Sirj, the husband of Besh's daughter, Elica, did his best to keep them moving. He woke early each morning to restart their fire and prepare food for breakfast. While Besh and Lici ate, he readied the horse and cart, so that they could leave quickly after eating. And in the evenings, he gathered wood, started a cookfire, and set up their simple shelter of tarpaulin and wood.
Still, despite the man's efforts, they barely covered a league each day. Besh had thought that having Lici's cart would allow them to travel faster, but with Lici's cart came Lici herself. It sometimes seemed that she actually wanted to slow them down, so that her baskets might do as much harm as possible. She would make them stop in the middle of their travels so that she might relieve herself behind a rock or in a small copse, and then she would wander off aimlessly, picking blades of grass and saying that she needed to weave new baskets. Besh and Sirj usually tried to coax her back into the cart, and on some days she complied. At other times she didn't. On one such occasion Besh tried to force her bodily back toward the wagon, and she turned on him viciously. They had taken away her knife, for their protection and hers, but she was preternaturally strong and her fingernails were long enough to rend flesh. Besh still had marks on his face and neck from his fight with her.
There were other days, however, when she wailed inconsolably at the mere thought of the plague she had loosed upon the land and seemed to be in as great a rush as Besh and Sirj to find the merchant to whom she had sold her baskets. And at still other times she spoke to herself, rambling on seemingly about nothing. In short, she was part demon, part doddering old witch, part madwoman. From one day to the next-sometimes from hour to hour-the two men couldn't be certain which Lici they would encounter.
For several days now, Besh had tried to get Lici to tell him something-anything-about the merchant to whom she had sold the baskets. He also needed to know how to stop the plague she had created, but that was a far more complicated matter, and it seemed to Besh that finding and stopping the merchant ought to be their first priority. He often asked Lici about the man: his name, what he looked like, what other wares he carried in his cart. Anything that might have helped them if they happened upon a sept or other merchants. But Lici would tell them nothing. Whenever he pressed her for more, she began to scream about how the man had lied to her.
"He said he was going to the Y'Qatt! That's what he told me! But he lied! He lied! He lied! He lied!" She would then lose herself in sobs and incoherent babble, punctuated now and again by her cries of "He lied!" It was much the same litany they had heard the first day they found her near the ruins of Sentaya, her home village, which had been ravaged by the pestilence more than sixty years before. At this point, Besh was torn between his desperate need to know more about the man and his reluctance to raise the matter at all. More than once it occurred to him that she might engage in such hysterics for just that reason. Perhaps, while regretting that some Fal'Borna would die as a result of her curse, she still held out some hope that the merchant would take the baskets to the Y'Qatt and thus fulfill the dark ambitions that had led her to conjure her plague in the first place.
From reading the journal of Sylpa, the Mettai woman who had taken Lici in when she was newly orphaned, Besh knew that the Y'Qatt, Qirsi who eschewed all use of magic, had refused to help Lici save her family and friends. She had gone to them in the hope that Qirsi magic might do what Mettai magic had been unable to do: cure the people she loved who were dying of the pestilence. But the Y'Qatt feared the disease as much as she did, and they sent her away, even threatening to kill her if she refused to leave their village. Since that day sixty-four years ago, Lici had hated the Y'Qatt. Knowing her as he did, Besh wouldn't have been surprised to learn that she had been planning this twisted vengeance ever since.
"I have to stop."
Besh was walking alongside the cart. Most of the time, he rode in it, resting his aging legs. But he'd been cold today, and he felt restless. Sirj walked a short distance ahead, leading Lici's white nag.
"I have to stop," Lici said again.
"Why?" Besh asked wearily. It wasn't yet midday, and already they had stopped twice since breakfast.
She smiled at him shyly, her expression that of a little girl, though with her wizened face and long white hair, the effect was ghoulish. "You know," she said, sounding coy.
The old man sighed. "She wants to stop again," he called to Sirj.
Sirj halted and ran a hand over his face, looking as frustrated as Besh felt. But he simply shrugged and said, "All right."
Lici scrambled down off the cart and started off toward a cluster of grey boulders.
"Just do what you have to do and come straight back," Besh called after her.
She glared at him over her shoulder, but said nothing.
It had been so long since last they saw the sun or the moons that Besh found it difficult to keep track of the days. One seemed just like the last, and since Besh couldn't see the moons to mark their progress through their cycles, he was reduced to guessing what day it might be. But if he was right, this was the fourteenth day of the waxing. Tonight, both moons would be full, and tomorrow would begin the waning. They were halfway through the Hunter's Moon, and they'd found nothing.
Besh could hear Lici speaking, her voice rising and falling as if she were arguing some point or chastising herself. Sirj walked back to where he was standing and shook his head.
"She's going to run off again," he said.
"I know. But I can't very well tell her that she's not allowed to relieve herself, can I?"
"I know it doesn't seem right," Sirj said, not even looking at him. "But that's what you think I should do."
"It's what we should do," Sirj said. "But yes, that's what I think."
"You're probably right. Next time then."
Sirj nodded.
"In the meantime," Besh said, "how do we get her back in the cart?" Lici stepped out from among the boulders, her eyes bright and alert, like those of a wildcat.
"Come along, Lici," Besh called to the woman. "We have a long way to go today."
She grinned and began to back away, as if daring them to come after her.
"Lici!" Besh said, warning her with a tone he usually reserved for his grandchildren.
She laughed, turned, and started to run. For an old woman, at times she could be surprisingly nimble.
"Damn!" Sirj said, starting after her.
Besh followed, though he was probably slower than both of them. As they ran, he saw that Lici was scratching at her hand; picking at it actually. She's trying to draw blood!
"She's drawing on her magic!" he shouted to Sirj.
He heard the woman mumble something, a spell no doubt. An instant later, just as Sirj was pulling his own blade free, probably to conjure a spell of his own, she stopped and spun around thrusting out her hands. Bright golden flames leaped from her fingers, catching Sirj full in the chest and knocking him backward and to the ground.
Somehow Besh had his knife in his hand; he didn't remember pulling it free. He dragged it across the back of his hand and bent to pick up a handful of dirt. Mixing the dirt and the blood from his hand in his palm, he chanted the first spell that came to mind. "Blood to earth," he said. "Life to power, power to thought, earth to stone!"
With these last words he flung the dark crimson mud from his hand. Instantly the mud turned to a fist-sized rock that flew at Lici with unnatural speed. It struck her in the back of the head and she fell heavily to the ground.
She was old enough that such a blow might well have killed her, but at that moment Besh didn't care. He rushed to Sirj's side with hardly a glance at the woman.
The younger man had managed to extinguish the flames that had engulfed his overshirt and he lay on his back, panting, his eyes closed. His clothes were blackened and still smoking. He had burns on his face and hands, and probably elsewhere on his body.