The new leg caught on everything.
It caught on the blanket, the basket, the loose string at the end of Chaska’s food sack. Pip lifted it too high, set it too far away, and once stepped on one of its own forefeet. Chaska sketched that movement while trying not to laugh.
“It’s practice,” Ysabet said.
“I know. So is this.”
The sketch was better than the previous one. Chaska had shown how the narrow joint folded backward before the foot came down. Ysabet could look at it without supplying a sentence about what Pip intended.
By midmorning it could walk beside them over the old road. The six-footed rhythm remained uneven, but its body no longer dragged sideways. The forked white mark looked brighter where the new branches met the old line.
They stopped beneath a low shelf near another section of broken bridgework. Lilt rested in a band of sun while Chaska tested a loose replacement strap against her harness. The repair could wait until the skin beneath it was ready. Ashaun went ahead to examine the path where the road climbed toward the ridge.
Ysabet laid out the mouse’s box and water. Pip ate clean clay with unusual concentration, then settled near the small covered entrance. The mouse came out, drank, and worked its way along the edge of the cloth.
A shadow passed over the road.
The mouse vanished into a crack beside the shelf.
Pip was on its feet before Ysabet had looked up. A little hawk swept past without descending and went on over the grass. The mouse remained hidden. Pip pressed its jaw against the stone, clicked, and ran along the shelf to a second crack nearly twenty paces away.
“Not there,” Ysabet said.
She could still see the hole the mouse had entered. Pip ignored her. It pushed its forefeet into the farther crack, withdrew them, and clicked again.
A tiny nose appeared beneath its jaw.
The mouse had found a passage through the rock.
Ysabet crouched slowly. Pip lowered a fold, and the mouse climbed into the warm pouch, dragging its bad foot after it.
Chaska came over with the strap in her hand.
“Could it hear?”
“Perhaps.”
“Under all that?”
“Perhaps,” Ysabet repeated, less firmly.
She wrote the distance beside her description of the shadow, and underlined the fact that Pip had not followed the mouse’s visible route. She did not move the mouse away again to see what would happen. It had already met a hawk and a morning’s worth of uncertainty.
They packed and climbed.
The road bent above the marsh. Far below, water shone among the reeds, divided into more channels than Chaska had managed to draw. The narrow trace of the old bridge disappeared into silver light. Ysabet could no longer pick out the landing where they had sold the skiff.
Pip walked beneath the edge of Chaska’s carried frame when the wind shook its sail. Twice it stopped to look back. The mouse moved safely in its pouch.
Then the creature bolted uphill.
Ysabet called once, saw how quickly the thin new leg could move, and ran after it. Her pack struck her shoulders. Chaska dropped the frame on a patch of grass and followed, leaving Lilt in the open place beside it.
They found Pip below a nesting cliff, more than two hundred paces from the place where they had stopped.
Stone swifts filled the air in short gray darts. A falling pebble had struck the lower shelf; several birds were calling around the disturbed nests. Pip stood among the talus with all six feet braced wide, head turning so fast its jaw struck a stone.
It ran toward one call, reversed, and tried to climb a slope that slid away under it.
Ysabet stopped short. A smaller swift crouched on a ledge to her left. One wing carried a pale streak where she had cleaned dirt from it yesterday. Its parent circled above, calling toward the fallen pebble.
Pip turned toward the streaked wing. It made a harsh, frightened sound and spread every fold along its body.
Ysabet felt nothing until it struck her knee.
For one instant the contact brought an impossible pull: warmth here, a sharp hollow elsewhere, distance stretched through her like a rope drawn tight. Then Pip moved away, and it ended.
She sat on the loose stones rather than pursue it farther.
Chaska reached her, breathing hard. “Where’s it going?”
“I think it knows that bird.”
“It knows lots of birds.”
“It warmed that one.”
Pip climbed three steps, slid, and struck its jaw again. Ysabet put the basket on its side in the shade of her knees. She tapped beside her open right hand.
The creature looked down. Its folds stayed spread, fine inner surfaces trembling in the wind.
She pulled her coat around the basket, leaving a dark opening. Not covering Pip. Making a place it had entered before.
The next click came quieter. Pip descended a pace, stopped as the swift called, then descended another. Chaska crouched on its other side without closing the way back.
“Here,” Ysabet said.
Pip reached the basket. She held the coat steady while it moved under the shadow. One fold closed against its body, then another. Its feet stopped scrabbling. The little mouse remained deep in the pouch, invisible except for a whisker.
They waited until Pip could drink.
Ashaun found them there. She looked up at the birds, then at the new white mark and the creature trembling under cloth.
“Is it doing something?”
“Too much,” Ysabet said. “I don’t think it knows how to stop yet.”
Ashaun stayed beside them while the gray parent settled near its young. At last the calling diminished. Pip’s head lowered against the blanket. The thin new leg folded under it, still shaking.
They returned to the grounded frame in slow stages. Chaska checked Lilt, then used the sail as a windbreak again. Ashaun opened her pack. She took the wrapped dagger from her belt and placed it beneath her spare clothes, at the bottom where she would have to unpack to reach it.
Ysabet saw. Neither woman spoke.
Beyond the grass the road continued toward the ridge. They would not reach it before dark. Chaska put the kettle on, and Ysabet stayed beside the basket while Pip slept through the first water boiling.
They climbed again the next morning, slowly enough for the thin new leg. Near noon they stopped on a broad shelf below thorn bushes. Chaska grounded the frame, spread its sail for shade, and let Pip crawl beneath while Lilt rested in the sun. Ysabet stood at the track’s edge, trying to choose which of two rising paths Quirin’s old map intended.