Madbond by Nancy Springer

Author:Nancy Springer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781453248485
Publisher: Open Road Media

Chapter Twelve

Those were the days of joy, as we followed the zigzag folds of the great peaks ever higher and farther—farther inland from the sea. With every dawn Kor’s delight and amazement redoubled. Up on those slopes the blue pines grew tall and straight, so tall that it dizzied us to study the tops of them. Nor were they furred with moss, but grew clean, with not much except a thick covering of tan needles on the ground between them. A wanderer could see and breathe in this forest. Each breath was piercingly chill and sweet.

“The air!” Kor exclaimed some few days after we had left his village. “Different.”

“No salt,” I told him, and he blinked, for he had never been out of the scent-reach of the ocean. But the mountain air seemed Sakeema-blessed even to me. All the freshwater wet, thrusting green smells of spring and snowmelt were in it.

And the mountainside meadows, where the snow still lay under the spruces and the violets grew by the streams and the small yellow lilies bloomed everywhere amid the grass, curling their petals back so avidly that they spread their delicate innards like a sunburst … I felt as besotted with delight as Kor. And the purple bellflowers, their stalks curving and stirring like Calimir’s graceful neck, and the deer grazing in the meadows even at mid of day—I put my bow to use. We did not lack for meat.

Once gone a day or two we traveled easily, not pressing the pace of those afoot, feeling no urgency. I think neither Kor nor I wanted that journey ever to end.

I felt like a child for gladness, being back in my mountains. More than once, turning to gaze around me, I caught Tassida staring at me as he had stared the first time he had seen me, and so great was my happiness that I did not care how much he gawked or what he was thinking. Only after several days did I begin to wonder what ailed him.

At night the stars seemed to cluster like daisies just above the treetops, so clear was the air, and I would lie back and look at them.… But one such night, some days after the start of the journey, when Tassida got up and left our cooking fire to go off by himself for some reason, I got up also and followed.

I was silent—Red Hart born, I was always silent when I walked, though I was not stalking after him, or did not think I was. After we were well away from camp, just as he stopped to make water or whatever he may have been about, I called softly to him, “Tass!” giving him a friend’s name, as we all did, for we all liked him. I liked him even though he stared at me.

He must not have heard me walking after him, for he jumped when I hailed him, badly startled, and crouched for a moment in the fighter’s stance, a black shape in the dim starlit forest, before straightening as I came up to him.

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