Текст книги "Fortress of Eagles"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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“A lot in spring, or in rainy spells. I don’t rightly know about that up there, that kind. But cooks dry the wholesome ones in the kitchen for the off-season, so ye never fear, m’lord: there’ll be mushroom soup aplenty all winter. I heard Cook say yesterday there’s a special attention to mushroom soup for harvesttide on account of Your Grace.”

Harvesttide was only two days off. He did indeed like mushroom soup, and he would be as happy as most in the approaching celebration if he were happy in other points, and if he knew he were welcome among the other lords, but neither was the case.

Still, it was too fine a day for melancholy on that account. Uwen rode beside him, knee to knee on Liss, a mare Uwen greatly coveted, and they were comfortable a while in silence. It was still a wooded road after they had taken the Cressitbrook way, winding deep among the base of hills where only the king’s woodsmen cut wood, and where only the king and the king’s friends hunted. It needed no quick pace at all, as Uwen had said, for them to reach Guelemara before dark. The road they took now showed no track of horses or men since the rains, and therefore held less likelihood of meeting anyone. The men rode more easily, far from any critical eye, talking of whatever took their fancy, and anticipating the harvesttide festival, for which the town had been preparing for days, building a bonfire of truly prodigious proportions.

Friendly voices, friendly company surrounded him, past the spring and down along the little brook that flowed down from it. Tristen listened idly and watched the leaf-paved road above the twitch of Petelly’s black-tipped ears—busy ears, they were, alert to every burst of laughter and every whisper of the freshening wind out of the west.

CHAPTER 2

There were pearls, an abundance of pearls. Cefwyn trod on one and winced, hoping it was only one of the sleeve-pearls, not some stray and costly one from the wedding crown, which lay in partial glory and strips of ribbon on the table. A mound of pale blue velvet and gold– and pearl-colored satin stood like a mountain range against the high, clear windows of the former scriptorium. The center panes of amber glass cast a bar of golden light across the room, from the embroidering maids to the far, scrap-strewn tables in this, the domain of the Regent and her ladies-in-waiting.

He endured his own wedding fittings in a hall similarly devoted to the groom’s garments, a hall piled with red and gold… Marhanen colors, more modest heaps, however, although he was the king. He was astounded by this volume of fabric, grown by half again, he swore, since his visit two days ago. Could so much cloth possibly be involved in a few gowns for one slender woman? He had thought he was expert in ladies’ accoutrements… but find his bride on their wedding night, in such an array?

Even finding his bride in this room proved no straightforward task, amid heaps and bales of velvet, destined for, one hoped, various other ladies of the court as well as his bride.

Amid all the ladies and maids and their stitching frames set in the advantageous light from the windows, one maid, with a deep curtsy, retrieved the damaged pearl, and another, with a deeper curtsy, snatched an imperiled length of satin fabric from his path. In what became a rapid sweep of curtsies among the women discovering his presence, he passed like a gale through a flower garden… and by sheerest chance the diminishing of ladies standing upright directed his eye to the group under the farthest of the three tall windows.

His bride, the Lady Regent of Elwynor, stood on a bench, curiously draped in lengths of blue cloth, with a knot of ladies about her.

Intriguing, he thought as he approached in that breaking wave of ladies rising and curtsying. It proved difficult to hold folds in unsewn velvet and curtsy at once, and the ladies’ efforts all went for naught as Lady Ninévrisë shed the velvet and descended into the sea of ladies’ wide, fashionable skirts.

Among so many witnesses she kissed him chastely on the side of the mouth.

“I murdered a pearl,” he said between two formal kisses. “Surrogate for my Lord Chancellor.” This last in a low voice as he led her off by the blue velvet mountains next the windows. “This man.” The precise cause of his anger, the inane and constant repetition of the phrase your late father found it good policy… followed by what had been done for the last twelve years, a recitation undaunted by the firm statement of his own will to change that policy… all of that was impossible to articulate in this listening hall of daughters and sisters of great lords—northern lords at that, all of whom were involved in this contest of wills between the king and his late father’s court. “This man.” He was not yet up to coherent exposition.

“What has he done?” Ninévrise asked.

“I asked for the tally of village levies. It was not my father’s policyto deal with such matters himself. Lord Brysaulin accordingly sent the tally to the lord of Murandys and notto my Master of Accounts, as I instructed. But my lord fatheralways had it go to Murandys. Accordingly the lords, now possessed of the information I had wished to present, are delaying me, fearing all this presages a new tax, and are already resolved, Murandys to the fore, to oppose any such collection. This is beyond incompetency. It verges on treason!”

“I should hardly think that there was any ill intent.”

“Oh, I have no doubt the river simply flowed as it was accustomed to flow, in all its old channels. But more than that—” He lifted a forefinger. “More than that—I asked for the accounts also to list the notable men in the villages by name and lineage. I wished the wagons listed, the houses, the weapons. No! The cattle, gods forbid, the cattle and the sheep, and the granaries were all Lord Brysaulin’s passion. There are no namesin his report, let alone tally of weapons. It was not my father’s policyto gather the names in the fall, nor the account of weapons. After two months of searching, sending scribes hither and yon, and the waiting, my Lord Chancellor has gathered for me a complete account of fields, of grain and granaries down to the half measure, and of the cattle of whatever age, oh, far more complete than my father was wont, but omitted the weapons, as something done two years ago, which he deemed accurate enough, and it was not my father’s policyto gather the names and the strength of the muster until spring. So the recording of all beasts of whatever age, with houses andgranaries has every semblance of a tax assessment! The lords are uneasy with the king’s apparent interest in their revenues, how not? and how am I to know these men’s resources if I have no names or tallies? Is it Uta Uta’s-son still over Magan village in Panys, or has the old man died this summer and is his foolishly indolent and dastard sonin charge, who will be devil a use when Lord Maudyn musters troops next spring? My father never inquired into such matters for reasons I leave to my father; but I do as my grandfather did, and with a war to fight, Ithink it reasonable to know the men of account in the villages as I know their lords, because Ithink it reasonable in me as king to know what sort of men my barons look to for their resources! I think it is of concern to the Crown whether a village be well led or indifferently led or led by an utter fool! I rely on such information when I rely on Panys to advance or to hold his entire contingent; and I will not do in my reign as the Lord Chancellor finds convenient, or face a set of barons inflamed by suspicions my Lord Chancellor has stirred up with his only half-following my orders!—And I want an entire tally of wagons, their kind as well as their number!”

He was not speaking to some child… but to the Lady Regent of Elwynor across the river, a sovereign in her own right. And against a wall of obstinate, self-interested Guelen opposition to his will, the Lady Regent of Elwynor was a calm, sweet, sure, and unassailable voice on his side. “He will simply have to obtain the names and weapons and the rest of it, my lord, and that will correct the impression he might have given.”

“The snow will fall and we’ll be holding muster in blizzards! Pray, is that a man, sir, or a snowdrift?”

“There is still time, adequate at least to amend the list.”

“And with a list I wanted done with noextraordinary fuss! Secrecy was my aim. Quiet proceedings. —Come with me. We’ll flee to Marisal, break a bowl together and set ourselves up as simple farmers.”

The Lady Regent must not, by treaty, attempt to advise him in the monarchy of Ylesuin: the marriage contract had stipulated likewise that he would not intervene in Elwynor.

It was a noble notion of dual reigns over two allied realms, give or take the inconvenient fact that her capital across the river was threatened by rebels. But besides all other reasons, they loved each other… at least… they were hoping to love one another: at this early date they were merely, hopelessly, smitten.

To all of this the maids and ladies-in-waiting demurely listened, so solemn, so seemingly occupied with their stitching; and if their being within earshot served him and her at all well, the ladies would gossip back to their brothers and fathers that the king had nointention of a tax, that Lord Brysaulin had bungled the accounts, that it was indeed wagons and village musters at issue.

And if they were uncommonly efficient at their talebearing, why, the king and his intended might even enjoy their harvesttide ale without conspiracy, or at least with the buzzing of some entirely new false and utterly inane rumor, of a muster and general war by snowfall, for instance.

Meanwhile the gray eyes that looked back at him danced with complete comprehension, thank the gods, a support that propped up his sanity and stayed the true Marhanen temper—not the best trait he had from his sire and grandsire. The mouth he longed to kiss was touched with astringent humor she would by no means launch here, either, in the hearing of the selfsame barons’ daughters: oh, they were both on their best behavior. And let the barons’ daughters report the Regent had been discreet and seemly. Let them report Her Grace had but meekly counseled the king to be reasonable with his barons and watch her grow in their esteem—a proper, seemly woman seeking no authority over Guelen women and their secret hierarchies, oh, aye, let them all, each and individually think so. But believe, too, in their bitter jealousy. He caught the look of Ryssand’s daughter Artisane above her stitching frame, and saw the fox-faced chit color and duck her chin.

“We should wait till spring to become farmers,” Ninévrisë said in all sobriety, and in a voice just low enough to make the eavesdropping maids strain for possible bits and pieces of Lord Brysaulin’s fate. “Beginning a farm in the winter, I fear we would starve.”

“There is that,” he conceded.

“Fifteen days,” she reminded him, which was the number of the days they had to endure until their wedding—the consummation of a treaty as well as a bridal bed, and on both, a stamp of priestly approval. The blessing of the priests would set the king’s consort beyond petty gossip and let the two of them, who ached to touch, do more than let fingertips meet in front of jealous (and spurned) young women.

Meanwhile fault-finding, book-wielding, legalistic priests, worst of all his inconveniences, were sniffing everywhere about the Guelesfort, also allied to various houses by blood and gold. And now the war, which had been advancing, foundered on an old man’s habit.

“Gods send we reach the fifteenth day with my chancellor yet unslaughtered.”

“He is an old man. A fine old man. He was kind to me.”

“A faithful man.” The royal temper fell with that reminder of a small, dutiful kindness when the court had been cold and uncertain in its welcome to his bride and ally. He was left with the ashes of his anger. And the accounts still in the wrong, hostile hands. “He served my father well as Lord Chamberlain. He served mewell until I came home to Guelessar—good gods, he kept the entire realm in order in a difficult time, with wit and goodwill, and for that I owe him gratitude, but good and beneficent gods, why will he not simply read the order I send him? I wrote it fair. —But, oh, I know, I know exactly his ways. Through all my father’s reign, when he dealt chiefly with Guelessar, we have done the harvest tally in Guelessar approaching harvesttide. So this must extend the selfsame inquiry to all Ylesuin and it must be granaries we wish to inspect, not wagons and bowstrings. I would trust Brysaulin to be honest, and to have all virtues of a good man, but, gods, even so, if I do not strangle me that man before Midwinter—”

“Hush, hush.” She laid a finger on his chin, and, thus close to him, whispered, “You must go to Brysaulin, instruct him again. Be patient. You are always patient.”

“I am Marhanen! I am never patient. Plague on Brysaulin. I faint for wit and converse about other than store of pikes and oats. Will you dine with me tonight in chambers—a gathering of old friends? I shall call Tristen, too. He’s out riding. I’ll have him in by sundown if I need send troops to find him.“

Ninévrisë’s eyes had changed from solemn listening to laughter, that quickly; and the gray eyes that sometimes had hints of violets (it was the first image he had seen, painted on ivory, and always what he remembered) sparkled and went thoughtful. Her voice sank very low, to escape the listeners. “Am I the prey tonight or is it Tristen? Policy must attend this festive mood. You are stalking someone.”

“Good lady!” He laid a hand on his breast, above the Marhanen Dragon, worked in gold. “I am suspect?”

“Today since dawn you have held close converse with the captain of your guard, the Patriarch of the Quinalt.” One finger and the next marked the tally. “Your brother the duke of Guelessar, and your brother’s priest, besides a converse again with Idrys, with Captain Gwywyn, and with Captain Kerdin—I discount your tailor—”

“Your spies are everywhere!”

“You ensconce me in this nest of women all with ambitions, all wishing to persuade me to confide in them, and wonder that I know exactlythe object of your inquiry, who was riding to Drysham today—”

“Cressitbrook. You don’t know everything.”

“—with his guard. It is he, is it not? Has Tristen done something amiss?”

“Tonight,” he said, with a glance at the women in the distance, and with his voice lowered.

“I hear it all, you know. The Warden of Ynefel is out spying on the land. He converses with the horses, quite dire and lengthy discourses, and likely with the sheep. His birds fly over the land and bring him news from every quarter…”

“His damned pigeons congregate on the ledge and on the porch of the Quinaltine just opposite, where they refine their aim on the Quinaltine steps, therein is the magical offense. Winter’s coming. He feeds them. Why should they fly farther afield?” He had heard enough, today, of the Quinaltine steps. And of his bride’s unorthodoxy… and her scandalous single petticoat, especially in the wedding gown. “Join me tonight. A small supper, a pleasant, quiet evening, no one but ourselves and Tristen. And Emuin. We shall invite Emuin.”

“Oh, thatwill set tongues a-wagging.”

Doubtless it would—a Teranthine father, the king’s old tutor, was entirely acceptable; a wizard was not; but Emuin was both.

And, damn the gossip, he missed their quiet suppers, and their days in Amefel. He missed them so much that those Amefin days, which he had once considered exile, now appeared to him in a golden glow of memory, a time when he had had few but faithful confidants every night at supper, when his table had been solely for food and intimate talk, not tiresome sessions with priests and clerks and lords who wished his brother were king. Even the banquets of state in the great hall in Henas’amef had been intimate, by comparison to the echoing hall of the Dragon Throne, where he now held court. The region before the throne was a gilt-and-ivory battlefield of policy wherein every move and every strategic alliance had been laid down by his father and now must be fought and refought and reforged by an unpopular successor. His digestion suffered in consequence, and while he had as yet found no gray hairs among the gold of his carefully clipped beard, nor a lasting crease on his young brow, he looked for them daily—even longed for them as a means to impress authority on the barons. He could no longer ride abroad, not with the press of royal business. He had grooms to exercise his horses. He could not find time for his father’s hounds, who were growing paunches. He could not so much as sit in the royal bathtub on most days without papers to sign, arguments to hear, justice to do, or some petition of the Quinalt about Tristen’s damned pigeons.

“Let them clatter about it,” he said to his bride-to-be. “Let them have a merry round of it. There’s Llymarish cheese and Panan apples stewed up with spices. There’s Guelen ham and Amefin sausages and the red wine from Imor as well as Guelen ale. I had it all carted in and set by for harvesttide. I shall serve it up tonight, just the few of us.”

“Seducer,” said his bride. Fingers touched fingers. Oh, very gladly would he have touched more.

It was an intrigue. Everything must be, in these days of his new accession and the making of an Elwynim alliance-by-marriage.

And she saw very clearly that it was Tristen he wished to speak to, involving neither pigeons nor the census nor the desperation that, indeed, sent him here for refuge. He saw the wolves closing on him in this latest folly and he had interests to defend.

But it was, besides a necessity arrived upon him, also an opportunity grown all too rare, that he gather around him the truest hearts in the court. In the press and clatter of his father’s courtiers attempting to assure their influence and those who had been in less favor with his father attempting to gain from him what his father never would have given them, he had lost the peace that he had not valued when he had had it. Yes, the king would have a live wizard and a reputedly dead Sihhë-lord at his table tonight.

The king should have things entirely to hisliking at least now and again.

A fox traversed the hillside, a quick whisk of red and buff: Lusin noticed it first, and called Tristen’s attention to it, with the remark that all such creatures were uncommonly fine-furred this year. But that was a moment’s distraction. Uwen and the men, Lusin and the rest, had fallen to discussing Liss, the chestnut mare Uwen rode for the day. The stables had her up for sale, at a high price—and Uwen could not, would not. He refused such an extravagance on principle.

“You should buy her,” Tristen said for the hundredth time, and Uwen, who slipped Liss apples right along with those he brought for his regular mount Gia and his heavy horse Cass, said, for the hundredth time, “It’s too high, m’lord. Too high by far, —not for the mare, but for me to be spending…”

“I say you should,” Tristen objected.

“It’s very good in ye, m’lord, but ’at’s household money, which I ain’t for spendin’.”

“You need another horse.”

“If I need another horse, it’s a good stout-legged gelding I’d be usin’ next spring an’ not bring Gia across the river. An’ I can wait for a foal of hers when things settle. ’T is pure folly to be buying any forty-silver mare, m’lord, the likes of me—”

“A captain.”

“As ye say, m’lord, but a poor ’un.”

“You like her,” Tristen said, and true, Uwen’s hand had stolen to Liss’s neck, and his hands said yes while his look argued glum refusal.

“Ain’t practical,” was Uwen’s word on it. “Ain’t in the least practical.”

The argument always came to that.

“She moves well,” Lusin said.

“Aye,” Uwen said, sighing, “but too fine for me.”

And so it usually went. Uwen fell to discussing a foal from his bay mare, and her fine points, and the mileposts came. Tristen, distracted, let the conversation slip past him.

It was not that the world in general had taken on that hollow grayness of wizardry at work. He felt no insistence of ghosts, and his perceptions stayed anchored easily and solidly to the road while the men talked of horses. All signs assured him that the world was in good order. Yet since his flight on the hilltop, his furtive peek from moment to moment into Amefel, he kept slipping just slightly toward that grayness both he and wizards could reach.

He had begun to look for something, he knew not what, searching with an awareness dulled by doubts and distracted by colors and movement and the occasionally puzzling discussion of foal-getting around him. That gray place was wizardry, or something like it, and he was reluctant to use it. Emuin strongly warned him against it. He ought to take interest in the business of mares and foals and all the disturbing questions of life beginning—but this summer, Uwen said, and this summerremained gray to him, without detail or shape or substance. He felt afraid when he thought of it—he felt guilty at treading into that gray space that waited there—guilty at any use of the Sight he did have. Emuin had forbidden it.

True, Ylesuin would surely have gone down to defeat by sorcery if he had not been on Lewen field at Cefwyn’s side, and if the other lords of Ylesuin preferred not to acknowledge that fact as yet, he knew in his heart that the danger to the realm was not done. Sorcery might not rear up again into the threat they had faced at the end of summer, when shadows had gathered thick and threatening under the leaves of Marna Wood. The enemies they faced in Elwynor now were only Men, not shadows, but they were still fierce enemies who might at any moment resort to wizardry to prevent a Guelen incursion into Elwynor, and the uneasiness that had assailed him on the hilltop nagged at him like a stealthy movement at the edge of his sight.

Such ventures, free of Emuin’s witness, were rare and brief. He worried at the gray space with some furtive sense of need, for if he was distracted by the men around him now, the town toward which he was riding all but blinded him. With its noise and its strangeness, its textures, its smells, its clatter and its truths and its pretenses, it posed a barrier surer than Emuin’s prohibitions.

He had been afraid on the hilltop. He asked himself now was there a reason for the fear, or was it only the realization of so many questions, so many, many questions about the world which would never find an answer if this year was all he was to have, and if all of the days he did have left were to be spent either sitting in his room or taking brief rides in the company of these men, on permitted roads?

He longed for a wider freedom. In his earliest days in the world he could lose himself in the contemplation of the textures of common dust, and in such uncommon sights as Petelly’s mane, in which a yellow leaf had just now lodged. But nowadays he had questions not so much of what he saw before him as of what he did not see, or seeing, failed to comprehend. This festival to celebrate the death of the year was one. The constant company of guards against threats he knew dared not assail him was another: while what he most feared they could not so much as imagine—not the king’s men, not even Uwen, whose honesty he never doubted and who had ridden with him into the heart of shadows. Uwen’s this summerwas part of it. But not all.

Still, in this province of Guelessar he did what pleased the king and did his best to comfort his detractors. He emulated the other lords at court in speech and manners. He feigned boredom when he was near them, but he knew he never did it well… Cefwyn had told him from the beginning that he was very bad at lying. From his side, he found their malice tiresome and tedious, while he still found wonders to stare at in the sparkle of glass or the color of a lady’s skirt—and dared not.

Ask questions of them? He dared not that, either… as, today, he would, if he dared, ask any man the same questions that he had asked Emuin, and still worried at, still unanswered: how long will this autumn last? How long will winter be? How long until the spring? And could Uwen imagine tomorrow… or next year… so easily? A man who was not a Man in the ordinary sense was by no means sure of such matters when wizards talked about the wanderings of the sun. There was so much else, so very much else that Men took for granted and seemed to foresee with such clear assurance, while that gray space Men could not reach was always waiting to draw him in, more real and more truthful than he found comfortable.

The year, the true Year, by which Men reckoned time, would begin on Midwinter Night. But when spring came, then his year began all over again, or at least hewould have reached his own beginning point.

When spring came, king Cefwyn and all the men said, the kingdom of Ylesuin would go to war across the river to win Lady Ninévrisë her kingdom. Next springthis and next springthat ran through all court conversations as if winter, this dead, dying, most ominous season, were a negligible affair that they would all endure and think nothing of.

And perhaps winter and change were negligible, for ordinary men. But in his darkest hours, in everyone’s blithe talk of seasons and this constant repetition of in the spring, he knew that Uwen most surely had a confidence and a vision of things to come that he simply did not have and had never had. Ordinary men, too, took for granted they would fare better in the next year than the last. And he did not have that confidence. He had never seen a year but this one… and the glance homeward this afternoon had struck a strange and persistent uneasiness into his heart, as if he had looked beyond a boundary of more than rock and stone… as if long-stable forces had lurched into movement today, a small slippage in what had been fixed, and he had done it. He had begun it.

Perhaps when he came full circle of a year it would complete something. Mauryl had Called him into being for Mauryl’s reasons, but now that winter was coming and the wedding was near, Cefwyn found no use for him. Emuin had no time. Uwen was at hisdirection, not the other way around. That left him waiting, at loose ends, unable to imagine what that new year would bring him, or what he would do in it, or what he had ever been meant to do, beyond Mauryl’s purpose for him, which had been to defeat the enemy at Lewen field.

He had survived the field at Lewenbrook. He had defeated Mauryl’s enemy Hasufin and not ceased to exist afterward, unnatural creation that he was. So that was one great barrier he had passed. Should he not survive the next? He had no least idea now just why the anniversary of his beginning should loom in his thoughts as some mystic demarcation, but he found it did so with increasing force. Perhaps once he passed that day, that anniversary hour of his birth, then he would began to live years as other Men lived, with anticipation of season following season for many, many years.

And then perhaps he would see something besides gray in his future as other Men did. Or perhaps he would not.

Or was it possible then that all his gathering of knowledge, none of which precisely answered Mauryl’s purpose for him, was in vain? Was it possible that Mauryl’s spell would only last until it met some boundary of nature, and was it possible the year was that barrier? Might that identical night next spring send him hurtling again into the dark, all that he treasured forgotten, all that he had gathered dispersed with the elements that had made him?

Next spring would tell him.

And how long was a winter? How long, again, would autumn last? Did the autumn last the same number of days in every year?

He had asked master Emuin that a fortnight ago, trying to approach that greater, more confusing subject with the old man, but Emuin had turned yea and nay on the matter of seasons just when he had thought he understood, and Emuin had said, well, mostly autumn lasted a certain time, and added in the next breath that winter might come late this year, and, no, it was not just when the leaves decided to turn color, it was when the air grew cold.

And why did that happen? he had asked.

Because the sun goes early to bed, Emuin had said.

And why was that, sir?

Probably it grows weary of questions, Emuin had said with sudden asperity, meaning he, a wizard, and the wisest man Tristen knew, had reached the end of his patience, and the world, again, was more complex than a glance discovered.

Then Emuin, repenting, had pulled out charts and, all one glorious evening in Emuin’s tower room in Guelemara (and with the jewel-breasted pigeons wandering in and out the window) had showed him the travels of the sun through the stars. Emuin said that a year was fixed, but seasons varied, and showed him the chart of a year as the sun traveled and told him autumn varied.

So what men knew about the seasons was mostly true and sometimes not; it was guessable but not knowable, discernible by its signs but obscure in its presence and in its moment of ending. It was like so many other things men accepted without wonder. Yet in that uncertainty lay the pivot point of his existence—would he continue on, or cease to exist?

Meanwhile the men talked of mares and bonfires, ale and women, and the road turned and came out of the woods for a while, overlooking first sheep pastures gone all brown and dry, then the plowed fields that foretold a village. On most of the early days in fall when they had ridden this same road, plumes of smoke had marked the horizon once they reached this point, farmers burning off the stubble, adding the stinging smell of burning barley-straw to the smoke that always hung about the valleys.

But the unsteady wind today, changing from west to south, had made burning off fields and pastures quite foolhardy, so Tristen guessed, or perhaps the farmers were done with burning. The air remained unusually clear and clean as they crossed the edge of the king’s woods near Cressitbrook. A sport of wind, scampering beside the road, whipped up a skirl of leaves out of the wood’s edge uphill of them, and Petelly and Liss danced side by side along a golden path, a last forest enchantment of fire colors, earth colors. Golden fine leaves of alder and birch paved the road under them as they drew a little ahead. The guards jogged to keep up, alongside the substantial stream that came babbling and flowing on their right. It was a walk through a treasure-house, the last thin arch of branches. The snow might come before they rode this way again. All the colors would vanish from the land, buried in white and gray and cold.