Find a new life somewhere else. Again.'
Lasse looked at her incredulously. 'Alone?'
She didn't answer. Her eyes had gone ahead of them, up the gentle swell of grassy hill to where a group of young men and women gestured and exclaimed to one another, and beyond to where the wall of the Cataclysm rose, sudden as pain. It shone black against the blue sky, and Tillu's neck protested when she rolled her head back to see its top. It was a wall across the wide world, a buckled wedge of stone and earth pushed up to bar the herdfolk and their reindeer from further wandering. Some places were tumbled and rounded with weather, cupping small green pastures or pockets of blessed white snow where the stinging insects never ventured. Reindeer clustered on the white patches in refuge from the bugs. But at this place the Cataclysm rose, vertical and uncompromising. A slide of schist and shale at the base marked its only flaking concession to wind and rain.
She could not see what held the herders' attention but she thought she saw the Najd's Steps They scarcely merited the name. A jutting scar crawled across the Cataclysm's face, up the expanse of sheer black stone, and ended abruptly far short of the peak. The ridge of stone looked as if it projected no wider than a foot path from the precipice, and in places seemed to have crumbled away entirely. Other cracks and juttings marred the surface of the Cataclysm, but only one could be the Najd's Steps. She was scanning the long narrow way for some sign of Heckram or Kerlew, when she heard Lasse give a low cry of despair. He gripped her arm suddenly, pinched bruisingly as he pointed up.
The figure materialized on a tiny outcropping of stone beyond the end of the Najd's Steps. For a moment it hung there. The wind billowed under its wings, spread the pinions black and wide to the bright fresh day. The bird rose, impossibly immense, lifting wide for flight.
And plummeted.
'Kari!' Lasse cried out, his voice cracking from boy to man on the name. And in that utterance, Tillu saw her, the wings becoming Kari's feathered cloak. Her small face was pale, her black hair streamed behind her. She did not scream. The Cataclysm thrust out a rocky spur to grip her. She caught on it and tumbled, the wind roaring through her cloak as she fell. Screams rose from the watching herders. The instant was forever.
Lasse dragged Tillu with him as he ran, plunging through the horrified herders. It was farther to the base of the Cataclysm than it looked. Her breath caught painfully in her ribs. Tufts of grass and low bushes scratched her ankles and tore at her calves, but it could not distract her from the crumpled black figure on the green sward.
They were there too soon. Lasse flung himself to his knees beside her, reached to roll her over. Tillu didn't try to stop him. He couldn't hurt her any more than she was already hurt. But he pulled his hand back from the body with a stifled cry. He turned a wide, white face up to Tillu, horror and grief shaking his lips. Tillu dropped stiffly to her knees, put a hand on Kari. And pulled it back. Gelid. Beneath the black feathered cloak, the body was sodden and still, pulped organs and bones inside a sack of skin.
Tillu swallowed dryly, her mind reeling. If she had not stayed with Heckram last night
... if she had asked his advice earlier. If, if, and all useless.
'Get up,' she croaked, rising on shaking legs. She tugged at Lasse's sleeve, then gripped his collar and dragged him to his feet. He did not resist her, but he didn't cooperate as she pulled him back from the body. 'Don't look at her. Don't touch her.
You can't help her now, Lasse. Come away. Come away.'
'What's happened?'
'Who was it?'
'Is he dead?'
The bright-cheeked girls and tousle-headed youths had caught up with them. Their urgent questions rattled around Tillu as she dragged Lasse back from the body. She didn't want to be here when they rolled her over. Two deaths in a day. She couldn't take anymore. 'I have to see Capiam,' she insisted, pushing her way past the young herders.
'Let go of me. Let me through.'
'It was the healer,' she heard a young voice say behind her. 'Why isn't she doing anything?' And then a sudden scream rose, piercing the bright morning. They had rolled Kari over. She kept her grip on Lasse's wrist, dragging him along.
The screams floated thin as splinters in the wind. Heckram flinched himself more tightly against the rock face. He wondered if someone had seen him. He doubted it. He considered leaning out, to look down the sheer rock face and see what the cry was about. He grinned harshly at the notion. He kept his hands and cheek pressed against the rock face and edged on another step.
He forced his thoughts away from the sheer fall behind him. He thought of Tillu, and how he had told her of his youthful venture up this same path. He wasn't sure if bravado or forgetfulness had made him speak so lightly. Now that he was up here, he remembered the ache of calf and back and shoulder. And fingers. He had taken the bandages from his injured hand to improve his grip. Every time he closed his hand now, the pain leaped up his arm. He refused to let himself focus on it. The path was substantially narrower than he remembered. He had been smaller then, he reminded himself. Narrower of shoulder and more sure of foot. Certainly more blithely unaware of death and pain. He pushed on, sliding his foot forward through the gritty rock dust that coated the trail. His toes felt raw. He had discarded his boots long ago, left them on the last wide piece of the Najd's Steps. His bare feet gripped the cold stone more surely, but felt every abrasion. Something light brushed against his foot. He looked down in the narrow space between his body and the cliff-face. A black feather. Another one.
Odd. He had seen cliffs full of birds' nests before, but they weren't as windswept as this one. He wondered that the feather stayed on the narrow path at all. He pushed on.
The trickling sweat was from the warmth of fear and weariness. The sun on his back was still the thin warmth of morning. Its light touch reminded him of Tillu's hands on his body, of her hands spread against the small of his back as she lifted herself against him. A smile, almost foolish in its softness, came unbidden to his lips. Every time he thought he knew her, she surprised him. Her concern for Kari, her constant anxiety over Kerlew, her sober caring for Rolke had never prepared him for the woman she had shown him last night. She had cast her wariness aside, and revealed beneath it a deep hunger and an almost innocent joy in satisfying it. Like a child with a new toy, he thought, and blushed despite his isolation. No woman had ever so thoroughly explored his responses to her touch. The newness of it had made him a youth in her hands, ignited energies and curiosity he had thought outgrown. Even now, he wanted her again. This, he realized suddenly, is what Ristin meant. The feeling she had hoped he would have for Elsa, that no hardship was too great. Did Tillu feel it, he wondered? His face sobered an instant. Hadn't she trusted him to bring Kerlew safely home?
He wondered what he would do if he didn't find the boy up here. Look elsewhere, he told himself pragmatically, refusing to worry about time lost. He chuckled sourly at a sudden idea; how would it be to return to camp and find that Kerlew had already returned on his own? Good, he decided. It would feel good to find the boy safe anywhere. An image of his small, uncertain face rose in Heckram's mind. There were so few times when he had seen the boy's face unshadowed by fear or uncertainty. When they had carved spoons together. When he had given the boy the bone-knife for his own. The night his thin fingers had awkwardly plaited strips of leather for a new harke-harness. He understood suddenly a father's pride in his child's small accomplishments.
A lost memory bobbed into his mind. He held a tablo board up for a tall man's inspection, and his heart swelled tight with pride at the grin that split the man's dark beard. 'Well, and will you be the wolf now, son, and give your father a chance to win on your new board?' Heckram pressed flat to the cliff for a moment, feeling the light morning breeze finger his garments and hair. How had he lost a moment like that, forgotten it so completely? He had had so few moments like that. He stood very still.