Tjorr cocked an eye at him knowingly. Eodan felt his wind-beaten face grow hot. He said angrily, "She is my oath-sister. Did she think I would forget what that means?" "_Da_," nodded the Alan, "or she would have given herself to Mithradates with no fuss." He squinted down the rutted dirt road, which wound among boulders and sere grass until it lost itself in stormy black clouds. "Now our task is to trail her, and she would have made herself hard to trail. We can only follow this, I think, till we come on someone who's seen a boyish-looking horse archer go by ... for thus I take it she equipped herself." "So my groom told me, and he was too frightened to make up a lie. Come, then!" They jingled through unspeaking hours. At day's end they passed a goatherd in a stinking wool tunic and knitted Phrygian cap. He gave them a sullen look and mumbled his own language, which they did not understand, through greasy whiskers. Eodan felt grimness. Bad enough to be entering wilds where few if any could speak with him; but this was also a land where the half-Persian warriors had made themselves hated. He thought, as darkly and coldly as the whistling twilight, that Flavius might well overhaul him tomorrow before he had any word of Phryne. He might be wholly doomed; the gods feared proud men. Well, if such was his destiny, he would give no god the pleasure of seeing him writhe under it. "_Ho-ah!_" cried Tjorr. Eodan looked up from his thoughts. The Alan pointed westward, where a single dirty-red streak beneath steel and smoke colors marked sunset. "A horse out there," he said. Eodan spied the beast; it was trotting wearily north over the plain. Horror stood up in him and screamed. He clamped back an answer of his own, struck spurs into his mount and left the highway. The wind snapped his cloak and tried to pull him from his seat. Once his horse stumbled on a rock, unseen in the gloom, but he kept the saddle, swaying lightly to help the animal muscles that flowed between his knees. And so he drew up to the other horse. It was a chestnut gelding with silvered harness; a light ax was sheathed at the saddlebow--thus did the riders of Pontus equip themselves. The beast shivered in the heartless wind; its tail streamed, but the mane was sweat-plastered to a sunken neck. Worn out, it groped a way back toward the king. Eodan felt as if the heart had been cut from him, leaving only a hollowness that bled. "Hers," he said. "None else," said Tjorr. "A lone alien, with arms and armor worth ten years of a shepherd's work ... a sling ... and the steed bolted--" He looked down upon his useless hands. "I am sorry, my sister." Eodan let her horse go. He began to follow the way it had come, as nearly as he could judge. He would not leave Phryne's bones to whiten on this plain. Surely the gods cared for her, if not for him. They would lead him to her and grant him the time to make a pyre and a cairn and to howl over her.