Changer of Days (8 page)

“Why Kheldrin, for all the Gods’ sake?” he demanded. “You could have come to us—to me; you must have known we would shelter you. I could have protected you…”

“I was a child, and you were young; you had no base to fight from, as you do today—not then. And remember where I ran from—remember what happened to the last place which gave me sanctuary…”

“How did you survive Bresse?” he asked, his voice husky. “Feor went to seek you, and found only a message:
The young queen lives.
It was then he sent me after you. I traced you to the river…and the river seemed to have swallowed you. And yet…I was sure you were alive, and waiting somewhere…”

“I was safe, Kieran,” she said, reaching for his hand. “I was safe, and…there were times when…I was even happy. And I learned…so much.”

“Khelsie magic,” he said, too quickly, his reaction a recoil born of pure instinct.

A shadow of pain crossed her face. “We are not so very different from one another,” she murmured. “But Bresse, Kheldrin…it doesn’t matter. It’s all gone, Kieran. There’s a great empty place inside of me where Sif ripped something away; I cannot even reach for Sight any more. I tried, at the battlements, to help you…it would have been easier, less bloody, less violent…but you saw what happened.”

“Does Sif know?”

“I think…Senena knew.” There was a catch in her voice, and Kieran, seeking to distract her from this line of thought, raised her to her feet.

“Come on. It’s time we were moving. They must have organized themselves by now. I’d rather not be here when they discover the open postern.”

She let him hoist her onto the horse and then he vaulted up into the saddle behind her, holding her against him with his left arm. They rode in silence, with Kieran choosing to skirt the edges of the concealing foothills for as long as he could, until the bulk of the castle was almost out of sight. His silence was composed of the peace of finally holding the foster sister lost so long ago, whom he had sworn to find and protect; of calculations as to how best to get Anghara to Lucher, the loyal village; and of contemplating how many of the men he had led into Miranei would walk outside its walls again. He also kept an ear cocked to their rear, waiting for sounds of pursuit. It was Anghara, therefore, who watched the gray expanse of moorland which stretched out at their left; and Anghara who roused in the circle of Kierah’s arm to point at a distant smudge on the horizon.

“Over there,” she said quietly. “What’s that?”

Kieran reined in the horse, narrowing his eyes against a sun which had already leapt almost into the noon zenith, and then drew his right hand over his face in a gesture of unutterable weariness. “Sif,” he said. “It has to be Sif. He’s too early, damn him. We’re too close to Miranei. It is not over yet.”

“Perhaps we should have stayed in the keep,” said Anghara faintly. “And just barred it against him.”

“You do not have the men or the arms to hold it,” said Kieran. “Yet. Your name has been kept alive in Roisinan, but it will still take more to convince them its bearer is likewise. And only then…Right now, there are too many with their loyalties still divided, and their knowledge of the keep is more than enough to hand it to Sif in a siege. Remember, that’s how he achieved Miranei in the first place.”

Anghara looked down onto her folded hands for a moment and bit her lip. But when she glanced up at Kieran, her gray eyes were steady. “And now?” she asked.

“I hope Rochen wasn’t in his path,” said Kieran. “We might be on our own. But I still mean to try and get you to Lucher. At least there they will shelter…”

“No,” she said. “If there is any chance of Sif taking it out on the innocent…no. Where would you look for Rochen and the rest of the men?”

“There should have been a base camp…”

“Is that where the rest of them will make for…if they get out of the city?”

“Yes, but…”

“Let’s find that first. And then we shall see.”

“But we’ll have to ride almost at the army’s heels, across open moors,” said Kieran helplessly.

“Until they get to Miranei and learn what happened there,” said Anghara, “they will not be looking back.”

Kieran said nothing more, but when the smudge on the horizon drew level with them and resolved into Sif’s returning army he urged the horse into a cautious canter, angling into the moors and to the rear of what he thought Sif’s main body of men might be.

The luck held for a span longer; Kieran led them into a shallow curve which skirted Sif’s rearguard, and they flanked the army unobserved. But then it seemed as though their good fortune had come to an abrupt end.

A ring of cold ashes. A broken knife half buried in the turf. Trampled ground. A torn piece of cloth, dark with what looked like blood.

“Yours?” Anghara asked quietly after a moment’s stunned silence in which Kieran had simply sat his horse motionlessly and stared at the evidence before him.

“If any escaped,” he said after another moment, his voice sounding tired and much older than his years, “I will find them; I know where they will have gone.”

He slipped off the horse and crouched closer to what had been the campfire, peering at it.

Anghara, wincing, let herself down as well, rubbing a cramped leg; she let him have his silence. The horse nosed rather hopelessly at the bitter moor grasses at its feet.

The sun slipped slowly across the sky; days were still winter-short, and there wasn’t much daylight left. Anghara walked about for a few minutes to stretch her legs, then returned to lean gratefully against the horse’s warm, hospitable flank. She still felt weaker than a new-hatched chick, and was contemplating calling to Kieran, a few paces away and engrossed in his investigations, to leave off and try instead to find a place where they could stop for the night. But then the silence of the moors was broken by…something. The horse lifted its head, with a snort; Anghara reached instinctively for its nostrils.

“Kieran,” she said sharply, a fraction of a second before his own head came up, and he sprang to his feet, loosening the sword in his scabbard. Horses.

“Take the beast and get back,” he said levelly.

She would have demurred but a look at his face stopped her; she did as she was told. From behind the shelter of the horse’s body, she stared across its back as the thunder of approaching hoof beats metamorphosed into four riders. Four riders wearing the livery of the keep guard.

She heard Kieran’s sword sing free of its sheath, and in the next moment she heard her own voice shouting, “Kieran! Put up! It’s the twins!”

Charo, in the lead, stood up in his stirrups and waved, as though to confirm her words; Kieran’s sword sank down until its point rested on the spongy sward. “Four?” he said softly, sick at heart.

“Kieran!” Charo called out. “Wait!”

Now they could see the newcomers were leading two empty horses, one saddled, the other free, led only by a rope halter.

It wasn’t until they came to an untidy stop almost at Kieran’s feet that the significance of the deserted campsite occurred to them. Adamo swallowed convulsively. But it was left up to Charo to ask, “Are they all dead?”

“Not all,” said Kieran. “Or there would be bodies.”

Anghara hadn’t thought of that. Of course; there would have had to have been bodies if Sif’s soldiers had simply overrun the camp. Sif’s army wouldn’t have waited to bury the dead. There had to have been survivors.

Adamo straightened in the saddle, casting his eyes around the moors. Shadows were lengthening. “Perhaps we’d better find a place to lie up tonight,” he said. “And I’d rather it wasn’t here. I wouldn’t like to light that cold fire.”

“We brought your Sarevan, Kieran,” said Charo proudly, glancing in the direction of the bare-backed horse he himself had on a lead rein. “We didn’t have time for such niceties as saddling a riderless horse. Sorry.”

“Whose was the other?” Kieran said.

“It’s Daevar’s,” said Adamo quietly. “We lost him to an arrow; we couldn’t tarry to pick him up when he fell.”

“And the others?” said Kieran bleakly.

“They didn’t make it.”

“You were shot at?” Anghara asked him abruptly. “Were you followed?”

They hesitated. It was Charo who answered at last. “The main gates were still closed when we turned to look for the last time.”

“I think they have their hands full tonight at the keep,” said Kieran grimly. “If anyone could organize a posse at this short notice out of the chaos we left behind, it’s probably Sif—but he’s got important deaths to deal with tonight. We may have a few hours.”

“He might think it better to chase after us while we’re still close enough not to tax his men,” said Charo.

“He’s just come back from a campaign,” said Kieran. “All he may know is that five men were seen fleeing the city, one of whom was accounted for by a lucky shot; the escaped prisoner wasn’t with them. Four men aren’t worth the trouble, and he won’t want to lose the important trail in the dark. He’ll come for us tomorrow. We’d better put as many miles between us as we can before then.”

Their choices were few—north through Brandar Pass into Shaymir, back into the western hills, or down across the open moors, south or east, and in either direction there was a river barring their way. But beyond the southern river lay Bodmer Forest, and that was Kieran’s country. They would find shelter, and allies. If only they could outrun Sif’s army to get there.

They snatched perhaps an hour or two of sleep, long after midnight; Anghara had found it hard to rouse from an exhausted slumber when Kieran gently shook her awake in the dark hour before dawn so they could ride on. But she insisted on Kieran riding his own horse; riding double would only wear out the horses and slow them down.

The moors around Miranei itself were an extension of the mountains at its back—mostly high, flat country. But the land folded itself into gently rolling fells as the small company rode south and east. They drove the horses hard, but they’d had to slow down a little once they gained the fells; they could ill afford an accidental toss or a lame horse. They paused for a moment at what felt close to midday, to give the animals a brief respite; the sun was warm upon their upturned faces, and the horses were already lathered with effort. The ground rose before them, first gently, then increasingly steeply; they were in the lee of the bare slope of a hill, not very high in its own right but looking as though it might command an unimpeded view of the surrounding moors. And there was an illusion of greater height, imparted by the presence of a tumble of huge granite boulders crowning the hill. At least one of these, too obviously shaped to be natural, looked as if it had once been a Standing Stone. Anghara’s eyes were full of this. What Kieran saw was different. A vantage point.

“From up there,” Kieran said abruptly, “we would know.”

“Yes,” Anghara agreed. “We would know.”

There was something still of power on the hill’s broken crown, something which clung to the hill like a barely visible mantle. Perhaps it was this that held Kieran back, despite his earlier comment. His companions sat their mounts in morose silence, one or two casting their eyes back the way they had come. They knew without doubt they were being followed—having Anghara with them, how could they not be—but they didn’t know by whom, or how many. The hill could tell them. But the hill first had to be climbed; and none of them seemed to have the inclination to do it.

In the end it was Anghara herself who swung down from her mount with a decisive motion. She staggered and almost fell as aching legs, weakened by the punishment of this hard ride so soon after her long incarceration, set up a clamor of protest. She caught herself on the pommel of her saddle and stood with her head bowed for a moment, gathering strength; then she let go, tossing the reins of Melsyr’s horse to Adamo, who caught them more or less automatically.

“We have to know,” she said, turning to Kieran, her eyes defensive. “And I am blind. I may as well look with other sight.”

“And if anyone’s watching, they’ll know exactly where we are,” said one of the men.

Kieran reached a decision and swung off his own horse. “We’ll both go,” he said.

“Madness,” said Adamo. “Now if we lose you, we lose you both.”

“For the sake of all the Gods, then, hurry! My bones tell me they can’t be far behind,” said Charo, chewing his lip.

Anghara was still weak, looking more frail and transparent than ever, her eyes bruised with great dark circles which bit into the pallor of her cheeks. Something gave her strength, though; she turned and strode up the incline without looking back, leaving Kieran to scramble after her. He reached her in two or three long steps and frowned.

“You’ve changed,” he said. “In Feor’s classroom you were always the cautious, careful one. I don’t remember you being this impatient, this rash. First bearding Sif’s army on the open moor, now this. What are you trying to prove?”

“It is Sight that drives me,” she said, “the Sight that is gone from me. You, who have never had to live with it, cannot know what it’s like to lose it. It’s like I’m missing half my soul.” She shivered. “This place is…there’s something about this hill. Even blind, it touches me. It is a dark feeling…as though something…died…and yet, I welcome it. Even that. It heals me while it wounds me.” Her eyes glittered strangely as she stared up at the tumbled stones. “I have talked with the Old Gods, Kieran. There is real power in Kheldrin.”

“I cannot understand you when you talk of those things,” said Kieran. It had taken severe self-control not to snap again at the mention of that alien land.

“No,” she said, not looking at him, smiling into the distance. “You’re human.”

“So are you, damn it!” he said, goaded to anger.

“No,” said Anghara, softly but emphatically, remembering an echo of a God’s voice—al’Khur had called her something…what was it? A name of power. Inhuman power, great enough to have shackled a God’s will. And he had said…he had said she would claim it. “Once, perhaps, I was. No longer. Even blind, no longer.”

Their last few steps to the hill’s summit were taken in silence. Snow still lay in the crevices of the huge boulders. Anghara’s foot sank ankle-deep into a pile hidden in the cool shadows underneath the stones as she scrambled onto one of the lowest and crouched there, slowly sweeping the horizon with eyes shaded under her hand against the bright midday sunlight. Suddenly her hand dropped from her face into a pointing arrow in one graceful motion.