“Now what?” Danica asked fretfully. “Do we fly over that?” They were huge, barren thrusts of stone pushing high out of forests like bone out of skin. She looked at Justin; we all did. There was a peculiar expression on her face, as if she recognized something she had only seen before in dreams.
“There will be a road,” she said softly. We were in thick forest; old trees marched in front of us, beside us, flanked us. Not even they had found a way to climb the peaks.
“Where, Justin?” I asked.
“We must wait until sunset.”
We found a clearing, where the road we followed abruptly turned to amble west along a stream. Christabel and Danica went hunting. Fleur checked our supplies and mended a tear in her cloak. I curried the horses. Justin, who had gone to forage, came back with mushrooms, nuts and a few wild apples. She found another brush and helped me.
“Is it far now?” I asked, worried about finding supplies in the wilderness, about the horses, about Christabel’s stubbornly lingering cold, even, a little, about the harper. Justin picked a burr out of her mount’s mane. A line ran across her smooth brow.
“Not far beyond those peaks,” she answered. “It’s just that—”
“Just what?”
“We must be so careful.”
“We’re always careful. Christabel can put an arrow into anything that moves, Danica can—”
“I don’t mean that. I mean: the world shows a different face beyond those peaks.” I looked at her puzzledly; she shook her head, gazing at the mountains, somehow wary and entranced at once. “Sometimes real, sometimes unreal—”
“The harper is real, the dragon is real,” I said briskly. “And we are real. If I can remember that, we’ll be fine.”
She touched my shoulder, smiling. “I think you’re right, Anne. It’s your prosaic turn of mind that will bring us all home again.”
But she was wrong.
The sun, setting behind a bank of sullen clouds, left a message: a final shaft of light hit what looked like solid stone ahead of us and parted it. We saw a faint, white road that cut out of the trees and into the base of two great crags: the light seemed to ease one wall of stone aside, like a gate. Then the light faded, and we were left staring at the solid wall, memorizing the landscape.
“It’s a woman’s profile,” Fleur said. “The road runs beneath the bridge of her nose.”
“It’s a one-eared cat,” Christabel suggested.
“The road is west of the higher crag,” Danica said impatiently. “We should simply ride toward that.”
“The mountains will change and change again before we reach it,” I said. “The road comes out of that widow’s peak of trees. It’s the highest point of the forest. We only need to follow the edge of the trees.”
“The widow,” Danica murmured, “is upside-down.”
I shrugged. “The harper found his way. It can’t be that difficult.”
“Perhaps,” Fleur suggested, “he followed a magical path.”
“He parted stone with his harping,” Christabel said stuffily. “If he’s that clever, he can play his way out of the dragon’s mouth, and we can all turn around and go sleep in our beds.”
“Oh, Christabel,” Fleur mourned, her voice like a sweet flute. “Sit down. I’ll make you herb tea with wild honey in it; you’ll sleep on clouds tonight.”
We all had herb tea, with brandy and the honey Fleur had found, but only Fleur slept through the thunderstorm. We gathered ourselves wetly at dawn, slogged through endless dripping forest, until suddenly there were no more trees, there was no more rain, only the unexpected sun illumining a bone-white road into the great upsweep of stone ahead of us.
We rode beyond the land we knew.
I don’t know where we slept that first night: wherever we fell off our horses, I think. In the morning we saw Black Tremptor’s mountain, a dragon’s palace of cliffs and jagged columns and sheer walls ascending into cloud. As we rode down the slope toward it, the cloud wrapped itself down around the mountain, hid it. The road, wanting nothing to do with dragons, turned at the edge of the forest and ran off the wrong direction. We pushed into trees. The forest on that side was very old, the trees so high, their green boughs so thick, we could barely see the sky, let alone the dragon’s lair. But I have a strong sense of direction, of where the sun rises and sets, that kept us from straying. The place was soundless. Fleur and Christabel kept arrows ready for bird or deer, but we saw nothing on four legs or two: only spiders, looking old as the forest, weaving webs as huge and intricate as tapestry in the trees.
“It’s so still,” Fleur breathed. “As if it is waiting for music.”
Christabel turned a bleary eye at her and sniffed. But Fleur was right: the stillness did seem magical, an intention out of someone’s head. As we listened, the rain began again. We heard it patter from bough to bough a long time before it reached us.
Night fell the same way: sliding slowly down from the invisible sky, catching us without fresh kill, in the rain without a fire. Silent, we rode until we could barely see. We stopped finally, while we could still imagine one another’s faces.
“The harper made it through,” Danica said softly; what Celandine’s troublesome, faceless lover could do, so could we.
“There’s herbs and honey and more brandy,” Christabel said. Fleur, who suffered most from hunger, having a hummingbird’s energy, said nothing. Justin lifted her head sharply.
“I smell smoke.”
I saw the light then: two square eyes and one round among the distant trees. I sighed with relief and felt no pity for whoever in that quiet cottage was about to find us on the doorstep.
But the lady of the cottage did not seem discomfitted to see five armed, dripping, hungry travellers wanting to invade her house.
“Come in,” she said. “Come in.” As we filed through the door, I saw all the birds and animals we had missed in the forest circle the room around us: stag and boar and owl, red deer, hare and mourning dove. I blinked, and they were motionless: things of thread and paint and wood, embroidered onto curtains, carved into the backs of chairs, painted on the rafters. Before I could speak, smells assaulted us, and I felt Fleur stagger against me.
“You poor children.” Old as we were, she was old enough to say that. “Wet and weary and hungry.” She was a bird-like soul herself: a bit of magpie in her curious eyes, a bit of hawk’s beak in her nose. Her hair looked fine and white as spider web, her knuckles like swollen tree boles. Her voice was kindly, and so was her warm hearth, and the smells coming out of her kitchen. Even her skirt was hemmed with birds. “Sit down. I’ve been baking bread, and there’s a hot meat pie almost done in the oven.” She turned, to give something simmering in a pot over the fire a stir. “Where are you from and where are you bound?”
“We are from the court of Queen Celandine,” I said. “We have come searching for her harper. Did he pass this way?”
“Ah,” she said, her face brightening. “A tall man with golden hair and a voice to match his harping?”
“Sounds like,” Christabel said.
“He played for me, such lovely songs. He said he had to find a certain harp. He ate nothing and was gone before sunrise.” She gave the pot another stir. “Is he lost?”
“Black Tremptor has him.”
“Oh, terrible.” She shook her head. “He is fortunate to have such good friends to rescue him.”
“He is the queen’s good friend,” I said, barely listening to myself as the smell from the pot curled into me, “and we are hers. What is that you are cooking?”
“Just a little something for my bird.”
“You found a bird?” Fleur said faintly, trying to be sociable. “We saw none … Whatever do you feed it? It smells good enough to eat.”