It was all rather disheartening.
Mienthe kept as far as possible to drier ridges, which provided brief, welcome respites from the mud of the lower-lying regions. Her boots had begun to dry at last, but water came chest-deep on her horse in some of the unavoidable marshy areas. Mienthe kicked her feet out of the stirrups, tucked her feet up, and stubbornly kept riding east, until at last she found herself emerging from the shadows of the marshes and riding down a final bank onto the broad, hard-beaten surface of a true road, and lying before her, in the brilliance of a clear afternoon, the wide brown width of the lower branch of the Sierhanan River.
She encouraged her horse to trot. He did not want to do that, laying his ears flat and jigging sideways when she tried to make him, and after the night and day they had had Mienthe could hardly blame him. But the horse was good-tempered enough to lengthen his stride into the fast, swinging walk that was almost as fast as a trot would have been, the walk that made Delta horses so desirable as plow animals. That was good enough. Mienthe did not really want to sit a jarring trot, anyway.
There were plenty of hoof marks and the tracks of wagons and carts in the packed earth of the road, and Mienthe practiced in her mind the sorts of things she might say to startled folk she might pass, to explain her solitude and muddy, bedraggled appearance: I barely got out of Tiefenauer in front of Linularinan soldiers… I had to cross through the marshes. Perfectly true. Yet she did not feel she had any ability to explain what had really happened, what still might be happening. She could visualize merchants or farmers rolling their eyes: Chased out of Tiefenauer by Linularinan mages, were you? Mienthe knew she simply did not have the ability to make anybody believe anything of the sort. Especially not while her horse and skirts and boots were caked with mud, and her hair straggling down her back—she could not look less like a granddaughter of old Berdoen and a cousin of the Lord of the Delta.
But there were few other travelers, and although they gave Mienthe curious, sidelong glances, none of them stopped to speak to her. She passed the occasional farm-track, and from time to time pasture fences ran along the road for some way. Sometimes big, flat-faced white cattle gazed at her incuriously from behind those fences. Tall shaggy farm dogs watched suspiciously as she passed, in case she should be a swamp cat or a cattle thief, but they did not come out to the road.
This branch of the Sierhanan, like the northern branch, was cleaner and wider and better for traffic than any of the smaller Delta rivers. Boats ran along with the current—flatboats, mostly, heading downstream; now and again a keelboat being heaved back upstream by a team of oxen. But the keel road was on the other side of the river and the drovers much too far away to call to or see clearly.
For the first time, it occurred to Mienthe that even when she found her father’s house, the staff there might not know her. Certainly they would not be able to see in her the nine-year-old child she had been… Would any of them even have known her when she was nine? A sudden, vivid memory of Tef, in the cutting garden gathering flowers for the house, came into her mind. She could almost make herself believe he would be at her father’s house, living still. Tears prickled behind her eyes.
She would have felt so much more that she was riding to her proper home if she had really expected to find Tef there waiting for her. She couldn’t think of her father’s house as her home at all. It occurred to Mienthe that she did not even know exactly where her father’s house actually was. Well, she knew that it was set on the river a little north of Kames proper, so she must go right past it if she kept on south on this road, but would she recognize its drive when she came to it? She experienced a sudden conviction that this was impossible, that she would not, that she would have to ride all the way into Kames and ask there for directions, like a beggar hoping for generosity from some relative who had a place at the house as a maid or stablemaster… She flushed and checked her horse, looking indecisively left toward the river, and then right, up the low wooded hill that ran up away from the river… and there were the gates.
She somehow knew the carved wooden posts at once, and the wrought-iron bands that spiraled around them; she knew the graveled track that led between avenues of great oaks and how it would curve through neatly kept woodlands to the wide gardens surrounding the big house. Though she would have said she had no clear memory of any of this from her childhood, she knew it all. She checked her horse and sat for a long moment simply staring at the gates and the graveled drive. She did not feel excited or happy to have come back to this house; was she simply too tired? But she did not even feel very relieved to have arrived. She must be much more weary than she had thought.