wished he had not answered. His companions, Ilbran and Kare, Syresh and Lenane, all the men he had brought from Oreja, had heard the conversation and stood looking up also. The albanet did not turn their heads to see the ones far below who watched them.
A silence, a sudden waiting silence filled the air with emptiness. Ahead of them, Andiene stood motionless, listening, where the path bent in a huge bow of stacked and splintered rock.
She called, “Come!” and beckoned for them to run forward. “Hurry!” They obeyed, slowly at first, then urged on by a compulsion that Kallan alone recognized. She stood on the very cliff’s edge and let them push past her. “Go on!” she cried. Ilbran obeyed her, the last one, and she was left alone on the long path.
And then, she turned and backed away from where she stood, her arms held out in front of her like one who shows his empty hands in a sign of peace. The air was expectant. There was danger enough, of an earthly kind, simply in walking backwards on the narrow trail.
She did not once glance down, or behind her at the path. Her head did not move; her hands did not tremble; she moved as though there was some enemy before her that she must fix and hold motionless. She backed away, until she stood by Kallan and Ilbran, an hundred paces from the cliff corner where they had stood when she first called warning. Then her hands fell.
The cliffside fell in that same motion, a roar more terrible than a sea storm, a cloud of dust more blinding than any summer storm. It slid slowly, so slowly that Ilbran could not understand how such a massive weight could hang on the edge of nothingness. It gathered weight and power and speed as it fell. Ilbran knelt and held his daughter close to him, and prayed. He stared at the raw wound on the mountainside, long after the last clatter of rocks had died away.
Then Andiene laughed, a sharp sound to break the dust-choked silence.
“Whoever travels these hills will have some clever climbing to do, even if he wears a gray cloak!” She turned. “Kare, I thank you.”
Ilbran let loose his grip on his daughter’s shoulders. She looked up at Andiene. “Did I … ” she began, then crumpled forward.
Ilbran was slower than he should have been, his eyes on Andiene. It was Kallan who lunged and caught at her on the very edge of the cliff, and dragged her back over the edge.
Some things happen too suddenly. Ilbran looked at his daughter, and at the drop, stepless and sheer down to the green treetops far below. “I owe you life once again,” he began, speaking to Kallan, then stopped, cut off by the unexplainable mockery in the other man’s eyes.
He turned to Andiene then. “You thanked her for what?” he asked, and his voice was filled with the pain of betrayal.
“She helped me,” Andiene said. “I did not ask her. I could not stop her. In any war, you take what aid is offered to you.”
Ilbran gathered his child into his arms. “Shall we go on?”
Kare lay lightly in his arms, as he carried her for many days. In the brief and burning days of aftersummer, they took shelter again among the rocks. The heat is less fierce in the mountains. They did not suffer much. Kare lay quietly and did not wake. Ilbran watched her in fear and dread.
Andiene looked backward often, as they traveled the mountain trails, but did not speak of what had happened. Though the new recruits from Oreja learned to be more easy in her presence, they still stood in awe of her. Kallan stayed with them, training them, matching them against himself and each other, teaching them to fear him, and to rejoice in the rare praise he gave them. At last they came to the end of the mountains, where the road turned and went west. Their path lay open to the city.
Ilbran stared down at the valleys of green blaggorn, lined and circled with thornfruit hedges, a green and growing land.
This was the edge of his own land, the land where he was born. Mareja, the kingdom of the sea. The sun was low in the west, blinding him, but he imagined he saw the sparkle of waves at the very edge of his vision.
Kare woke that evening, opening dark amazed eyes to stare at the reborn world. Ilbran