Godbond by Nancy Springer

leader’s glare met me, and within an eyeblink the commotion, which I had considered to be at its height, redoubled. By my mother’s bones, but it must have been a precious thing they guarded! I had not thought they could come out of their quarrel so quickly to turn on me. One more breath and I would be dead—I could feel rage hot as blood in the air. But Talu, as terrified as I, reared high. Teetering on her hind legs, she somehow managed to turn in the narrow space between rocks, and at a plunging, panicky gallop she took me back the way we had come.
    I was in nearly as much danger from her as I had been from the Cragsmen. I could not have stopped her if I had tried—and, mindful of wrathful enemies not far behind me, I did not try—but Talu’s every wild leap threatened to throw me against a boulder, or smash my knee against one, or my head against a tree, or send us both crashing down when she snapped a leg between stones. Her hooves slipped and scrabbled on dizzying slopes—this was terrain that scarcely should have been ridden at a slow walk! I held onto her by clinging to her mane until she took a man-tall drop at a leap, but then I considered that I had had enough. Moreover, there was a thought in me that I did not wish to be carried too far from the place the Cragsmen so fervidly guarded. So I swung down by her neck and took my chances with a landing on hard rock. Then I lay, the breath knocked out of me, and watched her plunge crazily away, and took accounting of my bodily harm. Bruises, nothing worse.
    Behind me, out of sight but not yet out of tongueshot, I heard the noise of the Cragsmen, who were quarreling still. I lay where I was until their uproar had quieted, that and my ragged breathing and the thumping of my heart. Talu had careered out of sight and hearing. I rose cautiously and walked away from the direction she had gone, back toward the Cragsmen but to one side of them.
    It was not hard for a Red Hart hunter on foot to elude Cragsmen. I stalked softly past them, and they knew nothing of it. I dare say they thought I was yet on Talu, blundering back up the mountain. Few travelers are foolish enough to let themselves be separated from horse and gear. But being a fool, and afoot, I found the many boulders more to my liking than I had when they threatened to break my neck. They gave me good cover as I stalked, and though the Cragsmen ceased their scuffling and moved back to lines of guard once again, I eluded them easily enough. I crept between rocks until I had left them behind, and then I softly walked, looking, searching. Even though I did not know for what.
    But there was no doubt in me once I saw it.
    Boulders ended suddenly, spearpines thinned, sky showed. Underfoot lay a smooth, flat place made of many small stones—I noted that later, for at the time my seeing was all taken up by the crag. An odd sort of tall, jagged crag, very steep, very aspiring, loomed ahead. And in its side opened a most peculiar cave. As I drew nearer, step by slow, cautious step, I noticed that the rock wall around the entry was all networked with small lines, like cracks—they were cracks. With a shock I realized that the crag was no crag, nor the cave a cave.
    Name of the god, it was a place made by the long-ago kings whose powers I scarcely understood, a place left from time lost in time.

Chapter Four
    Times so long ago, they had been forgptten even in Sakeema’s time. Their kings and peoples, unknown even in legend. Even I, a storyteller, had never known of such times and such people until Tassida had told me of them. How she remembered them, I did not know, for there was much I did not know of her. But I had since seen such lodges, though much smaller, standing in Mahela’s sad undersea realm.
    A strange word Tassida had once told to me: castle . This, then, a castle? Awesome, even though silent, empty, ruined.
    Gazing, scarcely breathing, I stepped within the shadow of the