“Why?” Zemetrios shouted up at her.

“Why else?” the woman nonsensically said.

She grinned. Her teeth were white as winter. On she strode, around the crumbled village wall. She vanished from sight.

“A sign,” he said. “Guidance.”

“Only if you’re insane enough to think it so. I’m making back the other way toward the coast. My band of women was abducted by pirates, that’s what I must suppose. At Amnos, to be a female warrior is to be a priestess, too. I owe them more than mere comradeship—they were in my charge. So damn the Isle and the Seven Nights. I’ll build a beacon of my own and hail some ship. I must find them.”

“Clirando,” he said, “don’t you see, you and I—we must go up the mountain.”

“Why should I see something so absurd.”

“Our penance. Didn’t your temple speak to you of a sacrifice?”

Clirando stared at nothingness. “Yes. They said too that there was less danger for my girls than for me.”

“I’d swear your band is safe. They’re valiant and strong. You’ve trained and led them. So you must trust them, even if you can never trust me. As for this—don’t you feel the tug of that place—whatever it is—up there?”

She licked her lips. The chill wind was biting through her clothing and the molting furs in which she, as he, had wrapped herself.

Unwillingly she accepted that it was true enough, the mountain pulled at her. It was not so high. It would be no awful task for either of them to scale it.

Instantly on the wind then, she heard a many-voiced and horrible jeering wail. As her head jerked up in remembering fear and distaste, she saw Zemetrios too was glaring along the snows, his eyes searching. Their demons had returned.

There had been a sip of happiness for them at the phantom inn. Now they were due to pay.

“Then, let’s go,” he said. “What choice?”

“None.”

He broke into the fast steady lope before she did, running toward the skirt of pines.

It would not matter, she thought, despite any prior notion or hope, whether they went together or apart. Both of them must face the individual punishment the Isle had in store.

Yet she too jogged forward. Increasing her speed, she caught him up. They advanced again shoulder to shoulder, up the rising slope.

All that day they climbed. Once they were through the hedge of pines, the mountain was not itself irksome, but the slides of impacted snow and translucent ice sometimes presented blocks to swift progress.

They began, inadvertently, to work as a team.

Bittersweet, this. Clirando had never met a man so sane in his judgment of obstacles or so decided in solving them. Nor, where she detected the solution, so willing to agree. She had found many men in the past, even some of the best, obstreporous as it were on principle. Thestus primarily. She would have understood this if she had been a house-reared woman, but she was educated, trained, fit, and canny.

Where necessary, they assisted each other.

They took only short breaks from the ascent. Neither had any food, and only a little water, which they drank sparingly.

Once he remarked that the previous evening’s dinner had seemed to nourish them, even if it had been sorcerous and nonexistent.

At this she recalled again the other feast—the sexual and emotional feast of their lovemaking.

She saw that he did, too.

He said, looking at her, “My name you know. It was never Thestus.”

Rage boiled in her, then died.

“I know. But let that be for now.”

And silence returned to divide them as two swords had not.

Twilight, after the unseen sun went down, found them high on the shelves of Moon’s Stair.

A broad cave, one of many, yawned in the mountain. They ducked in, and made a fire.

“Who watches?” he asked.

“I.”

“Last night you slept.”

“That was some spell. I shan’t tonight.”

“Do you think so?”

Presently they portioned the watch, in the acceptable way, between them, lying or sitting far across the fire from each other.

The full moon of the Third Night swam up the sky, only partly tearing the veil of snow-cloud. Later more snow fluttered down.

How beautiful he was, asleep.

A rift of tenderness opened in her heart. She slammed a mental door against it.

Clirando did not slumber. When he took the watch, she lay static as a log, her back to him.

Outside, at frequent intervals, and as she had heard it during the slog up the mountain, there echoed the dim jeering yodels of the pig things, her personal demons. He presumably heard the abusive shouts of his dead friend and brother, Yazon.

It was not that she dreamed, but she had one brief almost-vision of Araitha. Clirando’s own friend and sister floated through the depths of a dark sea, a corpse with golden hair furling and unfurling.

Next morning they drank the last water, some of which was by then ice, and went out.

Inside an hour of traveling, the way flattened to a craggy, endless-seeming plateau. They had gained the top of Moon’s Stair.

They paused. Snow armored the crag. Outcrops thrust white into the dead sky. Boulders lay everywhere. There was nothing unusual, but also nothing comfortable up here. It was a place of the known earth, yet alien—as only the things of the earth could be.

“There was after all no purpose in climbing here.”

“Nevertheless, we climbed,” he said. “Everything in life is like that, surely. It’s our choice and talent to make a purpose from such chaos.”

The wind lifted and fell, cutting about itself with sharp blades.

Into the lea of one of the outcrops they went, for shelter.

Below, far off, slopes, forest, the lost village. It was just possible too she thought, even in the wan daylight, to imagine the mighty outer circle of ocean ringing the island.

By nightfall they had trekked some way over the mountaintop. They sought a crevice between rocks for the night’s bivouac.

Tomorrow they would descend. There was nothing else to do.

The moon came up in the dark. This evening it was unclouded, shining on the snow.

It was the Fourth Night. The middle night of the seven.

Clirando again took first watch.

In order this time not to gaze at him in his sleep, she stared rigidly out across the fire.

An hour later, in the moonlight and with no warning, Araitha came walking toward Clirando over the mountain.

Clirando got up. She drew her knife—pointlessly.

Araitha wore her traveling cloak, and in her hair were the ornaments she had put there for safekeeping during her voyage to Crentis. No doubt in reality they lay with her on the sea’s floor.

Lovely, strong, brave—how proud you could be of her, this ghost. Comrade—friend—sister—

“Stay back, dead thing,” rasped Clirando. “Only say what you want from me.”

Araitha did not slow her pace. She sighed, and her ghost-breath, clean as when she had lived, touched Clirando’s face.

Clirando thought the ghost would keep going until it walked right through her. She gripped her knife and braced herself—but at the last second Araitha dissolved like colored steam.

Yet, in the open area beyond the rocks, everything now was changed.

The mountain plateau was no longer there.

A vast blank alabaster whiteness loomed and curved away. It was not snow, but level, even, and icy cold with a burnishlike freezing fire. While above, contrastingly, the sky was an inky-black Clirando had never witnessed on any other night. Stars seared on this black like volcanic embers, and of all shades—purple, russet, amber, jade. But the moon itself had disappeared. Instead, hanging low over a distant jumble of countless spiked mountains—as unlike those of the Isle as was possible—another moon shone. In colour it was greenish turquoise. It cast an underwater light, and formed peculiar shadows. Soon Clirando did not think it was a moon. It was some other—lamp? world?—or was it in fact the earth, hung in the sky off the moon itself?