“I think I see a trail.”
Vika rode up beside him and frowned. She looked to each side, seeing that there was clearly no way around.
“A trail? Are you sure?”
Richard pointed up at the top of the granite. “Look over there to that split in the granite wall. I think it might be a way up.”
“We can’t take the horses up that. It’s way too steep.”
“Yes, but it looks like there are boulders and rock jammed into that crevice that would allow us to climb up it on foot. Look at the top of the wall over to the left by that mass of tree roots coming down over the edge. What do you see?”
Vika rested her wrists on the horn of her saddle as she stood in the stirrups and leaned forward, squinting up at the top of the wall.
“That’s strange. It’s foggy and hard to see, but it looks like it might be several stones stacked atop one another.”
“Exactly.” Richard dismounted. “It’s a cairn.”
She frowned over at him. “What’s a cairn?”
“It’s a way to mark a trail in difficult areas where it would be easy or even dangerous to get lost and go the wrong way. If I’m right, and it’s not something natural, it would mean we have come across a long-forgotten trail.”
Vika held her long, single blond braid in her fist over the front of her shoulder as she frowned up at the top of the wall. “Why would there be a trail up here?”
“It could very well be an old trail leading over a pass. It has to be from before the boundary that ran up the spine of these mountains. If I’m right, it may be a way not only to get up higher to the tree line, but to get over these mountains. It could be a trail that leads over a pass and into the Midlands.”
“The horses can’t get up there, that’s for sure.”
“You’re right about that,” Richard said as he dismounted.
Once on the ground, he started to unbuckle the saddle girth strap. “We are going to have to leave them and go the rest of the way on foot. If it really is a trail, this would be an incredible stroke of luck. Once we find the mother’s breath and heal Kahlan, then we might even be able to get over the mountains on this trail. That would save us a lot of time getting to Aydindril.”
Vika scanned the area before she climbed down out of her saddle. “It’s pretty flat here, but what if the horses wander off?”
“It’s a risk we will have to take. Let’s get the saddles and tack off them,” he said.
“Should we take anything with us?” she asked.
Richard nodded. “We’d better at least take our packs.”
“We should also take some dried meat and whatever supplies we can carry,” she suggested.
“I have some oats tied to the back of my saddle. I will leave some of it out for the horses. That should keep them around.” Richard gestured to the left. “There is a little water running down off the rocks over there. It’s collecting enough for them to get a drink. After we get the saddles off we need to break out the travel candles. The light is fading fast, but if that really is a trail up there, the candles will help enough that we should be able to keep going.”
Vika glanced up toward the mountain they could no longer see. “Candles in the tin traveling cases won’t provide much light.”
“With the fog, even if it was still light out, we wouldn’t be able to see very far anyway. With the candles you can wait at that cairn up there while I scout ahead to see if I can find the next one. When I do, you can come catch up and then wait at that one until I find the next. In that way, if it really is a trail marked with cairns, we can keep going even in the dark.”
Richard dragged the saddle off his horse and set it on a rock. As Vika did the same, he spread some oats on a flat area of rock. The horses were eager to eat. After giving them a pat on the neck, he swung his pack and his bow up on a shoulder. Vika untied supplies from her saddle. She hoisted her pack up onto her shoulder.
Once Richard lit a strip of birch bark with a steel and flint and it flared up into flame, he then used that to light the candles. They immediately started out into the foggy darkness, climbing up the narrow split in the granite wall.
3
Not long after daybreak they had made it up near the tree line and left the trail to search for mother’s breath among where the snow had started to stick in patches. As eager as he was to find the plant, he had to be careful when he moved across the rocky ground they were searching. If he fell off the mountain, he wouldn’t be able to help Kahlan, and in the place where they were searching, there was certainly a danger of falling. With the fog now down below them, there was no telling how far it was down some of the drop-offs.
The trail they had found was marked well enough with cairns and took a route that made for much easier climbing, at last saving them a lot of time. Richard was sure the trail had to have been laid out long before the boundary between the Midlands and D’Hara had gone up because, like the mountain range, the boundary divided the lands, so there would have been no purpose for a trail over a pass that would have been cut off once the boundary was there. It was fortunate that the cairns were still standing after all that time, and even more fortunate that he and Vika had happened across it.
It had worked surprisingly well for Vika to wait at each cairn they found while Richard went ahead to find the next one. Then she would climb to him by the light of his candle and wait at that cairn while he went on ahead to find the next. It was slow going to do it that way, but still a lot faster than wandering aimlessly up the mountains and having to backtrack from dead ends or being forced to climb in difficult and dangerous areas, especially when there was no way to tell if after a lot of hard climbing it would end up providing a way to continue. Sometimes it didn’t.
They had climbed on the trail, following the cairns, throughout the entire night. Richard was too driven to find the plant that could save Kahlan to stop and sleep. Vika was Mord-Sith. Mord-Sith were trained to do without sleep.
Once it had gotten light enough to see, they had been able to make much faster progress following the trail. But their method of continuing to cover ground throughout the night had helped make critically important progress. Now that they were finally up to where the trees were thinning out and they had daylight, they left the trail to search at the base of where the snow had begun to stick, hoping to find mother’s breath not yet killed by the ever-descending snow line.
“Lord Rahl!” Vika called out.
Richard had been using his hands to help keep his balance on the steep ground as he searched under brush and the lower sides of rock ledges that were still free of snow. Shale had told him that she needed living plants with their roots; she couldn’t use them if they had been killed by the snow.
He stood and looked off to his right. “What is it?”
“I found it!”
It felt as if his heart came up in his throat. He scrambled over a rounded projection of rock and through several patches of snow, then held on to low-growing, thick juniper brush to help keep from sliding down loose scree.
Richard found Vika sprawled on her belly in front of an opening in the rock. The rising sun was at their backs, so it lit the entrance to the small cave.
Vika pointed. “Look! It’s mother’s breath. It’s protected in here from the snow, so it’s still alive.”
There were three plants to her left, where she was pointing, and a couple more to the right side, just inside the cave’s maw. They had fist-shaped leaves just as she had told him. She had been right; after seeing those odd, lopsided leaves, he knew they were a plant that he would never forget. Just inside the opening of the cave, where Vika was on her belly, wouldn’t quite be high enough to stand in, but it was enough to protect the plants.