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.
Dag let both fear and hope fade from his mind, together with worries about the inner nature of what they faced. It was just targets. One at a time. That one.
And that one. And in that confusion of flickering shadows…
Dag loosed another shaft, and was rewarded by a distant yelp. He had no idea what he’d hit or where, but it would be moving slower now. He paused to observe, and was satisfied when Saun’s next shaft also vanished into the black dark beyond the cabin and returned a meaty thunk they could hear all the way up here.
All around in the woods, the patrol was igniting with excitement; his head would be as full of them as Mari’s was in a moment if they didn’t all get a grip on themselves.
The advantage of twenty paces was that it was a nice, short, snappy range to shoot from. The disadvantage was how little time it took your targets to run up on your position… Dag cursed as three or four large shapes came crashing through the dark at them.
He let his bow arm pivot down and yanked out his knife. Glancing right, he saw Saun pull his long sword, swing, and make the discovery that a blade length that gave great advantage from horseback was awkwardly constrained in a close-grown woods.
“You can’t lop heads here!” Dag yelled over his shoulder. “Go to thrusts!” He grunted as he folded in his bow-arm and shoved his left shoulder into the nearest attacker, knocking the man back down the hillside. He caught a blade that came out of seeming-nowhere on the brass of his hilt, and with a shuddering scrape closed in along it for a well-placed knee to a target groin. These men might have fancied themselves bandits, but they still fought like farmers.
Saun raised a leg and booted his blade free of a target; the man’s cry choked in his throat, and the withdrawing steel made an ugly sucking noise. Saun followed Dag at a run toward the bandit camp. Razi and Utau, to their right and left, paced them, closing in tight as they all descended, stooping like hawks.
In the clearing, Saun devolved to his favorite powerful swings again. Which worked spectacularly bloodily when they connected, and left him wide open when they didn’t. A target succeeded in ducking, then came up swinging a long-handled, iron-headed sledgehammer. The breaking-pumpkin sound when it hit Saun’s chest made Dag’s stomach heave. Dag leaped inside the target’s lethal radius, clutched him tightly around the back with his bow-arm, and brought his knife up hard. Wet horrors spilled over his hand, and he twisted the knife and shoved the target off it. Saun lay on his back, writhing, his face darkening.
“Utau! Cover us!” Dag yelled. Utau, gasping for breath, nodded and took up a protective stance, blade ready. Dag slid down to Saun’s side, snapped off his bow lock and dropped it, and raised Saun’s head to his lap, letting his right hand slide over the strike zone.
Broken ribs and shattered breathing, heart shocked still. Dag let his groundsense, nearly extinguished so as to block his targets’ agony, come up fully, then flow into the boy. The pain was immense. Heart first. He concentrated himself there. A dangerous unity, if the yoked organs both chose to stop instead of start. A burning, lumping sensation in his own chest mirrored the boy’s. Come on, Saun, dance with me… A flutter, a stutter, a bruised limping. Stronger. Now the lungs. One breath, two, three, and the chest rose again, then again, and finally steadied in synchrony. Good, yes, heart and lungs would continue on their own.
The stunning reverberation of Saun’s targets’ ill fates still sloshed through the boy’s system, insufficiently blocked. Mari would have some work there, later. I hate fighting humans. Regretfully, Dag let the pain flow back to its source. The boy would be walking bent over for a month, but he would live.
The world returned to his senses. Around the clearing, bandits were starting to surrender as the yelling Glassforge men arrived and broke from the woods. Dag grabbed up his bow and rose to his feet, looking around. Beyond the burning tent, he spotted Mari. Dag! her mouth moved, but the cry was lost in the noise.
She raised two fingers, pointed beyond the clearing on the opposite side, and snapped them down against her armguard. Dag’s head swiveled.
Two bandits had dodged through the perimeter and were running away. Dag waved his bow in acknowledgment, and cried to his left linker, “Utau! Take Saun?”
Utau signaled his receipt of Dag’s injured partner. Dag turned to give chase, trying to reaffix the bow to its clamp as he ran. By the time he’d succeeded, he was well beyond the light from the fires. Closer…
The horse nearly ran him down; he leaped away barely before he could be knocked aside. The fugitives were riding double, a big man in front and a huge one behind.
No. That second one wasn’t a man.
Dizzied with excitement, the chase, and the aftershock of Saun’s injury, Dag bent a moment, gasping for control of his own breathing. His hand rose to check the twin knife sheath hung under his shirt, a reassuring lump against his chest.
Dark, warm, mortal hum. Mud-man. We have you. You and your maker are ours…
He despised tracking from horseback, but he wasn’t going to catch them on foot, not even with that dual burden. He calmed himself again, down, down, ours!, down curse it, and summoned his horse. It would take Copperhead several minutes to blunder through the woods from the patrol’s hidden assembly point. He knelt and removed his bow again, unstrung and stored it, and fumbled out the most useful of his hand replacements, a simple hook with a flat tongue of springy steel set against its outside curve to act as a sometimes-pincer. Tapping out a resin-soaked stick from the tin case in his vest pocket, he set it in the pinch of the spring and persuaded it to ignite. As the flare burned down to its end, he shuffled back and forth studying the hoofprints. When he was sure he could recognize them again, he pushed to his feet.
His quarry had nearly passed the limit of his groundsense by the time his mount arrived, snorting, and Dag swung aboard. Where one horse went another could follow, right? He kicked Copperhead after them at a speed that would have had Mari swearing at him for risking his fool neck in the dark. Mine. Fawn plodded.
Now that she was finally coming out of the flats into the southeastern hills, the straight road was not as level as it had run since Lumpton, nor as straight.
Its gentle slopes and curves were interspersed with odd climbs up through narrow, choked ravines that slashed through the rock, or down to timber bridges replacing shattered stone spans that lay like old bones between one impossible jumping-off point and another. The track dodged awkwardly around old rockfalls, or wet its feet and hers in fords.
Fawn wondered when she would finally reach Glassforge. It couldn’t be too much farther, for all that she had made a slow start this dawn. The last of the good bread had stayed down, at least. The day threatened to grow hot and sticky, later. Here, the road was pleasantly shaded, with woods crowding up to both sides.
So far this morning she had passed a farm cart, a pack train of mules, and a small flock of sheep, all going the other way. She’d encountered nothing else for nearly an hour. Now she raised her head to see a horse coming toward her, down the road a piece. Also going the wrong way, unfortunately. As it neared, she stepped aside. Not only headed north, but also already double-loaded Bareback. The animal was plodding almost as wearily as Fawn, its unbrushed dun hair smeared with salty crusts of dried sweat, burrs matting its black mane and tail.