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Whatever Kiril had done with the cell, finding it wouldn’t be simple.
After four days on the road, Bryar felt wonderful. Even without the Aura, even though his muscles, however toned by his bouts with Joss, were unaccustomed to long-distance treks, he recognized the imperative of his need to travel.
He’d taken the track to Stanstead, then crossed the ford and struck out on the northern trail, the one where Willow first encountered the two strangers, Joss and Kiril. The land west of Stanstead gradually flattened from rolling hills to plain. Fields lay fallow or planted in winter legumes, although vast swaths bore no trace of human habitation. Rivers recently wakened from their seasonal freeze carried their burden of spring melt, spreading to fill their valleys. Branches of deciduous trees, bearing tiny chartreuse pinpricks of leaves, rustled in the chilly wind. Forest replaced fields before he reached his goal. The weather held fine, and he enjoyed the solitary walk, following the waypoints to the end, somewhere in the woods.
Logically, Kiril wouldn’t have hidden the cell close to habitation, but there had to be a predominant landmark, natural or manmade. But which? And what?
Bryar made an unobtrusive camp well off the trail, grabbed a quick lunch, and set off into the forest to look around and get his bearings. The journey from the Motherhouse provided a fine lesson in how much he relied on the Aura to guide his steps, but he was an adequate tracker, a skill learned in boyhood. He sought the incongruity that would remind Kiril of the location of his treasure.
Joss had told him about their wilderness survival training. He didn’t dare assume he was dealing with an amateur.
He found his first clue as the sun neared the horizon. Moving slowly and cautiously through the forest, he had been following an animal track which broke out into a natural meadow. The land was soggy, studded with boulders, the grass already greening. A few trees, still barren, punctuated the bog. As he looked across the clearing in the low-level light, he could see evidence of compacted snow, not yet fully melted, spaced to a man’s stride.
Kiril had been here sometime in the late winter. Or someone had. He couldn’t discount the possibility that a local hunter left the trail, but he thought it unlikely. The last village he passed was most of a day’s walk away; he wouldn’t find another for two or three days more. Plenty of game closer to home, surely.
He squelched across the meadow and paused at the far side.
Now where?
Within a day or so, the warm weather would remove these traces of footprints. He scanned his surroundings. A long-dead tree, its top branches victim to years of harsh winters, formed the only anomaly in the landscape. Twice his height and his arm’s breadth around, it stood about ten paces in from the edge of the forest and fifty to his left.
Bryar cautiously explored the snag. No footprints to guide him now; the snow, where it remained, edged toward wet mud.
He’d find the cell near ground level; Arwen and her team had traced it by its seepage into the earth. It had to be shielded now, because there had been no further disruptions to the Aura.
On the far side, a deep cleft split the trunk. Generations of ice-cold, composting leaves and dirt filled the hollow.
Only one way to find out. He plunged his hands blindly into the waste. When he touched a hard, unnaturally smooth surface, he could have wept.
He’d done it.
Piece of luck.
Luck, the combined work of Weavers, and his willingness to close himself off from the Aura. He detected no discernable effect from the box’s proximity.
Ezra had been unable to devise a sure weave to shield the cell. Dirt provided the best protection they knew of. Bryar had never seen it before and studied it in wonder. So this was the source of all their trouble, this box about the size of his large hand, a little over a thumb’s width thick, gleaming gold in the daylight. After a moment’s contemplation, he dropped his pack to the ground and pulled out a large bag of tightly woven linen. Within minutes he had transferred the cell, mulch and all, into the bag.
He reminded himself to be cautious as he followed his own trail back through the woods. He had no reason to believe Kiril was anywhere near, but the man clearly meant to hold onto the cell with minimal regard for its effect on life in the Midland. However, the meadow and surrounding forest remained quiet, with only the occasional skittering of some small animal in the undergrowth, as he made his way to his campsite.