conquer the plains!”
Beramun ignored his helping hand and stood, bracing herself against the sticky wall until her knees ceased shaking.
He watched her through narrowed eyes. “You can live as the chiefs mate or die as his slave. The choice is yours. Until you decide, you’ll work like the others in the tannery.”
He indicated she should precede him up the tunnel. She limped past, bruised from her hard landing, and they walked in silence. The long tunnel eventually ended on a blank wall. Looking up, Beramun saw an opening. A ladder made from peeled saplings was positioned in the hole. Weary, her entire body aching, she began the climb up.
When they emerged, she saw it was still night. Zannian pointed wordlessly to the pen where the other captives slept. Head held high, Beramun limped into the low-walled prison.
Chapter 5
Tiphan and his young helpers left the valley through Cedarsplit Gap, climbing into the low-hanging clouds as they went. Everything they wore or carried soon acquired a thin coat of ice. Once they crested the pass, they encountered a frigid wind that cut through their furs. By the time the sun rose above the eastern range, all three travelers were numb to the bone.
Tiphan consented to a pause in the lee of a promontory for refreshment. Strengthening drafts of Hulami’s best wine got their blood coursing again.
“The wind shouldn’t be so bad on the downslope,” Mara remarked.
“I hope so,” said Penzar, lips blue with cold. “Tosen, now that we’re out of Yala-tene, can you tell us where we’re going?”
In reply Tiphan opened his hip pouch and took out the scrap of Silvanesti map. He spread it on a convenient rock and pointed approximately halfway between the eastern rivers.
“Here,” he said.
Penzar touched the ragged edge of the tom map reverently. “This is elven?”
“Yes. It represents a place, like you might draw a picture of a person you know.” Tiphan drew his knife and deftly scratched a few lines on the rock face behind them with the bronze blade. Mara and Penzar squinted at the image. It was a simple face — round head, eyes, nose, the suggestion of a mouth.
“This might be anyone,” Tiphan said. “So I add — ” He scored a curling line from the back of the image’s head. “Now who is it?”
Penzar said, “Mara!” and the girl echoed, “Me!”
“If I drew a three-sided lake with a waterfall at the broad end, you’d know what place it was, wouldn’t you?”
The boy grinned. “Of course, Tosen.”
Mara was studying the crude likeness on the rock. She glowed with her pleasure at having been chosen as the subject of her leader’s lesson, but she quickly resumed her serious countenance.
Standing out from the sheltering boulder, she said, “The wind dies. Shall we go?”
As they crossed the high divide between east and west the wind subsided. It was still freezing and extremely dry — too dry for snow or ice — but the sun was bright, and they made good time. Penzar moved ahead, scouting for hidden danger and game, but he found neither. The mountains were desolate this late in winter, and save for few birds of prey wheeling in the faultless sky, they saw no animals at all.
By afternoon it was Mara’s turn to scout ahead, which she did with her bird stick in hand. If she scared up a covey of quail or a grouse, she could bring down a bird in flight with her carved throwing wand. Unfortunately, she found the rocky crevices as lifeless as Penzar had.
At this height, the sky was clear, blue, and free of clouds. Shading her eyes, Mara looked to the eastern horizon. Slender, thready clouds reached out from the edge of dawn, like long white fingers. It was snowing, possibly raining, somewhere far to the east, but she reckoned the moisture wouldn’t reach them for several days.
The clatter of loose rocks ahead woke her from her reverie. She drew her arm back, ready to throw her stick at whatever was moving up ahead. Listening, she heard something else: the rhythmic fall of hooves.
Mara turned and sprinted back up the trail. Topping an outcropping of rock, she spied Tiphan and Penzar in the distance and ran even harder. When she was close enough, she gasped her warning.
“Tosen! Horses!”
Horses meant nomads or elves. In either case, the trio was in no position to meet hostile strangers. They hastily quit the trail, taking shelter between two boulders. Penzar stood with spear ready as the others peered around the rocks to see what was coming.
Four swarthy heads appeared, bobbing as they came. They had leathery faces and shoulder-length black hair, lank and woven through with vines and leaves. They weren’t elves or humans, and as they drew nearer, it became plain they were not riding on horses. They were horses below the waist.
“Centaurs,” Tiphan whispered.
The four leaders were followed by a crowd of others, all weighed down with baggage — furs, hides, bedrolls, tools, and woven willow panniers. Mara counted twenty-two centaurs in sight, with more coming over the ridge. This was no hunting party. This was an entire tribe on the move.
The lead man-horse reached the spot where Tiphan, Mara, and Penzar had left the trail. In their haste to hide, they hadn’t obscured their tracks, and the centaur saw the signs of their passage. He held up a hand, shouted something in a guttural tongue, and the whole tribe halted. Gray-haired elders cantered forward to confer with the scout. With much gesturing of arms and stamping of hooves, the scout made his point. Bending his forelegs, he knelt and sniffed the stony ground. Slowly he raised his head until he was staring directly at the humans’ hiding place.
“Tosen?” Penzar whispered, gripping his spear.
“Be still. I’ll deal with them.”
Tiphan stepped from the crevice. The centaurs spotted him and began an excited babble. Four of them galloped up, flanking the Sensarku leader.
“Mara! Penzar! Come out,” he said evenly. “Penzar, leave your spear.”
“But Tosen — ”
“Do as I say!”
Mara emerged from the cleft in the rock and stood confidently by her leader. Penzar came out more slowly, eyeing the fierce-looking centaurs with obvious suspicion.
One centaur, whose hair was liberally streaked with gray and whose dark horse’s body was likewise dappled with silver, approached Tiphan. He scrutinized the Sensarku and uttered a short sentence in his own tongue.
Back in the rocks, Tiphan had thought he recognized this centaur. Now it was time to test his memory.
“Miteera?” he ventured. “Miteera?”
The centaurs pranced and muttered, obviously startled to hear the word from human lips.
“Miteera,” said the gray-dappled centaur. “Your face I not know.”
“I am Tiphan, Konza’s son. Peace to you, Miteera, and to your people.”
“Know you me… how?”
“I know many things,” Tiphan said, smiling. “I am chief of the Sensarku, the Servants of the Dragon.”
“Ah!” Miteera turned to his people and gave them a rapid explanation in their own tongue. To Tiphan, he said, “From Arku-peli?” Tiphan admitted they were. “Your chief Arkuden?”
The smile faded from Tiphan’s face. He forced it to return. “Yes, the head of our village is the Arkuden,” he said. “What brings you and your people to the high mountains, Miteera?”
The old centaur’s face darkened, his gray eyes narrowing. “Pushed out eight suns ago. By B’leef.”
It took Tiphan a moment to realize Miteera was saying “Balif.” To be certain he asked, “The Silvanesti drove you out? The elves?”
Miteera nodded and spat on the ground. “Old Ones with fire and metal drive Miteera people out. Many die. We go to sunset. Leave B’leef.”
