She had seen heaps of snow in shadowed verges beside the road and huge fields of ice and snow on the slopes above, giving credence to the tale, but she had also seen flowers aplenty, pale blue, butter yellow, scarlet and orange, scattered across tough grass and ground-clinging shrubs. She had seen sky so deep a blue that it shaded into violet as if brushed with a stain of beet juice. She laughed at herself. Their party included a bard journeying to Darre to make his fortune, and he never used such prosaic images as beet juice to describe the sky.
No one traveled the mountains alone, not even King’s Eagles. They had found a party assembling in the city of Genevie and joined it. Now they counted among their companions the bard, seven fraters, a high and mighty presbyter returning to the skopos with an important cartulary and his train of clerics and servants, and a motley assortment of merchants, wagons, and slaves—and the two prisoners she and Wolfhere and ten of King Henry’s Lions escorted to the palace of the skopos in Darre.
A breeze skirled down from the heights, and the sun slid behind a low-lying ridge. The moon’s pale disk gleamed softly against the darkening sky. Dusk. She shuddered.
Where was Wolfhere? How was she to make her way back down that path in darkness? What if he had fallen and hurt himself?
A bird called. She had a sudden, awful feeling of being watched.
She spun and there, perched on a stub of rock jutting out from the cliffside that demarked one side of the narrow defile, sat a hawk. She let out a nervous chuckle and fanned herself, abruptly flushed though the day was cooling fast. The hawk did not stir. Uncanny, with eyes as dark as amber, it stared unblinking at her until she felt chills run up her back.
And there was something else … a suggestion of something hovering just where the path dipped out of sight. Something there and yet not there, a figure glimpsed out of the corner of her eye, a pale woman creature whose skin had the color and texture of water. But when she looked directly, she saw nothing, only shadows sliding along the rock like the ripple of water over pebbles in a stream.
The hawk launched itself up in a flurry of wings. She ducked instinctively and heard a gasp. Was it her own or someone else’s, someone hidden?
The hawk was gone. A light bobbed into view. Wolfhere, whistling, came up the path around the shoulder of the cliff face.
“Lady Above!” she swore. “I thought you weren’t coming back.”
He stopped and looked around, then cocked an eyebrow and resumed walking past her and down the path toward the hostel. To keep in the light she had to hurry after; the moon was not yet half full and did not give enough illumination for her to negotiate the hillside track.
“Where did you get that lantern?” she demanded, angry that she had waited for so long but would evidently get no explanation.
“Ah,” he said, hoisting the lantern a little higher.
He did not intend to answer her. Fuming, she followed him down the path, stumbling now and again over a rock or a thick tuft of grass grown untimely in the middle of the track. By now the hostel appeared below them only as a dark encrustation against the blacker ridge; a single lantern burned at the enclosure’s gateway. So did a light burn all night, every night, a beacon for any lost traveler caught out and struggling toward safe haven just as after the body’s death the soul struggles upward to the Chamber of Light—or so the bard had said, thinking it a poetical conceit.
“Where did you go?” Hanna asked, not expecting an answer. Wolfhere gave her none. She watched his back, his confident walk, the gray-silver gleam of his hair in the twilight, his ancient, seamed hand steady on the lantern’s handle.
Hanna did not distrust Wolfhere, but neither did she precisely trust him. He kept his secrets close by him, for secrets he clearly had. Starting with the one he had never answered: How had he come so fortuitously this past spring to the inn at Heart’s Rest just in time to save her dear friend Liath from slavery? He had freed Liath and taken her away from the village, made her a King’s Eagle like himself. Like a leaf drawn in the wake of a boat, Hanna had been dragged along also. She, too, had been made a King’s Eagle, had left the village of her birth to begin these great adventures. Wolfhere was not a man of whom one asked questions lightly, but Hanna was determined to see Liath remain safe. So she had asked questions, which was more than Liath was willing to do. How had he known Liath was in Heart’s Rest and in danger? From what was he protecting her? Wolfhere had never taken offense at those questions; of course, he had never answered them either.
They left the narrow defile and mysterious valley behind and, soon enough, the hillside path deposited them on the smooth stone of the old Dariyan road a few hundred paces from the enclosure’s gateway. Stars bloomed above, a sudden harvest of bright flowers; ahead, a lantern flared as it swung back and forth in the breeze.