A Strange and Stubborn Endurance Sneak Peek by Foz Meadows

Author:Foz Meadows
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

5

That first night, after hours of riding steadily uphill, we camped in the shadow of the Snowjaw Mountains. Though the autumn weather had been pleasant when we set out, it had grown steadily colder the higher we climbed, and would doubtless only grow more so once we entered the Taelic Pass. The clothes I’d brought with me were ill-suited to the drop in temperature, but Markel’s foresight had at least seen me dressed in layers, which was better than nothing. It ought to have been miserable, but I was too tired to care about the thinness of the bedroll Raeki gave me, or to offer complaint at the night wind chilling my neck. After my spat with Keletha, I’d spent the day in silence, ignoring every effort made to draw me into conversation. It was churlish, but at that point, I’d felt entitled to a little pique. Markel, who understood me better than anyone, made no attempts to sign with me, though he did pass me food at intervals, glaring pointedly until I ate. We slept back-to-back, the better to guard against the cold, but though I woke twice from nightmares about Killic, sweating and shaking, Markel never stirred, and when dawn came, I didn’t speak of it.

The days that followed were gruelling in every sense, but thankfully devoid of peril; almost anticlimactically so. The Taelic Pass was a narrow defile, barely wide enough in parts for two wagons to pass abreast, cast in almost perpetual shadow by the dizzying loom of the peaks. Sheer cliffs towered on either side, broken only occasionally by boulders, scree and, even more rarely, the skinny lines of goat-tracks, though the animals themselves kept a wary distance, presumably having learned caution from the long predations of bandits and hungry farmers. Light snow fell from time to time, melting icily where it kissed my skin, and I shivered to think how much worse the crossing would be in a month or so, with the onset of winter.

I took to avoiding Keletha; indeed, I avoided everyone other than Markel, inasmuch as doing so was possible, submitting myself to only as much conversation as felt necessary to improve my Tithenai accent while keeping from being a nuisance. As Markel told it—as planned, he’d been listening in on the Tithenai conversations—there were two competing theories in play to explain my odd behaviour, neither of which was surprising. Indeed, they mirrored Keletha’s first suspicions: either I was still in love with Killic and heartsick at his abandonment, or else I pined for Markel himself. Depending on the speaker, Markel’s nonreciprocation was attributed to his being too simple to have any sexual desires at all, to his being interested only in women, or else to the fact that he was pining for me in turn, the both of us too Ralian to act on our obvious feelings. We both laughed quietly at that last theory, though I noted which riders thought Markel simple—the muleteer Daeri and the tracker Shathan—and ignored them more fully than I did the others.

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