Sindérian nodded. That was exactly what she had been thinking.
“I believe I had some such notion, but there was no need. Hardly had my knees touched the ground when the last of the ice melted away. Then all of her lovely color came back, she opened her eyes and sat up on her couch of furs, with the water pouring off of her and all her clothes and hair streaming wet.
“All memory of her life until that moment was gone,” he continued. “She could not remember her name, or where she had been before the mountains, or even what it was that brought her into the high reaches of the Cadmin Aernan. I insisted that she travel with me back to the Heldenhof, and there—because she was in a sense newborn—she was taken to the nursery and cared for along with the children, until she grew stronger.”
“And you never guessed who she might be?” Sindérian said, with a skeptical quirk of her dark brows.
Ristil’s chestnut stallion shied at something in the road, but he controlled it with a sure hand on the reins.
“I suspected she was the girl that Éireamhóine lost between Hythe and Arkenfell. The wizard told me he cast a spell of protection in the last moments before the avalanche hit them. A spell wrought in haste, he said, and he hardly dared to imagine it had been successful, but still there was a chance, a small chance…”
The King shrugged. “I could hardly proclaim the truth to the world without telling the tale of the wizard and Winloki. And as for the young woman herself, it seemed to me that she had chosen not to remember.
Éireamhóine had told me enough of her unhappy story; I hadn’t the heart to revive those bitter memories.”
“And you fell in love with her and married her.”
A cold wind came down the mouth of the pass and lifted his bright golden hair. “My sons loved her long before I did. The death of her child—from which I believe she suffered deeply, even without remembering the cause of her pain—the fact that they were still mourning their own mother, these things seemed to strike a chord of sympathy between them. It was my eldest who gave her the name of Sigvith, while she was still with them in the nursery. But I was not far behind Arinn and Kivik in learning to love her. She was so beautiful and good, what did it matter to me who or what she had been before? If I hadn’t already two sons, perhaps my jarls and thanes would have protested more vigorously when I announced I would marry her. But in the end, they were more than reconciled, for as you have seen she is as kind and gracious as she is beautiful.”
Sindérian nodded thoughtfully, remembering Luenil as she had been at seventeen: bitter, sorrowful, defiant—reckless of her own safety. It was pleasant to have seen her as she was now, in comely, prosperous, graceful middle age. This one time the Fates had been kind.
Leaving the mixed forest of the lower slopes for the cliffs and gorges, the woods of pine, spruce, and fir farther up the mountain, was like riding from summer through winter’s door.
It began with wisps and rags of vapor, and the sun making rainbows through shimmering veils of mist and cloud. Then the mist thickened into a fog so dense it muffled all sound. As the fog grew colder and colder, moisture froze on Sindérian’s eyelashes and hair; her face began to feel like a mask of ice. At the first intimation of sunlight up ahead, she drew a deep sigh of relief.
But when she finally emerged from the fog it was into a cold flurry of snowflakes. And the deeper the army rode into the mountains, the heavier and heavier fell the snow, until soon they were forced to plough a way through high drifts blocking their road.
“No, never before at this time of year, not within memory,” the King said in response to Prince Ruan’s question. “But there may be ice giants somewhere about, and it’s said that they make their own weather.”
Whatever the cause, the weather grew worse. A great wind came skirling through the mouth of the pass, hurling sleet and snow into their faces. For Sindérian, swaddled in a borrowed blanket over her cloak, there were times when the men and horses just ahead of her appeared as nothing more than bulky grey shadows. Then lightning flared and a barrage of thunder rolled down the mountainside, setting the horses dancing and fighting at their bits. She felt the shock of it carried on the air even before she heard it.
Not a natural storm, she decided, every hair on her head tingling. Far from any ordinary clash of the elements, she believed she could sense a conscious intention behind every last snowflake and freakish turn of weather. But the tempest soon passed, all but the shrilling wind and a light fall of snow. In the woods to either side of the road, icy pine needles rattled in the blast, and the horses were so dashed and buffeted by the gale, which seemed to come at them from every direction at once, they could make little progress.
The sun dipped toward the horizon; a slip of dirty yellow moon came up. Though no one wished to stop any longer than necessary in such miserable conditions, it was obvious that the horses could not go on forever. When the King finally called for a halt, the riders began to set up camps under the trees and to search the area for pinecones and seasoned wood. A hundred communal fires sprang up in the shadows, snapping and sputtering, struggling to stay alive in the falling snow. Soon, a hundred tin kettles were hard at work boiling up water for soup or comfrey-root tea.
Finding a place near one of the fires, Sindérian settled down with her back to a fallen log and her legs drawn up to her chest inside the blanket and cloak. After a while her teeth stopped chattering. The horses made a kind of wall screening their riders from the wind, and a layer of dead pine needles made a damp cushion that was better at least than sitting on the ground. Just outside the circle of firelight, Faolein landed on a snowy branch overhead, where he fluffed himself up and drew in his head until he was nothing but a round ball of feathers.
It seemed to Sindérian that she must have dozed off for a time, because the next thing she knew a dim light was sifting through the branches, and she was surrounded by the groans and faint curses of men heaving themselves up off the ground, brushing themselves off, and gathering up their things.
She lifted her head from where it had been pillowed on her knees and rose stiffly to her feet. Stamping her boots in order to bring life back to her frozen limbs, she looked to the left and right, wondering what had become of her father during the night. The sparrowhawk was nowhere in sight. When she cast her thought out in search of him, she made only a tenuous contact. He seemed to be well but far away, higher up where the air was more rarified.
Reassured by the thought that it would hardly be possible for him to lose her so long as she travelled with such a vast host, she headed out of the trees, with both her horses following behind on a leading rein.
When she reached the road it was to walk out into a sleety sort of drizzling rain.
All around her riders were mounting up, getting ready to ride. So it seemed that she had somehow slept through breakfast—or perhaps there had been no breakfast at all. She adjusted the hood of her cloak and took the bay gelding by the bridle. As she swung up into the saddle, a cloud bank to the east parted, and sunlight erupted like a fountain of gold above the peaks.
By noon, the sky was a brilliant, cloudless blue and the weather had turned distinctly sultry. Ice and snow melted into slush, the way grew slippery, and the entire line slowed to a walk.
Long before evening, everyone was mired in a river of mud. The footing had become so treacherous, it was necessary to dismount and wade through the muck, leading the horses. Toiling along with a hand on each bridle, Sindérian tried to avoid the places where the mire was deepest, but her skirts were already soaked with muddy water halfway to her knees.