Naamah's Blessing

about me. He never expected me to go.”
    “Do you suppose he ever imagined you’d come after him?” Mathieu asked.
    Balthasar laughed with genuine amusement. “No.” He ran one hand over his sweat-streaked, grimy face, flicking his fingers with disgust. “No, I think Thierry de la Courcel will be surprised as hell to see me when we find him.”
    “If we find him,” someone on the far side of the fire muttered.
    “
When
we find him,” Balthasar corrected him. He glanced at me. “He’s still alive, right?”
    I stared into the dusk falling over the savannah, the trackless sea of grass rippling in the evening breeze. I wished we’d had a confirmed sighting to assure us we were on the right path; and I wished that Jehanne had returned to my dreams to tell me once more that her step-son lived, or give me any kind of guidance.
    Bao nudged me. “Right, Moirin?”
    “Absolutely,” I said. “Without a doubt.”

FORTY-SEVEN

    W e marched across the savannah.
    Our gratitude at having reached dry land with ample grazing soon gave way to frustration at the lack of drinking water. Eyahue had cautioned us to conserve our stores, but he hadn’t fully reckoned on the needs of our pack-horses, being unaccustomed to taking them into consideration.
    At every stream and drinking hole, we drank our fill and refilled our waterskins, doling out the contents parsimoniously to men and horses alike on the long stretches in between. Onward we marched beneath a broiling sun, throats parched and dry. Eyahue taught us the trick of holding pebbles in our mouths to generate saliva.
    “Keep going, keep going! You’ll have plenty of water on the river.” The old
pochteca
chortled. “More than you ever wanted!”
    On the tenth day, one of our pack-horses foundered. We had done our best to tend to the horses, but this one had developed an infection in the frog of its hoof on the left foreleg after slogging through the swamp, and it had only worsened over the course of the journey. When it began to limp too badly to keep pace with our caravan, we made the decision to put it down.
    The Jaguar Knight Temilotzin did the deed, cutting the big vein that pulsed alongside the pack-horse’s neck with a keen-edged obsidian dagger. The horse sank to its knees and toppled slowlyonto its side, its eyes rolling in what looked like relief, bleeding profusely into the grass. Its sides rose and fell several times, and then went still.
    We butchered it and ate the meat. We redistributed its load among the men and continued onward. And we still had no confirmation that the Dauphin’s party had passed this way.
    “What if they misread the map?” I asked Eyahue. “What if they missed the river?”
    He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter if they read the map wrong. Sooner or later, they will meet the river.”
    And sooner or later, we did, too.
    Even as the swamp had given way to savannah, the savannah gave way to the jungle once more.
    There were signs of cultivation on the outskirts of the jungle. It was Brice de Bretel who let go a startled cry, pointing. “Look!”
    At a glance, it seemed an unremarkable sight. One of the local inhabitants was tilling a field, walking behind the patiently plodding horse that drew his rough-hewn plow, the fellow’s strong hands gripping the handles as the two-pronged wooden plow dug furrows in the earth. I had to look twice before it struck me.
    His
horse
.
    There were no horses native to Terra Nova, and the Aragonians hadn’t explored this far. There was only one explanation for it: Thierry’s party had been here before us.
    “Do you suppose we’ve found them?” someone asked nervously. “Or… what became of them?”
    I asked Eyahue what he thought.
    “No,” he said dismissively. “I know these people. I speak their tongue. They are peaceful farmers and fishers.” He pointed toward the jungle. “The river is only an hour’s walk away. It is likely that your prince traded horses for canoes.”
    Temilotzin scowled. “So your people will give horses to peasants, but not to the Emperor?”
    “I doubt they had a choice,” I said. “Nor will we. It’s barter or turn them loose. But they’re geldings, not breeding stock.”
    That mollified the spotted warrior. The fellow with the plow had caught sight of us, and he and a handful of others working the field were staring. Eyahue went to speak with them, then beckoned us over, grinning from ear to ear.
    “Yes, your white-faced strangers were