settled back into the small firelit cocoon that surrounded her chair. The knife blade resumed its flashing in the light, somehow less playful than before.
Although she'd only been staying at the inn for a few weeks, Martine hadn't expected the farewells to sting so much. After all, besides Jhaele and Jazrac, there were few people she really knew here. She'd been pointedly avoiding most of the Dalesmen with a Harper's natural instinct for secrecy. Now, slightly tipsy and pleasantly tired, she felt a poignant stab of regret at the prospect of leaving the sleepy little hamlet. The flowing river, the winter- stripped trees, even the cracked, barren slopes of Old Skull seemed somehow homey and comforting. I could live here as well as anywhere else, the Harper thought idly, but she knew she wasn't ready to settle anywhere just yet. I'll be back, she told herself before draining her mug and trundling off to bed.
The dawn came with Martine feeling ill-rested and anxious. Journeys always do this to me, she noted irritably as she climbed out of bed. She could never sleep soundly the night before a trip, always waking up at hours only marked by their darkness, always jittery with the hopes and the tensions of wanderlust.
Astriphie's shrill cry from the stable yard got the ranger's sluggish blood moving. It was time to shake off the numbness of town and return to the wilds where she really
belonged.
After a quick splash of chill water that passed for a rinse and a struggle with her traveling clothes, Martine clomped down the worn wooden stairs and into the yard. The pale morning sun washed over the cobblestones, the light having yet to reach the full richness of the day.
Martine was greeted by a harsh birdlike shrill that turned to a whinnying squawk. 'Astriphie, keep still!' she shouted as her mount reared back, tossing its head so that it threatened to swing the goggle-eyed stableboy clinging to its halter clean over the yard fence. Astriphie was no ordinary steed, but a hippogriff, with the forequarters an enormous bird and the hindquarters a sturdy horse, the juncture between the two marked by a pair of golden-feathered wings. The beast clicked the bill of its eaglelike head, threatening playfully to snap the stableboy's arm like a dry splinter. The lad trembled, almost dropping the rope in abject terror, not being able to distinguish the hippogriff's playfulness from hunger.
The Harper hurriedly took the reins, and the boy scrambled to safety behind a stable door. 'Astriphie, stop!' Martine commanded, punctuating her words with a quick falconer's whistle as the hippogriff reared up again. A sharp tug brought the creature back down, its front talons scrabbling on the stone while its rear hooves beat out an irritated tattoo. It craned its feathered head around to fix one blinking eye on Martine and then clacked in disapproval until she reached up and stroked the feathers of its massive wings soothingly. The long equine tail flicked against its haunches as if to point out where to scratch next.
'Good girl, Astriphie,' the Harper said softly as she automatically ran her hands over the saddle straps, checking their fittings, making sure her packs and saddlebags were secure. High above the forests was no place to discover a loose girth. Golden-pinioned wings beat the air in a gentle whoomph that swirled a maelstrom of dust and straw. The saddle slipped as the mighty trapezius muscles of the flying beast rippled under the leather seat, but the straps held tight. Satisfied, Martine tossed a coin to the boy. By now he had recovered enough to venture out from behind the door. Martine led Astriphie out into the road and lightly swung into the saddle. The stableboy ran to the fence to watch as the pair trotted, then galloped down the road, until at last, with a muscular heave of its great wings, the hippogriff lifted from the earth and sailed away over the top of the brown-leafed forest.
All day they flew east, soaring over the forest, the coast of the Moonsea barely in sight to the north. With only the briefest of stops for rest, they pressed on the next day and those that followed, until on the fourth day, they passed the vulture-haunted spires of Hillsfar, then three more to carry them past the streets of Mulmaster tumbling down the mountain slopes, and farther east to where boats could cross the Moonsea to the rocky shores of Vaasa. Here Martine nosed Astriphie northward and piloted the hippogriff over the stormy waters of the Moonsea until they sighted the northern coast, where they rested in a village of fishermen too poor to be suspicious of such a strange traveling pair.
After a few days of dining on fish while Astriphie took a well-deserved rest, the pair resumed their northerly course, following the trails up passes winding through the mountains that isolated the north. They flew over the northern stretches of Vaasa, where people thought all strangers were Damaran spies, and beyond to the plains of Damara, where villagers spoke in whispers of her supposedly Vaasan looks. Mindful of these animosities and suspicions, Martine kept her questions few and short when she stopped in villages, passing herself off as a merchant's
agent looking for new markets for her employer.
By this subterfuge, Martine passed through Damara and found herself at last flying over the snowbound ridge of an isolated valley, the last before the walls of the Great Glacier itself. Samek, it was called, home to a village of gnomes, or so the garrulous frontiersman farther south had claimed. 'Be the last outpost afore the wilds,' he swore. 'Mebbe they can guide you to the glacier, though 'tain't a harderheaded batch than them little folk. Tain't got no trade, an' they put up with no truck at all from outsiders, big folks especially.'
The tracker's gloomy predicition came to mind as the Harper steered Astriphie into a gentle dive that would carry them over the valley's heart. At its widest, Samek was no more than a few miles across, pointed like a narrow slot north and south. The sides of the valley were ringed in by mountains already deeply cloaked in snow, the treeless peaks mottled with frozen white. Tall pines dressed in the dull greens of winter lined their slopes, the dour monotony broken on the higher reaches by cracked outcroppings of collapsed rock. Natural cathedrals to the gods was how Martine thought of these spectacular mountain peaks.
They swooped lower over the valley, and Martine turned her attention away from the peaks to scan the forests and meadows below, watching for the village. Since the valley was inhabited by gnomes, she didn't expect to see houses, barns, or the patchwork patterns of fields. The little folk didn't build their towns as humans did, she knew from experience. They liked to hide their dwellings in the bases of trees, in hillsides, or among the reeds along the river. Still, she hoped to spot a trace of smoke or a winding trail she could follow.
In her first two passes over the valley, Martine noticed the meandering track of several game trails, mountain streams reduced to waterfalls of ice, and the grass-tufted snowfields of frozen bogs, but no sign of a village. It was on the third pass, as Astriphie banked into a turn that tilted the saddle to a dizzying angle, that Martine caught sight of a wisp of smoke rising through the thick-growing trees. With a quick series of whistles and a hard pull on the reins, the ranger swung the hippogriff in a broad loop that came to bear straight toward the smoke. Black-green branches flashed beneath her feet as she urged Astriphie lower until her mount's hooves scraped off the branches of the uppermost pines. Martine strained in her saddle to peer over the hippogriff's side while its wings rose and fell in massive beats. Bearing straight on, they closed on the column of smoke that was their guide.
Flying almost too fast, the pair shot over a small clearing and straight through the rising plume of smoke. Martine instantly noted it had the tang of woodsmoke. Whipping around in her saddle, she caught a glimpse of a cabin and a man on the ground, staring up, with an axe in his hand. Not pausing to consider the consequences, she yanked back on the reins and shouted, 'Down, Astriphie! Land.'
The hippogriff plunged toward the nearest clearing, a smooth meadow along the banks of a stream. The beast hit the snow with a running bounce that jarred the ranger in her saddle and engulfed them in a blizzard of white powder. Martine wasted no time unbuckling herself and dropping to the ground, cat footed and ready, her sword already in her hand. 'Stay, Astriphie,' she commanded, leaving the hippogriff unhobbled just in case something dangerous happened by. The mighty steed flexed its wings contentedly and seemed to chirp back in understanding.
Once she was into the woods, the snow was far deeper than Martine had expected, and it was with considerable difficulty that she floundered through the heavy drifts. By the time the Harper reached the clearing she had spotted from the air, she was panting and sweat soaked. She didn't
try to scout out her goal, but stepped through the screen of underbrush boldly and stood in full view of the axeman. At first glance, she guessed the cabin's owner was at home in the woods like herself, a man who chose to live out in the wilds, and so she placed her faith in the usual frontier hospitality.
The man was standing near a stump where he had been chopping wood. There was a neatly piled stack of waiting logs on one side of him and a jumbled heap on the other. Behind him stood a small cabin built of solid pine logs. A rickety stone chimney clung to one side of the house, and a little shed that looked like a combination storehouse and entrance jutted off the front. The substantial walls were broken by one small window, heavily shuttered. The yard around the cabin was cluttered with snow mounded piles of cordwood and what she could only guess were the half-finished projects of every frontiersman.
