Which was true enough. It was easy to find a cranny to curl up in out of sight of the road, and bedtime was a simple routine when all you did was spread a blanket and lie down, unwashed and unbrushed, in your clothes. The only pests that had found her in the dark were the mosquitoes and ticks.
“You could sleep in the barn. Start off early tomorrow.” Shading her eyes, the woman stared down the road where the patrollers had vanished a while ago.
“I’d not charge you for it, child.”
Her honest concern for Fawn’s safety stood clear in her face. Fawn was torn between unjust anger and a desire to burst into tears, equally uncomfortable lumps in her stomach and throat. I’m not twelve, woman. She thought of saying so, and more. She had to start practicing it sooner or later: I’m twenty. I’m a widow. The phrases did not rise readily to her lips as yet.
Still… the farmwife’s offer beguiled her mind. Stay a day, do a chore or two or six and show how useful she could be, stay another day, and another… farms always needed more hands, and Fawn knew how to keep hers busy. Her first planned act when she reached Glassforge was to look for work. Plenty of work right here—familiar tasks, not scary and strange.
But Glassforge had been the goal of her imagination for weeks now. It seemed like quitting to stop short. And wouldn’t a town offer better privacy? Not necessarily, she realized with a sigh. Wherever she went, folks would get to know her sooner or later. Maybe it was all the same, no new horizons anywhere, really.
She mustered her flagging determination. “Thanks, but I’m expected. Folk’ll worry if I’m late.”
The woman gave a little headshake, a combination of conceding the argument and farewell. “Take care, then.” She turned back to her house and her own onslaught of tasks, duties that probably kept her running from before dawn to after dark.
A life I would have taken up, except for Sunny Sawman, Fawn thought gloomily, climbing back up to the straight road once more. I’d have taken it up for the sake of Sunny Sawman, and never thought of another.
Well, I’ve thought of another now, and I’m not going to go and unthink it.
Let’s go see Glassforge.
One more time, she called up her wearied fury with Sunny, the low, stupid, nasty… stupid fool, and let it stiffen her spine. Nice to know he had a use after all, of a sort. She faced south and began marching.
Chapter 2
Last year’s leaves were damp and black with rot underfoot, and as Dag climbed the steep slope in the dark, his boot slid. Instantly, a strong and anxious hand grasped his right arm.
“Do that again,” said Dag in a level whisper, “and I’ll beat you senseless.
Quit trying to protect me, Saun.”
“Sorry,” Saun whispered back, releasing the death clutch. After a momentary pause, he added, “Mari says she won’t pair you with the girls anymore because you’re overprotective.”
Dag swallowed a curse. “Well, that does not apply to you. Senseless. And bloody.”
He could feel Saun’s grin flash in the shadows of the woods. They heaved themselves upward a few more yards, finding handgrips among the rocks and roots and saplings.
“Stop,” Dag breathed.
A nearly soundless query from his right.
“We’ll be up on them over this rise. What you can see, can see you, and if there’s anything over there with groundsense, you’ll look like a torch in the trees. Stop it down, boy.”
A grunt of frustration. “But I can’t see Razi and Utau. I can barely see you.
You’re like an ember under a handful of ash.”
“I can track Razi and Utau. Mari holds us all in her head, you don’t have to.
You only have to track me.” He slipped behind the youth and gripped his right shoulder, massaging. He wished he could do both sides together, but this touch seemed to be enough; the flaring tension started to go out of Saun, both body and mind. “Down. Down. That’s right. Better.” And after a moment, “You’re going to do just fine.”
Dag had no idea whether Saun was going to do well or disastrously, but Saun evidently believed him, with appalling earnestness; the bright anxiety decreased still further.
“Besides,” Dag added, “it’s not raining. Can’t have a debacle without rain.
It’s obligatory, in my experience. So we’re good.” The humor was weak, but under the circumstances, worked well enough; Saun chuckled.
He released the youth, and they continued their climb.
“Is the malice there?” muttered Saun.
Dag stopped again, bending in the shadows to hook up a plant left-sided. He held it under Saun’s nose. “See this?”
Saun’s head jerked backward. “It’s poison ivy. Get it out of my face.”
“If we were this close to a malice’s lair, not even the poison ivy would still be alive. Though I admit, it would be among the last to go. This isn’t the lair.”
“Then why are we here?”
Behind them, Dag could hear the men from Glassforge topping the ridge and starting down into the ravine out of which he and the patrol were climbing.
Second wave. Even Saun didn’t manage to make that much noise. Mari had better land her punches before their helpers closed the gap, or there would be no surprise left. “Chato thinks this robber troop has been infiltrated, or worse, suborned. Catch us a mud-man, it’ll lead us to its maker, quick enough.”
“Do mud-men have groundsense?”
“Some. Malice ever catches one of us, it takes everything. Groundsense.
Methods and weapon skills. Locations of our camps… Likely the first human this one caught was a road robber, trying to hide out in the hills, which is why it’s doing what it is. None of us have been reported missing, so we still may have the edge. A patroller doesn’t let a malice take him alive if he can help it.”
Or his partner. Enough lessons for one night. “Climb.”
On the ridgetop, they crouched low.
Smoothly, Saun strung his bow. Less smoothly but just as quickly, Dag unshipped and strung his shorter, adapted one, then swapped out the hook screwed into the wooden cuff strapped to the stump of his left wrist, and swapped in the bow-rest. He seated it good and tight, clamped the lock, and dropped the hook into the pouch on his belt. Undid the guard strap on his sheath and made sure the big knife would draw smoothly. It was all scarcely more awkward than carrying the bow in his hand had once been, and at least he couldn’t drop it. At the bottom of the dell, Dag could see the clearing through the trees: three or four campfires burning low, tents, and an old cabin with half its roof tumbled in. Lumps of sleeping men in bedrolls, like scratchy burrs touching his groundsense. The faint flares of a guard, awake in the woods beyond, and someone stumbling back from the slit trenches. The sleepy smudges of a few horses tethered beyond. Words of the body’s senses for something his eyes did not see nor hand touch. Maybe twenty-five men altogether, against the patrol’s sixteen and the score or so of volunteers from Glassforge. He began to sort through the life-prickles, looking for things shaped like men that… weren’t.
The night sounds of the woods carried on: the croak of tree frogs, the chirp of crickets, the sawing of less identifiable insects. An occasional tiny rustle in the weeds. Anything bigger might have been either scared off by the noise of the camp below, or, depending on how the robbers buried their scraps, attracted.
Dag felt around with his groundsense beyond the tightening perimeter of the patrol, but found no nervous scavengers.
Then, too soon, a startled yell from his far right, partway around the patroller circle. Grunts, cries, the ring of metal on metal. The camp stirred. That’s it, in we go.
“Closer,” snapped Dag to Saun, and led a slide downslope to shorten their range.
By the time he’d closed the distance to a bare twenty paces and found a gap in the trees through which to shoot, the targets were obligingly rising to their feet. From even farther to his right, a flaming arrow arced high and came down on a tent; in a few minutes, he might even be able to see what he was shooting at.