Grince leapt to his feet. Digging deep in his pockets, he hurled a handful of small items to the wagon’s wooden floor. “I don’t have any friends.” He pushed past her, jumped to the ground, and ran.
Stooping, Aurian sifted through the scattered objets—a pathetic collection of painted trinkets, cheap copper brooches, and carved wooden combs. “There wasn’t even anything of value here.” Looking in the direction Grince had fled, she shook her head sadly.
Hidden from curious eyes among the rolling swells of the northern moorland, the small group of travelers made their way swiftly eastward. For Grince, who had never ridden a horse before, the journey was an experience he could well have done without. There was no time for him to learn horsemanship—all he could do was to cling to the saddle and bump painfully along, while one of the others took his reins and led him as though he were a small child. It was utterly humiliating—but had only his pride been hurt, Grince could have put up with it. The aches and bruises, however, were a far more serious matter.—During the first day he must have fallen off a dozen times at least—and on one unforgettable occasion, the horse tossed him right into a bramble thicket.
“Serves him right,” Hargorn had muttered as the Mage struggled to disentangle the cursing, yelping thief from the mesh of thorny briars. The veteran had still not forgiven Grince for attempting to steal from the smugglers. “Maybe that’ll make up for the thrashing you wouldn’t let me give him, Aurian.”
Nursing his hurts and scratches, Grince glowered at the veteran who was riding up ahead and hauling him along as though towing a cart. The horse didn’t like such treatment either, Grince could tell from its laid-back ears and the direful expression in its rolling eyes. The minute Hargorn lets go of those reins, he thought ruefully, with a sinking sense of the inevitable, this accursed creature will fling me off its back again—and I’ll have even more bruises to add to those it’s given me already.
Much to Grince’s dismay, they rode on well into the night, navigating by the stars and seeing their way by the merest sliver of moonlight. Aurian, with her Mage’s vision, rode ahead to pick out the easiest path. The two cats, who tended to scare the horses if they came too close, flanked the procession well out on either side. The thief was so exhausted that despite his hurts he fell into a half-doze, half-reverie as the miles passed by. His mind went back to earlier that day, when he had run from the smugglers’ camp.
Having more sense than to lose himself in the bleak, trackless wilderness, Grince had followed the course of the stream up between the hills, until all sight and sound of the encampment had vanished. Damn them! He hurled a stone into the stream with all the force he could muster. Why had he left the city with these cold-eyed, hard-faced strangers? He could have dodged that ass Pendral’s guards with both eyes shut and one hand tied behind him! In the end the High Lord would have forgotten . ..
Grince’s thoughts wound down into a small, cold silence, in which he realized all too clearly that Pendral would not forget—not while he had a breath left in his body. All at once, the thief was seized with panic. Gods help me, I can’t go back to Nexis, he thought. I can never go back there—I’ve lost everything! He threw himself to the ground and huddled there, oppressed and terrified by these vast, empty open spaces that stretched out around him.—Without a building or a fireside or a person within dozens of miles. And Grince needed people. Stealing was the only thing he knew. Out here he couldn’t feed himself, shelter himself, or even make a fire.
“Grince? Are you hurt?” A hand touched his shaking shoulder. Looking up, Grince discovered that Aurian had used her friends the great cats to track him down. She squatted down beside him, frowning. “What happened? Did you fall?”
It took a moment for the thief to realize that the look on her face was not condemnation but concern. “What do you care?” he snapped.
“Well, somebody has to,” the Mage retorted, equally brusque. “Clearly you don’t.” She held out her hand. “Are you coming back to the camp? We’re getting ready to leave.”
Grince looked away from her. “They don’t want me.”
“I wouldn’t be at all surprised, after the way you behaved—but whether they want you or not has nothing to do with it,” Aurian told him briskly. “They certainly wouldn’t leave you alone out here to starve. Anyway,” she went on, “no one is really angry with you, Grince—just disappointed, that’s all.”
“What’s the difference?” the thief muttered sullenly.
“A whole lot of bruises, for a start.” A cold grey spark of anger was beginning to kindle in the Mage’s green eyes, and Grince felt an obscure satisfaction at having put it there. He had been snatched away from everything he had known, he felt lonely and scared, uncertain and helpless in this strange new world, but at least he had managed to influence something in his immediate surroundings.
Then it all went wrong as Aurian got to her feet and began to walk away without a backward look. “We’re leaving soon,” she flung curtly over her shoulder. “You’d better be ready, because we’re not waiting for you, we’re not coming back for you, and Mandzurano certainly won’t let you ride with his folk now that you’ve been pilfering his cargo. To perish of cold and starvation on this moor would be a very unpleasant way to die, but it’s entirely up to you.”
She was almost out of sight before Grince realized, to his horror, that she really meant what she’d said. With a thrill of fear he thought of wandering these desolate uplands all alone. What about when night came? He’d be stuck out here in the cold and darkness. . . . Clearly the wayfarers steered clear of well-traveled trails—no one might pass by this place in months, if ever.—And were there wolves on these moors?
Grince took to his heels and pelted after the vanishing figure of the Mage.
“Wait!” he shrieked. “Lady—wait for me!”
His reception had been cool when he had returned to the camp, but Aurian, without really saying anything much, always seemed to be between himself and the wrath of the others—Hargorn, in particular. It had been she who had selected the quietest of the ponies—the spotted mare—for him to ride, and she had taken pains to see that he was as comfortable as could be expected, for a raw novice. It had also been the Mage who had picked him up and dusted him off every time he took a tumble. And everything she’d done had made Grince feel increasingly guilty.
The feeble moon was dipping down behind the hills, and Grince was feeling the shivery, light-headed weariness that came of still being up and about in the deepest hours of the night. He snatched at the horse’s mane with a curse as Hargorn, in front of him, stopped suddenly and the spotted mare barged into him from behind. Hargorn’s animal let fly with a vicious kick, the mare plunged to one side—and the thief found himself on the ground once more. As Aurian had taught him he rolled to one side, out of range of the pounding hooves, and simply lay there, too miserable and weary to rise.
The Mage materialized out of the darkness and snatched at the mare’s bridle before the beast had time to bolt. “Don’t bother remounting,” she said—rather unnecessarily, Grince thought—“we’re stopping here.”
The thief awakened to a cold, grey world. He was wrapped in a blanket and the cloak that Hargorn had found for him back at the Unicorn, and he was curled up in the midst of a nest of springy bracken. Dimly, he remembered his bitter resentment the previous night, when Aurian had made him gather the stuff. He could see the sense of it now, however—it was bed and windbreak both, and far preferable to lying on the short, unyielding turf of a windswept hillside.—The thief rubbed bleary eyes and got to his feet—at least he tried to rise. To his horror, he found he was so stiff that he could barely move, and he ached as though someone had sneaked up in the night and beaten him with a stout stick while he slept. Too wretched and dispirited even to curse, Grince flopped back into the bracken with a despairing whimper.