Battle Magic

16

THE TEMPLE OF THE TIGERS, AND

KANGRI SKAD PO MOUNTAIN IN THE DRIMBAKANG LHO

Dawn found Briar with the orange-and-black stone tiger at the southern temple gate. He had managed to talk the guards into letting him out at some point; he didn’t remember when. The tiger was good company in his present bleak mood. Wrapped in a fur from his bedroll, he had told it about Evvy, how aggravating she could be, how protective she was of her cats, how much she loved new clothes. The tiger had curled around him, forming a bowl to hold Briar. At last he had slept.

It was the chief priestess who found him. She spoke with the stone tiger gently, thanking it for its care of Briar, until it slowly uncurled and took its normal place by the gate.

As Briar looked at the old woman sleepily, she told him, “I think we must treat the gate tigers differently after this. It is written in our books that they are mindless slaves of our magic, but apparently they are otherwise. We have you to thank — perhaps.” She touched one of his swollen eyes. “You have been weeping.”

For a precious moment he had forgotten. Tears spilled down as he told her, “They killed Evvy. My student.”

“You shall have revenge,” the old woman said. “Last night a messenger came from the west. Your people will wait here another day for the wounded to heal. By this afternoon warriors from the western temples and tribes will join you. Parahan and Souda want to go east, to trap the enemy in Fort Sambachu. We shall see. General Sayrugo is closer.”

“I want to go there,” Briar said, struggling to his feet. “I want to serve them at the fort like they served Evvy!”

The old woman helped him up. “When you agreed to help Parahan and the others, you put yourself at the orders of the God-King. You may not have a choice.”

Briar glared at her, but he was too weak with grief to argue. Instead he thought of something else. “Wait — I can’t go. I have to wait here for Rosethorn. She’ll be returning from the mountains soon, I hope. I said I would meet her.”

“And you will,” the priestess said patiently. “When was the last time you had any food?”

He shook his head, not because he didn’t want to eat, but because he couldn’t remember his most recent meal.

“As I thought,” she said. She towed him into the temple complex.

They fed him egg soup and momos, scolding him when he picked at his food. When he’d eaten enough that the cooks let him be, he went to the healers’ tent and helped there. Midday was curry. Jimut sat on one side of him, Souda on the other. Between them he ate all that was set before him, just to stop them from nagging him to death.

He was about to leave the temple to say prayers for Evvy in one of his new willow groves when a squad of Gyongxin warriors carrying the yellow banner of messengers galloped up the road. He knew a couple of them from Fort Sambachu.

“We almost did not come up here,” the woman who carried the banner told the gate guards. “Those trees weren’t on your road when I was here last! How —” Looking past the guard’s shoulder, she saw Briar. “Oh. I thought Rana made that up about you growing trees from nothing. Never mind. I bring messages for Prince Parahan and Princess Soudamini, and Captains Lango and Jha!”

Only when Lango identified the newcomers as General Sayrugo’s warriors did the guards open the gate. The messenger and her guards led their horses inside. Briar felt distantly sorry for them. They would soon learn of their own losses: the slaughter of Captain Jha and his company. At least they had been soldiers. They had known they were expected to die in war. Evvy had not. She had been dragged here by Briar and Rosethorn. She had not wanted anything to do with the emperor. All she had wanted to do was see the mountains.

Evvy slept a lot. She dreamed, too, and they were the strangest dreams of her life. The fluorite bear was in most of them, trundling beside her from her head to her feet, watching as snakes made of backbones and skulls unwound her bandages. Lions made of ice and packed snow licked her feet. A spider at least twice her size leaped down from a roof she couldn’t see and bandaged her feet in its webs.

In some dreams, when the bear wasn’t present, a woman with a white eye painted on her forehead came and argued with her about food. Usually Evvy would drink the soup brought by the woman just so she would go away. Evvy knew that dreams didn’t work like that. People didn’t go away because you did the things they wanted you to do in dreams, but these dreams were as odd as the strange things that she saw in them.

In one, she asked the fluorite bear, “Which is weirder, the nine-headed snake, or —” Suddenly she was wide-awake and saying, “— the giant spiders that come from above?” She sat up and looked around. She was definitely awake. She could feel her ragged clothes against her skin. She could smell herself. When had she last bathed? “Can you smell me?” she asked the bear.

“No,” it said gravely.

“Oh, good.” Swallowing, terrified of what she might see, she made herself look at her feet. They were there, looking like her ordinary, everyday feet. She wriggled her toes. They were stiff, but not painful. “I dreamed the Yanjingyi yujinon flayed my feet and killed everyone in the fort, but that part was so real,” she murmured. “I dreamed they killed my cats. And then I came here and a big spider wrapped my feet in its webs. I know that part was a dream.”

“It was all real, Evumeimei Dingzai,” the bear told her. “I called to you so you might find safety here in the mountains. The webs dropped from your feet a sunrise ago, when your feet were healed.”

Tears trickled down her cheeks. “My cats really are dead?”

“Once I understood why you called for them in your dreams, I showed their images to one of my snow leopards,” the bear said. “She went to the dead pile behind the stone cave. She found the seven little cats that matched your dreams in the pile.”

Evvy turned over on the soft pile of rags where she had been sleeping and wept harder.

When she finally dried her eyes and sat up again, she found the bear had not moved. “I don’t usually cry like this,” she told him belligerently. “Just so you don’t go thinking I’m some kind of watering pot.”

“What is a watering pot?” he asked.

“It’s a jar. You put water in it and pour it on plants so they grow.”

“Is not the rain enough?”

Evvy rubbed the dried blood on the back of one foot. It flaked off. “People have plants in their houses. They use watering pots for indoor rain.” Slowly, grimacing because she was so stiff, she drew one foot up onto the opposite knee so she could look at the sole. It was puffy with scars that crisscrossed the flesh, but when she poked them, they were merely sore, not as painful as they had been when she had fled the fort. “You cured them.”

“The webs of the peak spider cured them,” the bear explained. “Forgive us for keeping you in slumber. We felt that it would be less unnerving for you if you did not see how you were healed.”

“I don’t care about how I was healed,” Evvy said bitterly. “I care that I was hurt in the first place. I care that they killed all those people in the fort. I care that they killed my cats.” She opened and closed her hands, remembering the feel of the stone-cold dead cats under them as she crawled over bodies, looking for clothes. “What did the villagers ever do to deserve dying like that, tell me! They had little ones with them, babies, and those imperial qus killed them and dumped them in a pile to rot!” She glared at the fluorite bear, who had cocked his head knob once more. “What! You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”

“I do not know what crazy means,” the creature said in his slow, thoughtful way. “What I think is that we healed the hurt in your feet and the hurt in your body, but now your spirit is sick. I want to heal that pain for you, but I do not know how. I can heal the meat creatures of my mountain, but I leave two-legged meat creatures to their own kind.”

“Do you always talk this way?” Evvy demanded. She wasn’t being polite, or grateful, but if her cats were dead, why couldn’t this thing just have left her to die? Briar and Rosethorn have each other, she thought. The memory went through her like lightning. Briar and Rosethorn! If the enemy got around General Sayrugo and her troops, or killed them all, to reach Fort Sambachu, maybe they caught up to Briar and Rosethorn, too! How will I ever know?

The stone thing said, “My difficulty is that you are not entirely of the meat creature kind.”

“Of course I am!” Evvy retorted.

“No. If you were, I would not have heard your approach when you were still in the lowlands of the Ice Naga River.”

“The what?”

“The river that flows below my mountain, before the stone place where they tried to kill you, Evumeimei Dingzai.”

“We call it the Snow Serpent River,” Evvy told him. “And you can call me Evvy.”

“I could not begin to say such a name before I would have finished it. Will you accept Evumeimei?”

She sighed. “I suppose I have to. What do you call yourself?”

He tipped back his head knob and gave voice to a series of sounds she could not even begin to remember. Her mind caught on to two syllables she knew she could say.

“I’m going to call you Luvo. I’m sorry, I know that’s not your whole name, but I can’t say it all, or even remember it.” She hung her head. “I’m not trying to be rude or disrespectful. I suppose being a mountain is a big thing, like being a god. I can’t do big things.”

“I am only the heart of this mountain,” Luvo said kindly. “And part of you is of my kind, the mountain kind. Though it saddens me to say that you are impaired. Too much of you is a meat creature. I cannot understand how you came to be.”

Evvy wiped her nose on her arm. “Rosethorn and Briar say I’m an ambient mage. We draw our power from different parts of the world. They get their magic from plants and growing things. Briar has one foster-sister who gets hers from the weather, and another one who takes it from metal and fire, and one who draws it from making and working with cloth. I get mine from stones.”

“I did not know that this could ever be true,” Luvo said, fascinated. “This magic is of a different kind from that used by the chanting people, or the people of the white eye.”

“I think those are academic mages and shamans,” Evvy said. “I know Briar’s somewhere west of the fort with Parahan and Soudamini. They have mages with them, but I think Briar’s the only ambient one. If he isn’t dead.” She twisted her hands in her ragged shirt. “What am I going to do? How will I find him or Rosethorn? They don’t know where I am. I can’t go back to the fort — they’ll torture me again!”

“You could not return to the fort,” Luvo told her. “It no longer stands.”

Evvy blinked at him. “Did General Sayrugo come? Or the God-King’s army? What happened?”

“The hill that it was built on shook,” Luvo said. “The fort fell down.”

Evvy looked at the stone creature for a long moment, not exactly sure what he meant. Then she asked, “How did that happen?”

“Our mountains are young and still growing.” Luvo’s deep voice was bland. “Growing mountains may shake the land around them.”

“Why?” Evvy demanded. She had a feeling this was not an accident.

“The land and its guardians do not care for intruders who damage and kill those who belong here, or those who would bring good things here.” Evvy could have sworn she felt the ground quiver beneath her. In fact, she was sure of it. Nervously she eyed the stalactites that hung from the cave’s ceiling.

Then she screamed. A giant spider was leaping from one stalactite to the next, coming lower and closer, until it dropped to the ground only a few yards away from her. Evvy looked at its hairy body and its large black eyes and screamed again. It held one great foreleg in the air as if it were hurt. Evvy realized it held a bag even as she scrabbled backward off her bed of moss and scraps.

“Evumeimei, stop it!” boomed Luvo. “You frighten Diban Kangmo!”

“I frighten — whatever that is?” Evvy shrieked.

“Her name is Diban Kangmo. She is bringing food for you,” Luvo said firmly. “Stop that dreadful noise. You must thank her. She did not want to feed you. She did not like the idea of bringing a meat creature so far into our mountain.”

Evvy clapped her hands over her mouth and stared at the spider. She was six feet tall if she was an inch. Her mouthparts would easily crush Evvy’s arm. Once the girl caught her breath and was certain of what she would say, she moved her hands to ask, “Dee-what?”

“Dee-bahn kang-moh,” Luvo said even more slowly than he normally spoke. “One of her daughters healed your feet.”

Evvy gulped at the thought of something so huge working on her body. She was so very grateful she had not woken up then. “What is she? What are they?”

“Peak spiders,” Luvo replied. “The gods and goddesses of the utmost heights of the Drimbakangs.”

Evvy shuddered. She did not want to think about gods shaped like spiders. Slowly she knelt and touched her forehead to the cave floor. “I am very, very sorry, Diban Kangmo,” she told the giant spider. “I guess I am still upset by what has happened to me. Please thank your daughter for healing my feet.” This she meant with all of her heart. “I would have died, probably. And thank you for feeding me. I swear you won’t regret it.”

She peeked at the spider. Diban Kangmo took two steps forward — her feet made clicking sounds on the stone. Slowly she uncurled the leg with which she held what Evvy saw were several cooking pots. She carefully set them on the ground. Then she stepped back a couple of yards.

Evvy looked at the pots. She wasn’t quite sure what to say, or do. “Where did she find them?” she whispered to Luvo.

For a moment Luvo said nothing. Then he told Evvy, “There is a place on the Ice Naga — what you call the Snow Serpent River — to the west, like the … fort … that fell down, only with more — You do not like it when I call your people meat creatures. What do you call them?”

“Humans,” Evvy said. “Or people.”

“People can be anyone,” Luvo argued. “Diban Kangmo and her kin are people, as are the ice lions, the cave snakes, the nagas, the deep runners, we mountains. Humans are those meat creatures on two legs?”

Evvy nodded.

“The place like a fort where many humans are gathered just now. It is a place that reaches for the sky in spirit, and the humans who live there all of the time make pretty noises with long tubes and metal plates.”

“It’s a temple, maybe,” Evvy said. “I heard Parahan say that the first stop on the Snow Serpent Road was the Temple of the Thunder Horses.”

“That is where she found your food.”

“Did the humans there see her?” Evvy asked, wondering if she was the only one to scream at the sight of the giant peak spider.

Luvo sounded amused. “No one sees the spirit people of this realm if those people do not desire it. They prefer quiet lives. Stop asking questions, Evumeimei!”

Gingerly, keeping an eye on Diban Kangmo, Evvy crawled over to the pots. All of them were cold. She did not care. She started with tea, gulping it down. It soothed her dry and raw throat. She then turned her attention to the food, scooping up the barley-flour balls called tsampa and stuffing them into her mouth. These had butter and milk curds. Normally she would have spat such things out. Today they tasted better than anything she had eaten in her life, even her beloved fried eggplant. Another pot contained spicy rice curry with lamb. She alternated handfuls of that with the tsampa until she could eat no more. Only when she couldn’t even look in the other pots to see what was there because she was so full did she lurch to her feet and go to the great stretch of water near her resting place.

“I’m dirty,” she told Luvo. “I’m going to wash.” Since she was fairly sure he wouldn’t know what dirty was, she explained, “I’m all over blood and piss and dung and sweat. I don’t normally smell like this.” She fumbled with her clothes, peeling them off layer by layer. It didn’t occur to her to be shy. A talking rock and a giant spider were hardly the sorts to make her nervous about baring her skin. “I wish I had clean things.” It was hard to tell in the green light from the glowing spots everywhere, but she was nearly certain there was blood on some of her clothes. That made sense, given that she had taken the garments from the dead.

The water was very cold. After all of the cold-water baths we took as we traveled, I should be used to this, she thought gloomily, but I’m not.

The memory of her cats, seated to watch on countless stream banks as she and Rosethorn yelped in cold waters, struck her like a knife stab. She sat on the bottom of the cave lake and silently let her tears flow.

At last she began to drag her fingers through her knotted hair. Once it was straight again and fairly clean, she lurched up onto dry land.

Her dirty clothes were gone. Beside her mossy bed lay a pile of fabric in various green-tinted colors.

“There is an enclosed place,” Luvo said as she approached. “It is like the ‘temple’ place for the Thunder Horses, but it is for my mountain and those of my brother and sister. Your humans come to it and leave things for the humans that sing there and light lamps and bow up and down as you do, only more. They use fire to make smoke that smells interesting, too.”

Evvy gave him a tight smile. “The humans here worship your mountain and the other two as gods. They think you three are the husbands of the Sun Queen.”

“Ridiculous!” Luvo said. “The sun is not even part of this world!”

Evvy knelt clumsily and sorted through the pile. Soon she wore multiple layers of gaudy silk robes lined with fur. Somehow Luvo had also brought away several pairs of breeches that fit once she had rolled them up, and two pairs of fur-lined boots. She could wear one pair. Once she was clothed, she drank some more tea and fell asleep again.

The western army, made up of over five hundred tribesmen, priests and priestesses, and shamans, mounted on small, tough horses or driving carts, arrived around noon as Briar was brewing medicines in a temple workshop. One of the children brought word of the new arrivals, but Briar was busy keeping the greatest strength of his potions from cooking off. Once, when he took a rest, he walked up onto the wall to a view of many tents and soldiers inside and outside the temple. The sight alone made him cross. He wondered if he could ask his new friend the orange stone tiger if it would let him sleep there again that night.

The village child returned later to let Briar and the other healers know that a messenger had arrived from the east. Briar was not interested. He could not feel Rosethorn’s approach. With Evvy’s death, he doubted the east held any good news for him.

Jimut brought Souda’s dinner invitation to him. Though he was done for the day, Briar refused it. He meant to beg food from a cook and go somewhere private to eat. But Souda marched into the workshop as he finished his cleanup and seized him by the arm.

“No more hiding,” she said firmly. “You will eat with us, without arguments.” She did not release him until they were inside the tent that she and Parahan seemed to use as an audience chamber. Guards had set dishes on the carpet. Cushions were strewn all around them. Parahan was there already, scooping something into his mouth with a piece of flatbread.

“You couldn’t wait?” Souda demanded.

He swallowed and said, “Briar, sit. Don’t hide, will you? I’m missing her, too. I know you knew her longer, but you know I wouldn’t be here without her.” His smile trembled. “She was too young to consider all the consequences, as you and I would have done.”

Briar nodded. He took a cushion next to the big man and picked up a plate. He spooned curry onto it, then looked at it blankly, having lost track of what he’d meant to do with it.

Souda took the plate and loaded meat, flatbread, and dumplings onto it beside the curry. “Eat!” she ordered. “We have work to do!” She sat cross-legged on a cushion of her own and served herself. “While the westerners were getting settled, another messenger from Sayrugo arrived,” she told Briar. “She wants us to meet her at Melonam. It’s northeast of here, on the road to Garmashing. Her soldiers moved as many people to the eastern temple fortresses as they could before they ran into more imperial troops than they could handle.”

“They tried to fall back to Fort Sambachu,” Parahan said abruptly. “Well, they did fall back. Except the fort isn’t there.”

Briar stared at him. “What do you mean, the fort isn’t there? It didn’t just get up and walk away.”

“The general’s letter says that maybe there was an earthquake,” Souda explained. “Only she doesn’t know how they didn’t feel a quake that was strong enough to make the entire fort collapse in on itself.”

“Could Evvy have done that? If she was dying?” Parahan whispered.

Briar shook his head. “That place was big! We pulled down parts of a house, her and me, but nothing that size.”

“I wish she had done it!” Parahan shouted. Two soldiers stuck their heads inside the tent flap. Souda waved them out again. “I wish she’d pulled it down on those murderers!” her twin snapped, his voice softer this time.

Briar hooked a hand around one of Parahan’s shoulders for comfort. “We’ll come up with some surprises for their friends, you’ll see,” he promised. When Parahan looked at him, Briar gave his friend a small, nasty smile. “We’ll make Weishu regret he ever heard of any of us.”

Parahan wrapped his hand around Briar’s. “Yes. Yes, I think that sounds like a most magnificent idea.”

“Briar, can you sense Rosethorn yet?” Souda asked.

He shook his head. “But if we take the road north from here, it’ll be easy enough to feel for her. I’ll let the plants know where I’m going. She can follow our trail.”

Evvy woke to find Luvo in the same place he had been when she had gone to sleep. The giant spider was gone. She was relieved, though Diban Kangmo had been nothing but kind to her. Still, being watched by all those eyes was nothing short of unnerving.

There was food remaining in the pots that Diban Kangmo had brought. Evvy ate a good amount of what was left. Would the spider steal more? Surely the temple inhabitants would start to wonder where their food was going. Also, the temples were supposed to be housing refugees. Was Diban Kangmo stealing food that should go to them?

She emptied the teapot and realized she had another issue that had to be addressed.

“I, um, need a privy,” she told Luvo. Then she had to explain what privies were for, and why she couldn’t just go where she stood, like the animals of his mountain. Once all of that was said, he showed her a cranny in the wall of the cave where the flooring was more sand than rock. Afterward she bathed again. Binding her hair in a scarf from his pile of offerings, she steeled herself and said, “Luvo, I can’t stay here. I have to find my friends. Sooner or later they’ll learn the enemy took the fort. They’ll think I’m dead, or that I got tortured and told where everyone is. I have to find them.”

Luvo rocked back and forth on the rounded pegs that served as feet when he wanted them. “Do you know where they are?”

“I know which way they went,” she said honestly. “The places they were going to stop at, the people there should be able to tell me where my friends went afterward.”

“How will you go?”

“I’ll walk, I suppose.” She tested the sole of one foot on the stone. They were still tender, but she had the boots, and the longer she waited, the farther away her friends would be. “I’ll steal a horse or mule if I get the chance.” It would have to be in an open field around the temples where they were grazing, and she would have to pray that the herders didn’t have any dogs.

Luvo hummed to himself. “I could find your friends.”

“How? They don’t have stone magic like me.”

“You said that the fire around your stone self is magic that lets you draw on it. I did not know of this reason for the fire in some meat creatures — humans — before. Now that I know it, I can tell which fires I see on the plain are simply magic and which are wrapped around part of the world. I can see the magic around your plant people if we are close to them. I think it is best that I go with you. Are you able to carry me?”

Evvy walked over to him. Excusing herself, she bent, wrapped her hands around him, and lifted. She heard her spine crackle, but Luvo did not move. “You’re so heavy!”

“Forgive me. I am a mountain outside this heart aspect.” He grew warm under her palms, though not hot. “Try again.”

Evvy tugged. She lifted him an inch, no more.

He warmed a second time. “Try.”

She was able to hoist him into her arms that time, but she staggered when she tried to move a few steps. “I’m sorry!” she said, placing him on her bed. “I’m more worn-out than I realized. All of my packs weigh as much as you, but …” She turned away so he wouldn’t see her mouth quiver.

“That is the lightest I can make myself. I shall think of something.” He climbed off her bed. “Rest. I will reflect on this and resolve it.” He watched as Evvy curled up on the rags. “You cannot understand what a joy my moments of speech with you are. Each one presents me with a new idea or a new problem, when I have seen nothing new in ages. I have not felt so alive in millennia, Evumeimei.”

“Huh!” she said, disbelieving. “I’m not the interesting one. That’s Briar, and Rosethorn, and Parahan. They’ve done all these things, and they know languages, and books, and different people. I just know stones. Not even all of those.” She yawned.

“Then I look forward to our meeting with your friends. Truly, Evumeimei, do not value yourself so little. You are a bright light in my underground home.”

“Thanks, Luvo. That’s a really nice thing to say.” She pulled some rags over herself and slept before her new friend even walked away.

She dreamed she could hear Diban Kangmo talk with him.

She will be dead before you know it, the peak spider advised from a position high on one of the cave’s stalactites. It is folly to become attached to her.

I think it has been folly for me to keep myself separate from them, if they can produce young like this one, Luvo replied. Will you guard her for me until I return? I worry about the cave snakes.

She needs more food, the spider said as Luvo waddled into the dark. Get some for her. Make one of my children carry it.

When Evvy woke, she smelled cooking. She also smelled musk and dung, and heard the restless shift of hooves on stone. She opened her eyes and saw a large yak drinking from the lake. Luvo sat near her bed, next to a smaller peak spider — only three feet tall — and two covered pots.

“This is Diban Kangmo’s daughter,” Luvo explained as the smaller spider scurried off into the far end of the cave. “She is very shy of humans. She is the one who bandaged your feet.”

“Thank you so much!” Evvy called after her.

“She also brought food for you and a bag for me to ride in.”

“Ride? Ride what?”

“Big Milk,” Luvo said. “She is the queen yak. It is a great honor to you that she chose to do this for us, and our luck that she has no young to prevent her from helping. We cannot ask a male. They are too restless.”

Evvy thought she was going to cry. Big Milk had turned her head to stare at them with one eye. Or rather, she stared at Evvy.

Finally the girl thought of something safe to say, other than that the rock had lost his mind. “Luvo, she doesn’t have a saddle or bridle.”

She had to explain what those things were between bites of onion-and-mushroom dumpling. When she finished her description, Luvo said, “I could not ask one of my friends to take metal in her mouth and bind her head in leather. She might become ill. Poor thanks that would be! Besides, I have never seen anyone ride a yak in such a way. You will tie the bag around your waist and shoulders, and hold on to Big Milk’s fur. She has plenty of that. She will not even feel it if you pull. Her undercoat is quite thick and packed firmly beneath the outer fur.”

“But how will she know which way we’re going?” Evvy asked. “The reins are so you can pull right, and the horse goes right, and so forth.”

“I will tell her which way to go,” Luvo said confidently.

“Where will I sit?” Evvy didn’t say that the animal’s back looked as broad as if she could lay down on it and sleep without rolling off.

“The herd boys ride on the necks of the tame yaks. You have trusted me so far, Evumeimei.”

“I didn’t have a choice.”

“Do you have one now?”

Evvy looked at Big Milk, who swiped a thick tongue around furry jaws. The girl sighed. “Not really.”

Evvy hated to do it, but she used one of Luvo’s silk offering scarves to wrap up the leftover dumplings. The cloth was made of brightly dyed patches, and now it would have grease stains. No doubt it would also stain the crimson shirt she wore, since she was hanging that small bundle on her chest. Once she was ready, she lowered Luvo into the bag he had brought. It was a picking bag, big enough that she could slide one strap over her shoulders and under her arms. She wrapped the coarse upper strap in a scarf so it would not chafe her neck, and wore the upper strap there.

Luvo must have said something to the yak. She ambled over and knelt on her forelegs. Impulsively Evvy scratched Big Milk between her curved horns as she would a cow. She felt a bit better when the yak turned her head and rubbed it against Evvy’s belly.

“I think we’re going to get along,” the girl said. “Now, be patient with me, all right? I’ve never ridden anybody as wonderful as you before.”

“She likes the compliment,” Luvo told Evvy. “Swing your leg over, carefully!”

With a bit of experimenting and a little struggle, Evvy managed to get herself and Luvo onto Big Milk’s back. Then she gave the great yak another forehead scratch and settled her grip into the fur on the animal’s neck. “Now what?” she asked.

Slowly Big Milk straightened one foreleg, then the other. Evvy squeaked, then bit her lower lip to keep from doing so again. She yelped. Her lip was one of the injuries from the fort that was not completely healed.

Big Milk ignored both noises. She set off briskly along the shore of the lake, headed deeper into the cave.