Chapter Twelve
Theo feared his tired muscles would fail him by the time he and the two Conservatory riders galloped wearily into the courtyard at Bariken. He didn’t know how the hruss had survived the pace the riders had forced on them since leaving the stables at Conservatory. He himself was exhausted, and he fell as much as slid out of the high-cantled saddle. He had been an itinerant Singer more than half his life, and was a saddle-hardened man of six summers, but this journey had been exceptional. Gram and Jane, who had neither rested nor eaten since dawn, had to be almost past endurance as well. Still, they refused refreshment, demanding to be taken at once to the Magistrix of Bariken. Night was hard on their heels as they entered the House.
Bowing to the Magistrix in her spacious windowed apartment, Theo was uncomfortably aware of how dirty and disheveled they all must look. Never, in the all too many Houses he had worked for, had he encountered a woman more beautiful than this one. Wishing he looked more presentable, he tried to smooth his hair. It sprang back immediately into a curling tangle.
Gram and Jane spoke urgently of Maestra Lu’s psi impressions. Rhia bent her glossy head and listened as Theo tried to ignore the trembling of his legs. He had heard this story in detail at Conservatory, but he listened again, still not comprehending how even a Conservatory-trained Cantrix could pick up thoughts at such a great distance, as Lu claimed to have done.
Theo’s parents had been itinerant Singers, like their parents before them. They had refused to consider Conservatory. Like all Nevyans, they revered the Cantrixes and Cantors who warmed and protected the Houses, but they never aspired to the Cantoris, not for themselves, not for their son. They were proud of the accomplishments of their line, and they were satisfied. They had not offered Theo a different choice, and he had never thought to ask.
The Magistrix was speaking. “Is it really possible?” Her eyes were clear and sympathetic in her smooth face. “Could your Maestra have heard someone’s thoughts at so great a distance?”
“Maestra Lu can,” Gram insisted. Jane nodded. Both stood straight, despite their weariness, intent on their purpose. They were whip-thin, weather-worn. Gram looked angry, and Jane worried. “We need riders to go back up the Pass with us, at the earliest possible hour.”
“Of course,” Magistrix Rhia said. “And of course, we all hope Cantrix Sira is, indeed, alive.” Her Housekeeper, a long-limbed, dark man, sat still as stone behind her, while she leaned forward in her carved chair, concern in every line of her graceful body.
“We feel the loss of our young Cantrix deeply,” she went on. “You must have met our messengers on the road.”
“So we did,” Gram said. “They went on to Conservatory.”
Rhia spoke over her shoulder to the Housekeeper. “Wil, please arrange for the search party without delay.”
He stood, and bowed.
“At first light, please,” Jane begged. “There may be no time to lose.”
Theo watched the Conservatory riders with admiration for their dedication, even as envy, his old, unwelcome companion, welled in his heart. He tried to thrust it aside, even to deny it. Surely by now, as old as he was, it was a pointless emotion.
“Our men will be ready at dawn,” Wil said. “Now let me arrange beds and baths.”
“Yes,” said the Magistrix. “You must rest. You will want to be fresh. Singer, will you ride with them tomorrow? We have no other Singer here but Cantrix Magret, and of course we can’t spare her from the Cantoris.”
Theo bowed as elegantly as he knew how, despite his chagrin over his grimy appearance. “Of course, Magistrix. I agreed to this at Conservatory.”
The three travelers followed Wil out the door. Theo didn’t know which he craved more, hot food, a bed, or a bath, but he meant to make the most of each. He was, however, to be kept from all of them for some time yet. An anxious and saddened Cantrix Magret, lonely and overworked, pressed him with questions, searching for a hopeful clue about her young colleague’s survival.
As the first flickers of morning light edged the horizon, the search party gathered in the courtyard. The Conservatory riders met those from Bariken for the first time over a quick breakfast in the great room. The Bariken men, called Alks and Mike, were large and grim-faced. Theo’s friendly overtures were met with little more than grunts, and he soon gave them up.
He was still tired from the day before, but eager to be moving. He shivered inside his caeru furs. These northern mountains felt the beginning of the deep cold sooner than the southern timberlands he had recently traveled through.
Jane was a shadowy blur in the twilit morning, her breath a shifting cloud before her hood. Gram raised his hand to the other riders, and the party was off, the hruss slogging through fresh powder from the night’s snowfall. Alks and Mike led the way, and Theo trailed behind Jane and Gram. With a little chill of apprehension, Theo noticed that Jane had a long knife strapped to her waist. He was sure it hadn’t been there before. As they rode, he wondered what intuition had caused her to arm herself so visibly.
As the light grew, Theo realized that all the riders but himself carried weapons. Tension flickered under his breastbone. Only once before had he been inadvertently involved in violence between humans. Usually the struggle between man and the environment was enough to occupy those who lived on the Continent. His senses sharpened, and the very air seemed alive with danger. As the saying goes, he thought, the drifts are deep in this one.
The powdery snow that hindered the search party’s progress also obscured the hoofprints of the hruss that preceded it. Maestra Lu sensed this, wrestling with her fears at Conservatory. She could not have proved it, but she knew in her bones that two others had ridden out from Bariken, ahead of Jane and Gram and the Singer Theo. They were pushing their mounts up into the Pass as fast as they were able.
Lu paced her room like a wezel in a cage, long past being able to make wild rides into the Mariks. There was nothing she could do but fret and pray, in the age-old manner of mothers.
Sira awoke from her second night alone in Ogre Pass stronger, but desperately hungry. She had seen a wezel the night before as she called up her quiru, but the little meatless creature hardly seemed worth the trouble of killing. This morning, though, she felt she could have eaten even its scruffy hide.
She had a scrap of dried caeru meat left, and she chewed it as she broke camp. She saved the last of the dried fruit for midday. She supposed she could come across a living caeru today, but she doubted she would be swift enough to bring it down. There was so little wildlife in the mountains, and most of that terrifying. She had no desire to encounter a ferrel by herself, although she supposed if the feathers could be pulled off, there might be some meat on the long bones. She had seen one as a child, swooping down from a mountaintop to pick up a caeru pup in its beak as if the little thing weighed nothing. She could not bear even to think of the tkir. She promised herself an early quiru, so there would be no risk of being caught by darkness.
She had walked all day yesterday, not quickly but steadily. Two more days should get her there if her sense of direction was true. A lifetime spent within the walls of her parents’ House, Conservatory, then Bariken had not prepared her for a trek through Ogre Pass.
She walked through the day, stopping only to finish off the dried fruit. She sucked on snow until it melted in her mouth, feeling almost constantly thirsty. The snow chilled her, and made her teeth ache. She had to balance her thirst with the dangers of the encroaching cold.
At least the snow had stopped. The sky was gray, but the clouds lifted above the peaks. By evening, Sira felt she had been walking through deep powder all her life, as if her memories of Houses and other people were only dreams. She felt entirely alone in a cold white world.
Her muscles ached with the unaccustomed exertion, and her wounded shoulder was stiff as she sat against a softwood tree at last and dug out her filla. What would she have done if Trude had taken her filla? She shuddered to think of it.
Darkness slipped down from the mountaintops as she played a little first-mode melody. The quiru grew around her, a fragile little home, all there was between her and the malignant night. She warned herself firmly to stay alert. It was hard, though, so very hard. The emptiness of her belly made her feel disconnected and drowsy.
She settled in under her furs. Her quiru hung suspended and still, undisturbed by any breeze. Only the creaking of the ironwood trees around her campsite disturbed the silence.
As her eyes grew heavy and her mind drifted in a fog of hunger, Sira thought she saw the rounded, furry back of a yearling caeru pup slipping into her quiru. She imagined she could see the yellow-white blotch on the snow, just inside the circle of light, and that she smelled its acrid odor. Only her eyes showed out of her own caeru furs, and she dreamed that she and the animal looked the same, curled on the snow, two mounds of yellow-white fur in the glow of the quiru.
There was a faint cry, distinct and insistent, in her mind. Sira could not resist its direction. She blinked, and came out of her dream.
A half-grown caeru lay near her. It was as beguiled as she, drowsing in the warmth, unaware that the other furry mound was not one of its own.
Moving instinctively, pushed by that distant voice in her thoughts, Sira reached for one of her knives. Slipping it from beneath the furs, she felt its shape and heft, and measured her target. She tested the action in her mind before she moved, once, twice, three times; then she leaped. Her knife struck true, just behind the foreleg and up, straight to the heart of the sleeping animal.
She jumped aside as the caeru twisted in its death throes, but not quickly enough. A long yellowed claw caught her forehead, and hot blood streamed over her cheek. She dared not get near enough to cut its throat, but had to wait as it pumped out its lifeblood over the snow.
Plucking a bit of fur from her bedfurs, she pressed it over the gash in her forehead. There was no time to worry about this new wound. Swiftly, she carved out the caeru’s heart and liver. She ate them warm and raw and dripping, kneeling there in her quiru under the lonely stars.
Maestra Lu released the long, fragile tendrils of her thought at last. She could no longer keep her mind extended so far, reaching out into the wilderness. Commanding the caeru had taken all her energy. She put down the filhata that had been her tool, and leaned her head into her hands.
She smiled to herself, weary but triumphant. Sira was no longer so hungry nor so weak. Lu had never reached so far before, or done something with such effect, and if the caeru hunters knew what she could do, they would give her no rest.
But the effort had taken all her energy. Like Sira, it had been two days since she had slept a full night or eaten properly. All at once, her reserves of strength evaporated like snowflakes in the sun, and Maestra Lu collapsed, unconscious. Her Housewoman found her lying on the cold stone floor the next morning.
*
By the light of morning, Sira stared unbelieving at the caeru carcass inside the fading boundary of her quiru. A thousand questions tumbled through her mind. Had she really done this, or had it been a hunger-induced nightmare? She had never killed anything in her life.
She looked down at her hands, and was shocked and rather queasy to find them crusted with blood, the nail rims dark. Then she nodded to herself, grimly. “At least,” she muttered, “it is not my blood.”
Her own blood had dried uncomfortably on her forehead, but, fearful that this new wound would bleed again if she cleaned it, she left it as it was, crudely bandaged with a scrap of fur.
Before departing the campsite, she clumsily carved out what meat she thought she could carry, wrapping the grisly bits in a section of hide to put in her pack. Soon she was walking again, finding the Pass growing steeper and steeper as she toiled through the snow. She left the remains of her kill to freeze solid where they were.