The Very Best of Kate Elliott by Kate Elliott Page B

dismiss the woman as not worthy of his warrior’s prowess. She ran, and he followed.
    The fire’s hissing crackle, the horse’s weight and speed and heavy hoof-falls as it plunged toward the wall of fire; the high thrumming atonal singing of the wings in the presence of powerful magic; all this perhaps distracted Vayek as she raced ahead and dashed through that flaming gap in front of him. Fire roared. The smoke poured up to greet her, and because she was only one small human on two small feet, she darted to one side even as the clothes on her back grew hot and began to curl and blacken. He galloped past like the fury of the heavens, not even seeing her step aside because he was blinded by the tale he had long since learned to believe was the only tale in all the world.
    But it wasn’t the only tale.
    She could follow Vayek back onto the sea of grass into a life whose contours were utterly familiar and entirely honorable. Handsome, brave, strong, even-tempered, honorable, famous among the clans for his prowess, with two secondary wives already although he was not ten years a man, he would be the worst kind of husband. A woman could live her life tending the fire of such a man’s life. Its heat was seductive, but in the end its glory belonged only to him.
    She spun, feet light beneath her, and raced back through the gap.
    To find the witch already in action. She had bound the bundle of griffin feathers to her own back. Now she had her arms under the bearded man’s shoulders, trying to hoist him up and over a saddled horse. Kereka ran to help her, got her arms around his hips and her own body beneath him. Blood slicked her hands and dripped on her face, but his rattling breaths revealed that he still lived.
    The woman spared her one surprised glance. Then, like a begh , she gestured toward the other horses before running to a patch of sandy soil churned by the battle and spotted with blood. She unsheathed her obsidian knife and began, as one might at the Festival dance with Tarkan’s flaming arrows, to cut a pattern into the expectant air.
    A distant howl of rage rang from beyond the sorcerous fire.
    Kereka ran to fetch the three remaining foreign horses who had come with the witch and the bearded man as well as her own mount. The other horses were already saddled and laded, obedient to the lead. She strung them on a line and mounted the lead mare as an arch of golden fire flowered into existence just beyond the obsidian blade. The witch grabbed the reins of the bearded man’s horse and walked under the fulgent threads.
    Into what she walked, Kereka could not see. But riding the shore of the river of death was the risk you took to find out what lay on the other side.
    Wings sang. The shape of a winged man astride a horse loomed beyond the fire. Vayek burst back past the writhing white fire of Edek’s corpse and into the circle. The complex weave that gave the arch form began to fray at the edges, flashing and shivering.
    Griffin feathers are proof against sorcery.
    She flung Edek’s griffin feather away; it glittered, spinning as on a wind blowing out of the unseen land beyond the arch, while Edek’s gauntlet fell with a thud to the dirt. Then she whipped her mount forward, and they charged into a mist that stank of burned and rotting corpses, of ash and grass, of blood and noble deeds.
    Her eyes streamed stinging tears; heat burned in her lungs.
    The foul miasma cleared, and she was trotting free down the slope of a hill with blackened grass flying away beneath the horses’ hooves and the sun setting ahead of her, drawing long shadows over the grass. The witch had already reached a familiar-looking stream, and she was kneeling beside the body of her comrade as she cast handfuls of glittering dust over his limp form. Saplings and brush fluttered in a brisk wind out of the west.
    Kereka twisted to see behind her the same stones, the very same stone circle, rising black and ominous exactly where they had stood moments