He loathed it, and after getting hurt badly during the avalanche, he hated it even more.
Denna cast him an amused glance. "Are you so eager to start climbing?"
"Not at all. I just want it done in a timely fashion so we don't get stranded and need to be evacuated. I don't want to see another dragon for as long as I live."
"Jeffson is not done yet," I said. "We start when he gives the signal."
Palel turned to look at the guide. "I wouldn't want to rush him. He knows what he's doing. We probably owe him our lives."
That was a slight exaggeration, but it was true that after the avalanche Jeffson had dug with his bare hands alongside the rest of us to get to people buried under the snow.
When the packs were sorted, and there was nothing left to delay us, Jeffson turned to me. "We are ready, Your Highness."
It was a lost cause to make him stop addressing me formally.
"Before we go, I just want to reiterate that I'm not going to push this time," I told him once more. "If I do, I'm authorizing you to overrule me. Hopefully, no intervention will be needed.This is an easy climb on an established path, and the weather is good."
"The weather was good when we started the other one," Palel murmured. "And it stayed good. And we still got hit with an avalanche."
He had a point, and I looked up to assess the amount of snow above. It was a long way to where the peaks were white, and if there was an avalanche, it would probably lose its momentum by the time it reached us, but there was always the possibility of things going wrong.
"Not likely this time," Jeffson said.
We set out up the lower slope, and the path was wide and easy at first, the mountain lulling us into a false sense of security before showing us its teeth. I hoped the teeth would not come out. Jeffson had set the pace at the front of the porters, and I dropped back because I had questions for them.
"You've been guiding people up these mountains your whole life," I said. "I wonder if you are familiar with the folklore regarding thin places."
Jeffson made a derisive sound in his throat. "Nonsense to scare children from going where they are not supposed to," he said. "My grandmother swore that there were real accounts of people who saw those supposed thin places, but then she also swore her goat could predict the weather, and that she saved the entire flock from freezing by refusing to leave the barn the morning before a severe snowstorm hit us out of nowhere." He stepped over a large rock and guided me around it without breaking stride. "She used to tell my brother and me about a place two valleys east, where strange things happened once the sun went down." He smiled. "She talked about light bending, but since the auroras are a constant in these mountains, that was most likely something related to them."
"What did she mean by light bending?" I asked. "How can light bend?"
"On water," he said, as if I was a little dim for not knowing it. "You see a shine in it. Only according to my grandmother, the story claimed that there was no water there, and that shapes could be seen moving on the far side of the shine."
That echoed the stories in Professor Haldren's journals.
"I've walked that valley a hundred times," Jeffson continued. "I've never seen anything magical."
"The shapes in that bent light, what did they look like?" I asked.
"People going about, like you'd see folk across a field, only instead they were on the other side of the shimmer." He shrugged. "It was just light reflecting off the ice, or simple hallucinations. The high air does it. Makes water appear where there is none and shows a man his dead mother waving and smiling at him."
"It's not just the east valley," Dyshas said from behind us. "My gran's from over the ridge, and they tell it there too, only their place sings. You hear it before you see the shine, she said. Music and voices speaking strange sounds." He grinned. "Gran told us to never answer those voices, or they would pull us through to the afterworld. She said to run away."
"Did anyone ever try to walk through?" I asked.
"If anyone did, he didn't come back to tell about it," Borin said. "Just like the dead. They never come back to tell us what's on the other side. My gran said she would come back to tell us, but she didn't." He sighed, and I could see that he missed his grandmother. She must have passed recently.
"It's just thin there, she used to say," Borin continued. "Worn, like a place in a blanket you can almost see daylight through, but your finger won't go to the other side." He made asmall gesture as he said it, two fingers brushed quickly over his closed eyes, the sign against the evil eye.
I was tempted to do the same but refrained because a sophisticated woman like me shouldn't believe in silly superstitions like common folk.
"There is nothing to it," Borin said. But if it was nothing, why had he just made a ward against the evil eye?
The stories they'd just told me were the same as the ones Professor Haldren had collected from herders and villagers over many years.
The light that bends where there was no water. The shapes on the far side, always at a distance, always indistinct. The sound in the older tellings, music and voices speaking unfamiliar sounds.
When I'd repeated Professor Haldren's argument to Gavon, that a true wonder ought to grow and change in the retelling in the way invented ones did, he'd dressed the dry scholarly point in stage silk. "A made-up wonder grows in the telling." He'd enunciated every word, delighted with himself. "It acquires heroes who step through and come back changed, because that is what an audience wants the storyteller to give them."
