Hart and Ravagin exchanged glances. "Whenever you're ready," Ravagin told her. "Any idea how long the spell's good for, by the way?"
"Not really. All he told me was that it would last long enough."
"I hope he knew what he was talking about," Hart muttered.
"Me, too," Danae nodded with a shiver. "Well... help me sit up a little."
Ravagin complied, sitting down next to her and putting his arm around her shoulders to give her some support. Hart, he noted peripherially, had taken advantage of the distraction to quietly move a meter away from them. "Ready?" Danae asked.
"Yes," Ravagin nodded.
"Okay. By the way, the demogorgon warned me this might hurt a little."
The demogorgon turned out to be right.
Chapter 28
"If it helps any," Ravagin's voice came, too loudly, in her ears, "it looks like a line of storm clouds will be blocking off the sun in a half-hour or less. If they don't dissipate too quickly, they ought to keep it under cover until sundown."
Danae didn't reply. She was thoroughly sick of this whole mess. Sick of the blinding white glare that continued to burn into her eyes through both eyelids and three wrappings of cloth, sick of the loud swish-thud of their horse's hooves in the tall grass, sick of the exaggerated rolling motion of the animal and of the oppressive pressure of Ravagin's body pressing against her back. The encounter with the demogorgon had effectively left her in a reverse sensory deprivation tank, and after nearly half a day of it she was ready to go insane.
She'd risked her life to buy them all a way to escape. A difficult, dangerous decision, one she'd made in a responsible, adult manner... and in return, Ravagin and Hart had once again chosen to treat her like a child.
Behind her, Ravagin cleared his throat—a loud, raspy sound. "Look, Danae, we're going to be arriving at Findral fairly soon, and I'd like to be back on speaking terms before we get there. I understand why you're mad, but Hart was determined to go ahead with it, the same way you were hell-bent on doing the demogorgon invocation yourself. You can hardly defend one example of bullheadedness and not the other, now, can you?"
Danae gritted her teeth hard enough to hurt. "Oh, you understand why I'm mad, do you? Well, maybe you think you do, but then your style of thinking has never been too good where my feelings have been concerned."
"So explain it to me. Come on—the silent treatment's gone on long enough."
She took a deep breath. "Did it ever occur to you that I just might like to have some input into a major decision like that? That as a thinking, rational part of this team I had a right to be in on it? No, of course it didn't. I'm just Danae, the brainless heiress who has to be taken care of like she was still eight years old."
Ravagin waited until she was finished, until the echoes of her voice had faded from her sensitized ears. "I suppose that's one way to look at it," he said. "It's not the way I intended it, but... Well, all right. Suppose you'd been consulted. What would you have said?"
"What difference does it make now?"
"Come on, humor me. Would you have agreed to let Hart risk his life drawing the pursuit away?"
"Agree to let him get himself killed, you mean? Of course I wouldn't have."
"But that's his job, isn't it? He's paid for taking this kind of risk for you—and for getting killed in the process, if it comes down to that. Right?"
"That is about as cold-blooded—"
"No, answer the question first. Isn't that his job?"
She tried forming three denials... but none of them made it past her lips, and eventually she gave up.
"All right," she sighed. "Yes, I suppose that's how he sees it."
"All right, then. From his point of view, this decoy plan was the best way he could see to do his job.
You wouldn't have been able to change his mind. All an argument would have accomplished would have been to make him wonder whether he should instead have stayed here at your side... and that kind of doubt would have been a handicap he might never have gotten rid of. Is that what you would have wanted, to have given him something else to have to fight?"
"No, of course not—"
"Fine. Then you're saying you'd have been able to sit here, hiding all of your doubts where he couldn't see them, and given him your permission to go off and get himself killed in your behalf?"
"You make it sound so damn brutal..." She trailed off as her brain suddenly registered something her ears had picked up. Something in Ravagin's voice.... "That is what happened, isn't it? Only with you doing it instead of me? You didn't like the plan, either."
"It's the best possible plan for our safety—yours and mine." Abruptly, Ravagin sounded very tired.
"It's also the worst possible one for Hart."
For a long minute there was no sound but the swish-thud of the horse's hooves and the droning of wind and distant insects. "It's not a matter of being treated like a child, Danae," Ravagin said at last.
"It's the simple fact that there are certain no-win situations in this universe—and a no-win situation requires a no-win decision. When you've lived through enough of them, the way Hart and I have, you begin to realize that sharing the guilt around with others doesn't make your piece of it any easier to carry."
He fell silent... and for that minute, at least, the quiet pain in his voice overshadowed the glare in Danae's eyes. Groping in front of her, she found Ravagin's hand on the horse's reins and held it. "I'm sorry," she whispered.
He didn't reply; but a moment later his free hand reached tentatively around her waist to hold her tightly against him. Almost painfully tightly... but she didn't mind.
If she couldn't help share his guilt, she could at least try and share some of his pain.
It was after sundown, and the white glare in her eyes had subsided to merely a dazzling gray, when Ravagin called a halt. "How do you feel?" he asked as he helped her off the horse.
"Like I just spent four hours riding a car with oval wheels," she grunted, wincing. The pins and needles in her legs and buttocks were almost painful in their intensity. "I never realized just how much horses bounce when they walk."
"No signs of this sensory stuff wearing off?"
"I can't tell. Where are we?"
"About a kilometer from the village of Findral. Or, rather, from where the edge of Findral's nighttime lar will be."
"We going to spend the night there?"
"That's what I'm currently trying to decide."
He was silent for a long minute, and Danae found that if she ignored the countryside sounds around her, she could actually hear the faint sounds of humanity from the direction of the village. "What's our other choice?" she asked. "Spend the night out here?"
"Under the circumstances, that's not really an option. The risk of bandits aside, we're in fairly desperate need of food and rest. No, our only other real choice would be to backtrack along the road toward Besak and find an isolated inn that has its own lar at night. Unfortunately, we have the same problem in either case."
"Me?"
He snorted gently. "Your eyes and ears, actually, but it boils down to the same thing. You're going to attract a lot of attention, and we can hardly pretend you got lost from a blindman's bluff squad."
"How about if we say I've got a severe head injury or something?" she suggested. "That way we could pass these off as bandages and also explain why I'm staying isolated in the room."
"And that we're on our way to Citadel to consult one of the master healers there? Yeah, that's the obvious explanation... except that if we try it in Findral someone's bound to suggest calling in one of the local healers."