the western hills there, so the earthworks run less than two miles.”
Hamil studied the old fortifications. “Seem to have had little use of late.”
Geran nodded. “Orcs haven’t come into the Winterspear Vale in numbers since my father was a young man. The Highfells make for good walls.”
A short distance beyond the old dike, Kara turned eastward along a cart track that ran past the long fieldstone cowsheds and hay cribs of an old dairy farm. The track petered out into a footpath and began to climb steeply up the side of the valley. Trees and brush thinned out quickly as they gained height, and soon they were picking their way through the steep meadows and mossy rock outcroppings of the hilltop. From their vantage they could see the broad path of the Winterspear all the way to Hulburg’s distant rooftops. Then they crossed over the crest, and they were in the Highfells proper. To the north a long line of low gray downs stretched off until they simply melted into the distance; eastward the rolling downs marched for miles until they began to climb up to meet the wooded ramparts of the Galena Mountains, perhaps twenty miles distant.
Raw, blustery wind whistled through the grass and heather, pushing the brush first one way and then the other. The sky was blue and cloudless, marked only by a distant earthmote drifting aimlessly against the wind. Hamil surveyed the view. “This is the so-called Great Gray Land of Thar? There doesn’t seem to be much to see.”
“Here, near the Moonsea, the moorlands break up into the steep glens and valleys that we call the Highfells,” Kara answered him. The wind blew her hair into her face, but she shook it off, paying no attention to the raw cold. “But if you ride a few more miles north or west of here, yes, you’d be in Thar.”
“How far does it run?” the halfling asked.
“From here west to the Dragonspine Mountains and the Ride beyond, close to two hundred miles.” Kara turned and pointed off to their right, where the mountains fenced the horizon. “To the mountains, not more than another twenty miles or so. Vaasa’s about seventy miles east of us, on the other side of the Galenas.”
Hamil waved his hand at the downs ahead. “And to the north?”
“For the most part, more of the same until you reach Glister, a hundred and fifty miles away,” Geran said. “There’s a shifting stretch of dangerous Spellplague-riddled changeland in the middle of the moor, and a couple of days’ ride past Glister there is a much wider stretch of changeland that runs for hundreds and hundreds of miles. All sorts of plaguechanged monsters roam those lands, and sometimes they come down into Thar. No one I know of has ever found out what might be north of that, but sooner or later I imagine you would run into the Great Glacier and snows that never melt.”
“And no one lives up here?”
“None but orcs and ogres, and their tribes generally keep to the northerly parts of the moorland,” Geran answered. “Shepherds and goatherds graze their flocks up here in the summertime, but other than that, the land’s not good for much. The soil’s thin and poor and doesn’t drain well. You’ll want to be careful of your mount-this isn’t good ground, and there are a thousand places where a horse can snap its ankle.”
The halfling silently absorbed the view for a moment. Geran could guess what he was thinking; the idea of so much land that was so wide, so open, and yet so desolate was likely foreign to his experience. Hamil had grown up in the warm forests south of the Sea of Shining Stars; the Moonsea’s northern shores must have seemed like the very end of the world to him. For his own part, Geran found the cold, clean air and long views bracing. It was a hard land, to be sure, but it was a simple land. The complexities and confusion of life held less of a grip on his spirit here.
He glanced over to Kara. Since her thirteenth summer, the summer when her spellscar had manifested itself, she’d found a refuge up in those barren and lonely places. Geran and Jarad used to come to the Highfells to savor the independence and freedom the wild country offered. But Kara had taken to spending as much time as she could in the wild land around Hulburg simply because there was no one there to shy away from the deformity of her spellscar. He’d long since learned that Kara’s spellscar was not dangerous, but all too many people around Hulburg-or any place, really-regarded the spellscarred with fear and suspicion. It didn’t surprise him to see that Kara had continued to seek solitude in the high country in the years that he’d been away from Hulburg.
They continued on, riding more east than north, keeping a cautious pace. No trees grew in the Highfells, of course, but in small hollows or sheltered spots, thick low gorse grew, and sometimes they found small shelters of fieldstone and turf in these places-lodges used by herdsmen in the warmer months. From time to time they came across sudden steep-sided streambeds, narrow and deep, or passed by old cairns and low, rounded barrow mounds. And on one occasion they rode along the rim of a sharp, steep-sided bowl of changeland easily two hundred feet deep, its sides made of glistening blue stone grooved with strange whorls. Geran remembered the place well; one summer afternoon in his fifteenth year, he and Jarad had explored the sinkhole by roping themselves down to its floor, only to find that its lower reaches were honeycombed by crevices where repulsive, silver-winged eel-like creatures laired. They’d had to climb back up with smoking torches clutched in their hands to keep the nasty things from chewing them to pieces.
Another half-hour brought them to the edge of a barrow field, a wide expanse of small burial mounds. The southern borders of Thar were strewn with the ancient tombs left behind by people long since lost to history. Hundreds of the mounds lay within a day’s ride of Hulburg. Sometimes dozens stood together within a few hundred yards of each other, and sometimes a single barrow stood all by itself, a dismal and lonely sentinel on the open downs. Geran had never learned why that was so.
Kara stood up in her stirrups, taking a moment to gain her bearings as she studied the barrow field. This one was well ordered; the barrows stood in low rows, serried ranks of weary soldiers standing watch against the cold north wind. She looked left, then right, and nodded to herself. “We’re here,” she said. “This way.”
They followed behind Kara as she rode up to one of the larger barrows. Long ago someone had excavated its door, revealing a low, black opening in the hillside. The whole thing was better than a hundred feet across and almost twenty feet high, which suggested to Geran that someone important had been buried in the mound; most barrows were quite a bit smaller. Kara slid out of her saddle, patted Dancer’s muzzle, and made her way slowly into the open space before the barrow’s black doorway, her head down and her eyes on the ground. Geran and Hamil dismounted as well and waited for a moment as the ranger studied the moss-covered rocks and wiry grass of the hollow.
“Here,” she said over her shoulder. “This is where Jarad was found.”
Geran felt a cold shiver in his heart, but he forced his feet into motion. He came up beside Kara, looking at the ground where she pointed. He couldn’t see much, but that didn’t surprise him; Kara had always been much better at reading tracks than he. Hamil joined them a moment later, squatting to run his fingers lightly over the ground.
“The Shieldsworn sent for me as soon as they learned Jarad had been found,” Kara said quietly. “I had a good look at the scene later that day. You can’t see much, since it’s been almost a month now, and we’ve had a lot of rain since. But you can still make out the impression in the heather, there, and just a bit of rust from his mail. He’d been here for about two days before he was found.”
Geran took a deep breath and straightened up to look around the hollow. “What do you make of it, Kara?”
“Jarad rode up from the south side of the barrow and hitched his horse back behind those boulders there.” She pointed at a jumble of gray stone and gorse a couple of bowshots from the door, more or less back in the same direction from which they had just approached. “He approached the barrow on foot, circled the area briefly, and chose a spot where he could lie low and watch the door-over there, in the gorse. There’s a depression that would make for good cover. I’ll show you.”
She led them away from the barrow door about forty yards, angling away to the side, until they stood by a tuft of wiry brush. “He waited here for a short time, perhaps an hour or so. Then a party of five riders approached the barrow from the south and dismounted right in front of the door there-four men and a woman. A fight followed; I think Jarad wounded two men before he was cut down, right where his body was found. No one moved him.”
“You’re certain of all that?” Hamil asked.
“I told you, I had a good look at the scene.”
Geran smiled humorlessly. “What Kara isn’t saying, Hamil, is that she’s the best tracker between Melvaunt and Vaasa. I’ll say it for her. You can consider everything she just said ironclad fact. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s read a few more pieces of the puzzle she hasn’t shared yet, because she can’t quite put them together.”
