“I did not lie. He rejected my offer of alliance, so I am forced to work on my own. Did he reject you?”

Her body had a woman’s shape, yet there remained something girlish in her speech and aspect, as if the body had grown apace while the mind was trapped and now hurried behind trying to catch up. “No. I left him. I seek to punish those who harm others, but he is afraid to pass judgment. How can he be? I encounter people so twisted in their hearts. They are locusts, eating everything in their path. And I saw a man cloaked as we are, only he was twisted, too, like Uncle Girish. There must be others, like me, who are not afraid to pass judgment on the ones whose hearts are diseased. We are the wolves. It is our obligation to cull the sick ones, so the tribe remains strong.”

Hari laughed bitterly. “The ones you seek are the ones who released the locusts.”

“Best you go home, lass,” said Marit, trying to sound kind, although the girl’s words disturbed her. “Find your companion and return to him. He is wiser than you know.”

But after they watered their horses and drank their fill, the girl followed them.

45

To fly lifted Nallo’s spirits. To skim through low-lying clouds and get soaked to the skin with unshed moisture made her laugh. To glide on the wind—currents and thermals, which Volias told her she would learn to identify and anticipate—while the earth rolled away on all sides gave her joy. No chanter or tale-spinner, she could think of no better way to describe the earth from her harness than that it was like a textured carpet of greens and browns and yellows, ribboned and splotched with the variegated blues of water. Glorious!

Volias took them in easy stages so she would not get too badly chafed by the harness. Even so, the mey fell away with breathtaking speed. They could cover a day’s journey in half a morning, and Volias said that they were going slow.

They flew upriver along the River Olo with the Lend rising to the south, its mysterious grasslands wavering like a dream in the distance. Then westward upriver along the River Hayi, with the Soha Hills rumpling the land to the north, air currents tangled. Surely they flew over the village where she had lived with her husband, but she could not pick out earth-bound landmarks from the air. Mount Aua reared his gleaming pate, and they were buffeted through the Aua Gap with the city of Horn seen below to resemble an onion chopped in half, its nested circles climbing the slope of a ridge that marked the terminus of a prominent range of hills whose name she did not know.

There was so much she did not know!

She’d never thought about it before.

Pil flew a ways off to her left and Volias to the right and out in front. Tumna kekked as they glided down the long descent to the Istrian Plain, known to Nallo only in the tales. She twisted in the harness, trying to see what Tumna had spotted. She kept her feet fixed on the training bar, while Volias hung with feet dangling, perfectly at his ease, and after a moment she realized something was moving where her feet blocked her view. Now it was behind them.