It was impossible to think of the Hiril Dúnedain as really, truly dead; she’d been a part of Mary’s life since she was born, as her mother’s younger sister, and she’d been the re-founder of the Rangers here in the Fifth Age, together with her anamchara Eilir Mackenzie. Their liege-lady since the twins moved to Mithrilwood.
It was especially hard to believe her gone when all you’d heard was the tale of it and all you’d seen was the urn with the ashes-she’d been mortally wounded in Boise on the clandestine mission that rescued Fred Thurston’s mother and sisters and sort of by accident his sister-in-law, who’d been desperate to get herself and her son away from Fred’s brother Martin, the parricide and tyrant.
The murder and usurpation hadn’t bothered Juliet Thurston since it made her a ruler’s consort and her son the heir, but the way he’d become enslaved to the Church Universal and Triumphant had. Mary was almost sympathetic; she remembered the High Seeker’s eyes, windows into nothing. Waking up with something like that on your pillow…
Almost sympathetic, not really sympathetic. But Aunt Astrid is dead and she died saving that worthless bitch’s life. Well, the bitch and her son, who’s just a little kid. And Ritva was there…I’m glad one of us was. They’ll be someone can tell the story to our children.
Wryly, with a smile that combined sorrow and humor:
Aunt Astrid will be even more powerful as a legend than she was as Lady of the Rangers. And Uncle Alleyne is taking it…well, he’s perfectly functional. In wartime, that’s all you can really ask. Afterwards he’ll have Diorn and Fimalen and Hinluin. Children take you out of yourself.
They completed the next leapfrog maneuver. Everyone’s equipment was silenced-no sounds of metal on metal, no creak of leather, no rattle of arrow on arrow in the quivers, swords worn slantwise across the back rather than at the belt, and the dark green and mottled gray of the Ranger garb blended into the late night better than black would have done. The sound of a score of her people settling into their new positions was less than the scuff of a glove on stone.
The cloth mask of the hood left a strip across her eyes bare, with a screen of gauze pinned up for nighttime; she let her eye travel with a slow methodical scan. Watching for movement. Watching for patterns, the outlines that would mean a man hiding, that you didn’t need to see as much as sense. Not the narrow focus that excluded everything but a target, instead the wide-open acceptance that took in all your surroundings as a network connected each thing to the next. Yourself a part of it, sensitive to the slightest tug on the web.
Nothing. A desert mouse hopped by, squeaking faintly and making a prodigious sideways leap as it realized a human was six inches away; Mary grinned behind her mask at its expression of bulge-eyed terror. It fled even faster as something half-visible ghosted through the air above, the wilderness going on about its own life heedless of the human-kind. The night was intensely still but the stars were dimming with high thin cloud coming in from the west, the tail end of fall storms hitting the Cascades and spilling into the interior…
She chittered. The faintest of passing shadows as the team behind hers moved forward and upward. Again, and again; not mechanical, but a subtle dance with every slightest fold of the land, each loose rock and clod of earth and miniature gully washed by the recent fall rains, testing each foothold and handhold before committing to it.
The final leapfrog left her, Ritva, and Uncle Alleyne at the head of the sparsely-dotted column that now snaked up from the river to the plateau above. She inclined her head to see faint shadows cast by irregularities in the ground that didn’t fit the landscape, then crouched and ran her fingers over the ground to take in details that even an expert couldn’t see when it was this dark and in the distorting moonlight.
All shod horses, she battle-signed, when the other two came close enough to see the broad movements. Some of it very fresh. Enemy cavalry sweeping the area, repeatedly, in the last few hours. Lots of enemy cavalry. And all shod…Boise regulars.
They both made gestures that meant: I spotted that too.
They settled in, picking blinds that would work as well in daylight if they had to stay that long and tenting their war-cloaks out around them. She dug a rock out of her position and set it carefully where it wouldn’t draw notice; even with a Ranger tunic on-light mesh-mail between two layers of thin soft leather-a pointed stone digging into your belly-button for hours at a time could get old. The lighter beaten dirt of the road to the north of their position glimmered like a silver ribbon through the heath, with nothing else but the rusted, tattered snags of a pre-Change building of sheet metal half-buried in dust and brush beyond it to say this wasn’t somewhere east of Rhûn a couple of Ages of the World ago.
Like the Paths of the Dead, she thought with a slight shiver; it was that season. Come on, now, Ranger, control your imagination.
Once they were certain there weren’t any enemy observing them, there was a brief clipping of vegetation and rubbing of soil to make the cloaks perfect matches for the locality. She stifled a sneeze at the spicy scent of cut sagebrush. Then they took position and waited; Dúnedain got a lot of practice at that, and the Quest had driven it home. Mary sucked on a hard candy to keep her energy level up, worked her muscles against each other on her bones to keep from stiffening in the cold and at long intervals took tiny sips from a flexible tube that ran to a flat bladder on her back.
Euuuu.
It tasted horrible, flat and rubbery. Also she didn’t want to drink too much, because eventually you had to get rid of it. Peeing yourself was an occupational hazard sometimes, you couldn’t be fastidious when things were serious, but the smell could give you away to an alert scout close-by.
Speak of Morgoth and He appears, she thought, an hour later.
She controlled her breathing to damp down the spurt of tension. It was still some time to dawn, and dense-dark now that clouds had covered most of the sky. The sound came first, shod hooves thumping dirt; she could feel it through her belly and breasts where they pressed against the soil. From here you could see the dirt road running east and west and then the dark shapes of riders spread out in a long line, with the odd lantern they were using more to keep alignment than for light.
The cavalry patrol were taking their time and picking their way forward slowly. They were Boise cavalry from their gear, horse-archers with sabers at their belts, but a number of them had light lances as well. They were using them to prod at the odd suspicious spot, little gleams of dull silver in the night.
Too professional for comfort, Mary thought.
With a practiced effort of will she pushed aside the visceral knowledge of how much steel slicing your flesh hurt when it happened. That was just her body’s memory reminding her how she’d acquired so many scars at a still-young age. If they got that close, wounds would be the least of her problems. The Dúnedain were superb fighters at their skulk-and-snap style of war, but they didn’t have any disguised Maiar with long beards or shining elf-lords with magic swords to even up impossible odds right now.
Though my big brother does have a magic sword, genuine article, so maybe someday…Hmmm. They’re combing their line of march over and over and not just going through the motions either. Old General Lawrence Thurston did his job well.