When I heard him screaming, I knew I’d best get Jasyr saddled. He’d be wanted within the hour, and me and Molly, too, I guessed, no matter it was the time when nobody but wolves and owls and highwaymen had any business abroad. The moon was half grown and half risen, so I couldn’t claim it was too risky. Never could get myself out of it on that account anyway, but the young master wouldn’t take the horses if it was full dark. He used to want it so, but I pointed out that Jasyr didn’t have no magic in him to make him see better in the dark, and if he was to break his leg, we’d have to put him down. So on those nights we’d run on our own feet down the forest tracks until one or the other of us dropped from it. It was always me dropped first. I’d only had two good legs for a bit more than five years, since the Prince had healed me with his magic, and I’d never yet figured out why running on ‘em had any great attraction.
“C’mon, Molly. Don’t know why you can’t saddle yourself by now, we’ve done this so much.” She blew in my ear nice and warm.
The three of us - Molly and me and Jasyr - would always be in the stableyard, when he came.
“Don’t you ever sleep?” he said. I don’t think he knew how wicked his screams were, or maybe he just didn’t like to think about it.
“Thought it’d be a good night for a ride,” I said back to him.
“You don’t have to.” He always said that.
“You know there’s nothing I like better’n riding - even if it’s the middle of the night.”
Like always, we rode an hour or so as hard as Jasyr and Molly could go. We came to a lake we knew of, and I slowed Molly down to a walk. She had a big heart and good wind, but not as strong legs as Jasyr. We’d cool ‘em down and rest ’em before we rode back. The young master always listened to me about horses.
We let the horses drink and feed a bit while we flopped on the ground in the moonlight. Lots of times we did that and never said a word, but on this night, the young master told me again about his dreams. Before I’d thought about it, I said, “Are you sure…?”
He wouldn’t even let me get the question out any more. “It’s not the Lords. I’d know it. It’s not! It’s not!”
“It’s not!” I shouted, and sat bolt upright, causing a shower of dead leaves to fall all over Paulo, who was waving a knife in the air blindly while trying to extricate himself from his blanket.
“What’s happening?”
“Nothing,” I said, and flopped back against the tree. “The usual.”
“Dreams again?”
I nodded, and closed my eyes against the bright sun, and didn’t mention to Paulo that it appeared I’d been dreaming his dreams for a change, instead of my own. I was going crazy.
We rode west and north as hard as we could get the horses to go. Paulo could coax a horse to do anything he asked, and he coddled and pampered them, staying up every night talking to them, rubbing them down, and feeding them any special tidbits he’d found along the way.
Once the gray bag was empty, Vroon, Zanore, and Ob kept us supplied with food, so we could avoid villages and towns, leaving no evidence as to our course or destination. The three would pop in and out so often that after a while we scarcely blinked at their odd comings and goings. I commanded them to pay for whatever they took with a copper from my dwindling hoard, but they didn’t understand the concept at all. Trading made some sense to them, but when they bit the coins, examined them, and spun them up in the air, they couldn’t come up with any use for them and told me I must be mistaken. I insisted, and, though I couldn’t be sure, I think they complied with my wishes at least in that matter. They still wouldn’t answer any more questions.
On the twelfth day of our flight, we rode into the highlands of Valleor, climbing unending slopes of grass littered with white rock and detouring around a thousand cold lakes and a few scattered sheep lays. The sky stayed thick and gray, and it rained every day. Our boots were sodden and our feet cold, but just when I was ready to beg Vroon to find us dry boots, the three vanished and, this time, failed to return. By the chilly sunset when Paulo and I lay behind a scattering of giant, smooth boulders tumbled on a grassy hillside, observing the shepherd’s lay, we hadn’t seen Vroon and company for three whole days. Paulo’s stomach was rumbling like a herd of oxen.
“It won’t behave,” he whispered, when I motioned him to be quiet. Sound carried amazingly far in rocky places like that. The pounding of a hammer from one of the sheds below sounded as if the anvil were sitting between my feet. The bleats from the flock grazing in the valley, and the gurgling and whispering of fifty trickles of water across the slopes, echoed sharply through the thin air.
We had been watching the lay since early afternoon when I spotted the shepherd - easily identifiable as the storyteller from Prydina. When he had finished mending a holding pen, we followed him home. Both the shepherd and his son carried bows. I didn’t want to test how quick their hands would move if they thought we were wolves or thieves, so I decided we would wait until dark and slip around the dale without bothering them. The moon would be up soon after, and though it was still young, it was big, and the night was clear. It would show us the way to our destination. Then we’d see what we could see.
The sturdy-looking younger man milked the goats, carrying the pails into the sod-roofed hovel that squatted in the middle of the valley. Fine smells floated up from the chimney. When a girl called out that supper was ready, my own stomach growled. The valley got even quieter after the burly shepherd laid down his hammer and went into the house. Paulo and I shared out the last cold, hard bits of a meat pie that Vroon had acquired for us three days before. But the meat smelled bad and we weren’t willing to risk it, so we threw that part away and ate the stale, greasy crust.
As dusk faded into night, the family reappeared only briefly: the girl to empty a bucket onto a little garden and fill it again at a catchpool, the younger man to relieve himself out by the sheep pen, and the gray-bearded shepherd to smoke a pipe. A short while later they were all inside, and the house was dark.
Paulo slipped back up the hill to retrieve the horses, and we led them quietly around the edges of the lay, keeping downwind of the sheep and the dogs. The gibbous moon was huge and yellow over the southeastern horizon, and we used its light to find the stunted fir tree the shepherd had told me marked the entrance to a steep rocky defile. We scrambled up, leading the horses, glad the earthen banks along either side weren’t high enough to cast the treacherous path into deeper shadows. The defile led to the top of a low, narrow ridge that stretched northward.
“Are you sure this is right? This don’t look like any road to anywhere.”
“This is exactly what he described to me. He was very precise. I think he wanted to prove he wasn’t just making the whole thing up. Watch for a patch of junipers that looks like a giant cocklebur. A hundred paces past it, the track and the ridge will angle east. That’s where we start looking.”
And there, where the ridge abruptly joined the shoulder of a craggy mountainside, we found the rock pile and the wide flat rock where they’d found the one-handed boy’s things on the day he vanished.
“I don’t see nothing here,” said Paulo, whispering for no reason as we examined the rocks and the soft flat ground in the moon shadows.
A few scrubby bushes poked out of the rocks. Only a goat could climb up the steep hillside behind the boulder pile, and in every other direction were endless slopes covered with short, stiff tuck-grass, and endless clumps of sheep’s folly, and endless night. No road. No black-and-purple sky. And the stars were their familiar white, not at all green.