They traveled west at first, then north, with the mountains on their right and the heavy Airdthmar forests on their left, forests that had never been completely explored, that held creatures no one had ever named. When times were peaceful the kings of Damar had set up expeditions to drive deeper into the forest, for it stood in the way of their kingdom’s free trade and concourse from one town to the next; but the Airdthmar was not kind to the folk who tried to chart it and lay roads through it. Arlbeth claimed to be fond of it. “It is quiet, it causes no courteous passer-by any trouble, it keeps its own counsel,” he said. “Would that all the quarters of the Damarian compass were so civilized.”
Aerin gazed into the trees as she rode, but she saw only blackness looking back at her. She had thought to go west originally because the Airdthmar seemed like the obvious place to look for a mysterious mage who visited dreams; but as they cleared the foothills Talat shied away and veered north, and Aerin half permitted, half agreed with him.
There was no trail for them to follow; they wove their way back into the foothills again, away from the smooth way that Arlbeth and his army had gone to meet with Nyrlol, or that any folk with legitimate business took around the eastern edge of the Airdthmar; Aerin did not want to meet anyone who might take word of her back to the City, nor be overtaken by any party sent in pursuit.
They came at last to a pocket valley in the hills, a small undistinguished valley like many others, well furnished by the thick purple color grass, which did not grow in the City, and with a few trees. The sun was setting as they paused, and Aerin, seeing a rock that would do for a mounting block, thought that this would be a good place to stop for the night; but she made no move to dismount, and Talat remained standing, ears pricked, uninterested in the lush lolor, which generally he preferred to anything else. As the sun disappeared it seemed to Aerin that the light never quite faded; but that might have been the glitter of her fever.
Talat looked back over his shoulder at her, and Aerin’s knee as if of its own volition bent him toward the mountains behind the foothills—east again; and Talat at once found the hidden trail that began at the edge of the pocket valley.
The way was soon so steep that Aerin worried about Talat’s weak leg; but when she tried to slip off his back and walk beside him for a while he sidled all around and rubbed her against the trees that grew close around them, and she at last gave it up. He was right; climbing uphill would make her cough. He went slowly, and all four feet hit the ground evenly, and Aerin concentrated on hanging on to the front of the saddle with both hands. And breathing. It had seemed to her lately that she had to remember to breathe, that her lungs would prefer to be still.
By dawn she was light-headed with fever and altitude and exhaustion, for even though she slept little, lying quietly on the earth was an easier way to pass the time than clinging to a heaving saddle. Still Talat toiled on, the sweat running down his shoulders, though the air was cool. Aerin let go the saddle and wound her cold fingers in his mane to warm them.
The ground leveled abruptly. Talat paused disbelievingly, all four feet braced; then he went on again, and the trees gave way before them, and the secret track Talat had followed so trustingly was a plain trail before them, and at the end of a short way was a small bare courtyard, set round with pillars, and a great grey stone building. Talat walked into the courtyard and stopped. Aerin unwound her hands from his mane and stared down past his wet shoulder to the ground, and thought about dismounting; and then a tall blond man was standing beside her. She wished to feel alarm, for she had not seen or heard his approach; but Talat was not disturbed, and she recognized the man’s face from her dreams. He lifted her bodily from the saddle, and as his arms took her weight, fear crossed his face: “May all the gods listen—there’s nothing left of you.”
He carried her into the stone hall, and she leaned her head against his chest, and thought of nothing. His boots were soft-soled and his footsteps silent; but the rustle of her breathing echoed through the hall like the wings of a flock of small birds. He set her in a high-backed chair at the far end of the hall, and picked up a goblet from a small table, glared at it, muttered over it, said, “This will have to do,” and gave it to her. She held it, dreamily, but even with both hands around it, it swayed and began to sag, and the man, with a muffled exclamation, leaned over her and grasped the stem of the goblet around her two hands. His hand was warm, like Talat’s mane, and the goblet was cool. “Who are you?” she asked, looking into the frowning face bending over her.
“I am Luthe,” he said. “Drink.”
She took the first sip, obediently, as she had drunk Teka’s draughts when she was young and had fevers. She did not remember a second sip.
She awoke, pressed down with blankets, in a narrow curtain-less bed. The bed was one of many, set side by side down a long narrow corridor; the heads were pushed up against one wall where slit windows high above shed sunlight on their feet; and beyond the beds was a narrow passage and then the far wall, taller than the window wall, the roof slanting up sharply from the one to the other. She blinked drowsily at the far wall; it was blank grey stone, like the rest of Luthe’s hall. Or not blank: Aerin sat up, shedding blankets, and frowned; etched into the grey stone were faint relief pictures, but she could not quite decide what they depicted: men with antlers, women with wings, trees with eyes that watched. She blinked again; her vision hadn’t been trustworthy in a long time.
Her fever was gone. She felt as weak as when she had first dragged herself to the stream after Maur’s death, but she felt happy, with a senseless transparent happiness like that of a very young child. She wrestled cheerfully with the enshrouding blankets, got feebly to her feet, and began to make her way down the row of beds by clinging to the foot of each in turn—all of them empty, and all but hers neatly made up with coarse dark blankets, and pillows wrapped in smooth dark cloth. She came to an arch of doorway and looked through; the thickness of the wall it pierced made the entrance dark, but beyond it the great hall was bright with daylight. There were windows cut high into the two lengthwise walls of the great chamber, the walls themselves high enough that the windows looked out over the roofs of the sleeping corridors; and yet far above them all the ceiling was invisible in darkness.
Luthe saw her and frowned. “You should have slept longer.”
“No, I shouldn’t. I have slept just the right amount; I feel dazzlingly”—she ran out of breath, and leaned against the threshold—“hungry. I haven’t felt hungry in a long time.”
“I will claim that as my consolation; but evidently I still have not learned to get simple sleeping draughts right. Lily would be ashamed of me. Come eat, then.” He watched her drift toward him; it seemed to be a long way from the sleeping-chamber door to the table before the hearth, where he was. His hands closed over the high back of the chair he stood behind as he watched her, but he did not offer to help her. She fetched up against the table at last; it was a small delicate table, but she was little more than a wraith, and when she flattened both hands on the top of it to steady herself it held her slight weight easily.
She looked up at him and smiled: a lover’s smile, sweet and brilliant, but it was not directed at him; her eyes looked at something invisible that she herself did not recognize, and yet his heart stirred in a way he did not like. He returned her smile with a deeper frown, and she chuckled—a little tapping sound, like mouse feet on a stone floor. “I am not blind, sir, though I do seem to see light where there is only darkness and strange pictures on a blank wall; and I am quite sure that I see you scowling furiously at me, like a tutor at a student who persists in misbehaving. Pray tell me what I have done.”