Matthias only snorted and, as the last daylight faded, rolled up in his blanket. Exhausted by his day’s labor hauling ashes and water and lime, he quickly fell asleep.
Anna snuggled up against him, but she could not go to sleep as easily. Instead, she closed her eyes and dreamed of the wide world, of a place far from the filth of the camp and the lurking shadows of the Eika.
II
IN THE SHADOW OF THE MOUNTAINS
1
THE hawk spiraled far above, a speck against the three mountain peaks that dominated the view. It sank, then caught an updraft and rose, wings outstretched, into the depthless blue of the sky. Here, where human paths arched closest to the vast and impenetrable mystery of the heavens, Hanna could believe that anything was possible. She could believe that the distant bird, hovering high overhead, was no hawk at all but a man or woman wearing a bird’s shape—or else that it was a spirit, an angel disguised in plain feathers, surveying earth from the heights.
Or perhaps it was only a hawk, hunting for its supper.
A thin crest of breeze touched her ears, and she thought she heard the bird’s harsh call; its slow spiral did not alter. As she waited, the heavens shaded from the vivid blue of afternoon into the intense blue-gray of impending twilight. Shadow crept up the stark white peaks as the sun sank in the western sky.
Where had Wolfhere gone, and why was he taking so long to return?
The path wound farther up into heather and gorse, sidetracked by heaps of sharp boulders and the high shoulder of a cliff face. Beyond, the dirt track lost itself in a narrow defile. Wolfhere had bade her wait here while he walked on ahead, disappearing through the narrow gate of stone and crumbling cliff into the vale that lay beyond. Through the gap Hanna saw the rippling tops of trees, suggesting a cleft of land that ran lush with spring-fed plants. She had seen other such valleys in these mountains, sudden gorges and startlingly green vales half hidden by the jagged landscape. Beneath the scent of gorse she smelled cookfires and a distant whiff of the forge.
Why had Wolfhere wanted her to accompany him this far, and no farther?
“Stay here and watch,” he had said. “But on no account follow me and let no other follow me.”
What was he hiding? What other did he expect to follow them up here, on this goat track he called a path? She turned to look back the way they had come. At first she thought they had been following a goat track along the heights towering above the ancient paved road that marked St. Barnaria Pass. But no goat’s track sported a thin trail of wagon wheels, although how a wagon could possibly be dragged up here was more than she could imagine.
It was very strange.
A few steps back, an outcropping gave her a good view down onto the pass below. The road had been built during the old Dariyan Empire by their astoundingly clever engineers. In the hundreds of years since then, not even winter storms had washed it away, although many of its stones were cracked or upturned by the weight of snow, the thawing power of ice, or the simple strength of obstinate grass. Its resilience astonished her.
The hawk wafted lazily above. She blinked back tears as her gaze caught the edge of the sinking sun. Specks swam before her eyes; then she realized that two more birds had joined the first.
Her neck hurt from staring upward for so long, but in her seventeen or so years of life she had never imagined there might be a place like this. She knew the sea and the marsh, rivers and hills and the dark mat of forest. She had now seen the king’s court and the glittering parade of nobles on his progress. She had seen the Eika raiders and their fearsome dogs so close she could have spit on them.
But to see such mountains as these! The peaks were themselves presences, towering creatures hunched in sleep, their shoulders and bowed heads covered by drifts of snow deeper than anything Hanna had ever seen. Last winter she would have laughed at any poor soul foolish enough to suggest that she, Hanna, daughter of the innkeepers Birta and Hansal, would herself journey across those mountains wearing the badge of an Eagle. Last winter her mother and father had arranged for her betrothal to young Johan, freeholder and farmer, a man of simple tastes and no curiosity, his gaze fixed on the earth.
Now, as summer flowers bloomed alongside the high mountain pass, she—mercifully unbetrothed—was on her way south across the Alfar Mountains, an agent of the king on an important errand to the skopos herself. Truly, her life had taken a sudden and surprising turn. How distant Heart’s Rest seemed now!
From the outcropping she could see down to the road and, farther back, partially hidden by the thrusting shoulder of a ridge, the hostel where their party had halted for the night. The stone buildings nestled into the ridge’s spine. Under the protection of the skopos, the hostel was run by monks from the Order of St. Servitius. According to Wolfhere, those monks stayed up in these inhospitable heights through the winter. A merchant in their party had been snowed in one terrible winter, or so he claimed, and he had regaled the party with a horrific story of fire salamanders, cannibalism, and avenging spirits. The story sounded so true when he told it, but Wolfhere had stood in the shadows of the campfire that night, shaking his head and frowning.