Finding the Way and Other Tales of Valdemar (5 page)

“Try and keep up,” Sherra said out loud, and her guide style altered considerably. Now, whenever there was a large tuft of watergrass, she leapt to it, and the Companion bounded along moments after. Her stick-probing became attack-like jabs rather than measured taps. Her thoughts, which Sherra hoped were kept to herself, was that this was largely guide theater. They were not moving that much faster, but the extra activity gave a sense of urgency that seemed to satisfy the Spirit Horse that they were making good time. Besides, the extra noise and splashing would keep the crocodiles, swampcats, and big hunting snakes away. Of course, it might attract something
else,
but life was full of gambles.

They paused, both panting and splattered with the slimy muck that now seemed to make its way into every crack and fold of their equipage, and Vesily got that far-off look again.
:We are going the wrong way. She . . . he . . . my Chosen is that way. You’re taking us the wrong way.:

“Trust your Guide,” Sherra replied. “Oftentimes, only way to get somewhere is by passing it and going around something. You want to go in a straight line. That isn’t how you get to
anything,
” Sherra said with a touch too much acid in the tone.

:So far you haven’t gotten me to anything your way,:
Vesily snapped back.

“You are welcome to leave me at any time, Spirit Horse, and it is not as if I am doing this life-risking for a great amount of pay! You Valdemarans are our allies now, so I owe it, but you haven’t made me
like
it yet.”

:You don’t have to
like
it, you have to do your duty, same as me!:

“My duty isn’t to argue with you, my duty is to guide you, and that might just end at any moment. The sooner I’m rid of you, the sooner I make way towards my own bed.” Sherra stabbed her staff into the mud for emphasis, glaring up at the Companion. She could almost see the thoughts turning over like the gears and wheels of a mill, turning. The Spirit Horse was weighing the possibilities. Strike off on her own into the Mire, using the few techniques she had seen the
hertasi
do which she could duplicate, and make maybe a fifth of the time they were making now—even though her instincts told her the direction they made good time in was, in fact, the wrong direction? Risk lethal injury or outright death, never to see a Chosen at all, or stay with Sherra, to go get help?

Sherra turned so quickly she slapped her tail against Vesily’s fetlock. “Daylight is burning.”

The
hertasi
resumed her Path out of the swamp.

Vesily snorted and stamped in place, over a dozen times, but Sherra never looked back—or at least she did not look back in a way that the Companion would recognize as such. And when no one sees a tantrum, then
technically
, the tantrum never happened.

But Vesily did, indeed, follow Sherra.

Vesily was caught in a mud-bog twice before they made it to the edge of the Mire, once deep enough to reach the bottom of the saddle she bore; as a side benefit being stuck had the effect of making her too weak to argue with Sherra’s advice. Sherra talked Vesily through how to escape the bog—how moving slowly and deliberately would allow mud to fill in to the vacuum that moving her limbs left behind—but it was exhausting, and most maddening, it was something that simply could not be paused. The effort had to be deliberate and continual, until freedom. And, in some kind of sick cosmic comedy, the mud hole butted against a rock shelf.

A circular one. And it, too, had mud tracked onto it by what appeared to be a human.

Vesily and Sherra looked at each other.
:Is that—?:

“A Changecircle, yes,” Sherra agreed. She bent to look at the tracks, and then peered into the Circle itself. “What is in here is not from this part of the world. That patch of reeds, it’s dying. All those sedges are the wrong color, the wrong height.” She followed the tracks to a stunted tree. “And now I see what must have happened. Your human could not take direction from the sun because of the clouds, but look, here is moss on the tree. The problem is, it is growing on the wrong side of the tree, because the tree itself was turned about in the Change, and has not grown new moss yet. Your person took bearings from the side the moss was on, and for whatever reason did not recognize this is a Changecircle.” She spotted something else . . . something that was very much not good . . . and groaned. “I am so sorry,” Sherra said.

Sherra held up a torn bit of yellow-dyed cloth, only as long as one of her own fingers. She flicked out her forked tongue, which vibrated up and down at the very tips. “There is blood in this mud. The taste of it is faint but there. Whoever your Chosen is, they’re losing blood and I can’t sense any of the protective oils like we have. Or rather, wait—not much of it. There was some, once.” Sherra frowned and searched a little more, blinking her nictating lids against a persistent cloud of midges. “These little scraps of cloth seem to be discarded bandages.”

There was a flattened patch of grasses, vines, and mud, and then a faint trail of broken greenery headed in what, by the mistaken bearings, would be what the Chosen thought was east. That meant the Chosen was headed back into the Mire.

:My Chosen’s mind is feeling worry and despair, and fear. Of death. But not for herself? Himself? That way.:
Vesily nodded her head twice to show Sherra the way, but Sherra already knew. The Path had changed direction, now that they’d reached that Circle, and now was a critical moment. “Vesily,” Sherra began, “We should rest here where the ground’s solid and—”

:I know,:
Vesily stated.
:But I can’t. I know I should rest but I feel like I’m killing my Chosen if I wait.:

“You could kill your Chosen
and
yourself if you don’t wait. There is a saying among guides and scouts—‘sometimes you must be slow to be fast.’ Being too bold means you get stuck or hurt, and spend your time extricating yourself instead of making miles.” Sherra reached up to pat Vesily’s foreleg. “You have done everything you could, and you were smart when you could have been reckless. Don’t do something stupid now.”

:My Chosen is in
there!: Vesily cried in Sherra’s mind, and the Companion stamped her hooves.
:What if we rest a candlemark here and find my Chosen a candlemark too late? What about your guide-wisdom then?:

“And what if we do not rest, rush in, and get delayed
two
candlemarks because we were too tired to see a mudpit? Believe me to my last breath, Spirit Horse, that is
far
more likely. You don’t know
how
lucky we’ve been
this
far. But I am concerned by this too. I say that we rest now, as best we can, and then we let our emotions push us when we need it the most.”

Vesily stood, watching the middle distance, in the direction of her Chosen. She didn’t chase after her Chosen, at that moment, and Sherra took it as the victory for wisdom that it was and wasted no time getting fresh water and food. Sherra had an uneasy feeling that she hoped Vesily couldn’t pick up on—that this was no longer a guide trip and more of a salvage and rescue journey. She didn’t ration her food as if she’d need it for a return leg. Something told her she’d only restock at the Vale, this time, because she couldn’t get home. She found herself examining her weapons and triple-checking their thumb releases when she “heard” Vesily’s Mindspeech.

:She’s insane,”
the Companion said softly.
:She’s—everywhere she turns is the right direction, she thinks. She crawls and then rests, wants food and cold water. But it’s so incoherent. She falls down, holds her belly, thinks of—everything. Randomly. I know her direction, Sherra, but I don’t know her. :

Sherra tugged on Vesily’s tail. “Come here. Lie down and sleep. Look, your kind believe in destiny, yes? That spirits guide you to where you need to be? Our kind, we know these things to be true. Our spirits are agents of change long after the beings they were are dead. So lie down, here, and listen to me. Would the spirits that guide your people lead you through this, only to have you fall short?”

:Your logic is flawed,:
Vesily retorted petulantly,
:Because why would your agents of change allow my Chosen into the swamp again?:

Sherra frowned again. “I don’t know. Maybe they couldn’t reach her for some reason having to do with the Mire, or the Changecircles, or how her mind is.” Wait. What was that the Companion had just said? “What do you mean,
my
agents of change and your Chosen?” She blinked, thinking fast. “You mean that your Chosen is Tayledras?”

“There is a chance things are not as bad as they seem. Many Tayledras can survive in the wild.” Sherra didn’t mention that probably three-quarters of the Hawkbrothers never left a Vale more than once a year. It might help Vesily’s morale if she went right on thinking that
all
Hawkbrothers were scouts.

The overcast sky darkened as they set off again and soon drops of rain made rippling rings in the swamp-water. Thunder boomed from their left, then right. The drizzle picked up, and by the time they were again deeply into the swamp, it was a downpour.

This had its advantages; the rain was clean to drink, and it kept many of the dangers of the Mire hunkered down. But it was absolute misery to trek through.

Finally Vesily stopped.
:This is ridiculous. I can go faster with you on my back, and you weigh almost nothing. Take to my saddle.:

Sherra hesitated, looking up at the Companion through the pouring rain. “Ah . . . I cannot ride, Lady,” she admitted.

Vesily snorted.
:Neither can most of the Chosen when we Choose them. Take to my saddle.:

Sherra didn’t argue; she simply crawled up onto the saddle and let the Companion pick through the deeper parts of the swamp. Vesily seemed to take the direction straight from her mind now; certainly she was going exactly the way that Sherra sensed they should.

The storm picked up. About three hundred horse lengths away was deep swamp. Again, mixed blessings; it would shelter them from the storm, but be slower to traverse. Out here they were exposed, and dusk was already here. Gods forfend, they might even be struck by lightning out here. There certainly was a lot of lightning around to be struck by. One particular cloud-to-cloud lightning flash lasted so long that it illuminated the entire Mire as clearly as bright daylight.

It lit up a particular
something
at the edge of the deep swamp.

Sherra leaped onto a vine-twisted snag for a better look, hanging on to Vesily’s saddle for stability. Visibility was poor, thanks to the rain, even for her sharp eyes, but she was sure she caught a patch of yellow, like the bandage fragments in the Changecircle, amidst the orange glow of what she hoped was not webbing. It was at the base of a huge tree, of the kind that only the Pelagirs could produce. Sherra knew of only six other of this kind, and this was half again bigger than those she had known before. Its form was twisted and massive, and its trunks split into scores of branches, and each of them in turn into dozens more, all weighed down with vines by the thousands, each as big as Sherra’s arm. It did not obscure the canopy; it
was
the canopy, reaching far beyond what Sherra had ever seen from anything in the Mire. It filled the horizon so that the lightning seemed to come from inside it. In more than one of the gaps between the trunks, an orderly latticework could be seen, but it emitted light of its own, rather than shining silver in lightning. The larger sections glowed a mottled deep orange, and the thinner parts were a brighter orange, all about the brightness of an oil lamp. As they moved closer, Sherra hoped they were human- or
hertasi
-made, but with a sinking heart, she recognized them as being more akin to spiderwebs than ironwork. Her Pathfinding told her
there
, that is where they must go. “I see something,” she began to say, but her heart rate surged when she saw, despite the rain, that there was something in the water. Moving. A serpentine distortion in the rainsplashed surface, sending a wake behind it, angled towards the patch of yellow, and it was—it was bigger than the Spirit Horse, by far. Her other Gift almost physically hit her, and she spoke without thinking. “We need to move, Vesily, we need to get over
there
now, right now!”

It was a bad thing to say to a Companion that was wound up too tight already about her Chosen, and Sherra regretted it right away, because Vesily lurched up from the muck and took Sherra with her. Sherra’s “Wauuuugh!” would probably not be mistaken by anyone as a war cry, but Vesily seemed spurred on by it. The
hertasi
managed to hang on as the Companion plunged desperately for the tree, but right now she couldn’t tell which direction was even
up
for what felt like a day of being pounded by water, mud, debris and reeds on one side, and Companion on the other. It was less than a minute, it turned out, and Sherra regained her senses when Vesily finally slowed alongside the patch of yellow she’d spotted.

The patch of yellow was a woman, in Hawkbrother clothing, or rather, it had once been. Face down, on the arched, forked root of an ancient tree, the woman appeared to be on her knees with her belly between the fork, though the waterline obscured anything below the waist. Every spot of exposed flesh was ravaged by insects, her clothing torn away and used as makeshift bandages. Sherra jumped off of Vesily’s side onto the tree itself, then scrambled down to where the woman was. Sherra braced for the worst, but discovered the woman was alive. Carefully, Sherra lifted her head up from the moss and found the woman’s eyes opening, and turning towards Vesily.