Deep within himself, he could find the person Leona thought he was if he only let go, drifted, let the moors come in. Reflexively he pushed the idea away, but he let Leona’s voice go on without interruption. There was something soothing in it. Something kind. After a time, he forgot to listen, but she went on talking as the sky darkened and the rock walls moved away on either side of the canyon’s end.
It was well into the night hours under a high cold moon when they found a hollow softly bristled with dry grasses into which they curled closely for shared warmth. As Jaer drifted into sleep he heard Leona’s voice still going on and on about Anisfale. He slept before she had finished.
They did not wake until the sun was half high in the morning. As they sat sleepily over tea and stewed grain, Medlo teetered nervously on the bank at the roadside, peering back the way they had come and muttering about possible pursuit.
Leona tapped the last of her grain onto the earth and wiped the wooden bowl with a twist of grass. ‘Perhaps pursuit can be led away. For many hours yesterday I talked to Jaer of Anisfale, of herders and shearers, of the names of families. Jaer tried to pretend to listen, but soon grew bored. No matter. When he slept, I told him he was in Anisfale, among the sheep.’
Jaer scratched his thigh. ‘I… I remember. The bracken was all scratchy. I wore an itchy hat.’
Leona smiled her animal grin. ‘It is true the hats itch, and so do the woollen drawers.’
‘I’m still scratching,’ said Jaer crossly.
‘How would that stop them finding Jaer?’ asked Medlo. To have him dream of Anisfale?’
‘If there are searchers, they may have gone to Anisfale.’
The old woman interrupted them in a voice as dry as a winter’s branch. ‘Someone searches for the lad?’
There was an uneasy silence. Jaer finally mumbled, ‘It’s true that something seems to come after me. I do dream about something … looking for me.’
Terascouros went on eating, casting puzzled glances from face to face. At last she broke the silence. ‘Where is it that you go?’
Jaer began to speak, choked, tried again. ‘Eastward. I am going eastward.’
Medlo snorted and remarked that Murgin lay eastward, not a good place to go. The old woman concurred. ‘I have seen it in visions,’ she said. ‘Barren, hard, acid, tortured. I would not go there willingly.’
‘Nor I, again,’ said Medlo.
Thewson said, ‘Whether east or west or here, I do not like this grain and salt meat. It is time to hunt for fresh meat, time to be paid and go. We have come as was agreed. Here the canyon ends. I would be paid and go hunting.’
‘That is true,’ said Leona. ‘We were offered payment to come through the canyon with you. Unless you desire that we accompany you further.’
All of them were looking at Jaer, Medlo with mounting irritation, Jasmine with despair. Jaer said nothing, only stared moodily at his feet.
The old woman sighed, then stood in the sun stretching like an old cat, slowly blinking in the light from behind disordered locks of hair. ‘If you are in doubt, I would willingly give you of my gift, for I have the gift of prophecy – much good has it done me – and am able to see past things and future things.’
Medlo smiled mockingly. Terascouros glared at him and made a hissing noise through her teeth. She picked a stick out of the fire to draw with it a circle in the dust of the road and signs and words on and around the circle. From the river she gathered five stones, selecting them with care, each different in colour and shape, marking these too with the sooty stick. Then, over their mild protests and visible amusement, she chivvied them into the circle and thrust a stone into the hands of each. As they stood uncertainly, she began a breathy chant, a sound of dead reeds in a shallow lake, a language older than spoken words.
For a moment they stood there, embarrassed, wondering whether to stay or move away, and then the world dropped away from them slowly, leaving an aching darkness behind and they in it, moored to a circlet of flame. They bloomed upon the circle, orbs of fire, one red as a heart of embers rimmed with black, breathing a slow pulse of fire; one green as new meadows under rising suns, dancing with the light of spring leaves; one amber as the weight of noon, lit with copper and bronze, burning with the topaz glow of deserts; one pale blue and glittering as steel blades, sharp with a deadly whispering; one white and featureless, a sphere of dew or snow or light of summer moon. Out of the void around them a demand fell upon them, a question to which their spirits went out in answer, ‘Where is the thing you seek?’ Within each of them, the question was breathed in with a smell of bitter frost, accepted, answered, and let go. From each of them fell a meteor of flame, red and amber, green and blue, featureless white, drifting and spiraling away into the void below them all. For a time they burned in their orbs, each bleeding light away along the shining arc, red bleeding into green, green into blue, the colours mixing, muting, becoming more subtle, fading, fading….
And they came to themselves standing upon the dusty road, the marked stones lying within the circle at their feet. Beside them was Terascouros, hunched to the ground, still as the stones, barely breathing. Jaer tried to look at Leona, seeing instead a fiery light, red as blood, glittering like claws. His eyes fell
