their arrows, and the others watched them surreptitiously. Bows seemed as outlandish to the sword-bearers as feathers on one of their horses. Jack's men felt absently for revolvers that weren't on their hips.
At dawn they set off again, and now Harry felt that she rode into her dream; perhaps she would wake up yet and find herself in the king's tent, with unknown words on her lips and Corlath's hands on her shoulders, and pity in his eyes. They rode, the archers striding long-legged behind them, up a narrow trail into the mountain peaks; up the dark unwelcoming slopes to the border of the North. The cold thin air bit at their throats, and the sun was seen as scattered falls of light through the leaves. The ground underfoot was shaly, but Tsornin never stumbled; his ears were hard forward and his feet were set firmly. Harry tapped her fingernail on the big blue stone in the hilt of Gonturan and thought of a song she'd sung as a child; the tune fluttered through her mind, but she couldn't quite catch the words. It made her feel isolated, as though her childhood hadn't really happened - or at least hadn't happened as she remembered it. Perhaps she'd always lived in the Hills; she'd seen Sungold foaled, and she had been the one first to put a saddle on his young back, and had trained him to rear and strike as a warhorse. Her stomach felt funny.
They reached Ritger's Gap, the Madamer Gate, before sunset, spilling out across the little plateau that lay behind it, with trees at its back and only bare rock rising around it to the mountaintop, a few bowlengths above them. There was a long shallow cave to one side, where the mountain peak bent back on itself, and low trees protected much of the face of it. "We'll sleep in something resembling shelter tonight," said Jack cheerfully. "At least as long as the wind doesn't veer around and decide to spit at us from the south."
Harry was listening to the northern breeze; it sneered at her. "It won't," she said.
Jack cocked an eyebrow at her, but she said no more about it. The plateau was loud with the panting of men and horses; they had hurried to arrive, just as her dream had told her they would, or must; the last hour, men and horses had had to scramble up, side by side. Harry leaned against Sungold's shoulder, grateful for the animal solidity of him; he turned his head to chew gently on her sleeve till she petted him. After a minute of staring around her she slowly followed Narknon as the cat paced up to the Gap itself and stared into the valley beyond. Even Narknon seemed subdued, but perhaps it was the day's hard miles.
Two riders abreast could pass the narrow space in the rock, perhaps, but their knees would touch. On this side of the Gap, the plateau sloped up to the shoulders of the narrow cleft and down the other side, where men and clever-footed horses might climb. Harry stared through, and became conscious of Sungold's warm breath on the back of her neck. Narknon leaped down from her perch beside the cleft, turned her back on it, and began to wash. Harry stood in the Gap itself, and leaned against the spot Narknon had vacated. A pebbly slope dropped down away from her to a scrub-covered valley between the mountain's arms; there was a lower valley wall on the far side, but it fell away into foothills. Harry felt her sight reaching away, into the harsh plain beyond the dun-colored valley and scattering of low sharp hills; and on the edge of the plain she saw a haze that eddied and drifted, like a tide coming in, exploring the shore before it, reaching out to stroke the little hills before it swept over them.
Harry turned and went back to her company. She said to no one in particular, "They will be here tomorrow."
It was a silent camp that night; everyone seemed almost superstitiously afraid to polish a dagger one last time in too obvious a fashion; much quiet checking of equipment went on, but it was a shadowy sort of motion. No one met another's eyes and there was no bright ring of metal on metal. Even footfalls were muffled.
Jack's bay gelding Draco and Harry's Sungold had become friends over the days of carrying their riders side by side. The Outlander