along the starlit circling path.
Kare lay unconscious all that night. He had thrown the stone harder than he needed to. He sat beside her, and counted her breaths, took her pulse, compared it to his own. He had kept this same useless vigil once beside a comrade thrown from a horse, and had watched helplessly as pulse and breathing slowed and faded to nothingness. But this time the child’s life held strong.
When she woke the next day, she walked around unsteadily, and complained of a headache; she did not ask him what had happened. When evening came, he took a rope, knotted one end of it around her wrist, the other around his own. The calling came again out of the darkness. “Kare, Kare,” a voice that knew but the one word.
The child listened intently, but did not struggle. “That is not my mother,” she said at last.
“No,” he said. “I do not think it is.”
She slept much, those next few days. Kallan had little nursing to do, but much watching and waiting. He only hoped that her father would be as patient. The calling mixed with the howling of the forest, and became so familiar that he scarcely knew when it ceased.
They might have left sooner, but he was afraid for the child to travel. A blow to the head can do strange things. Alonsar waited patiently enough, and grazed greedily in the blaggorn field. When they were ready to go at last, Kare was awestruck by the horse, and stepped warily around him.
Kallan tried to reassure her. “See,” he said as he slipped the bit into the horse’s mouth, “his teeth are big, but they are grinding teeth, not fangs to tear flesh. And he is brave and gentle, and can travel faster and longer than a man can run.”
She came a little closer, but still ready to flee.
“See, though he was trained as a war-horse, yet he will go willingly as a pack-horse.
Indeed, Alonsar was a patient creature, as he stood loaded with the other man’s sword, and bundles of food better than anything they would find as they traveled, and bundles of the child’s choosing, herbs and clothing, things she did not want to do without.
Kallan had looked into the jars she had chosen, the simple herbs, though he did not recognize them, that stood on the lower shelf. There had been some jars—high above a child’s reach—whose contents had sickened him, when he browsed idly along the shelves. Evil had dwelled here, sure enough, but when he looked into the child’s eyes, he could see no sign of it.
Kallan saw her reach out and touch the horse cautiously, almost won over. Then she turned and saw him, armored again in his mail shirt, his iron cap, and she backed away from him, not trusting his metamorphosis into a strange metal creature.
More explanations were needed. He stumbled over them. His life was nothing he was able to explain to a child that had never seen the world. “You know, the forest is not safe, even in daytime,” he said. She looked at him gravely, knowing full well that armor would be no guard against the ones that run through the woods.
But at last she let him lift her up onto the horse. She sat light as a wisp of cloud, wide-eyed and astonished. He urged Alonsar to a canter, an easy gait. She was too amazed to speak, but every now and then, she laughed. Kallan seemed to see things as she must see them, the forest swiftly floating past. It had been so long, the city seemed far away, another life, so gladly discarded.
A movement between the forest trees, a cry that no human had made. Alonsar shied, stumbled, and went down, with a agonized scream.
Kare was thrown, to lie stunned in the path beyond. The horse sprawled on the ground, awkward and ungainly, making a sobbing noise in his throat. Kallan knelt beside him, and felt his front legs. Alonsar would not walk again.
He glanced to either side. Whatever had frightened the horse was not to be seen. Places enough for it to hide and wait till night. The forests are never safe. Kare watched him, not sure of what had happened, but wise enough to recognize a disaster. “Walk on slowly,” he said, “and do not look back.”
She had the habit of obedience. Kallan rejoined her soon. He had wiped his sword clean of blood on the grass that grew by the side