Wolves in Davon Wood grow to extraordinary sizes, and are more than a match for any three Bane — even these three. Keera, however, shakes her head slowly, and answers: “A panther.” Veloc’s face, too, fills with apprehension, while Heldo-Bah’s shows childlike panic. The solitary, silent Davon panthers — which can reach lengths of twelve feet, and weights of many hundreds of pounds — are the largest and most efficient killers known, each as lethal as a pack of wolves and, like all cats, nearly impossible to detect before they strike. They are particularly fond of the caves and rocks near the Cat’s Paw.
Keera listens intently to the Wood, leaning forward on a worked maple staff with which she has humbled more men than would ever admit to the experience. “I sensed him some time ago,” she murmurs. “But I do not believe he stalks us. His movements are — strange …” She cocks her head. “Hafften Falls†—near the river. The rocks are high and hidden, hereabouts — good ground for panthers. We, however—” she reaches into her bag for a stick with well-oiled, charred rags wrapped in tight layers around one end—“will need torches. At this speed, in this darkness, we may go over the bank and break our necks, before ever we realize it. Veloc: flint.” As her brother goes into his own sack, Keera frowns at Heldo-Bah, so that her small nose points in accusation. “And by the Moon, Heldo-Bah, stop complaining! This poaching was your idea; it’s your stomach that can’t bear any more wood boar—”
“They’re made of nothing but fat and gristle!” whispers Heldo-Bah.
“We’re going, are we not?” Keera answers sternly. “But stop drawing attention to us with your eternal grumbling!”
“It’s not my fault, Keera,” Heldo-Bah says, tossing his own torch on the ground before Veloc. “Tell your fool brother. These lies of his—”
“They’re not lies, Heldo-Bah — it’s history!” Veloc’s face and voice grow improbably pompous, as he produces sparks for the three torches that he has sunk into the moist Earth in front of him: “If you choose to ignore facts, then you’re the fool — and the simple fact is, long before Broken, all men were of roughly the same height. The Bane did not exist, nor did the Tall — the names meant nothing. It has been recorded, Heldo-Bah!”
Heldo-Bah grunts: “Yes — by you, no doubt. Written on the rump of some other man’s wife!” Glancing about for something on which to inflict his bitterness, Heldo-Bah sees only a creeping orange tree grub on a moss-covered log. In a startling flurry, he slices the creature into four pieces with his deadly knives. “It’s bad enough that you make these insane tales up to charm women into your bed — but to then try to pass them off as ‘history,’ as though no one would ever question you …” Heldo-Bah picks up the four oozing‡ segments of wood grub — and drops them, one after another, into his mouth, chewing ferociously and seeming satisfied by a taste that would cause most humans to erupt from both ends.
Keera watches in revulsion. “Do you never consider, Heldo-Bah, that wood boar may be the least likely cause of your ailments?”
“Oh, no,” Heldo-Bah says simply. “It is boar — I have studied the matter. And tonight, I will have beef! What do you see, Keera?”
“We’ve angled our run well — we should be at the Fallen Bridge in a few minutes, and cross straight onto Lord Baster-kin’s Plain.”
Heldo-Bah moans delightedly, seeming to forget the panther. “Ah, shag cattle … Good beef, and beef belonging to that pig Baster-kin, too.”
“And the Merchant Lord’s private guard?” Veloc asks his sister.
Keera shakes her head. “We will have to get closer before I can answer that. But—” She lifts her staff, hooks it onto a leafy birch, and pulls the fluttering green curtain aside to reveal the distant summit of Broken, perfectly framed by the trees. “All seems quiet in the city, tonight …”
At the sight of the torch-lit metropolis, fountainhead of power in the kingdom of Broken and wellspring of misery for those who dwell in Davon Wood, a passionate silence falls over the party, and, soon thereafter, over many of the forest creatures that share this sudden glimpse of the northern horizon. The eerie calm is not broken until Heldo-Bah spits out the last bit of his vile meal. “So — the Groba has not dispatched any Outragers,” he grumbles; and it seems he finds this last word infinitely more sickening than what he has just eaten.
Veloc glances dubiously at his friend. “Did they consider it?”
“There was talk of as much, among that last group of foragers we met,” answers Heldo-Bah. “They claimed to have witnessed one of the Tall’s death rituals at the Wood’s edge, and sent a man back to Okot with the news. When he returned, he said that the Outragers had argued that the act required a response — for the Tall did their killing on our side of the river.”
Keera presses: “But are they certain it was the Tall who were responsible? The Groba are forbidden to dispatch Outragers unless they are sure, and the river spirits are very active, following spring thaw — they may have coaxed a forest beast to attack one of Baster-kin’s men—”
“And I might have stones the size of a shag bull’s,” Heldo-Bah answers, spitting again. “Save that I don’t. Rock goblins and river trolls …” The forager’s cynicism is answered by even louder crackling on the forest floor nearby. His face reverting to childlike fear, Heldo-Bah snatches a lit torch from the ground and glances in all directions. “The existence of which,” he declares in a clear voice, “I accept as an article of faith!”
Keera is over to him in a few bounding steps, and claps a hand over his mouth. Her eyes and head always moving, she whispers, “The panther …” Keera creeps to the very limits of the flickering glow created by the three torches, holding her maple staff at the ready. “I may have been wrong — he may be stalking us. Yet it did not seem so …”
Veloc comes to her side. “What can we do?”
“Run?” Heldo-Bah whispers, joining them in a bound.
“Yes,” Keera says, “but we will not manage fifty yards, even holding torches, unless we give the panther something else to think about. An offering — where is the boar joint from yesterday?” Veloc produces a piece of bone and meat, wrapped in a bit of hide. “Leave it here,” Keera commands. “It will draw him, and the fire of the torches should remove any lingering interest he might have in us.”
“And catch the interest of Lord Baster-kin’s Guard,” Veloc replies, even as he follows his sister’s orders.
“We will extinguish them at the Fallen Bridge,” declares Keera, her mind, as ever, solving problems before Veloc and Heldo-Bah even contemplate them. “Come now, quickly — away!”
Having resumed their characteristic pace through the Wood, the three Bane need only moments to reach the craggy, deafening banks of the churning Cat’s Paw river, where they find themselves near the thick, hundred-foot trunk of an enormous red fir, whose roots have recently given up the desperate struggle to grip the scant Earth of the high riverbank. The ancient sentinel’s mighty body now points directly north across Hafften Falls, one of the most daunting of the Cat’s Paw’s many cascades: it has sacrificed itself to provide the most reliable of several natural bridges between Davon Wood and Broken — bridges that many of Broken’s military commanders would like to see destroyed, and with them the threat posed by the mischievous and sometimes murderous Bane. But the merchants of Broken, although they despise the exiles, make enormous profits from the goods that the tribe’s foragers bring out of the wilderness: a child in Broken, for example, who does not number among his possessions a little Davon tree shrew like those that now huddle in cages in the sacks carried by Keera’s party can depend upon the disdain of his play fellows, while any woman who cannot drape herself with sufficient jewelry made of the silver, gold, and precious gems found in the wilderness will leave her house only at night, or elaborately veiled. Worse yet, a husband or father who cannot afford to buy such things is seen as faltering in his devotion to Kafra—