“The Hounds are fairly certain nobody's following,” Girvan said. “See? The leader's not sending back-trackers nearly as often as he did at first. Now he's doing it just enough to satisfy a cautious man. And we can be sure this fellow's careful. We could tell that back in Estcarp, by the way the ambush had been laid out.”
Weldyn looked up, scanning the countryside that lay ahead. “That must be the edge of Tor Marsh to the left, where the heavy mists are. Alizon Gap must lie beyond the bend in the road, where the Alizon Ridge ends. Hills. Just hills.”
Yareth also gazed at the Ridge, lying purple-smudged and hazy on the horizon. His eyebrows quirked speculatively. “That's the direction we are headed. It's the kind of country where I feel comfortable. We could go unseen. Everything considered, it is probably the safest route.”
Girvan stared at him in disbelief. “No! Absolutely not! The Gap is at its safest right now, on the heels of those who've gone through and set off the wards. They'll need time to gather energy and reset themselves.”
Yareth didn't seem to hear. “Now that we are close enough to see with our own eyes what lies ahead I think we should leave the road. Find a way through the hills. We can do it easily enough.” His voice sounded curiously flat.
“For once I fully agree with you, my brother Falconer,” Weldyn said. His voice had the same intonation as Yareth's. “We'll avoid the Marsh. Go through the hills.”
It did seem reasonable, Eirran thought, now that they were here, and could see what they were facing. Why risk the dangers of the swamp? Around her, the other began murmuring in agreement as well.
Girvan scowled at them. “The magic in this place must be scrambling your brains,” he said in disgust. “Weldyn, you're the one who first mentioned dangers in the heights.”
“I've changed my mind.”
“Listen. I come from the southern part of Alizon. There has to be a reason the people who live there call Alizon Ridge the Forbidden Hills. Nobody but those with something to hide dares go there. So if you want us to look like a band of thieves, robbers and cutthroats, I commend you to find your way into the country from that direction.”
“Aye, but we may have less to fear there than on the road. They're bound to have somebody, someplace, watching the Gap. In the hills, we can send the birds up to spy out anything dangerous in our path. If the kidnappers have perchance left a man to watch the road at the Gap, we can avoid him altogether.”
“If it were so easy, the Hounds would have used that way and as you can see, they didn't,” Girvan said. “They've got a lot of reasons to hurry, but they chose the Gap with all its danger and magics. Don't you think there's a reason for that?”
“Of course.” Yareth smiled coldly. “No Hound ever whelped could match a Falconer in anything he set out to do.”
“And also,” Weldyn said, “the stink of magic is not one that I have come to love. Some of us are shape-shifted. What if the disguises the Hags gave them and their horses are affected some way by the wards?”
Eirran listened intently; this was a question that troubled her even more than it did the others who were, as yet, unaware that her own magical disguise made her appear a man like they were. It made the choice of going through the hills that much more attractive to her.
Girvan snorted with derision. “Don't you think the Witches are smart enough or skillful enough to think about such things? Their shape-changings aren't so easily done away with.”
“My nature urges me to the hills,” Weldyn said stubbornly. “And so does my brother Falconer's.”
Yareth nodded. In this one matter, at least, the two Falconers were as one, however much they might disagree entirely about other matters, such as women, and wives.
“Well, there's one thing you haven't considered.”
Weldyn looked at Girvan, displeasure written on his face. “And what would that be?”
“The pretense we're traveling under, that we're blank shields looking for employment with other than the Hags of Estcarp. Honest men wouldn't come slinking into Alizon through the Forbidden Hills.”
“That must be taken into account,” Yareth said reluctantly.
“And another matter.” Girvan smiled a little, like a man who is about to play his top card. “If you go through the hills, you'll never know if the Hounds or their captives made it through themselves. You might be walking straight into the enemy land and have nothing to go for once you were there.”
There was a long silence. All at once, Eirran took a deep breath, as if she had been deprived of air for too long. The Witch's Jewel, hidden in her doublet, seemed to tingle against her skin.
That's my imagination, she thought. That's impossible. The Jewel died with the Witch. I don't know why I'm still carrying it.
But she made no move to throw it away. Instead, she flexed her shoulders, working an unexpected stiffness out of them.
She glanced around; the others had begun blinking and moving uneasily as well, as if coming out of a trance. With its vanishing, Eirran recognized the persuasive magic that had been working on them, trying to lead them away from their goal. But Girvan had told them that the wards were designed to take an intruder toward Tor Marsh. This magic, or whatever the strange impulse to enter Alizon Ridge was, had sought to send them in the opposite direction.
Yareth, pale of face, stared down at the toes of his boots. A damp breeze had sprung up and the horses, sensing water nearby, had become restless. They stamped and snorted, dragging at their reins. “Your arguments are unwelcome, but convincing,” he said at last. “I like it not, but you speak harsh truth. So I will take your advice, Girvan. We will keep to the road even though it leads us into illusion and deception and I long with all my being to turn aside.”
Girvan relaxed perceptibly. “As I said, sometimes the illusions are quiet, after someone has passed through recently,” he said. “Let us hope that this is the case with us, Yareth.”
“Let us hope also that you are right that the magic in this place is working on Weldyn and me in a different and more subtle fashion than on another, and that you are keeping us to the right path.” The Falconer stretched and loosened his muscles much as the others had done.
“Aye,” Hirl said. “While you were making your argument for the Alizon Ridge, it sounded very reasonable. The only way to take, actually. I was ready to follow you there. But Girvan's words have made me see the situation in a different light.”
“I agree,” Ranal said, and the others echoed him.
Girvan allowed himself a bitter smile. “For once I'm glad I am Alizon stock,” he said, “if it helps me keep a clear head when the rest of you are ready to rush off to your doom.”
“We are grateful for it,” Yareth said.
They turned to take one last look at land that was undeniably Estcarp. Then, with renewed purpose, they mounted their horses, nudged them forward, and once more took up the pursuit. As they rode, however, both Falconers ever cast longing glances toward the low mountains lying so close and so tempting.
II
Try as he might, Girvan could find no explanation for the strange urge that had come upon the Falconers to enter the Forbidden Hills and which had in turn communicated itself to the other men. As for the Gap itself, the rest of the company made no secret about hoping it would be as the guide had predicted. And to their intense relief, they were allowed to proceed without incident.
“As you said, the magical wards and defenses set by the Witches must indeed lie quiet for a time after being triggered,” Dunnis said.
“Or perhaps the spells are growing thin after so much time and use,” Loric commented.
“Or weren't much to begin with,” Weldyn said sourly.
Ranal spoke for all. “Whatever the reason, the situation as it is suits me more than I can tell you.”
Though dense fog arose as the band of Guardsmen pretending to be blank shields rode onward, the mists felt like those born naturally of the earth and the nearness of the marshlands where they traveled
rather than fashioned out of some malevolent magic. Nor did the land appear to change its shape, to try to drive them toward the swampland lying behind the sullen wall of cloud. To everyone's relief, both Falconers began to behave in a fashion more nearly normal, as they began concentrating once more on the trail and the task at hand.
“Ah,” Weldyn said. He leaned from his saddle, examining the ground beneath his horse's hooves. “They left the road here. The tracks are plain.”
Equally obvious a distance beyond was the spot where the Hounds had stopped for a while, probably to eat a hasty meal, and had then begun walking on foot, leading their mounts. Here and there the trackers pointed out where the ground had been torn by dog-claws, as if the animals had had to be forcibly restrained from running—not away, as reason dictated, but rather toward Tor Marsh. Eirran shuddered, not wanting to think about the kind of magic that could have prompted such a reaction.
The Falconers dismounted and, leading their horses by the reins, followed the footprints slowly, gleaning every scrap of information they could gather from the appearance of the trampled ground.
“What can you expect to find?” Loric said. “There are too many footprints, all on top of each other.”
“Notice that they tried to be very careful to walk where the first in line had trod,” Yareth said. “But they did not always succeed. See here.”
He pointed at a single clear print of a tiny foot, to the right of the main body of tracks. It was as if the diminutive owner of that foot had started to go in that direction and had been pulled back by force. But a few steps farther on, the entire company had turned right, to the east and away from the marshlands.
The muscles worked in Yareth's jaw. “They put one of the fledglings in the van, to smell out the magic, just as Kernon suggested they might.”
Eirran closed her eyes, trying to keep her voice steady. “Can—can you tell which one it was?”
“No,” he said. “But their tactic was successful. The fledgling led them back toward the main road, though it looks like someone didn't agree with the direction she wanted to go.” He straightened up and gazed westward. An enormous bank of thick fog obscured anything that lay beyond, as solid in appearance as a wall. Its very presence forbade a traveler to venture in that direction. “The Tor Marsh is cut off from the rest of the world, thoroughly and without recourse even when the other magic is quiet. I wonder why.”
“I can answer that,” Ranal said. “The Tormen blundered badly, back during the war. They gave aid to the Kolder, capturing some high-ranking prisoners and turning them over to the Kolder for a price—”
“High-ranking indeed,” Hirl said. “It was Lord Simon himself, and Lady Loyse of Verlaine. Never understood how the two of them got caught, or why the Tormen would deal with the Kolder for that matter.”
Ranal shrugged. “Whatever their reasons, they did it. And the Witches sealed off the Tor Marsh from that time forward. The Tor people aren't quite what you'd call human, so the stories go, and they never cared much for the outside world in any case. Now, so the stories go, the Witches have fixed it so you can blunder in easily enough if you're not careful but you'll never find your way out.”
“Convenient way to put a stopper in the Alizon Gap,” Weldyn said. “Well, we've learned what we could from this place. Let's be gone before the magic regains its power and snares us.”
III
The entire company felt uneasy, exposed, once they cleared the toe of the Alizon Ridge, the range of low mountains that divided Estcarp from Alizon, and entered the enemy land. But no one—neither the occasional traveler on the road nor the even rarer toiler in the wide fields and meadows—cast more than an incurious glance in their direction. Eirran, however, stared openly, as did the others who had never been this far north before. Even the Falconers riding proudly in the van, birds alternately perched on the saddle horn or soaring overhead, did not scorn to examine the countryside through which they passed.
These thorn fences, Eirran thought. They keep a traveler to the road, willy-nilly. They'll give us trouble if we have to flee cross country if we rescue the children. When.
Newbold came stooping back to Yareth's fist and “spoke” with him in falconsong. Yareth transferred the bird to his perch on the saddle and turned to Girvan. “Is there some secret to getting through these hedgerows?” he said. “Newbold tells me it's like a jumble of boxes when seen from the air.”
“Not through them,” Girvan said. “But there are openings, little gaps between one holding and another. Paths you can take if you know where they are.”
“We will have to teach our falcons to recognize these openings and paths,” Weldyn said. He spoke to Sharpclaw in the same avian language as Yareth and Newbold had used, and sent him winging skyward. A few moments later Newbold joined him aloft.
But though the birds quickly learned what was expected of them, the openings in the hedgerows proved to be both infrequent and ill-placed for the convenience of someone who was in a hurry to cross the country without using the road.
“It's simple,” the light-hearted Dunnis said. “We shall simply have to find a way to get out of Alizon as easily as we got in. Perhaps the Falconers’ birds can teach us how to fly.”
The other men laughed, even Weldyn, but Yareth merely smiled a little. Eirran shared his concern. The farther they rode, the stronger her feeling that they had escaped one trap only to ride headlong into another.
That is nonsense, she told herself sternly. We can't fail, now that we've come so far. We just can't.
She had begun to think the entire country of Alizon was tightly sewn into squares with the hedgerows representing the seams, when the thorny boundaries ended abruptly and the land opened out. A scattering of houses, wattle-and-daub over stone foundations, made up the outermost of the villages that inevitably cluster around a stronghold.
“Just beyond that rise is Alizon City,” Girvan said. “You can almost see the tallest turrets from here.”
Gooseflesh rose on Eirran's limbs and she shivered.
“Are we still agreed? We go in, pretend to join their Guardsmen —I mean Hounds—and then begin searching for the children? They could be anywhere by now, and we'll get farther in looking for them if we can work from the inside, so to speak. As one of them.”
Weldyn brushed fastidiously at his sleeve. “I wish we could clean up first. I hate to be seen covered with road-dust.”
Yareth stood in his stirrups, shading his eyes as if this slight additional height would allow him to catch sight of his goal despite distance and intervening countryside. “Plenty of time later. Let us not pause to rest, now that we're so close.”
He set spur to Rangin and the Torgian leaped ahead. Weldyn, unwilling for the younger Falconer to go ahead of him, dug his heels into his own horse, and the others were not far behind. After this fresh burst of speed, however, the party of Estcarpians settled back to a more moderate pace. They fell into their accustomed riding order—the Falconers in front, followed by Hirl and Girvan, then Loric and Ranal. “Kernon” brought up the rear with Dunnis. Eirran liked Dunnis because of his pleasant nature and had been pleased when it worked out that Dunnis was her usual trail companion.
Even though she thought she knew what to expect, she couldn't stifle an exclamation of surprise mixed with dismay when the town and castle came into view. It was far more daunting than she had expected. Compared to this, Estcarp's main castle was no more than a fortified dwelling-place and its city walls frail and ill-defended. But then, their purposes could not have been more dissimilar. Es Castle housed wisdom, and the kind of Power that did not come through feats of arms. What Alizon Castle housed, Eirran did not wish to think. The others were similarly affected by the sight and only the Falconers and Girvan did not cry out involuntarily.
“Castle Alizon has never fallen, except through infiltration or treachery from within,” Girvan said. There was a note of pride in his voice. He stared at the heavy, unyielding town walls, an unreadable ex
pression on his face.
This could not be pleasant for him. Eirran wondered if he could be thinking that he was, by some lights and in some views, a traitor to his native land.
But she didn't have long to ponder what Girvan's thoughts might be. The eight men pretending to be blank shields looking for employment were already crossing the threshold of the mighty gate of Alizon City.
IV
The eight dismounted once they got into the town proper and at Girvan's suggestion put their horses in a public stable where they could be fed, watered, and properly groomed for the first time since they had left Es City. The Torgians acted as if they still had leagues of travel left in them, but they all accepted nosebags of oats with more eagerness than they had shown for trail rations.
“I'll ask around at this tavern,” Girvan said. “I'm better at this than the rest of you would be. After all, I'm an Alizonder by birth. People will be more likely to talk openly with me.”
“We will wait here in the town square,” Yareth said.
While Girvan went about his errand in the tavern, the others strolled around the square, getting their first good look at an Alizonder city. Though Ranal, Loric, Hirl, Dunnis and “Kernon” didn't rate many second glances, the same was not true of the Falconers. Birds on fists, they attracted open stares from every side. But, proudly, they pretended to be oblivious to the attention they garnered.
“Don't see one Falconer every day, let alone two,” Dunnis whispered in amusement to Eirran.
She shrugged and said nothing.
By chance they had arrived on market day in Alizon City, and small farmers had come from everywhere, setting up their wagons and displaying their goods. Despite the poorness of the soil, there were many stalls offering late winter vegetables for sale. Eirran knew what was involved in growing foodstuffs. Remembering her own garden at home, she could imagine how the farmers had painstakingly added soil to their small plots of ground, nourished and cared for it, digging in all their table scraps and animal droppings so as to enrich it enough that seeds could take root and grow. So had she done at home, though the soil around Blagden was a hundred times better than Alizon's.