The sky had cleared and was full of stars. It was easy to tell which direction was south, and I sleepily marked the trunk of the tree with the knife before rolling over and going back to sleep. When I woke again, it was half-light. Thinking time.
The fact was, I did not know where I was. Stoneflight Demesne might have been east, or south, or west of me. The Tragamor’s camp had probably been northwest of the Demesne, but the canyon I had followed when I left had curved back and forth, and I could have been almost anywhere.
During the night, Murzy’s message had come clear, however. She had meant, “Get the hell out of here; try to get to Xammer as quickly as possible; stay away from the south—the High Demesne and the Ogress Valearn—use the wize-arts and be sensible.” That sounded like Murzy, though she had not exactly sounded like herself during that last conversation. It might be that Mendost had threatened her or one of the other dams. It would have been like him. Not healthy for me or mine, she had said, and Mendost often made places unhealthy for people. So—on to Xammer.
Which lay far, far to the east. That was the one direction of which I was certain.
The town of Mip lay northwest of our Demesne, down the canyon and across the mountains and down into the valley of the Dourt. If I had gone in Joramal’s wagon, we would have gone from Mip, up the river to its confluence with the Haws, then up the mountain road to the Banner, down the Banner to the Gathered Waters, and down the Gathered Waters to River Reave, to Gaywater, and thence east to Xammer. That’s more or less the way we had gone to Schooltown long before, and it would have taken a long time to get there.
Or one could put a canoe in Stonybrook, follow it down to the falls, carry it down the old stone stairs into the canyon below, thence into Long Valley and the great open fields above Lake Yost. Then, if one didn’t wish to paddle upstream on the Reave and the Gaywater, one would walk to Xammer, the whole business taking twenty days or less.
So I had two perfectly logical routes to Xammer, east or west. If I kept going west, I couldn’t fail to run into River Dourt. If I went east, I couldn’t fail to encounter Stonybrook—which became Stonywater lower down—or the walls of the great canyon. According to Cat Candleshy, once past the falls, Stonywater was calm and easy enough in contemplation, though I had never done it.
Despite Murzy’s warnings about the High Demesne, I had no real fear of coming upon it. There was all of Long Valley between our mountains and Tarnost—the Demesne of King Prionde and Valearn the Ogress. I was far enough north not to fear from the Ogress of Tarnost. I thought. It did not occur to me then that she might go elsewhere.
Well, tic-tac, front or back, dark or bright, left or right, fast or slow, here we go. I picked east. It seemed shorter.
So warmed, rested, fed, we set out. Though I had never been allowed to have a real horse before, I could mark definite advantages over Misquick. This one didn’t stumble, didn’t fall down, and didn’t stand with his head down refusing to move the way Misquick often did. He looked intelligently at the way we were headed and picked a simple, sure-footed way along it. I thanked him for this, which seemed to please him, and we went sedately along. Which left me free to think about other things.
I chose to think about the old gods. Prompted by Murzy’s chest tapping, probably. The star-eye was a symbol of one of the old gods, one of the elder people of the world. Not the True Game world, the whole world, which went on beyond the boundaries of the True Game in all directions, to the Southern Sea, the Glistening Sea, the jungles of the north, and even beyond those. Tess Tinder-my-hand had an old, old rhyme:
Bright the Sun Burning,
Night Will Come Turning,
Warm Fire Is Sparkening,
Sleep Brings a Darkening,
Bitter Tears Falling,
Lovers Come Calling,
Egg in the Hollow,
Hatching to Follow,
Mothwings Go Spinning,
End and Beginning,
Inward Is Quiet,
Dream Chains to Tie It,
Silence and Shadow,
Music and Meadow,
Eye of the Star,
Where Old Gods Are.
Each line of the verse was a spell. Egg in the Hollow was a hiding spell. Music and Meadow was a summoning of the deep dwellers used in bridge or tree magic sometimes. There were hundreds of couplets if one knew them all. Some weren’t used often. Hatching to Follow was a pregnancy spell, for instance, and it wasn’t often used. Though each line is a spell, there’s more to it than that. It has meaning in groups of lines—if you look at different groups, you can see how they fit together—and as a whole, too. Taken as a whole, Tess said it meant the old gods held it all together, in balance, so that everything had a place: fire, water, life, death, earth, and sky—everything. And everyone. I used to comfort myself with that sometimes at night when everyone had been after me all day and it didn’t seem there was any place for me at all. Then I’d sing, “Silence and Shadow, Music and Meadow, Eye of the Star” to myself until I went to sleep.
So, I had said, if it had all been so nicely balanced when the old gods were around, where were they now?
“Lost,” said Sarah, sadly.
“Betrayed,” said Margaret.
“Imprisoned,” said Cat. “The deep lookers and far studiers say that. Imprisoned. Locked up. No one knows where.”
“If I were a god,” I had said to Cat Candleshy, “I would not allow myself to be locked up.”
“Perhaps they didn’t know what was happening until it was too late,” said Cat. “Perhaps they were great, slow beings who did not
