Law of the Broken Earth(87)

But how far was it, from the mouth of the pass at Ehre to the Casmantian capital city?

Tan did not know the answer to this when she asked him. “I can tell you every distance in Linularinum, from Dessam in the far north right down to Desamion,” he said, and shrugged. “But I never expected to visit Casmantium. I don’t even speak Prechen. I don’t suppose…?”

Mienthe didn’t, either, aside from a few laborious words. She could say Please and Thank you, and she thought she could manage My cousin is Bertaud son of Boudan, Lord of the Delta, which might be very much to the point. But she did not know how to say anything as complicated as Linularinum has invaded the Delta and their agents are trailing us, or at least Tan, because he accidentally stole some powerful legist-magic out of a special book, so we need to see the Arobern right away.

She wondered whether Linularinan agents had actually dared come after them into the pass. She glanced uneasily over her shoulder. But the road behind them was clear all the way up the long sweeping curve of the mountain they had just descended, and beyond that she could not see.

“We’re well ahead, I’m quite certain, even if Istierinan has the nerve and resolve to send a man of his right to the very doorstep of Brechen Arobern himself,” Tan said.

He meant this to be comforting. It would have been more so, except he’d said something very like it before. That had been just prior to the loss of the two guardsmen. But Mienthe did not comment. She merely nodded and wondered whether, once they got past the wagons, they might possibly be able to beg or bribe the men driving the mule teams to slow to an even more deliberate pace and block anyone coming behind them.

As it happened, once they reached the wide gap at the bottom of the slope, the muleteers drew politely to one side to allow swifter travelers past. When Mienthe—very tentatively—put her request to the drivers, they seemed oddly eager to assure her they would be very slow on any upward stretch, and assuredly did not care to have any overbold travelers startle their mules by coming up alongside when there clearly wasn’t room.

It dawned on Mienthe, rather too slowly, that the muleteers thought she was with Tan in a very specific sense. They thought that she must have slipped away from her father, or maybe from her proper husband. Mienthe, horrified and offended, wanted to correct them. Before she could, Tan caught her eye and her hand and proceeded to encourage the muleteers’ assumption by putting on an understated air of nervous, half-embarrassed smugness that would have got the idea across to men far less romantically inclined. The muleteers grew even more amused and accommodating. Mienthe smiled until her face hurt.

She was too angry to speak to Tan when they at last left the wagons behind and rode up the next neatly angled slope of the road.

“It’s very convenient for them to assume—” Tan began once they were well away.

“I know,” Mienthe said through her teeth.

“It’s only practical—”

“I know!” said Mienthe, and put her hood up to make it clear she did not want to be mollified.

They did not speak again until they reached the middle of the pass, with its welcoming public house and stables and twelve lamps glowing along the road on either side to lead weary travelers in out of the cold.

The public house was set up on a low place where mountains climbed away in serried ranks in all directions. The mountains, glittering with ice, were rose-pink and gold where the late sunlight slanted down across them; the shadows between and behind them were violet, and the road running away toward the east seemed picked out in gold where it twisted up across the face of the nearest. Where the road flung itself across a chasm, high above, the iron bridge looked like a stark black thread.

The public house had a stable behind and two long wings, one angling in from the east and the other from the west. These met in the middle in a handsome square-cornered three-story building of dressed stone with carved wooden doors and real glass in the windows, blazing gold in the light. The whole was substantially larger than her father’s house, much more elegant than the great house in Tiefenauer, and a great deal more elaborate than anything Mienthe had expected to find in the middle of what was still, despite the fine new road, a rugged mountain pass.

Mienthe, wordless, gazed down and up and around in amazement.

Tan said in a low voice, “Would we might rise on eagle’s wings, mount above the heights where the rising sun strikes music from the stone, and fall again through the silence that is song.”

“Oh,” said Mienthe softly. And after a moment, “If there’s a poem that catches an echo of this”—Mienthe opened her hands to the surrounding mountains—“then someday you really must teach it to me.”