between the edges of the crevasse had turned nearly black with gathering night. Snake felt an overwhelming sensation of grief. This was how it had been the night Jesse died, lacking only stars, the sky as clear and dark, the rock walls surrounding her just as steep, the cold as exhausting as the desert’s heat. Snake hugged Melissa closer and bent over her, sheltering her from shadows. Because of the dreamsnakes, she could do nothing for Jesse; because of the dreamsnakes, she could do nothing for Melissa.
The dreamsnakes massed together and slithered toward her, the sound of their scales on fogdamp stone whispering around her — Snake came abruptly awake out of the dream.
“Snake?” Melissa’s voice was the rough whisper she had heard.
“I’m here.” She could just see her daughter’s face. The last diffused light shone dully on her curly hair and the thick stiff scars. Her eyes held a faraway dazed look.
“I dreamed…” She let her voice trail away. “He was right!” she cried in sudden fury. “Damn him, he was right!” She flung her arms around Snake’s neck and hid her face. Her voice was muffled. “I did forget, for a little while. But I won’t again. I won’t…”
“Melissa—” Melissa stiffened at the tone of her voice. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. North says he won’t hurt you.” Melissa was trembling, or shivering. “If you say you’ll join him—”
“No!”
“Melissa—”
“No! I won’t! I don’t care.” Her voice was high and tight. “It’d be just like Ras again…”
“Melissa, dear, you have a place to go now. It’s the same as when we talked before. Our people need to know about this place. You have to give yourself a chance to get away.”
Melissa huddled against her in silence.
“I left Mist and Sand,” she said finally. “I didn’t do what you wanted, and now they’ll starve to death.”
Snake stroked her hair. “They’ll be all right for a while.”
“I’m scared,” Melissa whispered. “I promised I wouldn’t be any more, but I am. Snake, if I say I’ll join him and he says he’ll let me be bitten again I don’t know what I’ll do. I don’t want to forget myself… but I did for a while, and…” She touched the heavy scar around her eye. Snake had never seen her do that before. “This went away. Nothing hurt any more. After a while I’d do anything for that.” Melissa closed her eyes.
Snake grabbed one of the dreamsnakes and flung it away, handling it more roughly than she would have believed she could.
“Would you rather die?” she asked harshly.
“I don’t know,” Melissa said faintly, groggily. Her arms slipped from Snake’s neck and her hands lay limp. “I don’t know. Maybe I would.”
“Melissa, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it—” But Melissa was asleep or unconscious again. Snake held her as the last of the light faded away. She could hear the dreamsnakes’ scales on the damp slick rocks. She imagined again that they were coming closer, approaching her in a solid aggressive wave. For the first time in her life she felt afraid of serpents. Then, to reassure herself when the noises seemed to close in, she reached out to feel the bare stone. Her hand plunged into a mass of sleek scales, writhing bodies. She jerked back as a constellation of tiny stinging points spread across her arm. The dreamsnakes were seeking warmth, but if she let them find what they needed they would find her daughter as well. She shrank back into the narrow end of the crevasse. Her numb hand closed involuntarily around a heavy chunk of sharp volcanic rock. She lifted it clumsily, ready to smash it down on the wild dreamsnakes.
Snake lowered her hand and willed her fingers open. The rock clattered away, among other rocks. A dreamsnake slid across her wrist. She could no more destroy them than she could float out of the crevasse on the cold, thick air. Not even for Melissa. A hot tear rolled down her cheek. When it reached her chin it felt like ice. There were too many dreamsnakes to protect Melissa against, yet North was right. Snake could not kill them.
Desperate, she pushed herself to her feet, using the crevasse wall as support and wedging herself into the narrow space. Melissa was small for her age, and still very thin, but her limp weight seemed immense. Snake’s cold hands were too numb to keep a secure grip, and she could hardly feel the rocks beneath her bare feet. But she could feel the dreamsnakes coiling around her ankles. Melissa slipped in her arms, and Snake clutched at her with her right hand. The pain shot through her shoulder and up and down her spine. She managed to brace herself between the converging rock walls, and to hold Melissa above the serpents.
Chapter 12
The cultivated fields and well-built houses of Mountainside lay far behind Arevin at the end of his third day’s travel south. The road was now a trail, rising and falling along the edges of successive mountains, leading now casually through a pleasant valley, now precariously across scree. The country grew higher and wilder. Arevin’s stolid horse plodded on.
No one had passed him all day, in either direction. He could easily be overtaken by anyone else traveling south: anyone who knew the trail better, anyone who had a destination, would surely catch and pass him. But he remained alone. He felt chilled by the mountain air, enclosed and oppressed by the mountains’ sheer walls and the dark overhanging trees. He was conscious of the beauty of the countryside, but the beauty he was used to was that of his homeland’s arid plains and plateaus. He was homesick, but he could not go home. He had the proof of his own eyes that the eastern desert’s storms were more powerful than those in the west, but the difference was one of quantity rather than kind. A western storm killed unprotected creatures in twenty breaths; an eastern one would do it in ten. He must stay in the mountains until spring.
He could not simply wait, at the healers’ station or in Mountainside. If he did nothing but wait, his imagination would overpower his conviction that Snake was alive. And if he began to believe she was dead: that was dangerous, not only to his sanity but to Snake herself. Arevin knew he could not perform magic any more than Snake could, magical as her accomplishments might appear, but he was afraid to imagine her death.
She was probably safe in the underground city, gathering new knowledge that would atone for the actions of Arevin’s cousin. Arevin reflected that Stavin’s younger father was lucky he did not have to pay for his terror himself. Lucky for him, unlucky for Snake. Arevin wished he had good news to give her when he did find her. But all he would be able to say was, “I have explained, I have tried to make your people understand my people’s fear. But they gave me no answer: they want to see you. They want you to go home.”
At the edge of a meadow, thinking he heard something, he stopped his horse. The silence was a presence of its own, all around him, subtly different from the silence of a desert.
Have I begun imagining sounds, now, he wondered, as well as her touch in the night?
But then, from the trees ahead, he heard again the vibrations of animals’ hooves. A small herd of delicate mountain deer appeared, trotting across the glade toward him, their twig-thin legs flashing white, long supple necks arched high. Compared to the huge musk oxen Arevin’s clan herded, the fragile deer were like toys. They were nearly silent; it was the horses of their herders that had alerted him. His horse, lonely for its own kind, neighed.
The herders, waving, cantered up to him and pulled their mounts to flamboyant stops. They were both youngsters, with sun-bronzed skin and short-cut pale blond hair, kin by the look of them. At Mountainside Arevin had felt out of place in his desert robes, but that was because people mistook him for the crazy. He had not thought it necessary to change his manner of dress after he made his intentions clear. But now, the two children looked at him for a moment, looked at each other, and grinned. He began to wonder if he should have purchased new clothes. But he had little money and he did not wish to use it for what was not absolutely necessary.
“You’re a long way from the trade routes,” the older herder said. His tone was not belligerent but matter-of-fact. “Need any help?”
“No,” Arevin said. “But I thank you.” Their deer herd milled around him, the animals making small sounds of communion with each other, more like birds than hoofed creatures. The younger herder gave a sudden whoop and waved her arms. The deer scattered in all directions. Another difference between this herd and the one Arevin kept: a musk ox’s response to a human on horseback flailing their arms would be to amble over and see what the fun was.
“Gods, Jean, you’ll scare off everything from here to Mountainside.” But he did not seem perturbed about the deer, and in fact they reassembled into a compact group a little way down the trail. Arevin was struck again by the willingness to reveal personal names in this country, but he supposed he had better get used to it.
“Can’t talk with the beasties underfoot,” she said, and smiled at Arevin. “It’s good to see another human face after looking at nothing but trees and deer. And my brother.”
“Have you seen no one else on the trail, then?” That was more a statement than a question. If Snake had returned from Center and the herders had overtaken her, it would have made much more sense for them all to travel together.
“Why? You looking for someone?” The young man sounded suspicious, or perhaps just wary. Could he have met Snake after all? Arevin, too, might ask impertinent questions of a stranger in order to safeguard a healer. And he would do considerably more than that for Snake.
“Yes,” he said. “A healer. A friend. Her horse is a gray, and she has a tiger-pony as well, and a child riding with her. She would be coming north, back from the desert.”
“She’s not, though.”
“Jean!”
Jean scowled at her brother. “Kev, he doesn’t look like anybody who would hurt her. Maybe he needs her for somebody sick.”
“And maybe he’s friends with that crazy,” the brother said. “Why are you looking for her?”
“I’m a friend of the healer,” Arevin said again, alarmed. “Did you see the crazy? Is Snake safe?”
“This one’s all right,” Jean said to Kev.
“He didn’t answer my question.”
“He said he was her friend. Maybe it’s none of your business.”
“No, your brother has the right to question me,” Arevin said. “And perhaps the obligation. I’m looking for Snake because I told her my name.”
“What is your name?”
“Kev!” Jean said, shocked.
Arevin smiled for the first time since meeting these two. He was growing used to abrupt customs. “That is not something I would tell either of you,” he said pleasantly.
