Master Nikolai shut his mouth and clenched his jaw.
"And you wouldn't go home," Yuri said further. "Not except to make me go. Which you can't do. So there."
"Damn your disobedience."
He did not like being damned by master Nikolai. He was sorry to be disrespectful. But he said, to drive home the point: "You can have my pony, if you want. I got this far. I can walk." Master Nikolai was furious with him, but he was not going to do as he was told, not this time, he had made up his mind on that account, and he was more scared than he had ever been in the mountains. He changed the subject, since master Nikolai was not going to say anything helpful. "Breakfast is ready."
"We're not discussing breakfast."
"Krukczy can catch you more fish. They'll freeze in the pass and they'll be fine. You'll have food all the way home. And he brought greens for Gracja this morning. So she's all right."
Silence from master Nikolai. Nikolai was mad at him. Nikolai tried to sit up and hurt himself, which did not improve his temper.
"Go home!"
"I wouldn't go home without my brother's dog. Do you think I'd go home without Aim?"
"You've not a hope of finding the boys. We don't know where they went."
"Zadny will."
"Damn that dog, he'll get you killed, that's all he's good for. He's got no sense!"
"I'd rather have you with me," he said, with a glance from under his brows, and there was a lump in his throat, and in his stomach, too, where breakfast sat like a stone. "I followed everything you said, master Nikolai, all the way up the mountains, and I didn't have any trouble. I did everything you said last night. Didn't I? And things are all right. I can get along all right if you go home. —But I'd rather have you there. Gracja could carry you. And Krukczy says he's going with us."
"Damn," Nikolai said under his breath, and muttered to himself and winced, with his eyes shut, because it hurt him to sit up. "Damn and damn, boy! You belong at home!"
But Nikolai never for a moment intended to go home without him. Nikolai wanted to find his brothers and not to have to face his parents without them. There was never a tune they were lost or strayed that Nikolai had not found them and brought them home, only this time was the worst, it was by for the worst.
"So will you go with me, master Nikolai?"
They were riding in the sun, and Bogdan asked him—asked him something, Tamas was sure—but, distressingly enough, he could no longer remember the exact sound of Bogdan's voice; or see Bogdan's face except in shadow. Sunlight streamed about them blindingly bright. Petals drifted down in clouds from the orchards, a blizzard of dying flowers.
If there were a means, he thought, to gather up all the flowers, if he could recover the recent springtime, if he could retrace their path on the mountain road and say, when they had hesitated at that dreadful stone, master Karoly, where are you leading us? Whose friend are you?—then everything might be different.
But he and the witch girl kept riding down the stream, and fever and sunlight blinded him. He might be home, in the orchards about the walls. But if he was where he remembered, a dreadful thing had happened, which in his confusion he could not recall, except the ominous curtain of petals, a sign of decay and change.
The stones in his dream echoed with drums. A goblin looked at him and was blind to him. A troll held him in its arms as skulls shone white under the moon, horse bones alternate with human, a goblin fancy of order. Their kind was not incapable of artistry.
Birds screamed from the thickets while the horses picked their steady way downhill. He saw huge lumps of rock, saw juniper and patient saxifrage, but nothing in this place of orchards, no tree so tame, only twisted shaggy bark, tough and resilient, and weathered gray stone. Gone, the soot-stained snows and lifeless rocks of recent nightmare. Roots here invaded rock and patiently wedged cracks wider, making mountains smaller. Master Karoly said so.
Came pine and linden, rowan and new-leafed, timid beech—he knew them by their names, master Karoly had taught him. Listen to their voices, Karoly had said: each sings a different song. So he knew with his eyes shut the sound and smell of each and every one. But what did that say of where he was or what did it say of the character of his companion, who refused all questions and rode in disdainful silence?
Wool-gathering again? he could hear Bogdan say. There are times to do things and times to think, brother. Figure it out, will you?
A dark-spiked shadow of pine ran along the streamside. The witchling led them down to the stream again—when had they ever left it?—and let the mare wade in and drink.
He stopped Lwi short of that: it dawned on him to look into the saddle kit, now that they were stopped in daylight. He was too stiff and sore to turn around to search the gear from horseback, so he slid down, thinking if anyone had food left in his saddlebags it might have been Nikolai; he had never thought to search this morning, and hunger had not much intruded through the pain.
That was a mistake, he thought, kneeling by the water's edge. Getting off was very surely a mistake.
Ela rode the mare between him and the sun, asked, disgustedly, "What are you doing?"
He had tried to get up. Instead he knelt with one knee on wet and soaking reeds, and wet his hands in the icy stream and carried them to his face, while Lwi wandered free in the shallow water. Ela dismounted, and he blinked wetly up into eyes green as glass, green as pond water. Her hair was palest gold. These details absorbed him, along with the frown that knit her brows.
"Fool. You'll catch your death. The stream is ice melt."
It might be. But it took the pain away, and he laved his face with it, ignoring warnings. He wished he could slip into it head-deep, and have it take all the ache, and the thinking, and the remembering. He said, conversationally, on the last of his self-possession, and the last shred of his strength, "I was looking for something to eat. Is there anything? I think I could go on, if there were."
As witches went, he vastly preferred master Karoly. Karoly would not have called him a fool. Karoly would have had some sympathy, long since, even if he had betrayed them. But she confessed there was something to eat, and said she would get it out of her packs if he would quit being a fool and not drown himself in the meanwhile.
She had not a kindly word to her name. She was the most unreasonable, ill-tempered, and arrogant creature he had ever met, including the troll. But she took packets from Skory's saddlebags, and thereafter Lwi and Skory browsed the shore while he and the witch shared the first meal he remembered in days—a little jerky and biscuit, and a sip of clean, cold water.
But after the work the dried meat was, he felt wearier than he was hungry, and set his shoulders against a gnarled pine so that the roots and the stones missed most of his bruises-only to rest, he protested, to her impatience, only a moment.
He was filthy, he was bruised down to the fingertips, there were cuts in his scalp, his bath in the cave had only moved the mud about, so far as he could tell, and she was right, he had soaked himself down the neck and now he was chilled and sorry for it. But he had a precious and clean bit of food in his hand, overall nothing much was hurting him, and his eyes drifted shut—as if, once the terror was past and food had hit his stomach, he could not keep his wits collected or his eyes open. He had found his land of once upon a time, but it was all dark, everything was grim and magical things lived here, oh, yes—trolls and witches. Of gran's stories—at least there were pine groves, and this brook which the goblins had not so far fouled. That was true. So he could still believe in her, for what little good those stories were.
Ela's mistress would prove wiser, and better natured than Ela or gran. And if not, if this ride was all for nothing, then he would ride away on his own, and trap and fish for his food and get home past the goblins somehow.