Tegan hauled herself out of the water, sobbing like a wetnosed baby, and over her sobs, she heard a giggle.
A girl. Giggling.
Then silence.
“Come out where I can see you, damn it!” Tegan yelled.
Nothing.
A single twig snapped, uphill from the stream, yes. Behind-that rock. Tegan pulled off her shoes, wet and useless anyway, and stalked the noise. A girl, giggling, in the high mountains, unafraid, must be one of them, one of the Gray Archers, the women who wore trousers and kept flocks of stunted griffins as flying steeds-although that tale might be only a wishful tale told to children, for no one had seen a griffin in living memory.
Not behind the rock. Tegan sank into its shadow and waited. If the elusive girl wasn’t one of the warriors, she was at least a girl, and she must know where food was, and shelter.
Click, a pebble disturbed.
Tegan moved toward the sound, back toward the water. A fish splashed, once, upstream.
There, beyond that stand of quiverleaf saplings. There was a glow from a small fire, above it the silhouette of an archer poised on a high cliff, her arrow nocked. Under the shadow of the cliff, the silent welling of a deep sourcespring reflected early stars. Women sat around the fire, dark shapes, unconcerned. One of them wore her heavy hair in a knot at the back of her neck. Tegan walked flat-footed to the circle of firelight. She pulled her ribbon over her neck, with its four copper coins tied in a twist of cloth and the tiny silver arrow all gleaming, and laid them at the feet of the Lady Idane.
“It’s all I have to give you,” she said.
“Oh, bother,” the Lady Idane said. “Someone get her some food, would you?”
Fear me, Tegan thought. Fear me, little ones. Fear is all I have to give you now.
In her red skirts, holding her dripping sword, Tegan entered the stench of urine and poison, a low space roofed with and floored with earth. Rows of cots stretched into the shadows. This was where her niece had slept, chained to her cot at night, freed only to be crushed in the earth.
If the pale squat man who was this room’s last guard meant to beg mercy, he moved too late. Tegan sliced a two-handed blow at his neck as he stepped forward. He fell, a mountain of pale flesh. In the shadows, Tegan saw the gleam of terrified eyes. The children had fled into the tunnels.
“The witch!” a child screamed.
“The Lady in Red. She’ll hurt us!”
“Run!” Tegan yelled. “Ardneh, help them! Run, I say!”
She stepped aside from the opened grate. As they ran past her, scrambling around the fallen guard, Tegan saw a welter of thin legs, of flailing arms. The children were as covered with earth as grubs. Some of them screamed. Most were silent.
They boiled out of the mine in a rush. One limped, and might have been left behind. Tegan grabbed the little boy and thrust him into the arms of a larger urchin.
Were they gone? Were all of them gone? Against the roar of the battle outside, she strained to hear any whimper, any scuffling sound at all. She searched in the low tunnels where they had hidden, her eyes wide to try to see in the dark. There was nothing, no one.
Ahead of her, a smoky lamp guttered and went out. The air reeked with malice, not a true scent, a trace of heaviness, of old evil. Between her breasts, the foil-wrapped stone gave off a dull, nauseating heat. Tegan clutched it tight in her left hand. She must call Ninidh here. If the demon devoured her, would the Lady Idane hear that Tegan had battled here, and lost? Would she be happy, knowing that Noya had been the better choice to train as her successor?
Noya was the best, the brightest, the girl who had gone out to lead Tegan into camp. Tiny Noya, so fast, whose quick attacks darted through Tegan’s guard. Caedrun, who coached the girls at swordplay, matched them often in those hot hours of drilling, slow Tegan, fast Noya, the reward for the exercises a jug of cool water in the shade, so precious.
Always, Noya, the winner, drank first.
Sometimes there were four, or six, women summering in the high country, sometimes there were twenty. Waking, Tegan learned to count bedrolls, to look for new faces, and later, to see who had slipped away in the night, off on some errand that might last days or longer-two of the women round the fire that first night were gone by morning, and still gone in autumn.
There were no griffins here.
There was no Sword. Tegan had not seen it again, the Lady Idane’s blade serviceable and plain, as ordinary as her unremarkable riding-beast grazing in the alpine meadows.
There were, sometimes, women with babies slung on their backs who walked into camp and stayed a day or two, laughing in the deep shade and yelping in the cold water of the stream where Tegan had fallen. Others came to other streams; they moved camp five times that summer. Some of the women wore long skirts or brocade, and those seemed never to have carried swords at all, but came to sit beside the Lady Idane in the long afternoons, to speak to her in quiet, rambling phrases, or to listen. All of them wore tiny silver arrows around their necks, a match to the one Tegan had found in the earth and given to the lady.
The women talked of voyages, of the proper churning of butter, of the wiles that would hold a man, or send him away. Tegan listened, soaked up what she heard as if she were a dry sponge returned to water.
They came from everywhere, these women, seldom taking up the sword but keeping their skills honed in summer camps or winter caves, a network of women that spanned the kingdoms. And when they did bring out their bows or their blades, at necessity, they fought well.
The Lady Idane pulled them to her like a lodestone pulls iron. She said little, but when she spoke it seemed she had distilled a rambling bucketful of talk into a few drops of strong brandy. Quiet, calm, she seemed uninvolved in the activities around her, distanced from them. But when she said a word here, put her muscle to a task there, questions got answered, things fell into place as if even stones and trees hastened to do her bidding. Tegan watched her, fascinated, envious.
Sometimes she felt the lady’s eyes on her, her measuring, skeptical evaluation. What did she measure? What did she want?
Tegan grew shy around the lady. She hung back from the others, she said little. She watched and listened.
The world, seen from these high mountains, seemed laid out like a board game. Men, duchies, kingdoms, all were pieces to be moved if only the hand that moved them was skillful enough for the task. Swords were one move in the games these women played, but they were only used when other moves were blocked.
“There’s too much to learn,” Tegan whispered one night, sore from a drubbing Noya had given her. Tegan’s head swam with the Lady Idane’s explanation of the true cost of a bumper crop of barley. As the Lady Idane had it, a loaf of bread in Small Aldwyn would be dear in two years, when those who had sold their grain too cheap planted other crops, unless certain merchants in the foggy cities to the north could be persuaded to pay a fair price for this year’s barley. It made a sort of sense, but only if Tegan held the pieces in her mind in a certain way. Good crops can cause famine?
“Nobody can learn everything,” Noya said. “You want too much.”
“The lady said that the first time I met her. She was right.”
“She likes you, Tegan.” Noya yawned and pulled her blankets up over her nose.
“She’s never pleased with anything I do.”
“That’s how I know she likes you,” Noya said. She smiled, tucked in her bedroll like a brunette caterpillar, and blinked up at the stars. “Get some rest, Tegan. All of this thinking is making you skinny.”
Skinny? Tegan pulled her arm out from under her blanket and looked at it. It wasn’t skinny, it was slender. Well.
In two breaths, Noya was asleep.
Tegan backed out of the tunnel. What needed doing now needed doing at the mouth of the cave. When she opened the foil and released the demon’s soul, her life would hang on a thread of slimmest chance. She had no armor against the demon Ninidh, against any demon.