"Well, they're all gone but the smell. Let's get moving."

He turned his gray-green eyes away from the pass and glared at her. "Must you be in such hurry? I want to be sure no thief drops out to trail us."

Paks loosened her sword in its sheath. "Unlikely now. And with your magic arts, and this sword, we shouldn't have much to fear. I wanted to find a good camping spot before dark."

"Very well. Come along, then, and keep a good watch. Move as quietly as a human can."

Paks bit back an angry retort. It wouldn't do to quarrel with her only companion for the trip across the mountains; she had no other guide, and elves made dangerous enemies. She turned to the sturdy pack pony she'd bought from the Wagonmaster, and checked the pack a last time, then stroked Star's neck, and started up the narrow trail that forked away from the caravan route. She hoped Macenion would mellow as they traveled. So far he had been scornful, sarcastic, and critical. It seemed obvious that he knew a great deal about the mountains and the various trails across them, but he made his superior knowledge as painful as possible for anyone else. Now he walked ahead, leading his elven-bred horse whose narrow arched neck expressed disdain for the pack on its back.

But at the campfire that night, Macenion seemed to have walked out part of his bad temper, and regained his original charm. He lit the fire with one spell, and seasoned their plain boiled porridge with another. He set a spell to keep the horse and pony from wandering. Paks wanted to ask if he could not set one to guard the camp, so that they could both sleep through the night, but thought better of it, and offered to take the first watch instead.

Hot as it had been in the afternoon, it was cold that night, with that feeling of great spaces in movement that comes only on the flanks of mountains. Nothing threatened them that Paks could see or hear, but twice the hair on her arms and neck stood straight, and fear caught the breath in her throat. Macenion, when she woke him at the change of watch, and told him, simply laughed lightly. "Wild lands care not for humans, Paksenarrion—neither to hunt nor hide. That is what you feel, that indifference." She surprised herself by sleeping easily and at once.

For two days they climbed between the flanks of the mountain. Midway of the second, they were high enough to see once more the caravan route below and behind them, and the twist where it crossed the spine of the Copper Hills. Paks could barely discern the pale scar of the route itself, but Macenion declared that he could see another caravan moving on it, this time from west to east. Paks squinted across the leagues of sunlit air, wavering in light and wind, and grunted. She could not see any movement at all, and the brilliant light hurt her eyes. She turned to look up their trail. It crawled over a hump of grass-grown rock—what she would have called a mountain, if the higher slopes had not been there—and disappeared. In a few moments, Macenion too turned to the trail.