The only way in or out.
Impervious from the founding of the Keep.
Gil wondered if she should keep silent. But she knew she had to say what she thought. It might just be true.
"The problem is, Alde," said Gil, "the warriors of the Alketch have to know that all they can do is sit outside till winter comes and they get buried in snow. They have to know that we have wizards here and would be able to see them coming, and get ourselves stocked up and locked down. So my questions is:
Why doesn't this bother them?"
Alde sighed, her shoulders slumping a little, and her face was again the face of a young girl. "I wish you hadn't asked that," she said.
Chapter 7
"I expected to be killed, you see, o my sister," said the Icefalcon, his voice no louder than the stirring of wind in the grass that curtained the rims of the maze of coulees through which they rode.
"At the Moot, after Noon had gone up to the Haunted Mountain, I overheard Blue Child tell one of her friends, 'I will see that you get Little Dancer and Sand Cat.' I forget what favor he promised her in return.
But I knew that she meant to kill me. Thus when Noon came down from the mountain and kissed me with the kiss of death, I was... suspicious. It felt, you understand, rather too pat."
It was good to ride again. Cold Death had three horses with her, of the short-coupled gray line of Evening Star Horse, bred by Frogs Singing and his family in the Pretty Water Country; they traveled sure-footedly and in silence through the red clay hills, the grasses of the bottomlands shoulder-high and prodigal with wildflowers. Loses His Way, though in the Icefalcon's opinion not notably quick on the uptake, would at least be a more than competent guard for Tir.
The Icefalcon's mind turned uneasily from what he knew of Vair na-Chandros and the potential evils of Southron magic to what else might be waiting for him-for them all-here in the Real World.
Cold Death listened without comment to the Icefalcon's account of his life east of the mountains both before and after the coming of the Dark: of his meeting with Eldor, of Ingold, of the Guards, and the Keep, and Tir. She listened, too, without comment as he revealed what Loses His Way had told him concerning the Wise One, Antlered Spider.
"Noon raised me as much as you did, when Cattail and the Yellow Butterfly were killed." He named their parents, as was the way a mong the Talking Stars People. "As much for what Blue Child did to me on that day, I owe her for what she did to him. His death was in his face when he came to me in the firelight." He hesitated a moment. "when did he die?"
"The following summer," she said. "At the Place Where the Rocks Look Like Grapes. He grew too ill to keep up with the hunt and drank black hellebore, after giving his amulets and his horses to Blue Child."
The Icefalcon was silent, seeing again the old man as he stepped out of the night, hand outstretched, fingers shaking around the white shell, sorrow beyond sorrow in his sky-blue eyes.
"The Stars told our Ancestors," went on Cold Death quietly, "to send messengers to them at certain times. The bravest and the strongest, strong enough to pass through the Long Sacrifice without flinching or fleeing. They called you a coward."
"Blue Child did, I expect." His voice turned hard. "They all did."
The Icefalcon said nothing, staring straight ahead past his horse's ears to a rumpled wall of cottonwood, noting automatically the shape of limbs, the thickness or paucity of leaves.
"How could Noon abide when the one he raised as his son refused to undertake the journey to the other world for his people's sake?" She spoke reasonably, though he knew Cold Death had for all the years of adulthood absented herself from the Summer Moots, when the Long Sacrifice was made. "Without the messenger, our people would be at risk all the winter."
"Did disaster befall?"
"O my brother," she sighed, "there are always disasters. No, the people passed safely through the winter, save for the old men and the children, who died as old men and children always die. But with each death, Noon grieved. He was a man staked between two fires, my brother, glad that you lived and yet ashamed of that joy."
"I was not chosen," the Icefalcon said stubbornly.
"He thought you were." She watched all around her as she spoke, aware of every circling hawk, every basking lizard, every bobbing blade of grass.
The three horses moved within the aura of her spells and so were able to travel swiftly without much fear of being seen, but neither Cold Death nor the Icefalcon neglected the common cautions of travel in the Real World: covering their tracks, holding to the cliff walls, speaking in the soft-murmuring hunting voices in which all the children of the peoples of the north were raised.
As the Icefalcon had seen in Sarda Pass, no matter how powerful a shaman one kept company with, there was always a stronger waiting somewhere.
Her black eyes slid sidelong to him, and he could see reasons within reasons there, for asking what she asked.
At length he said, "I could prove nothing. I didn't know how it had been done. But Blue Child knew. And Blue Child was always my enemy, even before the death of Dove in the Sun at the Place of the Three Brown Dogs. The Dove perished through her own weakness, and no deed of mine could have saved her, but Blue Child blamed me for her death. And before that time, Blue Child always considered herself Noon's successor. It was in her eyes, o my sister. You were gone at the time of the Summer Moot, or I would have sought you out. Indeed, I thought of doing so, only after the Summer Moot, Noon and Watches Water and all of the others pursued me, and I had to flee."
Still Cold Death said nothing, her small brown hands resting easy on her muscled thighs, speaking to her horse with her mind as Wise Ones did. Winds slewed and cried among the crossing water courses, and the high hills cut off visibility, making the Icefalcon prickle with nervousness, as he did wherever he did not have a clear view of his surroundings.
"I expected to be challenged at the Summer Moot," he said. "I was a match for Blue Child's strength even in those days, though she is nearly ten years older than I. Had she attacked me from ambush, or put poison in my food, or come on me when I slept, it would have been better than what she did. Not only did she cast me out of the people, o my sister, and not only did she rob me of the right to lead them which Noon would have passed on to me. She made Noon the weapon of her will, an old man in the last summer of his strength. And he went to his death thinking me a coward and all his training of me gone to nothing. For that I will not forgive her."
Slunch grew thick on the hills to their right, the rubbery blanket of it slopping down into a small stream.
From this a shambling band of bloated things toddled on swarms of wriggling legs.
The Icefalcon's horse-Scorpion Eater he was called-flung up its head and snorted, but Ashes, the mare Cold Death had ridden these many years, only snuffled disapprovingly. Like one of the Talking Stars People, she refused to be impressed by anything.
Or perhaps, thought the Icefalcon, in these days such sights were common enough in the Real World.
Rain swept over the country, a spring cloudburst common to those lands, though the Icefalcon had noted already that they were fewer than they had been twelve years ago. Resting under a hazel brake at the foot of a hill, the Icefalcon asked Cold Death to scry along his back trail, to Sarda Pass and the Keep, though he was almost certain no one had followed him over the pass.
Clouds still sat on the mountain, livid below and blinding-white above, longer than the Icefalcon had ever known a Wise One to tie weather-spells in place. Cold Death broke off a blade of needlegrass and brushed it across the silver pool left in the old bison wallow and sat for a time with her brown legs drawn up, gazing into the sandy shallow.
"The pass is thick with snow, o my brother." She glanced at him under long straight eyelashes, like a thoughtful fox pup. "There are tracks of deer and rabbit in it, but the tracks of men always end in avalanche spills-one, two, three of them. Nor does anyone come on the road from the place west."