Cat talked like that sometimes. Margaret said something once about Cat having been a Gamesmistress in a School, though she could not have meant exactly that. One would have to be Gamesman caste to be a Gamesmistress. Perhaps Margaret meant another kind of teacher. When I asked her, though, she refused to discuss it. I did ask Cat about something that confused me, however. “Cat, I’ve never heard anyone speak about old gods except the dams. I never heard anyone in the Demesne speak of it, nor anyone in Schooltown when we went there.”
She puckered her mouth as though she wouldn’t answer me at all, but then said, “It’s part of the wize-art, Jinian. We hear certain things and draw certain inferences from that. Often inferences are all we have. We hesitate to pass them on lest they acquire an unmerited currency, but among ourselves we speak of it. Now, ask no more. You’ll learn in time.”
Don’t you hate it when people tell you you’ll learn in time? Obviously, the time to learn is when you’re interested! There was no use arguing with Cat, though, so I had to let it go. Now, on the mountainside, going east with the sun on my forehead and my stomach saying it was time for lunch, it would have been nice if she’d told me more. Perhaps she was thinking the same thing!
Lunchtime came and went. Sometime about mid-afternoon it began to occur to me that Stonybrook or the edge of the canyon should have appeared some time ago. We went from Stoneflight to Stonybrook every summer to get rushes for baskets, sometimes several times during the summer. It wasn’t a long trip even in a slow, bumpy wagon. Even if I had been at the extreme western edge of the table-mountain, right above the valley of the River Dourt, I should still have come upon Stonybrook by now. Which meant ... what?
Which meant I’d crossed it? No. Couldn’t have. Crossed no stream. Which meant I was so far north, I’d missed it completely, as well as the great east-west canyon it fell into.
Possible. Probable! If so, horse and I were on the north side of Longbow Mountain and would shortly arrive at Pouws! We climbed the slope to the right, looking for a place with a view east and north. If Pouws were anywhere near, there’d be smoke. And I knew people from Pouws. There was a girl a little older than I, Lunette. She had an older brother. I’d forgotten his name. They had guested with us at Stoneflight after being caught on the road by storm, oh, five or six years ago at least. I had been only eight or nine at the time. The older brother had ended up challenging Mendost to Game of Two, and Bram had had to put a stop to it by forcing Mendost to apologize for breaking guest privilege. Mendost and Dorto—that was his name!—had been unfriends ever since, though neither of them had taken it further ...
There was smoke! High, curling over a frowning ridge of stone, black, roiling smoke. No cookfire smoke, that. Horse cocked his ears forward, made a little uneasy sound in his nose, then he and I went farther up the mountain. When we came to the foot of a tall, sentinel stone, I left him there and clambered up the back of it like a tree rat, lying on top ratrug flat the way they do. Below me in the valley lay the Demesne of Pouws with Pouwstown on beyond it and a few farms scattered beyond that. What was burning was quite a large grain storage barn, and who was burning it was a Sentinel I knew very well because he was Mendost’s man. There was a Herald down there, too, and two or three others who were quite familiar to me. The situation was easy to read. Mendost, having made an alliance with King Kelver, was now setting out to even old scores. Which for Mendost meant declaring Game against everyone within six days’ ride of us in any direction. Including Dorto of Pouws.
Not precisely the time for me to ride into Pouws Demesne and ask for help. Sister of an attacker, betrothed to his ally. Lovely! Thus far I had kept my spirits up, planning each step ahead, but now I wanted to cry. With Mendost on a rampage, there would be no friends within reach. Behind me somewhere was Porvius Bloster, who was just stupid and prideful enough to declare Game against me personally because I’d outwitted him. Below me were Mendost’s men, dangerous as vipers. All I could do was keep riding east, staying well away from the conflict. I tried to recall what I knew about the country east of here. All I could remember was that there were no traveled roads.
No roads.
No roads because at the east end of Longbow Mountain is the Forest of Chimmerdong, where nobody goes.
I remembered the chant:
Tearful the music, full of woe,
In the stone deep, fern steep woods of Zoe.
But a stranger voice sings a sadder song In the sorrow-wild Forest of Chimmerdong.
“By all the old gods,” I said to horse when I had come back down the rock, “this is the dirtiest trick Mendost has played me yet.” Knowing even as I said it that Mendost had not thought of me at all—never had, much.
When we had passed all but one of the outlying farms, I rode up to the last farmhouse and traded with the little farmwife there. My suit of red clothing—which I had worn only once,
