Dapplegrim’s ears twitched back. “How could it be worse?”
She pushed herself up on one elbow. “It’s empty. There is no one guarding the throne in the mountains. The court is silent. The only noises are the creak of the chain and dead tree. And the whole of the dark valley where I last saw ten thousand fires–all of it is blackness. The marshalling places are emptied, and clearly have been for some time.” She seemed to need a moment to collect her thoughts. “How long do you think they would need to reach the mountains?”
Dappelgrim’s face was thoughtful. “A month? A week? We don’t know how far north the court of the king lies. One thing is certain: there will be soldiers passing through the Dragon Gates of Sorthe soon.”
“And the Pass of Old Faces, I’d wager. And any other passage south they can make use of. And in vast numbers.” Her voice constricted itself. “Oh, Dapple. I fear we’re too late.”
“No. We have friends who are already warning the folks of Brae and others that war comes. Allies are rallying. Trust to Samarkarantha. Trust to Keri and Keru. We must. And we must press on, ourselves. There’s something at the root of this that isn’t right. Something deeper and more strange—and more rotten—is going on than a mere grab for land or power… or even the settling of old remembrances. Hurm. Hur.”
“So, we go on.” Her tone was flat, cold. “And you’re right. Samakarantha will have warned Brae by now. The Foresetti will be armed and ready, too. They must be.”
“Yes. We do not know when the sword will fall, nor where. For now, we should stick to the plan. Hurm. That’s all we can do.” He hesitated a moment. “And here is the other matter of course… we can’t ignore that, even if armies are surging through the gates of Sorthe as we speak: we most certainly cannot ignore that other matter.”
“Yes.” Her shoulders slumped a little. She blinked a few times at the ground, then got unsteadily to her feet. “Let’s be gone. The idol gives off a resounding echo of power in the otherplaces. I could hear it the moment I had my fingertips on it. The unseen things will have heard it too. Of that, I have no doubt. For good or ill, they will know what it is, and where it is. We should move, now, and swiftly.”
“Agreed,” said Dapplegrim.
“Sure,” said the boy. He watched as Caewen laid a blanket and and saddle on Dapplegrim’s back, then pulled at various belts and buckles to fix it in place. The process looked complicated.
He wondered if the horse would be bothered by a saddle, but Dapplegrim didn’t seem to mind. It didn’t escape the boy’s notice though, that the stirrups had no spurs, and there was no bridle and no bit. Apparently, Dapplegrim steered himself.
When Caewen was done she turned to face him. “Ready?”
He nodded, trying not to let apprehension show.
“You’ll need to ride up in front of me. It’s a big enough saddle, so there’ll be room. I’ll keep a hold of you so you don’t slip off. We’ve a long ride ahead.” She put a foot into the stirrup, pulled herself up and settled into the seat. She then offered him a hand. He looked at it, and felt as if this was a decision. Here was a moment of choice. With a small, wavering smile, he took her hand, and climbed up. He did his best to make himself comfortable in front of her.
Caewen was adjusting her scabbard, ensuring that she could put a hand easily on her sword, when the boy found himself saying, quietly. “That’s odd.”
“What’s odd,” said Dapplegrim, with a flick of one ear.
“Wasn’t there a birch up the hill, over there? I noticed white bark in the shade of the other trees.”
Caewen and Dapplegrim both looked up the slope.
“Do you see anything, Dapple?”
“No, but we should be gone all the same. Holding tight?” he asked.
Caewen nodded. “We are.”
They took off, and it was like riding the wind. Never had he any idea that anything in the world could move so fast. Trees and rocks seemed to melt and stream past them. He could barely breath, so heavy was the onrush of air. He managed a happy gurgling half-laugh, and felt tears stinging his eyes as the wind bit.
Despite tiredness, despite fear, the ride was too exhilarating to not leave him laughing and laughing.
As the sun fully fell on a jagged line of blue-grey ranges far off to the west, their pace slowed and Dapplegrim subsided to a trot rather than gallop. They twisted along narrow upland paths that were not usually the tread of anything besides red deer. They climbed a ridge, but crossed open ground only when necessary. Caewen scanned the skies when they did.
The boy noticed, and gave her a questioning look over his shoulder.
“Sorthemen ride winged beasts, or so I’m told. Nothing so perilous as a dragon, mind you. But spies riding the winds are troublesome things.”
On they trotted, weaving in and out of trees, along the ridge-line. Below them, pines as black and thick as coal dust and cobwebs clung to rocky precipices, and even farther below, there were glimpses of threads of silver: the lines of small streamlets tracing their own ways into the valley below. Well out in the valley, where the land turned to rolling hills of green-gold grass, a trampled road of brown dirt lazed itself out, north and south.
“Where does the road go?” asked the boy, after he had spent some time intermittently wondering at the landscape or staring up at the wide blueness flooding the sky above them. He’d always lived in the woods. He’d never seen so much sky except when climbing to the very top of a tree.
Caewen answered. “North, to the Princelingdom of Sorthe. South will take you to a crossroads that could take a traveller many ways, but the largest kingdom thereabouts is Brae. Other, lands lie beyond, though I don’t know all their names.”
-oOo-
They rode on through morning, stopping only for a snack of bread and hard white cheese. The cheese was similar to a sort they made in Wurmgloath for storing over winter. This was the first time the boy felt a sickness-pang for home. Though as it happened, he didn’t have much time to dwell on it—only a few moments later he looked up from his food, and saw what Dapplegrim was about to eat. He felt a shock of coldness run through him. Caewen had poured out some oats into a wide, shallow bowl of wood, but then she uncorked a bottle and upended a thick, red-black viscous liquid that could only be clotted blood. She mixed this thoroughly with the oats, poured in a little water from a skin to turn it more into a mush, and put the meal in front of Dapplegrim. He muttered, “About time,” in a way that made the boy’s own blood chill a little. Caewen only laughed.
“Don’t mind him. He’s grumpy because we’ve been riding without a break for too long.”
Dapplegrim looked up. Blood and oats dribbled from his chewing lips. “Hur.”
She must have noticed then that the boy was looking taken aback. She walked over to sit next to him. As she did, she said, “It’s only sheep’s blood. I bought it from a butcher. It would have been used to make black-sausage, otherwise. You’ve eaten black-sausage haven’t you? That’s mostly blood cooked up.”
“But horses don’t eat blood.”
Dapplegrim looked up again and swallowed and said, “I’m only half-a-horse. The other half of me needs a bit of blood, a bit of meat.”
“It’s true,” said Caewen. “When we met, Dapplegrim wasn’t much bigger than any ordinary horse, but he was in hiding. He’d been eating hay and grass for years pretending to be just a horse. Once he got some meat into his diet he started to grow again.”
“Why was he pretending to be a horse?”
“A lot of questions,” said Dapplegrim, eying him.
“Hush, you. And, oh, it’s a long story,” Caewen answered. She waved a hand, wanderingly.” The short version is that he was hiding from an evil magician. Once we started travelling together, Dapplegrim shocked me with his taste in food too.” She laughed and there were memories in her eyes for a brief, glowing moment. “I couldn’t believe it when he went off to hunt… to hunt! Can you imagine?” She was almost mirthful now. “Whene he came back with a bloody rabbit in his mouth I nearly soiled myself, excuse me for being crude. But after a while… well… you get used to it.”
“I see,” he said. It was starting to seem that the world was a much bigger and scarier place than he’d thought–and he’d already thought it to be reasonably big and scary.
After the break they moved at a more leisurely pace. By late morning they had eased their way down into the rolling hills of the valley. Caewen kept squinting into the sky, but saw no sign of spies in the air. Around noon, they crossed the north-south road, and within a couple hours they passed into the woodlands on the western side of the roadway. Caewen and Dapplegrim visibly relaxed as soon as they were under the cover of leaves again. A while later, they rounded a small bluff where the trees thinned out, and saw before them in the vast-seeming distance, spreading out like a frozen heap of dead cinders, the Great Grey Mountain. It had foliage, but sparsely, and the only colours were bands of heather that grew on its lowest flanks, creeping through valleys and over hilltops.
“There,” said Caewen, pointing.
The boy stared but he didn’t see anything except the expanse of the mountainside and the bright cold sky above. It was so far away. It looked to him as if it might take days and days to reach it. Finally, scanning the mountain, he picked it out: a minute thread of grey smoke, almost invisible against the colour of the mountain rock. It looked like smoke from a chimney or hearth.
“The house of the seeress,” said Caewen.
They moved along the bluff a little farther, but before they’d reached the next slope, Dapplegrim stopped and looked around, almost as if he were shying at something. They had passed back into thick woods again. All was late-afternoon shadow, bands of golden sunlight, the trunks of trees and the low-hanging branches of the canopy.
“What is it?” said Caewen.
His ears twitched. His nostrils flared. “I don’t know but we must get off the track we’re on.”
They pulled off the trackway then, and scuffed-slid-stumbled down a scrub-clad slope of loose dirt and sharp rocks. Dapplegrim slid to a stop, and said, “Get down. Now.”