Finding the Way and Other Tales of Valdemar Read Online Free PDF Page B

along moments after. Her stick-probing became attack-like jabs rather than measured taps. Her thoughts, which Sherra hoped were kept to herself, was that this was largely guide theater. They were not moving that much faster, but the extra activity gave a sense of urgency that seemed to satisfy the Spirit Horse that they were making good time. Besides, the extra noise and splashing would keep the crocodiles, swampcats, and big hunting snakes away. Of course, it might attract something else, but life was full of gambles.
    They paused, both panting and splattered with the slimy muck that now seemed to make its way into every crack and fold of their equipage, and Vesily got that far-off look again. :We are going the wrong way. She . . . he . . . my Chosen is that way. You’re taking us the wrong way.:
    “Trust your Guide,” Sherra replied. “Oftentimes, only way to get somewhere is by passing it and going around something. You want to go in a straight line. That isn’t how you get to anything, ” Sherra said with a touch too much acid in the tone.
    :So far you haven’t gotten me to anything your way,: Vesily snapped back.
    “You are welcome to leave me at any time, Spirit Horse, and it is not as if I am doing this life-risking for a great amount of pay! You Valdemarans are our allies now, so I owe it, but you haven’t made me like it yet.”
    :You don’t have to like it, you have to do your duty, same as me!:
    “My duty isn’t to argue with you, my duty is to guide you, and that might just end at any moment. The sooner I’m rid of you, the sooner I make way towards my own bed.” Sherra stabbed her staff into the mud for emphasis, glaring up at the Companion. She could almost see the thoughts turning over like the gears and wheels of a mill, turning. The Spirit Horse was weighing the possibilities. Strike off on her own into the Mire, using the few techniques she had seen the hertasi do which she could duplicate, and make maybe a fifth of the time they were making now—even though her instincts told her the direction they made good time in was, in fact, the wrong direction? Risk lethal injury or outright death, never to see a Chosen at all, or stay with Sherra, to go get help?
    Sherra turned so quickly she slapped her tail against Vesily’s fetlock. “Daylight is burning.”
    The hertasi resumed her Path out of the swamp.
    Vesily snorted and stamped in place, over a dozen times, but Sherra never looked back—or at least she did not look back in a way that the Companion would recognize as such. And when no one sees a tantrum, then technically , the tantrum never happened.
    But Vesily did, indeed, follow Sherra.
    Vesily was caught in a mud-bog twice before they made it to the edge of the Mire, once deep enough to reach the bottom of the saddle she bore; as a side benefit being stuck had the effect of making her too weak to argue with Sherra’s advice. Sherra talked Vesily through how to escape the bog—how moving slowly and deliberately would allow mud to fill in to the vacuum that moving her limbs left behind—but it was exhausting, and most maddening, it was something that simply could not be paused. The effort had to be deliberate and continual, until freedom. And, in some kind of sick cosmic comedy, the mud hole butted against a rock shelf.
    A circular one. And it, too, had mud tracked onto it by what appeared to be a human.
    Vesily and Sherra looked at each other. :Is that—?:
    “A Changecircle, yes,” Sherra agreed. She bent to look at the tracks, and then peered into the Circle itself. “What is in here is not from this part of the world. That patch of reeds, it’s dying. All those sedges are the wrong color, the wrong height.” She followed the tracks to a stunted tree. “And now I see what must have happened. Your human could not take direction from the sun because of the clouds, but look, here is moss on the tree. The problem is, it is growing on the wrong side of the tree, because the tree