A little way ahead of them, a pathway led up to a clustered formation of rocks, close gathered to give almost as much shelter as a building. Allart started to direct them up to it, then hesitated, searching with his laran along that line of probability. He flinched, in panic; the cluster of rocks was the nest of banshee-birds, the evil flightless carnivores who lived above the timberline and were drawn by an unfailing tropism to anything with the body-heat of life. They must not go that way!
They could not remain here; the wind was strong enough to fling them off the ledge, and the snow thick around them. Already Cassandra was shivering, the borrowed travel-cloak never intended for a serious storm. Allart and Donal, more used to mountain weather, were not cold, but Allart was beginning to be frightened. They could not go back to Tramontana. They could not climb up where the banshees nested. They could not go ahead on the road to the narrowing path over the abyss. And they could not stay here. Was there no alternative to their death then? Was it ordained by fate that they should die in this blizzard?
Holy Bearer of Burdens, strengthen me. Help me to see a way, Allart prayed. He had almost forgotten how to pray since leaving the monastery, and fear for himself would not have done it, but Cassandra, shivering in his arms, spurred him to explore every avenue.
They could not return to Tramontana, but a little way back along the path was the stone wall. It was long abandoned and falling down, but it would provide better shelter than the open path; and behind it—he saw now with both memory and laran—a thick set clump of evergreens.
“We must go back to where we ate our midday meal,” he said, pitching his voice carefully above the shriek of the wind.
Slowly, holding on to one another, for the snow was wet and slippery underfoot, they retraced their steps. It was slow, hard going. Donal, who had spent all his life in these mountains, was surefooted as a mountain cat, but Allart had been years away from the crags around Nevarsin, and Cassandra was wholly unaccustomed to these roads. Once she slipped and fell full length in the snow, her thin borrowed dress soaked to the knees, her hands torn on the rocks under their coat of snow, and she lay there chilled and sobbing with pain. Allart lifted her to her feet, his face set with determination. But she had twisted knee and ankle in the fall, and Donal and Allart had almost to carry her the last few hundred steps to the rock wall, to lift her over it and help her into the thick enclosure of the clumped trees. As they were down into it, Allart’s laran screamed at him that this was the place of his death. He saw their three bodies, entangled, clutching one another for warmth, frozen and stark. He had to force himself down into the enclosure made by the trees.
Gnarled and old, twisted by the violence of mountain storms for half a century or more, the trees wove close, and inside their circle the wind was less, though they could hear it screaming outside, and there was a patch of ground unmarred by the heavy snow. Allart laid Cassandra down on the ground, folding her cloak so it kept the worst of the cold from her, and began to examine her injured leg.
“There is nothing broken,” she said shakily, after a moment, and he remembered that she was a trained Tower monitor, skilled at penetrating the bodies of herself and others for whatever was wrong inside. “The ankle is painful but nothing is harmed; only a tendon pulled a little… but the kneecap has been twisted out of its place.”
As Allart turned his attention to the knee he saw the kneecap wrenched to the side of the leg, the place rapidly swelling and darkening.
She said, drawing a terrified breath, “Donal, you must hold my shoulders, and you Allart, you must grasp my knee and ankle like this—” She gestured. “No! Lower down, with that hand—and pull hard. Don’t worry about hurting me. If it is not returned to its place at once I could be lamed for life.”
Allart steeled himself to follow her instructions. She was braced and tense, but despite her courage, a shriek was forced between her teeth as he gripped the dislocation and twisted it, hard, back into its place, feeling the grating as the kneecap slid back into its socket. She fell back in Donal’s arms and for a moment it seemed she had fainted, but she had closed her eyes and was again monitoring to see what had happened.
“Not quite. You must turn my foot to one side—I cannot move it myself—so it will fall back into place. Yes,” she said, between clenched teeth, as Allart obeyed her. “That will do. Now tear my under-petticoat and bandage it tightly,” she said. Tears came to her eyes again, not only of pain, but of embarrassment as Allart lifted her to remove her under-garment, although Donal modestly turned away.
When the hurt knee had been tightly bandaged in strips of cloth, and Cassandra, white and shivering, had been wrapped in her cloak, and was resting on the ground, Allart soberly took stock of their chances here. Outside, the storm had not nearly reached its height, and night, as he imagined, was not far away, though already it was dark, a thick, heavy twilight that had nothing to do with the actual hour. They had with them only the remnants of their picnic lunch, enough for a couple of sparse meals. These storms sometimes lasted for two or three days, or more. Under ordinary conditions, any of them could have gone without a few meals, but not if the cold should become really severe.
They could probably manage for two or three days. But if the storm should last much longer than that, or if the roads should become impassable, their chances were not good. Alone, Allart would have wrapped himself tightly in his cloak, found the most sheltered spot possible, and let himself sink into the tranced sleep he had learned at Nevarsin, slowing his heartbeat, lowering his body temperature, all the requirements of his body—food, sleep, warmth—in abeyance. But he was responsible for his wife, and for young Donal, and they had not had his training. He was the oldest and the most skilled.
“Your cloak is the thinnest, Cassandra, and the least useful to us for warmth. Spread it on the ground like this, here, so it will keep the cold of the earth from rising,” he directed. “Now, our two cloaks over the three of us. Cassandra is the least accustomed to the cold of the mountains, so we will put her between us.” When they were all three huddled together, back to front, he could feel Cassandra’s shivering subside somewhat.
“Now,” he said gently, “the best thing to do is to sleep if we can: above all, not to waste energy in talking.”
Outside the shelter where they lay, the wind howled, snow coming down endlessly in streaks white against the black night. Inside, only random flurries blew through the tightly laced branches. Allart let himself drift into a light trance, holding Cassandra close in his arms so that he would know if she stirred or had any need of him. At last he knew that Donal, at least, slept; but Cassandra, though she lay quiet in his arms, did not sleep. He was aware of the sharp pain in her injured leg, keeping her concentration at bay. At last she turned in his arms to face him, and he clasped her tight.
She whispered, “Allart, are we going to die here?”
Reassurance would have been easy—and false. No matter what, there must be truth between them, as there had been from the first moment they met. He fumbled in the dark for her slender fingers and said, “I don’t know, preciosa. I hope not.”
His laran showed him only darkness ahead. Through the touch of her hands he could feel the pain stabbing at her. She tried carefully to shift her weight without disturbing Donal, who was curled close against her body. Allart half rose, kneeling and lifted her, changing her position. “Is that easier?”
“A little.” But there was not much he could do in their cramped shelter. This had been the worst of all mischances; even if there were a break in the weather, they could not now seek better shelter, for Cassandra would probably not be able to walk for several days. Tended, put at once into a hot bath, given massage and treatment by a matrix-trained leronis to halt the swelling and bleeding within the joint, it might not have been very serious; but long exposure to cold and immobilization did not promise well for swift healing. Even if conditions had been right, Allart had but small training in those skills. Rough and ready first aid he
could give, indeed, but nothing more complicated.
“I should have left you safe at Hali,” he groaned, and she touched his face in the darkness.
“There was no safety for me there, my husband. Not with your brother at my door.”
“Still, if I have led you to your death—”
“It might equally have been my death to stay there,” she said, and amazingly, even in this extremity, he caught a flicker of laughter in her voice. “Had Damon-Rafael sought to take me unwilling, he would have found no submissive woman in his bed. I have a knife and I know how—and where—to use it.” He heard her voice tighten. “I doubt he would have let me live to spread the tale of that humiliation.”
“I do not think he would have had to use force,” Allart said bleakly. “More like, you would have been drugged into submission, without will to resist”
“Ah, no,” she said, and her voice thrilled with an emotion he could not read. “In that case, my husband, I would have known where to turn the knife ere they brought me to that.”
Allart felt such a thickening in his throat that he could not force an answer. What had he done to deserve this woman? Had he ever believed her timid, childlike, fearful? He caught her tightly against him, but aloud he only said, “Try to sleep, my love. Rest your weight against me, if it is easier. Are you too cold now?”
“No, not really, not close to you this way,” she said, and was still, breathing long, calm breaths in and out.
But have I given her freedom or only a choice of deaths?
The night crawled by, an eternity. When day broke it was only a little lessening of the darkness, and for the three in the hollow, cramped and restless, it was torment. Allart cautioned Donal, crawling outside for a call of nature, not to go more than a step or two from the thicket, and when he staggered back inside, battered and already snow covered, he said that outside the wind was so heavy he could hardly stand. Allart had to carry Cassandra in his arms; she could not set her foot to the ground. Later he meted out most of the food from the day before. The snow showed no sign of abating; as far as Allart could tell, the world outside their tree-cluster ended an arm’s length away in a white blur of snowy nothingness.
He let his laran range out cautiously ahead. Almost in every instance he saw their lives end here, yet there had to be other possibilities. If it were his ordained fate to die here, and if bringing Cassandra from Hali would lead inevitably to his death and hers in the snow, then why had his laran shown him no trace of it, ever, in any line of probability that he had foreseen to this time?
“Donal,” he said, and the younger man stirred.
“Cousin…”
“You have more of the weather gift than I. Can you read this storm and discover how far it extends, and how long it will take to move past us?”
“I will try.” Donal sank inward in consciousness, and Allart, lightly in rapport, saw again the curious extended sense of pressures and forces, like nets of energy upon the surface of the ground, and in the thin envelope of air above it. Finally, returning to surface consciousness, Donal said soberly, “Too far, I fear. And it is moving sluggishly. Would that I had my sister’s gift, to control the storms and move them here and there at my will!”
Suddenly Allart knew that was the answer, as he began to see ahead again. His laran was real foresight, yes; he could dislocate time and stand outside it, but it was limited by his own interpretation of what he saw. For that reason it would always be unreliable as a sole guide to his actions. He must never be content with an obvious future; there was always the probability, however small, that interaction with someone whose actions he could not foresee would alter that future beyond recognition. He could rule his laran, but as with his matrix jewel, he must never let it rule him instead. Yesterday he had used it to find safety here and avoid the most obvious deaths lying in wait; it had worked to avert imminent death until he could explore some other probability.
“If we could somehow make contact with Dorilys—”
“She is not a telepath,” Donal said, sounding doubtful. “Never have I been able to reach her with my thoughts.” Then he lifted his eyes and said, “Renata… Renata is a telepath. If one of you two could manage to reach Renata—”
Yes, for Renata was the key to control of Dorilys’s power.
Allart said, “You try to reach her, Donal.”
“But—I am not so strong a telepath.”
“Nevertheless. Those who have shared love, as you two, can often make such a link when no other can. Tell Renata of our plight, and perhaps Dorilys can read the storm, or help it to pass more quickly beyond us!”
“I will do what I can,” Donal said. Drawing himself upright, the cloaks still hunched around him. he drew out his matrix and began to focus himself within it. Allart and Cassandra, clinging together beneath the remaining cloak, could almost see the luminous lines of force spreading out, so that Donal seemed no more than a solid network of swirling energies, fields of force… Then, abruptly, the contact flared and Allart and Cassandra, both telepaths, could not close away that amplified rapport
Renata!
Donal! The joy and blaze of that contact spilled over to Cassandra and Allart, as if she touched them, too, embraced them.
I was fearful, with this storm! Are you safe? Have you remained at Tramontana, then? I feared when it broke that the escort would be forced to turn back; did they meet with you, then?
No, my beloved. Quickly, in rapid mental images, Donal sketched their plight. He interrupted Renata’s horrified reaction. No, love, don’t waste time and strength that way. Here is what you must do.
Of course, Dorilys can help us, and the swift touch, awareness. I will find her at once, show her what to do.
The contact was gone. The lines of force faded out and Donal shivered under the doubled cloaks.
Allart handed him the last of the food, and said, when he protested, “Your energy is drained with the matrix; you need the strength.”
“Still, your lady—” Donal protested, but Cassandra shook her head. In the gray snowlight she looked pale, drawn, deathly.
“I am not hungry, Donal. You need it far more than I. I am cold, so cold…”
Quickly Allart knew what she meant and what faced her now. He said, “What is it with the leg, then?”
“I will monitor and be sure,” she said, a flicker of a smile touching her face, a wry smile indeed. “I have not wanted to know the worst, since there seems nothing I could do to mend it, however bad it may be.” But he saw her look go abstracted, focused inward. Finally, reluctant, she said, “It is not good. The cold, the forced inactivity—and in the lower part of that leg the circulation is already impaired, so that it is more susceptible to chilling.”
There was nothing Allart could say but, “Help may soon reach us, my love. Meanwhile—” He took off his outer tunic, began to wrap it around the injured knee to protect it, and wrapped her in his under-cloak, remaining in his undertunic and breeches. At their shocked protest, he said with a smile,
“Ah, you forget; I was a monk at Nevarsin for six years, and I slept naked in worse weather than this.” Indeed, the old lessons took over; as the cold struck his now unprotected flesh, he began automatically the old breathing, flooding his body with inner warmth. He said, “Truly, I am not cold. Feel and see…”
Cassandra reached out her hand, wondering. “It is true! You are warm as a furnace.”
“Yes,” he said, taking her chilly fingers in his and laying them under his arm. “Here, let me warm your hands.”
Donal said, in astonishment, “I would that you could teach me that trick, cousin.”
Feeling enormously genial with the sudden flooding warmth, Allart replied, “It needs little teaching. We teach it to the novices in their first season with us, so that before a few tendays have passed, they are romping half naked in the snow. Children who are crying with the cold in their first few days soon begin to run about in the courtyards without even remembering to put on their
cowls.”
“Is it a secret of your cristoforo religion?” Donal asked suspiciously.
Allart shook his head. “No, only a trick of the mind; it needs not even a matrix. The first thing we tell them is that cold is born of fear; that if they needed protection against cold, they would have been born with fur or feathers; that the forces of nature protect even the fruits with snow-pods if they need them; but man, being born naked, needs no protection against the weather. Once they come to believe that, that mankind wears clothes because he wishes to, for modesty or for decoration, but not to shelter against the weather, then the worst is over and soon they can adjust their bodies to cold or heat as they wish.” He laughed, knowing the euphoria of the extra oxygen he was taking into his body was beginning to act upon him, to be converted into warmth. “I am less cold than I was last night under our shared cloaks and body warmth.”
Cassandra tried to imitate his breathing, but she was in severe pain, and this inhibited her concentration, while Donal was wholly untrained.
Outside, the storm raged even more fiercely, and Allart lay down between the two, trying to share with them his warmth. He was desperately anxious about Cassandra; if she suffered much more pain and chilling, her knee might not heal for a long time, perhaps never wholly restore itself. He tried to conceal his anxiety from her, but the same closeness which had enabled Donal to reach Renata—without a Tower screen, through an open matrix-link alone—meant he and Cassandra were similarly linked and, especially at this close range, could not conceal a fear so strong from one another.
She reached for his hand and murmured, “Don’t be frightened. The pain is not so bad now; truly it is not.”