discover that the stone has vanished.
But at night, you can call light from your palm.
Marit was weak, too exhausted to travel. She lived in the shelter through the cold season, gathering and hunting. Once she had gained enough strength, she cut herself an exercise staff to work through the conditioning forms taught to reeves.
The winged horse vanished for intervals that never lasted longer than a day. She never saw it graze in the meadow or drink from the cold stream, which made her suspect that it, too, was a ghost: the ghost of a Guardian's winged horse. The Guardians were dead and gone. She had herself seen the bones of a dead Guardian, the day she was murdered on the Liya Pass. Most likely this state of being betwixt and between was indeed the punishment she had received for walking onto a Guardian altar when everyone knew it was forbidden.
But at least Joss still lived. He had survived. That was her consolation.
2
A new year arrived with the heat and the Flower Rains. She prepared travel food. When she left, she traveled along animal tracks and footpaths through high, dry country unfamiliar to her. Walking was such a slow way of traveling, especially since the worn leather
straps of the sandals she had taken from the hut kept breaking. Yet if she walked in bare feet, her soles got cut and bruised.
The winged mare tagged after like a love-struck youth. When the path was reasonably smooth, she practiced riding. Except for that morning of its arrival, she did not see it fly.
Not until the day the bandits attacked her.
She heard them long before she saw them.
'We've been tramping up here for months and found nothing. I say we go back to Walshow. I'm wanting hot spiced soup from Shardit's kettle.'
'That's not all you're wanting from Shardit's kettle. Not that she don't dole it out to anyone with enough coin to pay the tithing.' Cruel laughter floated over the trees.
Marit paused on a mostly washed-out track where she was picking her way among stones and steep water- cut trenches. Reluctantly, she had taken the knife and the bow from the shelter, not liking to steal but knowing she couldn't survive without them. She shut her eyes, listening. The wind chased up the ridge through pine and tollyrake. She smelled a sweet-sour scent, like a festering corruption in flesh.
'Shut your ugly muzzle, arsehole. She's my wife.'
'We all know what she was before, heh heh. Didn't she get thrown out of the temple for asking for coin-?'
A scuffle broke out: the distinctive smack of fist against flesh; men egging the combatants on; feet scraping and sliding on earth; breath coming in bursts and gasps.
'Stop that!' A stouter weapon thumped heads. 'Cursed fools. Keep your minds on our task.'
'Yes, Captain. Yes, yes,' they said, but she heard resentment and fear in their voices.
'Move on out, then. Move out.'
'Captain! See there! Is that the one we're looking out for?'
Their tiny figures were perfectly visible where the path bent through a clearing a very long distance below, beyond earshot. Hearing them had distracted her from looking so far. But she could see them.
And they had seen her.
She swore under her breath, losing track of their voices as they
burst into activity, some racing up the path while others spread out to make a net of men along the hillside to capture her in case she tried to sneak past them. She had only seven arrows, and the knife was just a knife, the blade not longer than her hand.
'The hells!'
She began climbing back the way she had come. The horse blocked the track, lowered its head, and shoved her.
'Great Lady! You useless beast! Get out of my way.'
It raised its head and stared at her, affronted.
'I beg you, please,' she added impatiently. 'I can't fight them. I have to run.'
It unfolded its wings. They were astonishing, as pale as its silvery-gray coat and too fragile to lift such weight.
'Curse it.' She tugged her stolen pack more tightly on her shoulders and ducked under one wing to come up at the saddle from behind. The wings rose over the mare's shoulders, sprouting out of a deep barrel chest thick with muscle. She made awkward work of mounting but fixed her legs into the straps -
The horse leaped.
She shrieked as she lurched sideways, grasping the post to stop from falling as the mare beat with heavy wing-strokes into the sky. Then she started laughing with relief and nerves as they rose higher, and the men came into view. One loosed a single arrow, which fell harmlessly back to earth, although she wished it might loop back and stick him in the chest.
The mare's flight seemed snail-like compared with the effortless sail of her eagle. It passed through the edges of several promising thermals, but unlike an eagle, it did not catch them and rise. It flew no faster than a horse could gallop, its thin legs imitating the gait as if it were running along an invisible road. Slow, slow, slow. Below, the company continued its dogged pursuit, scrambling up the trail.
'We're in for it now,' she said to the horse, who flicked an ear. 'Cursed if I don't think they're out looking for me in particular, although why I should think so, I don't know. I must have escaped that woodsmen's camp after all. Maybe these are friends of theirs, or the very men from that camp in pursuit of me. Lord Radas might have put them on my trail. But the one man said Walshow. That
town lies beyond High Haldia, up in Heaven's Ridge. That's well to the north of the Liya Pass and far away from Iliyat.'
Above the trees, where they flew, she had a better grasp of the land around her. She knew she was no longer on the Liya Pass, and nowhere near the vale of Iliyat, where Lord Radas ruled. And she certainly wasn't anywhere near Copper Hall. She had seen country like this during the year she had flown her apprentice's circuit as a newly trained reeve: in the high mountain escarpments of Heaven's Ridge. Steep ridges and peaks dominated the northern and northwestern horizons, a wall to separate the Hundred from the dangerous lands beyond. She and the mare flew above the foothills, a wilderness known to reeves as a haunt of bandits and other folk tossed out of their home for criminal behavior; it was also the remote nesting territories where eagles mated and raised their young out of sight of human eyes.
How had she gotten here, hundreds of mey away from the place she had died?
If she had died. Yet she could not shake that horrible dream of walking to Copper Hall. It had seemed so real. Yet if she had died and become a ghost, why did she get cold? Why did her hands and feet get scratched? How could these men see her? That twenty gods-touched men would have flocked together in the barren backcountry defied belief, because the temples prized any man or woman gifted with the spirit sight, even the ones who were cracked in the head like the old man Mokass. It was almost as if she had been a ghost then, and no longer was. How could that happen?
They lost sight of their pursuers. The mare shifted balance for a ponderous turn. Mark's legs ached as she clung to saddle and post. To be harnessed under an eagle was a very different sensation from sitting astride a horse; the view was worse from the horse, for one, with those wings getting in the way of her sight. The rise and fall of the wings distracted her until a light glinted ahead, halfway up a black cliff face rising out of a wooded hill. As the horse flew straight for the rock wall, Marit realized that she had no reins and could not control its flight. They galloped through the air straight at the escarpment, and the shadows opened to reveal a cleft and a wide ledge. The mare sailed in. Its hooves struck stone. Marit hissed between gritted teeth as the horse stamped to a halt.
She dismounted, staggered, and dropped to her knees. The mare folded its wings and ambled to the back of
