ice they make. Keep the team moving. There’s no sense in pausing, or even in looking up. If we saw a chunk coming down, there’s no place to get away from it.’
The wind was an ever-present shushing, a nosy cold creature that nudged its way into every opening garments might provide. Sometimes it shifted about to meet the wagon with a shout and smack of head wind. Vandien looked like a huddled pile of garments on the seat. ‘You could ride within the cuddy, you know!’ Ki called to him. ‘There’s no reason we both have to endure this. I don’t need you to pick out the trail anymore.’
Vandien shook his head, making no words. Ki was secretly glad of his company in the icy wind, but wondered why he chose to remain there. When the sun was overhead, the winds seemed to decrease in volume. The snow still swirled about the horses’ hooves, but not as strongly. The trail, too, leveled out for a space and traveled horizontally across the mountain’s face, as if taking pity on the weary team. Ki halted the wagon to let them breathe. She blanketed them as they stood in their traces. The trail was wide enough for her to walk past the team, to stroke the frost from their muzzles and share an apple between them. They managed it awkwardly around their bits, jangling as they chewed. The wind buffeted her as she climbed back onto the wagon and to its shushing sound added a whistle. Ki wondered if it were building up again. She wanted to rest the team for a while, but feared to let them stand long if the icy wind was chilling them. She entered the cuddy, closing the door behind her.
Vandien had thrown his hood back from his face in the still cold inside the cuddy. His dark hair was tousled about his face, and the wind had burned his cheeks red above his beard. The contrast made his dark eyes seem brighter, almost shiny black. They sparked at her, and Ki returned his smile as she pushed her own hood back. There was a certain triumph to having come so far in such bitter weather. It was a heady feeling, having prevailed against the winds of the world.
Ki hooked down a dangling sausage, used her belt knife to cut chunks of it against the small wall table. It was so cold, the meat made her teeth ache. They ate together, feeling the wind rock the wagon gently on its axles, hearing the faint whistle it made as it swept past the cuddy.
Vandien rose abruptly, opened the cuddy door to the wind and then pointed to a speck in the sky. ‘I thought that was too pure a note to be wind song. There he is again! Hardly ever see a Harpy aloft in this kind of weather, but then, that’s a strange one. An outcast, did I tell you? Looks like he’s caught in the wind.’
Stomach quivering, Ki looked. He was so far away, she could not tell his colors; perhaps he was a brown, she told herself, or a deep purple. Or the ghost of a blue, whispered some sneering creature from a dark corner of her mind. The Harpy hovered, not overhead, but up the trail, and very high. His wings would dip, and he would circle high on the vicious winds to come again into position. His clear whistle cut the wind.
‘Look how he fights that wind, Ki! Like he wants to stay over the trail. You’d think he’d realize that the wind against those cliffs is what’s throwing him around.’
Ki did not reply. She was listening to another voice in her head, to Haftor, standing dark and menacing in starlight, holding tight to her wrist: Cora will not be able to contain such a secret. You killed those Harpies. That’s a debt paid only with blood. Neither time nor distance will heal it. Harpies don’t give up on blood debts. Neither do the men who serve them.
Vandien glanced curiously over at Ki, wondering that she did not share his curiosity about the creature. Ki was crouched like a cat, looking out the door under Vandien’s arm. Her eyes were glued to the speck that circled and whistled.
‘Ki!’ She jumped at her name. ‘We had best be on our way again. There is only one shelter spot between here and the bare faces of the Sisters. If we make it tonight, we may pass the Sisters tomorrow. Two days past that and we should be coming down out of the pass. Wagon and all, just as you said.’
Ki turned haunted eyes on him. He would never know what courage it took for her to emerge from the cuddy, to bare herself to the sky and the death that hung there. She almost hoped the Harpy would try to dive on her, to be smashed by the winds against the cliff face. But he did not. He was too wise for that. He hung, rocking in the sky. His whistles grew louder and longer in the thin air. He cried his triumph to Ki.
Team unblanketed, Ki clambered woodenly back onto her wagon. She started her wagon rolling again. The grade was easier now; the snow and wind no longer had to be fought. The wind had suddenly switched to come from behind them. The team pulled with a will, undisturbed by the creature that whistled and cried over their heads. Had they not been foaled and grown to size in Harper’s Ford, where the shadows of Harpies swept over the pastures? Ki wished the snow would mantle her from those eyes, the wind rise and dash it from the sky. But the sky only cleared and the wind became a shushing constant. The creak of the wagon could not mask the whistling that was not wind.
She hunched her shoulders, pulled her hood higher about her face. For one terrible instant she felt her face pucker and redden, and a part of her wondered if she would bawl in loud cries for the way destiny had caught up with her. She sobbed in a breath of the frigid air, and it braced her. Beside her, Vandien said loudly, inanely, ‘Have you ever heard the lay of the hunter Sidris, and how she went to slay the black stag with scarlet antlers?’
Even as Ki turned bewildered eyes upon him, he opened his throat and began to sing. He had a mellow voice that wandered willfully beside the familiar tune. He sang loudly, if not well, and she did not mind his missed notes, nor the places where he hummed to cover the words he had forgotten. He drowned the Harpy’s whistle.
The song was a ballad, evidently of his own people, put to a Common tune. He began it with a long introduction of meaningless syllables, repeated at intervals through the song. The song was long and wrenchingly romantic as it told of the hunter who followed the mystic stag and died nobly in the slaying of it. Another time Ki would have mocked the sentimental words about the two futile deaths. Now she was caught up in them. When finally the song died away and Vandien subsided into a somewhat embarrassed silence (truly, he did not have a voice for singing), Ki was surprised to find that the whistling of the Harpy had stopped.
She turned her eyes up to the sky. He was gone. But she knew that he could find her again whenever he wished. There would be no turnoffs from this trail, no friendly forest to hide in. For a moment she considered warning Vandien. Might not he share the fate ordained for her? And then it seemed to her that the Harpy was like the blue ice that twitched with maggots and sometimes overhung the wagon on the narrow trail. No use to look up and worry. If it was going to fall on you, it would. It would find you. As Rufus had found Ki that day.
He had come to the apple tree in the afternoon, to find Ki still sitting there, considering the things she had done …
‘Cora would see you,’ he said stiffly. His eyes were deeply shadowed. Ki guessed that he had slept little. She rose with reluctance to follow him. This summoning boded no good for her. She trailed after him dispiritedly, ignoring the speculative looks she received from Lydia and Holland as she entered the common room. They passed down the narrow hallway.
Cora’s eyes were closed. There was more gray in her hair than Ki remembered. Last night had been no time for noticing such things. Now Ki found herself remembering that when she and Sven were joined she had thought Cora sturdy as a tree. Her old cheeks still held a pitiful trace of that bloom, but they were no longer high and firm but wrinkled like apples stored away all winter. The single small window in the room let in little of the afternoon sunlight, and less air. Ki felt stifled. In the closeness her head throbbed and the buzz in her ears seemed louder.
Lydia, who had followed them into the room, plumped and smoothed the feather-stuffed coverlet that lay over the old woman. She sent Rufus and Ki a warning look. Rufus shooed Ki from the room and shut the door gently behind them.
‘She cried out for you, but that was a while ago. She seemed awake. But she drifts in and out. Her body already fails under the burden you put upon her last night. Inadvertently,’ he added grudgingly as Ki knit her brows.
He beckoned again, and she followed him down the hall to another door. There were no windows in Rufus’s room. His bed was