Days of Blood and Fire - Katharine Kerr [188]
As they worked their way higher, the nights started turning cold, even though their short length told them it was summer still. On dry days they would scrounge dead wood for a fire. Enj was always on the lookout as well for rotting leaves and desiccated needles to augment the meager supply of tow and rotted rags in their tinderboxes. Since Rhodry’s — entire life had been spent either in towns or along the roads leading between them, how well Enj lived in the woods filled him with admiration.
“This be my home,” Enj said simply. “Never have I felt Haen Marn as home since the night my father did drown.”
“Well, you still have my thanks from the bottom of my heart. Without you I’d never be able to do this, Wyrd or no Wyrd. Never have I known a woodsman like you, never.”
Enj looked away fast, blushing round the ears, then glanced at him smiling.
As they traveled Enj scouted for the landmarks his sister had seen in her silver basin. One after another they found them, the rock face eroded in a pattern like an ear of ripe wheat, the hundred-foot-tall fir, dead some twenty years at least, that still stood stark and black on a hilltop, an enormous boulder split by ancient ice with a young tree growing ‘twixt the two halves. Other subtler markers came and went, an oddly shaped hill, a pattern of trees, a waterfall that seemed to break in two round rock. Yet the day came when they reached the last of them, if indeed the outcrop they found really did look like a hound’s head. Avain might have seen a resemblance; they were both unsure.
“Hound or no, it does provide shelter from the wind,” Enj said. “So let’s make camp here.”
They set out snares, then scavenged for firewood.While Enj split their haul with their hand ax, Rhodry scrambled to the top of the putative hound’s head and stood looking round. They were on a slope downhill to their line of march, and to the west he could see a fair ways into the bluish haze of a summer forest.
“Enj! Here’s an odd thing! I see hills, flanks of the big peak due north, but then I think there’s a plain of some sort. It’s too cursed big to be a mountain meadow or suchlike, way at the horizon.”
The ringing of the ax stopped.
“You be the one with elven eyes, not me,” Enj called up. “Do the peaks rise again on the far side, like?”
“It’s too far to tell.” Rhodry shaded his eyes with his hand. “Looks flat, and oddly barren. You don’t know what it might be?”
“I’ve never traveled this far in my life. Truly, I’d wager that no man nor dwarf neither has ever walked this far north.”
All at once Rhodry felt dizzy. He slid down from his lookout and sat down in the shade of the outcrop, and as he did so, he patted the firm ground just to make sure it was still there. Enj sank the ax into a log.
“If it be round, that valley might be the ‘Gods’ Soup Bowl’ that Avain kept mentioning.”
“It looked long and narrow, actually.”
“Well, then, I don’t know.” He grinned, suddenly as sunny as his sister. “Let’s go see, shall we, and be the first men in the world to walk there.”
“That would mean somewhat to you, wouldn’t it?”
“Oh, as much as jewels and gold, truly. I do see that you don’t care in the least.”
Rhodry shrugged.
“If I weren’t heartsick with worry over this siege, it would mean more. For all I know, Cengarn’s fallen to her enemies by now, and me stuck here without one thing to do to save her.”
“My apologies. I keep shoving that horror out of my mind, like. Well, then, Rori, on the morrow, let’s keep moving in the direction of this mysterious plain, but if you can’t see any peaks by the time we camp, then we’ll have to turn back. We won’t be finding our dragon anywhere but near a fire mountain.”
“Truly? Why?”
“That be where they lair in the winter. They be cold-blooded, the great wyrms, and in the winter they’d die without some source of heat.”
“I see. I wish we had some scouts