Trinity Rising: Book Two of the Wild Hunt (Wild Hunt Trilogy 2) (55 page)

Snow was falling again when Teia emerged from her shelter. Fat white flakes, settling thickly on the tents, piling up against trees already stooped under the weight of snow on their branches like old men weary of winter’s burden.

It was barely dawn but the fire outside was already well alight, a kettle steaming on the stones. Lenna was hunkered beside it, a snow-dappled blanket over her shoulders for a cloak, swirling the teapot to hurry the brew along.

For the Banfaíth. For me
.

Four days, now. Teia had insisted that she could manage, take care of herself, yet as soon as she turned her back one of the women was there to serve her food or pour her tea – even Gerna took her turn, so stickily ingratiating when she did so that Teia was glad when it was over. Each afternoon one of the men would build her a shelter or tend to Finn as diligently as if the dun was his own horse. And no one would say who had given them their instructions.

‘Good morning, Banfaíth,’ Lenna said, pouring tea into a bowl. ‘Your tea.’

‘Thank you, Lenna.’

Hands wrapped around the cup to make the most of the warmth, Teia sipped her tea and yawned as she watched the camp stirring. In the dull, shadowless light, people moved through the falling snow like figures from a dream, distant and not quite solid. Even the tracks they made quickly began to fill, almost as if the snow was patiently erasing them from the mountain’s face.

As if we had never been. As if people of flesh and blood do not belong here
.

She shivered and glanced up at Tir Malroth, but the cloud was too low to see the mountain’s forked peak. No wonder her dreams had been so dark of late, when every stride took her closer to the Haunted Mountain.

Last night had been no exception. She’d been back in the caves, and Drwyn’s wolf-skin had torn itself from the curing frame and stalked her through endless tunnels, snarling that she had no place with the Crainnh. When she’d finally found the way up to the air, she’d emerged onto a stark mountainside above a plain of ash and smoke and death as far as her eyes could see.

She’d woken gulping for air, her throat raw and lungs aching as if she’d been running for miles. The underground chase had surely been nothing more than a bad dream brought on by recent events, but the blasted plain . . . that had the shine of a foretelling to it, and had so spoiled her sleep for the rest of the night that the least sound from outside the shelter had been enough to wake her with her heart racing.

The touch of a hand on her elbow almost made her leap out of her boots.

‘Oh!’

Lenna snatched her hand back. ‘Is everything all right, Banfaíth?’ She looked half-terrified, field-mouse eyes staring, the scar on her cheek livid in the cold.

‘Sorry. Yes, everything’s fine.’ Teia managed a smile. ‘You startled me, that’s all.’

‘I wanted to know if you’re done?’ Lenna gestured towards the shelter. ‘So I can put up your blankets?’

For a moment Teia thought about telling her no and doing it herself, but having been so badly frightened by that first conjured light, and then the revelation of her gift for foretelling, it had taken almost two full days just to get Lenna to speak to her without cringing. It might be kinder simply to let her be, however unaccustomed Teia was to being waited on.

‘I’m done,’ she said, and the girl disappeared inside.

A figure approached the fire. Shoulders hunched inside his coat and his footsteps creaking in the deepening snow, Baer greeted her with a nod. ‘Banfaíth.’

‘Baer. Will you have some tea?’

‘Aye, I will.’

Teia poured him a bowl from the pot keeping warm on the stones at the edge of the fire. Tea with Baer had become a daily ritual. He would tell her of the band’s progress the day before and his plans for the day to come, just like a chief to his Speaker.

Was that how she was regarded? Sipping her tea, she watched him from the corner of her eye. If he was expecting her guidance, she wouldn’t have much to offer. Whatever her gifts, there weren’t many ways in which a mere girl could counsel a veteran such as him. Even the time she’d spent with Drwyn had taught her little of a Speaker’s role; Ytha had always been careful to keep her guidance for the chief’s ears alone.

‘The lookout saw some game this morning,’ he said eventually. ‘Like elk but smaller, he tells me, and spotted like the fawns of the hill deer. I’ve sent two men to bring one down, to see if it makes good eating.’

It was the first game bigger than a bird that they’d seen on their journey into the mountains. Not a one of the band looked to be carrying an ounce of fat so Teia knew they were accustomed to hard bread and short rations, but away from the familiar plains and the places where they knew game could be found, even in winter, there were lean times ahead for them.

‘A good thought,’ she said. ‘We need fresh meat – the men especially, if they are to maintain their strength.’

She stopped, feeling suddenly foolish. Baer had been exiled for ten years; surely he already knew how to feed men so that they survived the winter. What could she possibly tell him that was new? Ducking her head to hide her blushes, she concentrated on her tea. The best she could do was play the role in which the Lost Ones had cast her, and hope she didn’t make even more of a fool of herself.

As she finished her tea, Baer bolted the last of his as if it had been a signal that their conversation was over. But then he looked down into the bowl and rolled his tongue around his mouth, hunting for the right words to say.

‘Speak, Baer,’ she said softly. ‘I’d rather know your mind than be forever guessing at it.’

‘Perhaps the others haven’t noticed yet,’ he began, still studying the dregs of his tea, ‘but it seems to me our path is set for Tir Malroth.’

‘And that worries you.’

His eyes flicked up to hers, then slid away. ‘It does.’

‘It’s the only safe route through the mountains. Drwyn sent scouts to the other pass, I know that for sure. They’d never let us through.’
And what if he sent scouts to the pass below Tir Malroth, too? What if they capture us, hand me back to Drwyn – or to Ytha?
She squashed that thought, hurried on. ‘No one ever goes this way.’

‘Aye, for good reason!’ he retorted. ‘It’s Tir Malroth, girl – the Haunted Mountain!’ He stopped, biting back whatever he’d been about to say. His jaw worked. ‘Forgive me, Banfaíth. I misspoke.’

‘Baer, I’m young enough to be your daughter – you don’t have to apologise to me.’ Tentatively, she laid a hand on his arm. She would miss the company if she left them here, but this was her task, not theirs. ‘I appreciate all the help you’ve given me to get this far. You didn’t have to come with me and I’m grateful you did. I will understand if you come no further.’

‘And let you go on alone?’ He snorted. ‘Neve would kill me. Besides, there’s better shelter here in the mountains than there was down on the plains. And maybe game now, too.’ He squinted against the falling snow to study the clouds and put down his bowl. ‘We’d best be moving soon. The trail ahead is steep and those clouds have plenty more snow in their bellies. I can smell it.’

Four hours later, a sharp whistle from up ahead stopped the trudging column in a wide forested valley. Teia looked around from talking to Neve and saw Isaak and Varn weaving through the trees ahead, the former with a deer’s carcass over his broad shoulders, the other man carrying both their bows.

Baer strode up from the back of the group and nodded to Teia. ‘Will you join me, Banfaíth, and see what Isaak has found?’

She steered Finn out of line and followed him to where the two men were slogging through the knee-deep snow towards them. The pair of them were caked in white but grinning fit to break their faces. Teia dismounted carefully and kneaded her aching back whilst she waited for the hunters to reach her.

Isaak slung the spotted deer off his shoulder and laid it at Teia’s feet. He’d made a clean kill, one arrow to the heart; only a little blood stained the doe’s chestnut breast and her wide dark eyes still held the last light of life.

‘Is it good?’ he asked.

Kneeling in the snow, Teia stripped off her mitten and laid her hand on the doe’s flank. The rest of the band crowded around, whispering and peering over each other’s shoulders to watch. Their eager attention made her nervous so she closed her eyes, and the whispers fell silent.

Ytha had scarcely taught her the trick of using her magic like this, out beyond her body. She concentrated on the texture of the hide under her palm, the faint, lingering warmth seeping from the organs beneath, and called up her power. Just a thread at first, which she allowed to flow along her arm, down through her hand and into the deer.

No new music greeted her because the beast was dead, but there was something . . . Almost an echo, or a space where something used to be that now was gone. She strained to feel the shape of it and was deluged in sensation. Not sight, not touch, but it filled her awareness with a sense of richness that all but made her mouth water.

Opening her eyes, she smiled up at Isaak. ‘Yes, it’s good. Very good. And this hide,’ she stroked it, ‘will make fine leather, soft enough for clothes.’

The shaggy young man grinned and drew his knife.

Teia levered herself to her feet and left him to it, unable to stomach the sounds and smells of butcher-work, however necessary it might be. Her back was aching again and walking seemed to soothe it a little, though her gait was becoming more and more like a duck’s as her belly, impossibly, continued to grow. Drwyn’s old trews had been let out at the seams as far as they could go before she left the caves but had begun to dig into her uncomfortably. Her breasts were tender, too, her once-dainty nipples now swollen and dark.

Perhaps they should stay a while in that valley. It was sheltered from the worst of the wind, with densely forested flanks and a stream that flowed too fast to freeze completely. They could hunt more, build a smoke-tent to cure the venison and the coarse sausage made from the offal. Rest the animals and themselves. After four days in these conditions . . . She kneaded her back and sighed. Rest would be good.

But time was against them, an enemy greater than the Wild Hunt and Drwyn’s war band combined. If she presented her warning to the Empire with time enough for them to prepare, there was some hope. If she was too late, she might as well not have come at all.

Ahead of her the trees petered out amongst the tumbled rocks surrounding the river that leapt and chattered the length of the valley. The snow was falling faster now, making up for its smaller, drier flakes with twice as many thrown down twice as hard. She could barely make out the opposite bank. At the edge of the trees she stopped; close to the water the stones were thickly sheathed in ice and crowned with caps of snow. The footing there would be chancy.

She brushed snow from a fallen tree at the edge of the rocks, where its neighbours provided a bit of shelter, and eased herself down to sit on it. No sooner did her back cease aching than her feet began; some part of her always hurt, as if the pain never went away, just took up residence in some other part of her body. Praise Macha, it would all be over in three months or so.

Mountains ringed the valley, their peaks lost in the low cloud and swirling snow. Without sight of the skyline she could not orient herself in relation to the great forked crown of Tir Malroth; she did not even know for sure that they were following the right trail. Picking their way was like chasing a mouse through the folds of a rumpled blanket: after a while the mazy valleys all looked the same. Snow and trees and rock; everything grey and white with scarcely a scrap of colour to be seen.

How far still to the pass? Another five days? Six? Baer would not be drawn on it, not even to hazard a guess. This trail was foreign to them all, knowledge of it having been lost with the lives that gave the fishtailed peak its name. She would have to look into the waters again to plot their course.

Except her dream was preying on her mind. It had left such a sense of dread behind, as brooding and formless as her sense of the Haunted Mountain looming nearby, but so thick it was almost something she could taste. She pulled from her belt-pouch the small bronze basin she had taken to carrying since her journey began. She scooped snow into it from a nearby drift and used a little of her power to melt it to water. Basin balanced between her hands on the roundness of her belly, Teia opened herself to whatever the waters would show.

Fires on the plains. Running. Dying. Maegern’s steed rearing. Scarlet and black, ashes and blood. Nothing new. The image reformed into the staring eye on the Raven’s shield, hideously alive, knowing her, down to her deepest fears and most secret desires. Then it blinked, opening again as a human eye so blue as to be almost violet in a pale, dirt-smudged face.

It took a moment for her to realise it was her own face, hollowed and hardened into the face of a stranger. A lock of white hair hung over the savage wound on her brow. Instinctively she touched it and in the water the woman – her – lifted a hand to touch her scar, too.

True telling. She’d found the first white strand when she combed her hair that morning using the little looking-glass Drwyn had given her. Only short, newly grown, but a portent for what was to come.