“It might not have come out on the first couple of uses.”
“Nori would have felt anything like that long before she bought the bow,” Payne returned flatly. “You can’t get an inner knot past her when she’s going over the woods.”
“Even Nori-girl could be fooled by something she can’t see.”
Payne set his jaw stubbornly. “Have you ever known her to pick a weapon with bad wood? If there’s rot in there, it’s new.”
“Can’t be new. There’s too much here, all along the center.” The older man ran his fingers along the rest of the wood.
“I’m telling you, Nori would have felt it.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” The thickset man slid a knife from one of his scabbards and began prying at the break. “Well, well,” he murmured, more to himself. “Looks as though something pierced the wood.” Wakje glanced at Payne. “I’m thinking of that archery competition in Ariye, two years ago, when Nori-girl walked off with last place.”
“It wasn’t really last place,” Payne protested absently. “Her spacing was perfect.”
“She hit the bull’s-eye only once.”
“She made a spiral with her shots, from center out. It was beautifully done. Even Gamon admitted it later.”
Wakje picked at the spot of rot. “It lost her the prize.”
Payne grinned. “You’re too goal-oriented, Uncle. Besides, she didn’t lose her reputation.”
“That’s what I’m talking about.”
He finally caught his uncle’s drift. “You mean the Great Broken Bow Debacle?” He thought back to the way she’d replaced every screw in the compound bows with a pulp plug. The bows had fallen apart the third or fourth shot each archer had tried to draw. “Sabotage. Okay, I get your point.” He frowned at the older man. “You know it was a joke, Wakje. She didn’t actually break the bows.”
The older man ignored that. Wakje flicked his knife in again, exposing the black spot of rot like a surgeon. “The line goes all the way to the outer wood. It’s just hidden in the design. Now look back at the center. It’s an almost perfect circle, straight in through every line of grain, as if something was injected into the wood.”
“An insect?”
He shook his head. “Borers twist along the grain before they go through a growth line. This was deliberate.” He looked up. “Ki,” he called.
“A moment,” the other man returned. “I’ve got something here you should see.” Ki pointed to a dark smear on the short cliff as they joined him. For a moment, they stared up at the stained stone.
“Human,” Wakje murmured.
Payne nodded. Only human blood would attract black gnats and blue-biters like that. He studied the marks. There wasn’t really enough blood to scare him. The stains could have been from anything—a scraped palm, a torn nail.
Payne forced himself to turn to watch Proving dissect the rest of the scene on the ground. He might dislike the man, but he had to admit he was more than glad Proving was there. It had been Proving, not Payne, who’d caught that second set of prints where Nori had turned off the main trail.
The chovas, Murton, had started it. They had paused to rest the dnu when the guard had shouted that he’d found Nori’s sign and that it was fresh. Murton had mounted and charged off, and no one had questioned the man. They’d simply jumped up and spurred after the outrider like a horde of stingers to water. Proving had cursed them all from behind, but the entire line had followed the outrider, trampling whatever sign had been there before they realized the chovas had been wrong. It had taken more than a kay to realize that the guard had been following the marks of a stickbeast. Murton had been shamefaced and devoutly apologetic, but Payne had had little sympathy. If it hadn’t been for Proving, they might never have recovered the trail. As it was, they had wasted precious time, and Proving was furious. The cozar had cursed them all for idiots and promised to slap the eyes from the skulls of anyone who trampled his tracks again. Murton was assigned to the rear.
Up to that point, they’d hadn’t been sure if Nori had been following the tracks of the wolf or the Grey One itself. Half a kay later, they were sure she had been with the wolf. There was only one explanation for that, and Payne felt a twinge of envy that the wolves must have Called his sister. That was why she’d left the wagons, why she hadn’t awoken him. With her background and sense of duty, a Call would have been too strong to refuse or even hesitate to Answer.
Speed, urgency . . . He pictured the scene in his mind. She’d arrived before the worlags, but he didn’t know if it was in time to save the wolf cubs. She’d fought there, with her back to the cliff, had lost her weapons, and had climbed out, while the wolves ran north to get away. From the top, though, which direction had she taken? Southwest, toward the Chimneys, or north and west, toward the wolves? Worlags could run a man down like hounds after a deer, but if she climbed the cliff, she would have had several kays’ lead. Payne could go around with the dnu and pick up her trail again at the top, or they could simply climb after her. The climb wasn’t difficult; the crack in the cliff ran halfway to the top, and there were plenty of holds above it. He looked at the blood smear again, then asked over his shoulder, “Have we got all the arrows?”
Ki answered, “As many as we can salvage.”
“Alright. We’ll leave the dnu with maRaya and Kahrl. Nori went up, that’s obvious. It would have gained her twenty, maybe thirty minutes while the worlags went around. We’ll signal from the top to let the other parties know if she went south to the Chimneys or north.”
He yanked off his gloves and stuffed them in his belt. Then he fit his hand into the cracks in the stones. Tightening his hand into a fist, he jammed it in the rocks so that he could hoist himself up, then up again. There was another smear at eye level on the stone. They were finger tracks: she’d brushed the dust from the cliff as she climbed and left her blood behind. He eased himself back down. It took him only a moment to get the rope from his saddle, hand his sword, bow, and quiver to Wakje, and toss the bulk of the line to the broad-shouldered chovas Murton. He tied one end of the rope onto his belt.
Payne set his fist into the gap between the columns, then glanced over his shoulder.
“Ready,” Murton told him calmly. He’d opened the rope loops so that they wouldn’t tangle as he fed them to Payne. “Climb on.”
The youth started grimly up the short cliff. Judging by the smears on the rocks, Nori had left enough blood to mark her trail that even a headless worlag could follow her.
He was halfway up the short cliff when he heard the distant foxhorn. Instinctively, his gut tightened. He waited for the repeated signal. When the sequence came again, he leaned his head against the stone. Recall. Successful recall. The signal came a third time, and Payne breathed a moonsblessing.
Murton called up. “She must have come back at the north crossing, just as you suspected.”
Payne grinned down as Ki’s son pulled out his own horn and blew the response. Trust Nori-girl to turn the world upside down for a day. He tried to ignore his anger at her carelessness. She’d be paying the sixth moon to Brean for a ninan for the trouble she had caused.
He looked down, shrugged the rope off his shoulders, and let it fall. Down below, Murton started coiling it up for the saddle. A few more minutes and Payne joined the others on the ground and took over the coiling from Murton as the others readied to ride. He’d almost finished when his fingers noted a change in the rope’s thickness. He paused, ran his hands along the length, then finished coiling the rope. A minute later, he casually walked over to Wakje.
“Here,” he said softly, indicating the stretch of rope. The older man ran his hands over the loop. The thin spot was like a gap in an old pillow. The rope sheath was intact, but the inner cord—the braid that gave the rope its strength—was so thin that only a quarter of it was still holding. “Good thing that recall came when it did.”
Wakje’s face, impassive as it usually was, grew subtly harder. “Someone fell on that rope. O
r misused it.”
“It’s mine and Nori’s rope,” Payne answered flatly. “No one climbs on it but Nori and me.”
From the side, Ki murmured, “It’s a classic damage pattern.”
Payne agreed. He tucked the thin loop carefully back in the coil and prayed his hands didn’t shake to show his temper. He kept his voice low. “You think someone deliberately damaged it?” He looked from one uncle’s set face to the other’s. “You think someone’s trying to kill her before we get to Shockton?”
“Or you,” Wakje agreed. “When was the last time you climbed on this?”
“Midterm break, on Irregular Rim. We did Kingpin, Spongen, and Whisker Face. Simple climbs, Short columns—two pitches each. Neither of us fell or strained the rope.”
Ki’s voice was dry. “Angered any cozar fathers lately?”
Payne gave a short laugh. “Two, but I brought both a quarter eerin just before we hit Sidisport, and all was forgiven.”
“You’re sure?” Wakje asked.
“They invited me back for dinner.”
Ki barely nodded at his son when Mye joined them. “And afterward?” Ki prodded Payne.
“Moonworms, Ki. It’s not as if the girls didn’t want the attention. They’ve been following me around ever since we joined the train.”
“And you indulge them both.”
“It’s just dancing.”
“In the moonlight,” Mye said slyly.
Payne grinned now. “I, too, have a reputation to maintain.”
Ki handed him back the rope, and Wakje murmured, “Might not be the reputation you want, not if it’s bringing you this. Perhaps you should think about jealousy and old boyfriends.”
Payne looked at the top of the cliff and slowly lost his grin. If he’d tied off the rope for the others to walk up the face, the line could easily have snapped under a man’s weight. With that jumble of boulders at the base of the cliff, any fall would have been nasty, if not fatal. Wakje was right. It was time to think about enemies. The problem was, he didn’t know where to start.
He glanced over the group. He knew his uncles, he knew Ki’s sons. He knew Ed Proving and Murton and the others only by reputation. Murton, for all that the man knew which end of a sword to use, sure as hells didn’t know the forest. But why would the outrider want to hurt Nori? Murton seemed pleased that his friend B’Kosan was interested in her. That was the problem with everyone Payne could think of. Everyone liked Nori, reserved as she was. It was Payne who irritated people.
He fingered the rope as he lashed it behind his saddle. It didn’t make sense, he thought. They’d done nothing but graduate and head to Ariye for Test. If someone just wanted Nori’s scout book, it could be stolen—perhaps not easily, but certainly without the effort of sabotage. Unless someone didn’t want them to Journey, there was no reason to cause them harm. He thought on that as they filed onto the trail and cantered back toward the road.
XV
If you build the target around yourself,
You have only to wait for the arrows.
—Randonnen saying
Morning on the grazing verge, on the side of Willow Road . . .
Nori opened her eyes from dozing. There was something she should hear . . . She closed her eyes and concentrated, but Rishte was far away, up on a ridge, out of reach of anything but the faintest of impressions. There was nothing nearby except for small birds that twitted the brush and wind rattling through waxy leaves.
The yearling had hung back when the rest of his pack had split off. He’d waited for Nori to follow the pack east. When she didn’t, he’d slunk back until he could overlook the verge where his wolfwalker stubbornly settled. He had howled unhappily more than once, startling Fentris, then Hunter as the sound rose from first one hill, then another. For the last two hours, he had been silent, more and more cautious as traffic thickened and his pack grew ever more distant.
Nori had with difficulty let him be. She could have slipped away to meet him, but both Tamrani had wanted her close. The pair of poolah last night had been nothing; they’d passed easily. The bluewing moths, though, and the swarm of night sprits that had devoured the hatching moths like a blizzard—those had unsettled the men. Nori couldn’t quite work up the energy to argue with either one. Her entire body ached, her eyes burned, and she could barely stay awake enough to tell Rishte she had to sleep. Besides, it had to be the Grey One’s choice to stay with her, instead of returning to his pack. She would not coerce the bond.
Right now, he snuck along the edges of her thoughts with a warning. Dnu, she realized. That was the sense of fast-moving dnu. It wasn’t the thin pounding of a single rider, or the rumble of a caravan, but a thick thunder, as if a herd of six-legged eerin were running on summer-hard ground. She smiled as she got to her feet. She caught Hunter’s attention. “The searchers are coming in.”
He shaded his eyes and peered down the empty road. The front end of a caravan was coming into view from the south, and a pair of the Humbled trotted away, their dull black robes fluttering in the wind. There was nothing else on the road. He raised one eyebrow when she shrugged and said, “It will be a few seconds.”
He hid his satisfaction. She was bonding, that was sure. As the search group came into sight, he asked dryly, “Have you ever been wrong?”
She hesitated, frowning. “No . . . No, I don’t think so,” she said uncertainly.
He raised a dark eyebrow.
She laughed. “I’m kidding, Hunter. I’ve been wrong as often as I’ve been right.”
Somehow, he didn’t believe it. “You’d make one hell of a scouting partner.”
Her face closed up. “There will be dozens of older, more experienced scouts in Shockton looking to pick up work.”
“Of course,” he said agreeably. But he watched her thoughtfully as she waved at the oncoming riders.
Kettre waved back and pulled up on the verge in a flurry of dust, just ahead of the others. “Where have you been?” the woman demanded as she slid from the saddle. She tossed the reins at the nearest man—Fentris—who caught them with a bemused expression.
Nori waved her hand at the dust. “Moons, Kettre, couldn’t you get us any dirtier? What did you do, gallop back the whole way?”
Kettre didn’t even pause. “We sent the search parties out last night, got started at first dawn. Payne was ready to chew up his scabbard when you turned up missing—”
“That sounds like him, but I am sorry. I didn’t expect to be gone this long—”
“Sure, and the moons don’t fly.” Kettre glanced at the two men while the other searchers reined in. She lowered her voice abruptly. “Can’t you go anywhere without finding some handsome man—or two—to bring you back?”
Nori grinned faintly at her disgust. “I didn’t ask them along.”
“You never need to.” Kettre pulled her a few meters away from the others and lowered her voice even further. “So, spill. Who are they?”
Nori shrugged. “Chaperones for Test youth, out of Sidisport. Rich enough to afford fancy gear—”
The other woman fingered the fine, rolled-up sleeve of the overlarge shirt. “I can see that.”
She swatted Kettre’s hand away. “And idle enough to take a month out of their year to watch some relatives Test.”
Kettre gave her a sharp look. She’d never heard Nori use such a dismissive tone for men she kept glancing at. Or rather, one man, she realized, as she caught Nori’s surreptitious look toward the taller one. “But you don’t know who they are?”
Nori sighed. “The slim one is Fentris, the tall one Hunter.”
Kettre watched her curiously. “Hunter’s a scout name.”
The wolfwalker shook her head. “He’s city. Rides with formal training, not loosely like a Randonnen.”
The other woman glanced back toward the Tamrani. “What about the other one?”
“He’s rigged right,” she admitted. “But he knows nothing about the forest. They’re both heading for the counc
ils, but they’re not friends,” she added, surprising Kettre. “Fentris called Hunter ‘Brithanas,’ and he called Fentris ‘Shae’ when they were trying to irritate each other. Other than that,” she said quickly when the other woman started to interrupt, “all I know is that they didn’t do badly last night on the ride, and—” She ran her hands down the silk-soft sleeve. “they have excellent taste in clothes.”
Kettre frowned. “Brithanas and Shae are family names, Nori. Old families. They’re out of Tamrani Houses.”
“The cozar said they were Tamrani,” Nori agreed.
The other woman gave her a disgusted look. “You could have mentioned that first. It is just slightly, in the barest way, a teeny bit important.”
Nori hid a grin.
“Brithanas,” Kettre mused. “Moons, Nori, don’t you know who he is?”
Nori shrugged. “Cityman, merchant. Arrogant and irritating. It’s enough.”
“Just once, could you use your brain for something other than badgerbear or stickbeast? Look at him. A Tamrani called Hunter in the trade lanes. Tall, green-eyed, well built, arrogant as old money, with a chovas hairstyle, but wearing tooled tesselskin boots?”
“I pick up the important things. I don’t worry about the rest.”
“You’ll rest your mind all the way onto your funeral pyre if someone doesn’t stay on your case. He’s Condari,” Kettre said in exasperation. “Condari Brithanas.”
The wolfwalker didn’t even blink. “Never heard of him.”
“Payne will have.”
“Payne hears all the gossip,” Nori said, not quite under her breath.
“If you’re going to ride with those two, you might consider listening to your brother. Even I have heard things about ‘Noble Hunter’ Brithanas.”
“You live in Sidisport,” Nori retorted. “You’re supposed to hear the news.”
“And Fentris Shae?” the brown-eyed woman warned. “You’d best be on your guard. He doesn’t make for a good ally.”
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