"What's the idea? You know I'm coming back, and you know there's a lot of trouble ahead, where I'm bound for."
And then her horse collapsed. Verrill had no magic to restore it to life. "Now I can't go back," she announced, contentedly, as though she had foreseen this decisive detail.
From time to time, Verrill halted, and cocked an ear. Thus far, he had heard no firing. He had seen no signal fires on the crests that were dark against the stars. The way became harder, and until moon-rise, difficult to pick.
When the first half-glow whitened the limestone slopes and the high snowcaps, the mountain world became a maze of illusion and shifting glamour.
Finally, Verrill's horse sniffed the air, and would have whinnied, had he not checked him in time. As he paused, he wondered whether Falana's presence, the night he had saved Kwangtan, would be sufficient precedent for her accompanying him into the field; or whether instead suspicion would be aroused.
He had reined in at the edge of a deep shadow. Before he could make up his mind, Falana said, "Turn around and see--I've got it."
As he twisted about, the horse shifted, moving out of the shadow and into light strong enough for him to see the ruby she had in her hand. It collected enough of the glow to pulse and flame as though in its own right. One good look he got, and then she had knotted it again into the end of her scarf and thrust it securely between her breasts.
"I'm going with you to the home of the gods," Falana said, "and if they, your people, don't like me, they can do what they want with me. But I'm going."
However she had made away with the gem, there would be the devil to pay when Kwangtan missed it. His exclamation of dismay made her add, "He won't make any trouble. He smothered under his sheepskin robe."
Verrill preferred not to ask whether she meant that the invalid had himself done this, accidentally, or whether, aroused by her prowling, his protest had been stifled, quickly and silently, by a solid armful of a woman who knew precisely what she had to do to save herself. Instead of being horrified by a very logical suspicion, he dismissed the query: for in either event, he had no longer any choice concerning Falana. She had made the bond so strong that wherever he went, he would take her. There was no more clash between him and Dawson. The bond that had attached him to Linda had been cut. Whether by smothering the fire priest, or merely robbing the fire god, Falana had done well for herself.