“I think we can hope for the best,” I said. “But those men might ride back downstream, cross the bridge, and come up this side. We should keep moving.”

“Moving where?” the magus asked.

I shrugged again and waved my good hand upriver. “That way.” Away from the people who might be pursuing us.

We slid down the bank to the road and walked up it. The road was a cart track of powdered dirt. My feet were happier, and with fewer jolts my shoulder was happier as well. The reassuring sensation of floating down the road returned. As we walked, the fields on our right disappeared and were replaced with land that had been cleared once but not farmed for a long time. Wild grasses grew, and there were bushes, but we were the tallest thing in the landscape. I felt very exposed.

I felt much better when the sun dropped behind the hills and night fell, but then the cold came. A half hour after the sun was gone, a chill wind blew down the back of my neck. The magus and Sophos didn’t seem bothered by it. I pushed myself a little faster to warm up and breathed with my mouth open to keep my teeth from chattering. I couldn’t dismiss the crawling sensation in the middle of my back. I was thinking that the Attolian queen wanted at least one of her prisoners back very badly.

The mountains were ahead of us, and we continued toward them in the dark. On this side of the range they rose very steeply, directly out of the Attolian plain, just as they had risen out of the Sea of Olives. We kept to the road by feel. When my bare feet stepped into the stubble, I knew that we had wandered from the track. Even with the breeze pushing me down the road, we walked very slowly. I was tired. I could still hear the roar of the river in its chasm, and I longed for a drink of clean water. When I began to stumble, the magus took my arm, but he was too tall. Sophos slipped under my good shoulder and supported me. Thoughts of the riders that might be behind kept us moving.

After a long time the moon rose, and the Seperchia, which had curved away from the road, began to curve back. The ground we were on had been rising, and the river ran beside us through a chasm thirty or forty feet deep. Its far bank was a cliff face that lifted straight up to the shoulders of the mountains. If we hadn’t crossed at the makeshift bridge, the trail we had been following would have dumped us into the water.

Our road ended in a bridge, and without discussion we started across it. Just before we reached the top of its stone arch, the magus stopped and then turned around. If he’d had ears like a horse, he would have swiveled them forward.

“What do you hear?” I asked.

“Hoofbeats.”

We crossed over the bridge and walked directly into the arms of the soldiers waiting there.

CHAPTER TWELVE

THERE WAS A LEDGE ON the far side of the bridge. At the back of it a squat tower defended a gate that closed off a cleft in the cliff face. The gate was open, and soldiers were scattered around three different fires in front of it, playing dice, sleeping, doing whatever soldiers do when they are off duty. There were only two guards posted at the bridge, and they were sitting on the stone pilings at the end. They didn’t see us until we arrived almost at their feet, and for a moment all they could do was stare. Then they smirked. Then they both jumped down, and one planted his spear beside us, looking suddenly crisp and military while the other guard ran to find his captain. No one said a word while we waited. Around the fires the soldiers didn’t even look up from their dice games.

When the captain arrived, he didn’t have much more to say than his guards. While he looked us over, I leaned on Sophos, and the magus supported us both.

The captain shook his head. To the magus he said, “Welcome to Eddis.” Then he turned to his lieutenant, who had come up behind him. “Get horses,” he said succinctly. “And four or five guards to take them. This is not for us to figure out. Get up on the bridge where you belong,” he said to the two guards, and they scrambled to the top of the arched bridge and looked out over the moonlit plain from there. “You three can follow me,” he said to us, crooking a finger in our direction.

A few soldiers in the camp noticed the movement by the bridge, and heads began to turn. The signs of relaxation disappeared, and the soldiers suddenly became professionals, eager and suspicious. By the time the lieutenant returned with five men and six small horses, the hoofbeats that the magus had heard had been heard by the guards as well and reported to the captain.

“That will be the Attolian guard,” said the magus. He might have expected to be handed over right then.

“I’ll deal with them,” the captain said to the lieutenant. “You take care of these.” He waved a disgusted hand in our direction. Then, signaling to more of his guards to attend him, he tramped away.

Horses were mounted with a lot of jingling and thumping, and a beefy soldier tugged Sophos out from under my arm. Taking him by the elbow and the seat of the pants, he swung him onto a horse. Somebody took my elbow, intending to do the same thing, but as they tugged, I swiveled around and sagged to my knees.

“Stop! Don’t do that!” shouted Sophos, his voice breaking, as he struggled to get down from the horse. The beefy soldier held him pinned and told him to calm down.

The man holding my arm looked a little closer at my face and suggested someone get a blanket. The one they fetched was warm from lying next to the fire. They wrapped me in it and then lifted me up gently into the lieutenant’s arms.

As the horses crossed under the gate, I saw carved griffons overhead, and then I think I fell asleep. I dreamt of rock walls moving past on either side and heard in my sleep the crashing of the ponies’ hooves as they climbed the stone roadway that ran up the cleft in the mountains, cut by the Aracthus before its path had changed.

When we reached the palace, the main courtyard was lit by lanterns, but most of the windows were dark. It was long past midnight. Everyone climbed off his horse, and two men helped me to the ground. After that there was a lot of hemming and hawing, and no one really knew what to do. Sophos came and tucked himself under my good shoulder. The magus stood beside us. All the others sidled a little farther away as if they were afraid our troubles might be contagious.

Finally someone opened the double doors that led to the entrance hall, and we trooped in. The clatter of boots on the marble floors announced our arrival to anyone who hadn’t heard the noise in the courtyard. Servants and onlookers appeared at the heads of the two staircases. Lights were still burning in the lesser throne room, and the great knot of us moved in that direction. The people on the stairs were sucked down in our wake, and by the time we’d left the dark entrance hall and crowded into the doorway of the brightly lit throne room, I felt like the center of a circus on the move. All we needed was dancing bears.

At first all I could see of the room was the walls near the ceiling where mountain swallows were painted swooping and diving, but a series of stairs led into the room, and as the people ahead of me stepped down, I could see where the lower walls were stained dark red and two gold griffons lay, one on either side of the throne. The throne was empty. At the raised hearth in front of it a group of women had been sitting and talking, and two of them had been playing chess. By far the least attractive of the women stood up.

She had black hair, like Attolia, and her gown was red velvet, but there all similarities between her and the lowland queen ended. The queen of Eddis tended to stand like a soldier. The ruffles on her shoulders made her arms seem long enough to reach to her knees. Her nose had been broken and had reknitted crooked; her hair was cut short like a man’s and curled so much over her simple silver crown that the crown itself was nearly invisible.