“I will ask Jandria if we have need of game for the pot,” she said quickly, “and you shall fly Preciosa if she will fly at your command; surely Jandria could not object if you want to get a bird for your own supper, unless you try to make one of us pluck and cook it for you.”
“I can do that myself,” Caryl said proudly, then grinned, lowering his eyes. “If you will tell me how,” he said in a small voice, and Romilly giggled, Caryl giggling with her.
“I will help you cook the bird for a share of it – is that a bargain, then?”
Three nights later they began to ride along the shore of a lake, lying in the fold of the hills, and Caryl pointed to a great house, not quite a castle, situated at the head of the long valley.
“There lies Mali, and my father’s castle.”
Romilly thought it looked more like a palace than a fortress, but she said nothing. Caryl said, “I shall be glad to see Father again, and my mother,” and Romilly wondered; how glad would his father be, to see a son held hostage by his worst enemy’s men, and taken from the safety of Nevarsin whence he had sent him? But she said nothing of this. Only that morning, flying through Preciosa’s eyes, she had seen out over the whole vast expanse of the Plains of Valeron, armies massing and moving on the borders. The war would soon be upon the green lowlands again.
And all that day they rode through a country scoured clean by war; farmsteads lay in ruins, great stone towers with not one stone left upon another, only scattered rubble as if some monstrous disruption like an earthquake had shaken them from their very foundations; what army, what dreadful weapon had done that? Once they had to turn aside, for as they came to the top of the rise, they saw in the valley before them a ruined village. A strange silence hung over the land, though houses stood undamaged, serene and peaceful, no smoke rose from the chimneys, no sound of horses stamping, children playing, hammers beating on anvils or the work-songs of women weaving or waulking their cloth. Dread silence lay over the village, and now Romilly could see a faint greenish flickering as if the houses were bathed in some dreadful miasma, an almost tangible fog of doom. They lay, pulsing faintly greenish, and she knew suddenly that when night fell the street and houses would glow with an uncanny luminescence in the dark.
And even as she looked, she saw the lean, starved figure of a predator slinking silently through the streets; and while they looked, it moved more slowly, subsided, lay down in its tracks, still stirring feebly, without a cry.
Jandria said curtly, “Bonewater-dust. Where that stuffs been scattered from the air, the land dies, the very houses die; should we ride through there, we would be in no better case than that woods-cat before many nights. Turn about – best not come too near; this road is closed as if a nest of dragons guarded it; or better, for we might somehow manage to fight even dragons, but against this there’s no fighting, and for ten years or more this land will lie accursed and the very beasts of the forests be born awry. Once I saw a mountain-cat with four eyes and a plains chervine with toes for hooves. Uncanny!” She shuddered, pulling her horse around. “Make as wide a circle as we can around this place! I’ve no wish to see my hair and teeth fall out and my blood turn to whey in my veins!”
The wide detour added two or three days to their ride, and Janni warned Romilly not to fly Preciosa.
“Should she eat of game tainted by that stuff of war, she would die, but not soon enough to save her great suffering; and should we eat of it, we too might lose hair and teeth if no worse. The taint of the foul stuff lingers long in all the country round, and spreads in the bodies of predators and harmless beasts who wander through the blighted countryside. She can fast for a day or two more safely than she can risk hunting too close to that place.”