But there would be others, too. Some of the folk from Garion’s Port might be there-the innkeeper or his wife, or perhaps the tanner’s pretty daughter.
How would he feel about taking her life?
Nix was crying. Jaz held her in the night and tried to get some sleep. The watch fire had burned down to coals and gave almost no heat.
And here so high on the mountain, the air felt thin and frigid, almost brittle. Jaz tried to warm Nix with his body, but could not even keep himself warm.
Fallion had been gone for hours. Jaz could not sleep. The graaks had been restless. Most of them were males, and at this time of the year, they were overwhelmed by the urge to hunt for food for their mates and to search for branches and kelp to use as nesting materials.
All through the night they let loose with graaak cries, then rustled their wings, eager to be off.
What would happen if I let the mounts go? he wondered.
He imagined that most of them would head straight for the sea, back to their nests, and try to rear their young. But not all of the graaks looked to be adults. The adolescents, those under nine years of age, wouldn’t have bonded with a mate yet, and would be more likely to remain close to their masters, soaring along the mountain ledges to hunt for wild goats or heading to the valleys to hunt for rangits and burrow-bears.
They’d return after they fed, and that was the problem. They might attract unwanted attention.
The only thing that he could do was to leave the graaks tied to their iron rings. Let them sit quietly and feed off of their fat. In a few days, without food or water, the reptiles might die-or worse, they might gnaw off their own feet in an effort to escape.
He imagined the graaks coming after the children, so crazed by hunger that they were willing to eat their masters. It had happened before, many times.
Jaz pitied the creatures. He knew what it felt like to be chained to a wall, with no food or water.
At long last, Jaz slept.
It seemed that he had only been down for a minute when he heard a guttural cry, and woke, his heart pounding in his throat.
Several of the graaks grunted, and he heard the rush of wings. Someone was riding away!
Jaz leapt to his feet. Nix was gone.
He raced outside and saw that the sun was rising, a great ball of pink at the edge of the world.
Down below him, he saw a graak flying just above the trees. Nix was riding it.
Gone to get food, he realized, and water. The children would need it.
Jaz was filled with wrath and foreboding. But there was no stopping her now. He could only hope that she did well.
Now was the time for her to get supplies, if she was to have any hope at all-now, before Shadoath’s troops looted all of the nearby towns.
Fallion had warned them all not to go scrounging for food. But you cannot command a child to starve, Jaz realized.
For all of their sakes, he wished Nix luck.
Shadoath waited on a pinnacle of a mountain, studying the night sky. She had three dozen endowments of sight, but even then she was blind in the right eye, and everything in her left eye looked as if it were shrouded in the thinnest of mists.
To the west, her golath armies were marching through the night, fanning out. The golaths were tireless, and by dawn they would have prodded beneath every rock and mossy log within twenty miles of Garion’s Port, looking for Fallion and Valya.
Shadoath had tried to follow the flyway, had taken it through several long detours and dead ends. Without someone to lead, her graak had lost its way.
At last she’d come to the end of it, rode out above some trees. She’d wondered if perhaps the children’s hideout was somewhere just at the end of the flyway, there in the jungle, and so she’d landed her graak and searched on foot for a time, sniffing in the shadows for the scent of children, listening for human cries, all without luck.
But late in the afternoon she spotted a pair of graaks far to the east and suspected that the hideout had to be elsewhere.
She’d lost sight of them as they flew into the mountains.
Now for the first time she spotted something in the distance, miles away: a sliver of white, almost like a cloud, appearing and then disappearing, appearing and disappearing.
A graak, she realized, flapping its wings in the dawn. She could even make out a shadowy rider.
Perhaps one of the children was on patrol or carrying a message. In either case, it meant that the child would return.
And when that happened, Shadoath would follow the child to the hideout.
48
Each man thinks himself an island of virtue, surrounded by a sea of louts.
In the long night, Fallion’s graak grew tired. It was a far journey, and even with light winds Windkris could not go on forever. The poor reptile began to cough as it flew, and the flesh at its throat jiggled, as if it grew faint from thirst.
Fallion considered abandoning the beast. He did not want to cause its death. But he was too far out to sea now to turn back.
By some good fortune, he spotted a small atoll, a rock that thrust up from the ocean. He stopped for a long while and let Windkris rest. The rock was hardly big enough for him to get down from his mount, perhaps fifteen feet across. So he sat upon Windkris as the black water surged all around them and watched the sunrise.
It was not until late in the early morning, when a pink sun had climbed into the sky, that Fallion reached Wolfram.
He recognized the island from the charts, its white sand beaches and the play of waves around it.
He let Windkris drop, and it flapped along its length.
The island seemed empty, uninhabited. There was no sign of the Mercy.
He flew up and down the coastline at such a slow speed that it seemed to him that he spent hours observing its every detail.
There were no fires to warm Dedicates, no hidden towers or compounds to house them.
They’re not here, he realized. But there are two other islands nearby. I’ll let my mount rest for the morning, and then leave.
He let Windkris drop to the beach and take a young sea lion as a meal.
Fallion found a pile of driftwood and curled up in the sand beneath it, gaining a little shelter from the wind as his mount rested.
As Fallion slept, Sir Borenson made his way toward Stillwater on the family rangit, bouncing and jostling all along the road until his head pounded in pain.
At each little village, he shouted warnings to whomever he could, telling them of the invasion, thus raising the countryside.
It was hard work, long work, made all the harder because he was traveling over rough roads in the heat of the day.
The journey to Stillwater normally took two days by rangit. He intended to make it in one.
