Angel Isle

CHAPTER

1

Cold, hungry, terrified, Maja watched the two strangers from her secret den beside the mounting block, beneath the burnt barn. That was where she’d run when she’d seen a troop of the savage horsemen from the north come yelling up the lane all those days ago, and lain there cowering. Her uncle and the boys were away fighting the main army of the horsemen, but they must have caught her mother and her aunt. Maja couldn’t see what they did to them because of the smoke, but she’d heard their screaming. Then the smoke of the burning buildings had got into the den and overcome her. After that she didn’t remember anything for a while, and when she woke the savages were gone and the farm was ashes around her.

She had felt too ill to move, and too terrified of the savages, and her throat had been horribly sore, but at last she’d crept out and climbed up to the spring and drunk, and then stolen round the farm like a shadow and found her mother’s body and her aunt’s lying face down in the dung pit, and a lot of dead animals scattered around. Her aunt used to make her help with the butchering, so she cut open a dead pig with her knife and roasted bits of its liver on the embers of her home, and despite the soreness of her throat had managed to swallow it morsel by morsel. By the time she’d finished, it was beginning to get dark, so she’d crawled back into her den and curled up in her straw nest and slept there all night without any dreams at all.

She’d spent the next day collecting dry brushwood and straw and the burnt ends of rafters and beams and piling it all into the dung pit on top of the two bodies. As dusk thickened she’d used a still smoldering bit of timber to set the pile alight.

“Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye,” she’d whispered as the flames roared up, then turned away dry-eyed. She didn’t seem to feel anything. She was vaguely sorry about her mother, and vaguely guilty that she’d never learned how to love her. There hadn’t been anything there to love. She’d dreaded and hated her aunt, but her aunt had shaped her world and she felt a far greater sense of loss at her going. Now that shape was shattered and all she had was emptiness, until her uncle came back from the fighting, if he ever did.

The dead animals had soon begun to rot, but some of the chickens were still alive and hanging around because they didn’t know anywhere else to go. There was good barley out in the little barn in Dirna’s field, which her aunt grew there every year to feed to the unicorns, so the chickens learned to come to her again when she called to them, and she managed to coax some of them into laying. She ate the cockerels one by one and found a few things still usable in the vegetable patch and the orchard, and survived, afraid and lonely.

She had found her den long before. Ever since she could remember she had needed somewhere to hide. Hide from her uncle’s sudden, inexplicable rages, from her aunt’s equally savage tongue, from her boy cousins’ thoughtless roughness. Only occasionally did anyone hurt her on purpose. Indeed, once or twice when she was small and at the end of one of his outbursts her uncle had slammed out to the barn, her aunt had deliberately sent her out to call him in, despite her terror of him. It was one of her aunt’s ways of punishing her, though she’d never been told what for. So she’d crept through the barn door, tensed for his anger, but instead he’d called to her and put her on his lap and fondled her like a kitten for a while, and spoken gently to her, though she could feel his rage still roiling inside him—and it was the rage itself that had terrified her, not the fear that she herself might suffer from it. Usually it had been her big cousin Saranja who’d suffered, or the two boys—and they had been always angry too. Even her own mother had been too vague and feeble to notice her much, let alone stand up for her when she needed help. She must have had a father, of course, but she’d never known him, and had no idea who or where he was. She didn’t dare ask. Saranja had been the only person besides her uncle who had sometimes smiled at her, as though she had meant it.

But then there had come the day she had taught herself never to think of, and at the end of it Saranja had gone away and the rage had been ten times worse than before and her uncle had never spoken to her kindly again.

And it was all Maja’s fault. It always had been, even before that. Since she was born.

There was a bit of the heap of ashes that had been Woodbourne which she fed with fresh wood to keep the embers going, and then hid under layers of ash when she’d finished her cooking. She’d just done that when she’d spotted the woman trudging along the lane with an old horse trailing behind her, and a solitary figure limping along further back. They hadn’t looked dangerous, but all the same she’d clucked to the chickens, who’d come hustling over, imagining it was the start of the evening drill that kept them safe from foxes. She’d laid a trail of barley to lure them into the den and lain in the entrance to watch, letting the scorched branch of fig that screened it fall back into place.

Now the woman came into the yard and stared around. She was grimy with long travel, but despite that was beautiful in her own fierce way, with a mass of glossy dark hair hanging well below her shoulders. Maja had a vague feeling she’d seen her before—or perhaps it had been in a dream, or perhaps she’d just imagined her in one of the stories she told herself. She had the look of a queen, angry, proud and sad—a defeated queen who refuses to accept her defeat. Maja used to tell herself a lot of stories like that during her lonely and miserable years, stories of adventures she would never have and courage that would never be hers.

The horse shambled in behind the woman and stopped, as if it didn’t know what else to do.

The woman called out in a strong voice.

“Anyone there?”

No one answered, so she started to wander around, scuffing here and there with her feet at the edges of the pile of ash that a month ago had been Woodbourne. She stooped and pulled what looked like a golden feather from the ashes. Another followed, dangling below it.

Maja stared. The roc feathers! Why hadn’t they burnt with everything else? She knew them well. Once a year, after supper on the eve of Sunreturn, the whole family would sit and listen to her mother telling them the old story of Tilja and the Ropemaker, and her aunt would fetch the feathers out of the box where she kept them—she never let anyone else touch them—to show them it was all true, and then put them back when it was over.

The woman smoothed them between her fingers and turned and said something to the horse, then looked back along the way she had come. After a while a man limped into the yard. He too was stained with travel, but unlike the woman looked sick and exhausted. There was a bloodstained bandage round his left leg. All the same, he also looked like someone out of one of Maja’s stories, the last loyal soldier in the queen’s defeated army, perhaps, a laughing warrior, an officer used to giving orders. Despite everything, his neat triangular beard gave him a jaunty look. Maja decided she liked him. She wasn’t afraid of him.

“Ribek Ortahlson,” he said.

That was obviously his name. Ortahlson! That was in the old story too. He must come from Northbeck and a man in his family sang winter after winter to the snows to make them fall and block the passes, so that the savage horsemen of the northern plains couldn’t come raiding, the way they had now—just as a woman from Woodbourne sang winter after winter to the unicorns in the forest so that the sickness stayed in the forest and the armies of the great empire to the south couldn’t get through to tax the Valley of everything it owned.

The woman answered but she was facing away from Maja, who couldn’t hear what she said. They both turned to the horse, which had wandered up to the mounting block, letting Maja hear and see everything. The woman laid the feathers on the horse’s back, behind the shoulders, and began to stroke them. She whispered something, and the whole Valley seemed to shake and shimmer. The shock-wave thundered through Maja’s body, and she passed out.

When she came to—it could only have been a few seconds—the quills of the feathers were sinking into the hide. The horse shrugged, raised its head, and gave a long sigh as if of sudden, huge contentment.

The woman stood back beside Ribek, watching the feathers twitch as they embedded themselves into the muscles that had grown to receive them. At once they started to thicken and extend themselves. The quills became bone. The individual barbs lengthened into vanes. A joint appeared below them, dragging with it a fold of hide along the undersides of the quill. All along this fresh plumes erupted, as golden as the original pair. The horse itself started to grow to accommodate the major muscles that its wings were going to need, and still to remain in the true proportions of a horse. At the same time its original indeterminate dunnish hue lightened and brightened to a glowing chestnut. It raised its head, stamped a hoof and snorted like a charger. The movement allowed Maja to see that it was no longer a gelding, but a stallion, entire. The whole landscape seemed to pulse and quiver as the woman continued to stroke the now enormous wings.

Vaguely for some time Maja had been noticing a dull drumming that had been coming from the southwest. Abruptly it changed its note. Absorbed in the wonder of the event, neither of the other two seemed to have noticed it.

The woman sighed.

“I never believed it,” she said. “I was still hoping it wouldn’t happen.”

“I’ve always believed,” said Ribek. “To see it is something different. What now? To judge by the story we’re expected to ride it. I’ve never ridden a horse—we’re boat people and millers.”

“We can’t go on calling it ‘it.’ What do you call a horse that’s partly a roc?”

“A rocking horse? I’ve ridden a rocking horse at the Gathering when I was a kid.”

“A name,” said the woman. The tone of her voice, Maja thought, meant she didn’t really get it that anyone could be lighthearted at a moment like this. She seemed to change her mind.

“Well, I suppose Rocky’s not a bad name for a horse,” she said, and repeated it, trying it out on her tongue.

“Rocky?”

The horse tapped a forehoof gently on the ground as if it approved.

“Rocky it is then,” said the woman. “Bareback’s possible, but it’d be tiring any distance. Suppose…it can’t do any harm…”

She moved forward and laid her spread hands on Rocky’s back. With apparent confidence—but diffidence seemed to be not in her nature—she spoke the single word, “Harness.”

Again that shock-wave. This time Maja stayed conscious, though if she’d been standing she’d have staggered and fallen. Then the tremor and glitter of the landscape and a series of piercing thrills, as one by one a double saddle appeared, stirrups, saddlebags and scallop-fringed reins and bridle, the leather all glossy scarlet, the buckles and studs gold, and the plume on the bridle a fountain of golden feathers. The woman looked up, frowning. The movement broke the spell of the wonderful and beautiful event, and Maja looked up too, and gasped. Something almost as astonishing, but this time terrible and strange, was happening in the sky.

Hidden till now by the treetops of the forest edge beyond the farm, an immense, dark bag-thing had appeared, floating toward it, shaped like a fat sausage pointed at both ends, held up by nothing, but carrying below it a sort of long, thin basket, as big as the largest boat on the river. Even more dangerous and terrifying because they were so much nearer, five enormous birds were flying steadily ahead of it. Each of them towed a bag like the first one, nothing like as huge but still as big as a haystack, below which dangled a harness carrying a man in a bulging dark helmet and jet-black uniform. They seemed to Maja to be flying directly toward her. This had happened to her before, many, many times in dreams—the monsters who knew where she was hiding, and were coming for her now. Always in dreams, she had woken before she saw them. This time she was awake, and they were real. Her limbs locked rigid with terror.

The two humans had their backs toward them and hadn’t seen them. But now the horse had. He didn’t like it at all. He started to fidget, to stretch his great wings for flight, to try to rear. The woman shouted to the man to load the kit into the saddlebags and come and hold the bridle. And as soon as she could she darted round to the mounting block and slid into the front saddle. The man hurried to follow. The horse was almost on his hind legs. Maja broke out of the terror-trance. She scrambled from her den and up the block.

“Take me too!” she shouted. “Don’t leave me behind! Please! Please!”

The horse was rearing, his hind legs tensed to spring, his wings spread for the first mighty buffet that would carry them into the air. Maja felt herself caught by the collar and flung forward and upward. She grasped desperately for something to hold on to. Another hand caught her out of the air and sent her crashing against the horse’s neck. Rocky squealed and bolted north. Maja clutched, found a handful of mane, and then another, and then just clung there, while the great wings smote the air in panic.

She felt some sort of a struggle going on behind her and managed to crane round. By now they were well clear of the ground. Ribek’s legs and waist were dangling down by the horse’s flank, with him grasping the after saddle and wrestling to hoist himself further, while the woman, with one hand twisted into Rocky’s mane, was reaching round with the other to help him. At last he made it and settled down, gasping, into the saddle.

“Sheep-faces, and an airboat,” shouted the woman, as soon as she’d got her breath back.

“More magic?” asked Ribek, like her, shouting to be heard above the wing-thunder. “People like you and me? Or something else?”

“Oh, they’re people all right. Only where I’ve been we call them Sheep-faces. They just don’t think the way we do. And they don’t do magic. We’ll be all right. A horse at a canter is faster than bird-kites, and the birds get tired. The airboat is even slower but it’s driven by engines and can go on for ever.”

“Any idea where we’re going after that?”

“Just getting clear of the Sheep-faces, for the moment. After that…Maybe Rocky knows. He isn’t just bolting. He’s bolting somewhere. I’ve got to get him slowed down. He’ll kill himself, this speed.”

Maja crouched out of the way to let her lean past her and over Rocky’s neck, murmuring in his ear, nudging gently on his bit, letting him feel her legs against his flanks. Ribek watched their rear, calling the news. The bird-kites, far outpaced, turned back to the airboat almost at once, but it continued to follow doggedly until it was a dwindling dot, almost out of sight.

Sometimes in her dreams Maja could fly, and when the monsters came she could soar away from them. Then, at this exact moment, when the danger seemed gone, the gift deserted her, and she was plodding through heavy plowland with the pursuers only a field or two behind. Rocky gave a long shuddering sigh. Now. She tensed herself for the onslaught of terror as the frantic wingbeats slowed.

It didn’t happen. Instead, she felt the tension of the great body ease as he started to glide. They came lower and lower. Looking down, Maja saw fields and a farm beneath them. A boy was driving cows in to be milked. He gazed up, and his mouth fell open. She heard his faint shout, saw him point, and Rocky shuddered again, deliberately this time, shaking away the final shreds of both nightmares, his and hers, and flew purposefully on. Somewhere.

“If the story’s any guide—” Ribek said.

“Don’t tell me!” snapped the woman. “I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to know. That stupid story’s ruined my life. I’ve never believed it. I never wanted to believe it. I don’t now. If you’re trying to tell me that Rocky’s taking us to look for the stupid Ropemaker, I’m getting off right away, soon as we’re clear. You can keep Rocky, and welcome.”

“I don’t know how to ride a horse,” said Ribek, obviously teasing. He seemed to be like that.

“Then Rocky can tell you that too,” snarled the woman.

“Maybe our new friend knows how to ride a horse,” said Ribek, still teasing. “Who are you anyway? We can’t go on calling you uh.”

“Me?” said Maja, astonished to be asked, to be even noticed. “I’m…I’m Maja Urlasdaughter.”

“Maja!” said the woman in a totally different voice. “You’re still alive! Oh, thank the stars! I’ve thought of you so often. It was the worst thing of all, leaving you behind there in that hell. I was sure she’d have…”

She didn’t finish the sentence. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t important, swept away like a leaf in a stream on the flood of hope that welled up in Maja, unstoppable. Normally she would have pushed it away, having decided long ago that hope was only the insubstantial shadow that solid, real disappointment cast in front of it wherever it came. Not now.

“You’re…you’re Saranja?” she whispered, and then had to say it aloud because her whisper was drowned by the wing-thunder.

“Oh, Maja!” said Saranja, laying the reins down on Rocky’s neck and hugging Maja to her like a doll. “That’s wonderful! That’s absolutely wonderful! Ribek, this is my cousin Maja, who I never thought I would see again. I think this is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

“Hello, Maja,” said Ribek. “Glad to have you with us. Perhaps you can persuade your big cousin to stop talking nonsense about not coming to help look for the Ropemaker.”

Saranja snorted, let go of Maja and picked up the reins.

“What happened to them?” she said after a while. “My parents, your mother, the boys?”

Maja told her about finding the bodies, and the bonfire she’d made on them. She didn’t say anything about the screams.

“Your father and the boys went off to fight the horsemen,” she said. “I don’t know anything about them.”

“If they were in the same fight I was,” said Ribek, “it wasn’t good. We held the horsemen for a while and it looked like we were winning, but then some of them came round and caught us from the side, and after that it was a massacre. I got out by the skin of my teeth, but a lot of people didn’t.”

Again Saranja was silent for a while.

“Well, that’s all over,” she said at last. “I suppose I can stop hating her now.”

The Valley flowed backward beneath them. Maja had never been so far from Woodbourne and had no idea of the names of any of the farms and villages she could see, but Ribek knew the Valley well and told them old scandals and new gossip about the people who lived there, though Maja had to strain to hear through the wind-whistle and wing-thunder. After a while he got hard biscuity bread out of his satchel and passed it forward.

“How come you showed up so pat at Woodbourne, Ribek?” said Saranja. “Or were you just running away?”

“At first I was. Slinking back to Northbeck and hoping for the best—it’s pretty out of the way up there—but, well, I’d known we were for it when the Ice-dragon didn’t show up last winter. My grandfather saw him once, but mostly you don’t. You just know he’s there. I came down to Woodbourne and tried to ask your mother if anything was happening to the cedar magic. She didn’t answer. Her mouth was a slit. She just shook her head and shut the door in my face. So that was that. Nothing for it but to stand and fight and hope for a miracle. It didn’t happen.

“I headed for the river with a bunch of others who’d been in the fight, but the horsemen caught up with us just as we got there. Some of us tried to hold them off while the rest got onto a couple of rafts. That’s when I got hurt, but someone hauled me onto a raft and off we floated. Down river, of course. South. That’s how I finished up less than half a day from Woodbourne. I thought after all I’d better come and see if your mother had changed her mind about talking to me—I’d never have thought well of myself again if I hadn’t. Pretty sure nothing would come of it, but, well, it didn’t turn out like that and here we are.

“Know what we’re talking about, Maja?”

“Me?” said Maja, again startled to be asked. “Er…er…Yes, of course. It’s in the story. There’s always one boy born at Northbeck who can hear what the stream is saying and when he’s old enough he has to climb up into the mountains and sing to the snows every year so that the Ice-dragon comes and blocks the passes with fresh snow and the horsemen can’t get through; and there’s always a girl born at Woodbourne who can hear what the cedars are saying, and when she’s old enough she has to go into the forest to sing to the cedars and feed the unicorns so that they bring the sickness that stops the Emperor’s armies coming through because they’re supposed to be defending us but they’re just as bad as the horsemen.”

“And that’s what I ran away from,” muttered Saranja. “All that rubbish about being bound to those stupid unicorns and cedars.”

Maja’s words, when they’d come, had come with a rush and now she was gasping for breath. She’d had to crane round Saranja’s body so that Ribek could hear her through the wing-thunder. He laughed.

“So you know the story,” he said.

“Do you want me to go on? It’s rather complicated.”

“Let’s get ourselves somewhere a bit more comfortable, so we can talk without having to shout. Your ancestor Tilja and my ancestor Tahl will have seen things differently, and there’s twenty generations of storytelling since then, so the stories themselves may be pretty different by now.”

“All right.”

Time passed, and more time. Gradually Maja became aware of a strange, throbbing sensation running through her—through all of her, body, mind and soul. She had no words for it. She had never felt anything like it before…Yes, she had! Those sudden, fierce thrills when Saranja was conjuring Rocky’s harness up out of nowhere—this was the same kind of thing, but very different, as different as a howling tempest from a breeze so faint that you can’t feel it, and can only tell it’s there by the drift of thistledown it’s carrying along. It came from Rocky.

This was the feel of magic, she realized. When it was strong magic, suddenly happening, when Saranja had whispered the Ropemaker’s real name—Maja knew from the story that must be what she had said—it was like a thunderclap straight overhead, stunning the senses. Things like giving Rocky his wings and harness were thunder not far off, startling in its suddenness, thrilling in its power. But what came from Rocky now was like continuous thunder rolling along distant hills, almost beyond hearing, vaguely menacing but at the same time comforting.

Rocky was magical all the time because the two gold feathers Saranja had found in the ashes of Woodbourne were roc’s feathers, and a roc is a magical animal. Twenty generations ago the magic that protected the Valley started to fail, and four people, Tilja and her grandmother Meena from Woodbourne, and Tahl and his grandfather Alnor from Northbeck, had set out into the Empire to look for the man who had put the magic there in the first place, a magician called Faheel. He had been very old and tired, and had sent them on to look for a magician who called himself the Ropemaker. But while they were on Faheel’s island Tilja had picked up a couple of roc feathers. Then, when they’d found the Ropemaker and he’d done what they asked him, he’d used the feathers to give Meena’s bad-tempered old mare a pair of wings so that Tahl and Alnor could fly safely over the forest, without being killed by the magical forest sickness that was only fatal to men and was now back in place to protect the Valley from the Emperor’s armies.

The story, as Maja had said, was a lot more complicated than that, so she started sorting the rest of it out in her mind for when the time came to tell Ribek the Woodbourne version.

By the time she’d done that they were flying up a prodigious valley carved into the northern mountains. Soon Rocky curved to the right and, still flying strongly, climbed steadily to cross a snow-covered ridge and glide smoothly down into the next valley.

“By all the waters!” said Ribek. “I know where we are! Our mill’s in the next valley! Think we’re far enough in front to spend the night? If we haven’t lost them completely.”

“We’re going to have to stop somewhere,” said Saranja. “Anything to eat at your mill? For him, I mean. He’ll need more than grass after that effort. Assuming we can get him over that.”

She pointed toward the mountain spur now facing them, almost half again as high as the one they’d crossed.

“There’s a good pass a dozen miles south,” said Ribek. “And it’s a mill, you know. Been a rotten year for custom, with all the fighting, so the barn’s full of last year’s grain. We do a line in crimped grain for horse-feed.”

It was drawing toward evening by the time Rocky had beaten his way up through the thinner air to the top of the pass and started the long glide down.

“He’s getting tired,” said Saranja. “No wonder—any ordinary horse would be dead, what he’s done. What are they going to make of him at your mill?”

“If it’s there. If they’re there. Depends whether the horse people came raiding up this far. But if they’re there they’ll be all right. We’re Ortahlsons, remember—my grandad saw the Ice-dragon. But listen. I’ve been thinking. Those fellows who’re after us—they knew we were there. I’d heard an odd noise just as I was getting to Woodbourne, but then you started putting Rocky’s wings on and it stopped, and I decided it didn’t matter. They must’ve been trying to sneak up on us.”

“Yes. My fault. I heard it too, but I was too busy dealing with Rocky to think about it, and I know what engines sound like. You’re right. They’d turned them off and started to drift toward us. The bird-kites are quicker, so they got them out as soon as they were close enough. They’ve got a magician on board. Anything magical the way Rocky is sends out a bit of a signal, and if he’s good enough the magician can pick it up until we can land somewhere and I can take his wings off him, supposing I can. I don’t know anything about flying horses.”

“I thought you said the Sheep-faces didn’t do magic.”

Saranja started to explain. Maja tried to listen, sleepy still, and only half hearing.

“They don’t. But they want it. That’s what they’re like. Anything they haven’t got. You’ve got an opal mine, they want it. All the warlords keep a magician in their household. They’re not mighty magicians, not like the ones in the story, and when their warlords start fighting mostly they cancel each other out, but they can usually tell when someone else is brewing up magic anywhere near. The Sheep-faces have got hold of a few—they pay them the earth. I couldn’t help picking up a lot of this sort of thing because my owner liked to have a woman sitting at his feet when he was in council or anything—pet dogs, we were. Added to his status.

“First off the Sheep-faces ran up against the Empire. Wanted to trade, they said. Empire took a look at them, worked out what they were at, wouldn’t let them in. So they tried to force their way in. They’ve got some amazing weapons, but they hadn’t met dragons before, or directed lightning, or some of the other stuff that got flung at them in the Empire. Those airboats burn—get a flame against one of those bags and it goes up like gunpowder….”

“Gunpowder?”

“Too long to explain now. So the Sheep-faces started trying to encircle the Empire and ran up against the warlords. The only thing that stops warlords fighting each other is somebody else to fight. Magic doesn’t work as well the other side of the desert, but some of the warlords’ magicians could fling fire—not as good as dragons or lightning, but enough to stop an airboat getting in close, and the warlords fought hit-and-run on the ground, which they’re good at and the Sheep-faces weren’t, so it was a really bloody business down south until the Sheep-faces backed off. Now they’re working to set the warlords fighting each other—doesn’t take much doing—and meanwhile mopping up all the magicians they can. I reckon that airboat was a patrol coming up through the desert, looking for magic stuff over on their left, and all of a sudden they found out there was more on their right than they expected now the Valley’s open. Six years ago, when I crossed the desert, nobody that side had any idea it was there. The Sheep-faces must have been coming to take a look when I happened to be giving Rocky his wings—that’d send out a signal you could pick up a hundred miles off.”

“So they can follow us wherever we go?”

“Until they run out of fuel for the engines. It’s a patrol. They’ll be carrying plenty. Could last for days. How far to your mill, Ribek?”

“Five miles from the bottom of the pass. That’s it, ahead. You can see the river. Better get him down while we’re still over the forest, I suppose.”

“Umph. Not something they teach you in riding school.”

Maja saw her do something with the reins and felt the slight shift of her body. Rocky steepened his glide, landed with barely a jolt and folded his wings. Ribek and the woman dismounted. Saranja lifted Maja down and helped Ribek unbuckle the saddlebags and harness, then moved to Rocky’s flank. Her hands seemed to know what to do. She laid one on the root of each wing. She was a tall woman, but even on tiptoe she could barely reach across to the further one. At her touch the horse half spread both wings. Her lips moved, soundlessly. Again that shock-wave, the fierce, glittering tremor in the golden evening light sweeping along the opposite mountainside, that pang of excitement deep in Maja’s soul, so intense this time that she cried aloud.

Saranja looked at her with raised eyebrows.

“I…I’m all right,” she said. “It’s just when you do that…”

“Your Sheep-faces’ magician will have felt it too, surely,” said Ribek. “I felt it a bit myself.”

“Uh-huh. Probably still feel it when they get here,” muttered Saranja.

Gently she stroked each hand up the two massive bones that carried the wings. And again. And again. Each time she repeated the simple movement the wings became smaller, and the horse itself dwindled in proportion, until only an ordinary chestnut stallion stood there, in a harness of brown leather, with a couple of golden feathers lying on each shoulder. Even so, it was a handsome beast, tired after a long day, but well muscled, its coat glossy with health, and with an odd, humorous look in its eye, as if it knew some secret no other horse was aware of.

Saranja unwound a golden hair from her wrist and bound it round the quills. As she did so Maja felt the strange Rocky-sensation die away. Saranja slipped the feathers into her belt-pouch, and the world was ordinary again.

They walked the hundred paces to the edge of the woods. Maja gazed around as they went on. Small interlocking fields, not a square foot of good earth wasted, lay in two narrow strips either side of the river. She could see a dozen farms from where she stood. All had a winter-hardy look. There was no sign of the ravages of the horse people. The slopes above were clothed with dense woods all the way to the tree line.

“Five miles to your mill?” said Saranja. “They’ll be sending patrols out the moment they land.”

“Should be enough for tonight,” said Ribek. “They won’t see much. It’s a waning moon, doesn’t clear the ridge till well after midnight.”

“Suppose they’re here before morning, is there another way out of the Valley?” said Saranja. “We’ll need to start well before dawn. They’ll have bird-kites up watching for us soon as it’s light. We could fly, but I’m not sure he’d make it over the next ridge.”

“I can take us up through the woods and along to the next pass. It’s a bit more exposed after that. Won’t their magician be able to pick up your feathers soon as he gets near them?”

“I don’t think so, not with the hair round them. Can’t be sure, but I can feel them sort of come into their power when I unwind it.”

“So can I!” said Maja. “It was there, like a kind of background buzz, but it stopped as soon as you put the hair round.”

“Funny,” said Ribek. “I can’t tell, but that sounds all right.”

“Let’s move,” said Saranja. “I want to take a look at that leg of yours. You’d better ride—you look dead beat. I ought to be, too, but I’m not. Still, I wouldn’t mind sleeping in a bed, even if it’s just three or four hours. Maja too, I expect.”

Bed! Maja thought, as Ribek climbed wearily into the saddle and Saranja lifted her up behind him. She settled sidesaddle, leaned her head against his back, reached her arms as far as they would go round his waist and fell asleep.

It seemed to Maja that she woke in the same place that she’d fallen asleep, sitting sidesaddle on Rocky, leaning against Ribek’s back, with the whole side of her face numb and creased with the imprint of his jacket. Only it was now daylight, daylight sweet with the dewy airs of early morning. Saranja was on foot, leading the way up a steep hill path through dense old woodland. From far down the slope to her right she could hear a drowsy throbbing sound.

“Ahng…are…,” she mumbled. “Are we nearly there?”

“Nearly where, kid?” said Ribek.

“We were going to your mill. We were going to sleep in a bed.”

“Been and gone, kid. You slept four hours in a real bed.”

“Oh! I thought that was only a dream. There was a blue clock on the wall.”

“That’s right. In the kitchen. My grandfather made clocks for a hobby. That’s where I belong. Best place in the world.”

“I don’t belong anywhere.”

“Not Woodbourne?”

“Not now. It’s gone. Anyway, it wasn’t like your mill. It wasn’t a good place. Saranja ran away.”

“She was telling me. That sort of thing shouldn’t…I wonder if I should have left you at the mill. They’d have looked after you there.”

“No. I’m going with you. Wherever it is. Do you know yet? What’s happening?”

“At the moment we’re trying to get away from the Sheep-faces. Anything else can wait. That’s them you can hear buzzing away down in the valley. We aren’t trying for the main pass, because that’s pretty exposed over the top, and we think they’ll have those kite-men up, but there’s another little one they mightn’t spot.”

Nightmare flooded back. The throbbing from the Valley was no longer drowsy. It was the purr of the monsters who would find her in the end.

Ribek’s voice, ordinary, calm, faintly teasing, dissolved them.

“Hungry? There’s raisin cake.”

“Ung…don’t know.”

“That means you need raisin cake.”

He was right.

“Why aren’t we flying?” she mumbled between the delectable mouthfuls.

“Because their magician will be on to us the minute Saranja puts Rocky’s wings on and they’ll start following us all over again. We’re hoping that if we can get a bit of the mountain between us and them before she does it that might damp the effect and perhaps we’ll shake them off here. You agree?”

“Ahng,” said Maja, startled out of the returning nightmare, simply by being asked, and then deciding he was probably joking.

“I hope your leg’s better,” she said.

“A bit,” said Ribek, sounding surprised in his turn. “Saranja cleaned it out at the mill and put a new bandage on. She knows a lot about wounds. Rough lot of thugs she’s been living among, she says.”

Maja was bewildered. She wasn’t used to being talked to like this—wasn’t used to being talked to at all, in fact, apart from when her mother took it into her head to tell her one of her stories. Otherwise at Woodbourne she’d been talked at—told what to do, or not do, or how furious the speaker was with somebody else. If she hadn’t been there, they’d have told the cat. She liked this new experience, but she didn’t know how to cope with it so she didn’t say anything. The path twisted and began to climb back the other way, and then twisted again. And again. After a bit she settled into a light doze, in and out of sleep, reliving bits of her dream that hadn’t been a dream.

“Was there a big yellow cat?” she mumbled.

“Monster,” said Ribek. “His mother was killed by a fox and our old bitch finished suckling him, so he’s got it into his head he’s a dog. He won’t let another dog through the gate. He’ll see foxes off too.”

“And an owl on a shelf?”

“Woolly. My pet owl when I was a kid. My grandfather stuffed him for me when he died.”

And green plates and bowls on the dresser, she thought, and the steady, peaceful rumble of the millstream over the weir. A place to belong. She fell into a pleasant daydream of living at the mill, deliberately replacing the purr of the monster with the sound of the weir.

The path zigzagged to and fro, steeper now, and the trees on either side almost all pines, gloomy and mysterious. Even gallant Rocky had begun to plod, but Saranja still strode ahead, apparently tireless. There wasn’t much to do or look at, so Maja settled back into her daydream, less satisfactorily because she didn’t know enough about the real mill to make the dream one solid. She’d have to ask Ribek. At last the steady rhythm of Rocky’s stride fell still. They had reached the end of the trees. The dazzling light from beyond, bright sun glittering back off a vast white sweep of snowfield, made her screw up her eyes. Through a haze of tears she could just make out somebody—Saranja—out in the middle of the dazzle, shading her eyes as she gazed back over the treetops. She waved to them to come on up into the open.

“All clear, far as I can see,” she said. “I want to give Rocky a bit of a rest and a feed. You go on ahead with Maja and we’ll catch you up.”

It was only when Saranja lifted her down that Maja realized she was wearing someone else’s coat, a bit too big for her, but very warm and comfortable.

“One of my nieces lent it to you,” said Ribek. “You’ll need it over the top. We’ve got other stuff in the saddlebags. Ready, kid? Off we go. One child and one cripple set out to conquer the mountain.”

He led the way out of the woods and along the edge of the forest to the right. After a little while he turned up across the snowfield. It was last winter’s snow, almost as hard and slippery as ice with daily thawing and freezing. Maja couldn’t see any sign of a path, but before long the snowdrifts began to rise on either side of them and they were walking along a little valley that soon became almost a canyon with ice-sheeted black crags poking through the snow on either side. The footing was rough and treacherous and Ribek was limping heavily, sometimes just taking a single step, and pausing, and leaning on his stick and leading off again with his hurt leg. Maja worked her way up beside him and put her arm round his waist and did her best to help him along.

“Thanks, kid,” he muttered, and plodded grimly on. Saranja and Rocky caught up with them just as they reached the top of the pass.

“You don’t look too good,” she said.

“Cold’s got into it a bit,” Ribek answered. “Maja had to carry me most of the way.”

He was such a lovely man, Maja decided. He was only joking, of course, but still, when his leg was really hurting him, he’d found a way of saying thank you to her.

“Good for her,” said Saranja. “We’ll get you back on Rocky soon as we’re off the ice, and we’ll get his wings back on him first good place we come to.”

The slope down wasn’t so steep, but still horribly slippery in places. Maja stayed with Ribek, helping him best she could. Saranja hurried ahead with Rocky, tethered him at the edge of the trees, and came back and took Ribek’s other side. Together they heaved him into the saddle, where he pretty well collapsed.

The downward path was much like the one they’d climbed, twisting through pines, and then ancient deciduous trees, which reminded Maja of the forest behind Woodbourne. The air grew warmer. They came to a large, open glade, with a stream tumbling through, and halted.

“Put me by the water,” said Ribek. “It’ll tell me soon as the Sheep-faces cross the ridge. And I might be able to tickle a fish or two for lunch, if you get a fire going.”

“I’ll want one anyway,” said Saranja. “Much better deal with your leg using warm water. Maja, dear, see if you can find us some dry stuff for firewood.”

(Maja, dear…Amazing. Unbelievable.)

Half an hour later Rocky was grazing contentedly at sweet mountain turf, Maja was nursing a good steady blaze with a small iron pot balanced over its heart, Saranja was carefully cutting a mat of blood-soaked bandages away from Ribek’s leg, while he lay face down at the edge of the stream with his left arm trailing in the water. Even as Maja watched he swung it up out of the water, something silvery arced through the air, and there was a plump fish flopping to and fro on the grass. Saranja reached out and grabbed it, reversed her knife in her hand and whacked the fish firmly, just behind the head, with the heavy hilt. She dropped it back on the turf, where it jerked a couple of times and lay still. She went back to Ribek’s bandages as if she hadn’t done anything clever at all.

Maja realized she was still a bit afraid of her cousin, though she used to look after her and try to protect her when she got the chance, in a way Maja’s mother had always been too feeble to do, and her aunt too bitter. Saranja was so strong and certain, so tireless and brave. But deep down inside her, banked and controlled and hidden, Maja now sensed something else. She knew it from twelve years of hiding from it at Woodbourne, raging like a brush fire on the surface of everyone’s life there, her uncle’s day-long, week-long, year-long fury, and the midwinter bitterness of her aunt’s response. It had never crossed Maja’s mind to wonder why Woodbourne was like that. It just was, and always had been, ever since she could remember. And somehow it was all her fault.

No wonder Saranja had run away. But it had been too late. That rage was already there, inside her, like a family illness. She’d taken it into exile with her, and brought it back fiercer than before.

And there was something else about her, strange, different. A sort of inaudible hum, rather like the odd, buzzing sensation that Maja picked up from Rocky when he was wearing his wings but not when he wasn’t. Except that that had been part of Rocky, coming from inside him. This was much fainter, and it wasn’t part of Saranja. It came from something she was wearing or carrying. And it was doing something to her, something magical…

How did Maja know all this anyway? She had no idea, but she did.

Ribek shifted a little way up the bank and caught another fish, and then another. Maja knew what to do from tagging along on her boy cousins’ fishing expeditions, and had them gutted and spitted by the time the fire was hot enough to roast them. Saranja disappeared into the wood to look for healing herbs and didn’t find any, but came back with a pouchful of sweet wild yellow raspberries instead.

Ribek unpacked one of the saddlebags and produced fresh brown bread from the mill, and butter churned from the rich milk of mountain pasturage. Maja ate purring inwardly, like the old farm cat over its bowl of scraps. She’d never in her life felt so happy. Perhaps she never would again. She’d like to have stayed here for ever. But of course she couldn’t. The other two weren’t just escaping. They were going to look for the Ropemaker. They wouldn’t want her with them for that, she’d only be in the way, no help at all. They’d find someone to leave her with on the journey. And then it would all be over, probably.

“How far is it still?” she said.

“Where to this time?” said Ribek.

“To find the Ropemaker. You were getting ready to go and do that when the Sheep-faces came and we had to run away, weren’t you?”

“Not really,” said Saranja. “We were being got ready for this, I suppose you could say. All my life I was being got ready, I’m beginning to think. All my life I’ve been fighting against it, without realizing, and in the end I ran away from it, but it brought me back when the time came, or that’s how it feels. I still don’t like it. I still don’t want to believe it. Why me? It makes me mad. But I’ve got to start believing it now. I’m stuck with it.

“The snows failed last winter so the glaciers melted and that let the horsemen through from the northern plains. I don’t love the Valley the way everyone else seems to, but I’m not going to stand for Valley people being raped and murdered year after year by those savages. Somebody’s got to go and look for a magician to renew the magic, so that Ribek can sing to the snows and bring the Ice-dragon back to block the passes; and so that someone from Woodbourne who can listen to the cedars can feed the unicorns in the forest so they’ll keep the sickness there and stop the Emperor’s armies coming through and taxing everyone of all they’ve got. The Ropemaker’s the obvious person. He put the magic there in the first place, so I suppose we’re starting with him.”

“That reminds me,” said Ribek. “What about the forest? Did your aunt say anything, Maja?”

“Who to? She didn’t tell anyone anything, except when they’d done wrong. Um, I suppose she’d been in a bad temper all the time, not just some of the time, like she used to be.”

“You can’t know everything,” said Ribek. “We’ll just have to assume it’s happening. And I’m no keener than Saranja is on the idea of coming haring off to look for the Ropemaker. I’ve got work to do.”

“You should have seen him last night,” said Saranja. “He’s wonderfully proud of that mill of his, aren’t you?”

“Well, I’ve never asked for anything better,” said Ribek. “It’s a good life. If a farmer wants to send his prettiest daughter up with his grain, because he thinks I’ll give him a better deal, why should I discourage him?”

“Only you always knew this might happen, because you believed the stupid story,” said Saranja. “I didn’t. And you didn’t either, Maja, because there’s no one like you in the story.”

“Me!” said Maja.

“Well, you’re here, aren’t you?” said Saranja. “I don’t believe you would be if you weren’t wanted. Same with Rocky. He looked like a completely useless old nag when he started tagging along after me. Nobody could possibly have wanted him for anything. But there had to be a horse for me to put the wings onto, so there he was, and here we are, the four of us, setting out together at the start of another stupid story. We’re going to find the Ropemaker, wherever he is, so that he can seal the Valley off for another twenty generations, and I expect there’ll be all sorts of adventures on the way for you to enjoy.”

“I…I don’t think I’ll be very good at that sort of thing.”

Ribek laughed aloud.

“Do you imagine I do? Or Rocky? I don’t know about Saranja—she’s obviously made for it. You know the story, don’t you? Do you imagine Tilja thought she’d be good at that sort of thing when she set out with the others to find Faheel? But in the end they couldn’t have done it without her. No, kid, you’d better face it. You’re going to have to dare and adventure with the rest of us, and Rocky’s going to take us wherever we’re supposed to be, and that’s all any of us knows, and Rocky doesn’t even know that. He’ll just find himself doing it.”

“Oh.”