a pale full light, other times disappearing completely behind a dark and thick blanket.
Brynn wasn't seeing it, any of it, Juraviel knew. She was looking across the years as much as across the distance. She was seeing the crisp night sky from a camp of deerskin tents fiested among great boulders on the high slopes of the Belt-and-Buckle( She was pearing her mother's laugh, perhaps, and her father's stern but loving comrrtands. She was hearing the nickers of the nearby To-gai ponies, so loyal-that they didn't need to be tethered, as they protested the sparse grasses at the great elevation.
That was good, Juraviel knew. Let per recall the feeling of the old days, of her life before Andur'Blough Inninness. Let her remember clearly how much she had lost, how much To-gai had lost, so that her calls to her people to reclaim their heritage would be even more full of passion and conviction.
"Do they still go to the high passes?" Juraviel prompted.
Brynn's expression changed as she lowered her gaze to regard the elf, as if one of the clouds from the sky had dropped down to cross over her fair features. ?I know not," she admitted somberly. ?When I was taken by your people, the Chezru were trying to establish permanent villages."
"The To-gai-ru must walk the land with the creatures," said Juraviel. ?That is their way."
"More than our way. It is our spirit, our path to..." She paused - unsure, it seemed.
"Your path to what?" the elf asked. ?To heaven?"
Brynn looked at him curiously, and then nodded. ?To our heaven," she explained. ?There on the high plateaus.
There in the autumn valleys, full of the golden flowers that bloom to herald the cold winds. There by the sum-mer streams, swollen with melt. There, following the deer."
"The Chezru do not see the value of such a life," Juraviel noted. ?They are not a wandering people."
"Because their deserts are not suited to such a lifestyle," said Brynn. ?They have their many oases, and their great cities, but to wander through the sea-sons would not show them much beauty beyond those denned enclaves. Behren is not like To-gai, not a land of differing beauties in differing seasons. Thus they do not understand us and thus they try to change us."
"Perhaps they believe that in giving villages to the To-gai-ru, they will be showing the To-gai-ru the path to a better life."
"No," Brynn was answering before the elf even finished the statement, and Juraviel knew that he would elicit strong disagreement here - indeed, that was his goal. ?They want us in villages, even cities, that they might bet-ter control us. In villages, they can watch the clans, but out on the plains, we would be free to practice the old ways and to speak ill of our conquerors."
"But the gains," the elf said dramatically. ?The stability of existence."
"The trap of possession!" Brynn was quick to argue. ?Cities are prisons and nothing more. When they run correctly, they trap you, they make you dependent on the comforts they provide. But they take from you - oh, they take so much!"
"What do they take?" There was an unintended urgency to Juraviel's tone. He could tell that he was getting to Brynn, driving her on, which was precisely his duty.
"They take away the summer plateaus, the mountain wind, and the smell.... oh, the scents of the high fields in the summer! They take away the swollen rivers, full of leaping fish. They take away the rides, the ponies charging across the open steppe. Oh, you should hear that sound, Belli'mar! The thunder of the To-gai-ru charge!"
She was breathing hard as she finished, her brown eyes sparkling with energy, as if she were witnessing that charge - as if she was leading that charge. She finally came out of her trance a bit and looked to the elf.
"I will witness it," came Belli'mar Juraviel's soft and assuring answer. ?I will."
Their road remained fairly straight south over the next few days, and Brynn was under the impression that they had but a single goal here: to get to To-gai and begin the process of liberation.
That's what Juraviel and the others had told her, but the elf knew that he and Brynn had other things to attend to before beginning the long process of placing Brynn at the front of a revolution. Brynn Dharielle had been trained in the rigorous manner that had produced rangers from Andur'Blough In-ninness for centuries, but, as fine as that training might be, Juraviel