WHEN I WOKE, THE SUN was up and the day was already warm. I was on the sandy bank of the Aracthus, my feet still in the water. The river lifted them and tugged gently, but not as if it still hoped to suck me in. It was moving quietly between its banks and seemed willing to make peace over the loss of Hamiathes’s Gift. At least that was my thinking as my eyes opened. A moment later came more sensible questions. Had I tried to escape the last maze at the last minute the night before and been trapped by the river, hallucinating everything else, the obsidian door, the gods, Hephestia, and Hamiathes’s Gift?
Altogether they seemed to make a likely fantasy that would fit well with my dreams during the past week. I wondered if I could have invented the cloth on Oceanus’s robe and the way it had felt, first satin cool and then velvet soft. My fingertips brushed against each other at the memory, and I looked down to see what I held in my hand. Still caught in my palm after a night in the river was the poor, plain, gray-and-white spotted stone—Hamiathes’s Gift.
Covering that hand with the other, I closed my eyes and thanked Hephestia, and Eugenides, Oceanus, Moira, Aracthus, and every god and goddess I could remember. Then I pulled my feet out of the river and dragged myself up to where the sand was dry and lay down to sleep a little longer. The magus, Pol, and Sophos found me there. They had seen the stone door from the cliff lying in the clear water beyond the waterfall and had walked downstream with their packs in case they might find my body and give it a decent burial before turning toward home. I woke to find them standing around me.
“Well,” the magus said when I rolled over, “that is good news at least.” As I sat up, he leaned over me. “It is a great relief to my conscience that you are not drowned, Gen.” He patted my shoulder awkwardly. “We are alive and you are alive, so this expedition was at least not the disaster of earlier ones. If we failed to retrieve Hamiathes’s Gift, well, perhaps someone else found it first, or perhaps it was never there at all.”
I had meant to make him wait a little, but he sounded so bleak that without meaning to, I rolled my hand over and opened the fist so that he could see the Gift, resting on my palm.
His knees seemed to weaken, and he squatted down beside me with his mouth open. I smiled at his wonder and my own delight. I was taken aback when he put his arms around my shoulders and hugged me like his own son, or anyway like a close relative.
“You are a wonder, Gen. I will carve your name on a stele outside the basilica, I promise.”
I laughed out loud.
“Where was it?”
I told him about the obsidian door and the stairway to the throne room, but I stumbled a little. When it came time to mention the gods, I passed over them. It didn’t seem right to talk about them in the light of day, with people who didn’t believe and might laugh. If the magus noticed, he didn’t comment.
“The river came down just as you said it might,” he told me. “And washed right across our campsite on the lower bank. So we owe you for our lives as well as for this.” He looked down at the stone he held in his hand.
“Is that really it?” Sophos asked. “How can you tell?”
The magus flipped it over so that he could see the lettering carved there, the four symbols of Hephestia’s ancient name.
“But it’s just a plain gray rock,” said Sophos.
“Do you have any doubts?” I asked.
“No,” Sophos admitted. “I just don’t understand why I am so sure.”
“In the story the other night,” I told Sophos, “when Hephestia rewarded Hamiathes at the end, she was supposed to have taken an ordinary stone from the river and dipped it in the water of immortality.”
“So it is just a rock?” he asked.
“Not entirely,” said the magus. “Look carefully at it in the sun.” He handed it back to me. I bounced it a moment on my palm. It was a rounded oval and just the weight, I thought, to go in a slingshot. But I looked closer at the letters carved in the side of it and saw the sun glint off something blue at the bottom of the carving.
“It’s a sapphire,” I said, “at least part of it is.” I peered down the hole bored from top to bottom, then flipped it over and, looking closely, could see where the water had worn the stone smooth and uncovered a few blue flecks of the gem inside.
“There is a description of it in the scrolls of the high priests of Eddis,” said the magus. “Whenever anyone produced a stone, the high priest compared it to the scroll’s description. No one but the priest could read the description, and so no one ever offered a successful copy. Probably because someone who is already as wealthy and powerful as the high priest of Eddis is difficult to corrupt.”
“Or he’s corrupt already and doesn’t want to share his power,” I said.
“But you know the description?” Sophos said to the magus.
“Yes.”
“How?” I asked.
“My predecessor visited the high priest during a trip as ambassador to Eddis. He offered the priest a drugged bottle of wine and then looked through his library while he was unconscious. He didn’t think that the description of the stone was particularly important at the time, but I found it noted in his journals after he disappeared.”
I shuddered at the idea of poisoning a high priest. For that sort of crime they were still throwing people off the edge of the mountain.
“You’re wet, Gen,” said the magus, mistaking the cause of my shivers. “Get into some dry clothes and get something to eat. Then if you have the strength, I’d like to get at least partway across the dystopia. The rest of our food is with Ambiades.”
So I ate the last of the jerky. The bread was gone. Sophos filled a cup with river water for me and set it aside until the silt settled. I had once again lost the tie for my hair, so I asked Pol for some string. He offered me two pieces of leather thong, one longer than the other. I tied up the end of my braid with the long one and kept the short one to use later. Then we began to pick our way back across the dystopia, the magus wearing Hamiathes’s Gift around his neck. It had passed out of my hands only a few hours after I had stolen it.
When the sun got hot in the middle of the day, we crawled into the shade of the tilted rocks and slept for a few hours. We reached the edge of the olive trees as the sun was setting, but we were still more than a mile above the campsite where we had left Ambiades. The sky was light as we walked south, but the groves were dark. Through the darkness we saw Ambiades’s fire blazing.
The magus shook his head. “He’ll have the fire watch out from fifty miles away.” He sent Pol ahead to put it out, or at least reduce the blaze, so that when the magus, Sophos, and I got to the clearing, Ambiades was over the first shock of seeing us return alive.
“I thought you were all dead,” he said. He didn’t admit that he’d kept the fire burning bright because he’d been afraid of our ghosts wandering back across the dystopia. While we were gone, he’d eaten most of the food, but the magus spared him any lectures, and we all went to sleep. I didn’t wake to see if anyone was keeping watch over me. I didn’t stir until the sun was up and I heard Ambiades moving around the camp, cleaning up the mess he’d made while we were gone. There was nothing for breakfast.
The magus intended to go down the edge of the Sea of Olives until we reached the nearest town to buy food for ourselves as well as some for the horses. “We’ll take a more direct route home. Now that we have the Gift, the quicker we go the better,” he said.
The horses must have been as happy as I was about the prospect of fresh food. The grazing was poor among the dried-up grasses. We packed up and rode back into the olives until we came to the overgrown maintenance road that turned toward the distant Seperchia. We came to a wide, shallow stream. As our horses stepped into the water, a group of mounted men swung out from behind a patch of dry oak and brambles where they had been hidden. I saw that they had swords in their hands. I didn’t wait to learn anything else.
The magus and I were nearly knee to knee, ahead of the others. I dragged the reins of my horse over to one side, and it stumbled into the horse beside it. I brushed shoulders with the magus for just a moment and then turned the horse on its haunches and drove it with my heels back toward the trees on the streambank. As a branch passed overhead, I grabbed it, using my free hand, and pulled myself up into the tree.
By the time I was secure on a higher branch and could look down, Pol and the magus had their swords out and one of the attacking horsemen was already lying in the water. I watched as the magus proved himself to be a swordsman as dangerous as Pol. Between them they held the three remaining attackers. Sophos was behind them, twisted in the saddle, his back to the fight, trying to get his own sword out of his saddlebag. Ambiades was doing the same, but he’d had the sense to first run his horse onto the bank, away from danger. Sophos, looking in the wrong direction, didn’t know how close he was to being spitted.
I called his name, but he couldn’t hear me over the other shouting, which in retrospect I realized was mostly the magus and Pol yelling at him to forget the sword and hide in the trees. Pol was being drawn out by one attacker, leaving the magus to fight two men and Sophos still unaware of his danger. His attention was on his sword belt, which was caught in the buckle of his saddlebag.
Swearing, I stood up on my tree branch and rushed along its length. I threw myself facedown, lying mostly on the main limb and partly on the outer branches, and reached through the prickling leaves. All that I could reach of Sophos was his hair. I grabbed that and pulled him off-balance just as a horseman slipped between the magus and Pol.
Sophos fell face first off his horse, almost taking me with him. He landed in the mud with his horse between him and the fighting, and if he’d stayed down, he would have been safe, but he struggled to his feet, sword in hand, as the cursed horse moved away. He was left standing with his mouth open, looking at the lifted sword of his opponent.
I closed my eyes, but at the last possible moment he must have shifted his weight and parried the blow aimed at his head. His return to guard position was slow, and I don’t know what he would have done next, being too far off-balance to recover, but he didn’t need to do anything. As I opened my eyes, Pol slid his sword into the man’s rib cage, nearly to the hilt. The man grunted and hung for a moment on the sword before he slid off into the water. There was another splash on the far side of the stream as the magus finished his opponent as well. I pushed myself upright on my branch and moved back toward the trunk of the tree.
There were four riderless horses, stamping around in the muddy stream. When their feet stopped crunching on the gravel and they stood still, looking confused, the magus was able to ask Sophos if he was hurt.
“No, I’m fine.”
“Good. Ambiades?”
“I’m fine.”
“Pol?”
“Nothing serious.” He was mopping up blood from a slice just below his elbow.
“And Gen? I see you found a safe place to wait while we were busy.”
I opened my mouth to point out that I didn’t have a sword to defend myself with, not that I wouldn’t have climbed the tree anyway, but instead I stared at him with my mouth hanging open like a horrified gargoyle. I pointed to his shirt. He lifted one hand, instinctively checking for a wound, before he realized. Hamiathes’s Gift was gone. He looked down at the neatly sliced leather thong lying over one shoulder. He ran his hand over it in disbelief, then felt frantically in the folds of his clothes. He checked the ridges in his saddle and saddlebags before he jumped off his horse and waded into the stream, cursing. Pol and Sophos followed after him, but there was too much mud in the water by then. Nothing could be seen.
“What happened? What happened?” cried Ambiades from the bank. He was the only one of us still mounted.
“The stone, the cursed stone,” said the magus. “I’ve lost it in the fighting. Damn it, who the hell are these people?” he said, shifting a body off a gravel bank in midstream.
“Are they all dead?” Ambiades asked.
“Yes, they’re all dead. Get over here and help me with this one.”
They dragged the bodies out of the water, while I sat forgotten in the tree. I very carefully rebraided my hair and watched. When the dead men were laid out on the bank, the magus remembered me.
“Come down and help look,” he told me. He was distracted and was asking more than ordering.
Reluctantly I slipped down from the tree and stepped around the bodies. They were soldiers of the queen of Attolia. One of them was a lieutenant. He was young, and looked younger with wet hair stuck to his forehead and water beading on his face. He’d led the other horsemen as they rode down on us, led them no doubt onto the end of Pol’s sword.
There was one part of his uniform that hadn’t gotten wet, with either blood or water, and its shape—a coleus leaf—caught my eye. After a moment I stooped to scoop a little water from the stream and dribbled it back and forth across the dry spot on his tunic. I soaked the image until it melted into the wetness of the rest of his uniform. The water was cold. It splashed on his neck and pooled in the hollow of his collarbone, but he didn’t mind, and he didn’t deserve to be marked with the coward leaf as he journeyed to the underworld.
When the mark was gone, I straightened up and noticed Pol watching me. I shrugged and wiped my hands on my pants, but my pants were muddy and my hands only ended up dirty as well as wet.
We left the bodies lying on the bank while the magus organized a search for Hamiathes’s Gift. Once the mud had settled, he had us stand in a line across the stream well below where the fighting had been. Staying in line, we worked our way upstream until he was sure we had passed the place where the stone would have dropped. There wasn’t enough current to have moved the stone far, but the stone was no different from any of the thousands of pebbles there on the streambed. Only the magus and I had held the stone. Ambiades had never even seen it. We’d stayed for almost a quarter of an hour, all of us staring at the gravel under our feet when Pol finally spoke up.
“It’s gone, magus.”
The rest of us continued to stare at the streambed.
“Magus.” Pol spoke more firmly, and this time we picked up our heads. Ambiades, Sophos, and I looked back and forth between the magus and his soldier.
“Yes,” the magus finally agreed, after a long moment of silence. “We’ve got to go. Ambiades, get the horses and bring them to this side of the stream. Sophos, see if any of those other horses are still nearby. We should have tied them up. If they have saddlebags, check to see if there’s any food in them.”
Three of the horses were standing with ours—misery loves company—but the fourth one was gone, presumably back to its camp.
“There’s no time to catch it now,” said the magus. “We’ll have to go as quickly as we can.” He pulled himself onto his horse and looked one last time at the stream. “I don’t believe this,” he said.
I watched him until even I felt uncomfortable and looked away, as Pol, Sophos, and Ambiades had done. He’d had the stone for a day and lost it; I should have been pleased. Five days earlier I would have been delighted to imagine what it would be like for him in the court of Sounis when he went back to his king and told him the gamble had failed, but I wasn’t enjoying myself. I told myself it was because I was wet from wading in the stream. Or it may have been that I was afraid of the people who would be coming soon to find out what happened to the lieutenant and his three men.
“All right,” said the magus at last. “All right. Let’s go.” But he still didn’t turn his horse away from the stream. In the distance we heard a shout. The stray horse had been found, but the magus sat, unwilling to give up. He looked at the streambank and the trees around him, as if for landmarks, as if there were some hope that he might return to the place to search again. My nerves communicated themselves to my horse, and it sidled and blew underneath me.
Finally the magus dragged himself away. We turned our horses down the track and kicked them into a gallop. The magus rode beside me, still looking stunned. I don’t know what the others were thinking; I was concentrating on my riding. This was no time to drop behind or, worse, fall off the horse.
When we’d covered some distance, we turned into the trees and rode more slowly for almost an hour until we came to another open path.
“They’ll track us,” Sophos said, looking over his shoulder.
“We’ll have to keep ahead of them,” said the magus. I swiveled my head around to look at him. He sounded almost cheerful. He looked cheerful.
“A little danger adds spice to life, Gen,” he told me.
I was stunned at his recovery, and it must have shown. “I’ve had some time to think, Gen. The stone itself isn’t important. Now that we have seen it for ourselves, as well as having the description, and we know that no one else can produce the original, we can make a copy.”
How someone could have held that stone in his hand and then say it wasn’t important, I didn’t know. I almost expected lightning to strike him dead.
“What about the fact that the stone is supposed to carry its own authority?” I snapped. “You’re supposed to look at it and know that it is Hamiathes’s Gift.” We’d all felt that, I’d thought, by the banks of the Aracthus.
But the magus had an answer. “That will be dismissed as superstition,” he said confidently. “We’ll manage just fine.”
All of my work could be thrown away. He would manage. I gritted my teeth.
The magus turned to speak to Pol. “We’ll follow this track into the cultivated groves, then cut through those toward the main road. If they haven’t seen us, we might hide in traffic; if they have, we’ll swing back under the olives and use the maintenance paths as much as possible.”
“What about food?” I asked. My tone nettled him.
“I guess we’ll try to get something in Pirrhea tonight,” he said vaguely.
“Tonight?” My exasperation pierced his bubble of false cheer.
“I’m sorry,” he snapped, “but I can’t pull food out of the sky for you.”
“You’re not going to pull it out of Pirrhea either,” I said. “What do you plan to do, knock on a door and say, ‘Excuse us, there are four of the Queen’s Guard dead, soldiers are searching every road for us, and I’d like to buy a few loaves of bread and some dried beef, please’?”
“And what do you suggest, O oracle of the gutter?”
“I suggest that you should have brought food for five people with this miserable traveling circus of yours. Alternatively, you should have left Useless the Elder and his younger brother at home!”
“He’s not my brother.” Ambiades was offended.
“That,” I snarled at him, “was a figure of speech. Now shut up.” He jumped in the saddle as if he’d been slapped. I turned back to the magus. “How do you propose to get food?”
But the magus had had a moment to think and had arrived at the obvious solution. “You,” he said, “are going to steal it.”
I threw up my hands.
Pirrhea was an old town. Like many, it had outgrown its walls and was surrounded by fields and farmhouses. I walked through kitchen gardens, harvesting whatever my hands found in the dark. I dropped what I gathered into a bag I had taken from a shed at the first house I passed. Once I got too close to a goat pen and the occupants bleated at me. When no one came out to check on them, I went in and collected two cans of goat milk from the settling shelf. I was thirsty as well as hungry and drank one of the cans while I considered burgling someone’s kitchen for leftover bread. I decided against it. Stale bread wasn’t worth the risk, but I did slip into the henhouse of the largest home I passed, to wring the necks of three chickens. I dropped them into a second bag and left town.
The magus and the others were waiting for me in the trees on the far side of an onion field. I hadn’t been keen to risk my neck for them. There had been recriminations of uselessness as we rode. Ambiades hadn’t liked it when I’d suggested he should have been left home. I pointed out that he’d been no help at the ford. He pointed out that I had climbed a tree. I pointed out that I had no sword. He offered to give me his, point first.
When I’d left the others in a rare grove of almond trees outside town, the magus had told me he’d give me an hour, and if I wasn’t back by then, he’d find the town center and shout “Thief!” at the top of his lungs.
In the dark he hadn’t been able to see the contempt on my face, but he could hear it in my voice. “Be sure to shout ‘Murderers! Murderers!’ too,” I said.
His answer had followed me as I walked away. “I’ll make sure that we all go to the block together.”
Everyone looked sadly at the chickens when the magus said there was no time to cook them. Pol tied them to his saddle, and we headed off into the dark, eating handfuls of raw vegetables and crunching grit in our teeth.
“There’s a livery stable on the main road at Kahlia,” the magus said. “We can steal a change of horses there.”
I choked on the spinach I was chewing. “We can what?”
“It’s another two hours’ ride if we push the horses.” He went on, ignoring my interruption. “We can find a place to camp by the road. There are enough travelers that we won’t be noticed. We’ll get a couple of hours’ sleep. Pol, you could put the chickens into the fire, and then we’ll get the horses and ride on. We should lose them when we cut away from the main road, away from the Seperchia’s pass to Eddis. They won’t expect that.”
“You are going to use the same trail back home? Why not just ride for the main pass?” Ambiades asked. “It’s closer, isn’t it? And once we’re in Eddis, we’re on neutral ground.”
“Once we get to Kahlia we’d be closer to the main pass,” the magus agreed. “But they’ll have all the roads blocked, and I’m not sure we could sneak through. The land around the pass is mostly open fields. They won’t expect us to cut back inland, and we should slip by them.”
“I think the main pass would be better,” Ambiades said hesitantly, giving the magus one last chance.
“It’s not your job to think,” the magus told him.
Ambiades tossed his head, and I thought he might say something, but he didn’t.
“About those horses…” I said.
“You’ll do your best, Gen,” said the magus, “and if your best isn’t good enough, we’ll all—”
“Go to the block together,” I grumbled. “You said that before.”
No one said anything more until we stopped on the road just outside Kahlia. The magus was as optimistic as ever. Pol seemed to take everything in stride, and Sophos didn’t know enough to be frightened. Only Ambiades was as nervous as a cat too close to a fire. Sophos had forgotten that he was keeping his distance from his idol, and he tried to chat with Ambiades as they unsaddled the horses, but Ambiades didn’t answer.
Pol kindled a fire in a traveler’s fire ring and cut up the chickens to cook. The fire ring was just a circle of stones mortared together. There was one every fifty yards or so on the roads outside large towns. They were built for the merchants who stopped their packtrains outside towns to camp. There were several packtrains camped near us that night, and smaller groups of travelers with just one wagon or no wagon at all. It was warm enough that a tent or a blanket roll would do. There were a few guards posted, but they weren’t watching for us.
We all slept, except Pol. The magus woke me before he woke the others and gave me careful directions how to get through town to the livery stable near the opposite gate.
“Bring the horses out there. Pol will be waiting for you. The rest of us will be up the road with the saddles.” He seemed as carefree as Sophos, but he didn’t have Sophos’s excuse.
“Do you have any idea how impossible this is?” I asked him.
He laughed. “I thought you said you could steal anything.” He gave me a shove on the shoulder and started me down the road.
“Things,” I hissed to myself as I walked, “don’t make noise.”
The moon was still up, and there was enough light to see the road in front of me. When I got close to the town walls, I could see by the light of lanterns burning by the gates. They were open. They probably hadn’t been closed for years, but there was a guard in the archway.
He was supposed to be watching for suspicious people—like me. I couldn’t think of a plausible excuse for coming into town at such an hour, so I avoided the problem altogether by circling away from the gate and climbing over the wall out of the guard’s sight. I dropped down into someone’s backyard, then worked my way between buildings until I found a wide street that I hoped was the one the magus had mentioned in his directions.
I hurried through absolutely empty intersections, listening at every corner for the footsteps of the watch, but I met no one. I was on the right street, and I found the livery stable and the inn next to it without trouble. Both were closed for the night of course. Wooden shutters were pulled over the windows of the inn, and the gates to the courtyard were closed. I listened again for the watch, and when I heard nothing, I pushed open one gate after lifting its post off the ground so that it wouldn’t scrape. The post fit into a gap between the flagstones so that the gate wouldn’t swing closed again.
When I peeped into the stable, I found the ostler asleep in his chair at one end. Good luck for me. Not only was he asleep, but I guessed by the empty bottle on his left that he was drunk as well. I collected five leading straps from a peg over his head and slipped down the row of stalls, looking into each one at a sleeping horse. I picked five that I thought were mares and woke them with a whisper. I clipped the straps to their halters, and then I opened all the stall doors, carefully so that there was no squeak, starting with the one farthest from the ostler. The horses lifted themselves to their feet. Puzzled at being disturbed at such an odd hour, they made small noises of inquiry, none loud enough to wake the ostler.
When all the stall doors were open, I went back to my chosen five and led the first one out. As I led her past the stall of my next choice, I leaned in to twitch the strap hanging from that mare’s halter. She obediently followed her stablemate out of the stall and down the row. The other horses came out in the same way. Soon all five were in a line, and the horses left in their stalls were leaning out of their stalls, wondering what they were missing.
I was at the door of the stable, looking out at the stone-flagged courtyard where the horses’ hooves were going to sound like the crack of doom. I looked back at the sleeping ostler. He would sleep through the noise only if he were very drunk indeed, and there was no way to know how much had been in the bottle when he started. There was an obvious solution, but I was a thief, not yet a murderer.
I sent a hasty prayer to the god of thieves that the horses would keep quiet and that the ostler was blind drunk; then I shuffled around until I had all five leading ropes in my hands and drew the horses out.
The silence was so profound that I turned back to make sure that the horses were following. It hadn’t occurred to me that the gods that I’d seen silent and unmoving in their temple might still be taking an interest in me. I almost bumped into the mare directly behind me. She threw up her head in surprise but didn’t make a noise. I stepped backward, and she followed. The iron shoes on her hooves struck the flagstones soundlessly. The other horses came as well. Afraid that I’d been struck deaf, I backed out of the courtyard. Behind my horses came the others from the stable. They slipped through the gates of the inn and disappeared like ghosts down different streets. When the ostler woke, he would have to search the entire town before he would know that five of his charges were missing.
At the town gate I found Pol standing over the body of a guard.
“Did you kill him?” My lips formed the words without speaking.
Pol shook his head. Like the ostler, the guard was asleep. Pol took four of the horses, two leading straps in each hand, and left me just one to lead up the grass beside the road, between two houses and then out across the fields. We reached the cover of some trees and found the other three waiting.
“Was there any trouble?” the magus asked, and the spell of silence burst with a pop.
I shook my head. “No,” I said, “no trouble.” Except that I’d discovered that I was eager to divest myself of the gods’ attention as quickly as possible.
Sophos took the leading strap from my hands and led my horse away to be saddled.
Pol asked me, “Are you all right?”
I nodded my head.
He took me by the elbow and felt my body shaking. “Are you sure?”
I nodded again. How could I explain that this was a perfectly normal reaction for someone who has had a careless prayer answered by the gods? The silence of the horses had been immeasurably more unnerving than the gods in their temple. Maybe because the stables had been part of my world and the temple had not. I don’t know. For the first time in a long while, Pol had to help me onto my horse.
We were only an hour away from Kahlia when a cold, damp breeze blew down my neck and I pulled up my horse to listen to the sound of the temple gong beating in the night.
“What’s that?” Ambiades asked when the others had also stopped.
Probably Aracthus, still doing his part, I thought. “The ostler woke up,” I said, and dug my heels into the horse underneath me.
By morning we had nearly covered the ground back to the mountain trail. The horses were exhausted, and our pursuers were so close that twice we’d seen them over our shoulders at straight places in the road. The ostler must have called out the town garrison without counting his horses first. We lost sight of the soldiers when we turned into the olive groves, but they remained close behind. As we twisted in the dark under the trees, we moved a little quicker than our pursuers, only because we knew where we were going and they did not.
The mountain rose so steeply out of the Sea of Olives that it appeared without warning as we came out of the trees. Suddenly in front of us sunshine was falling on the piled rubble at the base of the cliff. The magus pulled up his horse and dismounted.
“Not many people know about the trail. If we can get up the cliffside before they see us, they might not know where we’ve gone.”
“Doesn’t Eddis begin here? Won’t we be on neutral ground?” Sophos asked.
“Only if there’re enough Eddisians to insist on it,” said the magus, and slapped his horse with the riding crop, sending it down the alley between trees and mountains, followed by the other horses. “Get moving,” he said to the rest of us.
“Not me,” I said, intending to find a safe hiding place to wait until the hunt flowed past. It was past time for me to be going my own way. Once they were free of pursuit, the magus and Pol might turn their attention to ensuring my return to Sounis and prison, and I wasn’t going back to prison, or to Sounis for that matter.
The magus was astonished. Then he was angry. “What do you mean, not you?”
“I’m not going back to prison or the silver mines or some other hole in the ground. I’ll take my chances in Attolia.”
“You think I would take you back to the prison?” the magus asked.
“You think I would trust you?” I answered, unfairly. He hadn’t given me any reason not to trust him, but everyone remembered my comments in the mountains about the probability of a knife in the back.
“The Attolians will kill you just the same,” he said, “more painfully probably.”
“They’ll be too busy chasing you.”
The magus glanced over at Pol.
“You don’t have time to waste forcing me,” I pointed out.
He threw up his hands. “Fine!” he bellowed. “Go die on the swords of the Attolians. Be drawn, be quartered, be hung, I don’t care. Spend the rest of your life in one of their dungeons. What possible difference would it make to me?”
I sighed. I hadn’t intended to offend him. “Leave me a sword,” I said without thinking, “and I’ll do my best to slow them down.” I could have bitten off my own tongue, but the magus didn’t take me up on my offer. He snorted in disbelief and turned away.
The others followed, but Sophos turned back after a few hesitant steps. He awkwardly pulled his sword free from its scabbard and offered it hilt first in my direction. “It’s not any use to me,” he explained truthfully.
It was a beginner’s sword, lighter than a regular one but better than nothing. I took it by the blunt part of the blade just below the hilt and raised it to him before he turned to hurry after the magus, who had looked back once to snort in contempt before disappearing between the boulders.
I chose a nearby boulder and climbed up the side of it. Once I reached the top, I was above the eye level of any passing horseman, and it was as good a hiding place as any. Any pursuers would ride by without being aware of me, unless of course I jumped down on them, waving a sword.
I couldn’t imagine what had possessed me to suggest such a thing to the magus. I’d sworn to the gods from the king’s prison that I wasn’t going to embroil myself in any more stupid plans. Of course I hadn’t actually believed in the gods at the time, but why should I care what happened to the magus and his apprentices? I spent ten minutes sweating in the sun, reviewing all the reasons I didn’t like the magus and everything he stood for, and trying to ignore a grisly image of all of them being beheaded.
There was a jingle of bits, and several hundred yards away the Attolians appeared one by one from the cover of the trees. They paused to look at the hoofprints leading toward the main pass, then ignored them, riding directly toward the magus’s secret trail. They weren’t the garrison from Kahlia; like the soldiers we’d met earlier, they were dressed in the colors of the Queen’s Guard.
I told myself one more time as they passed beneath me that the only reasonable thing to do was to wait until they passed, so I could sneak down the far side of the boulder and disappear into the trees. Then I jumped onto the shoulders of the second rider from the front. The other horses were moving too quickly to stop, and as I hit the ground on top of the Attolian, I saw a hoof land on the turf several inches from the end of my nose. The Attolian struggled up on top of me, just in time to be hit by a following hoof. The horse came down as I scrambled away on all fours, dragging Sophos’s sword. I’d managed not to stick the Attolian, his horse, or myself. I got to my feet and ran.
Once I was among the olives I could move faster than the men still on horses, and I was well ahead of those who’d been thrown. I was heading for a patch of dry oaks I’d seen from the clifftop ten days earlier. The oaks grew low to the ground, and I counted on their tightly packed leaves to hide me. Without dogs, the pursuers had little chance of dragging me out and I could stay undercover until nightfall, then disappear in the dark.
The solid mass of oak trees was visible between the trunks of the olives, and I was slowing down, trying to pick the best place to dive into the cover of their leaves, when a second party of horsemen appeared and cut off my escape. Unable to outdistance them for long, I swung back toward the mountain, hoping to get among the rocks, where I couldn’t be ridden down. If I could climb the cliff face, and if they didn’t have crossbows or, gods forbid it, guns to shoot me with, I might get away or at least surrender without being killed first. I pounded across the hard-packed dirt under the olives, and some small part of me that should have been thinking something more sensible noticed that my strength had returned since I’d left the king’s prison.
I made it to open ground, but my pursuers caught up with me just before I reached the rocks. A horse moved in front of me, and I had to turn to avoid it. There were horses everywhere, and shouting. Everyone seemed to be shouting.