She turned and cantered the black stallion down a momentary dip in the land, then urged him up the steeper ground to the next higher rise.
For a brief, fearful moment, she almost fell off her horse as he lurched up the opposite slope, but she clutched his shaggy black mane as she toppled suddenly forward against the back of his neck and hung on with all of her failing strength, slowly righting herself. Momentarily out of their line of sight, she could hear their distant shouts. Triumphant shouts, urging each other on.
Si'Wren raised her eyes and looked beyond to the vista of the distant lowlands, whence she had come so far with her Emperor. Then she dropped her eyes, and noticed for the first time that her dark mantle of hair, left unbraided, had been woven by the wind into a knotted mass of tangles like a black flame.
Seeing that her stallion was also wounded, she doubted if he could carry her for very much longer, and dreaded the prospect of falling into the hands of such men. But which way to turn? Then, despairing of what to do next, she seemed to hear a distant roaring.
A waterfall.
The black stallion's muzzle and forequarters were flecked white with foam, and his neck was streaked with blood. His flanks were heaving from his exertions and injuries. Loathe to go on like this, she turned him and rode down another little dip and then up again to the next higher rise. She was ascending a rising series of gently rolling grassy steppes, interspersed by long wide strips of gently sloping meadows and successive narrow courses of green trees.
Then she came to the last rise, and slowed her horse again.
The muted, distant sound of the waterfall became an open roar as she pulled her horse abruptly to a dead halt barely in time, before she would have plunged over a steep drop-off.
The waterfall upstream descended in a streak of white from the crest above, arcing and fanning out majestically from a high ridge. At the waterfall's base shimmered a wide pool, whence emerged the continuation of the deep fast-flowing stream before her. The undercurrent sucked and churned violently as it passed immediately below her position.
After much hesitation, Si'Wren pulled gently on one of her reins, turning her steed upstream towards the waterfall, as she brought in her heels and pressed lightly against the black's heaving flanks, urging him forward along the edge of the bank, seeking some way to get safely down and across. But the closer she came to the waterfall, the higher and steeper became the bank along which she rode, and the more her mount labored. Already suffering from the arrows in his neck, he was drawing near to a state of total exhaustion.