James West - Lady Of Regret

“Whatever for?”

With tears in her eyes, Nesaea said, “To find my father.”

The mountain trail led Rathe and Loro over an ancient stone bridge spanning a river that surged from the mouth of a steep-walled gorge. On the far side, the trail turned hard north to follow the river up into a soggy white curtain of mist. The two riders halted in a patch of grass to let their horses graze.

Loro cast a baleful eye on the river gorge. “Do you suppose we’ll ever get out of these accursed mountains?” Clad in leather jerkin and trousers, a cloak of simple dark wool, with shoulders nearly as wide as he was tall, Loro had the look of an ascetic warrior-priest with a weakness for feasting.

Rathe searched for another way, some indication of lowlands. Where the forest did not block their path, dark granite cliffs did. There might have been more, but he could see nothing beyond the fog. As ever, ravens croaked their gleeful scorn somewhere above.

“North is the only way out of the Gyntors.” Rathe nodded at the gorge. “As that heads north, I’d say we are on the right path.”

Loro shivered under his cloak. “Or, it might be that the mountains go all the way to world’s end.”

Over the last many days, when not considering the shadowed swordsman he had faced, Rathe had begun to think the same, though a map he saw once named the lands beyond the mountains the Iron Marches. “You wanted the life of a thief. I dare say cold, hunger, and hard paths are the lot of such men.”

“Not along the shores of the Sea of Muika,” Loro said, falling back on his tired belief they could live like bandit-kings on the western shores of Qairennor.

“Once we get through the mountains, mayhap we’ll find the truth of that. Not before. Until then, we ride until sunset. As always.”

“I’ve not seen the sun in days,” Loro said, sneaking a sip of blackberry brandy from the flask he kept under his cloak. Popping the stopper back, he glanced skyward to prove his point.

Rathe craned his neck, found a pale glowing disk just beginning its slow westward fall. “There it is,” he said with forced cheer. He heeled the gray into a plodding walk up the steep trail.

Loro cursed him, but followed.

The air grew colder and thinner as the day wore on. The horses labored up the steep trail, hooves slipping over ice as often as loose gravel. Sprigs of tough grass and clumps of wiry bramble took root in thin soil along the riverbank, spread dripping branches over sheets of crusty snow. Rathe wondered how anything grew here.

“Gods and demons, my arse is sore,” Loro protested. He had lasted a full quarter turn of the glass without a word of complaint. He shifted in the saddle with a scowl. “And my stones, gods be cursed, have grown a bleeding crop of blisters. Show me the civilized man who has ever had to suffer such as this!” His shout could not contend with the voice of the river, a rumbling rush filling the gorge with thunder.

“We stop at dusk, no sooner,” Rathe said.

“Dusk is hours off!” Loro shook beaded water from his bald pate, wrung out his hood, and pulled it back up.

“Not so long as that,” Rathe said.

He guided the gray through an ice-edged stream tumbling out of a treacherous gulley to join the river. Once across, he drew rein to search the chasm of fractured gray rock. A croaking raven took to wing from a briar thicket. A yearling stag lifted its head from the stream, a warning snort steaming from its nostrils. Stunted evergreens grew everywhere, holding to fissures with roots like contorted fingers.

Loro sighed, slumped in the saddle, took a forlorn sip from his flask. “I’m cold, hungry, and have not had the pleasure of a bitter ale longer than is proper. Gods!” he called skyward. “Grant me a great soft wench to warm my bones!”

“Keep an eye out,” Rathe said. “I cannot give you women or ale-and by all gods, I’ll not tend your bloody stones-but if we find a cave or hollow, or perhaps a few trees fallen together, we can have a dry night.”

“I beg for plump teats and a cozy tavern, and you think to offer me a moldy cave or a spidery woodpile? Are you a simpleton, or a man without heart?”

“If you crave affection,” Rathe said mildly, “head back down the trail, rope one of those woolly goats you missed putting an arrow into this morning, and-”

Rathe cut off at a noise behind them.

As one, the men drew their swords.

“What do you see?” Loro asked.

“It’s what I heard that troubles me.” Rathe had not seen any figures in the mist of late, but the watched feeling had only grown stronger the longer they wandered through the mountains.

“Must have imagined it,” Loro said dismissively. “With this river, why, it’s nigh impossible to hear myself think, let alone hear anything else.”

Rathe raised a hand for quiet. As with the branching gullies climbing into the mountains, the river gorge was all of sheer rock dotted with mossy outcrops and small, bristly spruce. No more than a hundred paces at its widest, there was nowhere to hide, unless a man could pass for a tree or a lichen-crusted stone.

“What do you think you heard?” Loro asked in a hollow voice.

“A hoof scraping over stone, maybe a sword clearing a scabbard,” Rathe said. It had been a faint sound, barely heard for the river. All at once, the raven winged into the mist, and the stag vanished into dense underbrush.

Loro peered into the shifting fog. “King Nabar’s men?”

“Being as they chased us into the mountains in the first place, who else would it be?” Rathe did not let on that this menace felt different than what he had felt with the shadow-man. Or any man, for that matter.

“We fled into the mountains,” Loro corrected. “We could have escaped to anywhere.” It was a sore point for him that Rathe had chosen to go north through the Gyntors, instead of toward the Sea of Muika by way of the warm, grassy steppes of Qairennor. “Something tells me those fellows had sense enough to avoid following us here.”

“King Nabar put a large enough bounty on my head to make any man throw aside his fear of this place.”

“Why should Nabar care about you? It’s not as if Lord Sanouk was loved in Cerrikoth, let alone the king’s city of Onareth. Might Nabar wants to give you a reward.”

Rathe dismissed that possibility with a shake of his head. “You were with me when the bounty hunters tried to kill us in the south. Aside from that, Lord Sanouk was Nabar’s brother, and I killed him. That Sanouk deserved worse than death for the things he did means nothing to the king. Nobles of every stripe frown on the killing of fellow nobles, unless it is they who are doing the killing.”

“Aye,” Loro said slowly, “but it could be others are hunting us, now. Mayhap something else entire. You and I both saw the fright in the eyes of the folk at Valdar, when they spoke of dead cities in these mountains, all haunted by the souls of men cursed through black sorceries. Gold does a man no good, if he’s dead.”

“Men tell tales,” Rathe answered, despite having seen some of those tales come to life and attack with a vengeance. He had fought them, a Shadenmok and her demon hounds. And while strange and terrible, those creatures had died like most everything else he ever poked a blade into.

Loro studied the back trail a long time. “You asked who I thought could be after us, but I ask what is after us.”

Rathe tried to swallow, but his throat felt dry. He abruptly sheathed his sword. “I want to escape this gorge before nightfall.”

“Aye,” Loro agreed, but kept his sword out.

They picked along the rough trail for another two hours. Loro’s complaints resumed, and Rathe kept constant vigil. He saw and heard nothing more to alarm him. Neither did he find a likely spot to camp, or any chance they might climb out of the gorge. It was not the first night they would spend in the open, but he did not relish another.