—and then she had lost him and tumbled free, landing hard on her knees with the wind knocked out of her lungs. Her bow lay beside her on the sandy ground. Branches rattled in a dry wind, and a gold feather drifted down through the air to catch in her hand. Coughing, she got to her feet.
“Well,” said the old Aoi sorcerer, letting the half-twined rope fall to the ground as he stood. “This time you have surprised me.”
“I didn’t expect to come here,” she admitted. She had to lean with hands braced on her thighs, catching her breath. Catching the sobs that shook her. She wanted to weep, but that was one of the lessons that Da had taught her, that she’d learned so well that it had become habit: “If you’re crying, you can’t hear them coming up behind you.”
Ai, God. There was nothing she could do for Alain. But she had to be strong enough to find Sanglant and Blessing; she had to be strong enough to come to their aid. She rose, letting her breath out with a shudder, tucked the feather away, and brushed dirt from the knees of her leggings and from her palms. She checked herself reflexively for her possessions: bow, quiver, sword, dagger, cloak, Alain’s ring, the torque Sanglant had given her. Of Blessing she had nothing but the link of shared blood.
“I meant to leave Verna,” she continued, still stunned by the departure of the creatures who had meant to take her with them. “But I didn’t know I’d end up here.”
“Yet you are here.”
“I am here,” she agreed, “But—” But still she hesitated.
“You are still bound to the other world,” he said, not dismayed, not irritated, not cheerful. Simply stating what was true.
“I am still bound to the other world.” Without thinking, she set her hand against the blue-white fire of the stone, and she looked inside.
He leans back against the rock face and lets the glorious heat of the sun warm him. They came clear of the valley an hour or so after dawn and, with the birds singing around him and his mother walking beside him, he understands he is free for now of Sister Anne and her threats and her war. Yet how can he be free from that war knowing what he has learned, that his mother’s people mean to return to Earth from whatever place they have been hiding, or exiled? True, his mother desires to go to Henry. But what will she tell him? And what will he say to his father? Whose story can he believe? On whose side will he muster?
He opens his eyes. Resuelto and the pony crop at what grass they can find upon the hillside. Below, smoke curls up from the cookhouse of the hostel below, and he sees robed figures hastening about. The monks are agitated today. Even the bees are agitated, swarming around flowers but not landing to sip nectar.