Page 46 of Into the West

And then there was a brief flash of light that blinded her for a moment. When she could see again, the Gate upright was in place, looking as if it had always been there, standing tall and slightly curved against the background of water and riverbank. And between this upright and the one still on the bank stretched the peculiar reflective-water effect of a Gate that was ready to use.

“Has Jonaton gotten his Gate up already?” she asked Sai in open astonishment.

The old man sighed and sagged a little. “Very likely. Of course, this just might be a sign that the power from the ley-line on the other side is coming to this Gate through the anchor, but I doubt that very much. The boy is good, and he’s younger than we are, curse him. He can do alone what it takes two or three of us Old Men.”

“And he’s handsome, too! This is how we know all the gods hate us,” Venidel chimed in.

“Every last one,” Endars agreed.

At just that moment, there was a plop and a splash—and a crude little boat made of bits of wood held together with a bit of string with a leaf for a sail swirled away from the Gate on the sluggish current.

“Well, there’s the answer. The other Gate is up. Jonaton did all the heavy work at his end, and we might as well get moving,” Sai said.

“You are going to lie down in your bunk,” Briada Fairweather said, with a jerk of her head toward the barges. “Leave the moving to us.”

Since there really wasn’t anything else to be done at the camp, Sai allowed his fatigue to show, and plodded over to the men’s barge, followed by Endars and Venidel. Delia ran back and jumped onto the middle barge to keep a lookout next to Amethyst. She was pleased to see that the Fairweather lads took up similar positions on the first and last barges bearing full-sized crossbows and deadly war bolts meant for piercing armor.

As for Briada, she had a war bow of her own, and was mounted on the Charger that Kordas had given her. Anything that the arrows or Delia brought down, the horse would turn into broken bones, blood, and feathers. Briada chirruped to the Tow-Beast to tell him to move on.

The Tow-Beast knew his business and did not need a leader or someone to guide him; he responded completely to voice commands. And now he strained in his harness, and Delia braced herself for the little jolt as the barge ahead of hers started to move, the ties strained, and her barge jerked into motion.

She braced herself again for the Gate transition, but this one must have covered a shorter distance than any other transition she’d experienced, because it was just a momentary sensation of cold and falling.

And then . . . they were on a whole new section of the river. And the noise! She looked behind her, and since the Gate didn’t even cover a quarter of the river, she had a clear view of the rapids that they had just bypassed. But she would have known they were there without looking; the water roared and thundered, and the barges actually vibrated with the sound. There was so much spray in the air that it smelled like rain, and thanks to all that moisture, the air felt like ice.

She’d never actually seen rapids before—there hadn’t been anything like rough water at Crescent Lake, and all the waterways around the Valdemar manor were man-made canals. One look at the churning river and enormous boulders sticking up everywhere made her knees feel a little wobbly. On this side of the river was what was left of a cliff; it looked as if at some point in the past the entire thing had collapsed into the river, narrowing the channel and forming the rapids.

We’d never have survived trying to tow the barges through that.

And . . . the collapsed cliff went back as far as she could see—and a lot farther beyond that, since it must have taken Jonaton and Briada at least a day to ride past the rapids to this point. What brought that much rock down all at once? It looked as if it had happened a long, long time ago. Was it that war of mages they keep talking about?

The Gate had been set up at a point where the river resembled the stretch they had just left behind, and immediately after that the banks narrowed dramatically and the water, now forced to go through a smaller channel, sped up to the point that it surged over the rocks in its path and leapt into the air in standing waves.

She had expected Jonaton to have set up a camp here, but he just added his horse to the Tow-Beast so they were now pulling double in harness, waited for the men’s barge to come even with him, and with assistance from Ivar, managed to roll himself over the railing and onto the barge, where he lay on the narrow deck for a moment. Then Venidel helped him up and into the barge itself.

. . . if something comes along that only magic can defeat . . . we are in big trouble. With all of the mages needing rest, was this really the time to be moving forward?

On the other hand, you couldn’t hear much of anything here, and the damp and cold couldn’t be good for them. Maybe it was better to move. Ow. This mist coating everything we have in ice would be dangerous, and there would be more every day, if we stayed here. We’d be found in the spring melt, glazed like a bad candy.

Ivar mounted his horse, which was tied up beside the Gate, and sent it trotting up to Hakkon. She couldn’t hear anything they said over the roar of the water, but he came back to her barge, loose-tied Manta to it, and he and Bay leapt aboard.

He and Bay clambered up on the roof to sit there beside her and Amethyst. The Doll began petting Bay’s enormous head without prompting, and the dog put his head in her lap, overcome with doggy bliss. Strange how all the animals seem to like the Dolls, she thought. Maybe they understand that the Dolls would never hurt them.

“We’ve got a campsite marked out ahead, away from the rapids but before the weird forest,” Ivar told her in a half-bellow. “We have to get away from the rapids, no matter what. Otherwise we aren’t going to be able to hear conversations, much less hear things coming through the brush at us. And I don’t fancy trying to sleep in damp blankets even once. Jonaton and Briada said they didn’t have any trouble passing through that uncanny forest, but I got a look at it, and I don’t want to take any chances.” He paused a moment. “When we reach it, don’t leave the barge. And don’t kill anything. I . . . just have a feeling. Keep to supplies aboard. Even if you think we are desperate for firewood, don’t snap off what look like dead branches; don’t Fetch anything that isn’t lying on the ground. The further north we go, the weirder the animals get. This time out, we spotted vanishing herons. Turn to the side and they disappear; just their legs show. Anything hidden by feathers? Invisible. We only saw them when we were two horselengths from them. Find that on a predator, or on razorvine, well. Bad day. We may not be able to trust what we see.”

It wasn’t just because of the damp cold that she shivered. “Can we get through it in a day?” she asked.

At this point, Briada noticed they were talking, added her horse to the string, and dismounted with impossible agility and skill right onto the barge. “Please tell me we are stopping short of the forest,” she shouted.

“We’re stopping short of the forest,” Ivar told her. “Delia is concerned about whether we can get through it in a day.”

“That won’t be a problem. My horse couldn’t get out of it fast enough. If we start early-early-early, feed the horses and mules well overnight, and hitch every animal to the barges, we should get out of it well before sunset. The beasts are going to need a good rest afterward, but that’s a small price to pay for not being in that place when the sun goes down.”

“I am relaying all this information to Rose,” Amethyst said, pitching her voice high to carry over the noise of the water.

There was no forest right here by the rapids, only rocky banks in the bottom of a narrow valley covered in scrub brush and tall grass. Now Delia was very glad that she’d loaded down the last barge with wood, although it didn’t look as if they were going to be in any need of fodder for the horses.

She glanced up ahead; it looked as if the river made a big curve to the west, following the valley. Perhaps that would cut off some of the sound from the rapids.