That was the only truly scary part, knowing his life continually depended on things he had never done before—like getting a fire to take, like staying awake, with no older brothers to wake him if he nodded. But he had done it. He had not frozen last night. So he thought he could do the other things, and the next and the next.
He had a small bit of rabbit for breakfast, and gave the bone to Zadny, who came just close enough to nip it in his teeth. He thought if Zadny were truly clever he would find his own rabbit, but he did not think Zadny was thinking about being hungry right now until someone held food in front of him. Nikolai said it was four days from the start to the top of the mountain, he had tucked that away in his memory, too, so that was all the breakfast he afforded himself. He crawled out of his bed of pine boughs into the cruel wind, dusted the snow off Gracja, and put the warm blanket he had slept with on Gracja's back, before the saddle that had been his pillow.
Then he bundled up the wood he had had drying all night next the fire's heat, and tied it on with Gracja's saddle-strings. He had done everything Nikolai had taught him to do; his breath hissed with shivers as he climbed onto Gracja's back the hard way, with a great deal of squirming about to bring his leg over Gracja's neck, because of the wood; the cloak flapped in the wind, and half-blinded him—it was not a graceful mount, but he was up and on his way to the hardest part of the climb, with Zadny already leaving tracks in the new-fallen snow.
He would show up on the other side of the mountain with Gracja and Zadny and say, "Of course I made it. No, I didn't have any trouble—none at all ..."
"Quiet every where," Nikolai remarked, riding closer to lamas and Bogdan. "No sight nor sign of trolls."
"No sight nor sign of anything," Bogdan complained, with a gesture outward, toward the sky and the eagles that hunted above them, in the thin, cold air. "Except them. —Where are the trolls, master Karoly?"
"Minding their own business," master Karoly retorted.
Master Karoly meant they should ask him no more questions; but it was a half-hearted shot, as if he was thinking about something else entirely.
"Something's wrong with him," Nikolai muttered to Bogdan. "He hasn't complained once today."
It's true, Tamas kept thinking—he kept hearing that remark over and over in his head and it made him more and more uneasy about Karoly. Something was wrong, something that distracted the old man, as if he were hearing something distant and difficult.
Bogdan remarked finally, when they were riding side by side, "The old master's worried. Has he talked to you?"
Tamas shook his head. "No." He waited for Bogdan to confide further in him, the way Bogdan would if they were at home and without Bogdan's friends around. But that was all Bogdan said. He asked finally, to fill the silence, "How far are we from the top? Did Nikolai say?"
"We're past it, Nikolai says. We're through the pass and going around the mountain—Nikolai says. But he's never been farther than this."
The valley looked no different than the one they knew. There was nothing magical about it, nothing that gran had described, no sign of trolls or faery. Bogdan rode beside him a while more in silence, then fell back to talk with Filip, in words too low to hear, perhaps confiding his worries to his friend, since his brother was too young for his confidences.
The journey was not turning out as he had hoped. It was certainly something to see the mountains from up here. But what had seemed an adventure into once-upon-a-time at its outset, came down to ordinary, barren stone, with more spits of sleet to sting their faces. Karoly was not talking to any of them, the older men were not talking to the younger—they rode in their own small group, with Jerzy wondering aloud were they on the right trail; and no one was interested in Stani's second eldest's opinions or his presence.
But it did,, thank the god, seem that the trail was slightly downward, now; and by afternoon, that pitch was unmistakable, even steep—all rocks and scrub pine, never yet a flat place and never yet a leaf the horses could use to fill their stomachs, but at least the wind was not so bitter cold, and even Jerzy grew more cheerful.
Now, Tamas thought, they would begin to see the landmarks their gran had described. A place called Krukczy Straz, that was the first—a tower in pine woods, that guarded the broad valley where the road went down to Hasel, where there might even be relatives, if grandmother's kin were alive. At Krukczy Straz they might find a warm gate-house to sleep in, at least, even if it was nothing but the defensive tower its name implied. There would be warm water for washing, and a good meal, and hay for the horses, and they might still get there tonight, if it was well up in the highlands, the way he recalled in gran's stories.
"Isn't there a tower?" he ventured, riding close to master Karoly. "Do you think we can reach it tonight?"
Everyone else was more cheerful. Master Karoly was not. Karoly took a glum moment about answering him. "It's possible. Or not. Let's not get ahead of ourselves, shall we?"
It was certainly not the forgiving master Karoly of the drafty tower study or the orchards around home. Tamas rode by him a moment more, wondering if Karoly would have more to say, or remember his presence—a lad could begin to wonder if he had not gone invisible to his companions, or whether Karoly saw him at alclass="underline" Karoly did not so much as look at him again, or speak. He let his horse drift back to a slower walk, until it was him in the middle, between Nikolai's group; and Bogdan's group.
Tell Bogdan about it? Tamas wondered. What could I say? Master Karoly frowned at me?
The trail meandered along the mountain and then plunged steeply, wearingly downward, with never a sprig of grass for the horses, into a dead, skeletal ruin of pine and cedar. They had fed the horses the scant grain they were carrying, and pressed their journey late into the afternoon on a level road, with the mountains like a wall around them, unforgiving, sleet-dusted lumps of rock.
"This is madness," Jerzy said, as a sudden bitter wind howled out of the heights, whipping at their cloaks and the winter-coat of the horses. "Are we on the trail at all? I swear we're going up again."
"It is the road," master Karoly broke his silence to say. "It's illusion. We're still descending."
"I'm not sure you know where we are, old man. I'm not sure we didn't take a wrong turn on the mountain—"
"No," Karoly said shortly.
"Master Karoly," Bogdan said, "we're out of supplies; and if we come to green grass, or if things get better lower down, that's one thing: but it's far from encouraging, what we're seeing. We can't press on without limits: these horses can't do it, we can't do it—"
"We can't make it back over the pass," Nikolai said, "without supplies. There's no point arguing it. No matter where we are, we've got to go ahead. It is a road, it has to go somewhere, and somewhere has to be down from the heights. We should keep moving, past sunset tonight if need be."
"It is the right road," Karoly said under his breath.
Tamas said, "Grandmother mentioned—" and then held his peace, because what gran had said had no more currency than what Karoly knew.
"We're lost," Jerzy maintained; and Karoly only shook his head and looked away across the valley. Wisps of cloud veiled the depths. Birds circled far out across the gray expanse, eagles or carrion crows it was hard to say: size and color were illusory in this place. The birds made long shadows on the clouds.
Crows, Tamas decided, as they rode lower, through a foggy patch. Carrion crows and ravens fit everything they had seen so far; not only Maggiar had suffered a blight last winter. Trees on the mountains had died, leaving sticks of evergreens. The wind came out of the west, down the throat of the pass and against their backs, cold and damp off the patches of sleet on the slag-heap mountains. Instead of gran's waterfalls they found frozen, soot-stained ice; instead of the pine groves of her stories, charcoal stumps thrust up through sere, blackened brush.