'Not much,' Kyra replied. 'We better be cuttin' overland from here if m' mem'ry be still good. Look you -- '
She dipped a twig in muddy, black water and drew on a flat rock near the cave's entrance.
Tarma got down on her knees beside her and studied her crude map carefully. 'One, maybe two candlemarks, depending, hmm?'
'Aye, depending.' Kyra chewed on the other end of the twig for a moment. 'We got to stick t'ridges -- '
'What?' Beaker exclaimed. 'For every gossip in the hills to see us?'
'Oh, bad to be seen, but worse to be bogged. Valleys, they go boggy this time of year, like. Stuff livin' in the bogs is bad for a beast's feet. Y' want yer laddy's hooves t' rot off 'fore we reach trail's end, y' ride the valleys.'
'No middle way?' Tarma asked.
'Well.... We won't be goin' where there's hkely many, an' most of those'd be my kin. They see me, they know what I was abaht, and they keep their tongues from clackin'.'
'That'll have to do.' Tarma got up from her knees, and dusted the gravel off the knees of her breeches -- which were, she was happy to find, rela-tively dry. 'All right, children, let's ride.'
'I dunno -- ' Garth said dubiously, peering up through the drizzle at what was little better than a worn track along the shale cliffside.
Tarma studied the trail and chewed at the corner of her lip. 'Kyra,' she said, finally, 'your beast's the weakest of the lot. Give it a try. If she can make it, we all can.'
'Aye,' Kyra saluted, and turned her mare's head to the trail. She let the mare take her time and pick her own places to set her feet along the track. It seemed to take forever --
But eventually they could see that she was waving from the top.
'Send the first bird, Beaker,' Tarma said, heading Ironheart after the way Kyra had followed. 'We're going to see if this trail is a dead end or the answer to our prayers.'
Twice before sunset they lost the track on broad expanses of bare rock, and spent precious time trying to pick it up again, all of them combing the ground thumblength by thumblength.
Sunset was fast approaching the second time they lost, then found the trail again. Tarma scanned the sky warily, trying to judge, with the handicap of lowering clouds, how much time they had before darkness fell. They obviously weren't going to make trail's end by sunset -- so the choice was whether to camp here on this windswept slant of scoured stone, or to press on in the hope of coming up with something better and maybe instead find themselves spending the night on a ledge two handspans wide.
She finally decided to press on, allowing just enough time in reserve that they could double back if they had to.
The track led on through lichen and rubble: treacherous stuff, except where the wild ponies had pounded a thin line of solidity. Jodi was mapping as they went along, and marking their backtrail with carefully inconspicuous 'cairns' composed of no more than three or four pebbles. The drizzle had stopped, at least, and the exertion that was warming them had driven most of the damp out of their clothing. The pony-track led down into a barren gulley -- Tarma disliked that, and kept watching for water marks on the rocks they passed. If there was a cloudburst and this happened to be one of the local runoff sites, they could be hock-deep in tumbling rock and fast water in the time it took to blink.
But the gulley stayed dry, the track eased a bit -- and then, like a gift from the gods, just before Tarma would have signaled a turnaround point, they came upon a possible campsite.
Sometime in the not-too-recent past, part of the hill above them had come sliding down. creating a horseshoe of boulders the size of a house. There would be shelter from the wind there, their fire would be out of sight of prying eyes -- and it would be easy to defend from predators.
Garth eyed the site with the same interest Tarma was feeling. 'No place to get out of the rain, if it decided to come down again,' he observed, 'and nothing much to burn but that scrub up there on the wall. We'd have us a pot of hot tea, but a cold camp.'
'Huh. The choice is this or the flat back there,' Tarma told them. 'Me, I'd take this. Kyra? This is your land.'
'Aye, I'd take this; we've slept wet afore,' Kyra agreed. 'This 'un isn't a runoff, an' don't look like any more of the hill is gonna slip while we're here. I'd say 'tis safe enough.'
