every yard of dew-dampened ground that we covered, it seemed that the world grew a little brighter. I took courage from this golden light. By the time full day came, I could no longer feel the serpent writhing along my spine.
Even so, I pressed Altaru to cross this forsaken country as quickly as we could. The ground fell gradually before us; in places, it grew damp and almost boggy – though nothing like the Black Bog that guarded the way into Rajak. The horses found their footing surely enough, and began to quicken their pace, urged on by clouds of biting, black flies. By noon we had covered nearly fifteen miles, and by late afternoon, another ten. And in all those miles, we saw nothing more threatening than a couple of foxes and the prints of a bear by the muddy bank of a stream.
And then, as we drew nearer the Santosh and entered a broad swathe of woods, we came upon a band of ragged-looking men whom Maram immediately took to be robbers. But they proved to be only outlaws exiled from Vishal for protesting the ruthless war that Baron Yashur was prosecuting against Onkar. With their matted hair and filthy tunics, they seemed scarcely Vaiari. But Valari they were, and they offered us no hindrance, only the roasted haunch of a deer that they had just killed.
And more, when they heard that we were journeying to Tria, they offered to show us a way over the Santosh.
Meeting these 'wild' men that Maram had so feared was a great stroke of fortune.
After we had eaten the gamy-tasting venison, they led us west along a track through the woods. A few miles of tramping along the black, hard-packed earth brought us dose to the river. We heard this great surge of water through the trees before we could see it: the oaks and willows grew like a curtain right down to the bank. But then the track straightened and rose toward the causeway leading to an old bridge spanning the river. At the foot of this rickety structure, we paused to look down into the river's raging brown waters. There was no way, I knew, that we could have swum across them.
The outlaw Valari said goodbye to us there and wished us well on our quest.
Crossing the bridge proved to be an exercise in faith. We all dismounted and led our horses across the bridge one by one, the better to distribute our weight across its rotten planks. Even so, Altaru's hoof broke through one of them with a sickening crunch, and it was all I could do to extricate it without my badly startled horse breaking his leg. But Altaru trusted me as much as I trusted him. After that, we picked our way across the rest of the bridge without incident. Master Juwain and Maram, with their lighter sorrels and the packhorses, encountered no problems.
As darkness was coming on, we camped there on moist, low ground near the bridge.
Maram argued for a higher and drier campsite, but I convinced him that anyone pursuing us on horses would make a huge sound of hooves pounding against the drumlike boards of the bridge. This would alert us and allow us precious time either to flee or mount a defense.
And so we ate a joyless dinner in the damp next to the river. It was a cold, uncomfortable night. Sleep brought only torment. The season's first mosquitoes whined in my ear, bit, drew blood. After a time, I gave up slapping them and in exhaustion slipped down into the land of dreams. But there the whining grew only louder and swelled to a dreadful whimpering as of a prelude to a scream. Toward dawn I finally came screaming out of my sleep. Or so I thought. When my mind cleared, I realized that it was not I but Maram who was screaming: it turned out that a harmless garter snake had slithered across his sleeping fur and sent him hopping up from it on all fours like a badly frightened frog.
We were very glad to begin the day's journey. And very glad at last to have planted our feet on Aloniaagsoil, if only the most southern and eastern part of it. It was a land that human beings had deserted many years ago. If any habitation had ever existed on this side of the river, the forest had long since swallowed it up. The oaks and elms through which we passed were more densely clustered than those of Mesh; there were many more maples, too, as well as hickories and moss-covered chestnuts. The undergrowth of bracken and ferns was a thick, green blanket almost smothering the forest floor. It would have been difficult to force our way through it if the forest had proved as trackless as Maram had feared. But the old road leading from the bridge – as on the other side of the river – turned into a track leading northwest through the trees. It seemed that no one except a few wandering animals had used it for a thousand years.
All that day we kept to this track, and to others we found deeper in the woods. As I had intended, we traveled on a fairly straight line toward the gap in the Shoshan Range through which the Nar road passed. Not far from the river, the ground began to rise before us and became drier. We saw no sign of man, and I began to hope that our cut across the wild lands of Anjo had either confused or lost whoever was hunting us. We slept that night at a higher elevation where we saw neither mosquitoes nor snakes.
Our next day's journey took us across several rills and streams flowing down from the mountains toward the Santosh. We had no trouble crossing them. Toward evening we encountered a bear feasting on newberries; we left him alone, and he left us alone. On our third day from the bridge, we entered the Gap in the Morning Mountains, where the land became hilly again. There I had intended to turn toward the Nar Road that cut through the Gap perhaps twenty miles to our north. But the folds of the hills and the only track we could find ran to the northwest. I decided that it wouldn't hurt to keep to these wild woods for another day or two before setting foot on the Nar Road.
In truth, I loved being so far from civilization. Here the trees lifted up their branches toward the sun and breathed their great, green breaths that sweetened the air. Here I felt at once all the wildness of an animal taking my strength from the earth and the silent worship of an angel walking proud and free beneath the stars. It would have been good to wander those woods for many more than a few days. But I had friends to lead out of them and promises to keep. And so on our fifth day in Old Alonia, I began seeking a track or a cut through the hills that would take us to the Nar Road.
'Where are we?' Maram grumbled to me as we made our way beneath the great crowns of the trees high above us. Through their leaves the sun shone like light through thousands of green, glass windows.'Are you sure we're not lost?'
'Yes,' I told him for the hundredth time. 'As sure as the sun itself.'
'I hope you're right. You were sure we wouldn't get lost in the Bog, either.'
'This isn't the Black Bog,' I told him. As Altaru trod over earth nearly overgrown with ferns, 1 looked off at some lilies growing by the side of the track. 'We're only a few miles west of the Gap. We should find the Nar Road only a few miles north of here.'
'We should find it,' Maram agreed. 'But what if we don't?'
'And what if the sun doesn't rise tomorrow?' I countered. 'You can't worry about everything, you know.'
'Can't I? But it's you, with all your talk of men pursuing us, who has set me to worrying. You haven't, ah, sensed any sign of them?'
'Not for a few days.'
'Good, good. You've probably lost them in these dreadful woods. As you've probably lost us.'
'We're not lost,' I told him again.
'No? How do you know?'
An hour later, our track cut across a rocky shelf on the side of the hill. It was one of the few places we had found where trees didn't obstruct our view and we could look out at the land we were crossing. It was a rough, beautiful country we saw, with green-shrouded hills to the north and west. A soft mist, like long gray fingers, had settled down into the folds between them.
'I don't see the road,' Maram said as he stood staring out to the north. 'If it's only a few miles from here, shouldn't we see it?'
'Look,' I said, pointing at a strangely-formed hill near us. After rising at a gentle grade for a few hundred feet, it seemed to drop off abruptly as if cut with cliffs on its north face. At its top, it was barren of trees and all other vegetation except a few stunted grasses. 'If we climb it, we should be able to see the road from there.'
'All right,' Maram grumbled again. 'But I don't like the look of these hills. Didn't Kane warn of hill-men west of the Gap?' Master Juwain came up and sat on his horse looking out at the misty hills. Then he said, 'I've been through this country before, when I traveled the Nar Road toward Mesh years ago. I met these hill-men that Kane spoke of. They waylaid our party and demanded that we pay a toll.'
'But this is the King's road!' I said, outraged at such robbery. In Mesh – as in all the Nine Kingdoms – the roads are free as the air men breathe. 'No one except King Kiritan has the right to charge tolls on any road through
