Six

Dragons were not nearly the danger I had feared in Gidesta, but we would see them flying over in the spring and sometimes raiding down into the valleys in the autumn. This is one of the many Mountain myths in which they figure.

Upper Reaches of the Pasfal Valley,

13th of For-Summer

Come on, wizard! Any slower and your lice’ll get off and walk!” For all his cheerful words, I noted ’Gren was leaning on a large boulder as he taunted Usara.

“It wouldn’t hurt for you to take it a little easier,” I retorted. “The air up here’s thinner than a beggar’s dog!” That was an exaggeration but I was finding the steady incline a long haul. At least there was a breeze to cool the early summer sun. A hopeful butterfly went past in a lazy pattern of pale blue that mimicked the bleached sky above us.

Sorgrad, some way ahead, sat down on the rough turf fringing the narrow scar of the path. “We might as well stop and eat before we go any farther.”

Usara’s pack hit the ground with a thud. “How much farther is it to the next village?” he asked, narrow chest heaving.

Sorgrad shook his head. “There’ll be no more villages, not this high. This is Anyatimm territory now. Westerlings keep to the old ways, more than anyone.”

“So if there are no villages hereabouts, where do these Westerlings live? Where are we likely to get shelter, come to that?” I looked up from unpacking the calico bag of provisions I’d wheedled out of the last hamlet, from women short and stocky, light of hair and eye.

“We stop at the next fess, the next compound,” replied ’Gren with a touch of scorn. “Any traveler has the right to ask for fire, food and shelter.”

“Which is freely given because everyone knows they’re in the same situation when they travel,” added Sorgrad. “This is a hard land and the only way to survive is to cooperate.”

I nodded, seeing the bleakness underlying the thin soil and short-lived blooms so bright with the sun’s gloss. I wouldn’t want to be up here much beyond the turn of For-Autumn. “So who were those people in the valley bottom?”

“Lowlanders.” ’Gren held out his hand to me and I filled it with a wedge of creamy sheep cheese and some coarse bread.

“They looked mountain-born.” Usara had got his breath back.

“Some Anyatimm men marry lowland women,” explained Sorgrad, “but they’re no longer counted as blood.”

I chewed thoughtfully on my bread, not the finest I’d ever tasted but at least it was light with leaven and baked in a proper oven. “Is that important?” I picked a husk from between my teeth.

“Yes, to the Westerlings certainly. Once a man leaves the mountains, it’s hard for him to come back. If he’s married a lowland woman, it’s nigh on impossible.” Sorgrad unhooked a waterskin from his belt and drank.

Something chirruping in a stand of long grass was the only sound to break the silence. I wondered how far we were from Selerima. We’d walked right out of Aft-Spring and on into For-Summer, nearly a whole half-season by my reckoning. The comfortable little towns of Solura growing fat in the lush river valley had dwindled to smaller villages carefully tending stock and crops in less generous lands and these had finally given up to close-shuttered knots of stout stone houses resolute in the hollows of the rising hills.

I looked around as I ate. My wonder at this country was slow to fade. Rolling hills of lush green grass had sharpened to stark fells, purpled with ling and berry bushes, striped with screes and waterfalls. Our pace had slowed and there were days when I’d wondered if we were getting any nearer at all to the great folded mountains that rucked the land up to the sky. Now we were into that land I realized the distances had deceived me. What had looked like a mere shrubby cloak draping the bones of the land was revealed as forest to rival the land of the Folk. Unfamiliar firs mingled with tall straight birches cascading down steep hillsides in endless billows of trees. There were no roads worth the name and precious few tracks. It was a vast country, daunting, and it made me feel very small and insignificant.

On the far side of this valley, I could see a blackened scar of wildfire softened with a bloom of new green. Beyond, a jutting jag of stone burst from a jumble of grass and saplings, a stream fell to its fate over the angular edges, splitting and plaiting to plunge into a rainbow haze. Behind, a rampart of flat-topped rocks marked the far side of another valley hidden in the folded land, no way of guessing how far, how deep or how long it might be. The striped and dappled face of a cliff shifted and changed as a cloud passed between it and the sun. Still farther away, a saw-edged peak pied with snow and rock was merely the nearest of the massive mountains drawing clouds close around their shoulders.

“Are those the high peaks?” I asked Sorgrad.

“No, just the southern ranges. The land falls away again beyond there, into a wilderness of lake and plain. The highest peaks are a season’s journey farther north again.” He looked up at the sky, face unreadable.

“So where exactly are we?” asked Usara with a frown.

“Hachalsoke.” ’Gren waved an expansive arm. “Home to the Hachalkin.”

“One family owns all this tract of land?” Usara’s confusion was hardly surprising. You could fit Hadrumal and all its wizards into the wide valley whose sides we’d been toiling up.

“You have to understand that things are very different up here,” said Sorgrad slowly.

“Tell us,” I encouraged. “We don’t want to get someone’s hackles up by saying the wrong thing.”

“You need to watch what you say, both of you.” Sorgrad was deadly earnest. ‘This isn’t the Forest, everyone used to new faces and new ideas. Things move slowly up here and change comes seldom. The sokes have good reason to be wary of incomers; whole kindreds have been wiped out by pestilence brought by travelers.”