“Make the light,” she said. Her voice was a whimper, plaintive. “Can’t you make the light?”
“I don’t know,” he said, but he tried to bring the werelight round them, and after a while the ground glimmered faintly before their feet.
“We should find shelter and rest,” he said.
“I can’t stop,” she said, and started to walk again.
“You can’t walk all night.”
“If I lie down I won’t get up. I want to see the Mountain.”
Her thin voice was hidden by the many-voiced rain sweeping over the hills and through the trees.
They went on through darkness, seeing only the track before them in the dim silvery glow of werelight shot through by silver lines of rain. When she stumbled he caught her arm. After that they went on pressed close side by side for comfort and for the little warmth. They walked slower, and yet slower, but they walked on. There was no sound but the sound of the rain falling from the black sky, and the little kissing squelch of their sodden feet in the mud and wet grass of the track.
“Look,” she said, halting. “Medra, look.”
He had been walking almost asleep. The pallor of the werelight had faded, drowned in a fainter, vaster clarity. Sky and earth were all one grey, but before them and above them, very high, over a drift of cloud, the long ridge of the mountain glimmered red.
“There,” Anieb said. She pointed at the mountain and smiled. She looked at her companion, then slowly down at the ground. She sank down kneeling. He knelt with her, tried to support her, but she slid down in his arms. He tried to keep her head at least from the mud of the track. Her limbs and face twitched, her teeth chattered. He held her close against him, trying to warm her.
“The women,” she whispered, “the hand. Ask them. In the village. I did see the Mountain.”
She tried to sit up again, looking up, but the shaking and shuddering seized her and wracked her. She began to gasp for breath. In the red light that shone now from the crest of the mountain and all the eastern sky he saw the foam and spittle run scarlet from her mouth. Sometimes she clutched at him, but she did not speak again. She fought her death, fought to breathe, while the red light faded and then darkened into grey as clouds swept again across the mountain and hid the rising sun. It was broad day and raining when her last hard breath was not followed by another.
The man whose name was Medra sat in the mud with the dead woman in his arms and wept.
A carter walking at his mule’s head with a load of oakwood came upon them and took them both to Woodedge. He could not make the young man let go of the dead woman. Weak and shaky as he was, he would not set his burden down on the load, but clambered into the cart holding her, and held her all the miles to Woodedge. All he said was “She saved me,” and the carter asked no questions.
“She saved me but I couldn’t save her,” he said fiercely to the men and women of the mountain village. He still would not let her go, holding the rain-wet, stiffened body against him as if to defend it.
Very slowly they made him understand that one of the women was Anieb’s mother, and that he should give Anieb to her to hold. He did so at last, watching to see if she was gentle with his friend and would protect her. Then he followed another woman meekly enough. He put on dry clothing she gave him to put on, and ate a little food she gave him to eat, and lay down on the pallet she led him to, and sobbed in weariness, and slept.
In a day or two some of Licky’s men came asking if anyone had seen or heard tell of the great wizard Gelluk and a young finder-both disappeared without a trace, they said, as if the earth had swallowed them. Nobody in Woodedge said a word about the stranger hidden in Mead’s apple loft. They kept him safe. Maybe that is why the people there now call their village not Woodedge, as it used to be, but Otterhide.