“Your land truly is outside the Game? Almost I thought Chance was jesting with us when he said it…”
“No jest. Here, no Game of any kind. Howsoever, we bear no malice, either, and will send you away as you would. South, I think you said.”
“I thank you for helping us,” I mumbled, only to be stopped by his harsh laughter.
“No help, lad. No. We want none of the nonsense of the Game, none of its blood and fire here. If you are gone, so will the pawners go. It is for our own peace, not yours.”
So I learned that people may be kind enough while not caring a rather. He sent his girl child to us after a bit, she with long, coltish legs, scarred from going bare among the brush, and hair which fell to her waist in a golden curtain. Tossa, her name was. Riddle held her by the shoulder, her eyes level with mine, unsmiling, as he spoke to Chance.
“We have none of the Festival brutishness here, sir. These your boys need be made ‘ware of that. See to it you make it clear to them, or you’ll not walk whole out of our land.”
Chance said he would make it clear, indeed, and Yarrel was already blushing that he understood. I was such an innocent then that I didn’t know what they were talking about. It made no difference to me to be guided by a girl or a lad or a crone, for that. Tossa threw her head up, like a little horse, and I thought almost to hear her whinny, but instead she told us to come after her quick as we might and made off into the true night which was gathering.
Oh, Tossa. How can I tell you of Tossa? Truly, she was only a girl, of no great mind or skill. In the world of the Game she would have been a pawn, valued perhaps for her youth or her virginity, for some of the powerful value these ephemera because they are ephemera, and perhaps she would have had no value at all to spend her life among the corn. But to me — to me she became more than the world allows in value. Her arms reaching to feel the sun, her long-fingered hands which floated in gestures like the blossoms of trees upon least winds, her hair glinting in the sun or netting shadow at dusk, her laugh when she spoke to me, her touch upon the bandage at my head as she said, “Poor lad, so burned by the silliness abroad in the land”…
She was only teasing me, so Yarrel said, as girls tease boys, but I had no experience of that. Seven days we had, and seven nights. She became my breath, my sight, my song. I only looked at her, heard her, filled myself with the smell of her, warm, beastly, like an oven of bread. She was only a girl. I cannot make more of her than that. Yet she became the sun and the grass and the wind and my own blood running in me. I do not think she knew. If she knew, she did not care greatly. Seven days. I would not have touched her except to offer my hand in a climb. I would not have said her name but prayerfully…
Except that on the seventh dusk we came to the end of the lands which the Immutables call their own. We stood upon a tall hogback of stone, twisty trees bristling about us, looking down the long slope to a river which meandered its way through sand banks, red in the tilting sun, wide as a half-day’s march and no deeper than my toes. A tumbled ruin threw long shadows on the far side, some old town or fortification, and Chance got out the charts to see where we were. We crouched over them, aware after a moment that Tossa was not with us. We found her on a pinnacle, staring back the way we had come, frowning.
“Men on the way,” she said. “Numbers of them.” She put the glass back to her eyes and searched among the trees we had only lately left.
“Trail following. Riddle didn’t think they’d follow you!” She sounded frightened.
Chance borrowed the glass. “They’ve stopped for the night? Can’t tell. No sign of fire, but they’ve not come from under the trees yet. Ah. An Armiger, lads. And a Tragamor.”
Tossa exclaimed, “But they are powerless within the boundaries.” Still, she was frightened.
Chance nodded. “Yes, but they have blades and spears and fustigars to smell us out. They have more strength than we. And the boundaries are too close. The river marks them, doesn’t it?”
She nodded. Yarrel was thinking, his face knotted.
“Let the girl go away to the side,” he suggested, “while we take to the river. They aren’t following her. The river will confuse the fustigars. They have no Seer with them? No Pursuivant?”
Chance told him he saw none, but Tossa would have none of it. She had been sent to guide us out, and she would guide us out. “We will all go by the river, quickly, before they can get up here to see which way we went.”
Strangely, as we went down the hogback and into the river, I began to think of the boundaries and what they meant to the people who lived there. They were all pawns here, I thought, with no strength in them except their arms and their wits. In this land the Armiger could not rise into the air like a hawk on the wind; the Tragamor could not move the stones beneath our feet so that we stumbled and fell. In this land, we were almost their equals; no Chill Demesne would grow around us, blooming like a hideous flower with us at its center. Almost, I smiled. Now I recoil when I remember that almost smile, that sudden, unconsidered belief that we and those who followed were on equal footing. We galloped down the slope and into the river as dusk came, almost gaily, Chance muttering that we would run down the river then cut back into the Immutable land. The water splattered up beneath our feet; Tossa reached out to seize my hand in hers and hasten me along. When she fell, I thought she had stumbled. I mocked her clumsiness, teasingly, and only when I had prodded her impatiently with a foot did I see the feathered shaft protruding from her back. Then I screamed, the sound hovering in the air around us like a smell. Chance came and lifted her and there was no more smiling as we raced down that stream for our lives, angling away into a creek which fed it at a curve of the river, praying those who followed would go on down the flow rather than up the little stream, running, running, until at last we came to earth among trees in a swampy place, Tossa beside us, barely breathing.
I could feel the shaft in me, through the lung, feel the bubbling breath, the slow well of blood into my nostrils, the burning pain of it as though it were hot iron. I sobbed with it, clutching at my own chest until Chance shook me silent.
“Be still,” he hissed at me. “You are not hurt. Be still or we are dead.”
The pain was still there, but I knew then that it was not from the arrow but from some other hurt. I hurt because Tossa hurt; it was as though I were she. There was no reason for this. I didn’t even blame it upon “love,” for I had loved Mandor and had never felt his hurts as my own. This spun in my head as I gulped hot tears into my throat and choked upon them, smothering sound. Away to the south we could hear the baying of the fustigars, a dwindling cacophony following the river away, toward the border. The soil we lay on was wet and cold; the smell of rot and fungus was heavy. I heard Yarrel ask, “Is she dead?” and Chance reply that she breathed, but barely.
“A Healer,” I said. “Chance, I must find a Healer. Where?”
He muttered something I couldn’t hear, so I shook him, demanding once again. “Where? I’ve got to find someone…”
“That ruin,” he gargled. “Back where we came into the river. The chart showed a hand there, a hand, an orb, and a trumpet…” A hand was the symbol for Healer. The orb betokened a Priest, and the trumpet a Herald.
“Let me go!”‘ Yarrel was already dropping his pack. I thrust him back onto the earth beside her.