Northlight (22 page)

Terris nodded, eyes down, and chewed on his lip. “H — how did you find me?”

“Nobody I talked to remembered seeing
you.
I followed
her.”

The kid's face lightened, relieved.

“This is no simple go-find, even if you do have a sister out there,” Etch said. “You want to tell me what's really going on?”

Terris glanced in my direction, careful, used to watching and following. Damned bitch mother trained him hard. But this one was not mine to call. Last night I told him that what I thought didn't matter, and I was righter than either of us knew. About knives and woodscraft, yes, but not about this.

But there was more here than even what Terris told me, secrets he felt in his bones as if they were bred there. Secrets leading back to that old dragon, Esmelda. Now the stakes were more than help for Avi, who might be dead anyway. Now it was his life, and mine too maybe, if the demon god of chance looked the other way, and Etch's...
and what more?

I watched Terris's eyes, the tightness in his belly. I could feel what he was thinking. That the choice was his alone. And that a man needed to know what he might die for.

...and up on the funeral mount with death chants ringing in my ears and the bloodbats hovering, churning the dry steppe air with their stinking wings, the hot blood running down my sides — what was supposed I to die for?

An instant later, when I could breathe again, Terris was saying to Etch, “I don't expect you to believe any of this. In your place I wouldn't, either.” He told the story simply, all in one piece. There was something in his voice, some hint of steel, that made me believe him. I felt it in my bones, in my blood, and I knew the man Etch felt it, too.

Terris took the wrapped dagger from his travel pack, tied behind the sorrel's saddle. He held it out, but Etch made no move to touch it. “This is an exact duplicate of the dagger used to kill Pateros, a fake so good it fooled even Orelia's experts. My body was supposed be found with this in it.”

Etch's eyes twitched but his voice was calm enough. “Why would Montborne want to kill you?”

“I'm the son of Esmelda of Laurea.” Steel again. Steel and truth.

Etch let out a long, expressive whistle. “And the rest of it? The Ranger sister?”

“All true.”

Etch looked down at the reins in his hands. He couldn't go back to Laureal City. None of us could go back to what we were before. “Where do we go from here?”

“We'll take the dagger back to Laureal City,” Terris said after a pause. “We'll tell the whole truth. When it's time.”

“Well, then,” Etch said after a breath or two, “I reckon we'd better turn these horses loose. It'll be months before they find their way home, and that's assuming some farmer doesn't adopt them along the way.”

“Or the wolves get them,” said Terris, half-shudder. The moment of steel passed, leaving the raw, earnest kid once more.

“Wolves're carrion eaters, more noise than fight,” I told him. Then to Etch, “We could use an extra horse. We'll take the brown, he looks trail-wise.”

Etch nodded and began rigging the brown's gear into a pack saddle. We took extra grain for our own horses, a third tent, and spare blankets. Before we started out, I had Terris bury the second saddle well away from the camp. He came back looking like it did him good to bury something. The rusty black wandered after us, head down to browse, until the green forage won over the company of other horses and we lost him.

The forest thinned out as we climbed, rocks pushing out of the sides of the hills like famine bones. It was drier here, twist-bark and scrubby herbs like sauge and bat-bane. The horses flared their nostrils at the smell. Little gusts of wind pulled at my hair and whipped the blood to my face.

Each time was the first time on the edge of Kratera Ridge, always different, always the same. Avi and I had ridden here, full of scorn for the weirdings that frightened the others. It had been enough to be alive and with her.

“Your past or mine, it's all the same,” she'd said, gray eyes dancing. “We'll bury them together!”

The first of the strange places I hardly noticed, just a twinge up the back of my throat. But Avi spun around, her knife ready in her free hand. Her randy little gelding, cut too late to keep him from acting whole, squealed and crow-hopped. She pulled him short, cursing, but I could see her face had gone ashy white. Her hand shook as she slipped her knife back into its sheath.

A trick of sunlight, nothing more...

That's what I told her then, and that's what I told Terris. That's all most of us could see, a shimmer like a wave of heat or a flicker that wasn't not quite there when you looked right at it. A prickle in the hairs along your neck. A feeling...not of being watched, that feeling I'd recognize, that I could deal with. I didn't know what this was.

What I did know was that whatever it was Avi saw then, whatever lurked behind the twists of sun and shadow, was more than I could see, or any Ranger. It was like an old wound that I'd lived with so long I didn't think about it most of the time. Etch clearly didn't know what to believe. His eyes went jumpy and he patted his roan mare on the shoulder as if she were the one needed soothing.

Terris held on to the pommel with both hands, reins slack, letting the trail-wise gelding pick his own pace. Suddenly he swayed in the saddle, as if he were about to fall off. His eyes stretched wide and blank. The gelding, balance upset or perhaps sensing something I couldn't see, snorted and stumbled. Terris pulled himself straight. I could almost see him shaking.

I slowed up in the broad knuckle of a switchback and let him come even with me.

“That was...a trick of sunlight?” he said. “Nothing more?” With a deep-drawn breath, the color came seeping back into his skin.

I nodded slowly.

“That was no trick. I saw...”

“What?”

He brought his hands up as if to outline something, then let them drop. His fingers, once soft and pale, were covered with calluses and ground-in trail dirt, the nails broken by mending harness straps and picking stones out of the horses' hooves.

Etch kneed his roan beside us. He was sweating a little, his voice too loud. “When I was little, we used to talk about a ‘tracter' running over your grave, something that's there and not there. The sort of thing that only cowards pay attention to.”

Terris nodded and took another deep breath. He pointed across the little valley to the far hillside. “There's another one there, too.”

“You can
see
them?” Etch said, amazed.

“Avi could...
see
...them, too,” I said.

Terris brightened like a child. “Can she?”

Avi..
. It was like calling up a ghost, her memory. The touch of her lips on my hair. The smile in her rainwater eyes, the slow turning of her head. Away from me, always away from me and toward the twist of sunlight. Never looking directly at it, but drawn, as if it pulled her someplace I couldn't follow.

For a long moment, Terris's eyes went dark, unfocused. He swayed, grabbed the pommel of his saddle.

“Another weirdie?” I'd felt nothing.

He shook his head. His shoulders tensed. “I saw Esme standing in front of the Starhall.”

“Remembering her, you mean,” Etch said.

“No.” His voice was firm but troubled. “She was wearing the Guardian's medallion.” He looked right at me, as if he were searching for answers in my eyes and finding none. “Is it the future I see, or only some twist of wishful thinking? We can't go back to find out.”

He had the right of it. We could only go on.

We made camp early in a gravelly hollow with a little grove of ashleaf and the best forage I'd seen all afternoon, and a trickle of a stream. I didn't know that we'd find any place better, and I was no good for traveling on. Each passing hour I'd gotten more and more jumpy, until now it was as if one of those twisty places had worked its way under my hide. Finally Terris and Etch stopped trying to talk to me. They went to set up the tents and fire ring by themselves.

Terris asked Etch about some incident in a bar in Laureal City.

“Jekk's been picking on greenies for more years than I can count,” Etch said, shaking his head. “That wasn't the first time I had to step in. Sometimes a bar fight is just a bar fight.”

I'd heard enough. I hobbled the horses and left them to browse, found a smoothed-off rock surrounded by wild mimosa and rosemarie, and sat down to think. The smell of the flowers and the chomping of the horses lulled my body but not my nerves.

The deeper we traveled into the Ridge, the worse everything seemed. I couldn't bring Terris to the fort when I delivered the papers — too many questions like,
Esmelda's son, here?
There was Etch, farmbred as they come, and how the hell was I going to explain
him?

If Montborne put those goons on Terris's trail, did he know the kid was with me? Would he have sent orders in case we made it past his killers — orders about the kid? about me?

Too crotting suspicious, that's what I'm getting. Run with Esmelda's cub and that's what it gets me.

What if I just rode off and left these two to the search they'd taken on themselves? I could go back the fort, back to being a Ranger, first and only. Back to dreams of bloodbats circling...

Ay Mother! I don't know what to do. Help me.

She didn't answer me. She never did.

It was chance, the demon god, I ought to pray to. He was the one who threw me in with Terris and now Etch. The one who laughed in my face whenever I thought I knew what I was doing.

I sat there on the rock, trying to shrug off the demon god's claws, when suddenly the gray mare gave a strangled cry, a sound no healthy horse ever made, and staggered sideways. The hobbles jerked her forelegs and she went down like a sack of meal in the waving yellow-green stalks. Before she struck the ground, I was on my feet and scrambling, my heart pounding.

I yanked the knot on her hobbles and the rope came free. She pawed the matted roots, trying to rise. The other horses startled and moved a short distance away.

The mare kept pitching and throwing her body from side to side, but she couldn't get her hind legs under her. Her breath came in labored grunts.

I grabbed her mane as if we were on the trail together. “Up! Come on, that's the way! Get up, damn you!”

Then my eyes focused on her taut, rounded belly, the way her muscles wouldn't work right and the green-flecked slime dripping from her jaws. The trefoil leaves of ropeweed.

Ropeweed.

I fell to my knees at her side, my fingers still twisted in her mane. Her body was hot like a stove, fighting the poison.

No use. Ay Mother, it's no use. An hour, maybe, for a strong horse like her. Ten minutes for a man. Better, far better, it should have been me.

She was the finest horse I'd ever owned, she'd been with me clear across Laurea and the Ridge, she'd never balked at anything I asked of her, and what man could say the same? She carried me and Avi three days without a hitch, when that randy gelding got snake-bit and we were cut off from Derron with northers lurking behind every bush.

I remembered how she was when I bought her, bridled but not saddled, nose up in the sky, hip bones like knives, oozing scars all around her mouth. I paid the horse-trader his price and he took it, his eyes all the while glued to my long-knife. I walked up to the mare, slid my hand along her sweating neck, dropped my forearm knife into it and slit through the headstall straps. The trader gasped as it hit the paddock dust — long shanks, doubled chain, spur-edged clapper.

You can come with me now, I promised her. Or I'll take you back to the Border and set you free. Either way, you'll never wear that thing again.

The mare tossed her head, ears pricked, eyes never leaving me. I turned away and felt her muscles tense just before my fingers slipped from her. I didn't look back, not even when I stopped to slide the gate latch open. There she was, nose at my shoulder. I took a handful of her mane and she came with me, silk and shadow.

My fingers were still laced in the coarse gray-frosted hairs. I couldn't get them loose.

She stopped struggling to get up now, forelegs bent in front of her, head high, breathing as hard and deep as if she'd just galloped halfway across Laurea. She had heart, this mare, but the ropeweed already had her. There was no hope, except that the end would be quick.

Ropeweed. Mother-of-us-all,
ropeweed!

If I hadn't been so lost in my own worries, if I'd had half the sense of a headless twitterbat...

And she was gone now, as good as dead.

“What the hell?” Etch and the boy. I couldn't read their faces, strangely blurred. All I thought was they must have heard the mare cry out, even as I had.

Shit, what do I care what they heard?

“What's wrong with her?” Terris asked.

Etch jerked a tendril of ropeweed from the mare's mouth and held it up in front of his eyes as if he couldn't believe what he saw.

I wanted to hide my face against the mare's neck, now while I still could. But why should I have that right, I who had failed her? I lifted my face, naked to the sky and the gods and the eyes of men.

“It's ropeweed. My fault...” I couldn't hear my voice — did I whisper or shout those damning words?

Etch whirled, turning his broad, tight-muscled back, and for an instant I thought he was too sickened to look at me.

“Water!” he bellowed at Terris. “All of it — and a couple of blankets! Now!”

Terris took off for the camp faster than he'd ever run in his life.

Then Etch was practically on top of me, his face huge and distorted, red. His sweat had a rank male smell that shrilled along my nerves. I flinched as he roared at me, “I asked you, woman, have you got any anneth?”