At the seventh attempt, she almost struck the bush, and at the tenth, she nearly got Hylas. “How long is this going to take?” she complained.
“In your case I’d say months,” he said drily. “Or I could just catch a squirrel and hold it down for you—”
Her snowball struck him smack in the chest. He chucked one back, and they forgot about the slingshot and pelted each other.
Suddenly, Hylas’ face changed, and the snowball fell from his hand. Pirra glanced over her shoulder.
Havoc stood twenty paces away in a haze of frosty breath. She was much bigger and shaggier than when Pirra had last seen her, with a ridge of darker fur running from between her ears to her shoulder blades, like a full-grown lion. But her legs and paws were still spotted, and there was something cub-like about her face. Her large amber eyes were fixed on Hylas.
“Havoc,” he said.
The lion cub snuffed the air and made soft little yowmp-yowmp noises. In three bounds she was on him, flinging her forepaws around his shoulders in a powerful lion hug, and he was hugging her back and burying his face in her scruff, and they were rolling in the snow, so that Pirra could hardly tell boy from lion.
“I wonder how she survived the winter,” said Pirra, licking hare grease off her fingers.
“Scavenging, probably,” said Hylas. He’d given Havoc the hare’s innards and ears, and was now feeding her the slippery marrow, which she loved just as much as when she was little.
“You don’t think—she didn’t eat people?” said Pirra.
“No,” he said firmly. “Not Havoc.”
Havoc got to her feet and rubbed her forehead against his, and he sank his hands into the deep hot fur of her flanks and scratched her hard, the way she loved, breathing in her musky lion smell.
I’ll never leave you again, he told her silently.
Echo flew to Pirra and perched on her shoulder, and Pirra gave her the partridge wing she’d saved. Havoc saw the falcon and started purposefully toward her. Echo took fright and flew to a tree with her prize.
Pirra cast Hylas an anxious glance. “D’you think they’ll get along?”
“Not sure,” he said.
After erasing all trace of their camp, they set off. Their plan—such as it was—was to skirt the mountain’s flank, then head north and hope to find the coast—and somewhere, the House of the Goddess.
They walked all day without incident, and camped for the night in another cave, sharing what was left of the partridge. After they’d eaten, Hylas sat whittling a fishhook from the hare’s legbone, while Havoc lay against his thigh, quietly crunching the last of the partridge, held tight between her forepaws. Pirra curled on her side, gazing at the embers.
Echo perched on a rock beyond the cave mouth, one eye shut, the other fixed warily on Havoc. All day, lion and falcon had maintained a prickly distance. Hylas wondered how long it would last.
He put another log on the fire, and Pirra narrowed her eyes against the light. As dusk had fallen, she’d turned quiet, rubbing her wrist where her sealstone used to be.
“Are you thinking about your mother?” Hylas said carefully.
“No,” she said. But he could tell that she was.
“Were you with her when she died?”
“No,” she said again. She chewed her lower lip. “A priest came and told me. He said she was going to do a Mystery—that’s a secret rite—to bring back the Sun and rid Keftiu of Plague; but it got her first.” Her dark brows drew together. “He said she was buried sitting up in her coffin, with a gold band around her head. It had eyes engraved on it. Wide staring eyes, so that she can watch over Keftiu forever . . .” She broke off. Hylas could see that she was struggling to hold back her feelings. She’d hated her mother, but she’d respected her too. Yassassara had been so strong, and now she was gone. The shock must run deep.
To change the subject, he said, “What did you do all winter at Taka Zimi?”
She made a face. “Walked round the courtyard and got bored. Learned some Egyptian with Userref and got bored. Squabbled with Silea, my slave girl, and—”
“Got bored,” finished Hylas.
She snorted a laugh.
Echo awoke and turned her head right around to glare at Havoc, who pretended not to notice.
Pirra said, “Do you think she’ll ever learn to hunt? Echo, I mean.”
“In time,” said Hylas. “But she needs to go after pigeons. And she needs to hunt into the wind.”
“Why?”
“That’s what falcons do. Their wings are stronger than the prey’s, so the wind slows the prey down more than it does the falcon.”
“How do you know all these things?”
He shrugged. “It’s boring being a goatherd. Nothing to do except watch goats. If I hadn’t watched other creatures, I’d have gone mad.”
Again Pirra laughed.
After that there was a companionable silence, and a little later, Pirra rolled herself in her cloak and went to sleep.
Hylas sat on with Havoc. The lion cub had finished the partridge, and lay on her belly with one huge forepaw curled inside the other. Her face had lost that grim, taut look, and the wound in her shoulder was healing well.
Hylas scratched the pale fur under her chin, and she gazed up at him and rumbled happily. Over the winter, her large, slanted, black-rimmed eyes had darkened from the color of honey to the rich amber of beech leaves in autumn. She was going to be a beautiful lioness—and a powerful one. Although she wasn’t yet full-grown, when she stood beside him, her head brushed his thigh, and she had at least five times his strength.
She yawned hugely, baring white fangs as long as his thumb, then rose, stretched, and rubbed her forehead against his.
I wish it was always like this, thought Hylas. Everyone together and safe. If Issi were here, it would be perfect.
When the lion cub awoke, it was the middle of the Dark. She lay contentedly snuffing the boy’s warm foresty scent. Then she rolled over and flung one forepaw across his face to wake him up.
He mumbled and pushed her off, and she nosed his flank, but he went on sleeping. Such sleeps these humans had, she thought fondly. And always in the Darks, the best time to hunt!
The lion cub was happy. The boy hadn’t abandoned her, he’d come all the way across the Great Gray Beast to find her. Now they would never be parted, not ever again.
Rising to her feet, she had a good long stretch, then padded over to the sleeping girl and gave her a light muzzle-rub, because she too was part of the pride.
On a rock near the mouth of the lair perched that falcon who’d taken to hanging about. The cub thought about taking a swipe at her, but the falcon guessed and flew to the top of a pine, where she sat glaring down at the cub. Twitching her tail, the cub glared back. Stay away. They’re my humans.
Suddenly, the lion cub pricked her ears. The wind carried voices: stealthy and human. Flaring her nostrils, the cub picked up the scent she’d smelled before: the humans who’d been watching the pride all through the not-Light, although the boy and girl hadn’t noticed.
The humans were easy to find in the Dark, two men crouching behind a rock a few bounds above the lair. They weren’t the terrible men with the flapping black hides, but they were sneaky, and they worried the cub. What did they want?
Picking her way noiselessly between the pines, the lion cub climbed in a wide loop so that the sneaky humans wouldn’t sense her, then belly-crawled closer.
When she was within an easy pounce, she snarled.
The men fled in terror, and she bounded after them—not to catch them, just to scare them into not coming back.
Then, when she was sure they were really gone, the lion cub trotted back to the lair and settled down to guard her humans.
19
“I still don’t see,” said Hylas as they struggled through
yet another icy ravine, “how you could live your whole life in the House of the Goddess, but have no idea where it is.”
“I told you,” snarled Pirra, “they never let me out. All I know is it’s about half a day’s walk from the north coast—”
“You’re sure that’s north and not south,” muttered Hylas.
She shot him a look, which he ignored. Pirra always got bad-tempered when she was thirsty.
It didn’t help that Echo and Havoc weren’t getting along. At first it had been hisses and glares, but then Hylas had shared a squirrel between them, and Echo had tried to steal Havoc’s and the lion cub had taken a swipe at her, which the falcon had narrowly escaped.
To make matters worse, both were intensely jealous of any attention the other received from Hylas or Pirra. Earlier, Pirra had stroked Havoc, which had prompted Echo to fly off in a sulk; and when Pirra lured her down with a mouse Hylas had caught, Havoc had stalked off with wounded glances: Why are you being nice to a bird?
Now, as Hylas led the way between snow-covered boulders, he could feel Pirra brooding over what the cub might do to her beloved Echo. He worried about this himself. Until now, Havoc had been happily exploring the forest, often disappearing for long periods. What if he found her sitting under a tree with a mouthful of falcon feathers?
“Are we going in circles?” said Pirra, behind him.
“Of course not!” he said irritably. But after a day spent scrambling over ridges and detouring around unclimbable crags, he was starting to worry that they might be doing exactly that. And if it was true, the Crows could be anywhere.
Which, he had to admit, was hardly Pirra’s fault. “Sorry,” he mumbled over his shoulder.
She didn’t reply.
“I said I’m sorry!” he snapped.
When she still didn’t answer, he turned around.
Pirra wasn’t there. In disbelief, Hylas took in rocks and juniper trees, and tracks in the snow that belonged to him alone.
“Pirra,” he called, “if this is a joke, it’s not funny.”
But it didn’t feel like a joke. Drawing his knife, he retraced his steps.
The ravine was narrow, and the junipers tall and dense. “Pirra?”
Strong hands grabbed him and yanked him into the dark.
In a heartbeat he was blindfolded, stripped of his gear, and his arms tied behind his back. Someone seized his hair and jerked his head back. He heard muttering and smelled the tang of dittany; he guessed that a wisewoman was checking him for signs of Plague.
They must have decided he didn’t have it, because someone pushed his head down and steered him through an echoing space that felt like a cave. So far, his captors hadn’t said a word, but he guessed they weren’t Crows, or he’d have been dead by now.
The echoes changed and he sensed space opening around him. He smelled smoke and heard shuffling hooves, the huffing breath of livestock, and an angry murmur of voices. Then he was forced to sit on the ground and his blindfold was pulled off.
He was in a huge cavern, dimly lit by a smoky dung fire and thronged with goats, sheep, oxen, dogs, and people. He saw men with the weathered features and the crooked limbs of peasants, armed with scythes, pitchforks, and hostile expressions. Grimy women nursed babies and glared at him. Children gawped openmouthed; they had the same bizarrely shaven heads and single locks as the ghosts at the coast.
It flashed across his mind that at least Havoc and Echo were safe in the forest. Then he saw Pirra. She sat not far from him, bound, bedraggled, and furious. “Did they hurt you?” he said.
“No. You?”
He shook his head. “Who are these people?”
“Leave this to me, they don’t speak Akean.”
Their captors didn’t like them talking in a tongue they couldn’t understand, and a scrawny man at the front—Hylas guessed he was the leader—barked at Pirra in Keftian.
She spat a retort that drew sharp intakes of breath from the crowd, but the scrawny man merely snorted. Like all Keftian men, he had no beard; his mouth was puckered, as if he’d tasted something bad, and his small hot eyes glared at Pirra with startling bitterness.
At an order from him, a woman sullenly untied Pirra’s wrists. Pirra scrambled to her feet and launched another tirade.
“Whatever you’re saying, you’re making it worse,” muttered Hylas.
“I said leave it to me,” she told him.
As he watched her berating their captors in her hawk-like tongue, he felt as if he was seeing her for the first time. Despite her small stature and filthy clothes, no one could doubt that she was the daughter of the High Priestess. Her imperious tone and upright carriage, even her crescent-moon scar, set her apart.
But he could tell that she was frightened.
“Who are you and how dare you treat me like this!” said Pirra with as much authority as she could muster.
“Hold your tongue!” snapped the woman who’d untied her.
“Hush, Tanagra,” chided a burly man with a heavy brow and a squashed-looking nose. “That’s no way to address the daughter of Yassassara.”
“That’s exactly how to talk to her, Deukaryo,” cut in the scrawny leader. Then to Pirra, “You! Show some respect!”
“Who are you?” demanded Pirra.
“My name is Sidayo—and I’m leader here,” he said with a glance at the burly Deukaryo. “I was a water-carrier in your mother’s House, but I was born in Tusiti. Most of us are from Tusiti. We were fishermen and farmers. Now we live in the mountains and scrape an existence as herdsmen.”
“Tusiti,” said Pirra. “Isn’t that on the coast?”
“It was,” Sidayo said bitterly. “When it still existed. Before the Wave.”
“We worshipped the Sea,” put in the woman, Tanagra, “because the priests told us to. Now we can’t bear to be anywhere near it. That’s why we fled. We’re never going back.”
“The Sea took everything,” said Sidayo. “It drowned our village and rotted our crops. Smashed our boats, tore the clothes off our backs. We had to strip corpses to get something to wear.”
“It took my children,” Tanagra said fiercely. “It didn’t even leave me their bodies to bury. I’ll never worship the Sea again—no matter what the priests say!”
Pirra swallowed. “You sound as if it was my fault—”
“You’re Yassassara’s daughter,” Sidayo said accusingly. “She dealt with the Crows—”
“That was before she found out what they’re like,” protested Pirra.
“She dealt with them!” insisted Sidayo. “That’s why the Great Wave attacked Keftiu! That’s why the Sun is gone and there will be no spring—because of her!”
Angry shouts from the crowd, and many shook their weapons at Pirra. She felt her blood rising in defense of her mother. Yassassara had been cold and harsh and she’d never loved any living creature—but she’d loved Keftiu, and she would have given her life for it. She did not deserve to be treated in such a way.
“How dare you speak of my mother like that,” Pirra said between her teeth. “You have no idea—”
“And now you!” cut in Sidayo. “Coming here with that yellow-haired foreigner, bringing the Crows in your wake!”
More clenched fists and angry shouts.
“What’s happening?” cried Hylas, who’d been getting increasingly restless. “What are they saying?”
“We thought we’d be safe in the mountains,” Sidayo went on. “Safe from the Sea, safe from the Plague! But now you’ve brought the Crows. We saw them destroy Taka Zimi—and now you’re leading them here, forcing us to hide in caves—”
“Pirra, what are they saying?” shouted Hylas.
“They blame my mother for everything,” Pirra told him in Akean, “and they blame us because of the Crows.”
“Listen to her talk to the stranger in h
is uncouth tongue!” shrilled Tanagra. “Who knows what they’re plotting?”
Unable to contain himself, the man called Deukaryo leaped to his feet. “This must stop!” he bellowed.
The cavern fell silent.
In his ragged goatskins and battered felt cap, Deukaryo looked as if he was more accustomed to being part of the crowd than addressing it, but there was a strength about his burly figure that commanded attention.
“This girl,” he told the others, “is the daughter of Yassassara. Yassassara, who gave Keftiu eighteen summers of peace and plenty! To treat her like this shames us all!”
A few people hung their heads, but Sidayo crossed his arms and snorted.
“Instead of insulting her,” Deukaryo went on, “we should help her! Then maybe she can do what her mother could not—and bring back the Sun.”
“Oh yes, look at her,” sneered Sidayo. “I’ll believe she can bring back the Sun when that stream outside turns to wine!”
That drew sniggers from the crowd, and Pirra flushed.
“Until then,” Sidayo went on, “the Crows are still out there. So here’s what we’re going to do. We’ll take the boy up the mountain and leave him to take his chances—and we’ll keep the girl hostage. Then if we have to, we can give her to the Crows and they’ll leave us in peace.”
Shouts of approval. Deukaryo, overruled, shook his head in disgust.
“You can’t do that,” said Pirra in disbelief.
“What are they saying?” cried Hylas.
She told him in Akean, and he listened without expression. Then, still with his hands tied behind his back, he got to his feet. “Translate for me,” he told her as he turned to face the crowd. With his fair hair and straight Lykonian nose, Pirra thought he looked utterly foreign; but his mouth was firm, and he had a rough authority that made everyone listen.
“Blaming Yassassara,” he began, “gets you nowhere and misses the point.”
Pirra hesitated, then repeated this in Keftian, provoking furious gasps—which Hylas ignored. “Skulking in caves won’t get rid of the Crows,” he went on, pausing now and then to let her translate. “Nor will giving them the girl. You can’t bargain with the House of Koronos. Yassassara learned that before she died. There’s a prophecy in my land. It says an Outsider will bring them down.” He lifted his chin and squared his shoulders. “I am that Outsider. You Keftians call us the People of the Wild.”