Sword-Singer by Jennifer Roberson

Author:Jennifer Roberson
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi

Twenty-one

Our flight ended as abruptly as it had begun. There, suddenly, was Garrod, reining in his gray before it could run smack into a cliff of looming stone. There too was Adara, white-faced, hissing something bitterly in vicious Borderer. And also her son and daughter, drooping on their horses, turning back to look at Del and me hopefully as we stopped our weary mounts.

"Trap-canyon," I said briefly. "All we can do is turn around."

"Turn around! and go back?" Adara stared at me in shock, face half-curtained in tangled hair. "You mean, we've come all this way-"

"We had no choice," Garrod told her, quietly interrupting. "At least it bought us a little time."

"Time," she said bitterly. "Time to die here instead of there?"

I looked at her children. Massou was mostly asleep on his horse, all hunched up and stiff as if he'd locked his joints hours before. His head bobbed a little and eyelids drifted closed, no matter how hard he tried to keep them open. Cipriana wasn't much different, although her lids were more cooperative. Legs hung slackly against her mount, mostly bared by rucked up skirts to show woolen leggings. Blonde hair straggled limply; she shoved it back with effort.

"What do we do?" she asked.

I looked around at the place that now entombed us. We'd made our way through a narrow, winding conduit cutting through plainside cliffs and freeside rocks, all knuckled from wind and water. The ground itself was solid rock with only a thin crusting of dirt, and in some places it was nothing at all but naked stone. After awhile, in darkness, the canyon had blurred into nothingness, defined only by looming walls and a trace of diluted moonlight.

But now dawn replaced the darkness. And in the distance I heard a howl.

The hounds would, I knew, follow very soon. At this very moment they were probably at the edge of the plains, eyeing the earthfall into the narrow canyon. Maybe they were even over the edge already, pouring down in a white-eyed river.

I looked at Del, who sat quietly on one of Garrod's sorrels. "We could go back to the narrowest part of the canyon and block them, you and I. Turn them back. Keep them from getting through."

It was, I knew, only a temporary device; it seemed likely the hounds, with their vastly superior numbers, would eventually kill us both and continue on to catch the others.

Unless, of course, we were the ones they wanted. In which case, maybe they'd leave the others alone.

Del unsheathed her sword. "I have a better idea."

I looked at Boreal. It occurred to me to wonder why Del hadn't used her before now. "Bascha-"

"You saw what happened before." She knew perfectly well what I meant. "You felt what happened before. Loosed like that-uncontrolled, undirected-she can injure the innocent as well as destroy the enemy . . . on the plain I didn't dare."

I glanced around. Dawn was filling the tiny trap-canyon with a weak, pinkish light, divulging countless holes and crevices cut into the walls themselves.

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