Darian had been so taken by surprise by the stranger’s appearance that for a moment he had just stared blankly at his rescuer while the man held one hand firmly over his mouth. The man held a finger against his own lips while staring penetratingly into Darian’s eyes. Darian had never seen eyes quite so intensely blue before. Meeting their gaze was like falling into an icy pool, and it took his breath away just as surely. After a moment, Darian realized that he was miming for Darian to be quiet.
He nodded vigorously; after all, the last thing he wanted was to draw attention to both of them! Satisfied, the man released him, and Darian got his arms and legs underneath him and scuttled his way back into deeper cover, with the stranger between him and the enemy.
The stranger had already bandaged his knife wound, which astonished Darian. But after a moment, it was obvious why he had done so; he hadn’t wanted to leave a blood-trail, and the binding would make his arm at least partially usable for a while.
Now what? he wondered, as the stranger mimed for him to stay where he was, and keep very still.
He nodded again to show that he understood, and to his continued surprise, the stranger took three of his arrows out of Darian’s quiver, and began working his way, very flat to the ground and snakelike, through the rocks. He kept going until he came to the body of the man who’d first grabbed Darian.
Darian couldn’t see what he did there, but a few moments later, he came back into view and slithered his way to the body of the man who’d thrown the knife at him. Now Darian had the advantage of elevation, for the rocks where he was hiding were a bit taller than the Forest verge where the man had fallen from his horse, and he was able to see what the stranger did. Fortunately, those same rocks blocked the view of the enemy across the clearing.
To his puzzlement, Darian saw him carefully work his own arrow out of the wound that had killed the enemy, and insert Darian’s arrow in its place.
Now - why is he doing that?
He didn’t have long to puzzle over the question, for as soon as the stranger had finished his odd task, he tucked his own bloodied arrows sideways into his belt, gathered himself, and leaped like some great cat for the reins of the nearest horse.
The second horse shied and bolted, pounding off into the forest, but the stranger had the first one caught by the reins. The horse reared and danced, but the stranger held him firmly, and as soon as the beast had all four hooves on the ground, he swung himself up into the saddle before Darian could blink.
Without thinking, Darian stood up as the stranger wheeled the horse around on its hindquarters and dug his heels into its sides. It surged forward toward Darian, and the stranger leaned over its neck, stretching a hand out for him. Darian instinctively reached toward the stranger, who grabbed his arm, hand firmly around Darian’s elbow, as they plunged past. With a grunt and a gasp of pain, the man pulled Darian over the front of his saddle, and sent the horse racing off into the deeper Forest. This was by far the least comfortable way to ride that ever existed. The saddle-bow drove into his stomach, pounding breath out of him in grunting gasps, and Darian could not see much, but he glimpsed enough between bruis-irigs to know that he was heading deeper into the Pelagiris than he had ever dared go alone.
The boy had good instincts; he could not have reacted better if Snowfire had outlined the plan in advance for him. He stood up automatically when Snowfire leaped for the horse; Snowfire managed to get the reins in his good hand, not his bad one, so when the horse reared and tried to bolt like its mate, he was able to hold onto it. The moment the horse had all four hooves back down on the ground, Snowfire flung himself into the saddle.
Since the boy was perfectly positioned for a pickup, even to the point of having one arm extended, Snowfire dug his heels into the horse’s side and urged it into a leaping run. The boy was close enough that the horse had not gotten any kind of speed up before it reached the lad; Snowfire leaned down from the saddle, seized the extended arm, caught the boy’s arm at the elbow (ignoring the pain from his wounded arm) and hauled him up over the front of the saddle like a sack of meal. It was a good thing that the boy was so small and thin, or Snowfire wouldn’t have been able to manage the feat; as it was, he felt his wound break open under the bandage and tear, and a surge of warm wetness saturated the bandage just after the searing of renewed pain.
Two more strides, and the horse was in full gallop; meanwhile the pounding of hooves told Snowfire that Hweel had managed to spook the other two horses into panicked flight, hopefully without being seen by the distracted soldiers. That should delay pursuit nicely.
Good. By the time those brutes manage to catch their mounts, we‘II be long gone and the other horses will be too lathered to follow at any kind of pace.
Nevertheless, Snowfire was not about to slacken his pace, especially not here, where the ground cover was so thin and sparse that the horse could gallop safely through it. Snowfire guided the running horse in among the trees, allowing it to set its own speed. At the moment, it was so spooked by his appearance and his cavalier handling, that it just wanted to run, and he was disposed to let it. He simply used reins and weight to control where it was going, weaving his way in and out among the massive, columnar trunks, his main effort bent toward herding it in the direction of the stream he and Sifyra had passed on his way here. As soon as he thought they were well out of reach, he planned to slow the beast and take it into the streambed to break their trail.
Gradually, at about the moment when he was ready to slacken their pace, and he was quite certain the boy was long past ready, the horse slowed of its own will. Hweel had been trailing behind them, keeping watch on their backtrail, and had reported no followers. Now he sent the owl back to see if the barbarians had managed to organize themselves. He hoped not; he hoped they’d cut their losses and report to whoever was in charge of them that a huge force of Valdemaran warriors had used a child to lure them into an ambush. He rather doubted that they’d tell the truth, not with two dead and then-horses run to exhaustion and nothing to show for their efforts.
By the time they reached the stream, the energy and excitement that had sustained him had worn off, and his wound was bleeding freely. It had soaked right through the bandage and was going to make a right mess of his tunic if he didn’t do something about it soon. Hweel reported no pursuit at all - the horses were evidently not at all fond of their masters, and were nicely evading capture. The men didn’t have anything with them to tempt the horses into allowing them near enough to grab the reins either, which was certainly a mistake on their part.
That argued further for their being barbarians out of the northern mountains. They weren’t used to horses or riding up there, and wouldn’t have figured out that if your horse didn’t like you, he wasn’t disposed to coming back to you once he’d gotten rid of you, and if that happened, your only chance of catching him was to have something the horse wanted on your person.
The horse he was on didn’t much want to wade into the slippery streambed, but Snowfire used a little Mindtouch to persuade it, muttering to it absently, reminding it with images and feelings how good the cool water would feel on its hot legs. Finally, it stepped gingerly down into the water, and Snowfire allowed it to pick its way carefully among the rocks.
Interestingly, the boy hadn’t so much as uttered a sound in all that time, and he didn’t squirm or show any sign of discomfort, though he had to have been beaten raw by now. Snowfire hoped that his Valdemaran was equal to dealing with the child; he had picked it up mind-to-mind from one of the Guards at the next-to-last site his group had worked, but until he tried to talk to the boy, he wouldn’t know if it was equal to communicating with a possibly terrified child.
Of course, if the boy allowed, he could rectify that quickly enough with another mind-magic session. That was how he knew some of the dialects of the northern barbarians; he’d picked them up from a bold fellow who actually went up there to trade for furs. Snowfire had gotten a great deal of information from that hardy sou
l; he’d learned, for one thing, that once the barbarians accepted a person as a bona fide trader, he had near-immunity among them. “It’s an extension of their traditional immunity granted to tale-spinners and history-singers,” Shan had told him, and laughed. “But I suspect that it stems more from their greed for pretty baubles and fine fabrics than it does from any real interest in news of the outside world. At least they’re bright enough to know that if they kill the trader who brought the goods, there won’t be any more to follow him.”
The question in Snowfire’s mind was, what brought northern barbarians down into Valdemar? He hoped that there were only a few of them, and not an army. There had been trouble on the northern borders before, and that was when they knew that it was guarded by the Forest of Sorrows. If they had learned that Sorrows was no longer tenanted. . ..
Well, he would concentrate for now on the immediate problem; what to do with the boy, stopping his bleeding, and getting back safely to his base camp.
Snowfire pulled the horse to a halt after they had ridden for several furlongs through the streambed itself. By now the horse was cool enough that he could allow it to drink, and he really needed to rebandage that wound before the blood loss became a serious impediment to his performance. He got them all over to the stream bank, coaxed the horse up onto solid ground, let the boy get off, then dropped off the horse’s back himself.
What he really wanted to do was to lie down, but he wouldn’t be able to do that for a while. His arm hurt like fury, and besides needing to get the bleeding stopped, he wanted to get some cool water on it to ease some of the pain. There was only so much pain-dampening he could do, after all, on limited endurance. Tayledras scouts were durable, but he had just been through a fight, and the aftermath of a fight could leave anyone feeling as if they’d run the length of the Pelagirs,
He looped the horse’s reins around a branch with his good hand, and tied them off, giving the beast just enough slack that it could get a drink and snatch at a few bites of grass. Poor thing - it looked at him with astonishment (perhaps because he’d given it that freedom, or perhaps only because he hadn’t beaten it yet) and then buried its nose deep in the cool water. Then he knelt beside the streambed and carefully unwrapped the bandage from around his upper arm.
He let the wound bleed a little more while he put one end of the bandage under a rock in the sparkling clear stream, letting the swiftly-flowing, chill water wash it out for him. Then he splashed water on the wound, giving it a little rudimentary cleaning, and made certain that it wasn’t any more serious than he had thought.
It wasn’t; it was just a very simple penetration wound, and not a nasty-looking one as deep wounds go. There didn’t seem to be anything left in it, no signs of poisons visible, and as he had recalled, the knife had not seemed dirty or rusty. He reached into the water for the bandage to redo the job one-handed. It never even occurred to him to ask the boy to help.
Before he could do anything else, the boy was already at his elbow and had taken the bandage out of his hands. In a moment, he had wrung it as dry as possible and seized his arm.
“Please to hold still, good sir,” the boy said, carefully forming the Valdemaran words as he looked directly into Snowfire’s eyes, as if he thought he could give the sense of what he said if he simply spoke slowly and clearly, and locked gazes with his rescuer. Then again, if he had a touch of mind-magic, that might work; Snowfire had not lowered his own shields, so he couldn’t have told whether the boy possessed such a thing.
“Yes. Surely - “ Snowfire said, too much taken aback to argue. Was the boy in training to be a Healer? It certainly seemed as if he might be. But if that were the case, why was he not in the pale green of a Healer-student?
Using some clean, dry moss picked from a rock beside the stream as a pad, the boy rewrapped the bandage with the deft hands of an expert, putting exactly the right kind of pressure at the proper angles on the wound to hold it closed again. When he came to the end of the bandage and looked at it for a moment in puzzlement, Snowfire took over, and sealed the end of the bandage down again with magic.
And to his surprise, he felt the boy following what he had done with his own mind.
“Oh!” the lad said, sounding surprised. The next words were blurted, as if he spoke before he thought. “So magic is good for something - “
Then he clapped his hand over his mouth, his face, a comic mask of dismay.
“The littlest magics are usually the most practical,” Snowfire said mildly, in accented Valdemaran. He cleared his throat carefully. “I am Snowfire k’Vala, Scout of the Tayledras - or as you say, Hawkbrothers. I return now to my own people, in a place we have made for ourselves.”
The boy ducked his head awkwardly, but his eyes were alive with mingled curiosity and apprehension. “My name is Darian,” he said simply. “Darian Firkin. And - ah - thank you. I thought they were going to - kill me.”
“I do not think that what they had in mind for you would have been pleasant,” Snowfire said carefully, unsure of how much or little to tell the lad. He might well be much older than he looked; he had very old eyes for such a young face, and the face itself was a mask of politeness behind which something else was hidden. “Have you any place you need to go, or a place of safety that I may take you to? Or would you care to come with me to a safe haven?”
The boy held his breath, and slowly the polite mask shattered and fell. He crumpled, sobbing, apparently completely overcome by sudden, overwhelming grief.
Snowfire did not need to be an Empath to read that there was something dreadfully wrong, something triggered by mention of safety, or a safe place to go. He decided on his own that the best place for both of them was back with his little band. Whatever had gone wrong had evidently been horrible, terrifying; it likely had a great deal to do with those barbarians, and was probably something that he and his people urgently needed to know about.
But there was a more immediate need: to soothe the child enough so that he could ride without falling apart. The sooner he got back to camp, the better.
Snowfire had never had a little brother, but he had played the role of confidante and helper a time or two in the past, to warriors, mages, and younger scouts. “Hush, now,” he soothed, putting his good, though leather layered, arm about the boy’s shoulder - close enough to give emotional support, not so close as to be intrusive. He knew before the boy did, by the imperceptible tensing of the lad’s muscles, when he was coming too close, and backed off a bit. “Here, you may come with me, and we will go to my people. I promise, you will be quite safe enough with us. Eh? Then, when you are rested, you will talk to us, tell us what happened. Perhaps we can help. Even if we cannot, we will see to it that you are safe. Warm and safe and well-fed.”
The boy only nodded, and Snowfire mounted, lending the boy a hand so that he could swing up to sit behind the saddle instead of being carried like so much baggage. The boy must have ridden this way before; he put his foot carefully on top of Snowfire’s, trusted his weight to Snowfire’s arm, and got himself up behind the Tayledras with a minimum of awkwardness. And there he sat, his arms around Snowfire’s waist to hold him in place. His sobs had ended, but as he held tightly to Snowfire’s waist, the Tayledras felt him shivering, and not with cold, but with suppressed emotion and shock. He was very near a breaking point, and Snowfire wanted him to be safely in the hands of someone who could deal with his trauma before he came to that breaking point.
Nightwind was an Empath as well as a trondi’irn, and she would be the best person for the child at this moment.
Snowfire clucked to the horse, which lengthened its stride readily into a slow canter. Evidently it already preferred Snowfire over its previous masters.
It seemed as if this was something more serious than a single boy and a few sadistic barbarians. Perhaps this situation was more than his little group could deal with; after all, they already had quite a bit on their plate.
After the danger from the mage-storms had ended
, magic had been shattered like a broken crystal; the matrixed pattern of ley-lines and nodes was gone as if it had never been, and the energies that had once flowed in them were spread evenly across the face of the land. This had left the more powerful mages at something of a loss, but the Tayledras already had a plan in place to deal with such a contingency. They were a long-sighted and patient people when it came to making and fulfilling plans. They would move with urgency when speed was called for, or could wait for generations to lay something in place.
Magic flowed, like water, and like water it would not remain spread out over the land for long. If left to itself, it would form its own rivers and pools - or ley-lines and nodes - or it could be guided into paths that could be carved for it. The sooner those paths were established, the sooner it could be persuaded to follow those paths, and would flow as it had before - and the less likely it would be that stagnant pools would form, warping creatures and plants as had happened before, in the Pelagirs, after the Mage Wars were ended. There were many more Tayledras now than there had been then, with a great deal more experience, and now that there was no geas laid upon them by the Star-Eyed to cleanse the land, they were free to go out into it and rectify the situation before it became necessary to do those cleansings.
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