PART ONE: GILMAN'S COT

Speak to me, fair maid!
Speak and do not go!
What sorrows have your eyes inlaid
       With such black  woe? 

My dam is buried deep
Dark are my father's halls
And carrion fowl and wolves now keep
      Their ruined walls 

FOR almost as long as she could remember, Maerad had been imprisoned behind walls.  She was a slave in Gilman's Cot, and hers was the barest of existences: an endless cycle of drudgery and exhaustion and dull fear. 

Gilman's Cot was a small mountain hamlet beyond the borders of the wide lands of the Inner Kingdom of Annar.  It nestled at the nape of a bleak valley on the East side of the mountains of Annova, where the range split briefly and ran out, like two claws, from near the Northern end.  Its virtue, as far as the Thane Gilman was concerned, was its isolation: here he could be tyrant of his domain, with nothing to check him. 

It was a well-defended fortress, though no one came to attack.  At the cot's back was the stone cliff of the Outwall, the precipice cutting sheer some thousand feet from the Landrost, the highest peak in that part of the range.  Around the cot were walls of roughly dressed stone, rising to a height of thirty feet from a base twenty feet wide.  They tapered to four feet at the top, enough room for two men to walk abreast.  At the front were stout wooden gates which eight men or a wagon could enter with ease.  The gates were barred at night and most days, except for hunts and when the hillmen came in their big wagons to trade goods, salted meat and cheeses and dried apples for swords and arrows and buckets and nails. 

About a hundred and fifty souls lived there: the Thane Gilman and his wife, beaten to a shadow after bearing him twelve children, of which five still lived, and his henchmen and their women and bastards.  The rest were slaves like Maerad, captured in raids in Gilman's youth, or bargained for at the gate, or simply born there.  They lived in dormitories, long huts at the side of the cots, under the shadows of the walls. 

The buildings were ancient, older even than Gilman guessed, the walls raised in forgotten times by grim Northern men to keep out wolves, and worse.  Under Gilman, the walls were mostly used to keep people in.  The small enclosed meadows were tilled and harvested by slave labour, his tables and cloths and cheeses and sour drinks were all made by slaves, and Gilman wanted none running away.  His many guards served to reinforce his tyranny, and, not inconsequentially, gratified his own opinion of his authority.  Like many who ruled far vaster territories, Gilman was not above the pettiness of vanity.

If anyone did escape, there was nowhere to run to; their most likely fate was to be hunted down by untamed beasts in the forests that stretched below the mountains.  And even to this isolated cot came rumours of stirrings in the outside world: whispers of unnamed shadows which haunted the forest deeps, or of forgotten evils which now woke and walked in the daylit world.  Grim though Gilman's Cot was, these vague stories of horror worked as well as any wall, gainsaying any attempt to leave. 

Maerad was still too young to have given up hope of escape, although as she approached adulthood, and began better to understand her own limitations, she understood it to be a childish dream.  Freedom was a fantasy she gnawed obsessively in her few moments of leisure, like an old bone with just a trace of meat; and like all illusions, it left her hungrier than before, only more keenly aware of how her soul starved within her, its wings wasting with the despair of disuse.
 
 
 
 

The Springturn began like every other day of Maerad's life, with the iron clang of the dawn bell wrenching her from sleep.  It dumped her on the rim of consciousness, sore and heavy and blind, and her dreams sank into the darkness of her mind, as if they had never been.

Yawning, she staggered out of the slaves' quarters to the courtyard well, her skin wincing at the icy air.  She hunched her cloak around her shoulders, and, scarcely glancing at the dim shapes of the buildings around her, pumped some water and splashed it over her head.  Gasping, she shook the water off her heavy hair, and her breath plumed in white swirls out of her nostrils and through her chattering teeth.  Her limbs still felt like lead, her face was numb as a brick, but at least she was awake.

She was drying herself with her cloak when she heard a heavy step behind her.  Maerad turned quick as a wild dog, her hackles bristling:  but it was only Lothar, the huge, doltish man in charge of the buttery. 

"Late night?" asked Lothar, sniggering. 

Maerad turned contemptuously back to the well. 

"You could hear the lords until cockcrow," he said.  "And who took you last night?"

"Shut your muddy mouth, peabrain," she said shortly.  "Or I'll put the evil eye on you."  She turned to face him, glaring, and began to raise her arms.  Lothar went pale and crossed his hands before his eyes.  "Ward! Ward!" he cried.  "I meant no harm, Maerad."

"Then keep your mouth from evil gossip," she hissed.  "Get!  Go!" 

Lothar scuttled off, and Maerad permitted herself a grim smile before she savoured a precious minute to herself.  The cot was only just stirring; it was before cockcrow, and there were a still a few moments to the summons bell.  Most of the slaves huddled greedily into their little patches of sleep-warmth, reluctant to leave until the very last second. 

Maerad leaned back and breathed in hard, gazing up at the distant stars, tiny points of frosty fire high over the mountains.  She searched as she always did for the dawn star Ilion, burning brightly over the Eastern horizon, and sniffed a new freshness in the early air. It's the beginning of spring, she thought.  Despite her tiredness, her spirits lifted.  Then she looked down at her callused hands and sighed.  But not for me; I'm already withering.  What will become of me? 

She stared at the miserable dwellings around her with a dull hatred.  Apart from the Thane's quarters and the Great Hall, which were better maintained than most, the cot consisted of dirt-floored stone hovels, roofed with rotting wooden shingles.  Many were crumbling under their age and had been badly patched with clay and straw poultices, giving them an odd, diseased appearance. They stank of rotting middens and human filth and despair.  From inside the dormitory Maerad could hear the high, thin cry of a sick child, and someone else shouting angrily, and then the dry sob of a woman.  What will become of me? she asked herself again, uselessly; and then the clang of the summons bell broke into her thoughts and she shook herself and tramped to the commonroom for her meagre breakfast of thin grey porridge, and to be assigned her tasks for the day.

That morning Maerad was sent to the milchyard, Lothar's section.  She grimaced at her bad luck.  She would have to deal with him all day after she had slighted him, and today she was especially tired.  Last night had been one of the Thane Gilman's riots, a special gathering to mark the first spring hunt, and his men had come back hungry, wild haired, spattered with blood, quarrelsome, shouting for beer and voka and roast meats and music.  For Gilman it was one of the high points of the year, and the work of all the slaves was doubled for the day.  Maerad had worked an extra shift in the kitchen, turning and basting the deer carcasses on the iron spits.  Then, because she was the only musician in the cot, she had sat in the Great Hall all night playing the ballads she found so tedious: tales of the slaughter of deer and the valour of men and dogs; and later, drinking songs, and the bawdies, which Maerad hated most of all. 

The Great Hall was a grand name for what was really a large barn roughly crossbeamed, with a blackened hole in the roof to let out the smoke from the great fire that always burned in the middle of the floor.  Maerad sat with her lyre in a corner, blank-faced to hide her contempt, while twenty men seated at a long, roughly hewn wooden table set against the wall tore meat from bones with their bare hands and drank themselves insensible on the voka, a harsh, eye-stinging spirit distilled from turnips and swedes.  They hadn't bothered to wash, and their acrid smell and the woodsmoke made her eyes water.  No one tried to paw her, to her infinite relief; but even so, the hot red eyes of the men made her feel filthy.  As the night wore on the hall grew hotter and stuffier, and Maerad felt dizzy with the reek and her tiredness.  She played badly, something she seldom did even in such circumstances, but nobody noticed.

 The riot finished shortly before dawn, when the last drunken thug crashed face down on the long table and snored among the rest, who lay dribbling on their hands or fallen in their own vomit.  Then at last, trembling with weariness, Maerad picked up her lyre and left the hall, stumbling between sleeping dogs, tossed bones and filth, spilt voka and snoring bodies to the sweet air outside.  She stank, but she was so exhausted she had simply made her way to the women slave quarters and slipped onto her meagre straw pallet for a bare hour of sleep. 
 
 
 
 
 

In the cowbyre she leant her forehead into the warm flanks of a dark-eyed cow, who stood patiently chewing cud as she kneaded her full udder.  The milk splashed rhythmically into the pail.  Maerad was on the brink of sleep when suddenly the cow almost kicked her and then tried to rear.  Maerad started awake, rescuing the pail - spilt milk was not worth a beating - and tried to calm the animal.  Normally a word would do, but the creature kept snorting and stamping, pulling the chains that held her hind leg and head as if she was distressed or frightened. 

Maerad's hair prickled on the back of her neck.  She had a strange, taut feeling, as if there was about to be a storm and the air was crackling with electricity.  She looked around the byre.

A man stood there, not ten feet away, a man she had never seen before.  For a moment shock stopped her breath. The man was tall, and his stern face was shadowed by a dark, roughly woven woollen hood.  In the dim light from the doorway, she could see the outline of an aquiline nose and a glitter of eyes.  She stood up and reached for a rushlight, uncertain whether to shout for help.

"Who are you?" she said sharply. 

The man was silent. 

She began to feel afraid.  "Who are you?" she asked again.  Was it a Wer out of the mountains?  A ghost?  "Avaunt, black spirit!"

"Nay," he said at last.  "Nay, I am no black spirit.  No Wer in a man's skin.  No.  Forgive me."  He sighed heavily.  "I am tired, and I am wounded.  I am not quite - myself."

He smiled, but it was more like a wince, and as the rushlight fell past his hood and illuminated his features, Maerad saw that he was grey with exhaustion.  His face was arresting: it seemed neither young nor old, the countenance of a man of perhaps about thirty five years, but somehow with the authority of age.  He was high cheekboned, with a firm mouth and large, deepset eyes.  He held her gaze.  "And who are you, young witchmaiden?  It takes sharp eyes to see the likes of me, although perhaps my art fails me.  Name yourself."

"Who are you, to ask me?" said Maerad pugnaciously.  It occurred to her, with a pang of surprise, that she didn't feel afraid; although, she thought in that split second, she ought to be.

The man looked hard at her, searching her face.  He staggered slightly, and corrected himself, and then smiled again, as if in apology.

"I am Cadvan, of the School of Lirigon," he said.  "Now, mistress, how do they name you?"

"Maerad," she said, almost whispering.  She felt suddenly at a complete loss, confused by his politeness. 

"Maerad of the Mountains?" the stranger said, with a wry smile. 

"Of... of Gilman's fastness," she said haltingly.  And then with a rush - "I'm a slave here..."

"A slave?"

Steps sounded outside and Lothar's bulk darkened the door.  "Where's that milk?  What are you doing there, have you lost your wits?  Are you looking for the whip?  If the butter doesn't turn, we'll know who to blame..."

He was not pleased with her, after her rebuff that morning.  But again Maerad caught her breath in shock.  Although the stranger stood plain in his sight, Lothar seemed to look right through him.

"I'm - I'm sorry," she stammered.  "The cattle are restless..."

She sat on her stool and leaned forward to the cow again, who now stood patiently.  Lothar watched her while she milked.  She willed him to go away.  After a short time, she heard his steps leaving and she relaxed a little.  She kept milking, because she needed time to gather her thoughts.  The stranger still stood there, watching her.

"Maerad," said the stranger quietly.  "I wish you no harm.  I am tired, and I need to sleep.  That's why I'm here."  He passed his hand over his brow, and then leaned against the wall of the byre.

"He didn't see you," she said blankly, still milking steadily to cover her amazement. 

"No, it is a small thing..." he said, almost abstractedly.  "A mere glimmerspell.  What is interesting is that - you saw me."  He stared at her again, with that searching, disturbing gaze.  Maerad felt suddenly shy before him, as if she were naked, and turned her face aside.  She felt his eyes upon her, and then a kind of release as he looked away.  Involuntarily she shook herself.  She heard him shift and sit down.

"I wish I were not so tired," he said at last, and then asked:  "You were not always a slave?"

"My mother wasn't a slave," Maerad answered, speaking reluctantly, as if against her will.  "Gilman bought her and kept her here, when I was very little.  I think he wanted to ransom her, but none came to ransom."  She paused, and added flatly:  "And then she died."  She coiled around to face him, with a flash of anger.  "What business is it of yours?" she demanded.  "Who are you to ask me?"

The stranger seemed unperturbed, meeting her gaze calmly.

"What was your mother's name?"

"Milana.  Milana of Pellinor, Singer of the Gift, Daughter of the First Circle.  My father..."  She stopped milking, and her hands flew to her mouth in astonishment.  "Oh!"

"Oh, indeed," said Cadvan. 

"I mean, my mother was called Milana, that's all I remember..."  Maerad trailed off in confusion.  "She... she died when I was seven years old... I don't know anything about... about the rest.  Did you make me say that?"

"Make?  No, I can't make you say anything.  I asked, and the doors of your mind flew open.  There is more in that treasury than most people realise.  The School of Pellinor," he said, as if to himself.  "That was sacked, oh, years ago.  It was thought all were killed."  He fell silent, and Maerad, shaken, continued milking.  What was this man talking about?  Was he mazing her, as wild spirits were said to do, bewildering her senses before snaring her?  But he did not feel evil.

"By what right do you come in here and say... and say such things... I could call the Thane's men -"  She stuttered to a halt.  Somehow she knew she wouldn't call the guards. 

The stranger put his face in his hands and didn't answer her.  Maerad glanced at him angrily.  She finished milking the cow and turned her loose, bringing in the next one.  Cadvan was still sitting, unmoving, in the same position.

"You can't stay here, if you are of Pellinor," he said at last. 

Maerad looked across at the stranger with a sudden wild hope.  Did he mean that he knew some way to free her?  But no one could escape from the cot... 

He looked up at her.  "Could you - perhaps - spare some milk?"

Wordlessly she offered him the milk pail.  After a long draught, he wiped his mouth and smiled.  "A blessing on you, and on your house," he said.  Maerad nodded impatiently, brushing off the courtesy.  "Will you have to come to the byre again?" he asked.  "Today, I mean."

She examined his face suspiciously.  "Yes, I am sectioned here today," she said at last.  "I'll be milking again in the evening.  Why?"

 "Good."  He stretched and yawned.  "I'll sleep now.  We'll talk later, yes, when I am less tired."

He cast himself down on the hay and was asleep almost instantly.  Maerad looked down at him, considering whether to kick him awake and make him answer her questions, or whether to call the guards after all.  But for reasons she couldn't trace, she did neither.  Instead, she finished the milking and left him there.  She was beaten for the missing milk.
 
 
 
 

That day Maerad was so absentminded she was lucky to escape a second beating.  At her tasks in the milchyard, churning butter or setting the milk in bowls for soured drinks, she scarcely saw what she was doing.  At first she didn't know what she felt about the man in the byre.  Her mind, practised at the evasions of survival, skipped over the thought of him; he was, in a way, unthinkable.  But every now and then an image of his dark face rose unbidden in her mind, and with it an unsettling feeling she couldn't name: a skin-prickling premonition, not exactly unpleasant, but not quite comfortable either.  If she had been a child used to name-day celebrations, she might have likened it to the feeling of anticipating a gift; but she knew no such celebrations.  At the same time, the blank, impassive mask under which she survived, secret even to herself, seemed to have disappeared, leaving her exposed and a little frightened.  It was as if the stranger had opened a door long shut in her mind, and a cold fresh wind blew in, waking her from a stupor.  Who am I? she wondered: and the question hurt. 

She was used to her own strangeness.  It had often been a protection as much as a curse.  Because of her blue eyes and black hair, the fairhaired Northerners called her a witch, and she had played the part from an early age, making a virtue of what set her apart.  And Maerad did possess the power of cursing:  if she glared at someone, they might trip over and fall for no reason, or a beaker might fall from a shelf and break on their heads, and once she had blinded a man for three days.  She was also especially good with animals, another sign of a witch; those she tended grew fat and yielded twice the milk of the others.  Most of the slaves feared and avoided her, and Gilman's men... well, the Thane's men had also learnt to leave her alone.

Gilman was deeply superstitious and, like all bullies, a devout coward.  He believed that if Maerad were murdered her ghost would drive him to a grisly death  - madden him until he ran out into the wolfhunt, perhaps, or skewer him slowly with invisible knives of fire.  So Maerad escaped the worst details, which caused comment and petty malice among many of her fellow slaves.  Recently this resentment had flared into open violence: a month ago six women had attacked her and tried to drown her in the duckpond.  They had almost succeeded, but Gilman had rushed out of the hall, redfaced with panic, and hauled her out of the water.  Though Maerad was cuffed for the trouble she had caused, the slaves who tormented her were whipped and given no food for three days.  Saved by Gilman!  She grinned humourlessly at the irony.  It had stopped the persecution, for the moment; but now no one spoke to her at all, apart from idiots like Lothar.

If it hadn't been for her music she might have killed herself, or let the demons in her head taunt her into madness.  Or she might have just turned into stone and become like the rest of them, brutalised of all feeling.  Her lyre was her one possession, the only thing she still had of her mother.  It was small, fitting into the crook of her arms like a baby, a bare wooden instrument with no decoration except some indecipherable carvings:  but its tone was pure and true.  One of her earliest memories was of her mother playing it, plucking the strings and singing to Maerad - she guessed she must have been very young, because then her mother had not been sad. 

Maerad could play like a true minstrel; her ear was accurate, and she only had to hear a tune once to repeat it.  Mirlad, Gilman's Bard, discovered her talent after her mother died.  She was only seven years old then, and he somehow persuaded Gilman to relieve her from morning duties so he could teach her.  Mirlad, gruff, taciturn, sometimes cruelly harsh, had been her teacher until she turned thirteen: then Gilman demanded her labour in the fields again.  Maerad remembered her misery at that decision, and Mirlad's odd response.  "I've taught you everything I know about music," he had said, shrugging indifferently.  "Anything else would be a waste here.  You can play in the evenings, anyway." 

Her musicianship compounded her isolation, but it was another reason Gilman tolerated her: Mirlad had died some two years before, although perhaps only Maerad mourned his passing, and she was now the only person in the cot with the skill to play at his riots.  She played for herself, privately, whenever she could, and those snatched moments were the only consolation of her degraded life. 

Milana.  My mother. How long since I thought of you?  You braided my hair each night, even if your hands shook with tiredness, and you played me pretty tunes when I felt sad or when someone beat me, and kissed me, just there, on my forehead...  Maerad's mind flinched from the memory of her mother's death, how she had sickened, wasted by fever and pain and grief.  She had died, that was all, and after that Maerad was alone.

For as long as she could remember, Maerad had dreamed of escaping Gilman's Cot.  But year after year passed and brought only the knowledge that escape was impossible.  Hope had ebbed little by little, until, had Maerad known it, she wore the same sad beauty that she remembered of her mother.  Now, this Cadvan  - she said the name to herself, privately - had appeared out of nowhere, as if walls and guards and dogs did not exist. 

As the day wore on she turned over the morning's conversation with an increasing impatience.  Sometimes she convinced herself that she had dreamed the stranger, that he was an illusion of her exhaustion, a shadowy projection of the longing that burned inside her.  She had thought hope was dead inside her; but now she realised that it merely slumbered, like ash-grey embers which held yet a glowing heart, which the merest breath might fan into flame.
 
 
 
 

The hours dragged, but at last it was evening.  Just before she went to the byre, prompted by a sudden impulse, Maerad slipped back to her quarters and took her lyre from where she kept it under her pallet, wrapped in sacking. 

Cadvan was still there, lying on his back in the byre, his hands folded behind his head, apparently studying the ceiling.  He was not so grey-faced now, although there were still dark circles under his eyes, and he smiled at Maerad when she entered.  She looked back at him expressionlessly, waiting for him to speak.  He sighed and stood up.

"Well, Maerad, I've had a little time to think," he said.  "This is a foul noisome place, although to be fair the animals are well treated - better than the people here.  That is unjust enough."  He paused.  "Do you wish to leave?"

Maerad almost laughed.  The cot was guarded day and night, and the guards were vigilant.  Some slaves had, indeed, tried to escape, but all her life Maerad had heard of none who succeeded, although she had seen many savage beatings and, once, a man torn to pieces by Gilman's hounds.  It was enough to gainsay the attempt. 

"Leave this place?" 

"Seriously, Maerad."

"I've dreamed of nothing else these long years," she said.  "It's impossible.  Why do you think I'm still here?"

"So you do wish to leave?"  Cadvan paused and looked down at the ground.  "I guess it would be surprising if you did not.  I am in a little dilemma, then, as to what to do.  It would be most unwise of me to take you with me.  I am flying from danger into danger, and the world ever darkens; and I do not have my full strength."

Maerad's heart dropped with disappointment; she hadn't realised, despite her frank scepticism, the resilience of her hope.  But Cadvan continued.

"But neither could I leave you here, if you are indeed Milana's daughter, and you indeed wish to leave.  Perhaps I could come back, when I was stronger; but I have duties I can't abandon, and I would not be free of them for months.  And my heart tells me..."  He fell silent again, looking at the ground, as if he were weighing a difficult decision.

"I must leave now.  If you want to come with me, you may.  Leaving will be a simple matter.  Other things will not be so simple, but we will have to take them as they come."

Maerad was suddenly breathless, and could make no reply. 

"Yes?" the stranger said.  "Or no?"

"Why are you asking me this?" she said.  "It's impossible!  Are you tricking me?"

Cadvan merely looked at her, without answering.  She stared back at him stubbornly, refusing to lower her eyes.

"There come few times in a person's life where there is a clear choice," said Cadvan at last.  "The difference between one person and another is how they meet that choice."  There was a short silence, and then he gestured impatiently.  "I have no time.  I have made my offer.  You can stay or leave as you wish.  I am asking what you want.  If you don't know, it is no concern of mine."  He brushed some straw from his cloak, and turned to leave the byre.

A feeling akin to panic surged through Maerad.  For a second she felt as if she were plunged into suffocating mud again: only this time there would be no hand to haul her out onto the bank.

"Wait!" she called out.  "Wait."

Cadvan turned again to face her. 

"I'll come," she said. 

Cadvan looked at her bundled lyre.  "Is there anything you must fetch?"  Maerad shook her head.  "Well, that is good.  We'll go now, then."

"Now? What about the cows?"  And indeed, they were lowing, asking her to relieve them of their burdens of milk. 

"Someone else will milk them tonight," said Cadvan.  "I do not think Gilman will let his beasts suffer; they are too valuable.  Now, quickly.  Come here."

Maerad approached him warily, and he made her stand square in front of him.  He put his hands on her shoulders and spoke.  The words sent a thrill through Maerad, like plunging into cold, fresh water from a spring welling from the morning of the world. 

"Larnea il oseanna, lembel Maerad inasfrea!  Turn the eyes of men from Maerad so she may walk unseen, is roughly what I have said," he explained, dropping his hands.  "Now no man could see you, though you stood a span from his nose.  The virtue will not work on objects, if you drop them.  So keep your bundle close!  Now, we must scale the walls."

He picked up a pack Maerad had not noticed and walked towards the low door.  As he did so, Maerad was assailed by another wave of panic.  Somehow she already felt her decision was irrevocable, yet she didn't know what it was she had decided: why trust this man?  She knew nothing of him.  But her doubts were overwhelmed by a fierce longing, as if all her desires for freedom, crushed by hopelessness for so many years, came back in a single urgent wave.  It can't be worse than here, she thought, because here I'm certain to die, and out there - who knows?  She took a deep breath and followed Cadvan out of the byre.

"We must hurry," he said.  "No speaking.  I cannot make us unheard as well."

They left the byre and made for the South wall.  Maerad found it hard not to flinch in the open squares, where the Thane's men stood lounging against the walls toying with their weapons; it was difficult to believe in her invisibility when she felt so visible to herself. 

Their way led them straight past the Great Hall.  The chained dogs looked up and sniffed in greeting as they passed, but the men looked through them.

She kept close behind Cadvan, tiptoeing despite herself, until they came to the least guarded section of the outer walls.  The wall itself was not hard to climb; Maerad had often considered the logistics.  Impossible, however, under the vigilance of the guards, whose sight covered every inch of the wall and who knew their lives were forfeit if any left.  Cadvan set his foot on the wall, and Maerad helplessly showed him her sacking-wrapped lyre, which she could not sling on her back.  He stopped thoughtfully, took it and stowed it in his bag.  Then they started again.  When they reached the top, Cadvan paused, looking each way for the guards who patrolled the way.  Choosing his time carefully, he took Maerad by the arm and pushed her across the narrow path, and then together they went down the other side. 

As they did, Maerad heard the bell ring, once, twice, thrice, before it began a long urgent peal.  It was the signal for an escape.  She started, feeling horribly exposed.  Lothar must have discovered her absence already, but it was very quick - no doubt he wanted to be revenged for her slight this morning, for she would be whipped for sparking an alarm.  A commotion rose in the cot.  She half scrambled, half fell down the wall, beating Cadvan to the ground.

"Now you make the pace!" he said, laughing.  "I thought I'd never get you out of there!"

"They'll send the dogs after us!" whispered Maerad, panting with fear.  "There's no escaping Gilman's hounds.  They'll track a stag for a week and they can tear a grown man to pieces in a minute!"

"Dogs are easy to deal with," said Cadvan.  "Don't be afraid, Maerad.  If dogs are the worst we have to face, we will be fortunate.  But now we must move on.  See the end of this valley?  I want to be well clear of this before the night is over.  Our doom tonight is, I am afraid, a long walk.  Then we'll rest."

Maerad looked down the valley where she had been imprisoned most of her short life.  The ground swept away before her, a constant steady decline of boulders and mountain rubble covered with sparse scrub and the odd tree bent against the harsh winds that swept down from the mountains, the Osidh Annova, Eastern border of the Inner Kingdom.  A rudimentary track wandered down the centre of the valley, strewn here and there with stones from some landslide. 

She suddenly felt very small and frightened.  She looked at the man who stood at her elbow and swallowed.  His face was dark and closed; the great dogs which figured in her nightmares, with their yelping bays and their long loping gait, were but small trouble to him.  No doubt he knew far worse.  He now seemed remote, charged with some hidden power she only sensed.  She didn't want to seem foolish before such a man.  She squared her shoulders and took a deep breath.

"We'll walk then," she said, turning her face towards the broken path. 

At her back, behind the cot, reared the Landrost, its tip stained red by the setting sun, its massive bulk throwing all the valley into shadow.