He stood, and reached down for her
shoulder. But suppose he binds me again? she thought, as she rose in his grip. Wasn’t it better to do it now and have done? (His black-gloved fingers on her shoulder were strong.) Or was hers simply the endlessly rationalized delay of someone blatantly terrified of killing?
“I think,” she said softly, “you are a good and thoughtful man.”
What she thought was: You are an evil pig a-wallow in a rotten sty!
He didn’t pick up the rope as, holding her arm, he walked her by the brazier, the chair, the desk, across the matting toward the tent flap.
Still supporting her, with his other black glove he took the canvas and pulled it back.
Standing just outside, the prince ran his gauntleted hand down one side of his beard, then the other, and said: “Kire, you
are
a fool!
‘Hate
Prince Nactor…?’ Guards—” Naä pulled back, as Kire released her arm. A dozen shadowy soldiers waited in ordered formation behind the bearded prince—“arrest Lieutenant Kire—for incompetence, insubordination, and treason! And also the woman—”
The hesitation that had plagued her moments ago vanished before the immediate. Naä dodged behind the lieutenant, lunged for the table, thrust her hand under the brazier, and hurled fire—in a sheet that astonished her, even as it hung a moment in the air, and flickered, and threw up coiling smoke tendrils, a curtain of blue and yellow effulgence, of falling, flaming oil, dropping to the matting, arching toward the striped wall opposite. That same moment she hurled herself to the floor and rolled against the tent’s back canvas. Guards shouted. Were any of them dodging
around the back? But, yes, and she was under, up in the dark and the cool night, running—mercifully no tree or water barrel stood before her, or she would have smashed into it and knocked herself unconscious.
Naä ran.
Branches raked at her, bushes snatched at and scraped her. Rimgia’s shawl caught and tore—Naä paused to jerk it (swallowing the impulse to scream); she pulled free, snatched it after her, and ran again in a chatter of brush and leaves, till she tripped—and went sprawling. What she’d tripped on was large and rolled a little, loudly.
Flies in the dark make an unholy sound—and hundreds of them scritted, disturbed now, from whatever she’d fallen over. She caught the stench—like the puma pelt and the basket and the ravine itself, intensified to gagging, eye-watering level—and pulled herself away.
(She would forever recall it as some villager’s corpse, slain and left to lie. Actually, though, it was a prairie lion carcass: the evening just before the attack, Mrowky and Uk had been ordered to dump it in the forest three hundred paces off. But Mrowky couldn’t stand the thing and had insisted on leaving it here,
right
now, we’ve taken it far enough, nobody’ll find—no, I
mean
it! I’m leaving it! I don’t care what you do. Put the damned thing
down,
I said—now!)
Turning, gasping, Naä saw flames behind her; between the sounds of her breaths, back in the camp she heard soldiers shouting.
Another sound: the splat of water tossed on canvas (with the sound of the last flies settling)—how close she still was! How little ground she’d covered! And there were soldiers beating loudly
in the brush behind the burning tent. Naä pushed herself up and ran again. For a long time.
Qualt’s and his companion’s mischief had also continued on, as you surely inferred. At various places about the town and the camp there’d been four more rains of garbage from the trees. The one Qualt felt most satisfied over was when, during the distraction that the last shower of fish heads, peachpits, and old birds-nests caused, his flying friend, still unseen, had been able to drop two skins of water into the diamond-wired corral where more than a dozen oldsters and infants were sitting or standing, more or less bewildered, in the burning sun.
But now, with the Winged One, in the darkness, Qualt was once more crouched among the trees beside the Myetran camp, listening—rather the Winged One was listening and reporting to Qualt what he heard, for they were too far away from the tent for Qualt to hear directly. Heads bent together in the dark, ear touching ear, the Winged One related: “He asks if you folk are as gentle as you appear …She says, yes, you are …Now he wants to know what town secrets, what petty jealousies, envy, and ire she can tell him of; while she … she says you like her music, and she likes what you have to say… he tells her what a pleasant place his own home, Myetra, is, and how, after they have crushed Çiron, they will go on to destroy HiVator, Requior, Del Gaizo—”
Somewhat to Qualt’s surprise, it was at this mention of Hi-Vator that the Winged One suddenly went a-quiver in the dark. The wind of his sails set the leaves about them shaking
and shushing. And one membrane brushed and brushed Qualt’s back.
“We must go to Hi-Vator—now, we must go! Don’t you think so, groundling? And you can hide there as I have hidden here—and maybe we can even play some tricks as we have played here? But I will tell them of their danger! Though perhaps, after we get there, it would be best if I hid—and you went up to implore the Queen and her Handsman to save themselves; for there are few in Hi-Vator who ever paid much attention to me—and then, most of them, only to curse me. Of course, we could go together …and no one who knew the true import of the message I bring could really think evil of me anymore—do you think?”
“Dost
thou
think,” Qualt demanded, his hand on the hard, furry shoulder beside him, that flexed and flexed in darkness, “that the Winged Ones there might help us here?”
“Help you?” The beating paused a puzzled moment. “I dare say they could if they wanted. But help you? After all the help I’ve given you today, carrying you here, getting you there, lifting you out of this danger and away from that one, don’t you think it’s time, given the gravity of this turn, for
you
to think about helping me?”
“Then we must go to thy nest at Hi-Vator! Here, let me mount thee—” and, rising in the darkness from his squat, steadying himself on the shoulder below him, Qualt stepped over and around to the soft dirt behind. The warm back rose against his belly, his chest.
“Hold tight—we have not gone this far before! But you know now how it’s done!”
In the black, Qualt clutched the Winged One’s neck. Great
vibrations started either side of him. Twigs and soft soil dropped away beneath his bare feet. Swinging free, his legs brushed their calves by the Winged One’s rough heels. “But what of the singer?” Qualt thought to call.
“Oh,” and the head strained back beside his, “she has already escaped them—and is off running in the woods! There, look—their tent’s on fire. And all is confusion with them.” And they rose above the trees, Qualt looking down over the furred shoulder, to see flames lapping at the striped wall flare now, then retreat under the slap of water, then surge still again. Beside him, wings gathered up, beat hugely down—
How, Qualt wondered, could such flight be carried on in the dark—even as the first moonlight cleared. Then he forgot the paring of light above and simply clung, sometimes with his eyes closed, sometimes merely squinting against the wind.
They rose before the mountains.
And rose.
And rose—till, beside the rush of water over the rocks, at last Qualt stepped away from his flying companion, arms tingling, oddly light-headed.
“See there—the fire up on that ledge?” the Winged One said, while Qualt tried to catch his breath. “Climb for it, groundling!”
“Climb… ?”
“Up the webbing there. See the guy-lines running from under those rocks?”
There was no talk now—and Qualt was glad of it—of either of them continuing alone or either of them hiding. They climbed the sagging net.
As Qualt passed one ledge, a Winged One, very fat, waddled quickly
to the edge and, with lips pulled back from little teeth and little lids squeezed closed, followed them with her face from below to above.
They walked along a stone cliff, Qualt picking his way carefully, lagging further and further behind his companion, who, wings wide, bounded ahead, till three youngsters half ran, half soared from the cave-mouth beside him, to freeze, ears cocked and gawking. At a sudden mew within, they retreated. But now his companion waited for Qualt to catch up, making some disgusted comment about the children Qualt didn’t wholly follow.
Steps had been carved into the mountain, that they had to climb. Some of the edges were stone. Some were roots, with earth packed behind them. Qualt moved his hands along the stone walls either side and wondered why his companion, behind him now on the stairs, didn’t fly this last length of the ascent—which was apparently not the last length after all, because now they had to climb up another fifty feet of webbing, with the rush and rumble of falling water invisible below among dark rocks.
Finally they gained a ledge where a dozen Winged Ones waited. Qualt was very confused for a while, since no one seemed to want to speak to them.
Fires burned in several stone tubs. The cave entrances flickered and resounded with wings going in and out, with mewing retreating and emerging. Finally, Qualt heard someone say beside him, in that high, childish voice they all spoke with: “But you can see, that is
not
the groundling who was here earlier—that is
not
the one ‘who saved my life. I took him home. He has not returned. They look alike, yes—but not that much alike. Don’t you see how much smaller he is?
“And you—” which was addressed
to Qualt’s companion, who, on reaching the ledge, had suddenly seemed to become indifferent to the whole enterprise and was now sitting on the rocky rim, hanging his heels in space, with his sails drawn in about him and feigning great interest in the night-breezes and the night clouds and anything that was not the confused converse behind him. “Well,” continued the standing Winged One, who wore some sort of flattened chain around his neck (the only dress or ornament Qualt had seen among them so far), “we certainly didn’t expect to see
you
here, just now—”
“Please,” Qualt said, suddenly stepping forward, “please—thou must understand. But we
heard
something—!”
At which, with a sudden straightening of his hips, his companion pushed himself off the cliff, dropped into the black, like a feet-first dive into ink, then a moment later rose out of it, into the firelight, soaring now beside them, sailing now above them—with a triumphant hoot that Qualt had
never
heard before!
After that, Qualt and his companion both were given lots of attention.
Naä ran—well beyond the camp, now… still waiting for footsteps behind her, wondering at the fact that, somehow, she was still alive, to flee, to run, to escape—from her own absurd and dangerous plan. She took long breaths with her mouth wide, to make as little sound as possible. Ienbar’s knife was still in her belt. She still held Rimgia’s shawl at her neck—and only an hour later, in the woods at the other side of the village, did she realize that she had gone beyond the town as well. She was going up a slope: this way, she realized, would
take her toward the quarry where the stone workers went to hew in the day.
Leave
this village, she thought. I am a singer! (In the dark, she clutched the knife hilt till it hurt her hand, till it bruised the undersides of her knuckles, till it stung with the salt on her palm.) I am no woman for this sort of thing, whatever this sort of thing was—killing on the sly, making brainlessly heroic rescues. A bit wildly she thought: I could make a ballad out of what I’ve already done today and tonight and have the satisfaction of knowing no one will ever believe it! You may have lost Rahm. But you saved Rimgia. Reasonably, you can’t do more. So go! Go on—!
Which is when her foot went into the ditch—and with the shooting pain, she turned, she fell. I’ve probably twisted my ankle, she thought. She got herself free, stepped gingerly on it—it didn’t hurt that much. But in ten minutes, or when next she got off it, certainly then the throbbing that precluded walking would begin.
From somewhere, the moon (that, earlier, Uk had expected to light his way into town), rose with its crescent of illumination to light Naä’s way through the woods. The underbrush tried to slow her, but she hurried on. Then, at the height of another slope, brush gave way to grasses and trees—one of the pear orchards above the village. She started out across it, still cursing her foolhardiness, and shivering when she thought of the mad-luck that had let her get this far.
She shivered again, though the night had grown warmer—and was of the sort that, any other evening, would have been pleasant.
Between moonlit trees, in a small space a few yards to
her left, Naä saw dark forms stretched on the grass. More corpses, was her first thought. Even up here… ?
Nothing particularly happened to change her mind; but she decided to go closer. Would it be villagers she knew? When she was a yard away, it occurred to her that they might be sleeping soldiers the Myetrans had stationed—which was when one raised on an arm and whispered, “Who art thou …?” in a voice that, even as it started chills on her back, she recognized.
“Abrid… ?” she asked the shadowed figure.
“Who art thou… ?” He repeated.
She told him; “It’s Naä!”
The moon had leached all red from his braids, leaving them near the gray they were after his work day in the quarry, so that one could see his father in his face…
“Rimgia!” she heard the boy whisper, leaning toward the other sleeping figure. “It’s Naä!”