Harlen nodded unhappily. He was looking at the cart bearing the bodies of Katrin and Garren. Then he made up his mind.
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘And I’m going after them.’ He pointed at the cart. ‘They’d expect us to look after their son.’
With an effort he clambered on to his horse. ‘Are you coming?’ he said to Yakob, urging the horse forward.
Yakob frowned and looked about indecisively for a moment, then he nodded.
The two rode off together.
‘Sit with Jeorg,’ Gryss had yelled as he had scuttled out of the cottage in pursuit of Farnor. ‘He shouldn’t wake up for a while yet, but if he does try to keep him quiet. Let him have a little to drink, but don’t let him eat anything yet.’
As she closed the cottage door, for the first time in her life Marna had an urge to bolt it.
She left it unlocked, though, and returned to Jeorg’s room. As she sat down, Gryss’s old dog padded in grumpily and flopped at her feet. She bent down and patted it. ‘You’ve no idea what’s going on, have you, old thing?’ she said. ‘All this coming and going.’ The dog gave a heartfelt sigh and rested its chin on her foot.
Now, in contrast to wanting to lock the door, she felt trapped by the room. She hunched her shoulders unhappily. Inevitably, her thoughts returned to the fate of Garren and Katrin, and she began to shake. She had slept only fitfully through what had been left of the night and, as she had told Gryss, she had wept for most of the time that she was awake. Wept for the memory of Garren and Katrin, wept for Farnor and his loss, wept for herself and for fear of what was happening to the valley. Wept for things she could put no name to, because weeping was all she could do.
And the fears were still there. ‘They’ll do much worse to you,’ Gryss had said. She knew that, for pity’s sake. But it did not seem to have occurred to Gryss that they would probably do that anyway if they took control of the valley. That was why she was shaking. These were bandits, not soldiers with perhaps some semblance of honour or discipline. When they wanted women they would come and take them, and no one would be able to stop them.
And with Rannick leading them there would be no restraint. At the thought of Rannick her trembling became worse. Of all people. There would be no doubt about which way his attention would drift when the urge for female company came over him.
She clenched her teeth violently then clasped her hands together in an attempt to still their shaking.
Ironically, Marna was one of the few people in the valley who had had any time for Rannick. She had always felt a sympathy for him, sensing in him some-thing lost and helpless. But that had been before her ready smile and her pleasant inquiries about his well-being and his activities had been misconstrued for a more ardent concern. Rannick, considerably her senior, had taken the consequent rebuff badly and had been caustically formal with her ever since, though his eyes told a different tale. That she still felt some remnant of that earlier sympathy did little but confuse her now.
She remembered powerful hands holding her as she had never been held before. There had been a faint, unexpected flickering of desire at the contact, but the fear had been the greater and had expunged it; the hands had held her helpless.
‘There’s no harder thing in life than standing by helpless.’ Gryss’s words came back to her vividly as she recalled the incident. He had not meant them in that context, but they were nonetheless true.
And here, looking to the future, there was an ele-ment of choice.
Marna opened her hands. The trembling had stopped, but the spirit that drove it seemed to have suffused through her entire body, its centre resting solid and cold in the pit of her stomach. And it had changed in character. What had been fear was now anger and determination. She would never be helpless like that again. Frozen like a rabbit before a stoat.
Never!
She looked at Jeorg again. His battered features were an object lesson to her. She could not fight that way, trading blow for blow. She would have to use flight and stealth. But the conclusion was unsatisfactory. The memory of Rannick’s grip on her arms returned and her hands started to tremble again. This time she willed them to stop. Sooner or later, flight and stealth would not be open to her and she would encounter such power again. She must be prepared to deal with it.
Her eyes narrowed as she pondered, the fear-driven anger in her giving her a strange creativity. She had teeth and nails which could be used to great effect, but she would need more. She would need a weapon, she realized; something that would do greater damage than teeth and nails and futile fists. Much greater damage.
Swords, spears, clubs she dismissed even as they came to her. They would need strength and skill to use and, anyway, she couldn’t possibly carry something like that around all day.
A knife! Or, better still, knives. That was it. She drove a blade into Rannick’s arm and felt his grip vanish. Excellent.
And there were plenty about her father’s house. She began to run through an inventory of them, at the same time debating where about her person she could carry them.
Unexpectedly, her fear returned, springing upon her like some childish prankster. What about now? Wasn’t she defenceless? As before, she had a sudden vision of horsemen circling the house, of an urgent hammering on the door, of Rannick standing in the doorway come to take what he wanted.
Almost in spite of herself, she stood up and went to the window. Cautiously she drew the curtain a little. The sunlit lane stood reassuringly empty. She felt a little embarrassed, but the sense of urgency remained.
She let the curtain fall back and returned to her chair. A restlessness pervaded her and her eyes wandered about the room, though she could not have said what she was looking for.
Then she lit on Jeorg’s pack, dropped casually in a corner of the room in the flurry of attending to him.
She went over and picked it up. It was heavy. Quite unscrupulously she took it back to her chair, undid the clasps and began to rifle through it. Jeorg would have a spare knife in here, surely? The contents, however, were uninspiring; clothes, some fruit and dried meat, a few small sunstones, a tin of bandages and salves. Her nose wrinkled unhappily at the sight of these and she glanced again at the massive damage that had been done to her unconscious charge.
Even as she did so, her hand encountered a package. She felt around it carefully, testing its shape and size. Thoughts of a knife vanished in a surge of curiosity and, tongue protruding between her teeth, she gently withdrew the package. Rough string bound a waxed paper parcel.
Untying the string, she opened the paper to reveal a soft leather wallet. She examined it for a moment and then began to open it. It was a cunningly designed and well-made article, with tightly sewn seams and folds and flaps so arranged that, even without the waxed paper wrapping, it was effectively waterproof.
Inside were papers. She looked at them briefly and then, curiosity well aroused, she took them through into the back room where the light was better.
Although her search had been prompted by a need for a weapon with which she could defend herself, for some time Marna would have been oblivious to an army laying noisy siege to the cottage, as she became increasingly engrossed in the papers.
They were the details of the route to the capital that Gryss had prepared for Jeorg. Some of the notes and maps were obviously very old, having perhaps been prepared by Gryss during his own travelling days. Others were much newer.
For the most part, they were written in a neat, curl-ing script that Marna presumed was Gryss’s, though there were some more coarsely lettered notes here and there. And they were presented in a clear, logical manner that could only have been Gryss’s.
It was all there before her: the way to the capital, laid out for the following. Her mind raced. Fate had transformed an impetuous idea into a real dilemma for her. She could go now, this minute. She could take a horse from the inn, call at her home to gather clothes and food, and go. Go downland discreetly until she saw whether there were any guards posted or not, and then as fast as she could all the way downland and to the capital. Over the hill!