That sun. It was like the air, better than any sun that ever rose. I could have yelled for pure gladness at being aboveground.

I looked back; the mountains were fading off north and west, many miles behind me now, their lower parts missing in the haze, their tops transparently glowing with the dawn, like islands in the sky.

I mounted and the horse sprang off, galloping southeast.

I had only two notions on the matter of direction. First, that the pursuers might guess I would strike back east and north, west even, to get on the old tribal routes, and lose myself among my adoptive people. Second, that my shortest road to the sea lay southeast. The sea was a phenomenon I had never clapped eyes on for myself, yet it seemed, from the tales, a destination ultimate and uncompromising.

The ocean’s edge, the brink of the land; the lip of Chaos. Who would reason the hunted wolf would run that way?

The fresh air had me drunk with optimism. My food was three days gone; I picked up stones from the way, and used my belt as a sling to get a hare for my dinner, a trick I had learned as a boy. Now that I was free of the tunnel, and the ground rising, I kept a check on what came behind me. Seeing no sign of followers through the daylight, I made a fire that night in a hollow of the low hills where young oak trees grew, and broiled the hare’s flesh, while the horse cheerfully cropped spring grass. There was even a pool to drink from among the trees. These normal things were bounty after the ungiving majesty of the under-mountain road.

I made on before sunup. Having gained time, I had no mind to lose it again.

It was hilly country for the most part, though off to the east lay a flat, smoky plain, mirrored by countless dim green waters, so that it seemed at times portions of the bright sky had fallen there among its spreading osiers; the edge of some marshland I was glad to have bypassed.

The second night, there was a cave. I slept too comfortably and lost some hours riding.

That day the land peaked up, rough grassy country and thin woodland, spruce, oak saplings, pine and ivy-clad rock-thrusts, and here and there a great white mound of limestone, old quarries mined no longer and sprinkled yellow with premature wildflowers.

Having got high enough, I watched some minutes among the trees, scanning through the cloud and sun-play over the terrain below and behind. It was raining northward, obscuring the insubstantial mountains. Presently, between the rain and the light, I made out a formation of dark specks. The hunt.

They were less than a day away from me already, and had gauged my direction. Perhaps they had seen me on the skyline ahead, or picked up the marks of hooves in the softer clays of the marsh-skirting slopes.