If he heard, it was no comfort to him. He vanished with the words, but the smell of his anguish burned in my throat long past dawn, as that glowing green trail lingered on the hills even after Lukassa and I were on our way once again. I pointed it out to her, but she could not see it. I thought then that my friend had just enough strength left to call to me, no one else.
That day, I remember, I told Lukassa a little of myself and more of where we were bound, and why. For all her persistence, she asked no real questions yet but only, in different ways, “Am I alive, am I alive?” Beyond that, she seemed perfectly content to ride behind me, day after day, across a land so bitter and desolate that she might well have wished herself drowned again, safe in the sweet, rushing waters of her own country. I told her that a friend of mine was in great danger and need, and that I was journeying to aid him. That was when she smiled for the first time, and I saw what that village boy was following. She said, “It’s your lover.”
“Of course not,” I said. I was actually shocked at the idea. “He is my teacher, he helped me when there was no help for me in all the world. I would be more truly dead than you ever were, but for him.”
“The old man who sang to his vegetables,” she said, and I nodded. Lukassa was quiet for a while; then she asked, “Why am I with you? Do I belong to you now, the way that song belongs to me?”
“The dead belong to no one. I could not leave you, neither could I stay to tend you. What else could I do?” I spoke flatly and harshly, because she was making me uneasy. “As for lovers, yours has been hot after us from the night I took you away. Perhaps you would like to stop and wait for him. He certainly must care dearly for you, and I am not used to company.” Whatever power was besieging my friend so terribly, she could be no help against it. I had no business bringing her any further, for all of our sakes. “Go home with him,” I said. “Life is back that way, not where we are going.”
But she cried that one road was as foreign to her as the other, that in a world of strangers she knew only death and me. So we went on together, and her boy after us, losing and losing ground, but still coming on. As frantic for speed as I was, we began to walk by turns, to spare my horse; and there came days in that ugly land when we both walked. As for food, I can live on very little when I have to—not forever, but for a while—which was fortunate, because Lukassa ate, not merely like the healthy child she was, but as though only by eating almost to sickness could she remind herself that she was truly alive in her own body. I have been just so myself, over food and more.
Water. I have never known country where I could not find water—where I was born, a two-year-old can smell it as easily as dinner. It is not nearly as hard as most people think, but most people only think about finding water when they are already in a panic of thirst and not thinking well about anything. But those Barrens came as close as ever I saw to being completely dry, and if it had not been that the green trail, glimmering more faintly every night, sometimes crossed the course of an underground trickle, Lukassa and I might have been in serious trouble. As it was, most times we had enough to keep the horse going and our mouths and throats from closing against the burning air. How that boy following managed, I have no idea.
When we began climbing, the country improved, though not by much. There was more water, there were birds and rabbits to snare, and a small, small wind began to pity us just a bit. But from our first night, I could no longer make out the green trail, and I wept with rage when Lukassa was asleep, because I knew that it was still there, still trying to lead me to where my friend waited, but grown too weak now for even my eyes. The road, such as it was, forked and frayed and split constantly, going off in every possible direction: up box canyons, treacherous with tumbled stones; down and away into thinly wooded gullies; around and around through endless foothills, half of them sheared away by old landslides, and any or all of them the right path to take, for all I knew. I trusted to my luck, and to the fact that a wizard’s desires have body in the world: what one of those people wants to tell you exists, like a stone or an apple, whether or not the wizard has the strength to make you see it plainly. I could only hope that the reality of my friend’s road would call me by day, as the reality of his pain did by night.
Nyateneri came out of the twilight of our fourth day in the hills. She made no attempt at stealth—I heard the hoofbeats before we had our cooking fire built, and Lukassa was burying the remains by the time she came in sight—but for all that, she surprised me: not there one minute, there the next, like a star. I cannot afford to be surprised, and I was angry with myself until I felt the prickle of magic on my skin, and saw the air tremble between us as I stared at her, very slightly. Live long enough with a magician, and you cannot help acquiring that sense, exactly as you’d feel just where a stranger’s shoe pinched if you lived with a cobbler. It wasn’t her own magic—she was no wizard, whatever else she was— but there was surely some sort of spell on her, though what it might be I could not say. I am no wizard either.
She was brown-skinned, the shade of strong tea, and her narrow eyes, turned slightly down at the corners, were the color of the twilight itself. Taller than I, long-boned, left-handed; a lot of leverage in those shoulders, probably a powerful shot with that bow she carries, but not necessarily accurate—when you have lived as I have, those are the things you notice first. For the rest, she wore riders’ clothes distinguished only by a drabness that seemed deliberate: boots, trews, over-tunic, a Cape Dylee sidrin cloak—common west-country stuff, nothing quite matching. The hood of the sidrin covered her hair, and she seemed in no hurry to push it back. She rode a roan as gangling and strong-looking as herself, and behind her there followed a shaggy little black horse, not much bigger than a pony, and with the faraway yellow eyes of a carnivore. I have never seen a horse like that one.
She did not speak at first, but only sat her horse and regarded us. There was no friendliness in her bearing, nor menace exactly: nothing but that least spell-shimmer and a sense of dangerous exhaustion. Lukassa came quickly to stand beside me. I said, “What you see is yours,” which is a greeting from home. I cannot break myself entirely of using it, perhaps because it says something important about the people to whom I was born. Generous they are with the physical—known for it—but they keep a close watch on the invisible. One day I will just stop saying it.
“Siri te mistanye,” she answered me, and the back of my neck sparked coldly. That I did not take her meaning is not the point; there is a civilized understanding that a greeting is to be answered in the tongue of the greeter. Her tone was courteous enough, and she bent her head properly when she spoke, but what she had done she had surely done deliberately, and I would have been within my rights to challenge her or bid her ride on. But I was too curious for that, whatever my neck thought, so I compromised, asking merely for her name and adding that we could speak in Banli if common speech was too difficult. Banli is trade-talk, a pidgin for peddlers in markets far from home. She smiled at me then, taking the insult as it was meant.
“I am Nyateneri,” she said. “Daughter of Lomadis, daughter of Tyrrin.” Then I thought that she must be from the South Islands, clothes or no, because only there do the women take their descent through the mother’s line. Her voice suited this, being lighter than mine and slower, moving from side to side where mine goes up and down. She said, “And you are Sailor Lal, Lal-after-dark. This other I do not know.”