Josua did the same. "I hope you find Miriamele and Simon. But if you do not, there is no shame in it. As Isgrimnur said, come back to us as soon as you can, Binabik."

"And I am hoping that things will be going well for you in Nabban."

"But how will you find us?" Josua asked suddenly, his long face worried.

Binabik stared at him for a moment, then, surprisingly, let out a loud laugh. "How can I be finding an army of gra.s.slanders and stone-dwellers mixed together, led by a dead hero of great famousness and a one-handed prince? I am thinking that it will not be difficult obtaining word of you."

Josua's face relaxed into a smile. "I suppose you are right. Farewell, Binabik." He raised his hand, exposing for a moment the dulled manacle he wore as a reminder of his imprisonment and the debt he owed his brother for it.

"Farewell, Josua and Isgrimnur," said the troll. "Please be saying that for me to the others as well. I could not bear to be making good-byes to all at once." He leaned forward to whisper something to the patiently waiting wolf, then turned back toward them. "In the mountains, we are saying this: 'Inij koku na siqqasa min taq'- 'Inij koku na siqqasa min taq'- 'When we meet again, that will be a good day.' " He sunk both his hands into the wolf's hackles. 'When we meet again, that will be a good day.' " He sunk both his hands into the wolf's hackles. "Hinik, "Hinik, Qantaqa. Find Simon. Qantaqa. Find Simon. Hinik ummu! Hinik ummu!"

The wolf leaped forward up the wet hillside. Binabik swayed on her broad back but kept his seat. Isgrimnur and Josua watched until the strange rider and his stranger mount topped the hill's crest and vanished from sight.

"I fear I will never see them again," said Josua. "I am cold, Isgrimnur."

The duke put his hand on the prince's shoulder. He was not himself feeling either very warm or very happy. "Let's go back. We have near a thousand people we need to get moving by the time the sun is above the hilltops."

Josua nodded. "So we do. Come, then."

They turned and retraced their own footsteps in the sodden gra.s.s.

4.

A Thousand Leaves, A Thousand Shadows

Miriamele and Simon spent the first week of their flight in the forest. The traveling was slow and painfully laborious, but Miriamele had decided long before her escape that it would be far better to lose time than to be captured. The daylight hours were spent struggling through the dense trees and matted, tangling undergrowth, all to the tune of Simon's grumbling. They led their horses more often than they rode them. spent the first week of their flight in the forest. The traveling was slow and painfully laborious, but Miriamele had decided long before her escape that it would be far better to lose time than to be captured. The daylight hours were spent struggling through the dense trees and matted, tangling undergrowth, all to the tune of Simon's grumbling. They led their horses more often than they rode them.

"Be happy," she told him once as they rested in a clearing, leaning against the trunk of an old oak. "At least we are getting to see the sun for a few days. When we leave the forest again, we'll be riding by night."

"At least if we ride at night I won't have to look at the things that are tearing all the skin off my body," Simon said crossly, rubbing at his tattered breeches and the bruised flesh underneath.

It was heartening, Miriamele discovered, to have something to do. The feeling of helpless dread that had gripped her for weeks faded away, leaving her able to think clearly, to see everything around her as if with new eyes ... and even to enjoy being with Simon.

She did enjoy his company. Sometimes she wished she didn't enjoy it quite so much. It was hard not to feel as though she were tricking him somehow. It was more than just not telling him all her reasons for leaving Uncle Josua and setting out for the Hayholt. She also felt as though she were not wholly clean, not wholly fit to be with someone else.

It is Aspitis, she thought. He did this to me. Before him, I was as pure as anyone could want to be. I was as pure as anyone could want to be.

But was that really true? He had not forced himself upon her. She had let him do what he wished-in some ways she had welcomed it. In the end, Aspitis had proved to be a monster, but the way in which he came to her bed was no different than that in which most men came to their sweethearts. He had not savaged her. If what they had done was wrong and sinful, she bore equal blame.

And what, then, of Simon? She had very mixed feelings. He was not a boy any more but a man, and a part of her feared the man he had become, as it would fear any man. But, she thought, there was also something about him that had remained strangely innocent. In his earnest attempts to do right, in the poorly-hidden hurt that he showed when she was short with him, he was still almost childlike. This made her feel even worse, that in his transparent regard for her he had no clue as to what she was truly like. It was precisely when he was kindest to her, when he most admired and complimented her, that she felt most angry with him. It seemed he was being willfully blind.

It was a dreadful way to feel. Luckily, Simon seemed to understand that his sincere affection was somehow painful to her, so he fell back on the jesting, mocking friendship with which she was more comfortable. When she could be around him without thinking about herself, she found him good company.

Despite growing up in the courts of her grandfather and father, Miriamele had found little opportunity to be with boys. King John's knights were mostly dead or long since retired to their estates scattered about Erkynland and elsewhere, and in her grandfather's later years the king's court had become empty of almost any but those who had to live near the king for the sake of their day-to-day livelihoods. Later, when her mother had died, her father had frowned on her spending time even with the few boys and girls of her age. He had not filled the void with his own presence, but had instead mewed her up with unpleasant old men and women who lectured her about the rituals and responsibilities of her position and found fault with everything she did. By the time her father had become king, Miriamele's solitary childhood was over.

Leleth, her handmaiden, had been almost her only young companion. The little girl had idolized Miriamele, hanging on the princess' every word. In turn, Leleth had told long stories about growing up with brothers and sisters-she was the youngest of a large baronial family-while her mistress listened in fascination, trying not to be jealous of the family she had never had.

That was why it had been so difficult to see Leleth again upon reaching Sesuad'ra. The lively little girl she remembered had vanished. Before they had fled the castle together, Leleth had been quiet sometimes, and many things frightened her, but it was as though some completely different creature now lived behind the little girl's eyes. Miriamele had tried to remember if there had ever been any sign of the sort of things that Geloe had discovered in the child, but could think of little, except that Leleth had been p.r.o.ne to vivid, intricate, and sometimes frightening dreams. Some of them had seemed so detailed and unusual in Leleth's retelling that Miriamele had been more than half certain the little girl had invented them.

When Miriamele's father had ascended to his own father's throne, she found herself both surrounded by people and yet terribly lonely. Everyone at the Hayholt had seemed obsessed with the empty ritual of power, something Miriamele had lived with for so long that it held no interest for her. It was like watching a confusing game played by bad-tempered children. Even the few young men who paid court to her-or rather to her father, for most of them had been interested in little more than the riches and power that would fall to the one who received her marriage-pledge-had seemed to her like some other type of animal than she, boring old men in the bodies of youths, sullen boys masquerading as adults.

The only ones in all of Meremund or the Hayholt who seemed to enjoy life for what it was rather than what gain could be coaxed from it were the servants. In the Hayholt especially, with its army of maids and grooms and scullions, it was as though an entirely different race of people lived side by side with her own bleak peers. Once, in a moment of terrible sadness, she had suddenly seen the great castle as a kind of inverted lich-yard, with the creaking dead walking around on top while the living sang and laughed below.

Thus Simon and a few others had first come to her attention-boys who seemed to want nothing much more than to be boys. Unlike the children of her father's n.o.bles, they were in no hurry to take on the clacking, droning, mannered speech of their elders. She watched them dawdling through their ch.o.r.es, laughing behind their hands at each others' foolish pranks, or playing hoodman blind on the commons gra.s.s, and she ached to be like them. Their lives seemed so simple. Even when a more mature wisdom taught her that the lives of the serving-folk were hard and wearisome, she still dreamed sometimes that she could put off her royalty as easily as a cloak and become one of their number. Hard work had never frightened her, but she was terrified of solitude.

"No," Simon said firmly. "You should never-let me get this close to you."

He moved his foot slightly and twisted the hilt of his sword so that its cloth-wrapped blade pushed hers away. Suddenly, he was pressing against her. His smell, compounded of sweat and leather jerkin and the sodden fragments of a thousand leaves, was very strong. He was so tall! She forgot that sometimes. The sudden impact of his presence made it hard for Miriamele to think clearly.

"You've left yourself open now," he said. "If I used my dagger, you wouldn't have a chance. Remember, you'll almost always be fighting someone with more reach."

Instead of trying to bring her sword back where it would do some good, she let it drop, then put both hands against Simon's chest and pushed. He fell back, stumbling, before he regained his balance.

"Leave me alone." Miriamele turned and walked a few steps away, then stooped to pick up a few branches for the fire so her shaking hands would have something to do.

"What's wrong?" Simon asked; taken aback. "Did I hurt you?"

"No, you didn't hurt me." She took her armful of wood and dumped it into the circle they had cleared on the forest floor. "I'm just done with that game for a while."

Simon shook his head, then sat to undo the rags wound about his sword.

They had made camp early today, the sun still high above the treetops. Miriamele had decided that tomorrow they would follow the little streamlet that had long been their companion down to the River Road; the course of the stream had been bending in that direction for most of this day's journey. The River Road wound beside the Ymstrecca, past Stanshire and on to Hasu Vale. It would be best, she had reasoned, for them to take to the road at midnight and still have some walking time before dawn, rather than spend all of this night in the forest and then wait through daylight again so they could travel the road in darkness.

This had been her first opportunity to use her sword in several days, except for the inglorious purpose of clearing brush. It had even been she who had suggested an hour of practice before they ate their evening meal-which was one of the reasons her abrupt change of heart obviously puzzled Simon. Miriamele felt torn between a desire to tell him it wasn't his fault, and an obscure feeling that somehow it was his fault-his fault for being male, his fault for liking her, his fault for coming with her when she would have been happier being miserably alone.

"Don't mind me, Simon," she said at last, and felt weak for doing so. "I'm just tired."

Mollified, he finished his careful rewinding of the cloth, then dropped the ball of dusty fabric into his saddlebag before coming to join her beside the unlit fire. "I just wanted you to be careful. I told you that you lean too far."

"I know, Simon. You did tell me."

"You can't let someone bigger than you get that close."

Miriamele found herself wishing silently that he would stop talking about it. "I know, Simon. I'm just tired."

He seemed to sense that he had annoyed her again. "But you're good, Miriamele. You're strong."

She nodded, absorbed now with the flint. A spark fell into the curls of tinder, but failed to produce a flame. Miriamele wrinkled her nose and tried again.

"Do you want me to try?"

"No, I don't want you to try." She struck again without result. Her arms were getting weary.

Simon looked at the wood shavings, then up at Miriamele's face, then quickly back down again. "Remember Binabik's yellow powder? He could start a fire in a rainstorm with that. I saw him make one catch when we were on Sikkihoq, and there was snow, and the wind was blowing...."

"Here." Miriamele stood, letting the flint and the steel bar tumble to the dirt beside the tinder. "You do it." She walked to her horse and began hunting through the saddlebags.

Simon seemed about to say something, but instead applied himself to the task of fire-lighting. He had no better luck than Miriamele for a long time. At last, when she had returned with a kerchief full of the things she had found, he finally caught a small spark and provoked it into flame. As she stood over him she saw that his hair was getting quite long, hanging down onto his shoulders in reddish curls.

He looked up at her shyly. His eyes were full of concern for her. "What's wrong?"

She ignored his question. "Your hair wants cutting. I'll do it after we eat." She undid the kerchief. "These are our last two apples. They're getting a little old, in any case-I don't know where Fengbald found them." She had been told about the source of much of Josua's confiscated foodstuffs. There was an obscure pleasure in eating what had once been destined for that strutting braggart. "There's still some dried mutton, too, but we're almost through with it. We may have to try out the bow sometime soon."

Simon opened his mouth, then shut it. He took a breath. "We'll wrap the apples in leaves and bury them in the coals. Shem Horsegroom used to do that all the time. Then it doesn't matter if they're a little old."

"If you say so," Miriamele replied.

Miriamele leaned back and licked her fingers. They still smarted a little from the hot apple skin, but it had been worth it. "Shem Horsegroom," she said, "is a man of astonishing wisdom."

Simon smiled. His beard was sticky with juice. "It was good. But now we don't have any more."

"I couldn't eat any more tonight, anyway. And tomorrow we'll be on the road to Stanshire. I'm sure we can find something almost as good along the way."

Simon shrugged. "I wonder where old Shem is," he asked after a few moments had pa.s.sed. The fire popped and spat as the leaves in which the apples had cooked began to blacken. "And Ruben. And Rachel. Do you think they're all still living at the Hayholt?"

"Why shouldn't they be? The king still needs grooms and blacksmiths. And there must always always be a Mistress of Chambermaids." She offered a faint smile. be a Mistress of Chambermaids." She offered a faint smile.

Simon chortled. "That's true. I can't imagine anyone getting Rachel to leave unless she wanted to. You might as well try to drag a porcupine out of a hollow stump. Even the king-your father, I mean-couldn't make her leave until she was ready."

"Sit up." Miriamele felt the sudden need to do something. "I said I was going to cut your hair."

Simon felt at the back of his head. "Do you think it needs it?"

Miriamele's look was stern. "Even sheep get sheared once a season."

She got out her whetstone and sharpened her knife. The noise of the blade on the stone was like a louder echo of the crickets that chirped beyond the light of the small fire.

Simon peered over his shoulder. "I feel like I'm about to be carved for the Aedonmansa feast."

"You never know what may happen when the dried meat runs out. Now look straight ahead and be quiet." She stood behind him, but there was not enough light to see. When she sat, his head was too far above her. "Stay there," she said.

She dragged over a large stone, digging a rut in the moist earth; when she sat on it, she was just the right height. Miriamele lifted Simon's hair in her hands and stared at it judiciously. Just a little off the bottom ... No. Quite a bit off the bottom.

His hair was finer than it looked. Although it was thick, it was quite soft. Nevertheless. it was grimed with the days of travel. She thought of how her own must look and frowned. "When is the last time you bathed yourself?" she asked.

"What?" He was surprised. "What do you mean?"

"What do you think I mean? Your hair is full of bits of sticks and dirt."

Simon made a noise of disgust. "And what do you expect when I've been crawling through this stupid forest for days and days?"

"Well, I can't cut it like this." She thought for a moment. "I'm going to wash it."

"Are you mad? What do I want it washed for?" He drew up his shoulders protectively, as though she had threatened to stick the knife into him.

"I told you. So I can cut it." She stood and went to fetch the water skin.

"That's drinking water," Simon protested.

"I'll fill it again before we set out," she said calmly. "Now lean your head back."

She had thought momentarily of trying to warm the water, but she was just cross enough at his complaining to enjoy the spluttering noises he made as she disgorged the chilly contents of the water skin on his head. She then took her st.u.r.dy bone comb, which Vorzheva had given her back at Naglimund, and combed out the snarls as best she could, ignoring Simon's indignant protests. Some of the twigs were so entangled she had to unbind them with her fingernails, difficult work which made her lean close. The scent of wet hair added to his pungent Simon-smell was somehow quite pleasant, and Miriamele found herself humming quietly.

When she had done the best she could with the knots, she took up her knife again and began to trim his hair. As she had suspected, merely taking off the ragged ends was not entirely satisfying. Moving quickly in case Simon should begin to complain again, she began to cut in earnest. Soon the back of his neck came into view, pale from the long months hidden from the sun.

As she stared at Simon's neck, at the way it broadened at its base, at the line of red-gold hairs gradually thickening toward the hairline, she was suddenly moved.

There is something magical about everyone, she thought dreamily. she thought dreamily. Everyone. Everyone.

She ran her fingers lightly up his neck and Simon jumped.

"Hoy! What are you doing? That tickles."

"Oh, shut your mouth." She smiled behind his back where he could not see.

She trimmed the hair up over his ears as well, leaving just a little bit to hang down in front where the beard began. She lifted the front and shortened that as well, then stepped to the side to make sure it would not fall down into his eyes. The snowy streak was as vivid as lightning.

"This is where the dragon's blood splashed you." The white hair felt no different than the red as it trailed across her fingertips. "Tell me again what it was like."

Simon seemed about to make some flippant remark, but paused instead, then spoke softly. "It was ... it was not like anything, Miriamele. It just happened. I was frightened, and it was like someone was blowing a horn inside my head. It burned when it touched me. I don't remember much more until I woke up in the cave with Jiriki and Haestan." He shook his head. "There was more to it than that. Some things are hard to explain."

"I know." She let the strands of damp hair fall, then took a breath. "I'm finished."

Simon raised his hands to pat at the back and sides. "It feels short," he said. "I wish I could see it."

"Wait until morning, then have a look in the stream." She felt herself smiling again, stupidly, for no reason. "If I had known you were so vain, I would have brought one of my mirrors."

He turned a look of mock contempt upon her, then sat up straight. "I do do have a mirror," he crowed. "Jiriki's! It's in my sack." have a mirror," he crowed. "Jiriki's! It's in my sack."

"But I thought that it was dangerous!"

"Not just to look at." Simon rose and headed for his saddlebags, in which he began to rummage energetically, like a bear seeking honey in a hollow tree. "Found it," he said. A frown crossed his face. He withdrew the hand that held the mirror, then reached back into the saddlebags with the other and continued to search.

"What is it?"