The King raised a hand for silence.
But the archbishop leaned down from his horse. “Shut her up,” he said. “Your bastard goes to the fire with you.”
“This is your God of mercy, my lord?” Desiderata asked, her voice gentle. “To kill the child with the mother? The innocent child? The heir of Alba?”
“God will know his own,” the archbishop spat.
The King was having trouble remaining mounted. A pair of guardsmen came and supported him. He tried to speak, but de Rohan waved, and the men-at-arms led his horse towards the Royal Pavilion.
De Rohan lingered. “Count your remaining breaths,” he said. He smiled.
Desiderata felt liberated. She’d seldom been so calm-so strong. “You enjoy making hell come to earth, do you not?”
De Rohan’s smile, if anything, grew. “It is all shit,” he said. “Don’t blame me for it.” He breathed on his vambrace and polished it on his white surcoat.
She met his smile with one of her own. “It must be terrible,” she said with the clarity of the edge of death. “To be both selfish and impotent. How I pity you.” She reached out a hand-not in anger, but in sorrow.
He flinched. “Don’t touch me, witch!”
She sighed. “I could heal you, if you gave me the time.”
“There’s nothing to heal!” he spat. “I see through the lies to the truth. It is all shit.”
“And yet from your shit grow roses,” she said. “Burn me, and see what grows.”
Now he backed his horse away. “No one will save you,” he said.
She smiled. Her smile was steady and strong, and utterly belied the fatigue graven into her face. “I am already saved,” she said.
Chapter Four
The Wild
Nita Qwan and his two companions, Gas-a-ho, the shaman’s apprentice, and Ta-se-ho, the old hunter, spent one of the most comfortable winters of their lives-even a life as long as Ta-se-ho’s-in the halls of N’gara. Food and warmth were plentiful. So was companionship. Gas-a-ho passed in one winter from a gawky boy with aspirations to the rank of shaman to a serious young man with dignity and a surprising turn of mind. Tamsin, the Lady of N’gara, had passed much time with him, and he had benefited from it.
Ta-se-ho had also benefited. He looked younger and stronger, and when the sap began to move in the trees, and when the preparations for war began to grow serious, it was he, despite his age, who sat down in the great hall and suggested that they leave.
“I have heard matrons and shamans agree that the early spring is the most dangerous time to travel,” Nita Qwan said. In fact, he sought nothing but reassurance. His wife would bear their first baby soon, and he wanted to be home.
He also wanted to be away from the endless temptations of the hall-flashing eyes and willing companions and the new seduction of fame. Nita Qwan the warrior. Nita Qwan, the Faery Knight’s friend.
Nita Qwan, Duchess Mogon’s ally.
Ta-se-ho nodded as he did when someone younger made an excellent point. “This is true. The soft snow of spring is the most dangerous snow. Heavy rain on snow is when those walking in the Wild die. Nonetheless-” The old hunter sat back. “It came to me in a dream-that the sorcerer’s people would have an even harder time. The Rukh? They would die faster than we, as the ice breaks and the waters move. His men? His allies? Without raquettes, they are dead. Even with them-this is a time of year when the People can travel. Not safely, but safer than our enemies. We know the ground and the snow and the little streams under the rotting snow.”
Unannounced, Tapio, the Faery Knight, appeared and sat. His recovery from his duel with Thorn had been rapid, but it had left its mark-his face was thinner and one shoulder sat higher than the other.
“Your people, oh man. They will need to move quickly. Sssilently.” He flashed a fanged smile. “Before Thorn can ssseize them.” He nodded to Ta-se-ho. “You think well, old hunter.”
“I had a dream,” Ta-se-ho said with a slight inclination of his head. “I was reminded by ancestors that we used the snow of spring to escape you.”
Tapio showed his fangs mirthlessly. “Perhapsss. Timesss change. Enemiesss change.”
“You killed many of the People, Tapio,” Ta-se-ho said.
Tapio raised a hand and moved it back and forth as if it was a balance point. “And now I will sssave many.” He looked around.
Duchess Mogon, utterly graceful despite the bulk of her big reptilian body, came and squatted down. Lady Tamsin was with her.
She waved a hand, casually, and a glowing curtain of purple fire descended on them.
Mogon gurgled. “It is time,” she said, as if she was answering a question someone had put to her.
“I had a dream,” Ta-se-ho said.
Mogon nodded. “My hearing is not limited to the tiny fraction of the world humans hear,” she said. “Nor am I so very old. You wish to move across the spring snow.”
Nita Qwan thought of his pregnant wife. “He proposes that we move the Sossag people now.”
Mogon shook her head. “My people are all but useless at this time. Until the sun warms the hillside, we have only our human allies to protect our fields.” She showed all her teeth. “Not that we are impotent. Merely that we do not go far abroad.”
Tapio looked at Nita Qwan. “Can you do it?” he asked.
Nita Qwan shrugged, his hands in the air. “Ta-se-ho says we can do it,” he said. “I am not really a great warrior and I know almost nothing about moving at this time of year, except that it will be brutally hard and very cold and wet.”
Ta-se-ho laughed. “When has the Wild been anything but cold and wet for our kind?”
Tapio nodded. “I will prepare you sssome toysss, that may make your journey easssier.”
Nita Qwan bowed. “The Sossag people thank you.”
Mogon snorted. “I will go home in a week or two, when the lake begins to break up,” she said. “Bring the People to me. We will be strong friends.”
“But not your warriors,” Tapio said.
Nita Qwan and Ta-se-ho nodded. “We know what to do.”
The journey around the inland sea was hard. It was so hard that, later, Nita Qwan thought that all his life as a slave had been nothing but a test for the trek.
There were only the three of them and three toboggans. Tapio and Tamsin gave them several wondrous artifacts; a clay pot that was always warm, day and night, and whose warmth seemed to expand or contract depending on where it was-on the toboggans, it was merely warm enough to warm hands, but in a small cave, it was like a large fire. Each of them had mittens, made of a light silky stuff by the lady Tamsin and her maidens, and the mittens were always dry and always warm. Gas-a-ho had a small staff with which he could make fire.
“I made it with Tapio’s help,” he said modestly. “He and the Lady taught me so much.”
Even with these items and several more; even with the best and warmest clothes made by all the Outwaller women at N’gara and with blankets provided by the Jacks and the good wishes of every man, woman, and creature in the fortress-even then, the trip was horrible.
Each day, they walked across soft snow. Their snow shoes plunged into the snow as far as their ankles and sometimes as deep as their knees, so that half an hour into the day, walking was already a nightmare and after eight hours, it was like walking in deep mud. Every stream crossing was treacherous, and required the careful, patient removal of the raquettes, the plunge up to the groin in deep old snow so that each man could cross, rock to rock, on now-exposed streams. Toboggans had to be carried across, and every day the streams rose. Ponds and small lakes were still highways for rapid movement on the ice, but the ice would break soon.
They went as fast as their muscles would allow.
Camps were made in places no sane man would camp in summer-on exposed rocks, in the snow cave created by two downed evergreens, under looming rock faces and in the middle of stands of birch. Fires sank into the snow and vanished unless supported by a lattice of sodden logs. They slept on their toboggans. No one bathed or changed clothes.