For the next few days we worked our way through the maze of wind-eaten badlands north of where I’d last seen Avi. Despite the name, this country was far from a desert. The horses grazed well on quick-rye, which sprouts, ripens, and seeds within a week after a heavy rainfall, and my belly was full of the brush-grouse that fed in the same patch. Now the morning shadows stretched long over the dew-wet sauge and wire-grass, below the blue-white sky.
A hell of a morning to have my nose stuck in sheep droppings.
I sighed and straightened up from crouching on the canyon floor. “I don’t think we’ll find much. Wild sheep have been through here, covering up anything else.”
Terris muttered something no nice University boy should know.
Etch chuckled. “Can’t be helped now.”
The gray mare rubbed her head against my back and butted me with her nose as if to say, Crazy two-legs, what are you doing on the ground? She almost had her full strength back now and wanted more than a sedate stroll along the canyon floor.
I said, “You’re so uppity, Terris, you take the lead.”
He swung his leg over the sorrel gelding’s rump and jumped lightly to the ground. Earlier I’d watched him riding and knew Etch’d been talking to him about horses. He’d got the rhythm of his horse’s gait. Now he kept his eyes to the scanning pattern I’d taught him, and I was right on his flank, checking everything he saw, everything he didn’t see. He missed very little.
We went on through the noon hour, marking each canyon and all the branchings on our makeshift map, stopping to water the horses when we could. After that I led and then Etch, each of us checking the other. Boring, nerve-wracking, neck-stiffening, eye-watering work. Just before dusk, we halted at the branching of three gullies, a natural crossroads. Ground-hugging rosemarie grew everywhere here, thick enough to hide something small.
“We’ve cut so far eastward, we’re closer to due north than we were when we started,” I thought aloud. “There are connections, and these gully walls can be climbed.”
“We’ll have to mark this on the map and then go through the tributaries one by one tomorrow,” Terris said. He was tired, more from worry nerves than anything, and trying not to show it.
If it were me, I thought, this is where I’d leave something for Avi to find. If I could. A coin, maybe, a bit of torn clothing, a horseshoe nail...
I crouched down on the loose dirt and pushed aside the pungent clusters of leaves. Scanning, forcing myself to focus on each shadow in turn and yet to see the pattern of the whole. My eyes flickered over something small and circular, carved, bone-white.
“Ah!”
My fingers closed around it, smooth under its lightly incised markings. I handed it to Terris, grinning despite myself.
He smoothed off the dust. “A button?”
“Not just any button. It’s chevre horn, see, and this far north there’s only sheep. It’s too cold here for chevre — they do better by the Inland Sea. The horns fall off every year and the village women carve them like this. Each family’s got its own design, and each worker adds her own mark here, on the back. I know this pattern — it’s one of a set I bought for Avi. She left it just where she knew I’d look.”
“Hidden,” Etch said, looking grim.
“There’s been no sign of a struggle,” said Terris.
“She was well enough to leave that button where it wouldn’t be found except for someone who was looking for it.” My heart pounded.
“The light’s not good for much,” said Etch. “I’ll make some torches.” He bound kindling strips together to burn long and slow. We each lit one and went on, on foot. The night closed in on us.
The flickering torchlight turned everything to shadows that seemed part alive and part illusion, watching us as we passed with their lidless eyes.
There was nothing I was afraid of, not in this night. The things trapped in the shadows had no wings, no teeth, no knives.
Partway up a rapidly widening gully, Terris spotted what looked like faded footprints.
“Boots,” I said, “but they’re old enough so I can’t tell much more.” I held my torch up for better light. There, on the ground-clinging rosemarie —
I knelt down, hardly daring to touch it. The break wasn’t fresh, but neither was it very old. The exposed woody core was dry and yet the leaves beyond the break were still water-soft.
“Look there,” Etch pointed. “More. Leading north.”
I nodded, balancing the heady adrenalin rush against the day we’d had, the night ahead.
Terris marked my hesitation. He was as tired as any of us, but his voice was firm. “This is far enough. We make camp here.”
“We can’t give up now,” Etch said.
“We aren’t giving up,” Terris shot back.
“What good will we be to her half-asleep on our feet?” I added. “You said it yourself, the light’s gone and it’s too easy to miss a track by torchlight. Against the chance of an error like that, what difference will a few hours make? Tomorrow morning with clear eyes and good daylight will do us just as well.”
In the end, Etch and I agreed. Terris had better sense than either of us. We might wander around as if we had no more brains that the brush-sheep, losing the track because it was too damned dark. We might face a fight to the death. Part of me wanted to go on, but I couldn’t listen to that part. I couldn’t make a mistake, not with Avi’s life.
I was in the lead when we came to a sharp bend in the canyon. Here the clumps of rosemarie and wire-grass gave way to split-bark oak, so there must have been an underground spring for their taproots to draw from. Split-bark meant squirrels nesting in the branches and getting fat on the acorns. Just our luck, because the nitbrains would chitter out a warning as soon as we got close.
Beyond the grove, part of the western canyon wall had tumbled down and half across the trail, huge rough boulders easily big enough to hide a mounted man. All in all, an excellent place for an ambush.
From the gray mare’s back, I studied the narrow passage ahead. Nothing moved except for a branch that a squirrel had just jumped off. The squirrel, of course, was gone.
As for Terris and Etch, I couldn’t count on what they’d do if someone came barreling at them, knife in hand. Best thing’d be to run and hope their horses were faster, and I told them so.
“Stay behind me,” I said.
“And ride right past that?” said Terris.
“Around that,” I answered, sliding the long-knife out. The leather-wrapped hilt fit exactly into my hand. The steel whispered through my veins. “And we’ll be ready for them.”
I nudged the mare with my knees. She arched her neck and pranced forward.
Everything came clear now, as still as if the little canyon and everything in it held its breath. I could see every pebble, every shadow, every leaf. I could smell the squirrels cowering in their dens, smell their fear, hear the beating of their tiny hearts. I heard the beating of men’s hearts, too, behind the rocks. Adrenalin shivered through me.
“Get ready.”
The squirrels shrieked out their warnings, tinny and powerless, then scampered for cover. The mare’s hooves made a hollow sound on the dirt. We moved forward as if in a dream, she and I, knife and mare. Any moment now...
I caught the flicker of pale gold elkskin behind the first big rock. The mare wheeled on her hindquarters, smooth as silk. Behind us, two northers sprinted toward us on their scruffy-maned ponies.
“Go!” I shouted to Terris and Etch, and felt rather than saw them kick their horses forward, back towardthe trail, the rat-head brown in the lead.
The first norther closed with me, spear aimed to hook under my knee. He meant to topple me, not kill me, but I had no time to consider how peculiar this was. I shifted my weight, signaling the mare. She pivoted and slammed one shoulder into the norther’s pony. The pony whuffed! in surprise and went down, legs flailing. The norther scrambled to kick free, but the frantic pony rolled the wrong way, across his legs.
Where the hell is the other one?
There he was, pounding after Etch and Terris, hidden now as they regained the trail. I kicked the mare into a flying gallop, angling her between the fallen rocks. An instant later two more of them veered in from the side. The mare swerved toward the nearer one, a big man waving his brightly decorated spear over his head. I tensed for the impact, readying my knife.
Without warning, pain exploded across the back of my skull. The world went gray and shivery. I heard a roaring in my ears. I saw, as if from very far away, some other woman Ranger, copper-red hair stained with fresh blood, sliding from the gray mare’s back...
My body turned into a drum — POUND POUND POUND all through my head, huge round ripples of pain — POUND POUND POUND. I swayed and heaved as if a pair of dancers tweaked out of their minds on dreamsmoke were tossing me back and forth, thwacking at me with their sticks.
Put me down, you filthy crot-assed —
Then came the gut-whirling sick after being knocked over the head, but I had no time to spare, wallowing in it. I was slung belly-down over the gray mare. Her silken canter pulverized every still-intact bone in my body. I tried to get a full breath to clear my head, but it came out in a pathetic grunt. The arch of the pommel was excavating a hole in my short ribs big enough to drive a herd of brush-sheep through.
Actually, that was a good sign.
If I was pissed, I was alive. Cautiously, because my head felt like a huge, round, blood-filled sausage about to burst its casing, I looked up. All I could see were tufts of wire-grass and the muscular rump of Etch’s flea-bit roan. My hands and feet were securely tied.
“Hold!” a man shouted above the thudding hooves.
The mare slowed to a walk. Hands took hold of me, big and iron strong. A few quick jerks and my ankles were free. Next moment I sat upright in the saddle, my wrists still tied in front of me, telling myself I was ready for anything and not believing a word of it.
I eyed the man standing in front of me, the quilted vest bright with stitching and beads, the braided leather dagger sheath, the long plaits of ashy-yellow hair tied with dyed elkskin fringe. I recognized the designs as Cassian and couldn’t decide if that were good news or bad, my head still felt so muddled. The norther’s face was weather-rough, his cheeks soft with a naturally sparse, almost invisible beard. His eyes had the washed-out look of someone who’d stared into the sun a long time. My long-knife and its sheath were strapped behind his back.
He jabbed a thumb in the direction of my chest. His voice was slightly lilting, his face grim. “Prisoner.”
I nodded. If he meant to impress me with the gravity of my situation, he’d made a poor start. I was still alive, although I hadn’t yet figured out why. He’d taken my long-knife and the one in my forearm sheath, and probably the boot knife and folded utility blade. I wasn’t about to check on them now. But he’d clean missed the buckle knife.
From the corner of one eye I glimpsed the roan mare with Etch on her back and blood seeping through the bandages around one shoulder.
“Pay attention!” snapped the norther. “I say this only once. You disobey any order I give, you try to escape,” he pointed at Etch and then, quickly, behind me to where Terris sat white-faced on his sorrel, “he dies. No warnings.”
The norther offered no explanations of which he he meant, nor did he wait for any sign of agreement before jumping on his pony and booting it forward. He’d tied the mare’s reins to his saddle. I considered leaning forward, slipping the headstall off the mare’s head with my bound hands, and guiding her with my knees. She would outrun these ponies easy, and I could saw through the wrist ropes with my buckle knife. Which showed I wasn’t nearly as clear in the head as I thought I was, to even consider such a dumbshit idea.
I twisted around for a quick look behind us and saw only the haze-fogged outlines of the Ridge. The overcast was so heavy, I couldn’t tell the time of day from the position of the sun, or how long we’ve been traveling.
We headed north at an easy canter, dropping back into a trot from time to time to breathe the horses. The ground climbed and flattened as toward the end of the afternoon we passed from scrubby wire-grass prairie to wet tundra, thready ice-sod and low, dense-wooded thorn trees around patches of seeping melt water. I spotted something far ahead — forest maybe or low hills, but it might be only a trick of the shifting air.
I shivered and tried not to think of the warm cloak with the extra gear on the rat-headed brown. I told myself the cold was something good — a friend to clear my head and keep me sharp. Mother knew I’d lived enough of my life being cold. Cold and dry on the steppe, cold and wet on the Ridge. And now?
Now I was alive and in one piece. I still had no idea why. Terris and Etch, too — if they were well enough to ride, how bad off could they be? They could be norther prisoners, that was what.
But the northers didn’t take prisoners. The northers never took prisoners.
What the hell did they want with us?