Sometimes she forgot that Ian had never been more than a few hundred miles from the place he’d been born. Most people traveled far less than that, of course, but you thought about them as the ones you rode by when you passed a farm or village. It had been all travel since they met. She’d never had the slightest impulse to farm, but she was beginning to feel that two years of rarely sleeping in the same spot for more than a day running was taking mobility too far.

The western horizon was jagged; the plain of sagebrush and yellow-brown grass heaved up into rocky heights, gray striped with red, and woods of aspen and bristlecone and lodgepole in sheltered spots. They had no food with them, but that wasn’t the problem it would have been later in the year. They did have their bows and game looked to be available if not plentiful and Rangers learned how to forage for nuts and roots and edible greens. More serious was the lack of all camping gear; no tents, no bedding, no salt, nothing to cook with, only a few axes and hatchets. And . . .

“No horses,” Ian said succinctly. “Plus we’ve got wounded and carrying them’s going to slow us a lot. Not to mention a two-year-old.”

Ritva sighed. “We’ve done what Operation Lúthien was supposed to do, more or less,” she said. “All those people in Boise heard Cecile . . . and Juliet . . . and we’ve got them and Martin doesn’t. That was real important, it’s why this was such a high-priority mission. It would be a lot better if we could get them back to Montival quickly and completely out of his reach, of course. I suppose he’ll have a cavalry brigade headed this way as fast as he can.”

A long whistle split the air from the east, where the sentry was stationed. She read its modulations as she would speech or Sign: horsemen in sight.

The stillness dissolved in a rush for weapons and gear.

“No, I do not think it was an accident we met you,” Rimpoche Tsewang Dorje said later that night, after the rising of the moon.

He leaned forward to pour himself a cup of the herb tea from the pot that rested by the campfire. More glowed across the rolling plain, hundreds of them. The folk of Chenrezi Monastery and the Valley of the Sun that looked to it for leadership and the ranches and tribes allied to it had sent their riders to war, across the wilderness to join the High King’s host. That was partly because the questers had lived among them for a whole winter; and more because they trusted the Abbot when he told them it was necessary.