S. Stirling - The Given Sacrifice

I can hear the capital letter there, Mary thought.

“-into sheep.”

Well, good for you, Scout of twenty-eight badges! I know everyone’s entitled to their own customs, but some are just plain creepy about that. At least we can beat some sense into the Cutters.

The dark spearman frowned; he seemed to be the senior here, but primus inter pares rather than commander.

“We must see that you are worthy of badges, folk of merit,” he said.

Alleyne raised his brows. “You want us to send our people among you without guarantee of their safety?”

“If you wish us as allies, there must be trust,” the woman said.

“And I will stay as hostage,” the spearman said proudly. “A Scout is trustworthy!”

The redhead grinned. “And you hold our best hunting-ground hostage, too,” he said irreverently, looking at the parties of horsemen and butchering-camps scattered for miles to the westward.

I think this one has gotten out of the woods more, Mary thought. Then to Alleyne, in the Noble Tongue:

“Lord, I think this is a time for. . for the sort of gesture Lady Astrid would have made.”

He looked at her quickly, his sky-blue eyes blinking thoughtfully. Ritva made a small private sign: Good call, sis!

Uncle Alleyne had always been affectionately respectful of the founder of the Rangers, but while he was the husband of the living woman he’d been a mixture of chief-of-staff and Reality Anchor. He’d always loved The Histories , that was how he and Astrid had first come together, but he hadn’t had the fire she did. Since she’d died, though. . since then, he’d lived her dream for her, meticulously.

“You’re right, woman of Westernesse,” he said quietly. Then he replied to the Morrowlanders, with the air of a man quoting from a sacred book, the way bards did from The Histories around a winter hearth in Mithrilwood:

“For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf,

And the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.”

They looked at him sharply, obviously recognizing it. “I need no hostage, Andrew, called Swift,” he said. “For a Scout is, indeed, trustworthy.”

• • •

“Well, thanks,” Ingolf muttered. “For this glorious heartwarming display of trust and so forth your Uncle Alleyne made. He’s back there, I note.”

“We need to take chances,” Mary said back, quietly. “We’re in a hurry.”

She’d seen hints some of their. . guardians was a more tactful way of putting it than guards . . knew Sign. If they really needed to be secret they could use the Noble Tongue, but Ingolf wasn’t really fluent yet, and Ian could follow simple sentences but not really talk it at all, beyond stock phrases. Cole had none at all, and Talyn and Caillech only a few words. So far everyone had been impeccably polite to them anyway.

In the meantime the seven of them followed the trail at a wolf-pace, which was what the Morrowlanders called it too: a hundred yards at a jog, a hundred at a fast walk, a hundred at a normal walking pace, then repeat, with a ten-minute rest every hour. You could really cover territory that way. If you could keep it up, which they all could without much trouble. The Morrowlanders seemed slightly surprised, which they might well be if their standard of comparison was Cutter cowboys who thought they lost caste if they got out of the saddle. The Dúnedain didn’t think that way, nor Mackenzies, nor Cole’s service, and Ingolf was just plain versatile.

The game trail wound as their boots made a dull thudding on the soft pine duff. It took the easiest way through the hilly woods with the unerring skill animals had for a slope and for the least-effort way between two points. The land it led through varied, from open flower-meadow to dense pine forest and Engelmann spruce and pockets of aspen, and there were almost always mountains in view. The thin air was crisp in the mouth and lungs, like a dry white wine, scented with sap and meadowsweet and an intense green savor. Once she stopped for a moment with a gasp as they turned a corner and came into the open.

A river lay well below the hillside trail, winding in S-curves through a meadow intensely green and starred with blue and crimson and gold like one of Sandra Arminger’s neo-Persian carpets, only at this distance the color was more of an is-it-there mist flowing over the velvet, teasing the edge of vision. Beyond was the darker green of forest, turning to blue distance rising to the white teeth of the Absaroka Mountains.

It wasn’t a painting, though: it was full of life. A bison bull shook his bearded head and snorted as red-and-white mustangs swept by with their tails raised like plumes. A pack of lobos had started the horses moving, but they skirted the bison warily as they followed, their heads held high to keep them over the level of the grass. From a twisted spruce below the hillside trail two golden eagles launched themselves into the cool limpid air, banking out over the murmuring white water with the feathers splayed like fingertips on their yard-long wings. Waterfowl rose up in a cataract from a quiet stretch surrounded by willows where a bear nosed through the shallows, climbing like a twisting spire of smoke.

“Now that’s pretty,” Ian said, and everyone nodded agreement; several whistled softly.

Nearby tiny hummingbirds with iridescent orange-red throats circled each other in a buzzing blossom-war.

“Even compared to the Drumheller Rockies, that’s pretty,” he went on. “Even compared to Banff , that’s pretty.”

“Damn, yes,” Ingolf agreed. “I bet the winters here are something to behold, though, even compared to where I grew up.”

“ Oh yeah,” Cole said. “Lucky to get two months without a frost around here, probably, up this high.”

He was a native of the interior, if considerably south of this, drier and at a lower altitude. Ian nodded too, looking around at the vegetation. He had a right to be a connoisseur of winters, since the Peace River country lay a thousand miles to the north. The two Mackenzies and the Dúnedain winced a little. They were from the Willamette, off west of the Cascades. Where winter meant chilly and rainy and muddy, not howling weeks of freezing blizzard that could snatch you dead. Campaigning and travel had shown them the difference.

“I’ve done winter training, ski and mountain stuff, in country a lot like this,” Cole said. “And it’s no joke. But it’s pretty then, too. Sort of. . pure.”

They all took a moment to absorb the quiet. The two Mackenzies drew their pentagrams and nodded, then opened their water-bottles and poured libations. Mary put her hand to her heart and bowed. It was actually difficult to say what part of what she saw was prettiest, like a complex piece of music; she’d heard that people came from far away just to walk these woods before the Change, and she could believe it.

The three representatives of the Morrowland Council halted too; they didn’t say anything directly, but they did make that salute gesture again.

“A Scout is reverent,” one of them added.

The whole group-less the unseen but definite escorts who were pacing them out of sight of the trail-stopped at a shelter built into the side of a hill for the night. It wasn’t elaborately camouflaged, but it was fairly inconspicuous anyway, being three-quarters sunk into the slope. There was a bark-shingled roof extending a bit outward over walls of notched logs; a trickle of spring had been turned into a rock pool. A corral stood not far away with stone posts and wooden rails, and a lean-to packed with hay-baled hay tied with straw twists, which was an oddly advanced touch for the backwoods.