She slept poorly, hungry and cold, and waked early. The road was so poor . . . perhaps she should retrace her steps for a distance and see if she could come to more travelled parts? She tore some rags and bound her feet with them to ease the chafing of her boots . . . heels and toe were raw and sore. High in the sky, a single hawk circled – why was there never more than one in sight at a single time? Did they keep territories like some other animals for their hunting? And again that strange flash, as if she saw through the hawk’s eyes – was it her laran again? – and thought of Preciosa. Preciosa, gone, free, lost. It is strange, I miss her more than father or brothers or home….
The time for fruiting was past, but she found a few small fruits still clinging to a bush, and ate them, wishing there were more. There was a tree which she knew she could strip the outer bark and eat the soft inner part, but she was not that hungry, not yet. She saddled her horse, weary in spite of her long sleep. Slowly it was beginning to come over her that she could lose herself and even die in these lonely and utterly uninhabited forests. But perhaps today she would meet with someone and begin to find her way to Nevarsin, or some to some little village where she could buy food.
After an hour of riding she came to a fork in the road, and paused there, indecisive, aching with hunger, exhausted. Well, she would let her horse graze for a bit while she climbed to the top of a little knoll nearby and looked about, to see if she could spy out any human habitation, the smoke of a woodcutter’s fire, a herder’s hut even. She had never felt so alone in her life. Of course not. I have never been so alone in all my life, she thought, with wry humor, and clambered up the knoll, her knees aching.
I have not eaten well for days. I must somehow find food and fire this night, whatever comes of it. She was almost wishing she had stayed with Rory and his abominable old grandmother; at least there she had been warm and fed . . . would it really have been so bad, to marry that oaf?
I would rather die in the wilderness, she told herself fiercely, but she was frightened and hungry, and from the top of the knoll she could see only what looked like a wilderness of trees. Far away, at the furthest edge of her sight, a high mountain loomed, to the Northwest, and pale shadows around it which she knew to be snowcapped peaks . . . there lay the Hellers themselves, to which these foothills were only little lumps in the land, and beyond them, the Wall Around the World, which was, as far as she knew from traveller’s tales, impassable; at least no one she had ever known had gone beyond it, and on every map she had ever seen, it delimited the very edge of known country. Once she had asked her governess what lay beyond it.
“The frozen waste,” her governess told her, “No man knows. . . .” The thought had intrigued Romilly, then. Now she had had enough of wandering in unknown country, and felt that some human company would be welcome.
Although what she had seen already did not make her feel very hopeful about what she would meet with from men on the roads..
Well, she had been unlucky, that was all. She sighed, and pulled her belt tighter. It would not hurt her to go on fasting another day, though tonight she must find some food, whatever happened. She looked around again, carefully taking the bearings of the great peak – it seemed to her that there was something near the top, a white building, some kind of manmade structure; she wondered if it was castle, Great House or, perhaps, one of the Towers. Northwest; she must be careful to keep track of the angle of the sun and the passage of time so that she would not begin walking in circles. But if she followed where the road led, she would be unlikely to do that.