grinned again, wider this time. 'First the name and then the man. Tell me the truth: I do good work for you, don't I? May that always be true.'
Corinn did not have to respond to this. Rhrenna-the only other person who knew whom she met here on the balcony-descended the staircase, one hand lifting her dress so that she could move faster, the other holding a rolled parchment. She glanced at Delivegu for just an instant and then focused on the queen. 'A message,' she said. 'It's about Mena.'
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Mena awoke with a hot hand grasping her skull, searing her where it squeezed. She was on her side, and when she tried to swat the thing she realized through a rush of pain that her left forearm was broken. In the dim light of the predawn hour she stared at the strange droop of the limb, bent where it should have been straight, limp where it should have been firm. It was most definitely broken. Realizing that, she also knew that no physical being held her. It was just the pain from bashing her head on stones in the hillside. The burning on her thigh was from an impact abrasion. The soreness in her shoulder was from when she had dislocated it. She remembered the complete agony of it and the sweetness of relief when the tumbling motion of her fall had reset it. The rawness in her throat was from sleeping in the jumbled position in which she landed, with her mouth open to the dry rasp of a Talayan breeze. She knew a lot of things, but they were so cluttered in her head that she could not grasp the entirety of it.
Instead, she focused on a small thing. The little finger of her left hand had snapped at the base and canted off to the side in defiance of its siblings. It was red and swollen and did not really seem to belong with the others. It was a minor injury in some ways, but the unnatural shape of it captured all Mena's attention, forced her to focus through the pounding bands squeezing her skull. Slowly, she reached out and took the finger in the palm of her other hand. She held it a long moment, awed at how fat it felt. Then she twisted it back into position. As it popped into place she exhaled a jagged curse-not so much at the finger as at the searing splinters of pain that shot up her forearm and into her shoulder and throughout her entire body.
She lay on her back, breathing, holding still so that the pain might forget her and slip away. The gray sky above her was scalloped with high clouds tinted pink by the rising sun. They looked soft. They reminded her of something. As she tried to think what, a few moments passed, and then she raised herself awkwardly. Things to do. She had things to do. Despite and because of her pain, she had things to do.
Over the next hour, Mena limped about, gathering the supplies she would need to splint her arm. There were no trees nearby, and she did not yet want to raise her eyes and look beyond her immediate surroundings. Instead, she found several slim lengths of stone, along with ribbons of mossy turf that she sliced one-handed with her short sword. She was not far from a small stream. Its gentle gurgle called to her, and she hobbled toward it, cringing at the thirsty convulsions of her parched throat.
She stood beside the stream for a longer moment than she wished, unsure whether to drink from it or tend her arm first. Eventually, she did both. She unbuckled her sword belt, let it drop, and contorted her way out of her clothing. She stepped into one of the deeper pools wearing only her eel pendant, the one she had found gripped in a child's withered hand at the base of Maeban's aerie. The water bit her with cold, but that was good. She would be wet all over, but that was good, too, good to wash the filth and sweat and blood from her body. Letting her broken arm float, she scooped fingerfuls of water into her mouth with her right hand. She did so slowly, pausing to breathe between swallows, not rushing.
When she was as numb as she could bear, she crawled from the stream and-still naked and grateful for the touch of the morning sun-tended her arm. The flesh was not broken, but she could see the misshapen bone beneath her skin, which was bruised in blooms of ugly blue and green and red and yellow. Laying the limb on the ground, she worked around it, a one-armed being caring for a separate entity to which she was bound. She positioned the moss as padding, and lined the stones around it to make a splint. She used a length of string from her waist to bind it tight, a slow, slow process that left her fingers aching, hard as it was to tie with only one hand. She pulled on her left hand as she pressed the splint down with her chin, an attempt at straightening the bone, and then tightened the strings again.
By the time she was finished-dressed again, with the arm in a sling fashioned from the long ribbon of fabric that had been her belt-the sun was high and strong, and she was sweating from her efforts. Was the bone set straight? She could not be sure, but it was the best she could do. She might have looked to her small injuries as well, but that would just be avoidance of the more important thing. She knew these actions were small details, delays before she faced what she had to face. Her body would be bruised and battered for some time, but with the arm splinted she had no reason not to raise her eyes and look for it-for the foulthing.
Climbing up to a ridgeline and trudging along it toward a higher vantage, Mena took in the country around her. It was a temperate landscape of sharp, grass-covered hills. The soil was shallow, and the rocky frames of the slopes protruded here and there. She could not be sure, but she thought they had flown west, into the hills of northern Talay, perhaps not far from Nesreh and the western coast. She remembered glimpsing the sea on the distant horizon. That was before the beast-and she with it-had crashed to the earth in fatigue.
What a strange flight that had been. It had gripped her, hadn't it? Or had she gripped it? Had it wanted her with it, or had she wanted to be with it? She was not sure. She would have thought it a dream if the world around her were not so real and the pains in her body were not so acute. She remembered the moment it yanked her into the air, the way the earth fell away, as if she and the beast were motionless, but everything and everyone below them had suddenly dropped. At least, that's one way she remembered it.
On the other hand, she remembered the incredible, ear-battering sound of it. She had clawed up the tail like it was a rope. Up and before her, the foulthing flew. The beast itself had been silent, but everything else was a confusion of noise and wind, of flapping wings and erratic flight. The swinging weights smashed into her several times before she got her short sword free and managed to cut several of the ropes. This made it easier for the foulthing, she knew, but any one of those stones could have brained her. Besides, the creature did not truly seem to have much life in it. Each wing-beat was a display of power, but between them came long moments in which the wings seemed on the verge of dropping. She clung to the flying creature, sure that they would come crashing down any second, near enough that her troops would never lose sight of her.
The creature was more resilient than she knew, however. The undulating hills of Talay passed far below her, scrolling beneath them as they flew and flew on. Acacia trees became tiny blooms, rivers like lines on a map, her view that of an eagle looking down on a world laid out beneath it. She was not sure how much time passed like that. Hours, perhaps. A few times she believed it was Maeben above her. She thought she heard that great goddess's angry screech. It didn't make sense, not unless she had fallen into a dream. But how could she have done that when she was clinging for her life? Unless the beast really was holding on to her.
The last moments of the flight had brought them into this high country. She thought they were getting lower, but in fact the plateau and the hills upon it rose to meet them. She saw what she took to be the gray bulk of the sea in the distance, and then focused on the hills, the rocks, the pinnacles that grew closer and closer. The creature, it seemed, did not have the strength to rise higher. Its flight grew even more erratic, frantic one moment and slow the next, making them rise and fall. She thought she was going to smash into one rock face, only to be saved when the beast surged above it. Passing over it, Mena touched her feet to the stone in a quick scamper across its surface. She loosened her hand, considering letting go of the tail. Before she did she was airborne again.
The beast had dipped into the next ravine, and as it rose to fight its way over the coming slope, Mena felt her hand slide. Of course she could not hold on forever. Perhaps the beast was letting go of her. The sleek muscles of the tail grew limp in her hand. This time, as the creature just managed to clear the knuckle of rock that topped the ridge, Mena touched her feet to the vertical wall of stone but did not have the strength to hold on. The tail slipped from her grip. For a moment she was held there, her two feet on the stone, her body horizontal to the world, suspended in brief defiance of the earth's pull. Her last sight of the foulthing was from beneath it, as its shadow skimmed across the outcrop of stones and vanished, its tail snapping as it disappeared. She heard Maeben's shrill cry again, and then the earth remembered her. It pulled on her and all was the painful battering of her tumbling fall
