How long have you been able to do that?
A while. I had been giving thought to what the bear-man told us. And when we were apart, I came to know I had a life of my own. I found a place of my own in my mind.
I sensed a hesitancy to his thought, as if he expected me to rebuke him for it. Instead I embraced him, wrapping him in the warmth. I felt for him. I feared you would die.
I fear the same for you, now. Almost humbly he added, But I lived. And now at least one of us is free, to rescue the other.
I am glad you are safe. But I fear there is little you can do for me. And if they catch sight of you, they will not rest until they have killed you.
Then they shall not catch sight of me, he promised lightly. He carried me off hunting with him that night.
The next day it took all of my concentration to stay on my feet and moving. A storm blew up. We attempted a military pace despite the snowy trails we followed and the shrieking winds that constantly buffeted us with threats of snow. As we moved away from the river and up into the foothills, the trees and underbrush were thicker. We heard the wind in the trees above us, but felt it less. The cold became drier and more bitter at night the higher we went. The food I was given was enough to keep me on my feet and alive, but little more. Burl rode at the head of his procession, followed by his mounted guard. I walked behind in the midst of my guards. Behind us came the pilgrims flanked by regulars. Behind all that trailed the baggage train.
At the end of each day’s march, I was confined to a swiftly pitched tent, fed, and then ignored until the next day’s rising. My conversations were limited to accepting my meals, and to nighttime thought-sharing with Nighteyes. The hunting on this side of the river was lush compared to where we had been. He found game almost effortlessly and was well on his way to rebuilding his old strength. He found it no trouble at all to keep pace with us and still have time to hunt. Nighteyes had just torn into a rabbit’s entrails on my fourth night as a prisoner when he suddenly lifted his head and snuffed the wind.
What is it?
Hunters. Stalkers. He abandoned his meat and stood. He was on a hillside above Burl’s camp. Moving toward it, slipping from tree to tree, were at least two dozen shadowy figures. A dozen carried bows. As Nighteyes watched, two crouched in the cover of a dense thicket. In a few moments, his keen nose caught the scent of smoke. A tiny fire glowed dully at their feet. They signaled the others, who spread out, noiseless as shadows. Archers sought vantage points while the others slipped into the camp below. Some went toward the picket lines of the animals. With my own ears, I heard stealthy footsteps outside the tent where I lay trussed. They did not pause. Nighteyes smelled the stench of burning pitch. An instant later, two flaming bolts went winging through the night. They struck Burl’s tent. In a moment, a great cry arose. As sleeping soldiers stumbled out of their tents and headed toward the blaze, the archers on the hillside rained arrows down on them.
Burl stumbled out of the burning tent, wrapping his blankets about himself as he came and bellowing orders. “They’re after the Bastard, you fools! Guard him at all costs!” Then an arrow went skipping past him over the frozen ground. He cried out and flung himself flat into the shelter of a supply wagon. A breath later two arrows thudded into it.
The men in my tent had leaped up at the first commotion. I had largely ignored them, preferring Nighteyes’ view of the events. But when the sergeant burst into the tent, his first order was “Drag him outside before they fire the tent. Keep him down. If they come for him, cut his throat!”
The sergeant’s orders were followed quite literally. A man knelt on my back, his bared knife set to my throat. Six others surrounded us. All about us, in the darkness, other men scrambled and shouted. There was a second outcry as another tent went up in flames, joining Burl’s, which now blazed merrily and lit his end of the camp well. The first time I tried to lift my head and see what was happening, the young soldier on my back slammed my face back into the frozen ground energetically. I resigned myself to ice and gravel and looked through the wolf’s eyes instead.
Had not Burl’s guard been so intent on keeping me, and on protecting Burl, they might have perceived that neither of us were the targets of this raid. While arrows fell about Burl and his blazing tent, at the dark end of the camp the silent invaders were freeing smugglers and pilgrims and ponies. Nighteyes’ spying had shown me that the archer who had fired Burl’s tent wore the Holdfast features as clearly as Nik did. The smugglers had come after their own. The captives trickled out of the camp like meal from a holed sack while Burl’s men guarded him and me.
Burl’s assessment of his men had been correct. More than one man-at-arms waited out that raid in the shadow of a wagon or a tent. I did not doubt that they’d fight well if personally attacked, but no one ventured to lead a sortie against the archers on the hill. I suspected then that Captain Mark had not been the only man to have an arrangement with the smugglers. The fire they did return was ineffective, for the blazing tents in the camp had ruined their night vision, whereas the fire made silhouettes and targets of the archers who stood to return the smugglers’ fire.
It was over in a remarkably short time. The archers on the hill continued to loose arrows down on us as they slipped away, and that fire held the attention of Burl’s men. When the rain of missiles abruptly ceased, Burl immediately roared for his sergeant, demanding to know if I had been kept. The sergeant looked warningly about at his men, and then called back that they’d held them off me.
The rest of that night was miserable. I spent a good part of it facedown in the snow while a half-dressed Burl snorted and stamped all around me. The burning of his tent had consumed most of his personal supplies. When the escape of the pilgrims and smugglers was discovered, it seemed to be of secondary importance to the fact that no one else in camp had clothing of a size that would fit Burl.
Three other tents had been fired. Burl’s riding horse had been taken in addition to the smugglers’ ponies. For all Burl’s bellowed threats of dire vengeance, he made no effort to organize a pursuit. Instead he contented himself with kicking me several times. It was nearly dawn before he thought to ask if the minstrel, too, had been taken. She had. And that, he declared, proved that I had been the true target of the raid. He tripled the guard around me for the rest of that night, and for the next two days’ journey to Moonseye. Not surprisingly, we saw no more of our attackers. They had got all they wished and vanished into the foothills. I had no doubt that Nik had boltholes on this side of the river as well. I could not feel any warmth toward the man who had sold me but I confessed to myself a grudging admiration that he had carried off the pilgrims with him when he escaped. Perhaps Starling could make a song of that.
Moonseye seemed a small town hidden in a fold of the mountains’ skirts. There were few outlying farmsteads, and the cobbled streets began abruptly just outside the wooden palisade that surrounded the town. A sentry issued a formal challenge to us there from a tower above the walls. It was only after we had entered it that I appreciated what a thriving little city it was. I knew from my lessons with Fedwren that Moonseye had been an important military outpost for the Six Duchies before it had become a stopping place for caravans bound for the other side of the Mountains. Now traders in amber and furs and carved ivory passed through Moonseye on a regular basis and enriched it in their passing. Or so it had been in the years since my father had succeeded in negotiating an open-pass treaty with the Mountain Kingdom.