overhead loosed its hollow, eerie call. Somewhere not far away, a small stream chuckled to itself. A longtooth roared in the distance, and for a moment everything else was quiet.
The baron turned at a sound close by. He saw Elise half-sitting, watching him. Her expression was unreadable. 'Regrets?' he asked, voice the barest thread of sound.
Her answer was softer still. 'Of course. To leave all I've ever known… it's no easy road, but one I have to travel.'
'You could still go back.'
'With Wolfar's arms waiting? There's no returning.' She started to say more, stopped, began again. 'Do you know why I came with you? You helped me once, long ago.' Her eyes were looking into the past, not at Gerin. 'The first time I saw you was the most woeful day of my life. I had a dog I'd raised from a pup; he had a floppy ear and one of his eyes was half blue, and because of his red fur I called him Elleb. He used to like to go out and hunt rabbits, and when he caught one he'd bring it home to me. One day he went out as he always did, but he didn't come back.
'I was frantic. I looked for two days before I could find him, and when I did, I wished I hadn't. He'd run down a little gully and caught his hind leg in a trap.'
'I remember,' Gerin said, realizing why the dog Ruffian had seemed familiar. 'I heard you crying and went to see what the trouble was. I was heading south to study.'
'Was I crying? I suppose I was. I don't remember. All I could think of was poor Elleb's leg shredded in the jaw of the trap, and blood dried black, and the flies. The trap was chained to a stake, and I couldn't pry it loose from him.
'Hurt as he was, I remember him growling when you came up, still trying to keep me safe. You knelt down beside me and patted him and poured some water from your canteen on the ground for him to drink, and then you took out your knife and did what needed to be done.
'Not many would tried to make friends with him first, and not many would have sat with me afterwards and made me understand why an end to his pain was the last gift he could get from someone who loved him. By the time you took me home, I really did understand it. You were kind to me, and I've never forgotten.'
'And because of so small a thing you put your trust in me?'
'I did, and I have no regrets.' Her last words were sleepsoftened.
Gerin watched Nothos and the stars peep through holes in the leafy canopy and thought about the obligations with which he had saddled himself. After a while, he decided he too had no regets. He fed bits of wood to the tiny fire, slapped at the buzzing biters lured by its light, and waited for the sun to put the ghosts to rout.
At dawn he woke Van. His comrade knuckled his eyes and spoke mostly in sleepy grunts as they harnessed the horses. Elise doused and covered the fire before Gerin could tend to it. They breakfasted on hard bread and smoked meat. To his disgust, Gerin missed a shot at a fat grouse foolish enough to roost on a branch not a hundred feet away. It flapped off, wings whirring.
The track wound through the forest. Trailing shoots and damp hanging mosses hung from branches overhead, eager to snatch at anything daring to brave the wood's cool dim calm. The horses were balky. More than once Van had to touch them with the whip before they would go on.
Few birds trilled to ease the quiet. Almost the only sounds were the creaking of branches and the rustling of leaves in a breeze too soft to reach down to the road.
Once a sound almost softer than silence paced the wagon for a time. It might have been the pad of great supple feet, or perhaps nothing at all. Gerin saw-or thought he saw-a pair of eyes, greener than the leaves, measuring him. He blinked or they blinked and when he looked again they were gone. The rattle of the wagon's wheels was swallowed as if it had never been.
'Place gives me the bloody shivers!' Van said. To Gerin, his friend's voice sounded louder than needful.
The baron thought the day passing faster than it was, so thick was the gloom. He bit back an exclamation of surprise when they burst from shadow into the brightness of the late afternoon sun. He had not realized how much the thought of camping again in the forest chilled him until he saw he would not have to.
The hills cupped the valley in which Ikos lay. Travelers could look down on their goal before they reached it. The main road came from the southwest. Gerin could see little dots of moving men, carriages, and wagons, all come to consult the Sibyl. His own road was less used. The border lords usually put more faith in edged bronze than prophecy.
A tiny grove surrounded the temple. Probably in days long past the forest had lapped down from the hilltops into the valley, but the sacred grove was all that was left of it there. The shrine's glistening marble roof stood out vividly against the green of the trees.
Around the temple proper were the houses of the priests, the attendants, and the little people who, while not really connected with the Sibyl, made their livings from those who came to see her: sellers of images and sacrificial animals, freelance soothsayers and oracleinterpreters, innkeepers and whores, and the motley crew who sold amulets, charms-and doubtless curses too.
Around the townlet were cleared fields, each small plot owned by a freeholder. Gerin knew the temple clung to the old ways. He did not grudge it its customs, but still thought freeholding subversive. A peasant could not produce enough wealth to equip himself with all the gear a proper warrior needed. Without the nobles, the border and all the land behind would have been a red tangle of warfare, with the barbarians howling down to loot and burn and kill.
'Should we go down before the light fails?' Van asked.
Gerin thought of Ikos' dingy hostels. He shook his head. 'We'd get nothing done at this hour. From what I recall of the inns, we'll find fewer bugs here.'
The evening meal was spare, taken from the same rations as breakfast. Gerin knew those had been packed with the idea of feeding two people, not three. He reminded himself to lay in more. Pretty sorry scholar you are, he jeered at himself-worrying over smoked sausages and journeybread.
He must have said that aloud, for Van laughed and said, 'Well, someone has to, after all.'
The baron took the first watch. In Ikos below, the lights faded until all was dark save for a central watchfire. The hills to the southwest were dotted with tiny sparks of light Gerin knew to be camps like his own. In its grove, the temple was strange, for the light streaming out from it glowed blue instead of the comfortable red-gold of honest flame.
Magic, Gerin decided sleepily, or else the god walking about inside. When Math's golden half-circle set, he roused Van, then dove headfirst into sleep.
He woke to the scent of cooking; luckier than he had been the morning before, Van had bagged a squirrel and two rabbits and was stewing them. Elise contributed mushrooms and a handful of herbs. Feeling better about the world with his belly full, Gerin hitched up the horses. The wagon rolled down the path toward the Sibyl.
IV
Gerin soon discovered his memory had buried a lot about Ikos. First of all, the place stank. It lay under a cloud of incense so cloying that he wished he could stow his nose in the wagon. Mixed with the sweet reek were the scents of charring fat from the sacrifices and the usual town odors of stale cookery, garbage, ordure, and longunwashed animals and humanity.
The noise was as bad. Gerin's ears had not faced such an assault since he returned to the north country. It seemed as if every peddler in Ikos rolled down on the wagon, each crying his wares at the top of his lungs: swordblades, rare and potent drugs, sanctified water, oats, pretty boys, savory cooked geese, collected books of prophetic verse, and countless other things. A fat bald man in greasy tunic and shiny leather apron, an innkeeper from the look of him, pushed his way through and bowed low before the bemused Fox, who had never seen him before. 'Count Stoffer, I believe?' he said, back still bent.
Patience exhausted, Gerin snapped, 'Well, if you believe that, you'll believe anything, won't you?' and left the poor fellow to the jeers of his fellow townsmen.
'Is this what the capital is like?' Elise asked faintly.
'It is,' Gerin said, 'but only if you will allow that a map is like the country it pictures.'
