The broad fertile plain at Croaldhu’s heart dipped lower and lower until sedges and waterweeds began to replace the cultivated fields and the grassy pastures, until pools of water gathered in the hollows and stood in still decay, scummy and green with mud and algae. The fringes of the Marish, a large spread of swampland and grassy fens like a scraggly beard on Croaldhu’s chin, a bar on her path, a trap for her if she wasn’t careful; should the Temuengs get close enough they could pin her against impassible water or bottomless muck. The mistcrane flew back and forth along the edge of the Marish, trying to work out a way through it, a straggling line from one dot-sized mud island to the next, wading through the pools and streams to test depth and bottom, keeping as close to the Highroad as he could so he wouldn’t get them lost in the tangle of the wetlands, even after the road turned to a causeway built on broad low stone arches a man’s height above the water, an additional danger because Temuengs riding along the causeway could see uncomfortably far into that tangle. He led Brann and Coier along his chosen route, one that managed to keep a thin screen of cypress, flerpine and root-rotted finnshon between her and that road. The Wounded Moon was fattening toward full and the children’s crystal eyes saw as well by night as by, day, so they moved all night, slowly, with much difficulty, struggling with impossible footing, slipping and sliding, half the time with Brann dismounted and walking beside Coier, stroking him, comforting him, bleeding energy into him, helping him endure, stumbling on until they reached a mud island high enough to get them out of the water and away from the leeches and chiggers that made life a torment to the two fleshborn though they avoided the changechildren.
Gray. Even during daylight everything was gray. Gray skies, gray water, gray mud dried on sedges and trees, on low hanging branches, gray fungus, gray insects, gray everything. The stench of damp closed around her, of rotting everything, flesh, fish, vegetation. Three gray nights she rode, three gray days she rested on mounds of mud and rotting reeds, where she fed Coier from the too rapidly diminishing supply of corn, rubbed him down, touching to death the leeches on his legs, draining their small bits of life, feeding it back into him; once the leeches were drained they were easy enough to brush off, falling like withered lengths of gutta-percha. By accident she discovered another attribute of her changed body as she fed that life into the weary trembling beast; her hand was close to one of the oozing leech-bites and she saw the bite seal over and heal with the feed.
By the end of the fourth night, she was ready to chance the causeway rather than continue this draining slog. As dawn spread a pale uncertain light over the water, Jaril led her deeper into the Marish to an eye-shaped island considerably larger than the others with a small clump of vigorous, sharp-scented flerpines at one end, a dry graveled mound at the center with some straggly clumps of grass, a bit of stream running by it with water that looked clear and dean and tempting. She resisted temptation and began going over Coier, her probing deadly touch killing gnats and borers, chiggers and bloodworms and the ever-present leeches, feeding the weary beast those bits of life. It was a handy thing, that deadly touch of hers, and she was learning from far too much practice how to use it. By now she could kill a mite on a mosquito’s back and leave the mosquito unharmed. After spreading a double handful of corn on his saddlepad, she plunged into a stream and used a twist of grass to scrub the sweat and muck off her body and hair. While she washed, Yaril thrust a hand into the pile of wood Jaril collected and flew back to the island, got a fire going and set a pot on to heat water for tea, then took Brann’s clothing to the stream and began scrubbing the shirts and trousers with sand from the mound. When Brann was clean inside and out, when the water was boiled and the tea made, when Yaril had hung the sopping shirts and trousers on ragged branches of the pines, Brann sat naked on a bit of grass, cool and comfortable for the first time in days, watching Coier standing in the water drinking, sipping at her own drinking bowl, the tea made from the scrapings of her supply but the more appreciated for that. She set the bowl on her knee, sighed. “I don’t care how many Temuengs are shuttling along the causeway, come the night, I’m getting Coier and me out of this.”
Jaril looked at Yaril, nodded. “Traffic’s been light the last few nights, and…” he hesitated, “we’ve used more energy than I expected. Yaril and me, we’re getting hungry.”
“Think I’d like being the hunter for a change. Instead of the hunted.” She gulped at the tea, holding it in her mouth, letting the hot liquid slide down her throat to warm her all over. “Coier’s sick or something, the water’s got him, or those bites. He needs graze and rest, more than anything, rest. Me too. Maybe we could find a place to lay up once we’re past this mess.” She looked over her shoulder at the hazy sun rising above the pines. “Could one of you do something about drying my clothes? I don’t feel right lying down with nothing on. Anything could happen to make us light out with no time to stop for dressing.”
“Right.” While Jaril doused the fire, Yaril changed, went shimmering through Brann’s wet clothing, drying a set of shirt and trousers for her. When she thought they were ready, she brought them to Brann. “Get some sleep,” she said. “We’ll watch.”
BRANN WOKE tangled in tough netting made from cords twisted out of reed fiber and impregnated with fish stink. She woke to the whisper of a drum, to the suddenly silenced scream from Coier as his throat was cut. She woke to see little gray men swarming over the island, little gray men with coarse yellow cloth wound in little shrouds about their groins, little gray men with rough dry skin, a dusty gray mottled in darker streaks and splotches like the skin of lizards she’d watched sunning on her sunning rock, little gray men butchering Coier, cutting his flesh from his big white hones. She wept from weakness and sorrow and fury, wept for the beast as she hadn’t wept for her murdered sister, her murdered people, wept and fir a while thought of nothing else. Then she remembered the children.
She could move her head a little, a very little. It was late, the shadows were long across the water. No sign of the children anywhere. Another gray man sat beside a small crackling fire, net cording woven about him and knotted in intricate patterns she guessed were intended to describe his power and importance; a fringe of knotted cords dangled from a thick rope looped loosely about a small hard potbelly. In an oddly beautiful, long-fingered reptilian hand he held a strange and frightening drum, a snake’s patterned skin stretched over the skull of a huge serpent with a high-domed braincase and eyeholes facing forward. Smiling, he drew from the taut skin a soft insistent rustle barely louder than the whisper of the wind through the reeds, a sound that jarred her when she thought about it but nonetheless crept inside her until it commanded the beat of her heart, the in-out of her breathing. She jerked her body loose from the-spell and shivered with fear. Magic. He looked at her and she shivered again. He sat before that tiny hot fire of twigs and grass, his eyes fixed on her with a hungry satisfaction that chilled her to the bone. She thought about the children and was furious at them for deserting her until the drummer reached out and ran a hand over two large stones beside his bony knee, gray-webbed crystals each large as a man’s head, crystals gathering the fire into them, little broken fires repeated endlessly within. His hand moving possessively over them, he grinned at her, baring the hard ridge of black gum that took the place of teeth in these folk, enjoying her helpless rage until a commotion at the other end of the island caught his gaze.