“Bronwen,” he said in the middle of the milling and expostulating that had taken over this part of the town. He spoke softly, but his Herald-intern heard him. “They won’t have gone far. Enlist some of the locals and go after Nerys. I’ll find Kelyn.”
Time was when Bronwen would have argued simply for the sake of arguing. In this long, warm summer afternoon, she nodded and set about doing the sensible thing.
Mind you, Egil thought, if she decided my orders weren’t sensible, she’d perfectly well disobey them.
:We are surrounded by obstreperous youth,: Cynara said.
It was all Egil could do not to break out in painful laughter. As it was, one or two townspeople looked at him oddly.
He pressed them into service. “Tell me where Kelyn would most likely go.”
There were many opinions as to that, but Kelyn’s mother glared them all down. “There is one place where she goes when she needs to think. She doesn’t know anyone knows about it.”
“I won’t betray your secret,” Egil assured her.
The woman nodded brusquely, called over one of the boys who had been hanging about, staring at the Herald’s Whites, and said, “Take him to the Wizard’s Wood, to the stone circle.”
“Maybe it would be best if you simply told me where to go,” Egil said, “since she’s likely to run if she sees anyone she knows.”
“She might,” her mother conceded. “Well enough, then. Galtier will take you to the edge of the Wood. Stay on the track and don’t let yourself be tempted to wander off it. It will lead you to the circle.”
“That’s clear enough,” Egil said, “and I thank you.” He added a brief bow, because she was worthy of respect.
That flustered her into a scowl. “Go on,” she said. “Before she gets all her thinking done and runs off the Powers know where.”
Escape was almost too easy. Kelyn kept looking for pursuit, but she had made it as far as the Wizard’s Wood without anyone seeing her. They were all off gawping at the Heralds—for there were two of them; Coryn made sure she knew.
Two Heralds, two Companions. Kelyn hoped he felt the full force of her bitterness over that.
It seemed to trouble him not at all. She shut him out once more, diving into the solitude of her own mind.
That was not the most pleasant place to be. Such plan as she had was to ride her pony through the Wood, then keep on riding as far and fast as she could, until Coryn was no more than a memory.
A large part of her would rather stay and fight for him. But Kelyn had been raised to be practical. It simply did not make sense for a Companion to Choose two Heralds-to-be.
She should be that one. Not Nerys. By the Powers, never Nerys.
And yet as she endured the days of waiting for the Herald to come, Kelyn had seen and felt what this unprecedented Choosing was doing to Emmerdale. All her life she had done her best to outrun and outride and outsmart her rival. This was the greatest contest of all—and she was running away from it.
She hated Nerys, but she loved Emmerdale more. At last, after so many years, people were choosing between them. Lines were being drawn. Emmerdale was splitting down the middle, half of its people convinced that Nerys should be the Chosen, and half contending that Kelyn deserved it more.
Kelyn had never wanted that. Watching it happen tore at her heart.
Coryn was a dream. Emmerdale was real. Whatever grief or pain it cost to her to rip herself away from the Companion, the thought of Emmerdale splitting apart over it was worse.
It was the hardest thing she had ever done, and the most necessary. She kicked her pony into a canter down the familiar track, in the whisper of pine boughs and the dusk-and-dazzle light of the Wood.
Nerys had no time for anything but to throw a bridle on her pony and turn his head toward the mountain. The pony had been pent up for days; he was more than glad to burst out of the gate at a flat run.
Nerys was not running away exactly. She needed to think. There was no chance of doing it in town, with everyone in such an uproar and not just one but two Heralds come to muddle what little sense anyone had left.
The last people she ever wanted to see were Heralds who were truly Chosen, who had not been mocked with a false and bitter Choosing.
:It’s not false,: Coryn said.
She refused to hear him. He might be lurking in the hidden corners of her heart, but she did not want him there or anywhere. If a Companion wanted her, let him choose her—not force her to share with her worst enemy.
She more than half expected him to take issue with that, but he seemed to have gone. She refused to be disappointed, let alone sad. Good, she thought. Good riddance.
The track up to the high pasture seemed unusually long and arduous today. Nerys realized as she rode that she never had given Willa her mother’s message when she was there last. Coryn’s appearance had driven it straight out of her head.
That gave her an excuse. “At least I’ll get some use out of the whole sorry mess,” she said. Her pony slanted an ear at her, bunched his hindquarters and sprang up the last and steepest part of the trail.
He paused on the pasture’s edge, blowing hard. Nerys was breathing a little fast herself. She slid off his sweaty back and led him the rest of the way, taking her time, until his breathing slowed and his body cooled.
She took her time rubbing him down, too, then washed him off and rubbed him again until he was respectably cool. By that time Willa should have come out of the hut, or else come toward her from the edge of the pasture where the sheep were grazing.
But there was no sign of the shepherd. That might not have meant anything—Willa did like to wander on occasion—but she had been gone half a tenday ago, too, and it felt odd.
The hut was cold inside, with an air about its emptiness that said it had been abandoned for days. The hearth was swept clean, and Willa’s few belongings were neatly stowed, except for a half-filled water jar on the table and the last quarter of a loaf of bread gone rock-hard and stale beside it.
Willa never wasted food. If she had left the bread there, she had meant to eat it while it was fresh.
Nerys started off running toward the sheep, but she remembered just in time that neither the sheep nor their guardian dogs would respond well to human panic. She made herself take a deep breath, relax her body as much as she could, and walk slowly and easily toward the cluster of woolly white bodies.
They were all well, and all accounted for as far as Nerys could tell. The dogs did their own hunting; they could survive a whole season on their own if they had to.
But Willa was gone. Nerys told herself it had to be nothing, the shepherd was out hunting or visiting her daughter over the mountain. Except she would never leave the sheep for more than a day, and she would have taken the bread with her to eat.
Nerys knew a little bit about tracking, much of which she had learned from Willa. It was not much good on grass and after half a tenday.
She did not want to think about what that meant. If Willa had had a fall or been attacked or taken ill, she would have been alone and abandoned for days. It was all too likely she had not survived it.
“No,” Nerys said. “I’m not going to think like that. She’s somewhere she can’t get out of, but she’s alive. I’ll find her. I’ll bring her back.”
The sheep ignored her. One of the dogs pricked its ears at the sound of her voice, but she was neither a sheep nor a predator. She did not matter in its world.
She stood still, taking long, calming breaths. Willa could be anywhere on the mountain. But there were hunting runs she favored, and Nerys knew the way to Willa’s daughter’s village; she had gone there with the shepherd more than once.