Then they were gone.
Still Coll clung to the branches, gasping, feeling sobs in his chest, fighting not to let them out, for he knew that if they began, they wouldn’t stop, and he didn’t dare make that much noise, or the pack might come back.
They did. He clung tight, eying to breathe silently through his mouth, hoping against hope that they would go past again …
They did. He breathed a prayer of thanks to a kind and forgiving God, and went limp.
In the depths of the night, a star detached itself from the firmament and came spinning down toward earth. As it came lower and lower, a watcher on the ground would have seen it swelling into a great golden disk, not a proper star at all.
Of course, there were no watchers, if you discounted the small herd of wild horses sleeping in the spring night. The absence of witnesses was one of the reasons the ship was landing in the middle of a moor. The horses were another.
A slice of the ship’s underside separated and dropped down, forming a ramp for Magnus and Dirk.
“All right,” Dirk said, hoping his nerves weren’t showing. “How do we go about this?”
“You mean you’ve never caught a horse before?”
“Only tame ones.” Dirk held up the rope he was carrying, eyeing it with distrust. “What do you do with a wild one?”
“Convince it that you’re its friend, and that it wants to carry you where you want to go. That’s the easy part.”
“The easy part?” Dirk said with great trepidation. “What’s the hard part?”
“Getting the chance to get acquainted.” Magnus shook out his own rope, forming a lariat. “Let me show you how it’s done.” He marched off across the plain. Against his better judgment, Dirk followed.
When they came in sight of the horses, Magnus slowed down amazingly. Then, quietly and very slowly, he began to move toward the sleeping herd.
The breeze shifted, and the lone, waking horse sentry looked up, nostrils flaring, staring straight at Magnus, every muscle tense.
Magnus stared back.
Dirk could almost see the tension flow out of the horse, saw it calm amazingly, and knew that Magnus, the telepath, the expert in every psi power known to man (and in most of those known to woman, too), was reaching out with his mind to soothe and reassure the horse’s mind. More than soothe—slowly, the horse lowered its head. Then, quite relaxed, it folded its legs, lay down, and went to sleep.
“Now,” Magnus breathed, “we pick the ones we want, and set a lasso around each one’s neck.”
“You mean you do,” Dirk corrected.
The sentries saw the herald coming a mile away—or rather, saw the donkey with someone on its back. But their suspicions woke as the two horsemen who accompanied the beast turned away and rode in the direction from which they had come. The sentries told the captain of the guard, and the captain sent out two riders to see what the donkey carried. When they saw, one stayed trying to revive the herald before bringing him in, while the other rode back with the news.
The young king himself came down to see the herald as he rode through the gate. Black eyebrows drew down in anger as he looked at the man’s bruises, at the dried blood in the welts on his back. The herald managed to raise his head enough to croak, “Majesty … Earl Insol says … you exceed the limits of your power…”
“There are no limits to a king’s power!” His Majesty struck the swollen face with the back of his hand; the herald’s head rocked, and he would have fallen off the donkey if the ropes had been untied. The king turned away in disgust. “Put him to bed and see that he is tended.”
The herald croaked pathetically, and the captain said, “Majesty, do you not wish to know the rest of his message?”
“I know it from his condition,” the king snapped. “Earl Insol will not come to me—so I shall go to him, with my army! Send couriers to each of the knights of my demesne, that they must come to me straightaway with a hundred men-at-arms each!”
“As Your Majesty says.” The captain’s face was expressionless, hiding his foreboding. “Shall I also summon your lords?”
“The lords? Fool, they are more likely to march against me than for me! It was the lords who leashed my grandfather, and it is the lords who must be taught my power! It is for this that my father made more and more knights all the days of his reign. Now it is for me to use them! Earl Insol shall be the first! Summon my knights and their men, and we shall teach him the limits of his power!”
Coll crouched among the rocks, watching the lone monk amble toward the outlaw’s hill on his donkey. Coll stared at him with hungry eyes—and a hungry stomach. Oh, he had eaten better than ever he had as a serf, far better—but he would gladly have traded all his fresh meat for gruel with good companionship to sauce it.
Still, that was not to be, so he was glad to see a prospect of something better—two prospects! It seemed unbelievable, but in the month he had been hiding in the wastelands, he had come to realize that life sometimes did play tricks like this. A week since anyone worth robbing had come along that trail, and the food from the last one had run out two days before, two days in which he had eaten nothing but the little rodents who burrowed around his hill, and the occasional hawk who came to prey upon them. Now, in a sudden embarrassment of riches, there came three at once, two from the east and one from the west! The road curved around his hill, so he was sure neither saw the other, and decided he would have time to rob the monk before the knights came in sight—though he would have to use the back trail down his hill, for the knights were sure to come after him as soon as the friar went crying to them. At least they weren’t armored—but he could tell by their clothing that they were knights indeed, or, at the very least, reeves. Not that he feared them—but there was always bad luck. One alone he would have braced without a thought—he had become adept at unhorsing knights in this last month—but two was far too risky.
So! Rob the monk and be done with it, quickly. Down the hill Coll went, as nimbly as any of his ground squirrels. He knew the route well now, knew on which boulders he dared catch himself and which he dared not. At the bottom, he crouched behind a boulder set on top of another boulder—his hill was more a rock pile than an earth pile—and waited.
The monk came ambling along on his donkey, singing a ballad that had little of the sacred about it. Coll sprang down in front of him, brandishing his spear. The donkey shied, and the monk screamed, fumbling for his purse. “Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, wild man! You may have my purse, all the copper that’s in it, even a coin or two of silver!”
“What use is money to me?” Coll snapped. “Where should I go to spend it? No, fat man, it’s your saddlebag I’m after! Bread and cheese and wine, and anything else you have stored in there that I can eat!”
“Eat? Oh, I’ve something far better for you to eat here under my robe!” The monk fumbled under his cloth—then tore it open as he drew the sword hidden beneath, revealing a chain-mail coat as the cowl fell back to show an iron helmet. “Taste steel, robber!” he shouted. “Ho, my men! Out upon him!”
Suddenly they were there, leaping out from behind boulders: a dozen armed soldiers in leather breastplate: and steel caps. In a flash, Coll realized what had happened, realized it even as he leaped back among the boulders of his hill and scrambled to get out of sight. The knight had sent his soldiers across the plain the night before, while Coll slept, then come himself at first light, before Coll might have discovered the deception.
But they were stiff from crouching all night, those soldiers, and Coll was warm and nimble. They came charging up among the rocks, shouting and slipping. Coll braced himself against one of the unstable boulders, threw all his weight against it, and the knight cried out in dismay as the huge rock rolled slowly toward him, gaining speed. He had to forget Coll to turn his donkey aside—but the soldiers didn’t. With a whoop, they converged on Coll.