"I don't want to," he stammered, shaking with cold. It seemed when he shut his eyes she was there and he was not free ...
"She can't claim you again unless you will it, man, don't think of her!"
"I'm not," he said, and it was the truth—he had rather Azdra'ik's company than the ghost's, for ghost she must be: Azdra'ik at least was living, and solid, and where he had been and what he had let touch him he wanted not even to think about now that he was clear of it.
"Then keep walking!" Azdra'ik shoved him and he walked. But constantly he had a compulsion to look back, or to shut his eyes to see whether or not she was there—but it was not her, it was the goblin lord behind him, he convinced himself of that without looking back; he heard the constant meeting of metal and Lwi's four-footed stride in the leaves. He did not need to look over his shoulder, or even to blink so long as he could resist it—because at every blink of his eyes that place was waiting and at every weakening of his will that ghostly touch was brushing at his shoulder.
A light glowed through the trees, with a source beyond the next hill. The witch again, lamas thought, reeling blindly through the dark—it seemed to him in his despair that they must only have gone in circles or that the witch had won and Azdra'ik was defeated, finally, fatally for both of them.
But the forest seemed to grow thinner as he went. Thorns and brambles grew more frequent. It was the east, he began to hope at last, the east, and the edge of the forest, and the faintest of rising suns.
He lost his footing in his anxiousness to reach it, skidded and fell—the second time, the third, he was not sure, a slide over dry and rotting leaves. He made it to his knees, hearing Azdra'ik behind him as sound and sense spun and whirled through his wits. He reached his feet, and Azdra'ik had not struck him. His next reeling steps carried him to a massive rock, from which he could see a dim gray dawn, a last fringe of trees, a vast and open valley: he launched himself down slope for that light and glorious sky with a first real belief he might escape.
An iron grip spun him about and slammed him back against the stone. Azdra'ik's hand smothered his outcry, Azdra'ik's whole armored weight crushed him against the stone, and for a desperate, bewildered moment he fought to get Jjee, expecting the god knew what betrayal.
Then he caught from the tail of his eye a chain of dark figures crossing the open hillside below them.
Azdra'ik's enemies might well be his allies; that was his first thought. If he might free himself if only for a moment and attract their attention—but the least small doubt held him hushed and still. Hefeltashort, sharp movement as Azdra'ik jerked Lwi's reins, warning the horse to be still—and in only that small interval he saw more and more amiss in those figures down the hill, a foreignness in gait and armor.
Not men, he began to be sure now: they were goblin-kind, broader and smaller than Azdra'ik, like bears walking on two legs, armored and bristling with weapons.
"Those," Azdra'ik whispered, the merest breath stirring against his ear, "those are itra'hi, man, do you see the difference now?"
He tried to speak. Azdra'ik lifted his hand a little.
"No noise," he managed to whisper.
"Wise of you."
"Where are they going?"
"To mischief, always. Be still."
He was still. He watched until the goblins passed out of sight around the rock, and for a time after. Then Azdra'ik seized his arm and led him, Lwi's reins in his other hand, down a stony flat somewhat back of the track the goblins had crossed, and for the first time under the open sky.
Wooded hills rose on every side of them: huge boulders tended down to a straggle of grass and a dizzying prospect over a dawn-shadowed valley. It seemed to him that smoke stained the sky. Fires glowed within that smoke, hundreds of them, in a distance so far the eye refused the reckoning.
"Burdigen," Azdra'ik said. "Albaz."
"There's fire," he said faintly. "Why?"
"Have you never seen war, man? This is war."
"Against whom? Why?"
"Need there be a reason? That men exist. That the queen wants the land. That was the betrayal the witches of the Wood made inevitable."
"Why?"
"You do love that question. How can I know a human's thinking? Greed, perhaps. Or merely whim. A foolish witch wanted all that the queen had, and she tried to take it. While I—"
There was long silence. "What would you?" Tamas asked.
"I wanted what was ours," Azdra'ik said bitterly. "I wanted what was ours from time past. I thought there was a hope in humankind."
"Of what?"
"Of common sense." Azdra'ik seized his arm and shoved him along, and he saw no choice but walk—in a place made for ambushes, and not for silent passage with a shod horse.
The rising sun picked out the faintest of colors, warning them they were vulnerable; but if he were free this moment he could not face that woods now, or bear its shadow. The witch began to seem to him a recent dream, a nightmare in which he had not acquitted himself with any dignity or sense ... but the consequence of it was with him, in the cut finger, the chill in his bones, the vision of the dark and that cottage at any moment he shut his eyes.
"I'll walk," he protested faintly, trying to free his arm. But he stumbled in the next step and Azdra'ik jerked him hard upright and marched him a hard course downslope and among the rocks.
"It's where they went," Tamas objected, and jerked at Azdra'ik's hold a second time. "Where are we going?"
"To our little would-be witch. The fool's using the mirror."
"How do you know that?"
"Does the sun shine? How do you not know? Are you numb as well as stupid?"
He did not know. He did not know how the goblin knew, except by smelling it or hearing it in some way human folk could not. "Why?" he began to ask, hauled breathless along the slope in the wake of what he had no wish to overtake, and with the vision of smoke and distant fires hazy beneath them. "Inside or outside the woods? What do you—?"
Another jerk at his arm, that all but lifted him off his feet. "Quiet!" Azdra'ik whispered, and led him down and down the hillside, all the time holding Lwi's reins in his other hand. On a steep, gravelly stretch Lwi slid past diem and all but broke free. But Azdra'ik held on, the reins wrapped about his fist, and meanwhile gripped his arm so hard the feeling left his hand—stronger than a man, Azdra'ik was; but what Azdra'ik proposed to do on the track of a dozen of his enemies Tamas had no idea: no idea what Azdra'ik intended and no idea whether he was not better off drawing the weapons he still carried and trying the small chance they offered—
Were they going down there? he wondered. Were they going into war and siege? Nikolai's tales had seemed adventurous, distant, long-ago—but facing the fires in the haze across the plain, he found such destruction not romantic at all, rather a promise of terrors, in a land where goblins were the rule and humans were the prey. The fete of this valley might next spring be Maggiar's and the people suffering next year might be his own—while a goblin hauled him willy-nilly along the hill with what purpose he could not decide.
"I'll walk" he protested again, hoarsely, and jerked his arm to make the point. Azdra'ik did not let him go, but he kept his feet under him for the next dozen steps without wincing and Azdra'ik eased his hold.
Then without his asking or expecting it, the creature let him free.
He had thought he understood goblins, since Krukczy Straz—until this one, damn the creature, twice spared his life, and rescued him, and kept him on his feet last night, when sleep would have left him prey to ... whatever he had dealt with in the deep woods. Did one stab in the back a creature who had thus far led him nowhere he would not go?
Not when he was doing very well to keep his feet under him, and skirting hill after hill in the very footprints of a goblin patrol, above a smoke-hazed overlook of cities under siege.