He didn’t move, or speak. The tapping came again, twice more-light, teasing. Then it stopped, and there was silence again in the autumn night. Remembering many things, Crispin watched the moon leave the window, trailing stars, and finally fell asleep.
He woke to morning noises in the yard below. In the moment he opened his eyes, surfacing from some lost dream, he had a swift, sure realization about Zoticus’s bird, and some wonder that it had taken him so long.
He was not greatly surprised to discover, when he went downstairs for watered ale and a morning meal, that the Lady Massina Baladia of Rho-dias, the Senator’s wife, and her mounted escorts and her servants had already left, at first daybreak.
There was a mild, unexpected regret here, but it had been almost intolerable to envisage his re-entry into this sphere of mortal life as a coupling with a Jaded Rhodian aristocrat playing bed games on a country night- not even knowing his true name. In another way, it might have been easier that way, but he wasn’t. .. detached enough for that.
On the road again in the chill early-morning breeze, he soon caught up with the merchants and the cleric who had waited for him at the inn up the road. Settling into the long day’s striding, he remembered his realization upon first awakening. He drew a breath, released Linon from silence in the bag on the mule’s back, and asked a question.
‘How dazzlingly brilliant of you,’ the bird snapped icily. ‘She did come last night, didn’t she? I was right, wasn’t I?’
White clouds were overhead, swift before the north wind. The sky was a light, far blue. The sun, safe returned from its dark journey under the icy cold rim of the world, was rising directly in front of them, bright as a promise. Black crows dotted the stubble of the fields. A pale frost glinted on the brown grass beside the road. Crispin looked at it all in the early light, wondering how he’d achieve that rainbow brilliance of colour and gleaming with glass and stone. Had anyone ever done frost-tipped autumn grass on a dome?
He sighed, hesitated, then replied honestly, ‘She did. You were right. I locked the door.’
‘Pah! Imbecile. Zoticus would have kept her busy all night long and sent her back to her own room exhausted.’
‘I’m not Zoticus.’
A feeble answer and he knew it. The bird only laughed sardonically. But he wasn’t really up to sparring this morning. Memories were too much with him.
It was colder today, especially when the clouds passed in front of the rising sun. His feet were cold in their sandals; boots tomorrow, he thought. The fields and the vineyards on the north side of the road were bare now, of course, and did nothing to stay the wind. He could see the first dark smudge of forests in the far distance now, north-east: the wild, legendary woods that led to the border and then Sauradia. The road would fork today, south towards Mylasia, where he could have caught a ship earlier in the year for a swift sailing to Sarantium. His slow course overland would angle north, towards that untamed forest, and then east again, the long Imperial road marching along its southernmost edgings.
He slowed a little, opened one of his bags as the mule paced stolidly along over the flawlessly fitted stone slabs of the road, and took out his brown woollen cloak. After a moment, he reached into the bag again and withdrew the bird on its leather thong, dropping it around his neck again. An apology, of sorts.
He’d expected Linon’s brittle, waspish tone after the inflicted silence and blindness. He was already growing used to that. What he needed to do now, Crispin thought, closing and retying the bag and then wrapping himself in the cloak, was come to terms with a few other aspects of this journey east under an assumed name, bearing a message from the queen of the Antae for the Emperor in his head, and a creature of the half-world around his neck. And among the things now to be dealt with was the newly apprehended fact that the Grafted bird he was carrying with him was undeniably and emphatically female.