stallion stood nearly atop him. “You must be thirsty, too…”
Retrieving his leather jerkin, he spread it over his crossed knees so as to make a hollow. Then the Adept cautiously tipped half of the contents of the flask into the makeshift pail. Monso gulped the scant amount noisily. Only after the stallion had licked up all of the moisture did Alon raise the flask to his lips and drink sparingly.
The Adept shook the last drops from the now-empty flask into the jerkin for the stallion; then he crumbled journeybread for the Keplian to lip up from the garment’s battered surface. Plainly forcing himself, Alon broke off pieces of journeybread, trying not to open his cracked and bloodied mouth any wider than necessary to eat. Grimly, he chewed and swallowed the morsels. But when he held out a chunk to the songsmith, she shook her head. “I cannot. The journeybread is too dry.”
“Some fruit, then,” he said, locating the packet Dahaun had packed for them. “You need the strength, Eydryth.”
Too tired to argue, she mouthed and swallowed the overwhelming sweetness of the dried pulp. Eating did little to restore her blighted spirits, but slowly a measure of strength returned to her weary body.
She watched in dull surprise as Alon unstoppered their second flask and poured another generous measure for the horse. When Eydryth made a small, protesting movement, he shook his head. “I have traveled on short rations before. Rationing too severely does more harm than good, my lady. We are better off drinking now, attempting to keep our strength up while a measure of it still remains, rather than saving most of the water until we are too weak to go on.”
Remembering that her father had once told her something of the same thing, the minstrel nodded, accepted the second flask, then drank. “But only if you take more, too,” she said, handing it to her fellow-traveler. At her insistence, he took several more swallows, then stoppered the remainder carefully.
“How far have we come?” she whispered, trying not to move her parched lips more than necessary to make her voice heard. “How much farther to the end of this place?”
He shrugged grimly. “We have come farther than Yachne would ever have suspected we could,” he said. “Of that I am sure. The way out should lie just over that hill.” He pointed. Eydryth saw that his hand was shaking, despite his effort to steady it.
“What hill?” she whispered.
“You cannot see it?”
“Of course not.” Old anger made her tone sharper than she had intended. “I see only a thicket of dead bushes laced with thorny vines, all of it so interwoven it might as well be a hanging in the great hall of a keep.”
Alon gazed at her speculatively. “The thicket is illusion.”
“I will take your word for it.” The asperity was still there in her voice, though Eydryth was not sure precisely why she felt so nettled with him. Was it the witch’s spell that was causing her to feel such frustration and hopelessness? Or her anger at Alon for leading them into this trap of Yachne’s? She did not know. At his steady, measuring glance, her mouth tightened defiantly and she looked away, studying the vegetation that Alon insisted was not really there.
“Will we feel the vines and thorns?” she whispered, eyeing the sharp, greyish brambles apprehensively. “Or is this illusion one that confuses only the eye?”
“I fear that it is one of the more tangible ones,” he said. “Monso I can blindfold and lead, but you…” He shook his head.
“If I try and make my way through that, I will be flayed alive…” she muttered, staring at the vicious thorns. “Perhaps if my eyes were covered, also…” She trailed off with an inquiring glance.
Grimly, he shook his head again. “For you, the illusion is the reality. Whether you see it or not will make but little difference. As long as the false is real within your own mind, you will feel the results.”
“Can we go around?” she glanced at both sides of the thicket.
“Hardly. There”—he pointed to the left of the thicket—“is a scattering of large boulders, crowded so close that a dog would be hard-pressed to thread a way between them, much less something of Monso’s size. And there”—he indicated the right—“is one of the steaming pools. Can you not smell it?”
Eydryth’s nostrils twitched, then wrinkled. She could definitely detect the noxious fumes that proclaimed the reality of his assertion.
“Is that the only way we can go?” Panic clutched at her mind. Perhaps if she muffled her face and hands with pieces of blanket, and moved very slowly, she could avoid serious injury…