28

AT THE SEVEN STANDING STONES

Gaborn rode full-tilt, and though his mount was one of the strongest hunters in Mystarria, in the afternoon he felt it giving way beneath him.

The stallion wheezed for breath. Its ears drooped, lying almost flat. Serious signs of fatigue. Now, when it leapt a tree or jumped some gorse, it did so recklessly, letting brambles scrape its hind legs, setting its feet loosely. If Gaborn did not stop soon, the horse would injure itself. In the past six hours, he’d traveled over a hundred miles, circling south, then heading back northwest.

Gaborn felt certain Raj Ahten’s scouts must have begun to lose mounts by now. He could hear but two or three dogs baying. Even Raj Ahten’s war dogs had grown weary of the chase. Weary enough, he hoped, to make mistakes.

He rode on, leading Iome through a narrow gorge. Night’s shadows were falling.

He could see quite well here. As if the eyebright administered the night before had not yet worn off. This amazed him, for he’d expected it to lose its effect long ago.

He felt thoroughly lost, had no idea where he’d managed to end up, yet it was with a light heart that he raced down into a deep ravine, covered in pine.

Here he found something he’d never expected to encounter so far into the Dunnwood—an ancient stone road. Pine needles had fallen on it over the ages, and trees grew up through the middle of it. Yet all in all, as he headed deeper into the gorge, the path could be tracked.

It seemed a decidedly odd road, too narrow for even a narrow wagon, as if it were made to be trod by smaller feet.

Iome must not have expected this road, either, for she watched it with wide eyes, looking this way and that. In the darkness, her pupils dilated.

The woods grew silent as they rode for the next half-hour, and the trees grew immense. The trio descended from the pines into a grove of vast oaks, trees larger than Gaborn had ever seen or imagined, spreading wide over their heads, the oak boughs creaking softly in the night.

Even the lowest branches rose eighty feet overhead. Old man’s beard clung to those boughs in vast curtains, thirty and forty feet long.

On the hill beside him, in the trees, Gaborn saw lights winking among the boles of trees. Tiny holes had been dug beneath a rock shelf. A ferrin warrior rushed before the light, his tail whipping.