Free Sartor by Sherwood Smith Page A

heartbeats, until the soft, moist air around them soothed minds as
well as tired bodies. They splashed into a running stream, and bent and drank
of the sweet, cold water. Then they collapsed on the soft grassy bank, and once
their terror had subsided, all three fell straight into exhausted sleep.

SIX
    Kessler knew that Norsunder’s commanders doubted his
hold on sanity. He didn’t care. Surviving childhood in the deliberate
savagery of his uncle’s fortress in Narad, capital of Chwahirsland, had
refined in him the ability to live in the moment, detached from any emotion
except anger, which lent strength and speed.
    But even that had to be rationed, for he’d seen what
uncontrolled rage did to his uncle’s plans. Overweening self-indulgence
in a taste for vengeance and cruelty for the sake of cruelty had been the
direct cause of all of Shnit Sonscarna’s defeats. Though King Shnit’s
army was the largest in the world, it was also the worst trained—again
because his uncle was afraid of uprisings. There could be no thinker, no
leader, but him. And that’s why all the Sonscarnas were dead, except for Kessler’s
doddering uncle Kwenz, no threat to anyone, and Kessler, who had escaped.
    So he had learned self-control, learned it so well his mind
was like a series of locked vaults behind which little but darkness could be
descried, even in Norsunder, a realm where mind raids were both common and
unheralded.
    Here in Shendoral, he sensed the blanketing protection of
ancient magic that denied outside access to his mind. He also knew that the
magic in Zydes’s scope was not able to penetrate the border of the
woodland.
    For a brief time, he was free.
    But it would be brief. He had no illusions about that.
    He let the horse range among the sweet grasses of Shendoral,
and he himself sat on a riverbank to indulge in the luxury of solitary thought
while not being spied upon.
    When night fell, he’d resume his duties. As long as he
reappeared at the Base with the Landis girl as ordered, Zydes would not be interested
in an exact accounting of his time.
    While he sat down with his back to a tree and the morning’s
ration of hard biscuit and cheese in his hand, an hour’s brisk walk
northwards the three girls roused at last from sleep.
    Lilah woke first, looking up at first with non-comprehension
and then with pleasure through a ceiling of interlaced broad leaves to blue sky
beyond. Blue sky! The pure blue of a cool autumn morning. And below it,
crimson, amber, gold, yellow, rust, and myriad shades in-between delighted eyes
that had been looking for a seeming eternity on indistinct gray-grown haze.
    “Oh,” she breathed.
    Merewen hugged herself, knowing that she was home. Surely
danger could not follow them in Shendoral! “Savar’s house is not
far,” she cried. “There we can find hot food, and bathe, and rest.”
    “There are seasons here?” Lilah asked. “I
thought time didn’t work right.”
    “Well, we have seasons, and I have grown from very
small to what I am now,” Merewen answered gesturing down herself to her
bare feet. “So time is... time. But not the same in all parts of the
forest, so Savar said.”
    All day the girls walked toward the northeast bulge of the
woodland, where Shendoral ridged the gentle valley that led down to the Arveas
Lake. They stopped only to eat. Blackberry bushes grew wild here, as did
grapevines, and they found gleanings of nuts everywhere. The berries were not
the strange, withered ones they’d found on the periphery of Shendoral. These
were sweet and good, evidence of rain and the march of seasons. Munching these
foods staved off hunger, but they all looked forward to the good soup that Merewen
promised would be waiting.
    Hunger, leftover tiredness, and memory of the chase of the
night before kept them from talking much. Speed was necessary, they felt—Lilah
out of fear, Atan out of the sense of urgency that had driven her since she
woke up weeks before and knew that she had