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below and made them shout. Outrage filled them, not just on their own account, but on their god’s. They could see these black things only as monstrous, blasphemous parodies of the horse-god’s greatness.
    â€œLet us take to the trail again,” the captain said heavily. “We can have no thought of secrecy anyway, with these cousins of vultures wheeling above us.”
    So they rode on the track, which grew ever wider as they neared the foothills. One-roomed inns and small villages dotted that way, each about a day’s journey from the last, but the travelers did not stop at them—they had no coinage, not even coppers, and also they remembered what had happened the last time they had stopped at such a hostelry. They avoided each small settlement, making their camps in the surrounding wilderness. They soon were out of food again. No wild berries were ripe so early in the season, but they found the devil’s-toe root from time to time, and mushrooms were growing in the loam that was constantly damp from mountain fogs and dews. Seda gathered odd fungi that were large, bluntly pointed of shape and bright red, for all the world like Kyrem’s lost cap, long since turned to ash in that fateful inn. She cooked them by the dozen in a panful of steaming water, and they were pleasing to the taste as well as filling. Sometimes—not often enough—they would manage to down a squirrel with a stone, or snare a rabbit. And in the night Seda would pay brief and clandestine visits to the local cooking sheds, returning with bread, cheese, and sometimes even meat.
    No one came after them or troubled them on account of these thieveries. But the horse-birds still flapped above them and cursed them with never-lessening fervor.
    â€œCan the things know what they are saying?” Kyrem wondered aloud. “I mean, each of them has its own little tattle-taunt, quite short—could it be that the creatures have small wit of their own?”
    Even that thought was unpleasant. “If that is so,” the captain asked, “then who or what trained them and sent them to harry us?”
    No one knew. A nameless enmity hovered over them and followed them like their own shadowing cloud.
    The nights were, if anything, worse than the days. The creatures always stopped with them at their camp, thudding heavily to earth at some small distance or attempting in a clumsy fashion to roost in the trees. There they shouted mindlessly all night and rattled the branches with their weight, turning sleep sour. The soldiers tried to shoot them with makeshift arrows, to stone them, trap them, snare them, drive them away by any means, but it was a business like the swatting of midges, doomed to frustration. After a while they would turn surly and pull blankets over their heads, letting the birdlike things be. Seda suffered as much from them as the others. “Shun-shun-shuntali!” one of the black things would cry, “Shun-shun-shuntali!” until she had turned into a taut knot of misery and could scarcely eat or sleep. Since the others were nearly as wretched, no one noticed her particular discomfort. But after a few days of this siege of curses, Kyrem set his jaw and willed himself to combat it.
    â€œCome here,” he said to Seda one evening at their beleaguered campsite.
    She came listlessly. He had her sit down beside him and he took up one of her small hands, began wordlessly to trace with his own stocky finger the narrow bones that showed whitely through her skin. After a moment she looked up at him in astonishment. Comfort and strength were flowing through her, marrow-deep and bone-strong, and as she saw him truly, she realized that the power was in him again, as it had been that night at the inn; he looked bigger than himself and solid as the mountains, and the squawking demon creatures seemed of no importance beside him.
    â€œWhat is it?” she whispered.
    â€œDevan magic,” he replied