Tongue all that well either yet, of course, and Astrid had been gasping.
“It was…” Ritva thought. “She was hurting a lot and she said good-bye to us all and told Alleyne to teach the children she’d loved them and hadn’t wanted to leave while they were still so young, and then… I thought she was gone and she opened her eyes and said: Like silver glass… green shores… the gulls… a white tower… home, home, at last…
“And then she died,” Ritva whispered after a moment. “One by one they go, the heroes, the legends.”
The surviving crew folk of the dirigible were grouped at a little distance, the ones not too badly injured to stand. Major Hanks spoke a command and they came to attention, their hands following his to a salute. Behind them the burnt wreckage of the Curtis LeMay was smeared across a scrubby hillside, parts of the brush it had set afire still smoldering though the tall plume had dispersed over the course of the day. The Thurstons stood nearer, but Cecile and her daughters were a little apart from Juliet; and they stood on the side of her that put her son between them. The boy was sobbing from the swirl of emotions around them, but he was too tired to be loud about it.
The Dunedain were closer still, and Ritva was near the leaders; she was Astrid’s niece, after all. Alleyne had invited Juliet into the party, since it was to save her or perhaps her son that his wife had lunged forward, but there had been an icy politeness to it, and she had declined in a half-heard murmur.
“Farewell, beloved,” Alleyne said, his eyes locked on the body. “Wait for me, until my work here is finished.”
Farewell, anamchara, sister of my soul, Eilir’s fingers said. The threads of our lives are spun together forever.
Together they stepped forward, their hands on the torch. The pine logs were stacked crisscross in six layers, and the gaps between them had been stuffed with branches and needles and bone-white fallen timber. The wind from the north was still brisk, even though the storm had blown itself out. The kindling caught with an eager rick- rick-rick sound, and then the whole pyre seemed to explode into a pillar of flame and smoke that rose and bent away from them towards the southwest. The summer-dry sap-rich wood burned with a dragon’s hissing roar, almost instantly hot enough to turn bone to dust. Ritva felt her eyes water and brushed at them again.
Eilir was crying once more as they backed away, weeping quietly, her tears trickling down past a silent sorrow; she and Astrid had met in the first year of the Change, and sworn the anamchara oath not long after. They had spent a generation together. John Hordle wept as well, with the harsh jerky sound of a man unaccustomed to it. Alleyne’s handsome face looked as if it were carved from ivory; his lips moved silently in words she couldn’t make out for a moment, and then he bowed his head.
One thing’s changed, Ritva knew suddenly.
Uncle Alleyne had never taken some things about the Rangers altogether seriously, though he’d been scrupulously polite and never made a fuss even as he gave all his considerable skill and ability to their affairs. The Dunedain had already been refounded by Astrid and Eilir when he arrived fifteen years ago with his father and John, though not long before that. Now…
Now he’ll live her dream, she realized. And he’ll do it perfectly. For her.
They waited silently until the logs collapsed inward and the roar of the fire died down to a crackle that would last all night. Then he raised his head and gave the note. Ritva joined in on the beat, and every one of the Dunedain as well. Eilir swayed to the rhythm, her hands dancing: “A Elbereth Gilthoniel silivren penna miriel…”
When they were finished, Ritva whispered again to herself: “Thy starlight on the Western Seas.”
Then she shook herself. You had to be able to put things aside and go on. They were in a dangerous wilderness and there was a great deal to do. The ashes would be carried home in Astrid’s helm, and by her long- standing will be scattered in Mithrilwood by the falls whose beauty she’d loved, but that was her husband’s work and her anamchara ’s. Caught in the storm’s giant fist they had hopelessly overshot their rendezvous south of Boise, where helpers were supposed to be waiting.
They knew in a general sense where they were; it wasn’t all that far from where the Quest had passed through going east two years ago, just before they ran into General-President Thurston the elder’s column. They could locate themselves on a map as soon as they hit a marked roadway or abandoned town. What they weren’t likely to find was people, or any of the things people would have with them.
Ian Kovalevsky looked around. “Looks a bit like the Rockies, only lower,” he said.
Ritva snorted. “That’s because it is the Rockies, more or less, sweetie,” she said.
Sometimes she forgot that Ian had never been more than a few hundred miles from the place he’d been born. Most people traveled far less than that, of course, but you thought about them as the ones you rode by when you passed a farm or village. It had been all travel since they met. She’d never had the slightest impulse to farm, but she was beginning to feel that two years of rarely sleeping in the same spot for more than a day running was taking mobility too far.
The western horizon was jagged; the plain of sagebrush and yellow-brown grass heaved up into rocky heights, gray striped with red, and woods of aspen and bristlecone and lodgepole in sheltered spots. They had no food with them, but that wasn’t the problem it would have been later in the year. They did have their bows and game looked to be available if not plentiful and Rangers learned how to forage for nuts and roots and edible greens. More serious was the lack of all camping gear; no tents, no bedding, no salt, nothing to cook with, only a few axes and hatchets. And…
“No horses,” Ian said succinctly. “Plus we’ve got wounded and carrying them’s going to slow us a lot. Not to mention a two-year-old.”
Ritva sighed. “We’ve done what Operation Luthien was supposed to do, more or less,” she said. “All those people in Boise heard Cecile. .. and Juliet… and we’ve got them and Martin doesn’t. That was real important, it’s why this was such a high-priority mission. It would be a lot better if we could get them back to Montival quickly and completely out of his reach, of course. I suppose he’ll have a cavalry brigade headed this way as fast as he can.”
A long whistle split the air from the east, where the sentry was stationed. She read its modulations as she would speech or Sign: horsemen in sight.
The stillness dissolved in a rush for weapons and gear.
“No, I do not think it was an accident we met you,” Rimpoche Tsewang Dorje said later that night, after the rising of the moon.
He leaned forward to pour himself a cup of the herb tea from the pot that rested by the campfire. More glowed across the rolling plain, hundreds of them. The folk of Chenrezi Monastery and the Valley of the Sun that looked to it for leadership and the ranches and tribes allied to it had sent their riders to war, across the wilderness to join the High King’s host. That was partly because the questers had lived among them for a whole winter; and more because they trusted the Abbot when he told them it was necessary.
“But then, there are no accidents,” Dorje went on. “We are all pilgrims on the Way; taking different paths, but eventually the paths will meet. Is it then a surprise that the pilgrims do likewise?”
The Abbot of Chenrezi Monastery looked exactly as Ritva remembered in her last sight of him when the questers left the Valley of the Sun in the spring of the previous year. The shabby wrapped orange robe might have been the same one. It left one shoulder bare, and the skinny knotted legs that ended in gnarled sandaled feet. His head needed no razor, and his face was a mass of wrinkles and yet somehow like a boy’s, with a flicker of humor in the dark narrow eyes. The hard travel he must have gone through in the mountains and deserts had left no mark that she could see. You could feel the tough mountain peasant he’d been born beneath the bonze still.
Nor had the task of turning a panic-stricken resort community and a gaggle of quarrelsome Buddhists of a dozen different varieties thrown together by circumstance into a living community made him any softer in the years since the Change. She leaned back against her borrowed saddle and sighed with something that was not exactly pleasure…
More like relaxation, as if I were back at Stardell in one of the chairs by the fire and wine were mulling and snow falling against the windows. I don’t know why, because we aren’t home and lot of what the Rimpoche says isn’t exactly comforting.
Lawrence Jr. scampered over, with his mother in pursuit; there had been wolf-howls in the distant hills, and it was not the sort of place you wanted a child to wander away from light and people. He took a look at the monk and then crawled into his lap. The man settled him comfortably, and then beckoned to his mother.
Ritva scowled slightly as she turned to her second bowl of stew; it had venison in it as well as dried
