The Magic of Recluce - L. E. Modesitt [75]
Each step of the pony made my stomach churn, and with every other step, the wind gusted and threw the icy rain under my cloak. I worried about his hooves and fetlocks, or whatever they were called; but I worried more about me. So we kept going.
As I shivered in the saddle, I recalled fondly the heat of the day when I travelled to Nylan, at least in comparison to the chill that had already numbed my legs from boot-top to thigh. My buttocks remained painfully unnumbed.
My staff rested in the lance cup of the old cavalry saddle. That meant I swayed into it every so often, since it protruded well above the saddle. Flexing the reins every so often split the ice off them, but I had to keep brushing ice off the saddle and my cloak. The only thing the rain refused to freeze to was my staff.
The staff had saved me at least twice, and made me a target of everyone in Candar, or so it seemed. This last time, I had managed to escape without even using the staff, or letting anyone know I had it, but they were still after me.
We stopped twice, both times to let Gairloch drink and to let me stretch the kinks out of legs that felt like permanent cramps.
In time, close to midday, the rain stopped, the wind picked up, and ice began to form on the remaining puddles. Then I began to sense warmth in the staff again, as the road straightened and began to climb toward a low hilltop. Through the mist I could make out some sort of building.
“Oh…of course.” Since the duke and the countess didn’t like each other, the building was a border station…and another damned problem, since someone might well have warned the guards. I shrugged, pulled off my left glove carefully, and touched the lorken—hot enough to melt ice, and that meant some sort of danger.
“Well, Gairloch, they said you were a mountain pony…how much of a mountain pony?”
He didn’t answer, didn’t even flick his head, just kept walking.
I tried to think it through. Probably no one had warned the road guards. But even if they hadn’t, word would get out that someone from Recluce had entered Montgren, and no one seemed to be very friendly to anyone from Recluce, especially blackstaffers.
In the end, the answer was simple—avoid the border checkpoint. Accomplishing such a simple answer was more difficult. Tangled low brush sprang from the roadside at every point, and most of it was ice-covered.
Reining Gairloch to a halt off to the side of the road by a higher patch of brush that would shield us from scrutiny, should any of the guards possess a spyglass, I tried first to study the slopes and the land around us, low rolling hills covered with sparse clumps of bushes and an occasional cedar, with white oaks along the watercourse lines between the hills.
Few people in the duchy lived alone, or away from the towns. On the hillside that sloped away to my right, a black line ran nearly perpendicular to the road—the uncovered remnant of a stone wall nearly buried by the meadow turf. But no trees. As I stared, I could sense the same wavy heat lines that concealed the black ships of Recluce, except these were older and fainter and tinged with unpleasantness.
In a way it was too bad the wall wasn’t headed where I was, but the disorder bothered me.
I shrugged. We couldn’t stand behind the bushes forever.
Whheeee…eeeeuhhh…
“I know…I know…”
So I turned around and let Gairloch pick his way downhill to where the road turned out of sight of the border post, nearly half a kay. As I recalled, there was another brook that looked like it meandered down in the same general direction as the border post, but with the hill between us and the post.
I chucked the reins and Gairloch stepped across the flowing water and out onto the meadow. Keeping the hill to my right, we began following the watercourse, roughly parallel to the road.
…ppeeeeepppp…
The sound of the insects or frogs or whatever it was reminded me that I had heard very little, certainly no birds at all, since I had arrived in Candar.
We crossed a low mound that