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Sinnie joked with Finn as they rode, to chase away her growing unease. Tales of the Maer had always excited her, but things were starting to get a little too real. Legend had it the Maer once thrived throughout the continent and that humans displaced them, little by little, until at last they vanished entirely. But there were always rumors that pockets of them had survived, in the mountains perhaps, or in the thick swamps of the wild Ulau River delta, and that they occasionally forayed into human areas in search of humans for food, or slaves. She didn’t really believe the stories—no one did—but she also couldn’t get rid of the feeling maybe they did exist, that they had come back. And what she found in Brocland might be something entirely different than the sleepy village she had left five years before.
“I always pictured them as hairy men with a snout like a wolf, but shorter, kind of smushed-in. But still with fangs!” Finn bared his teeth and held out his hands like claws.
“Or maybe tusks? Like a man-boar,” Sinnie offered, doing her best to play along.
“Yes, and their hair would be all stiff and bristly, and their feet would be hooves!” If Finn was feeling nervous about the Maer, he was hiding it well.
“I have heard stories from a soldier who said he encountered them on a mission in the Hawk Mountains in the far east,” said Carl, who had sidled up to join their conversation, though the road here was barely wide enough for the three of them. “He said they look like men, even in the face, but they are much hairier, with thick beards reaching almost up to their eyes, even covering their noses.” He paused, scanning the road ahead, which wound through the thinning forest, with the hills rising ever steeper to their left and the valley deepening to the right. “They’re supposed to be fierce fighters, despite their primitive weaponry, truly vicious.” He stopped again, looking down, and Sinnie looked from Carl to Finn, then back again. Carl looked up, silent, and the dull expression in his eyes gave Sinnie chills. This time, even Finn had no witty comment to share.
Shortly after lunchtime, they passed Slippery Brook, whose icy waters rushed under a stone bridge that was older than anyone could remember, with Greenvale Road following it up a narrow pass in the rock. Sinnie knew that about a mile away, the pass opened up into a wide, sunny valley with a small lake, on the banks of which lay the village of Greenvale, a fishing and farming community. She had visited it once with her mother, who was trading several lambs for a ram after theirs was eaten by a wolf. To her it was a paradise, being so much sunnier and more wide-open than Brocland, which only received half the day’s sun in the shadow of the mountains. Sinnie had hoped they might stop in Greenvale, but she knew it was a little more than a day’s travel between Greenvale and Brocland, and unless they wanted to spend two nights rough camping along the road, they did not have time for any extra stops.
Carl got off his horse to crouch and study the road once they passed Greenvale. “Three horses,” he said, running his fingers over imperceptible tracks in the dirt. “Heading toward Brocland.”
“Just like Hoyle said,” Finn added.
Carl nodded. “And no tracks I can see coming back this way.” His words hung in the silence between them, deepening it. They all knew what it meant, and none of them had anything to add.
Past Greenvale, the road became narrower still, the hills and cliffs to their left steeper, and the valley to their right darker. The afternoon sun was swallowed by the hills, and on the few occasions when it poked its way through to them, the warmth was short-lived. A layer of haze, then clouds, crept up in the sky, lending a grayish cast to the landscape, where fewer and fewer trees grew as the soil became rockier. The valley below was full of pine trees, ferns, and scrub bushes, and Sinnie relished the distant clamor of the Snake River fighting its way down the valley’s rocks and boulders.
As a kid, she had always dreamed of following the river from Brocland down to the sea, but she had only entered the valley once, when she had convinced her father to let her join him on one of his prospecting trips. It had been damp, itchy, and boring, but she came back to the place in her mind over and over. She would see herself leaping from boulder to rock to gravelly bank, splashing in the pools, running along a game trail, dodging branches and leaping over turtles, but she would always find a way to keep going, running down and down and down the valley, until at last she would dive from a high waterfall into the sea.
The clouds had thickened by the time they set up camp in the shelter of an overhang, which they had all used before, like countless other travelers, the distance between Brocland and Greenvale being too far for one day’s journey except by a good rider with a fast horse.
“No fire tonight, I’m afraid,” said Carl. “If there’s anything out there, we don’t want to make ourselves too obvious.” He made eye contact with each of them, apparently looking for dissent, but neither she nor Finn disagreed. The weather wasn’t cold, but the rock seemed to siphon the heat away from Sinnie’s body. Looking down into the valley as the daylight dimmed, she could easily picture the Maer, or any other imaginable monster or beast, prowling through the ferns, turning suddenly as it caught their scent, fixing its malevolent eyes on their paltry refuge. Sitting at the shelter’s edge during her watch, Sinnie couldn’t decide which was worse: sleeping fitfully with visions of snarling, hairy Maer hounding them through the dark woods, or staring out into the blackness imagining the same, and twitching when the smallest noise broke the night’s silence, which was as deep as the mountain dark.
The pale morning light was a relief, feeble though it was, as was the fact the clouds seemed to have thinned. Sinnie gnawed at her journey cake, even drier and more tasteless than they had been at the start of the trip. She was sure her mother would send them back with some lamb pies and mutton jerky, maybe a loaf of rye bread and some raspberry jam. And some sheep’s milk butter, and some of the delicious mead she put down every fall. Her mother might not have been the most affectionate, but she was an ace cook. As Sinnie choked down the last bite, she decided she would rather face a legion of Maer than another day eating journey cake.
They set out with grim faces and weapons at the ready. Sinnie wondered what magic Finn was preparing in his mind, if that was even how it worked. She spent her ride sighting targets and imagining herself shooting at them, adjusting for distance, breeze, and her height off the ground. She had never shot from a horse before, and imagined it would mess with her aim quite a bit. And though she knew how to ride, she wasn’t sure how she would control the horse and shoot at the same time. She noticed Carl was wearing his mail shirt, hood, and leggings, and had his shield strapped to his left arm, as if he were riding into battle. It both gave her confidence and scared the piss out of her.
Several hours into their ride, Carl stopped abruptly, raising his right fist to shoulder level in what Sinnie assumed must be some kind of military sign to stop. About a hundred yards ahead, the road was covered with boulders and chunks of rock that appeared to have fallen from the cliff above.
“Okay,” Carl said, dismounting. “Okay.” He studied the scene in front of him, then turned to his companions. “I can’t think of a better place for an ambush.” He eyed the cliff, which rose about fifty feet above the road, then looked down into the valley, which descended steeply at this point. “If this were me,” he continued, “I would have archers on top of that cliff, maybe someone ready to push off rocks. Archers just on the other side of those rocks, and swordsmen ready to leap over. And a couple of stealthy fighters hiding in the woods down there.” He pointed to the right of the road, about halfway between them and the rocks. “They would sneak up and attack from behind once the ambush got underway.”
“So that’s how you’d do it,” Finn said in a quavering but jokey voice. “Good to know I can count on you if we ever need to lay an ambush.”
“And if you had to avoid the ambush?” Sinnie asked, her voice no less shaky than Finn’s.
Carl sighed, studying the terrain again. “Well, it would depend on how many of them I thought there were. I suppose in a perfect world, I would backtrack, descend to the valley floor and make my way past it.”
“And what about the cart? It doesn’t really fit into your ‘perfect world’ theory,” Finn offered.
“Well, we could leave the cart a little way back, head down, then back up again and come up behind them, hoping to catch them off guard.”
“But what if they saw what we were doing and came and took the horses and the cart? We’d be pretty much up a creek, no pun intended,” Sinnie said.
“True,” Carl agreed. “What we need is to find out if there’s really anyone there, and if so, how many, and how well-armed.” He gave Finn a hard look. “I know about the code and all, but maybe this would be a good time to let us know just what you can and can’t do.”
Finn screwed up his mouth, then nodded. “Okay, well, I can toughen my skin, which would protect me from their weapons, more or less,” he said. “And the force shield, which you already know, but it’s a lot harder.”
“Anything you can do to hurt or incapacitate someone?” Carl asked. Sinnie followed their exchange, rapt with the idea of seeing magic in action. The first time had happened so fast, she hadn’t really seen what Finn had done.
Finn nodded weakly. “If I can get set, I can push out a blast of that same force that can knock someone down, maybe knock them out.”
“And what about that rumor that you can fly?” Carl asked, a sly look on his face.
“No, I can’t fly,” Finn admitted, “not yet. Some of the masters can, but the best I can do is a kind of powered jump, which can take me maybe twenty or thirty feet. But landing at the other end is still pretty dicey. I haven’t fully mastered the technique. And I just want to add, in case you were unaware, I have received extensive training with my staff,” which he grasped in a fighting pose.
Carl nodded, frowning. “Sinnie, have you ever shot a flaming arrow?”
Sinnie laughed nervously. “Sure, plenty of times, in Hertle’s show. I don’t have any resin, though.”
“We could pull some off the torches,” Carl said. “And how far would you say you can shoot accurately?”
Sinnie thought for a moment. “Probably thirty or forty yards at least. I used to shoot from twenty all the time, and I could hit an apple off a puppy’s head. But that was with time to aim, and no distractions.”
Carl nodded again, scratched his chin, then squatted to examine the road. “The hoofprints continue at least this far,” he said, “so we can assume the livery boy and his three horses continued past this point. He probably assumed it was just a landslide, so he would have ridden right up to it, to see if there was any way around. And at that point...” He stood up, dusted himself off, and gave them a serious look.
“At that point,” Finn said, “for all we know he was able to get through, and he made his way to Brocland, where he fell in love with a stable girl, and they are busy making hay as we speak...” Finn trailed off as he saw Carl’s expression.
“If you want to ride on up and take a look, I’m not going to stop you,” Carl grumbled.
“Well, I’m not saying—” Finn began, then stopped. “Okay, so we assume this is an ambush, and now you know what we can do. What about you, soldier man? Do you have anything to share?” Sinnie could hear the agitation in Finn’s voice.
Carl grinned, slapped Finn on the shoulder. “I’m good for maybe two or three foot soldiers, depending on how skilled they are. So between me, and you, and Sinnie, I figure we can reasonably expect to do well against a half-dozen or so, if we are ready and things go well.”
“And if things don’t?” asked Sinnie, working hard to keep her voice steady. Her left leg was beginning to twitch, and she hoped her hands would not follow.
“That’s why we need a plan,” Carl answered, gathering several stones and pine cones from the side of the road, squatting down and pulling out a long knife. He put the stones in a pile, drew two lines in the dirt with his knife, and put three pine cones opposite the stones. “This is the landslide.” He pointed his knife at the stones. “This is the road. And this is us,” he added, touching the pine cones.
Sinnie and Finn leaned in close, and Carl looked up at them with a gleam in his eye like Sinnie hadn’t seen since their days playing Seeker of the South back in Brocland.