Think me not a coward, Lars. If staying to apologize would better the situation, I would. But staying here I shall be a shame to Rufus, a torment to your mother. I think I should be on my road, leaving you to heal yourselves.’
Lars cast his eyes down quickly. He raised his hand to his mouth and then spoke softly. ‘I thought you might see it so. Rufus will not be pleased, nor my mother. They are concerned about appearances. For myself, I have a graver concern than that. My people, Ki – they are not used to abuse from outsiders. They have been damaged. They will want revenge. They will look for a scapegoat, someone to center their anger on, to bear the brunt of the Harpies’ displeasure. And the Harpies will be displeased. While we dare not go to them with tribute they will not feed as well. We are one of the larger families in the valley and by far the most generous with the winged ones. They will miss our tribute. I wish you could stay, Ki. I would like you to live here among us, in peace. But who could promise that? My mind ignores the cries of my heart. It tells me that you must go, tonight, in secret. Tell no one of your plans. Travel swiftly, go to Carroin. The roads that lead there are level and wide; you will make good time. Stop for nothing. Leave the supplying of your wagon to me. I shall do it today, in stealth. Too many eyes will be on you. Tell no one: not Rufus, not Cora!’
Lars rose slowly from the ground. Ki remained sitting, her heart beating slowly and painfully. Her mind whirled. She did not wish to leave in stealth, to slink away like a shamed child. She wanted to redeem herself in their eyes, to make them see that she had wished them no harm.
‘Tell no one!’ Lars cautioned her once more. ‘Cora would try to make you stay, unmindful of any danger to herself. She would put her hospitality to her daughter by Sven above her own safety. There were many that did not approve when Sven joined you. Their tongues will wag long today.’ Then Lars left her, striding away, leaving Ki surrounded by a cold premonition of danger.
Cold nibbled at her spine, crept up around her to touch her, no matter how she shifted and burrowed deeper into the mattress. She opened her eyes grudgingly. Vandien was standing at the edge of the platform, rubbing his scruffy beard.
‘Daylight’s here,’ he said softly when she stirred. ‘We have to be on our way.’
Ki stretched stiffly and moved gingerly from the shelter of the shagdeer cover. Even from within the cuddy she could tell that the cold had deepened. The freezing air pressed in on the wagon like a clenching fist. She struggled hastily into her cloak. Vandien moved past her to take his from the bed and don it again.
With the cold had come a wind that whooshed past the entrance to the canyon. Their tracks from the night before were almost completely erased. The grays were huddled together between the wagon and the cliff wall. Their heads were down and their cropped tails lifted slightly in the breeze. Vandien pulled the protection of the hood further past his face.
‘Damn the luck!’ he spat. ‘A wind like this is all we need to make things worse.’
Ki looked at the sky with an expert eye. ‘The wind may be exactly what we do need to take the wagon through.’ She smiled a dry, cryptic smile at Vandien and jumped lightly from the wagon.
Sigurd whinnied shrilly at the sight of her. They were not pleased to be unblanketed. Ki gave them a small feed of grain to cheer them while she helped Vandien load the remaining firewood. It was not a large load. Vandien spent a single log to rejuvenate last night’s fire and heat a kettle. The Humans broke their fast only with hot tea, sipping it from steaming mugs that cooled too swiftly. Camp was soon broken, Vandien gathering the equipment and Ki stowing it. The harness leather was stiff and hard to thread through buckles thickened with frost. Sigurd tossed his great head about when Ki approached him with the cold bit, then sulked when she finally succeeded in getting it between his jaws.
‘We’re off,’ Ki announced through lips already chilled and dried by the cold. With a creaking and snapping of wheels pulled free of ice, it was true.
Snow was shallow within the sheltering arms of the canyon. But when they emerged from the mouth it became deeper. As they turned out of the canyon, the horses’ heads were pointed into the wind, and they pulled the wagon into a deepening drift of snow. The snow itself was a fine crystalline dust that swirled and lifted on the wind. The horses lowered their heads before it. It stung Ki’s face with icy kisses. Vandien pulled his hood full forward and turned his head aside. Ki could permit herself no such luxury. Someone must use her eyes to guide the struggling team. Her face stiffened in the icy press of the wind. It blew up her sleeves, and inside her hood it circled to slide down the back of her neck. The reins grew stiff in her hands.
The grays plowed through the snow gamely. The tall wheels of the wagon sometimes stuck and slid without turning. Ki strained her eyes ahead, trying to pick out the trail in the swirling snow. All the mountainside looked amazingly alike. She nudged Vandien and shouted over the wind.
‘Do you know this pass well enough to guide us through it in a storm like this?’
The hood nodded. He lifted a bundled arm to gesture that she should turn the team more to the right. Ki made the correction. The previous day they had traveled up winding canyons and between foothills, moving ever so gradually toward the Sisters where they overlooked the narrow trail. Now Ki found her path moving ever closer to the upthrusting of a mountain. As she followed Vandien’s pointed directions, the team headed less and less into the wind.
The trail began to ascend again, at a steeper grade than before. It seemed to Ki that no sooner were they freed of fighting the wind than they were forced to battle an uphill grade. The wind itself did not cease, but battered the wagon broadside now. At least it was sweeping the snow across their rocky path in shallower drifts, rather than piling it up before them.
The mountain became larger, barer, and steeper on the right side of the trail, while on the left the ground began to drop away. From a gradual slope in the morning, it became by noon a gentle hillside that rolled away from them. On the right side of the wagon the mountain began to rear up in sheer walls of bare stone that climbed vertically before they became the rugged sides of the mountain above them. The grays’ feathered hooves met bare, stony ground beneath the snow now. The wagon wheels no longer wallowed but rolled and crunched along. No sooner did the wind sweep a shallow drift of snow across their path than it eddied and swept it away again. Ki found she could follow the trail now without Vandien’s help as it was first covered, then revealed by the shifting winds.
They traveled through a country of absolutes. If it was not snow or ice they saw, then it was rock. If it was not white or gray in color, then it was black. The wagon, obscenely gay in such a setting, creaked through a country in which nothing else moved except the wind-blown snow. The mountain moved closer to the trail’s edge, until Ki knew that if she met another wagon or traveler coming from the other direction neither would have room to give way to the other. It was a possibility that she did not much fear.
It was hard to imagine spring in such a place, or anything other than snow. But here and there a patch of scabrous blue ice clung to the steep mountainside that reared above them, to show that thaws and running water were not unknown in the pass. The blue ice shimmered more brightly in the snow-paled sunlight than it should have. At last, they passed a chunk that was low enough for Ki to see plainly. The ice did not grow paler as they approached it, but bluer. Working within its depths she saw tiny, wriggling blue creatures.
‘Ice maggots!’ Vandien shouted over the wind as they passed narrowly under the shadow of the clinging ice. He shrugged casually as they passed, but to Ki they were new beings that both fascinated and repelled her. She did not realize the danger they presented until a great chunk of blue ice slid down the side of the mountain immediately behind them. It crashed on the path, sending rattling shards of ice bouncing off the back of the wagon. It obscured the way they had come with shattered chunks of blue ice. It would have smashed the wagon or killed the team, had they been in its path.
‘Little squirmers chewed it loose,’ Vandien observed without rancor. ‘This pass