Filip said, "The whole forest burned."
Master Nikolai said, with despair in his voice, "At least we've passed well below the tree line now. Spring will bring out the green in the lowlands, no matter the fire. There's bound to be forage further down."
Down was where they were surely going now, Karoly and Nikolai were right in that. The horses maintained a weary, jolting pace. The dusk between the mountains had closed about them, and since the foggy patch, cloud hung around the heights above their heads, gray and heavy with snow, casting everything in gloom.
Maybe Jerzy's right, Tamas thought: maybe we missed some turn of the trail on the heights and we've come down in the wrong valley—
But could master Karoly let us go astray? He's a wizard, Jerzy said it, persistently: Why don't we meet better luck?
Except if master Karoly could have cured what was wrong at home, wouldn't he have? And if he could have gotten us through the mountains without the storm, wouldn't he have? He's come here looking for his sister because things are happening he can't do anything about. Didn't he say to our father—I have bad dreams?
They passed into a defile of pale rock and a wide stream below the trail, that Karoly suddenly proclaimed was the road he remembered.
"Was it this grim?" master Nikolai asked.
"No," master Karoly admitted, still riding.
The men said other things as the road wound around the barren hillside, a slip zone of rockfalls and a long slope of rubble and dead brush down to a barren streamside—an appalling place, deeply shadowed by mountain walls on either side, but the road was most definitely a road now, broad and well-defined. They came to a milestone of the Old Folk, which explained the stonework bracings along this stretch-such roads ran here and there in Maggiar, too, with similar milestones; but a grinning face was roughly painted on it.
"What's that?" master Nikolai wanted to know.
"No good thing," Karoly said. Nikolai had reined to a stop at that find, so had they all, but Karoly passed it by with a look, as if it was part and parcel of everything in the land.
"What?" Bogdan called after him angrily. "Master Karoly, where are you leading us? What do you know, that you're not telling us?"
"That there's no way but this," master Karoly said over his shoulder. "That we've no choice but straight ahead. Come on!"
"Bogdan," Tamas began to say, with a strong feeling of misgiving about this road, but Bogdan set his horse to overtake Karoly's, saying something about keeping Karoly from breaking his neck; master Nikolai did the same, and the rest of them followed.
Tamas cast a second glance at the stone that seemed to mock any further venture down this road, wondering if the men all knew what that painted countenance signified, and he did not. He did not want to be a coward, and they would not regard his arguing. He worked his weary horse up to the head of the column with Bogdan and Nikolai and Karoly— easier on the overtaking just then as the road wound along the hillside to a steep descent.
But there they caught the first hopeful sight, a pale green vision of sunlight in the east, beyond the mountain shadow. Against that sunlight a dark tower loomed on the roadway, its foundations butted against the stream.
"Krukczy Straz," Bogdan murmured.
It surely was, Tamas thought. It was after all the road their grandmother had described to them, burned and dreadful as the mountains had become. They had come through the right pass, after all, and elsewhere the land was catching the sunlight still, like a promise of better things. "Quickly now," master Karoly said, silencing their chatter, and urged his horse faster down the road, that passed right alongside the tower crest.
Hisses then, sharp and quick, that no archer had to guess at; "Jerzy!" Filip cried. Tamas looked wildly about as horses bolted past and his own shied and reared. He saw Bogdan hit and falling as his own horse stepped backward on the road edge. He knew one heart-stopping moment of falling over the edge and onto the rubble, into a thunderous slippage of stones, battered and deafened in the rolling tide that carried him. He had time to despair of finding a stopping place. He had time to think of finding hold. The slide was a roaring in his ears and every handhold moved with him, slipping and tumbling as he went, down and down into choking dust.
3
CAME QUIET, AND COLD STONE BENEATH TAMAS' BACK. Water dripped and echoed in the dark around him. His body still felt the falling, but did not move, in a long, slow gathering of scattered wits, trying to reconcile sliding in a torrent of rubble, with this pervasive ache and this darkness and the regular echo of water drops.
The ceiling reflected a faint glimmering of light. None touched the wails. It was a broad cave, or a man-made vault-he could distinguish that much; but being here made no sense to him. He remembered going down, he felt the battering of the rocks—remembered he had outright fallen off his horse, no glorious end to his journey, Bogdan had been hit. Jerzy had. Dreadful images succeeded that one, arrows streaking black across a clouded heaven, horses and men screaming ...
A second waking, how long after the first he had no idea. He was still lying on his back. Light from some source touched both shaped and living stone, a ceiling glistening with water and black mold, but nothing of the walls. It was the same place as before: he could hear the drip of water and smell the mustiness of wet iron and stone. But there was a thumping somewhere distant, like drums, he thought, or the beating of his own heart. He remembered the road, and he had to find his brother, he had to get back there, their father had told him take care of Bogdan—
But something held his hands fast above his head, and fighting that restraint sent a wave of pain through his back. He worked half-numb fingers, trying to feel what was holding him, and touched what might be rope about iron bars, but he could not be sure whether anything was warm or cold, nor tilt his aching neck further back to see.
A shriek reached his ears, for away—only a bird, he told himself, a crow, maybe a dog's injured yelp—not a human voice. His hazed wits could not shape it. He lay straining and dreading to hear it again, but the drip of water into some pool was all the measure of time and sanity.
Eventually, louder than the water dripping, came a slither like something dragging across the floor, with an audible breathing. It was a nightmare. He wanted to wake, now, please the god, he was very willing to wake up now, but there was no waking. One wanted to think of escape, but he could not so much as turn over. He asked himself who had tied him here, and why; and with his head lifted as far as he could, saw a large shaggy lump move out of the faint light and into the shadow beside him.
A troll. He was done. He knew he was. Only the bones left, he remembered Nikolai saying; and wondered if he was the only one imprisoned here. "Bogdan?" he called into the dark, with all the courage he could find.
"Ssss!" the troll hissed, trailed musty rags of wet fur across his face and clapped a massive hand over his mouth. Half-smothered, he struggled and, with his head beginning to spin, stopped, in token that he would be quiet, with no surety at all it would let him go. But it slowly drew its hand away and let him breathe.
Then it shuffled off as erratically as it had come. He listened after its departure over the beating of his heart, saw its retreating shadow against the light and, shivering, gazed into the dark for a long time after. He wondered where it went and why it had left and most of all what ,had become of Bogdan and Nikolai and the rest of them—not without reckoning master Karoly. A wizard might have defended them. Maybe Karoly had saved the rest of them, Bogdan and all of them, that was what he wanted to think—he might be the only one the trolls had gotten, lying unconscious as he must have. Bogdan and Karoly might be looking for him this very moment. They might save him if he could stay alive, if he was not going to be a troll's supper before they could get here.