Zacharias shuddered. But he had come too far to let fear destroy him. Against all hope he was a free man again, bound by his own will into the service of another. He might be a worm in his heart, but hearts could change. She had said that all things change.
“Come, you who were once called Zacharias-son-of-Elseva-and-Volusianus.” She had stepped back from the edge of the stone circle and hoisted two baskets woven of reeds and slung them from the ends of Bulkezu’s spear, then balanced and bound the spear as a pole over the saddle. To the saddle she tied three pale skin pouches, odd looking things that each had five distended fingers probing out from the bottom as if they had been fashioned from a cow’s misshapen udder or a bloated, boneless hand. She tossed dirt over the fire. She whistled tunelessly and wind rose, blowing the fog outside the sanctuary of the stone circle into tufts of a wicked, cutting gale. The distant riders retreated farther away.
Bulkezu strained against the spear with its many rootling arms that clasped him to the earth, but he still could not shift at all. The remaining griffin feather hissed and fluttered in the rising wind. While she tested the harness, ignoring him, he tested his shoulders to see how far he could slide his wings out, or if he could wedge himself down far enough to cut at the magicked staff with the iron edge of that last feather. “I will have my revenge!”
She took no notice of his threat. Instead, when everything was to her liking, she returned to the eastern portal to watch. Fog shrouded the land, and in this fog she—and Zacharias with her—could easily make their escape, concealed from the eyes and ears of the waiting riders. But how long would they have until the Quman riders tracked them down?
She turned to smile at him as if, like the spotted thrush, she had divined his thoughts. Carefully, she wiped drying blood from her abdomen, then clapped red-streaked hands together and spoke words. A flash of heat blasted Zacharias’ face, and suddenly, as the burning stone winked back into existence in the center of the stone circle, he knew that the Aoi woman would not leave this sanctuary by any earthly road.
The woman regarded him unblinking, as if testing his courage. Bulkezu said nothing. Zacharias dropped the horse’s reins and untied the bedroll behind the saddle, shook it out to reveal the fine knee-length leather jacket that Quman men wore when they did not wear armor. He offered this to her so that she could cover herself, because not even necklaces covered her upper body now, only the smears and drying tracks of her own blood.
The stone burned without sound. Wind swirled round them, whistling through the stones.
Bulkezu threw back his head and howled, the eerie ululation that according to the shamans was the cry of the he-griffin. Zacharias had heard that call once, from far away, when the Pechanek clan had wandered the borderwild of the deep grass—the land beyond human ken into which only heroes and shamans might venture. Ai, God! He had never forgotten it.