When every bit of it was gone, I sat shivering. My senses were painfully alert to every sort of stimulus, but my awareness of touch was overwhelming. It seemed to extend beyond my skin like a cat’s quivering whiskers. I noticed the movement of air currents in the cavern, felt the striations in the rock beneath me, and even sensed the disturbance of the air caused by an insect flying past me. As I sat there, the acuity of my senses only increased. I could see in the darkness with a clarity of vision that surpassed my ordinary sight in daylight. At the same time, a restless energy crawled through me and over my skin, demanding that I be up and doing something, anything. Soldier’s Boy rose abruptly. “It is time to travel,” he announced, and my own words sounded like trumpets in my ears, not just when he uttered them, but when their previously faint echoes returned to me.
“Fill up the water skin, roll the blanket, and gather our things,” Olikea urged Likari in an excited voice. “We will quick-walk now, I’ll wager.”
So charged with energy was he that it was difficult to wait for them. I think Olikea sensed his restlessness, for she caught at my arm as I rose and clung to it, bidding Likari, “Come, come quickly, and take his other hand.”
The boy came at a run and seized my free hand as if his life depended on it. Perhaps it did. The magic rippled through me like fire in my veins.
In four steps we burst forth from the dark and dank cavern into daylight and a brisk wind. The day was heavily overcast with fat gray clouds, but the light was still shocking. Soldier’s Boy halted, dazzled, and only when both Olikea and Likari tugged hard at my hands before stopping did I realize the momentum we had had.
When Soldier’s Boy glanced back, I could see the opening of the cavern we had left as a tall crack in a jagged rock face. We stood on a beaten pathway on a hillside covered in tall, yellowed grass and fading gorse. Ahead of us, the trail wended its way down into a sheltered valley thick with evergreens. In half a dozen places, plumes of smoke drifted up past the treetops, only to be quickly swept away by the fresh breeze. A swift-flowing river from the mountains behind us divided the valley; even at this distance, I could hear the river’s voice, deep and greedy. It ran a steep course downhill, and stones moved with it, grinding and grumbling. Its waters were white with rock dust. It cut through the valley like a cleaver. In the distance, the sun was coming up over a sparkling bay at the river’s mouth. I had never seen such a dazzling vista. “Is that the ocean?” Soldier’s Boy asked dazedly. I shared his question, wondering if I were beholding the final destination of the King’s Road.
Olikea glanced at the distant water and shrugged. “It is a great water. No one has ever gone around it, though if you travel north far enough, it is said there are islands one can visit. They are cold and rocky places, good for birds and seals that eat fish, but not a place for the People. This valley is the best place for us. It has always been our Wintering Place.”
“Why?”
“By now the leaves will have fallen in the forest on the other side of the mountains. There will be no shelter from that light, or the deep cold. Here, the trees never lose their needles; it is always dim and gentle beneath their canopy. Snow falls in the valley here perhaps one year in five, and when it does come, it does not linger. It rains here, sometimes a great deal, but rain is kinder than snow and freezing, I think. In both late autumn and early spring, fish are thick in the river, and deer in the woods. In winter, we can live in plenty here.”
“Why don’t you stay here year-round?”
She looked at Soldier’s Boy as if he were daft. “The ancestor trees are not here, nor will they grow here, even when we have planted seedlings here. And in the summers, this is a place of fog and rains and floods. Sometimes people have tried to stay here, thinking they were too old to make the journey or that they would prefer to summer here. They do not prosper; sometimes they do not survive.”
Soldier’s Boy had bowed his head. Her words tickled at his mind, waking memories that Lisana had shared. He lifted his head and looked out over the valley. Then he pointed and said, “There. Those rising columns of smoke over there. That is our village, isn’t it?”
His eyesight was as shockingly keen as his sense of touch. His gaze picked out glimpses of mossy roofs and then small figures moving nearby. The thick foliage of the prevalent evergreen trees obscured most of the village scene. I could not tell how large a settlement it was. As he watched, a flock of croaker birds rose suddenly from their perches in the trees. They circled once over the village and then flew toward us, cawing loudly.