She just got her hips through the window, at the cost of a slight scraping sound and a whisper of a creak.
The figure stirred a little.
Wistala took the doll out of its bag and unwrapped it, mindful of the ears at the bottom of the stairs.
Wistala came still closer, feeling her way across rough, dry wood. A washbasin bowl with a little water, a bit glass with a number of dried wildflowers in it, a half-finished woven basket, and a few odd and ends of clothing hanging from some pegs were all the room contained.
A foot with the five ridiculous, almost-useless hominid toes stuck out of the blanket. Wistala gave it an experimental lick.
The figure stirred again.
“Hsssst,” said Wistala, as quietly as she could.
A wide green eye opened.
“Don’t be afraid,” Wistala said in Parl.
The human figure sat bolt upright even as she scooted up against the wall, drawing the covers up with her and bunching them under her eyes. But there was no question, the eyes, forehead, and hair belonged to Rainfall’s granddaughter.
Wistala smiled and bowed. “I bring tidings—”
“Aaaaaaaaagh!” Lada shrieked.
“You don’t—,” Wistala tried, backing away. She held up the doll.
“Heeeeeeelp! Monster! Esithephe, your baby!”
A clunk and a bawling sounded from downstairs. Wistala advanced, tipping the doll right side up and upside down to prove that it was just a bit of craft, but Lada snatched up the waterbasin, and liquid flew.
“Aiiieeee!” the girl—no, young woman, Wistala could see the smallish protrusions wherewith mammals suckled their broods—shouted, throwing the basin. Wistala lowered her head, and it crashed into the pile of pegged and geared wheels, sprinkling her with water as it passed.
Wistala tried again: “No! Your name is—”
A mouthful of pillow cut off that sentence. Lada rammed it home as she fled in a jumble of knees, elbows, and white nightshirt toward the stairs down, still screaming her head off.
The pillow came out of her mouth with a tear, and feathers flew.
Now screams echoed up from the lower levels.
“Lada!” Wistala shouted, spitting feathers.
The girl screamed as she fled down the stairs.
Wistala heard footsteps, shouts from below caught up in a babble of voices and a screaming baby. She considered going after Lada, but a male voice bellowing questions made her turn back to the window.
A heavy tread on the stairs decided her. She squeezed back out the circular window.
Something gripped at her tail, and she pulled it away hard and climbed up the tower.
Up?
She checked herself. She’d instinctively headed toward the safety of the sky. If only she could will her wings into appearing.
She turned around, testing her digits against the rough stones for the climb down. She watched pillow feathers drift, gently turning and rocking as they fell, and realized some of them had stuck in her scales.
A hairy face, pale in the dim moon, looked out the window. The man must have heard her, for he looked up.
She swung her tail down and poked him back inside with its point. He let out a howl.
I must give them an urgency beyond hunting me, if I’m to escape.
She gulped and squeezed her fire bladder, spat a thin jet of flame up into the wooden roof above. She looked across the narrow gap between tower and the south-facing leg of Galahall.
All interior-facing windows were open in the summer air.
She hurried over to the west side of the tower and, clinging rather precariously, extended her neck and spat. Missed—she’d judged the fall of flame badly.
Shouts from the courtyard—she tried again.
This time the flame passed through the window. Orange light glowed within.
She looked into the courtyard. Shirtless, barefoot men were emerging from doors while female faces, holding gowns closed at their throats, peered cautiously from the windows. She caught the gleam of a sword blade and a pike point. A spike-haired boy pointed up the tower—at her or the growing flame, she didn’t know—and screamed a warning.
Wistala saw a faster route down. She moved around to the south side of the tower and jumped to the roof of the east-running building, and from that leaped down the wooden roof of an exposed stable by the entrance. She jumped once more and hit the ground running, with men shouting and giving orders behind and a growing clamor of excited dogs.
“Horses! To horse!” the booming voice she’d heard in the tower bellowed.
Wistala hurried off into the night. Her muscles began to burn as her dragon-dash gave out. The tree-crowned ridge seemed very far away.
Stog had vanished. All that remained of him were some tracks and a little of his feed scattered on the ground.
“Stog!” she called, panting. The run had been a nightmare of breathless rushes from hiding spot to hiding spot, with dogs barking and crying behind when the horsemen weren’t blowing horns at each other. “Stog,” she shouted when she had her wind.
She snuffled around and found the trace of a scent. He’d gone off in the direction of Galahall. Had he seen the flames—the top of the tower still burned like a beacon—and gone off to give assistance? They’d missed each other in the dark, and no wonder: she’d splashed through every ditch she could find to confuse the pursuit. Or had he become frightened at the hunting horns, even now sounding across the wide lands south of Galahall?
Looking for him would be suicide.
She looked up the tall ridge and started up. The slow, steady climb suited her short limbs so much better than the run across the fields. By the time she reached the line of trees, she felt almost herself again. Hunger gnawed at her, but she was nothing like starved. She body-slid down the other side, flying down on chest and tail.
The hunters, if they didn’t give up upon reaching the edge of Galahall’s grounds, would either have to go round either side of the ridge or lead their horses up a very treacherous climb and then down again. By the time daylight came, she’d be deep in the Thickets.
Stog would have to find his own way home.
Will they never give up?
The question hardly left her mind as she made her best speed through the Thickets, a sort of sore-footed trot. Winded, thirsty, hungry, scratched at nostril and earhole, under-limb and tween-toe by the endless thorns, even her left eye had been poked, and it hurt abominably.
She plunged into yet another strand of bramble as she heard the clattering noise of the men behind.
The men signaled each other by rapping pairs of hollow wooden pegs, setting up a clatter that might have been designed to drive her insane, as though the thickets were full of maddened woodpeckers. Her mouth was so dry, nothing but cottony saliva covered her teeth, and all it did was catch dust and dirt kicked up by the horses thundering past her hiding spots.
Her one solace was the thought that she’d probably burned Galahall to the ground. What else could cause the thane to summon every man with a horse and boy who could whack two sticks together to this wild and uncomfortable corner?
Wistala listened and then crept up another dry ravine. The soil in this part of the Thickets kicked up a chalky dust, and even the thorn-vines and succulents looked sickly and undersize. Nothing took root at the hilltops, or anywhere the wind could reach. She stayed just below the empty crest of it—no need to create a silhouette for one of the hundreds of pairs of eyes looking for her to see—and took a bit out of a green segmented plant. Its buds were bitter-tasting but juicy enough to at least give the illusion of moisture.
She could see the twin hills of Mossbell in the distance, green and alluring, but she didn’t dare make for them. Who knew what the thane might do to Rainfall if he thought her host had sent her on purposes of possible assassination or proven arson?
Instead she headed for the river, carefully cresting yet another slope. They wouldn’t—couldn’t get their horses easily into the gorge, and it would be a brave rider who’d swim his horse into the rocks of the fast-flowing river.
The beaters must have spotted her tracks, for the noise level rose and several came together clack-tchick-clack-clack-tok-clack, no rhythm at all, just a crescendo of sound driving her on.
A man negotiated the precarious rim of the finger of land she had to cross. He bore a horn of metal, a long tube wound about itself like a sleeping snake. Obscenely close-set eyes surveyed the thorny runs from above a scarf wrapped round to keep out the dust. He bore a short spear with a long, sharp head and tapered tail.
He’d chosen his spot well. She couldn’t cross behind him, not without a climb in the open, though a brief one, perhaps exposing her to the noisemakers in the thickets.
But a good deal of thornbush filled a gentler slope leading up to his vantage. He amused himself by relieving himself into it.
Wistala was downwind, and the odor struck her nose like a challenge, the clattering in her ears a rattle of an enemy drake’s griff. She crept slowly through the densest brambles, sliding around the clusters of branch with their pitiful clumps of earth held tight by roots, until his shadow practically fell on her through the thorny lattice.
She took two steps closer, marked the route she’d use in the final dash—
He saw her approach too late and extended his hand, not the one holding a weapon, but rather to show some kind of talisman.
