She waited beside the telltale traces until Daren came storming back. By that time the expected drizzle had been falling for about a candlemark; and as she had anticipated, his cloak and his leathers were soaked through. He was shivering, and the leather was probably chafing him raw wherever it touched bare skin, and his temper was not improved by his discomfort.
“You were supposed to take downstream!” he shouted. “I had to take both! You lazy little bitch—you’re supposed to be doing something, not standing around waiting for me—”
“He left the path here,” she said, clenching her hands to keep from hitting him. “He walked backward in his own tracks, and then jumped off the trail into that pile of leaves.”
Daren looked at her scornfully. “I’m not some green little boy who believes in Pelagir-tales. I’m a prince of Rethwellan, and I’ve been trained by some of the finest hunters in the world. You—”
She lost her temper, and grabbed the lacings in the front of his leather tunic, then dragged him past the pile of leaves, surprise making him manageable for the necessary few steps. “Does that look like a Pelagir-tale, little boy?” she hissed, pointing at the very clear paw-print in the mud. “Seems to me you’d better start growing up pretty quickly, so you know what to believe and what not to believe. I’ve beaten you at this game five times out of six, and you know it, so don’t you think you’d better stop playing the high and mighty princeling and start paying attention to somebody who happens to be better at this than you are?”
He pulled out of her grip, his face growing red. “Since when does half a year of training give you the right to act like an expert?” he shouted.
“Since—”
That was all she had a chance to say.
Something very dark, and very large suddenly loomed up out of the bushes just behind her. She never had a chance to see what it was; the next thing she knew, she was flying through the air, and she had barely enough time to curl into a protective ball to hide her head and neck before she impacted with a tree.
After that all she saw was stars, and blackness.
This was the worst headache she’d ever had—
—and the most uncomfortable bed. It felt like a bush. A leafless, prickly bush.
What happened?
Kero tried to move, and bit back a moan as every muscle and joint protested movement. It felt as if the entire left side of her body was a single ache. And her head hurt the same way it had when one of the horses had kicked her and she’d gotten concussed.
“Well?” That was Tarma’s voice. “You two certainly made a fine mess out of this assignment.”
She opened her eyes, wincing against the light. Tarma stood about twenty paces away; just beyond her was Daren, lying up against another tree, as though he’d impacted and slid down it. Fine mist drooled down onto her face; droplets condensed and ran into her eyes and down the sides of her face to the back of her neck. Her mouth was dry, and she licked some of the moisture from her lips.
Looks like he got some of the same treatment I did, Kero decided, and shivered. Even wet, her wool clothing would keep her warm, but she must have been lying on the cold ground for a while and it had leached most of the heat out of her body.
“You’ve managed to botch everything I told you to do,” Tarma said coldly, arms crossed under her dark brown rain cape. Her harsh features looked even colder and more forbidding than usual. Her ice-blue eyes flicked from one to the other of them. “First you don’t even bother to set up a plan, or agree on who is going to do what. Then you, Daren, storm off into the game leaving behind a trail a baby could follow, so that Kero has to spend twice the time she should covering it for you. Then you, Kero, let Daren waste his time in a fruitless search when you knew from the moment you saw Warrl’s tracks that he was chasing a wild hare. Then you both start arguing at the tops of your lungs. An army could have come up on you and you’d never have known it until it was too late.”
She glared at both of them, and Kero didn’t even try to move under the dagger of that stare.
“Keth was working with me on this,” she continued, pitilessly. “We decided to make this run dangerous for you, to teach you that if you fouled up, you’d get hurt; just like real life. You triggered one of her booby traps with your arguing. And that’s exactly what it caught; two boobies, two fools who couldn’t even follow simple orders to keep their mouths shut. Well, I have a further little assignment for you: get home. There’s just one catch. Until you cooperate, you won’t be able to find your way back.” She smiled nastily, and turned on her heel, stalking off into the rain. In the time between one breath and the next, she was gone, as if the drizzle itself had decided to step in and hide her.
Kero struggled out of the bush she’d flattened in her fall. Twigs scratched her, as she slowly pulled herself up onto her knees, then from her knees, shakily, to her feet. Her head ached horribly, and she guessed that she was one long bruise from neck to knee along her left side. The only good luck she’d had was that she’d fallen into that bush in the first place. There had been enough dead leaves and grass between herself and the ground to keep her out of the mud. Bits of leaves clung all over her, making her look as if she’d slept in them. She brushed herself off as best she could, and waited for Daren to join her.
He used the tree trunk to steady himself as he got to his feet; he wavered quite a bit getting there, and looked as if he felt just as shaky as she did. When he saw she was watching him, he glared at her, and limped off after Tarma without taking a single backward glance at her.
That little bastard! she thought, indignantly. Well, two can play—
Then she looked around.
She had been in and out of these woods for the past several months. They weren’t that far from the back door to the Tower. It was late autumn, most of the leaves were off the trees, which should have made it easier to see through the woods in spite of the rain.
She didn’t recognize anything now. She was totally, inexplicably, lost.
And in three breaths, Daren came storming out of the mist, head down, limping along like a wounded and angry bull, and ran right into her.
“Hey!” she yelled, indignantly. He caught her as she started to fall, then shoved her away.
“What are you doing, running into me like that?” he shouted.
“Run—you pig! You ran into me!” she spluttered.
“You weren’t anywhere in sight!” he yelled back, turning red again. “You just jumped out of nowhere!”
“I did no such—” but he was gone again, as fast as his bruised legs would take him, this tune going in the opposite direction to the one he’d been traveling when he ran into her.
That—she couldn’t think of any name that was bad enough to call him. That swine! That rat! Unreasonable, pigheaded, overbearing, arrogant—She looked around, angrily, dashing water and wet hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand. That vague shape looming up through the rain, beyond and above the trees—that might be the cliff of the Tower.