I sprang to my feet and seized the satchel on the Tavrouni’s back. “Give it to me!” He stood his ground, splay-footed, stinking of curdled milk, and we hovered, locked together, for a long moment before I realized he was helping me, attempting to lift the strap over his head. I released him and he whipped off the strap, dropped the satchel, and drew his dagger. His companion sat on the floor, holding his stomach. One of the soldiers had fallen, his head on the hearthstone; in a moment the room filled with the sickening odor of burnt hair.
“Miros,” Auram cried. He shouted a few words in rapid Kestenyi and Miros sprang to my side, using the remains of his chair as a shield. “Hurry!” he panted. “Go through the back, there’s a door. I’ll go with you, I know the house. Ah.”
I reached for the satchel, then turned to him as he groaned.
He sank to the floor. A shadow loomed over us, a healthy and carefree shadow with crimson braid adorning its uniform. It advanced to strike, to kill. I dove for its legs and it toppled over me, its sword all slick with Miros’s blood slapping on the floor.
The soldier kicked, getting his feet under him. I rolled. A Tavrouni was there, his gray teeth bared, a knife gleaming between them. He sprang on the soldier like a panther. And I—I ought to have taken the angel’s body, risked everything for it, my life and the lives of others. But suddenly I could not. I thought: Too many have died for this. I thought: Not what will make us happy, but what is precious. And I did not lift a dead body from that chaos. Instead I reached for Miros. I seized him with both hands. I took my friend.
I clutched him under the armpits and dragged him into the dark kitchen where a scullery boy with a withered arm lay whimpering in the hay. The large, mild eyes of the cow observed me through the gloom, reflecting the beams of a coachlamp standing outside in the courtyard. The soldiers’ coach, no doubt. Miros was breathing fast, too fast. “Miros,” I said.
“Yes,” he gasped.
“I’m taking you outside. Somewhere safe.” I kicked the door open and dragged him into the alley. His bootheels skidded across the hard earth, leaping whenever they struck an uneven patch in the ground. He groaned with every jolt. In the dark I could not see where his wound was, how bad it was, but I saw he clutched his side, and his hands were black in the moonlight. He threw his head back, teeth clenched.
“Miros. Is it—can I—”
“Nothing,” he panted. “Nothing. I’ve had—worse—on a hunting trip.”
His words comforted me, although I knew they must be false. I glanced up: another corner among the mud houses. I rounded it, pulling my friend. A crash sounded somewhere behind us, breaking glass. It must be the window of the soldiers’ coach, for the inn had only shutters. Auram, I thought. Or perhaps one of our taciturn allies from the Tavroun. I hauled Miros up to grip him more surely, provoking a cry of pain. Faster. Another corner, more silent houses, sometimes behind the thick shutters a fugitive gleam like a firefly in the dusk. My goal was to put as many of those winding turns as possible between myself and the soldiers of the king. They could not track our movements in the dark, and I hoped the earth was too hard for them to gain much from it even in daylight.
At the next corner I paused, gasping for breath in the stinging cold. Miros lay flat on the ground. His head lolled to one side. His hands on his abdomen were lax. My heart gave a spasm of dread, and I crouched to check his breath and found it was still there. I stood again, gulping the cold. The night was silent, littered with stars. This night, this same night stretched all across Olondria, and across the hills I must somehow pass, the Tavroun, said to be the necklace of a goddess flung down carelessly in flight. Dark jewels in the night, a black ridge against the stars. I knelt beside Miros again. When I moved his hands aside, blood spilled from his wound as if from a cup. I stripped off my jacket and shirt, the cold air shaking me in its jaws, put the jacket back on and tied the shirt clumsily around his waist. I feared these maneuvers would do more harm than good; but at least, I hoped, we would streak less blood through the streets of Klah-ne-Wiy. I tried taking Miros’s weight on my shoulder, but he was too tall and heavy for me. I was forced to drag him as I had done before.
A fine, icy rain was falling when we reached the sleeping horse-market. The stalls were all dark, closed under covers of goatskin. The tents of the feredhai pitched in the square were mostly dark as well; only one or two glowed subtly through the rain. For an agonized moment I thought of going to one of those tents for aid; these were desert people, after all, traditional enemies of the Laths, unlikely to have ties with imperial soldiers. But I was afraid. I pulled Miros through the mud of the open square and into the rocks beyond.
Cold, exhausted, I hauled his insensible body up the trail. Thorns and juniper branches snagged our clothes. Once I lost hold of him and he slid down a slope of rattling pebbles, coming to rest against the stone wall of the hill. “Off the road,” I muttered. “Off the road. We have to get off the road.” This thought, its promise of rest, gave me the strength to go on with my task. I slid down to him and gripped his arms once more. “Not yet, Miros. Not yet.” Shivering and straining, I pulled him up the hill.
No fire. No fuel. No tinder. I dragged him into a ditch by the trail and lay down beside him. The rain had stopped, and the stars wore a veil of freezing mist. My breath curled in the darkness, white as foam. Beyond it starlight glazed the bare folds of the mountains. The Chain of the Moon.
I climbed the pass. This I have done, if I have done nothing else. I climbed the pass with Miros dragging on my arms. In his pocket I found a little penknife, and I used it to cut a strip from my sheepskin jacket which I looped under his arms and around my aching wrists. I pulled. I pulled under porcelain skies in the shadow of the pine gullies, through a landscape dark, dazzling, and inflexible, the stern cliffs topped by the pink glow of the peaks where scattered geese went flying, filling the air with dim nostalgic cries. It was uncompromising country, home of the short and rugged Tavrouni people, who call themselves E-gla-gla-mi and worship a pregnant goddess. Too desperate now to fear anything but death for Miros and myself I knocked at the slabs of bark that served as doors to their crooked huts. There were no villages now in the hills—all had been destroyed by either the Laths of the Valley or the warring nomads of the plateau. The huts I found belonged to taciturn shepherds who raised their goats on the meager vegetation of the cliffs. They showed no surprise when they saw me, and I recalled that bandits were said to haunt these hills and thought that these shepherds must be accustomed to such visitors—wild and wounded men who devoured their odash and curds without speaking and robbed them brusquely of food, water, and dried skins. From one I took a tinderbox, from another a length of Evmeni cotton. They sat by their smoking juniper fires, nursing their short clay pipes. One, a fierce graybeard with a broken nose, cleaned Miros’s wound with odash and stitched it with gut while the patient screamed as if visited by angels.
At last, after days of exposure and hardship, we were rewarded: a door of wonders opened in the landscape. At the crest of a rocky hill, suddenly, a new world lay before us, a blaze of gold, a bleak, profound desolation: Kestenya the savage and solitary, stretched out at the foot of the mountains, the great plateau that led to the birthplace of dragons. A few isolated lines marked it: a roughness hinting at hills, a dry riverbed like the shadow of a wrist. It was the home of the bull, of the stalwart, bristle-maned desert pony. Wolves prowled at its edges through the winters. It was “a shape to make men weep,” wrote Firdred of Bain when he first saw it: “exactly the shape of a desecrated sea.”