Lyne!” Mard said.
Weaver had set her harp aside and stood up. She was fascinated. She sidestepped over Burr’s way and rested a hand on the socket of his spearhead, just behind the glinting leaf-shaped blade, and pushed it gently aside. “Singing of this and actually seeing it are very different things,” she said.
Prim stood still through all of this, gazing into the man’s eyes. “It’s you,” she concluded, “it’s still Corvus.”
“Now that I have your attention,” Corvus announced. But then he gagged, hacked, and spat, as if having some difficulty learning to use the new vocal apparatus. When he had recovered, he went on in a somewhat deeper and more human tone: “There’ll be no more wanky chatter about such topics during the Quest.” He hocked up a little more and spat it in the general direction of the map. “Now roll that thing up, and don’t take it out anymore. What the hell are you doing, wasting your time looking at the map, when the world itself is spread out all around you?”
And with that his glossy black hair and beard wrapped themselves around his body and came together to coat all of his face save his eyes and his nose, and the nose and jaw extended and hardened into a beak. His feet shrank and his toes lengthened into talons. There was a lot of unsightly twitching and spasming and vocalization that caused everyone except Weaver to avert their gaze; Mardellian even clapped his hands over his ears, and Prim had to step lively as the creature voided its bowels in midtransformation. Then it was just Corvus again. He made two experimental hops and then took to the air.
The other six members of the party all looked at one another, just to confirm that this had really happened. Prim was still clutching the arrow she had been using as a pointer. She put it back into its quiver, then dropped to one knee at the eastern edge of the map. Before she began to roll it up again, she took one long last look at it, the way you do at an old friend before you set out on a long journey without them.
Burr had never unpacked; he was already good to go. Turning his broad back on the way they’d come, he gazed down the pass. The convolutions of the valleys below beguiled him for a while. But after a bit he picked out a plausible-seeming direction and indicated it with his spear. Then he looked at Corvus and raised his eyebrows.
“Ugh, more!” Prim blurted as they came round yet another bend in the valley. For she’d been hoping that this time it would be different and they would see open country, green pastures, a giantess looking after her beasts. “Is this what it is, or was, like to be Pluto?”
Brindle, who was ahead of her, turned his head in profile, frowning. Then he seemed to understand—or perhaps he was merely humoring her—and he smiled and turned back to the next rock, the next footfall.
“I mean,” Prim went on, “is it the case that Egdod said, ‘I want a valley here, with mountains at the top, and, at the bottom, a river emptying into the sea,’ and then flew on in the satisfaction of a job well done? And then Pluto came along later and shaped each individual rock and thought about where to set it down?” She feigned a yawn. “‘Oh, the previous two thousand rocks were all set in place rather firmly, I do believe I’ll balance this one just so, to trip up an inattentive traveler who might happen along a few eons from now.’”
She looked back at Burr to make sure he’d noticed the rock in question. As usual he was paying more attention to the heights around them than to the ground in front of the shaggy mukluks that for him served as boots. But he had a third leg in the form of his spear and fell no more often than anyone else. Occasionally he would stop and shush them all, and in the silence they would hear the cry of an animal echoing from the cliffs that hemmed in the valley, or see a little cascade of stones dribbling down from a vantage point.
Anvellyne was ahead of her at the moment. For he and Mardellian tended to grow bored, and dawdle and fall behind, whereupon Burr would grow stormy-looking and Brindle, noting as much, would yell at them, and then