Law of the Broken Earth(89)

She got up and went herself to pour out handfuls of grain for the horses and check their feet. At least there were few other camp tasks, as simply as they were traveling. Tan settled by the fire and stretched his leg out carefully, with a saddle under his knee.

Mienthe wrapped herself up in a blanket and tucked herself, not too close to Tan, between the cliff wall and the fire where the reflected warmth would, she hoped, eventually thaw her fingers and toes. She was acutely aware of his presence. And of the absence of the maid. And of the silence and solitude that surrounded them. She did not know what to say, but found herself suddenly unable to look at him.

“Tomorrow should see us out of the pass and down at least to Ehre,” he said, throwing another branch on the fire. His tone was utterly prosaic.

Mienthe nodded, staring fixedly into the fire.

“I could bring you something to eat—”

She shook her head and leaned her head back against the cliff. Then she lay down right where she was, closed her eyes, and opened them what seemed mere moments later to a spectacular dawn.

Clouds had piled up in the east, rose-pink and deep carmine and gold. The sun, rising behind the clouds and among the teeth of the mountains, flooded the valleys between the peaks with a streaming pale light that seemed almost solid enough to touch. To either side of the road, the luminous faces of the mountains glowed gold and pink with reflected light; ice streaked the high jagged tips of the mountains with crystalline fire. Violet and indigo shadows stretched out below the mountains, and the iron bridge, a surprising distance below their campsite, gleamed like polished jet.

“Good morning,” Tan said, smiling rather tentatively at Mienthe from beside the fire. He was heating pieces of last night’s roasted meat on sticks over the coals and folding them into flatbreads, and it was the savory smell of the dripping fat that had woken her.

Mienthe found herself suddenly and unexpectedly happy. It might have been the clarity of the air and the brilliance of the light, or the deep warmth that had built up around her through the night from the fire, or the feeling of safety. She had not realized how frightened she had felt, or for how long, until she woke secure in this stony nook high above the world, with no company but Tan and the horses. Somehow, in the bright light of the morning, it no longer seemed nearly so strange or worrisome to be alone in the mountains with only Tan for a companion.

She sat up, then got to her feet, shook out her traveling skirt and rubbed her face with her hands—Tan had put out a bowl of water and even a surprising bit of soap, so she could wash her face like a civilized person. Then she knelt down by the fire while Tan saddled the horses and rolled up the blankets. She didn’t even feel guilty about letting him do all the work. He looked wide awake and energetic, like he’d been up for hours, and he was hardly limping at all. Besides, there wasn’t a great deal of work involved in cleaning up their camp. So she peacefully ate the hot meat and exactly half of the honey cakes out of the packet. The honey was very good, spicier and somehow wilder than the honey from Delta wildflowers.

“We’ll be out of the pass and in Casmantium by noon,” Tan said, leading her horse up to her and offering her the reins. “Shall we lay odds on it?”

Mienthe couldn’t help but laugh. She laid Tan odds of three to one that they wouldn’t reach the far end of the great road before midafternoon, because that way she couldn’t lose—at least, she would rather lose than win.

“Your knee is better?” she remembered to ask.

“A night’s rest was all it required. It’ll be well enough as long as I leave the stirrups long,” he assured her.

He sounded so very sincere that Mienthe wondered if he was actually concealing a good deal of pain, but so far as she could see he looked calm and relaxed, without any of the visible tension of pain. So in the end she simply nodded and guided her horse out of the sheltered nook and up the long curve of the road that led east.

There was room to ride abreast, and for a while they did. But neither of them spoke, and after a little while, Tan fell back behind Mienthe. She did not mind. She liked the illusion that she was riding alone between stone and sky, the morning light pouring through the cold air around her, the granite glittering in the sun and the clean wind against her face. She could imagine she was the only living creature within a hundred miles—and her horse, of course. The horse also seemed cheerful this bright morning, moving willingly along with a long stride, its head up and its ears pricked forward.

This road truly was wonderful, Mienthe decided. She enjoyed its long spiral climb around the curve of a mountain and the artful way it doglegged up a narrow pass between two broken crags, with the sky an amazingly dark blue above and the mountains luminous with reflected light. She enjoyed the sharp thrill of crossing a graceful bridge spanning a gulf between two narrow spires. The chasm must have been at least four hundred feet long—she counted her horse’s strides to make that estimate and, turning at the end to look back at the bridge’s graceful, narrow length, wondered whether it was the longest bridge in the world and what magic of making kept it from collapsing down into the gulf.