‘As though I were an arrow someone was shooting, yes.’
‘I have not felt like that, Lady. I am not important enough. But, you, Lady, could be an arrow of the Powers.’
She stared at him in bleak amazement, feeling the bowstring tighten and sing behind her, feeling her being tense and point, upward and southward in the long arc, the sweeping flight that would end, where? ‘Well, it will be over soon.’
‘Not soon.’ The boy shook his head in mature consideration. ‘The scouts say many days yet before we see the World Wall Mountains. Then, it may take many days more to find Orena. None of them have been there. None of them have seen it.’
‘I have seen it, from afar. It will seem soon, Bomba. Sooner than we may like.’
So they went southward, surrounded by glamour and enchantment. Leona seemed to lead them but knew she no more needed to lead them than she needed to scan the sky for smoke or listen in the night for the bark of herders’ dogs. They would come to Orena if it was intended to be so.
As they travelled they came upon the locations of the Sisterhoods of the plain, one, then two, three, four. Four locations carefully mapped and learned. Four locations empty. From the places wagon tracks led away south beneath the curving high cup of the sky.
‘Gone,’ said Bombaroba. ‘All gone.’
‘To safety,’ whispered Leona, putting her cheek to his. ‘As we are going, Bomba. As we are being allowed to go.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
THE EASTERN WAY
Day 10
Month of Wings Returning
Jaer, Terascouros, and Medlo had travelled east from the Hill for thirty days, their journey bringing them to the southern edge of T’tumek Paddom, ‘the Stone Wall,’ those mountains which rose in jagged escarpments between Lakland and the River Del. The name was overly harsh, a leftover from the Axe King’s time. Jasmine would have called them ‘the Summer Moutains,’ for the herds of Lakland were pastured there from early spring to first snowfall. They were more forbidding on the southern side, but even here the land burst forth in flowers as the cold retreated north.
They had fallen into easy habits of travel, accommodations, among which was an assumed acceptance of the fact that Jaer, while she did not seem to know where she was going, or at least did not say, could not be moved from her direction: east as the quest book instructed. They had stopped asking her about it. She had stopped pretending to answer. They simply went, each day farther toward the edge of the settled lands, toward the Concealment. They did not talk about that either. They had no knowledge of it and speculation was fruitless. Instead, they talked about other things; Terascouros about her youth and the customs of the Choir, Jaer about growing up in the Outer Islands, Medlo about the lands of Rhees. Each of them tried to be courteous, to keep the talk going, for the silences which fell when there was no talk let the loneliness in along with the sighing wind.
Thus it was an unintentional lapse when Terascouros, one chilly morning, twitted Medlo for being a prince. It set him into a grim-faced monologue which for a time they were too shocked to try and interrupt.
‘There may be some,’ he sneered, ‘who think it enviable to be a prince. There may be some places yet in the known world where being a prince is enviable. It was not so in Rhees. Only those who shared my high rank thought it should be envied. They considered our lengthy history of great import but had not studied it sufficiently to recognize the long line of bastards, braggarts, and bullies who were our ancestors. I, on the other hand, learned of the successive centuries of dishonour from my mother’s lips. She thought it amusing to disillusion romantic youth.
‘Well, they were bastards and so was I. Nothing could alter that.’
‘Medlo, I didn’t mean to …’
‘Hush, old woman. Hear what it means to be a prince! I was a bastard, but they were also bullies and bigots, braggarts and fools, and these I resolved not to be. I made a dream for myself. In it, my father was a commoner, but noble, of true, natural nobility. I told myself he had been dazzled by my mother’s beauty, knew almost at once he had made a mistake, and then fled from her corruption. In my fantasy he did not know he had a son, would not know until the day a royal youth would favour him from the throne by saying, “Welcome, father.” Pah! I had as much chance of knowing my father as of knowing which orchard tree among a thousand dropped the apples for my pie. I outgrew that dream early. I dreamed then of one thing only, of purifying Rhees, of building a kingdom of true glory, true nobilitv.
‘What a dream for a pale, maundering, witless fool of a boy! I had outgrown any feeling of kinship for women earlier yet. My mother’s associates were not lewd or bawdy. I could have understood that, perhaps even enjoyed it. No, they were evil. Sickly, pruriently evil. They were notorious abusers of children, and I was not exempted from their attentions merely by virtue of being Mellisa’s son. They could not maim me or kill me as they had some others, however, and after I had bitten a few of them while screaming that they stank of rot – which they did – they let me alone. Since that time,’ he said between clenched teeth, ‘I’ve been tolerant of one or two of you women, but before that I could not consider them without revulsion.’
‘Your mother?’ asked Jaer. ‘Didn’t she care for you at all?’
‘Powers alone know what she felt,’ he replied, bleakly. ‘I think sometimes she did not feel at all, that her feelings were so corrupted and besotted with the drink and the
