Eternal Sky 01(34)

She’d torn the blanket free at the top and broken much of the ice off it, though the bottom was still frozen to the ground. With effort, wheezing, Temur managed to push it back over itself until it lay more or less flat across the icy ground. He set about checking Buldshak’s hooves and ankles for damage, then backed both mares out into the daylight.

They stepped cautiously on the glassy ground, ice creaking under their weight, ripped veils of steam following the movements of their heads. They stood steadily—Buldshak snorting and shifting her weight, Bansh calm and seemingly half asleep, mottled muzzle dipped toward her one white-splashed foreleg—while Temur ferried their gear out of the rockfall shelter in the largest bundles he could manage, barely avoiding the lake of piss the rose-gray unleashed as soon as he walked away from her head. He had to keep leaning on the wall or a mare’s withers to rest, and when he bent to struggle the door blanket free of the ice, he set off another coughing fit that left him on his hands and knees before it subsided.

By the time he had the mares fed and tacked, their gear loaded, the morning was half gone and the sun had cleared the peaks. This proved a blessing and a nuisance, for the ice rotted almost as soon as the sun touched it—the ground underneath had still been too warm to freeze—but that made for water-slick ice interspersed with patches of mud.

Still, there was no choice but to go on. Temur was sickening, and the mares needed green fodder and clean water.

Buldshak had the smoother gait, but it was into Bansh’s saddle that Temur struggled. The liver-bay was a rock, and she stood like one even though Temur mounted like a toddler, pulling on the saddle and her mane to drag himself across her back, bruising his thigh on the high cantle, thrashing grimly until he got himself seated. She knew he wasn’t well, or so he fancied; normally she was light on the rein or the leg, soft as a cat. But now she ignored his crude attempts to direct her and simply stepped forward, one hoof after the other, in the most cautious of possible walks while Temur huddled in his coat and two wrapped blankets on her back.

Buldshak followed on like a patient pack mule, content with Bansh’s lead. The day warmed. The ice melted into ankle-deep mud. Swarms of biting flies arrived with the heat, and Temur clung grimly to Bansh’s saddle while she plodded on. The sun slid behind the peaks again. The long shadows of the mountains plunged the pass into shadow. Temur knew he should stop: The mares needed rest and food—though Bansh, in her wisdom, was stopping to water herself and Buldshak at every stream they passed. A few swallows only, then onward. He knew he should stop, but he couldn’t lift his hands to draw the reins, and he thought if he slid out of the saddle he’d never make it back up again.

The heat was a blessing as he shook with chill. The stones on every side had soaked up the sun’s warmth; now, in the drawing dark, they gave it back. Behind the mountains to the west, the sky blazed amber, crimson. To the east it grew as dusky as a bruise.

Temur roused himself from his fever-dream. There had been a man in golden armor, and a woman on a horse. She had taken him somewhere.…

He pushed back his cowl of blankets to see. They fell about his thighs; the cool evening air soothed his sweat-matted hair. A mist was rising, and Temur looked at it through the glaze of fever and shuddered. If the ghosts he sought came now, he and the mares stood no chance of survival.

He had to get to Qeshqer. There might be help there, treatment for his fever, and perhaps even someone he could ask for guidance on where to find the ghosts—and the woman he desperately hoped they still held captive.

Even as he thought this, something stirred the mist. Something flitting, sparkling even in the gloaming, like chips of mica on the wing. Thousands of somethings, smaller than the span of Temur’s palm, their pale or dark wings largely robbed of color in the dusk.

Butterflies.

Thousands and thousands of butterflies.

Bansh stood stolidly as they swirled about her like windblown leaves. Buldshak snorted and shook out her tail, tossing her head when they landed between her eyes and crawled up her ears to take flight again. Their wings brushed Temur’s skin like falling petals. The delicate prickers of their feet tickled his face when they lighted briefly, then took off again. The wind of their passing was comprised of a thousand shifting currents.

He sat Bansh’s back and watched them pass until there was no light with which to watch them, and he merely heard and felt. There were so many he could smell them, a papery, dry-feather kind of smell he didn’t exactly have a name for. When the sky grew silvery again in the east, Temur expected moonrise to reveal them as flitting shadows in the glow of thirteen orbs.