Seema's brown eyes grew sad, and she began to coat her iron pot with flower oil.
"Today, shall we walk down to the play yard and see the children again? I think they would like that."
"So would I," he said. When Atreus had limped by the day before, several little girls had surprised him by bringing him a garland of wildflowers to help him heal. "Do you know, that's the first time a child ever ran toward me?"
Seema laughed. "Yes, I could see that. You were so surprised, I thought you would run."
"I would have, if my leg had been stronger."
Atreus smiled and took a drink from his wooden mug. The brew tasted more like a salty bouillon than tea. It was thick and greasy and probably the one thing he did not really love about Langdarma.
From the street outside came the thump-thump of running feet. A dark streak raced past the open window, and the door banged open. An adolescent boy rushed inside, panting for breath and filling the hut with the smell of sweat.
"There has been a rockslide!" He gulped down a breath, then continued, "My father needs help."
Seema grabbed a woolen satchel off the wall and began to stuff it with herbs and vials. "I will do what I can Timin, but you know the Sannyasi has taken away my-"
"Oh no, not your help!" interrupted Timin. "Kumara is already there, but the rocks are very large and we need the orange man to move them."
Seema let her satchel drop, her face falling as though she had been slapped. "Of course," she said.
Atreus limped to the stairs and hollered, "Yago!"
"Yeah?"
"Come quick!"
The ceiling shook as the ogre pounded across the floor above.
Seema handed Timin the last of Atreus's buttered tea. "Drink," she told him. "You will need strength for the run back. Where is your father trapped?"
"Beneath the Caves of Blue."
The youth began to gulp down the greasy tea.
"The Caves of Blue?" Seema frowned. "What was he doing there?"
Timin lowered the mug and passed it back to Atreus. "Searching for my sister," he said.
Atreus and Seema exchanged alarmed glances. Before they could ask any more questions, Yago squeezed down the stairs, his orange fangs bared in alarm.
"What is it?"
"Come quickly!" Paying no attention to Yago's expression, Timin grasped the ogre by the wrist and tugged him toward the door, saying, "You are needed."
Yago scowled and glanced toward Atreus.
Atreus nodded and said, "Do as he asks."
The ogre shrugged, then ducked through the door behind Timin. Atreus glanced at Rishi, who was coming down the stairs to investigate the uproar.
"Go with them," Atreus said to the Mar, pointing out the door. "Hurry… and keep an eye out for Tarch."
Rishi paled. "Tarch? I thought there was no way-"
"There isn't," said Seema, and Atreus finished for her,
"But this is a strange coincidence."
"And if it is more than a coincidence?" Rishi demanded. "What do you expect me to do about it?"
"The same thing you did at the icefall," Atreus said as he shoved the little Mar out the door. "We'll be along as fast as I can run."
"Run?" Seema asked, shaking her head. "You are not even ready to walk, and the Caves of Blue are at the far end of the basin, very high up the slope."
Atreus started out the door after his friends. "I'll crawl if I have to," he promised.
In the end, Seema borrowed a yak and led the way toward the Caves of Blue. Had Atreus's thoughts not been consumed by visions of Tarch abducting the beautiful girls of the valley, the journey would have been an enchanting one. The trails were lined with soaring birch and fir, many so large that even Yago could not have closed his long arms around the trunks. The ground itself was blanketed with a bounteous undergrowth of blossoming rhododendron that arched out over the trail sprinkling pink petals on their heads as they passed. Every now and then, they would come to a golden stream snaking its way down to the big river in the center of the basin, or cross an open meadow of long green grass where a small herd of yaks grazed contentedly.
After a time, they reached the terraced slopes surrounding a small hamlet similar to the one where Seema lived. Here, they were besieged by distressed women who began to fill in the troubling details of the rockslide. Timin's father had awakened that morning to discover his eldest daughter, a young woman of seventeen, missing. Discovering two set of footprints leading away from his hut, he had set off at once to catch the pair. Not long afterward, the rumble of a nearby landslide had shaken the hamlet. Timin had followed the dust plume to a slope of talus-a jumbled scarp of loose rock-beneath the Caves of Blue. There he found his father trapped under a huge boulder. There was no sign of his sister or the mysterious man with whom she had left
Atreus was astonished by the utter innocence of the villagers. Had a similar event occurred in Erlkazar, the father would have assumed the worst and set off with a company of armed men to hunt down the abductor. Here, the girl's disappearance seemed more confusing than alarming, as though they could not imagine why she would leave without saying good-bye.
By the time they reached the other side of the hamlet Atreus was convinced that Tarch had found his way into the valley. He said nothing to Seema, thinking it wiser to let her decide this for herself. In many ways, they were growing closer every day, but there remained between them a certain uneasiness he did not want to aggravate by pushing her to a conclusion she would soon reach for herself. With-out exception, the women of Langdarma were as beautiful as Seema was, and it could hardly be a coincidence that two of them had disappeared since she had escaped Tarch.
As they traveled along the terraced vegetable slopes, Atreus soon found himself looking out over the edge of the basin, to where it dropped away into greater Langdarma The valley was even more vast than he remembered, so wide that the other side was obscured in haze, and so deep that he could see no bottom, only the far wall plunging ever downward. The impossibility of finding the Fountain of infinite Grace in such an immense place struck him heavily. Yago and Rishi had spent nearly a ten-day searching just the upper basin, and it could not have been a thousandth the size of the main valley.
Clearly, he would need Seema's help to find the fountain, but he did not dare ask. The secret loomed over their relationship as heavy and foreboding as the ice-blue sky, an unspoken conflict they both feared to address. Atreus had asked many times whether there was not some way to change his external appearance, and Seema had always sidestepped the question, invariably changing the subject to his perception of himself. He could feel her holding back, trying desperately to avoid lying to him as she had lied about Langdarma, yet determined to keep from him some confidence she held even more dear than the valley's existence. As for Atreus, he felt burdened with guilt, like a thief who insinuates himself into a rich man's house in order to rob him blind. He did not see how Langdarma would be harmed by taking a single vial of water from the Fountain of Infinite Grace, yet he did not dare broach the subject for fear that the mere asking would somehow make his task impossible.
The trail entered the woods again and continued forward over the brink of the basin, but Seema turned up a side path and began to lead them uphill. The slope grew steadily steeper as they went. Soon, they were zigzagging up a series of switchbacks, creeping across craggy outcroppings and stealing glimpses down into the main valley. In many ways, it was a larger version of the upper basin, with a little less forest, a lot more barley field, and a broad blue river snaking down the center. At the far end, the valley gradually narrowed to a shadowy black gorge and disappeared into a wall of ice-capped mountains.