“Okay—don’t get upset.” Delilah tsked to her mount and rode up beside me. “We’ll go now. I’m just being a pain.”
“It’s not you, Kitten.” I bit my tongue. I had always hated snapping at her. Even though Menolly was the baby of the family, Delilah had always been the most sensitive and easily hurt. “I just feel exposed here. It’s probably two p.m. now. If we have eight miles to ride before we reach the trees, then we’ll be pushing toward dusk by the time we find them. How far beyond that we need to travel, I don’t know.”
“Good point. All right. Let’s stop for a quick drink and then head on.”
I couldn’t argue with the need to refill our water canteens or to water our horses, so we picked our way down to the river’s edge and spent twenty minutes resting and letting our horses drink and eat grass. While we were waiting, Bran hauled out his dagger and, once again, balancing on a rock, managed to snag five samracks that were quite a decent size. They wouldn’t provide all the food we needed for dinner, but it was better than nothing.
The moment I saw what he was doing, I began to hunt handovers. Delilah helped me. The movement stretched us out from riding. I was still sore but was getting used to Annabelle’s rolling gait. Between the two of us we netted a solid ten pounds of the roots. That would see us two meals, at least. I also found some watercress and wild onion. Smoky vanished into the undergrowth and when he returned, he had four good-sized loopers, birds in the duck family.
“Well, we have dinner tonight and breakfast,” he said.
“A bit more for breakfast,” Trillian called from a nearby huckleberry bush. “Early berries. Still a little sour but they’ll add good flavoring to the birds.” He returned with a small sack of the somewhat under-ripe huckleberries.
We filled our canteens and divvied up the food to carry, then Bran motioned to the bridge.
“Let’s ride.”
As we crossed the bridge and took the left fork in the juncture, I spotted a house in the woods, on the path that we had turned away from. I wondered who might live here at the crossroads, but then decided that was a path we didn’t have time to explore. At one time, I could have had a little house out in the forest, if I had continued to live in Otherworld. But just like the fork in the road we had just left behind, that life was one of the many paths that I’d never walk. Life offered so many possibilities to start, but as we continued, our choices winnowed down. There were paths we’d never see, and others we’d catch a glimpse of but wouldn’t have time to explore. And still others that would be barred from our journeys.
As we picked up the pace, heading toward the canaberry tree stand, I thought of all the possibilities that I had left behind and how many more were waiting for me. Ones that I knew nothing about.
THE SUN WAS well into the western side of the sky by the time Bran stopped on the path, pointing up ahead. We were reaching the edge of the treeline, it looked like, and the trees were thinning here. The stream met up with us again, winding this way and that, flowing from the northeast, from the hills. A bridge led over to another path that looked far more worn than the one we were on.
“We’re near the foothills of the Tygerian Mountains.” Bran rode back to my side. I was riding beside Trillian.
“How far are we from Gyldyn?” Trillian asked.
Gyldyn was the city of the Goldunsun Fae—a branch that had originated in the southern climes. They had uprooted their city when the Scorching Wars roared to life and moved to high in the Tygerian Mountains. While they had a lot of snow, they were open to the sun during the summer, and they had grown used to the altitude and solitude their position brought them.
“If you ride on flat land, a good four or five days’ ride south. But with the mountain passes? A week or more at best.” Bran motioned for us to continue and we rode out of the Deep into a rolling expanse of grassy knolls and hills. The hills gained a good altitude—three to four thousand feet at their peaks. Beyond the foothills, the brooding crags of the Tygerian Mountains rose, cloaked in mist and fog near their bases. It was amazing that people managed to navigate through them, but there were multiple passes. Rocky and frightening passages, yes, but during the summer they were traversable.
I stared at the vast panorama. The mountains stretched farther than we could see, north and south, slicing across the horizon with a jagged silhouette.
“They’re so beautiful.” Although the thought of working our way into them frightened me, the expanse was breathtaking.
“They are. Beautiful, deadly, and the source of our rivers.” Trillian reached out his hand and I took it as we sat astride our mounts. “But you’ve been to the Northlands. They make the Tygerian Mountains look like a hike in the woods.”