Mitchell Smith - Moonrise

No such unlooked-for pleasure, without price. Blind with longing, so deep in her son's dream, Patience struck a tree-top; a limber spruce-branch whipped across her face – and shocked from concentration, she fell through the air, awkward and clutching, until a greater branch snagged her, and wrenched her left arm from its shoulder socket.

From there, she fell and struck the ground.

… Patience tried to set tearing agony aside, and lay still for a moment. Then moved her head, moved her fingers and toes, carefully waggled her left hand to find if any nerves had been torn in the dislocation.

All moved. And she could breathe, and see, though suffering several hurts – none severe as the left shoulder's.

Patience took deep breaths, thought mindful warmth to keep herself from further shock… then carefully stood up out of a confusion of broken branches, her greatcoat, and sheathed scimitar akimbo. Her hat… her hat was nowhere to be seen beneath tall spruces. A Boston hat, broad-brimmed, blue-dyed, and made of beaver felt. An irreplaceable hat…

She wandered, stumbling a little, looking for a strong low branch forking into a narrow V. Surprising how difficult that was to find, where there were nothing but trees… She searched, hissing-in deep breaths against the pain, found two almost good enough – and then a third that was.

The left hand would move; its arm – hanging so oddly, almost behind her back – would not move, so Patience had to reach across with her right to grip its wrist. She lifted the left arm with only a single short yelp of agony, hauled it high, and jammed and wedged the wrist into the branch's rough fork. She began to faint… but wouldn't let that happen.

Another very deep breath.

Then she bent her knees, and jumped up and away, lunging hard to the right. She screamed, felt a grating almost-click, and landed with a grunt, things tearing in her shoulder, the world swaying almost away from her.

… A pause while she stood sick, vomiting a little down her front. The pain was so great that it drove her out of herself, took all of Patience Nearly-Lodge Riley, and left only a stranger standing.

… It was this stranger who rearranged the awkward arm, no matter how the woman screamed and wept. The stranger set the left wrist back into the branch's fork, forced it firmly… then paused to consider the angle necessary, the turn and twist necessary, the force necessary to leave the left arm's shoulder-joint no place to go but together.

That decided, the stranger allowed Patience back in – crouched stunned for a moment by her agony – then leaped again.

Grinding, and a surprisingly loud clack as what fit, fit.

Calling "Ohhh… ohhhh," Patience turned slow circles away from pain, then sat hunched on thick spruce needles, rocking back and forth to comfort herself as she would a child. A ferret seemed to cling to her left shoulder, chewing its way to the bone. Chewing at the bone, tearing tendons with its teeth. As if that. As if that…

With hours passed, it became only a deep drumbeat of pain, rhythmed with her heartbeat. Patience had sliced a wide strip of her greatcoat's hem free with her scimitar's edge, knotted the cloth into a sling one-handed… and carefully tucked her left arm angled in to rest.

Then, there was only the long night left to get through, until less pain might allow the concentration for Walking-in-air. If that proved not possible, then ground-walking the mountains' forest and stone would have to be the way north and east, and pain beside the point.

It was surprising, how familiarity dealt with fear. Just as he'd become weary of being frightened as the king had pursued him, so Baj became weary, after another day, of fearing falling.

Soon enough, he clambered along the mountain ridges fairly fast, and kept up – or almost up – with the Persons. Not that all these heights were airy, uncertain footing along granite cliffs. These mountains were so soft – anciently worn, according to Richard – that often their ridge peaks were rounded, rich with evergreens and even drifts of berry bushes here and there, though only tiny buds showed on those, and spring leaves hardly bigger, but a dark and bitter green.

Nancy no longer had to call, "Keep up!" and seemed to Baj to be relaxing from whatever annoyance she'd appeared to nurse the days past. She traveled on in her swift pacing way – more lightly than lumbering Richard – paying no attention that he could see to even dangerous passages, where only solitary sailing birds circled alongside possible slipping… to certain falling, and death.

When – on scree slopes – Baj went to all fours for a WT yard or two, as Richard and Nancy went more often, he could still feel a tenderness in his bitten forearm, as if a tip of one of the girl's fangs had touched the bone… An odd sensation – and, for what reason he couldn't have told, Baj had the most sudden yearning for Pedro Darry's company. How Pedro – still handsome, still a rake at forty years and more in his leather, lace, and satins – how he would have laughed, standing balanced on a precarious boulder. Thrown back his head and roared with laughter at Baj scuttling along behind small portions of bear's blood and fox's blood, with a measure of weasel circling somewhere behind.

"What in the Lady's name have you been up to?" Then, more laughter, observing Who'd-been-Bajazet – grimy, sweat-stained, sparse stubble unshaved – climbing the cliff-faces like a nervous squirrel, his rapier's scabbard-tip tapping the stone behind him.

How sweet that laughter would sound, if it brought Pedro to life again, to stand beside him. No better company in desperate circumstance than that merry swordsman… What had Mark Cooper said at the lodge, those moments before the dagger went in? "Darry killed three of our people…"

And Baj – climbing a merely steep stretch at last – could see it. A stone hallway, tapestries lifting a little along the walls as the river wind blew through. Then steel's bright sounds, bright glances of light along sword-blades flashing. Sad the Cooper man who first met that smiling face over sharp edges, bitter points. Sad the second man… and the third. They would have tried to turn him, get past him in the corridor to strike his back.

The fourth man must have managed.

Charm and laughter, all gone to spoiling dirt. And their complicity in that theft of life, only the least of Boston's robberies.

Baj climbed faster, until he saw Nancy's worn leather pack bobbing just ahead. Loss, it seemed, made strength.

He caught up and went beside her for a while – made the mistake of trying to help her over a great fracture in the stone, and received a satirical grin for it, and no thanks as she bounded up and over. It was in that sort of motion her mixed heritage was plain, that and her vulpine odor, as if an elegant vixen had been changed by some Warm-time wizard to a girl.

She climbed without his help, but Baj still kept up with her, so they traveled side by side for a while. At the next fracture – quite severe, as if a side of the great crest had broken – she stepped behind him, put a narrow hand on the seat of his buckskins, and with startling strength shoved him up.

When he got to his feet, she climbed past with that same grin. The long jaw, its sharp white teeth, seemed made for it, as foxes smiled at lost hounds casting.

"Thank you," Baj said, and kept on. It was surprising how even the early-summer sun burned down at these heights, so he wished he had a hat. Hats not common on the River, where the wind made fun and blew them away…though ladies sometimes secured them under their chins with bands of far-southern silk. It came to Baj as he threaded through a stand of stunted spruce, that he might not – almost certainly would not – see the Kingdom River again. Not feel the rainy winds that drove down its current in the short-summers… not feel the savage sleet that blew as Lord Winter came down from the Wall.