Raven Sisters #02 - Circle of the Moon by Barbara Hambly

Author:Barbara Hambly [Hambly, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780446509930
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2009-10-30T23:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-EIGHT

Although darkness was settling over the desert, Foxfire kept the Gray Cloak spell wrapped around her until she reached the broken jumble of immense pale rocks at the foot of the valley wall, about a hundred feet from the compound. Behind the rocks a wadi twisted back into the hills, and this she followed, keeping to the stony track in its center in the hopes of avoiding being trailed or, nearly as bad, being found out. All it would take would be for Red Silk to come out here and find her footprints, to know she’d slipped out over the wall.

In recollection of her grandmother’s tales, she cut a piece of brush from the wadi wall, and dragged it over her tracks. Not, she reflected, that the old lady wouldn’t identify the tracks of a dragged branch on sight.

But her errand really would take only a few minutes. Once out of sight of the old hunting lodge, Foxfire was more than ever oppressed by the deadly silence of the hills. She’d stayed up as long as she could last night, leaning against the thick stone wall of her room and listening through it to the sounds of the hills. She wasn’t really good at reaching out with her senses yet, but at least she’d been able to tell that there weren’t troops of bandits everywhere, as Opal feared. She had heard neither voices nor the clink of horses’ hooves, nor the groaning complaints of camels.

There had been the soft stirring of animal sounds, sounds she couldn’t identify. But if worse came to worst, she thought, she could always frighten animals or wilding teyn away with fire—though to do so would run the risk of betraying her to Red Silk, after which being carried off by bandits would seem a tame fate.

By the same token, she knew she had to retreat a considerable distance into the hills to keep her grandmother from being aware of magic being worked in her immediate vicinity. As she’d climbed over the wall—and sneaking her pale-blue linen dress into the laundry undetected would be another task for later in the night—she’d seen the crude little bundles of dried grass, ashes, and broken glass that hung from the line of spikes there, an old nomad defense against the Bad-Luck Shadow. A reminder, if she’d needed one, of her grandmother’s listening presence.

So Foxfire worked her way up the wadi and over a barren shoulder of red rock and dust turning colorless in the fading light, then along another gulch for some distance before she knelt and filled the pottery dish with water. It didn’t make a good mirror and she was afraid to call more than a tiny seed of light over her shoulder for fear that, even far off, her grandmother would see. The moon was rising over the hills, just past full and golden as fire. As her mind traced over the power lines she’d drawn in the dust, the spells she’d sketched invisibly on the inside of the bowl, she thought, Please be there.

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