White Road

far side of the fire, wearing nothing but a crude loincloth.
    “Thank you for word of good news, my friend.” It was hot and close, too. She shrugged off her fur-lined coat and sat down on a pile of furs across the fire from the witch. Turmay’s eyes were closed, his stooped body so still that he appeared not to even be breathing. His grey curls hung motionless over his shoulders.
    She’d seen the witch marks on his hands and face the night that her friend, Belan ä Talía, had brought him to her after both had seen visions of a
tayan’gil—
or “white child,” as he put it—far away in the south. Someplace where a tayan’gil had no business being made.
    Half naked as he was, she could see the elaborate witch marks that covered his shoulders and chest. Other marks circled his shins like the patterns on the
oo’lu
lying silent across his lap. Seneth had known generations of Retha’noi over the course of her long life. Only the male witches used the oo’lu—a long, intricately decorated horn made from a hollowed-out sapling. Each had a unique pattern of decoration, except for the black handprint somewhere along its smooth polished length. Turmay must have been playing it quite recently; the tingle of Retha’noi magic hung in the air, enveloping her like a scent.
    Which was better than the smell of the hovel: sweat and hides, sour milk, pungent smoke-dried meat, and a body that would not see a proper bath until spring.
    “Did you find the ride difficult, Khirnari?”
    Seneth started as Belan ä Talía leaned forward into the circle of firelight. “What have you learned, my friend?” she asked them both. Belan was a seer, a rarity among their kind and probably due to her mixed blood. The rare intermarriage with the Retha’noi had gradually become tolerated, since the hill folk had proven to be staunch allies and kept to the valley as jealously as the ’faie, if not more so. Breeding with an outsider, though? That was unthinkable, and strictly prohibited.
    “The tayan’gil is in Aurënen,” Belan replied. Belan and Turmay had been searching together ever since they’d had their first visions of the tayan’gil.
    “Aurënen? Are you telling me that the Aurënfaie would create such a creature?”
    “Who can say, Khirnari? We only know that one is there.”
    “Where in Aurënen?”
    The witch opened his eyes at last, and she saw that they were red-rimmed and bloodshot. “I can show you, though I don’t know the name of the place.”
    He lifted the wax mouthpiece of the oo’lu and settled his lips inside it. Puffing out his cheeks, he began to play. This horn was almost four feet long, and he had to shift to keep the end of it out of the fire.
    It was not music, though the strange buzzing, hooting, booming drone produced by the oo’lu was not unpleasant. If you listened attentively, you could hear the sawing song of summer cicadas, the bellow of a bull, the peeping of tiny marsh frogs, and birdcalls. The patterns were complex, when played by an expert. It was impossible for those not trained to it to get more than a breathy farting sound out of it.
    Turmay played a soft song this time, with the hiss of wind over snow and owl calls mingled with the slow drone.
    “Close your eyes and touch the oo’lu,” Belan told her.
    Seneth did so, and the horn, smooth and warmed by the witch’s breath, vibrated against her palm.
    Light flared behind her closed lids as if she’d stepped outside again, then she had the dizzying sensation of flying up through the smoke hole.
    Confused images tumbled across the surface of her mind—the blurred glimpses of brown steppes, mountains less jagged than those that protected her fai’thast, and the flash of sunlight across a great broad expanse of water.
    The Great Lake, near the Tírfaie town called Wolde
. Years ago she’d ventured from the valley as an
Ebrados
rider, and they’d stolen through the sleeping town. She could still remember the reek of the place, and the filth. But that lake! Standing on the shore under a full moon, she’d never seen anything so beautiful.
    Yet Turmay’s magic carried her on, farther and farther from anything familiar, over forests and grasslands, and over a body of water that made the lake seem no more than a puddle.
    The sea
, the witch whispered in her mind through the droning of the oo’lu.
My people once lived all around its shores, until the light-skinned people drove us into the mountains. We were fishermen and sailors,