The Spirit Stone - Katharine Kerr [113]
The Northlands rise into a wilderness maze, cut up by streams and rivulets that tumble down to join one or another of the south-flowing rivers. At the time of which we speak, primeval forest covered its hills and clustered at the bottom of canyons and valleys. Even those who travelled through it regularly would have been lost after a few days if it weren’t for the existence of a secret pathway. Alshandra’s initiates had devised a set of symbols that, carved high up on tree trunks or chipped into boulders, marked an east-west route leading to northern Deverry and the little villages and farms of those Deverry folk who believed in the goddess.
Although she’d been a priestess for some years now and thus should have trusted in Alshandra, Sidro still feared the forest road. She’d been born and raised in Taenalapan, one of the towns the Gel da’ Thae had built among the ruins of an ancient city. In her view, stone walls meant safety and comfort, while every crack of a branch or rustle of leaves and bracken in the forest signalled bears and wolves, searching for a tasty two-legged meal.
The damp woodland smell frightened her even more. She had enough Horsekin blood in her veins to pick up scent-marks too faint for a merely human nose, but she lacked a gamekeeper’s knowledge to identify their makers, so to her, the leavings of the smallest weasel reeked of as much danger as those of a big black bear. When night fell, she climbed into the cleft of a tree and twisted her blanket into a rope to tie herself to a branch. She drowsed, clutching her sack, rather than slept, until at last the sun rose.
As chief acolyte in Zakh Gral, Sidro had been free of missionary work and its long treks through wild places. Her humiliation over the matter of Evan the gerthddyn and his supposed miracle had lost her that high position in the order. As she trudged along, her mind rehearsed grievances beyond her power to stop it. Rocca worked that very well, the scheming shrew! she would think. Now Rocca held the post of chief acolyte and the favour of the high priestess while Sidro found herself back as a simple traveller for the goddess, the lowliest rank in their order, Alshandra’s Elect. I know he was a fraud, but they’d never let me tell them why! That thought brought her a scatter of tears.
Late on her third day out of Zakh Gral, Sidro came to a narrow strip of meadow crossed with a stream of clear water. In the sunlight she felt safe enough to rest. She laid her sack of supplies and her blanket on the grassy bank, then considered the shallow stream. Although by the rules of their order the priestesses of Alshandra scorned such comforts as bathing, Sidro had never been able to break herself of the desire to be clean.
She pulled off her leather dress, laid it on the grass, and, still dressed in her linen shift, stepped into the cold mountain water. Gasping and splashing she sank into a shallow pool, then knelt on comfortable white sand to let the water run over her back and shoulders. Without soap she could do little more than rinse off loose dirt and old sweat from skin and linen both, but even that little felt like luxury.
‘Alshandra forgive me,’ she murmured, several times over.
She was scooping up water and splashing it onto her face when a shadow swept across her. Overhead a raven circled, an enormous raven, so large that she knew exactly what—or rather who—it had to be. She rose and climbed onto the bank just as the raven landed with a flurry of shiny black wings, which he folded before he spoke. Although he used the Horsekin tongue, his rigid beak distorted his speech so much that she understood him only because she’d known him since childhood.
‘Turn away!’
Sidro did as he asked. A sudden shimmer of blue light cast a brief shadow onto the grass in front of her. When she turned back, Laz Moj sat cross-legged and naked on the grass, holding a single raven feather in his long fingers. His mach-fala, that is, his mother-clan as the Gel da’ Thae call their extended families,