“So mainly camping,” I said. “In the cold. And probably the rain.”
“Is that a problem? I didn’t take you for a finicky city girl.”
“If you’ve ever seen the city, you’d know that no one who made it their home could ever be called finicky.”
Joki broke into a smile for the first time that day. “True enough,” he agreed. “Well, no need to worry. The cart makes a decent enough bed. Or you can sleep under it, if you prefer.”
I opened my mouth to ask more about the sleeping arrangements, but, faced with Joki’s uncomfortable shoulders, shut it again. We would come to our agreement when we stopped. When he thought I wasn’t paying attention, I would catch Joki looking at me out of the corner of his eye, as he always had ever since I had become old enough to catch his attention. I wondered how much the fact that he was old enough to be my father would restrain him. Or just considerations of common decency. I wondered how much common decency he or any of the other men I was soon to meet would have. Probably even less than the men I had already met in my life, so precious little. Joki didn’t seem that dangerous, but...he was a dragon-sorcerer. Presumably in any fight against me or any other ordinary human, he would win. So I would have to rely on my cunning and his better feelings.
“Do you have any children?” I asked, hoping to stoke those better feelings.
“No.” He was looking off at the sky again. “Not that I know of. Maybe. None with the blood. So no.”
“Children without the blood are still children! They’re still yours! They still matter!”
“Yes,” he agreed, still looking off at the sky. “And no. You’ll find out when your time comes.”
I wanted to argue against that very hard, but I was afraid to remind him any more than he was already reminded that I certainly had the blood, even if none of his possible children did, and that, according to him, I would always breed true. So I swallowed back my arguments and ran over to the edge of the road to look through a break in the trees down to where we had been.
The valley spread out below in the soft beige squares of harvested fields, broken by the occasional burst of red from the maple groves. The slope we were on was covered in golden birches, warmed by the setting sun, which was releasing the scent of falling leaves.
“Can you see far from...there?” I asked, returning to Joki and giving him the question as a peace offering. “Does it have views like this?”
He shook his head. “All you can see is the peaks above, and the gorge below,” he told me. “A harsh view, and closed in. The mountains are not always a place of freedom.”
“So what’s the point, if there’s no freedom?” I asked.
“Power,” he told me, looking at me directly for the first time that day. “Knowledge and power. And health and wealth, of course, but that’s not what interests you, is it?”
I shook my head, a tiny movement. Health I had always had in abundance, and I believed Joki when he told me that I was likely to live a long life. They said that dragon-sorcerers could live forever, but forever was too long to imagine. A hundred years or so seemed enough to me now, barely a third of the way through that journey. And wealth held little attraction: what could I buy with coin that my healthy body couldn’t already give me? Even power...power to do what? There was no one I wanted to kill, no realms I wanted to rule. But knowledge...
“Was it knowledge for you, too?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said after a time, looking down. “Or so I would claim. The truth is, Laela, that if the blood is in you, you cannot say no to it. What’s bred in the bone will come out in the blood, and no one can deny it.”
I shivered. The cold wind coming down from the mountaintops, I told myself. It was blowing hard enough to ripple the water of the horse ponds in the fields below; more than enough to give me chills. “Enough of that,” I said. “We should look for a place to stop, if we’re going to be stopping by the side of the road for the night.”
“There’s a campsite up around the next turn,” Joki told me. “If we’re lucky we’ll be alone there.”
I didn’t like the sound of that, although there was neither threat nor promise in his words, but I silently hoped that we would not be alone. I silently hoped that there would be a noisy family party camping there with us. A couple of crying babes would make things safe for everyone, and lost sleep could always be made up later.
But when we came to the campsite, which was simply a wide flat spot carved out into the hillside by the side of the road, with a trickle of water running down the hill into a pool next to it, no one else was there. Joki unharnessed Tähti, brushed him down in a very desultory fashion, and set him to grazing on the sparse grass.
“Don’t you have any feed for him?” I asked.
“There’s grass.”
“No wonder he’s so thin!”
Joki gave me no reply other than to look away guiltily.
“He’ll never get up the mountain if we don’t feed him properly,” I said.
“He’s always managed before,” Joki said, still looking away guiltily.
“And then one day he won’t. Where are you stores?”
“I told you, I don’t have any horse feed.”
“But you must have human feed.” I went over to the cart and started rummaging through it, turning up, as I suspected, oats for porridge and barley for stew. There was a short sharp argument between me and Joki over feeding that to Tähti, which I won by walking off with the sacks in my arms. Joki called
