Part 7 (1/2)

Josua did the same. ”I hope you find Miriamele and Simon. But if you do not, there is no shame in it. As Isgrimnur said, come back to us as soon as you can, Binabik.”

”And I am hoping that things will be going well for you in Nabban.”

”But how will you find us?” Josua asked suddenly, his long face worried.

Binabik stared at him for a moment, then, surprisingly, let out a loud laugh. ”How can I be finding an army of gra.s.slanders and stone-dwellers mixed together, led by a dead hero of great famousness and a one-handed prince? I am thinking that it will not be difficult obtaining word of you.”

Josua's face relaxed into a smile. ”I suppose you are right. Farewell, Binabik.” He raised his hand, exposing for a moment the dulled manacle he wore as a reminder of his imprisonment and the debt he owed his brother for it.

”Farewell, Josua and Isgrimnur,” said the troll. ”Please be saying that for me to the others as well. I could not bear to be making good-byes to all at once.” He leaned forward to whisper something to the patiently waiting wolf, then turned back toward them. ”In the mountains, we are saying this: 'Inij koku na siqqasa min taq'- 'Inij koku na siqqasa min taq'- 'When we meet again, that will be a good day.' ” He sunk both his hands into the wolf's hackles. 'When we meet again, that will be a good day.' ” He sunk both his hands into the wolf's hackles. ”Hinik, ”Hinik, Qantaqa. Find Simon. Qantaqa. Find Simon. Hinik ummu! Hinik ummu!”

The wolf leaped forward up the wet hillside. Binabik swayed on her broad back but kept his seat. Isgrimnur and Josua watched until the strange rider and his stranger mount topped the hill's crest and vanished from sight.

”I fear I will never see them again,” said Josua. ”I am cold, Isgrimnur.”

The duke put his hand on the prince's shoulder. He was not himself feeling either very warm or very happy. ”Let's go back. We have near a thousand people we need to get moving by the time the sun is above the hilltops.”

Josua nodded. ”So we do. Come, then.”

They turned and retraced their own footsteps in the sodden gra.s.s.

4.

A Thousand Leaves, A Thousand Shadows

Miriamele and Simon spent the first week of their flight in the forest. The traveling was slow and painfully laborious, but Miriamele had decided long before her escape that it would be far better to lose time than to be captured. The daylight hours were spent struggling through the dense trees and matted, tangling undergrowth, all to the tune of Simon's grumbling. They led their horses more often than they rode them. spent the first week of their flight in the forest. The traveling was slow and painfully laborious, but Miriamele had decided long before her escape that it would be far better to lose time than to be captured. The daylight hours were spent struggling through the dense trees and matted, tangling undergrowth, all to the tune of Simon's grumbling. They led their horses more often than they rode them.

”Be happy,” she told him once as they rested in a clearing, leaning against the trunk of an old oak. ”At least we are getting to see the sun for a few days. When we leave the forest again, we'll be riding by night.”

”At least if we ride at night I won't have to look at the things that are tearing all the skin off my body,” Simon said crossly, rubbing at his tattered breeches and the bruised flesh underneath.

It was heartening, Miriamele discovered, to have something to do. The feeling of helpless dread that had gripped her for weeks faded away, leaving her able to think clearly, to see everything around her as if with new eyes ... and even to enjoy being with Simon.

She did enjoy his company. Sometimes she wished she didn't enjoy it quite so much. It was hard not to feel as though she were tricking him somehow. It was more than just not telling him all her reasons for leaving Uncle Josua and setting out for the Hayholt. She also felt as though she were not wholly clean, not wholly fit to be with someone else.

It is Aspitis, she thought. He did this to me. Before him, I was as pure as anyone could want to be. I was as pure as anyone could want to be.

But was that really true? He had not forced himself upon her. She had let him do what he wished-in some ways she had welcomed it. In the end, Aspitis had proved to be a monster, but the way in which he came to her bed was no different than that in which most men came to their sweethearts. He had not savaged her. If what they had done was wrong and sinful, she bore equal blame.

And what, then, of Simon? She had very mixed feelings. He was not a boy any more but a man, and a part of her feared the man he had become, as it would fear any man. But, she thought, there was also something about him that had remained strangely innocent. In his earnest attempts to do right, in the poorly-hidden hurt that he showed when she was short with him, he was still almost childlike. This made her feel even worse, that in his transparent regard for her he had no clue as to what she was truly like. It was precisely when he was kindest to her, when he most admired and complimented her, that she felt most angry with him. It seemed he was being willfully blind.

It was a dreadful way to feel. Luckily, Simon seemed to understand that his sincere affection was somehow painful to her, so he fell back on the jesting, mocking friends.h.i.+p with which she was more comfortable. When she could be around him without thinking about herself, she found him good company.

Despite growing up in the courts of her grandfather and father, Miriamele had found little opportunity to be with boys. King John's knights were mostly dead or long since retired to their estates scattered about Erkynland and elsewhere, and in her grandfather's later years the king's court had become empty of almost any but those who had to live near the king for the sake of their day-to-day livelihoods. Later, when her mother had died, her father had frowned on her spending time even with the few boys and girls of her age. He had not filled the void with his own presence, but had instead mewed her up with unpleasant old men and women who lectured her about the rituals and responsibilities of her position and found fault with everything she did. By the time her father had become king, Miriamele's solitary childhood was over.

Leleth, her handmaiden, had been almost her only young companion. The little girl had idolized Miriamele, hanging on the princess' every word. In turn, Leleth had told long stories about growing up with brothers and sisters-she was the youngest of a large baronial family-while her mistress listened in fascination, trying not to be jealous of the family she had never had.

That was why it had been so difficult to see Leleth again upon reaching Sesuad'ra. The lively little girl she remembered had vanished. Before they had fled the castle together, Leleth had been quiet sometimes, and many things frightened her, but it was as though some completely different creature now lived behind the little girl's eyes. Miriamele had tried to remember if there had ever been any sign of the sort of things that Geloe had discovered in the child, but could think of little, except that Leleth had been p.r.o.ne to vivid, intricate, and sometimes frightening dreams. Some of them had seemed so detailed and unusual in Leleth's retelling that Miriamele had been more than half certain the little girl had invented them.

When Miriamele's father had ascended to his own father's throne, she found herself both surrounded by people and yet terribly lonely. Everyone at the Hayholt had seemed obsessed with the empty ritual of power, something Miriamele had lived with for so long that it held no interest for her. It was like watching a confusing game played by bad-tempered children. Even the few young men who paid court to her-or rather to her father, for most of them had been interested in little more than the riches and power that would fall to the one who received her marriage-pledge-had seemed to her like some other type of animal than she, boring old men in the bodies of youths, sullen boys masquerading as adults.

The only ones in all of Meremund or the Hayholt who seemed to enjoy life for what it was rather than what gain could be coaxed from it were the servants. In the Hayholt especially, with its army of maids and grooms and scullions, it was as though an entirely different race of people lived side by side with her own bleak peers. Once, in a moment of terrible sadness, she had suddenly seen the great castle as a kind of inverted lich-yard, with the creaking dead walking around on top while the living sang and laughed below.

Thus Simon and a few others had first come to her attention-boys who seemed to want nothing much more than to be boys. Unlike the children of her father's n.o.bles, they were in no hurry to take on the clacking, droning, mannered speech of their elders. She watched them dawdling through their ch.o.r.es, laughing behind their hands at each others' foolish pranks, or playing hoodman blind on the commons gra.s.s, and she ached to be like them. Their lives seemed so simple. Even when a more mature wisdom taught her that the lives of the serving-folk were hard and wearisome, she still dreamed sometimes that she could put off her royalty as easily as a cloak and become one of their number. Hard work had never frightened her, but she was terrified of solitude.

”No,” Simon said firmly. ”You should never-let me get this close to you.”

He moved his foot slightly and twisted the hilt of his sword so that its cloth-wrapped blade pushed hers away. Suddenly, he was pressing against her. His smell, compounded of sweat and leather jerkin and the sodden fragments of a thousand leaves, was very strong. He was so tall! She forgot that sometimes. The sudden impact of his presence made it hard for Miriamele to think clearly.

”You've left yourself open now,” he said. ”If I used my dagger, you wouldn't have a chance. Remember, you'll almost always be fighting someone with more reach.”

Instead of trying to bring her sword back where it would do some good, she let it drop, then put both hands against Simon's chest and pushed. He fell back, stumbling, before he regained his balance.

”Leave me alone.” Miriamele turned and walked a few steps away, then stooped to pick up a few branches for the fire so her shaking hands would have something to do.

”What's wrong?” Simon asked; taken aback. ”Did I hurt you?”

”No, you didn't hurt me.” She took her armful of wood and dumped it into the circle they had cleared on the forest floor. ”I'm just done with that game for a while.”

Simon shook his head, then sat to undo the rags wound about his sword.

They had made camp early today, the sun still high above the treetops. Miriamele had decided that tomorrow they would follow the little streamlet that had long been their companion down to the River Road; the course of the stream had been bending in that direction for most of this day's journey. The River Road wound beside the Ymstrecca, past Stans.h.i.+re and on to Hasu Vale. It would be best, she had reasoned, for them to take to the road at midnight and still have some walking time before dawn, rather than spend all of this night in the forest and then wait through daylight again so they could travel the road in darkness.

This had been her first opportunity to use her sword in several days, except for the inglorious purpose of clearing brush. It had even been she who had suggested an hour of practice before they ate their evening meal-which was one of the reasons her abrupt change of heart obviously puzzled Simon. Miriamele felt torn between a desire to tell him it wasn't his fault, and an obscure feeling that somehow it was his fault-his fault for being male, his fault for liking her, his fault for coming with her when she would have been happier being miserably alone.

”Don't mind me, Simon,” she said at last, and felt weak for doing so. ”I'm just tired.”

Mollified, he finished his careful rewinding of the cloth, then dropped the ball of dusty fabric into his saddlebag before coming to join her beside the unlit fire. ”I just wanted you to be careful. I told you that you lean too far.”

”I know, Simon. You did tell me.”

”You can't let someone bigger than you get that close.”

Miriamele found herself wis.h.i.+ng silently that he would stop talking about it. ”I know, Simon. I'm just tired.”

He seemed to sense that he had annoyed her again. ”But you're good, Miriamele. You're strong.”

She nodded, absorbed now with the flint. A spark fell into the curls of tinder, but failed to produce a flame. Miriamele wrinkled her nose and tried again.

”Do you want me to try?”

”No, I don't want you to try.” She struck again without result. Her arms were getting weary.