Maeve Read Free Page B

retreated into unhappy memories.
    â€œSo you want to drive the Company out.”
    â€œYes.” She felt his helpless anger. For a minute, pity stirred in her, then she pushed it away. No, she thought, not again. It’s none of my business.
    They rode on in silence through air thin and chill enough to make her shiver and think about untying the poncho from behind the saddle, but not chill enough to make the effort really worthwhile. The air burned her lungs and leeched the moisture from lips and nose. As her tongue flicked around her mouth, struggling to replace the moisture, she could feel hairline cracks opening in her lips. Overhead the sky was a cold blue with ragged, wispy clouds scudding across the bowl while wind down lower drove the coarse dust singing over the scarred stone. Behind her, the sun crept down in its western arc with a foot-dragging lassitude that made her feel like clawing it to a more normal speed. Each time she glanced back she had to search for the rusty disc, her body rhythms with their ingrained expectations sending her eyes automatically to the wrong part of the sky.
    â€œCompany men!” Gwynnor said suddenly. “Are you …”
    â€œHuh?”
    â€œAre you part of a Company?”
    â€œNo. Where I was born no one had even heard of the Companies. Damn! That was a long way back.” Rubbing her fingers lightly over the springy hair on the kaffa’s back, she stared over the bobbing head at the desolate expanse of weathered stone. “A long way back …”
    â€œWhy did you leave the place where you belonged?” Disapproval was sharp in his tenor voice.
    â€œBelonged!” A bark of unhappy laughter was startled out of her. “They were going to burn me for a witch.”
    Her mount shied as a knobby little reptile fled in panic from under its feet. Almost immediately, a dark shadow plummeted from the sky and sailed off with the reptile wriggling in its talons. Aleytys frowned. She continued to watch a moment, then closed her eyes. The bird vanished from her senses, not even the faint flutter of awareness that proximate life usually stirred along her nerve paths unless she consciously blocked it out.
    When she looked up again the black, triangular shape was soaring upward on a thermal, too high to see if the whippy reptile still dangled from its beak. “Hey!” She pulled her eyes down. “Gwynnor!” He was riding slumped over, deep in unhappy thoughts. “Gwynnor!”
    He straightened his narrow shoulders and looked around.
    â€œIs there a bird up there, or am I dreaming?”
    His eyes rounded. “An eryr. Why?”
    â€œWhen I close my eyes, he’s not there. Why can’t I sense him as well as see him?”
    â€œYou SEE?”
    â€œIf that’s what you call it.”
    He fixed his eyes on the eryr as it sailed past the sun. “Prey animals on Maeve SEE. Most of them. So do some of the cerdd. I … I did once. No longer.” He slid rapidly over the words, then slowed as he continued to explain. “Since they’d starve without it, some predators developed the ability to be invisible to the SIGHT.” He swung bright, nervous eyes across the sky. “I was forgetting. There’s worse than the eryr in these skies.”
    â€œWorse.”
    â€œPeithwyr.” He shuddered. “Six meters of leathery wing and teeth with a poison sting in the tail.” He dug his heels into the kaffa’s side. With a snort of disgust the animal speeded up, the dip and sway of its gait increasing alarmingly. “I forgot,” he threw back at her over his shoulder.
    Aleytys goaded her own mount into faster movement and drew up alongside him. “I won’t be able to sense it coming?”
    â€œNo.” He looked around warily. “No,” he repeated after a while. “If a peithwyr attacks, get off the kaffa first. Get as far off as you can the first jump. If you’re lucky,