The arm attached to the shoulder she was staring at reached out toward her, and she was so absorbed in not thinking about anything that its hand had seized her chin before she thought to flinch away. The hand exerted upward force and her neck reluctantly bent back, but her eyes stuck on his chin and stayed there.
“Hey,” said Luthe. “This is me, remember? You aren’t allowed to pretend I don’t exist until after you leave my mountain.”
She raised her eyes and met his; blue eyes smiled into veiled green ones. He dropped his hand and said lightly, “Very well, have it your way. I don’t exist.”
She had already turned away, but she turned back at that, and his arms closed around her, and so they stood, while the sun shone down on their two motionless figures and one impatient stallion.
Aerin broke free at last, and heaved herself belly down over the saddle, and swung her leg hastily behind, thumping a bundle with her boot in the process. Talat grunted.
“Come back to me,” said Luthe behind her.
“I will,” she said to Talat’s ears, and then Talat was trotting briskly down the trail. The last Luthe saw of them was a stray blue gleam from the hilt of a sword.
Spring seemed to burst everywhere around them as they went, as though Talat’s small round hoofs struck greenness from the earth; as if the last white hairs of his winter coat conveyed a charm to the earth they touched. When they slept, they slept in small glades of trees where leaves had just begun to show; but in the mornings, somehow, the leaves were uncurled and heavy with sap; even the grass Aerin lay on had thickened during the night hours. Talat seemed to grow younger with every day, his shining whiteness brilliant in the sunlight, tirelessly jogging mile after long mile; and the birds followed them, as the leaves opened for them, and the flowers cast their perfumes around them. Aerin saw, and wondered, and thought she was imagining things; and then thought again that perhaps she wasn’t; but the sun told her that they went steadily north, and the hard feel of Gonturan in her hand reminded her of why they went.
They had first descended to the forest plain when they left Luthe, and turned right, or north, in the foothills; and here the grass grew to Talat’s knees, and he had to wade through it, with a rushing sound like a ship’s prow through the sea. Before them the grass was thinner; behind them, when she turned to look, the grass was deepest where their trail had been, and waves of grass rippled out from it in wide curving swells. Aerin laughed. “I believe we go in company after ail, though the company chooses to be silent.” Talat cocked his ears back to listen.
But soon they climbed into the mountains again, and there spring had more trouble following them, although she continued to try. Aerin was not conscious of guiding Talat, any more than she had been when they sought for Luthe; they both knew where they were going, and it drew them on; and behind them spring urged them forward. Higher they went, as the sun rose over them and set almost behind them, and the ground underfoot was no longer turf, but rock, and Talat’s hoofs rang when they struck.
When they first came to the stony ground, his hoofbeats struck a hard warning sound; they seemed to thunder of doom and loss and failure, and Talat shied away from his own feet. “Nonsense,” said Aerin, and dismounted, taking Gonturan with her; and she swung her up over her head and down, and thrust her into the trail before her, which was not rock at all, but earth; and as she drew the blade out again, there were some small crushed grass stems growing from the hole that she had made. Aerin knelt, and picked up a handful of dirt and pebbles from the tiny bit of broken earth before her; and threw her handful down the rocky way before them, as far as her arm could hurl; and as the handful disintegrated, the bits twinkled. She threw another handful after the first; and when she threw this into the air it smelted of the crushed leaves of the surka, and as she looked ahead she saw, as if her eyes had merely overlooked it the first time, a slender grey sapling bearing green leaves; and in its topmost branches there appeared a bird, and the bird sang; and around the tree’s foot there grew a budding surka plant, which explained the heavy pungent smell in the air.
“What a pleasant place this is,” said Aerin dryly, but it seemed that her words were sucked away from her, and echoed in some narrow place that was not the place where she stood. Her hand tightened a little on Gonturan’s hilt, but she raised her chin, as if someone might be watching, and remounted Talat. Now his hoofs rang out merrily, like hoofbeats on the stony ways of the City; and there was grass growing in tufts among the stones, and a few wildflowers clinging to crevices over their heads.
The feeling of being watched increased as they went on, though she saw no one, except, perhaps, at night, when there seemed to be more rustlings than there had been when they were still below on the plain, and more quick glints that might have been eyes. The fifth night since she had plunged Gonturan into the earth, and the twelfth since she had left Luthe, she stood up from her fireside and said into the darkness, “Come, then, and tell me what you want.” Her own voice frightened her, for it sounded as if it knew what it was doing, and she was quite sure she did not; and so she staggered and almost fell when after a few moments something did come, and pressed up against her, against the backs of her thighs. She did not move; and before her she saw the glints of many pairs of eyes, moving nearer, at about the right level for creatures the size of the thing that leaned against her legs. She had her arms crossed over her breast; now with infinite reluctance she unbent her right elbow and let the hand dangle down behind her leg, and she felt the creature’s breath. She closed her eyes, and then opened them again with an involuntary yelp as a very rough tongue dragged over the back of her hand. The weight against her legs shifted a little, and then a round skull pressed into her palm.
She looked down over her shoulder with dread, and the great cat thing, one of the wild folstza of the mountains, which could carry off a whole sheep or bring down a horse, began to purr. “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” Aerin said shakily. “I think.”
Her eyes had grown more accustomed to the darkness, and in the shadows now she could see more of the folstza, ten, a dozen, sixteen, twenty; they roved restlessly through the undergrowth as they approached, for, like cats of any size, they did not wish to admit that they approached; all but the one who warmed Aerin’s right thigh and shivered her with its purring. At last the folstza sat before her in a semicircle, blinking with green or gold or brown eyes, or looking off into space as if they couldn’t imagine how they found themselves there. Some sat neatly, tails curled around four paws; some sprawled like kittens. One or two had their backs to her. They were all sizes, from younglings who hadn’t grown into the length of their legs and the size of their feet, to some that were grey-muzzled with age.
“Well,” said Aerin. “I’m sure I am—er—grateful for your companionship. If Agsded troubles you too, I’m sure you could be of use in our—er—meeting.”
As if this were a signal, the cats stood up and wandered toward the small campfire, where Talat laid his ears back flat to his skull and rolled his eyes till the whites showed. “No,” said Aerin bemusedly; “I rather think these are our friends?’’ and she looked down at the thing that now twined itself between her legs (it had to scrunch down slightly to accomplish this) and rubbed its head affectionately against her hip.