“And if I’m cold in places other than my toes? Will you warm me there, too?”
His voice was a grin, and she laughed into his face. But then he took her chin in his hand and looked into her eyes, seriously. “Katsa. When we get closer to Leck, you must do whatever I tell you to. Do you promise?”
“I promise.”
“You must, Katsa. You must swear it.”
“Po. I’ve promised it before, and I’ll promise it again, and swear it, too. I’ll do what you say.”
He watched her eyes, and then he nodded. He emptied the last few berries into her hand and bent down to his boots.
“My toes are such a misery, I’m not sure it’s wise to release them. They may revolt and run off into the mountains and refuse to return.”
She ate another winterberry. “I expect I’m more than a match for your toes.”
———
The next day there were no more jokes from Po, about his toes or anything else. He hardly spoke, and the farther they moved down the path that led to King Leck, the more anxious he seemed to become. His mood was contagious.
Katsa was uneasy.
“You’ll do what I say, when the time comes?” he asked her once.
She opened her mouth to give voice to a surge of irritation at the question she’d already answered and must now answer again. But at the sight of him trudging down the path beside her, tense and worried, she lost hold of her anger.
“I’ll do what you say, Po.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“Katsa.”
His voice woke her. She opened her eyes and knew it to be about three hours before dawn.
“What is it?”
“I can’t sleep.”
She sat up. “Too worried?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I assume you didn’t wake me just for my company.”
“You don’t need the sleep; and if I’m going to be awake we may as well be moving.”
And she was up, and her blanket rolled, and her quiver and bow and bags on her back in an instant. A path, sloping downhill, ran through the trees. The forest was black. Po took her arm and led her as best he could, stumbling over stones and resting his hand on trees she couldn’t see to steady their passage.
When a cold, gritty light finally brought shadow and shape to their path, they moved faster, practically ran. Snow began to fall, and the trail, wider and flatter, glowed a pale blue. The inn that would sell them horses was beyond the forest, hours away by foot. As they hurried on, Katsa found herself looking forward to the rest for her feet and her lungs that the horses would bring. She opened the thought to Po.
“It takes this,” he said, “to tire you. Running, in the dark, on no sleep, and no food, after days of climbing in the mountains.” He didn’t smile, and he wasn’t teasing. “I’m glad. Whatever it is we’re running toward, we’re likely to need your energy, and your stamina.”
That reminded her. She reached into a bag on her back. “Eat,” she said. “We must both eat, or we’ll be good for nothing.”
———
It was midmorning, and the snow still drifted down, when they neared the place where the forest stopped abruptly and the fields began. Po turned to her suddenly, alarm screaming in every feature of his face. He began to run headlong down the path through the trees, toward the edge of the forest. And then Katsa heard it – men’s voices raised, yelling, and the thunder of hooves, coming closer. She ran after Po and broke through the trees several paces behind him. A woman staggered across the fields toward them, a small woman with arms raised, her face a mask of terror. Dark hair and gold hoops in her ears. A black dress, and gold on the fingers she stretched out to Po. And behind her an army of men on galloping horses, led by one man with streaming robes and an eyepatch, and a raised bow, and a notched arrow that flew from the bow and struck the woman square in the back. The woman jerked and stumbled. She fell on her face in the snow.
Po stopped cold. He ran back to Katsa, yelling, “Shoot him! Shoot him!” but she had already swung the bow from her back and reached for an arrow. She pulled the string and took aim. And then the horses stopped. The man with the eyepatch screamed out, and Katsa froze.
“Oh, what an accident!” he cried.
His voice was a choke, a sob. So full of desperate pain that Katsa gasped, and tears rose to her eyes.
“What a terrible, terrible accident!” the man screamed. “My wife! My beloved wife!”
Katsa stared at the crumpled body of the woman, black dress and flung arms, white snow stained red. The man’s sobs carried to her across the fields. It was an accident. A terrible, tragic accident. Katsa lowered her bow.
“No! Shoot him!”
Katsa gaped at Po, shocked at his words, at the wildness in his eyes. “But, it was an accident,” she said.
“You promised to do what I said.”
“Yes, but I’m not going to shoot a grieving man whose wife has had such an accident – ”
His voice was angry now, as she’d never heard it. “Give me the bow,” he hissed, so strange and rough, so unlike himself.
“Give it to me.”
“No! You’re not yourself!”
He clutched his hair then and looked behind him desperately, at the man who watched them, his one eye cocked toward them, his gaze cool, measuring. Po and the man stared at each other for just a moment. Some flicker of recognition stirred inside Katsa, but then it was gone. Po turned back to her, calm now. Desperately, urgently calm.
“Will you do something else, then?” he said. “Something much smaller, that will hurt no one?”
“Yes, if it will hurt no one.”
“Will you run with me now, back into the forest? And if he starts to speak, will you cover your ears?”
What an odd request, but she felt that same strange flicker of recognition; and she agreed, without knowing why.
“Yes.”
“Quickly, Katsa.”
In an instant they turned and ran, and when she heard voices she clapped her hands to her ears. But she could still hear words barked here and there, and what she heard confused her. And then Po’s voice, yelling at her to keep running; yelling at her, she thought vaguely, to drown out the other voices. She half heard a muffled clatter of hooves growing behind them. The clatter turned into a thunder. And then she saw the arrows striking the trees around them.
The arrows made her angry. We could kill these men, all of them, she thought to Po. We should fight. But he kept yelling at her to run, and his hand tightened on her shoulder and pushed her forward, and she had that sense again that all was not right, that none of this was normal, and that in this madness, she should trust Po.
They raced around trees and clambered up slopes, rushing in whatever direction Po chose. The arrows dropped off as they moved deeper into the forest, for the woods slowed the horses and confused the men. Still they kept running. They came to a part of the forest so thickly wooded that the snow had caught in the branches of the trees and never reached the ground. Our footprints, Katsa thought. He’s taken us here so they can’t trace our footprints. She clung to that thought, because it was the only piece of this senselessness she understood.
Finally, Po pulled her hands from her ears. They ran more, until they came to a great, wide tree with brown needles, the ground littered with dead branches that had fallen from its trunk. “There’s a hollow place, up high,” Po said.
“There’s an opening in the trunk. Can you climb it? If I go first, can you follow?”
“Of course. Here,” she said, making a cup with her hands. He put one foot into her palms and jumped, and she lifted him up as high as she could into the tree. She made handholds and footholds of the rough places in the trunk and hustled up after him. “Avoid that branch,” he called down to her. “And this one: A breeze would knock it down.” She used the limbs he used; he climbed and she followed. He disappeared, and a moment later his arms reached out of a great hole above her. He pulled her inside the tree, into the hollowed-out space he’d sensed from the ground. They sat in the dark, breathing heavily, their legs entwined in their tree cave.