The Magic of Recluce - L. E. Modesitt [122]
Then I shook my head. Idiot, idiot…the innkeeper didn’t want into the room. He was placing a bar through the iron handle on the other side to keep me from going out. The stone walls, the narrow window, all made sense. The innkeeper just didn’t like direct violence.
I checked again. The two were gone, now that they were convinced I was safely captured.
Lighting the candle, I stood up and walked to the window. If the wedges came out…Finally, I nodded and began to dress, wincing at the chill undergarments. They were still damp, but I could only hope my body heat would take care of that.
Then I went to work on the window as quietly as I could, thanking Uncle Sardit silently the whole time. Not easy, but the exertion warmed me up. The chill and heat had taken their toll on the glues, and with a little help here and there, I managed to slide the whole window into the room.
Out onto the frozen grass went my pack, cloak, and saddlebags. If I had been a pound heavier I wouldn’t have made it through the narrow opening.
Getting the window back in place I cheated, using some of the sense-weaving order-strength, but even by my father’s lights, using power to fix something wasn’t tempting chaos.
Then, I walked slowly, cloaked in darkness, to the stables. Gairloch was fine, munching on some sort of grass.
Setting another round of wards, I recovered my bedroll and curled up on some straw in the stall next to Gairloch.
The first hint of light woke me, not the wards, which I dropped. I saddled Gairloch, listening for the innkeeper and hearing nothing. Then I used an old staff to pry open the storage closet and took six grain cakes, which I stuffed into the provisions sack. I really wanted just to take them just to pay the innkeeper back. Besides, with the provisions from Justen, I wasn’t even certain I would need them. But the Easthorns looked cold, and Gairloch had saved my neck already and then some.
In the end, I left four coppers, probably too much, but that was the least my wonderful innate and growing sense of order would let me leave. After all, despite his dubious hospitality, the innkeeper had bought them somewhere, and leaving the coins made me feel better.
After sliding open the stable door, with the reflective cloak around us, Gairloch and I stepped out into the silence of the winter dawn.
…thunk…thunk…thunk…
Less than a kay across the meadow, we came to a brook. I dropped the shield, looking for signs of pursuit; but the inn remained dark, without even a plume of smoke from the chimneys. After Gairloch drank, I replaced the cloak of reflected light until we reached the road and the marker that featured an arrow and the name “Passera.” The edges of the road contained drifted snow, often up to Gairloch’s knees, but the wind kept most of the road clear, almost as if it had been designed that way.
Still, more than once we had to flounder through crusted and drifted snow gathered in the most sheltered elbows of the road.
Not knowing who or what to trust, and how, I avoided the next inn, instead finding a sheltered cleft up a canyon from the road. Getting to the cleft and concealing our tracks was more work, in the end, than fortifying an inn room would have been, but I slept more soundly, even on the narrow, rocky, frozen ground out of the wind. And it didn’t cost me three golds or the equivalent duke’s ransom, though I did wake up with the tip of my nose nearly frozen.
Climbing the eastern walls of the Easthorns wasn’t quite as draining—not quite—as surviving the winterkill storm. While it had taken two days to escape the storm, it took nearly two days more after Carsonn just to get to the top of the southern pass. In that whole time, I passed three other groups heading toward Certis, all of at least four riders, and all heavily armed. They had made my passage possible, in one instance having shoveled through a small snow avalanche across the road.
They never saw me or Gairloch, not when I heard them from a distance and removed us from the road and their sight.