“Peace…” She got out that word with great effort, as if she must speak past a constriction in her throat. “Peace to you, stranger. I am not kin-blood. Go you on into the Power’s way. We choose not our endings; we choose only the manner with which we meet such. Your task may have ended, but it was the body that failed you, not…”
Tirtha gasped. The sword and the stone—above them where they touched forming something that might well have issued from her abiding and commanding dream—save she was not asleep. There, in a faintly blue mist, was the casket even as she had seen it carried into hiding by that hold lady whose face she had never viewed. There was what she must seek and find—and it grew sharper, more distinct.
Need…
Fainter now, as if the last vestiges of whatever had summoned her were fast fading, as if the call she heard came only from a distance, growing ever more immeasurable.
And that need—it was hers also! Stranger—no! In some way past her understanding, this one had been kin-born. However, the dead did not have to bend her to his fading will—that geas was already a part of her.
“Hawkholme—!” Tirtha said. “I go there, yes. And what lies within that”—the casket was merely a wisp of vapor again—“is to come forth. I knew you not, kin-blood. But your need is already mine.”
The haze vanished—also that other—that remnant of will which had outlasted death itself. She was bound, but no more tightly than she had been before she entered this valley. Save that it seemed, in that moment, that when she took up the sword again from where it had fallen, there passed into the hand gripping it a new kind of energy, a strength she had not hitherto known.
Tirtha was still trembling, fighting down the raw fear that had touched her, as she returned to their camp. The night had swung by. She roused her companion, wrapped herself in her own cloak. Almost, she was afraid to surrender to sleep. Would the dream enfold her now, or would something else—a last lingering trace of that demand—strike at her? She closed her eyes with determination and willed herself to rest.
No dream came this night, nor did she confront, as she had more than half feared, that other presence. Instead, her sleep must have been very deep and heavy, for when she was awakened in the morning, she felt a reluctance to move, as if weakened.
They discovered the Torgian now biddable enough, standing quietly so that he might be saddled with the riding gear from which the Falconer had scrubbed the blood stains. But neither of them wished to mount in the place of his dead master; rather they put him on a leading rein and kept to their own sure-footed ponies.
Tirtha hunched her shoulders a little as she passed both mound and symbol, glancing at neither. In the brightness of this new day she could almost believe that illusion had enfolded her last night, and she kept her hand well away from sword hilt as she rode. Let the dead lie in peace—and might she ride so. She owned no debt to anyone—carried nothing but the purpose that had brought her here.
There was a thin trace on the far side of the meadow, a shadow trail such as only the very sure-footed mountain ponies could follow, and one they must have taken unencumbered. Both riders dismounted to lead their beasts, the Falconer hooking the Torgian’s halter rope to the empty perch on his own saddle pad, thus securing the horse in line.
The climb was one to be taken slowly and with care. When they at length reached a split in the valley wall, Tirtha stared eagerly ahead, hoping that they were not to be faced by another such ordeal. She was heartened to see that the trail beyond widened and when it did descend, the angle was far less sharp. Also there was greenery to be sighted in pockets ahead, as if they had now passed through the sharp rock desert which had been the outer forbidding part of the mountain ways.
Shortly before midday she brought down a prong-horn—a young buck—and they stopped to skin and butcher the kill. When they broke their fast at nooning, it was with good meat, fire-roasted. Nor was there any lack of life to be seen hereabouts. The fresh slot tracks of other pronghorns, the calls of birds, even a lazy scattering of well-fed quarewings out of a patch of fresh standing law-leaves—the crops of the birds so stuffed that they seemed too weighted to take to the air—all testified to that.
This was good hunting land, and Tirtha wondered if it might be well to try smoking some of the meat, halting for a day or so to add to their supplies. Oddly enough, along this particular trail, where she would have thought it more natural to find snow still lingering, spring growth was more advanced than in the lower valleys from which they had come. There were flowers in pockets of earth, wild fruit trees in bloom, so that the perfume blended on the air, bringing back memories of those farm garths where she had labored.
They were two days crossing this gentle land, and there was no trace in it of any evil. Sometimes Tirtha felt a freedom of spirit, in short flashes, as if nothing pushed at her. To live here in peace and quiet, depending upon the bounty of the earth alone, troubled by no dreams, no need—she wondered dimly now and then what such a life might mean.
If her companion had such thoughts, he never voiced them, any more than she revealed hers. They traveled mainly in silence, and she believed that he was intent upon accomplishing their journey as swiftly and with as little danger as possible. They still kept night watches in turn, and he rode ever, she noted, with the attention of a scout invading unknown territory.
Strangely enough, she no longer dreamed. That visit in her dreams to the ghostly hold had been for so long a part of her nights that Tirtha felt disturbed when it was not repeated. Several times she had drawn out during their camping that “map,” as the Falconer would call it, studying the symbols set on it to no better purpose than she had done the first time she had looked upon it. Was it a map at all? There were patterns for calling of Power; hastily she pushed that dangerous idea out of her mind.
On the afternoon of the fourth day after they had ridden out of the protected valley, the vegetation grew sparser, their path once more led into a barren country as it climbed. Just before nightfall they sighted a fall of stone. The Falconer halted, staring ahead—not as one who faced some to-be-expected barrier, but rather in bemusement, which showed openly on his usually expressionless face, for that day he had ridden bareheaded—a strange choice for one who had always kept to his mask.
Tirtha could see no reason for this sudden halt, but here the path was so narrow that she could not push ahead, but must wait on him to move. When he did not, she broke what had nearly been a full day of silence.
“There is no way beyond?”
For a long moment she believed that he was so lost in what thoughts filled his mind that he had not even heard her. Then, haltingly, his claw swung out, gestured at the river of broken stone.
“The Eyrie…”
Some trick of his voice, its pitch, awoke an echo from the rocks around them.
Eyrie. That was like the wail of a mourner at a Sulcar burn burial.
Tirtha stared. There was certainly little to show that this had been the site of the centuries’ old dwelling place of his race—at least nothing she could distinguish. She had heard that the Eyrie had been so well designed that it had the appearance of a hollowed-out mountain, and that very few, if any, outsiders (and those only the Borderers and males) had ever crossed its one-time drawbridge.
Here was nothing but river stone resembling any other slide they had skirted or crossed during their travels. Her companion held his head well back on his shoulders, gazing up the line of that heap of rocks, as if he hunted desperately for something that should still exist. In turn, she imagined a mist out of the past come to cloak that slide, to show for a heartbeat or two the fortress that had been. Yet she could truly not trace anything at all.