Rap spent most of the time in lonely brooding. He had been four weeks on his journey now. The king might be already dead and Inos had not been told of his illness.
Or had she?
He watched the goblins as they lived their boring winter lives, studiously ignoring him except when hospitality demanded that they must offer him food or drink. He endured Little Chicken’s mocking contempt on the rare occasions when he appeared in the adults’ building. He wished fervently that his talent for befriending animals would work on people, like Andor’s.
Always his thoughts came back to Andor.
King Holindarn knew a word of power. So Andor had said.
If Andor had gone to such trouble to try to learn Rap’s word, then he would also try to steal the king’s.
Words were passed on deathbeds. If Inos could return to Krasnegar in time, her father would tell her the word that had been passed down from Inisso. More and more, Rap was becoming convinced that Darad would revert to Andor, and Andor would seek out Inos at Kinvale. He would use his occult charm upon her to win her trust, then accompany her back to Krasnegar. She must be told about her father, but she must also be warned against Andor.
He had gained a week while Rap was a prisoner at Raven Totem. He might be gaining time now if he were already over the mountains, beyond the storm’s reach. As soon as the weather cleared, Rap would tell Little Chicken to increase the pace again.
Somehow he must keep up.
The weather cleared at last. The journey resumed and became more than an endurance test. Now it was a contest. The runs became longer, the rests shorter. Little Chicken would offer the challenge, and Rap would stubbornly accept. He ran until blood flowed from his nostrils and life was an endless torment of pain and exhaustion.
It was madness. With his farsight, Rap was incredibly surefooted, but if Little Chicken sprained an ankle, the two of them would die in the wilderness. They both knew that. Rap was not going to admit that he was in any way inferior to the goblin. But he was, as Little Chicken could demonstrate with no apparent effort. Rap’s supernatural abilities he merely ignored, so that they did not count. Day by day he raised the wager. Day by day Rap would call his raise. He despised himself for it, but he could not stop. He had cheated the goblin out of the opportunity to torture him—so now he was torturing himself. The agonies might not be quite so severe, although at times that seemed debatable, but they went on longer—much, much longer, day after agonizing day. The harder Rap tried, the more amusing the goblin seemed to find him . . . and the harder he tried.
Then one night, Rap thought he saw his chance. It had been the worst run yet—as they all seemed to be—and he reeled on his feet as he gathered firewood. The goblin allowed him to help with that task now, because his efforts were so obviously inferior. Suddenly, through the blur of fatigue and pain, Rap sensed movement within his range. He straightened, searched, and decided that it was a small deer. Calling for silence, he sent Fleabag out to circle beyond the doe and then drive it. Puzzled but impassive, Little Chicken squatted down, watching without a word. Rap strung his bow, notched an arrow, and waited, trembling with exhaustion and mental effort, carefully tracking his quarry’s approach. The deer burst through the trees where he knew it would, at easy range. He shot.
He missed.
Without seeming to hurry at all, Little Chicken rose, lifted the bow from Rap’s hand, stooped to pick up an arrow, aimed, shot, and unerringly nailed down their supper just before it vanished into the trees. He handed the bow back with a smile that showed more enamel than any human mouth should contain.
Shrouded in silent misery, Rap watched the skinning and cooking. It had been fatigue making his hands shake, of course. Even as clumsy an archer as he was should not have missed that one. He had tried to look clever and he had made a fool of himself again. Every joint and muscle in his body was shaking. This last leg of the journey seemed to have lasted for days without a break. Had he thought to notice the moon’s position when they started, he could have estimated the time, but he knew only that it had been many, many hours. He was so grossly exhausted that he was not sure he would be able to eat any of the venison anyway. He could barely keep his eyes open, his chest burned, his legs ached—and Little Chicken seemed as fresh as if he had just climbed out of bed. There had to be a limit to the amount of this torture that a man could take, and Rap was certain he had reached it now.
Why not just admit that the contest was hopeless? Who cared?
What did it matter?
Then Rap saw that the goblin was studying him from his crouch by the cooking fire, and his big ugly mouth was curled in disdainful amusement again. “Eat now, Flat Nose. Then sleep? Or run more?”
Rap glared back at the smirk.
Something inside him whimpered as he spoke.
“Run more, of course,” he said.
5
A hiss of rain rushing over glass died away into petty dripping noises. Logs at the far end of the room spat and spluttered sleepily in the great hearth, and somewhere far off a door was tapping.
Rain was a sign of spring, Inos thought happily, and she marveled once more that it should come so soon. For long months yet the iron heels of winter would stamp on poor old Krasnegar, but yesterday she had gathered snowdrops. Flowers! Trees had never impressed her much, but flowers did.
It was a drowsy do-nothing afternoon and she was curled into a big chair in the library with a book of wide erudition and archaic, inscrutable handwriting. Near the fire Aunt Kade nodded over a slim romance. Various other ladies and gentleman were also pretending to read—few of them seriously. Inos was serious, but about ready to admit defeat. She could ask to have a scrivener transcribe the key passages for her, of course, but she had an inexplicable certainty that she was not supposed to be troubling her pretty little head over this particular tome. The request would not be refused, she thought, but the results might be a long time in coming, and meanwhile the book itself would be unavailable. Spring! Summer would arrive in its turn and her ship would be waiting. She sighed and twisted a lock of golden hair and stared at the rain-blurred windows. Krasnegar? To be really honest, she did not long so much for Krasnegar now. She missed her father of course, but who else? There was no one of her rank there, and no one of her age who would understand one word she might say about Kinvale.
Inos turned to gaze for a moment at Aunt Kade’s drooping eyelids, wondering how she had stood it. Forty years or more she had lived in Kinvale, as wife and widow, and then she had thrown it all up and gone back to Krasnegar to mother a suddenly bereaved niece. A mere niece—a niece who had not appreciated her until she had seen what the old dear had given up. To return to stark and barren Krasnegar for a niece, when Kinvale had offered so much?
And she? Of course she must go back. She could not doubt it. She would return in the summer, unwed and unbetrothed, apparently.
Five months since Andor had gone . . .
Aunt Kade and her Grace—or Disgrace?—the duchess had run out of candidates at last. The long parade of suitors that had begun with the glorious Andor had ended now with the unspeakable Proconsul Yggingi. Andor had been an accident and Yggingi was a disaster. Yggingi had not been invited to Kinvale for Inos’ sake—Kade had assured her of that quite vehemently. After all, he was twice her age and already married. Unfortunately Yggingi himself did not seem to appreciate such considerations. He was the worst yet, the bottom of the barrel, and not even the official barrel. Any barrel. There were a few pleasant young men in residence at the moment—men who might be allowed to brighten a maiden’s day, if not share her life—but not one of them dared come near Inos now. Yggingi’s menacing glare had walled her off as his private preserve.
One of the reasons she had fled here, to the library, was to escape the creepy attentions of Proconsul Yggingi. A library was the last place that man was likely to visit.
How beautifully Andor had read poetry to her!