“Even allies must know their place,” Aerin said aloud, and was again startled at how decisive her voice sounded. She stalked over to her blanket and the cat on it, seized the hem of the blanket, and yanked. The cat rolled a complete circumference and came up again looking startled, but Aerin did not stop to watch. She wrapped her blanket around her shoulders, picked up the bundle she used as a pillow, and rearranged herself to sleep at the foot of the tree on the far side of the fire, with Gonturan’s hilt in easy reach. She lay down with her back to the fire, and stared wide-eyed at the writhe of tree root before her.
Nothing happened.
The silence was broken only by the small snaps of the fire, and even these, at last, subsided, and real darkness fell. I should keep the fire going. Aerin thought; who knows what else is out there waiting? Who knows ... But her nightmares claimed her, and she fell asleep; and again she was suspended in nowhere, but nowhere was lit with a smoky red light, and a voice was calling her name; or she thought it was her name it called, but perhaps the word was “uncle.”
She awoke at dawn with a cramp in her side, for a heavy black-furred head was resting in the hollow between her last rib and her pelvis. As she stirred he began to purr. She sat up anyway, and glared at him. “You are horrible,” she said, and he gave her the same sleepy smile as when he had attempted to usurp her bedding.
Talat was dozing uneasily, still leaning against his tree, and was inclined to be cross when she went to put his saddle on; but perhaps that was because of the four-footed grey-edged shadow she brought with her. She rode off without looking behind her; but she felt, if she could not hear, the fluid motion following, and the black cat trotted along beside them as he could, occasionally leaping into the rocks above them as the trail narrowed. Once he jumped over them, from a rock face on one hand to an evergreen tree on the other, showering them with small sharp needles and seedpods; and when he rejoined them Talat whirled and snapped at him, but he only glided out of the way. He was smiling again. “Don’t let him tease you,” Aerin murmured. Talat’s ears stayed back all that day, and he was a little short on the weak leg, for he could not relax.
On the next day the yerigs joined them, the shaggy wild dogs with their great ruffs and silky feathery legs and long curling tails. They were a little less alarming than the folstza only because Aerin was accustomed to the king’s hounds, which were only half the size of the yerigs. The royal barn cats who caught the mice that tried to invade the grain bins were barely a tenth the size of the foltsza.
The yerig leader had only one eye, and a torn ear. She touched Aerin’s knee gently with her nose and then raised her head to stare fiercely into Aerin’s face. “I welcome you,” Aerin said to her; and the dogs with her ranged themselves on one side of the campfire while the cats, pretending that the dogs did not exist, still somehow all found themselves on the opposite side of the campfire; and that night Aerin slept very warm, for there was a cat to one side of her and a dog on the other.
Still they traveled north and east, and still the sun rose before them and sank behind them, but it seemed to Aerin, leading her quiet army, that it rose more sluggishly and sank sooner each day; and while the trees still shook out young leaves for her, there were fewer trees, and the solitary sound of Talat’s shod hoofs rang duller and duller. Occasionally she thought wistfully of the Lake of Dreams, and of a grey stone hall that stood near it; but she struck these thoughts from her mind as soon as she recognized them.
And then the day came when dawn was barely a lessening of shadow, and the clouds hung so low it took an effort of will to stand up straight and not bow beneath their weight. “Soon,” Aerin said to those that followed her; and soon came back to her in a rumble of many throats.
Talat stepped out that morning as if all his joints ached, and Aerin was willing enough to go slowly; she heard little gibbering voices snarling and sniveling at the edges of her mind, and there seemed to be a red fog over her eyes, as if the nothingness that haunted her nights would find her out in the days; and she murmured a word that Luthe had taught her, and the voices stopped, and the fog lifted. But she was not long allowed the pleasure of this small victory, for now a single voice murmured to her, and its murmurs reminded her of her Northern blood, her demon blood ... . “No!” she cried, and bent forward to press her face in Talat’s mane, and then she felt the pressure of a heavy paw on her shoulder, and whiskers tickled her cheek, and she opened her eyes to see two yellow eyes in a black face that did not smile; and Talat stood perfectly still, his head bowed, as the black cat’s other forepaw pressed into his crest.
She sat up again, and the cat dropped to the ground, and Talat turned his head to look at the cat, and the cat turned his head to look back. Talat’s ears, half back, eased a little, and one reluctantly came forward and pointed toward the cat, and the cat walked up to him and put up his nose. Talat’s other ear came forward and pricked, and he lowered his nose, and the two breathed gently into each other’s faces. Then they went on.
The mountains opened suddenly into an ugly uneven plain; the footing was bad, crumbly and full of small hidden crevasses, and there were no trees at all. Aerin’s army stepped and glided and shambled out of the shadows of the rocks and the last leaves, and billowed up around her till she and Talat were the hub of a wheel; and all looked around them. “We are no longer in Damar,” she said calmly, and Talat heaved a great sigh. Aerin unslung Gonturan from her saddle, and carried the blade in her hand, for the comfort of her only, for there was nothing for a sword to do in the wide bleak brooding space before them, where no spring could come.
The silence hammered at her, and she heard the little gibbering voices again, but indifferently this time, as if she heard them from behind a locked door whose strength she did not doubt. “Come along, then,” she said, and Talat walked forward, yerig and folstza making way for them and then falling in beside them. There was nothing to see but the heavy grey sky and the bleak grey landscape. Mountains again there must be on the far side of this flat grey space; but the clouds ringed them in, and there was no horizon. Her beasts followed her because she led them, but they could not see what she led them to.
Neither could she see aught that was useful; but the small nasty voices in her mind seemed to push harder on one side of her skull than another; and so she went toward them.
And before them suddenly was a black mountain, or crag, or tower, or all three; for it was the size of a mountain, but of the looming impossible shape of a crag that will be ripped into an avalanche in the next great storm; and yet it was also a worked shape, however improbable, as if a hand had built it—surely in its peak was the glint of windows?—but the hand must have belonged to a madman. Around it twined a vast vine of the surka, and Aerin’s stomach turned over and fell back in her belly like a stone, and the gibbering voices could be heard to laugh.