Barbara Hambly - Dragonsbane

“What’s he looking for now?” he demanded one afternoon, when John ordered their fifth halt in three hours and, armed with his heavy horn hunting-bow, dismounted and vanished into the choking tangle of hazel and blackthorn beside the road.

It had been raining most of the forenoon, and the tall boy drooped miserably on the back of The Stupid Roan, one of the spare horses they’d brought from the Hold. The other spare, Jenny’s mount, John had christened The Stupider Roan, a name that was unfortunately apt. Jenny suspected that, in his wearier moments, Gareth even blamed her for the generally poor quality of the Hold’s horseflesh. The rain had ceased now, but cold wind still probed through the very weave of their garments; every now and then a gust shook the branches above them and splattered them with leftover rain and an occasional sodden oak leaf that drifted down like a dead bat.

“He’s looking for danger.” Jenny herself was listening, her nerves queerly on edge, searching the silence that hung like an indrawn breath among the dark, close-crowded trees.

“He didn’t find any last time, did he?” Gareth tucked his gloved hands under his cloak for warmth and shivered. Then he looked ostentatiously upward, scanning what sky was visible, calculating the time of day, and from there going on to remember how many days they had been on the road. Under his sarcasm she could hear fear. “Or the time before that, either.”

“And lucky for us that he didn’t,” she replied. “I think you have little understanding of the dangers in the Winterlands …”

Gareth gasped, and his gaze fixed. Turning her head quickly, Jenny followed his eyes to the dark shape of Aversin, his plaids making him nearly invisible in the gloom among the trees. With a single slow movement he had raised his bow, the arrow nocked but not yet pulled.

She tracked the trajectory of the arrow’s flight to the source of the danger.

Just visible through the trees, a skinny little old man was stooping arthritically to scrape the dry insides from a rotting log for kindling. His wife, an equally lean, equally rag-clad old woman whose thin white hair hung lankly about her narrow shoulders, was holding a reed basket to receive the crumbling chips. Gareth let out a cry of horror. “NO!”

Aversin moved his head. The old woman, alerted also, looked up and gave a thin wail, dropping her basket to shield her face futilely with her arms. The dry, woody punk spilled onto the marshy ground about her feet. The old man caught her by the arm and the two of them began to flee dodderingly into the deeper forest, sobbing and covering their heads with their arms, as if they supposed that the broad-tipped iron war arrow would be stopped by such slack old flesh.

Aversin lowered his bow and let his targets stumble unshot into the wet wilderness of trees.

Gareth gasped, “He was going to kill them! Those poor old people …”

Jenny nodded, as John came back to the road. “I know.” She understood why; but, as when she had killed the dying robber in the ruins of the old town, she still felt unclean.

“Is that all you can say?” Gareth raged, horrified. “You know ? He would have shot them in cold blood …”

“They were Meewinks, Gar,” John said quietly. “Shooting’s the only thing you can do with Meewinks.”

“I don’t care what you call them!” he cried. “They were old and harmless! All they were doing was gathering kindling!”

A small, straight line appeared between John’s reddish brows, and he rubbed his eyes. Gareth, Jenny thought, was not the only one upon whom this trip was telling.

“I don’t know what you call them in your part of the country,” Aversin said tiredly. “Their people used to farm all the valley of the Wildspae. They …”

“John.” Jenny touched his arm. She had followed this exchange only marginally; her senses and her power were diffused through the damp woods, and in the fading light she scented danger. It seemed to prickle along her skin—a soft plashing movement in the flooded glades to the north, a thin chittering that silenced the small restive noises of fox and weasel. “We should be moving. The light’s already going. I don’t remember this part of the woods well but I know it’s some distance from any kind of camping place.”

“What is it?” His voice, like hers, dropped to a whisper.

She shook her head. “Maybe nothing. But I think we should go.”

“Why?” Gareth bleated. “What’s wrong? For three days you’ve been running away from your own shadows …”

“That’s right,” John agreed, and there was a dangerous edge to his quiet voice. “You ever think what might happen to you if your own shadow caught you? Now ride—and ride silent.”

It was nearly full night when they made camp, for, like Jenny, Aversin was nervous, and it took some time for him to find a camping place that his woodsmanship judged to be even relatively safe. One of them Jenny rejected, not liking the way the dark trees crowded around it; another John passed by because the spring could not be seen from where the fire would be. Jenny was hungry and tired, but the instincts of the Winterlands warned her to keep moving until they found a place that could be defended, though against what she could not tell.

When Aversin ruled against a third place, an almost-circular clearing with a small, fern-choked spring gurgling through one side of it, Gareth’s hunger-frayed temper snapped. “What’s wrong with it?” he demanded, dismounting and huddling on the lee-side of The Stupid Roan for warmth. “You can take a drink without getting out of sight of the fire, and it’s bigger than the other place was.”

Annoyance glinted like the blink of drawn steel in John’s voice.

“I don’t like it.”

“Well, why in the name of Sarmendes not?”

Aversin looked around him at the clearing and shook his head. The clouds had parted overhead enough to admit watery moonlight to glint on his specs, on the water droplets in his hair when he pushed back his hood, and on the end of his long nose. “I just don’t. I can’t say why.”

“Well, if you can’t say why, what would you like?”

“What I’d like,” the Dragonsbane retorted with his usual devastating accuracy, “is not to have some snirp of a silk-lined brat telling me a place is safe because he wants his supper.”

Because that was obviously Gareth’s first concern, the boy exploded, “That isn’t the reason! I think you’ve lived like a wolf for so long you don’t trust anything! I’m not going to trek through the woods all night long because …”

“Fine,” said Aversin grimly. “You can just bloody well stay here, then.”

“That’s right! Go ahead, abandon me! Are you going to take a shot at me if I try to come after you and you hear the bushes rustle?”

“I might.”

“John!” Jenny’s cool, slightly gravelly voice cut across his next words. “How much longer can we travel without lights of some kind? Clouds are moving up. It won’t rain, but you won’t be able to see a foot ahead of you in two hours.”

“ You could,” he pointed out. He felt it, too, she thought—that growing sensation that had begun back along the road; the uneasy feeling of being watched.

“I could,” she agreed quietly. “But I don’t have your woodsmanship. And I know this part of the road—there isn’t a better place ahead. I don’t like this place either, but I’m not sure that staying here wouldn’t be safer than showing up our position by traveling with lights, even a very dim magelight. And even that might not show up signs of danger.”

John looked about him at the dark woods, now barely visible in the cold gloom. Wind stirred at the bare boughs interlaced above their heads, and somewhere before them in the clearing Jenny could hear the whisper of the ferns and the rushing voice of the rain-fed stream. No sound of danger, she thought. Why then did she subconsciously watch with her peripheral vision; why this readiness to flee?