Memoirs of a Ranger - Lambe Arkolyn

[Lambe]

I - 3



What You Drink in Trouble

Potions are a way of life for adventurers. Bad judgment is what happens when a man treats every draught like a blessing.

A found potion may save your life. It may also end it, change your hair, make you glow, put you to sleep, or teach your companions several new words.


Keep Close

Keep healing draughts and antidotes where your hand can find them. Anything needed before you fall over should not be buried under spare clothes and old trail food.

If poison is already in your blood, the bottom of your pack is very far away.


Found Potions

Adventurers use what they find. Anyone who says otherwise has never been far from an inn or a shopkeeper.

Use it, if you know what it is. Use it quickly, if the need is real. But do not mistake a label for wisdom. Ink lies sometimes. Glass gets reused. Dead men are poor witnesses, and green lips should make a thinking man pause.

Swamp rot is not a flavor.

If you drink it anyway, do not call it courage. Call it what it is.

Adventuring.


Do Not Drink

Do not drink anything unlabeled. Do not drink anything that smells wrong. Be wary of anything handed to you by a smiling rogue, and anything a wizard says is “probably safe.”

Probably safe means someone is guessing.


Before Trouble

Drink what helps before trouble starts. Strength does more good before the blade is drawn. Hiding works best before someone is pointing at you. If you wait until the claws are already in, you waited too long.


During Trouble

If you must drink in a fight, make room first. A potion helps less when the thing that hurt you is still close enough to do it again.

Healing potions close wounds. They do not close poor decisions.


Last Rule

Never trust an unlabeled bottle in a dead man’s pouch. There is usually a reason he still had it.


Last Note

Mira, if this page ever finds you, use what you know and leave mystery bottles alone. I do not care how brave your friends think it is to test one. Brave and stupid often share a cup. Do not drink that cup.

[Lambe]

5 - 58



Some places do not wait for us, yet still expect us to know where to stand.

Before the end of the year, I had told Tyn and a few others that I meant to go south into Tethyr. There was no need to make a ceremony of it. The Circle had steadied enough to stand with one less ranger for a time, and I had no wish to turn a road into a farewell.

By Alturiak of 1351 DR, I was already in Tethyr. I had crossed the Coast road and Amn by then, though I did not cross either quickly. I had no horse, and I had not gone south as a man in a hurry to be seen. Some stretches I walked alone. Some I took with caravans, when traveling with a line of wagons made better sense. A man with a bow draws fewer questions when he is walking beside wheels and taking a watch like everyone else.

I did not hide Mielikki. There was no shame in Her mark, even in Amn. Men who wanted a ford read or a night road watched did not usually care whether a ranger’s prayers had crossed their border with permission. What I kept quiet was the war. Only a few years had passed since I had stood against Amn, and I had no wish to learn which caravan guard, toll man, or old soldier might remember the wrong side of my bow.

Amn had not been broken by that war. Its inns still counted every cup. Its merchants still argued over weights, weather, and losses at the end of the month. But people remembered. Mothers remembered sons who had marched. Most remembered prices that rose and never came down. Guards remembered friends who had gone north and returned with fewer fingers, fewer teeth, or fewer words. I heard enough by keeping quiet.

I slept outside more often than I needed to. That was partly habit and partly caution. The road was wet, and there were mornings when my cloak had stiffened around me before dawn. I helped where I could. Checked a ford before wagons risked it. Warned a caravan away from a bad camp. Helped search for a boy who had gone missing near the marsh and found him before dark. There was no lack of work along the way.

The first sight of Tethyr did not come with trumpets or any welcome arranged for my return. It came under a low winter sky, from a rise where the land fell away into hills and wet fields. Farther south, the Wealdath lay dark against the distance, large enough that even haze could not soften it into something gentle. Smoke marked settlements below, leading out to roads that crossed and vanished. Somewhere beyond all that were places I had known before I understood what they would come to mean. I stood there longer than I meant to, and nothing in the land answered. That was fair. I had not written ahead.



Though it was not nearest to where I meant to end, I made my way to the coast first. Flora’s cottage was there, and I had not come this far south intending to pass it by. She had kept a cottage in a small hamlet within Port Kir’s reach, not in the city itself. Port Kir was too loud for the memory I carried. The hamlet was the sort of place that fed a port without becoming one. Nets, small fields, damp lanes, woodsmoke, shells in muddy yards, and enough trade passing near to make strangers useful before they became welcome.

The ealdorman called the place Alderwash. I could have sworn it had been called something else years before. I should probably check what it is called these days.

The cottage had never truly been ours. Flora had kept it because the hamlet needed an herbalist, and because the garden behind it already knew more healing plants than weeds. Someone had used the place before her. That showed in the shelves, the drying hooks under the rafters, and the workbench set where morning light came through the small window. Flora had changed it anyway. She had that way about her. A room could be half empty when she entered it and useful by nightfall.

It was useful to someone else now. There was a new fence, set crooked but sound. The garden had been cut smaller. A child’s shirt hung from a line near the door, snapping in the wind hard enough to sound annoyed by the day. Someone had stacked firewood where Flora used to keep baskets. The roof had been mended with newer thatch on the south side. A dog watched me from under the step and decided I was not worth barking at unless I came closer. I did not.

A few people looked at me twice. One old face knew me after a while, though not by my name at first. Flora came easier to memory than I did. That was how most of them had known me then, if they had known me at all. I had been the quiet man who came down from the trees, the husband who carried roots and bark and sometimes stood in the doorway while Flora worked. Younger folk passed me with no more interest than they gave any road-worn stranger. They had no reason to know what the cottage had once meant.

I thought that would hurt more than it did. It hurt, I will not deny it. But it was not the old kind of hurt, the one that catches behind the ribs and demands an answer. The house had not betrayed me by holding another life. It had done what houses do when roofs do not fall and people still need somewhere dry.

I write that now after having years to consider it. The same is true of many things in these pages. I did not always understand them so neatly when they happened. Memory has had time to turn them over before I put them down in ink.

I might have left Alderwash that same day if not for the sow.

That was how the hamlet spoke of the trouble, as if one animal had become a matter large enough to name. A boar sow had charged a woodcutter three days before I arrived. He lived, though he had a torn thigh and bruised ribs for his trouble. Another man had been chased off the lower trail the next morning. By the time I heard of it, some were already set on killing her before she did worse. Except for Tavin Rusk.

He was young for the work, early twenties at most, and one of the youngest men trusted to move regularly through the woods around Alderwash. That made it easy for older men to mistake caution for softness. I have seen that done to young woodsmen, young guards, young rangers, and young fools who later proved not to be fools at all. Tavin knew the trees, stormfall, axe paths, charcoal grounds, and the shortcuts villagers used through the woods. He did not know Flora nor me. He belonged to the hamlet as it was, not as I had left it.

He had good eyes. Before we went out, he showed me a bent pay token he had found near the lower way. It was not village coin. It had been punched for issue, not trade, the kind of thing given to men someone meant to count later. The mark on it was worn, and I did not know whose purse had first held it. It might have meant nothing. Men on the road dropped things often enough, then sometimes swore they had been robbed. Still, Tavin had kept it because it did not belong, and that told me something about him.

We took the lower trail first. The old way had held for years, not because every tree was marked fresh each season, but because the people who used it knew its habits. Trails in country like that are kept by feet as much as knives. A cut in bark, a leaning ash, a bend around wet ground, a place where roots hold a bank better than stone.

The weather had been hard on the trail, and rain had taken part of the bank below the alder bend. One marker tree had gone down into the wash, roots lifted like fingers. Another stood, but the old cut had turned pale and useless under wet lichen. Someone had gone around the trouble and widened a deer path without meaning to make a road of it. Broken branches showed where others had followed. Boots had beaten the mud flatter.

The false way ran too close to a low hollow screened by alder and blackthorn. I found the sow’s marks before we saw her. Deep cuts marked the wet ground, and leaves had been turned where she had rooted before stopping. There were piglet tracks as well, too small to mistake once I found them. She was not ranging wide or hunting men. She was holding one place against feet that had no business coming so near.

Tavin saw the tracks after I showed him where to look. He had known the lower line was wrong after the rain. He had known the sow’s behavior had changed. He had not yet put the two together, and there was no shame in that. A forester knows trees and use. A ranger has to know what happens when trees, beasts, weather, fear, and people begin pulling on one another.

We were too close when she showed herself.

She came out of the brush low and hard, bristles lifted, mud dark on her snout. Tavin held still, which mattered. A man who startles at the wrong moment can turn a warning into an attack. My hand stayed away from Howling. I lowered my shoulders, eased my weight back, and let my eyes rest where they could see without challenging.

Wild empathy is neither speech nor friendship, and a beast does not become tame because a ranger has patience. Most times, all it gives you is the space between warning and blood. I took that space, breathing slowly and making my body smaller without making it prey. I spoke low, not for words, but for shape and steadiness. The sow stamped once and threw wet leaves forward. She swung her head toward the hollow more than toward me. Her anger had a tether, and that was the answer I needed.

We backed away by inches, then by steps. She did not follow past the blackthorn.

After that, the work was simpler and took longer than killing her would have. We blocked the false turn with deadfall and enough thorn to make a tired man curse before pushing through. We reopened the upper line where the ground held. I cut new marks where travelers would see them without carving the trees raw. Tavin walked each bend with me until he could find the way without looking for my hand. We checked where water would run if the next rain came hard. We found a second place likely to fail before Greengrass and marked that too.

When I gave the ealdorman my assessment, I gave it the way I would have given it to the Circle, though I doubt he was used to hearing trail trouble laid out that way. The sow was holding ground, not hunting villagers. The lower trail had failed below the alder bend, two old marks were gone, and someone had widened a deer path until it carried people too close to the bedding hollow. I had blocked the bad turn, remarked the upper line, and left Tavin able to find each mark again. I told him to keep folk to the upper trail until Greengrass, send a woodsman with anyone who had to pass before then, and check the bank after hard rain. Once the piglet tracks moved south or deeper into cover, the lower way could be opened again. Until then, if another traveler was hurt, they were to close it entirely and guide people around rather than send men into the hollow with spears.

It was not a glorious report. It concerned rain, bad guidance, frightened people, a young forester with sense enough to keep a bent pay token, and a sow that wanted her young left alive.

I stayed in Alderwash a few days after that. Long enough to walk the upper marks with Tavin twice more. Long enough for him to show me where charcoal men had begun avoiding one stand of trees because of riders on the old road. Long enough to watch the hollow from a distance and see the sow move her young deeper under cover without anyone putting an arrow in her.

I thought of Eldath’s shrine more than once during those days, though I did not kneel anywhere in the hamlet. There had been no stone basin, no quiet watch, and no one waiting to see whether I remained. There had only been a damaged trail, a frightened animal, and work that needed doing before someone made the trouble worse.

When I left, the cottage was still there behind its crooked fence. Smoke came from the chimney. The child’s shirt was gone from the line. Someone had put a basket near the door where Flora might once have set one, though not in the same place.

The house had gone on without me. I was glad someone had kept the roof sound, though I cannot say every part of me was glad to see it. By the time I took the inland road, the false trail was blocked behind me, the upper marks were clean, and Tavin knew where the next rain would cause trouble. The coast fell away by slow miles. Ahead, Tethyr rose into wet fields, hill roads, and the darker reach of trees I had been born near without ever owning.

I kept southward until the road began turning me east.

[Lambe]

5 - 59



The past looks different when it no longer has to carry you.

I found my father’s mound by the old rise in the ground more than by any marker. Grass had taken most of the shape, and spring rain had pressed the earth lower on one side. I cleared wet leaves from it with my hands, set a loose stone back where it had slid, and checked the small run of water that had begun cutting near the edge. The water had not reached him.

I had been there before. More than once, when tasks or roads brought me near enough and I had time to turn aside. The first return had been the hardest, years earlier, after the sea had thrown me back into Tethyr and I had come looking for what fire and fear had left of the village. I was nineteen then, and every tree seemed to know more than it would tell me. That day in Ches of 1351 DR, they stood wet-barked around the old ground while rain gathered on the new leaves. The village itself was a shape the land had almost finished swallowing. A bit of wall here. A blackened timber softened by moss. Old field lines showed only where the grass changed color. I left what remained where it lay, paid my respects to my father, and stood a while among the other low mounds before taking the road again.

The Firedrake Shores lay behind me by then. I had come inland by slower roads, keeping to tracks that rose and fell with wet fields, hedges, and low wooded country. Spring work had begun wherever the ground allowed it. Plows had gone into fields where they could. Men watched the road before they waved. Women kept working when strangers passed unless given reason to stop.

Mosstone lay within the old reach of my childhood world, though as a boy I had known it first through other people’s mouths. Later, under Kolandir, I learned it better. We had passed through or near it more than once when he was teaching me the difference between a road and a trail. Mosstone had its own ways. It sat close enough to the Wealdath that the forest shaped life beyond the fields, and it carried enough druidic weight that a ranger of Mielikki could breathe a little easier while buying supplies or listening for road news. Tethirmin’s name was the one I knew from Mosstone, though travelers did not always agree on which hand truly guided the grove.

I left the archdruid to his own concerns. I bought food for the road, replaced a few worn supplies, and found a dry place to sit while I mended what I could. I also sent a letter north to Waterdeep.

Lydia would worry if word reached her from someone else that I had gone south into Tethyr. She had earned better from me than that. I kept it short. I told her I was in Tethyr and had come through safely. The old ground still stood, changed by the years but familiar enough. I left out some of the places I had stopped and the mud on my knees beside my father’s mound. She would know there was more behind the few lines than I had room to put down.

Mosstone gave me road news without much order to it. Traders complained about the mud until foresters corrected the roads they had taken. A carter swore half the bridges in Tethyr had been built by men who hated wheels. When someone mentioned Brost, I set down my cup and listened closer. Brost was still Brost from the sound of it. Humans had built it, though years near the Wealdath had taught its people some care in dealing with elves. Kolandir had shown me years earlier how quickly a room could close over a question about elves. Brost usually waited to decide whether the questioner had any right to ask.

Brost lay away from the nearest road. The old map in my head still turned toward it when I asked where to begin, so I bought enough food for several days and left Mosstone under low cloud. The rain followed me most of the way there, but it stayed light enough that I kept moving.

The town sat beneath the weather when I reached it. Smoke hung low over the roofs, and the lanes smelled of damp wool and cooked onions, with horses close by. A few heads turned at my cloak and bow before returning to whatever had been interrupted. I was careful with my questions and bought an ordinary drink before I asked again. I asked whether a Waterdhavian Flounder beer could be found that far south, because some habits from Waterdeep survive longer than they should. The look I received suggested Brost had either never heard of such a thing or had already formed a poor opinion of it. I took what they had and drank it while listening to the room.

Conversations thinned when certain ears were thought to be near. One man glanced toward the door. Someone else kept his eyes on his cup. Then came the old feeling of being watched by someone who did not need to stare, familiar enough that I knew it before I turned. I had begun to hear his shadow in the room before he sat near me. Kolandir found me before I found what I had come to ask after.

He had changed with the years. His hair was silver-white where I remembered light hair and wind, and his face had the weathered cut of old wood left in sun and rain. He still carried the same bow I remembered. His leathers were worn in the right places. His eyes moved over me with the same patient attention I remembered from the years when I had still needed every lesson twice.

We clasped forearms in greeting. He let me look at him, and I let him look at me while the room carried on around us. He noticed the scar before most of what time had done to me. His eyes went to my throat, then back to my face, and I gave him the short answer. A wolf bite. It was true, though there was more to it. He did not press. He only looked disappointed. Why would he not be? Faerun had been robbed of my beautiful singing voice.

We shared stories over a drink, most of which came up in pieces, though neither of us spent the evening feeding them. Kolandir had come to Brost because Ilikas Naerthalan had been absent too long. The trouble lay in what he had left behind and what had failed to appear after. Rangers disappear. Elven rangers more than most, or so men like me are told when we are young and impatient. A tenday means little. Two may mean less if the work is deep enough under trees.

Ilikas had left the wrong signs behind him. One mark had gone unrenewed, and a message place had been disturbed and closed too quickly. A contact had seen him asking after roads southeast, though he usually favored forest ways. Another said he had seemed calm until he thought himself unwatched. Kolandir had already traced some of it before hearing that a human ranger from the Coast had been asking questions in Brost. I write it down that he was told the ranger was of impeccable stature and otherwise difficult to mistake. He soon knew that was me. By the time the cups were empty, I had begun checking my arrows and considering what food I still had left.

We left Brost under a dull gray morning sky and ranged the eastern reaches of the Wealdath in search of Ilikas’s trail. I could not have said precisely how long it took, though by the ground we covered and what I knew of those roads, I would put it near three tendays. For the first few days, Kolandir led more than I did. The marks were elven, or near enough to elven habit that my eyes caught the shape after his had already measured the hand behind it. We maintained a steady pace and camped after long days. The evenings gave us time to speak of what the years had done between meetings, though much of it came while we ate, checked our gear, or worked over the next day’s ground.

Ilikas had moved cleanly at first. He knew where to leave a sign and where to pass without one. Some ground remembered boots better than others after rain, and he had used old lines that would have carried him quietly if he had been alone and unhurried.

At a stream crossing south of a broken mill, the work changed. Ilikas had taken the faster bank instead of the cleaner one. Farther on, a cache had been opened and closed in haste. One wrapper was missing. A tie had been cut rather than unknotted. A bit of wax was pressed into bark where a wet thumb had caught it.

We heard the name Thornmere first from a man who did not want to be the one saying it. He had come to the road with a bundle of split kindling on his back and stopped when he saw Kolandir. Then he saw me and stopped again in a different way. Armed men had been asking after a lady of that house, he said, though he called her a woman before correcting himself. There was coin for word of her. Safe return, the men called it. He kept shifting the weight of the kindling while he spoke and looked down the road twice.

The name did little to explain our wayward colleague then. Thornmere was one more troubled house in a country that had learned to produce trouble faster than bread. After that, however, Ilikas’s trail bent toward it. His pace changed with the ground. His steps lengthened where the soil held them. He used human roads where an elf moving alone might have kept to the trees and began skirting settlements close enough to learn from them. Twice we found places where he had watched a road crossing from cover, with grass pressed down where he had waited.

Kolandir knew Ilikas’s habits. I knew enough of human roads to see when they had begun to matter. We worked different parts of the same trail as the days passed. Kolandir read what Ilikas meant to hide. I watched for what other people had failed to conceal. Cart ruts lay beneath branches placed by hands that had not grown up hiding carts. Near a ditch, a boy’s footprint showed in the mud. Ash had been thrown wide from a campfire. Someone had wiped blood from a stone and missed the crack beneath it.

By late Tarsakh, we knew Ilikas had joined someone, or someone had joined him. The trail grew crowded by degrees. Another pair of boots appeared first. Later came signs of a horse led more than ridden. Cart wheels kept to hard ground when they could and dragged through mud when they had no choice.

We found the tracks of pack animals as well, then older feet and smaller ones among them. A litter had been set down often. Branches had been cut at the wrong height by tired people making room where the track narrowed. We approached carefully when we found them. Frightened men had good reason to keep weapons near.

We saw the first cart through trees near dusk, half covered in brush and still too square a shape to belong to the woods. Smoke had been kept low, and horses had been led deeper under cover. A woman with a bandaged hand saw us before we reached the open ground and lifted a knife she did not know how to use well. Others turned at the movement. A man reached for a spear. A child disappeared behind a wheel.

Kolandir let them see his hands. I did the same as we came forward at a pace that gave everyone time to decide what we were. They watched our weapons first, then the road behind us and the trees beside us. There were too many wounded for a bandit camp and too many children for a patrol. Mud had taken the hems of better clothes. A few people still stood like retainers despite exhaustion. Others looked like tenants or household folk who had left in a hurry with what they could carry.

We asked after Ilikas. His name moved through them faster than ours had, and someone slipped away between the trees to fetch him. The elven ranger came from the trees with his bow unstrung and held at his side.

I knew him well enough. Ilikas had stood at my wedding, and he had been a ranger I looked up to before I even saw myself as one. More refined than I was used to, he held that lifestyle nevertheless. Elves changed less than humans did, and the years had done little to make him unfamiliar. Mud marked his boots and the edge of one sleeve. He looked tired and stretched thin across too many people’s fear, though he held himself under control.

Behind him stood Lady Meriel Thornmere, flanked by two of her retainers. Her cloak was mud-dark at the edge. Her hair had been tied back in haste and retied badly since. She had the pale strain of someone who had slept little and still been asked questions by everyone awake. People made room for her without thinking. She passed among them without pausing over the attention.

Ilikas explained the situation before night finished closing around the camp. He had already spent too much of himself keeping those people moving, and his account came in pieces. Meriel had sheltered former subjects of a neighboring lord after they fled abuses committed under his rule. Their testimony made them dangerous once civil war spread through Tethyr, and Thornmere’s neutrality did little to protect her from accusations of rebellion and loyalist sympathy. The lord sent his captain, Rauthen Dalmor, to reclaim the witnesses and bring Meriel to account. Thornmere could not resist him. She fled with the witnesses, her loyal retainers, and those among her household and villages who would not be safe if left behind. Dalmor followed, calling it the lawful pursuit of fugitives.

The column needed to move west through the reach where Suldanessellar’s leave would matter. Beyond it lay a Thornmere holding deeper under the Wealdath’s shadow. Kolandir looked west toward trees I could not enter as he could. He watched the dark between the trunks for a long while, then began checking what food and water the column could carry before anyone moved again.

I went farther among the carts. Wounded people lay beneath blankets or against wheels. A few children had fallen asleep wherever someone found room for them. Near one cart, a man worked a strip of leather around a broken brace while another held the wood steady. Ilikas kept giving us names and roads, along with what he knew of the danger behind them. He also gave us the number of people who would die if the wrong men reached them first.

Whenever Meriel moved through the camp, his attention followed her before returning to the work.

He did not say what lay beneath his actions. His eyes gave it away.

[Lambe]

5 - 60



Some roads take hold before we know their end.

Kolandir went on where I did not. I had walked with him most of the way from the column, far enough that the camp lay miles behind us and the trees ahead had begun to feel less like forest and more like a watched threshold. There was no wall to see. No carved warning set across the path. Once, when the wind shifted the upper leaves, I thought I saw the forest rising far ahead, one crown shouldering above the others. The lower branches closed before I could be certain. The Wealdath only deepened, and the air beneath it grew quieter than weather could explain. Kolandir knew where he was permitted to go. I knew where I should stop.

He left me beneath a stand of old beech where the ground rose just enough to stay dry. I made no fire. I checked the sign behind us, found no fresh track worth troubling over, and set myself where I could watch the way he had gone and the way we had come. The column waited well back from that place. Meriel had not risked bringing her people near Suldanessellar’s reach, and Ilikas had agreed with her, though agreeing had cost him more patience than he wished to show.

I prayed there while I waited. It was not a long prayer. Long prayers are easy when a man has no work in front of him, and I had plenty. I asked Mielikki to guide those lost beneath Her trees, to steady feet that had already walked too far, and to keep frightened hands from wounding the wood that sheltered them. I thought of the Needle then, and of what the name meant when stripped of ceremony. A needle draws thread through torn cloth. It does not decide whether the cloth deserved tearing.

The column had already spent near a tenday beneath the Wealdath before Kolandir and I found them. I no longer remember that count cleanly. We had been bending west with them for four days since, and those I remember better because we had a destination to measure them against. Calling it movement made the work sound cleaner than it was. I put their number somewhere near a hundred, though people moving between the carts made an exact count difficult. Carts bogged in soft ground. Children stumbled when adults were too tired to carry them, and the wounded learned to measure the day by how many times a litter had to be set down. Ilikas kept them off the most open roads when he could. Kolandir corrected the forest paths where human haste would have led them wrong. I watched the rear, the flanks, and the small failures that gather around scared people.

The first morning after we found them, I had seen a boy breaking green branches for a cook fire because the deadfall nearby looked too damp to his eyes. His mother stood beside him with a sleeping child tied against her hip and no strength left to correct anything except the next thing that might keep them warm. I took the branches from him, showed him where dry wood hid under the fallen bark, and moved their fire pit three paces away from roots that would have smoked badly once heat reached them. Later he brought me a strip of bark too wet to burn and looked annoyed when I shook my head.

There were many such corrections. A bedroll spread across an animal trail. Someone stripping bark for cord from a living tree when old vine would do. All of it mattered if we meant to pass through the forest without leaving our fear cut into it.

The animals needed watching too. I eased one mule’s load when it began to stumble and made sure the beasts were watered when the column halted.

Kolandir saw some of that. He had never needed many words for watching.

I wondered once whether he thought of Brego. My father had served the Forest Queen in his ranger days, and Kolandir had taught me enough of that man that I recognized something of him before I grew into any part of it myself. Kolandir was a ranger of Rillifane, as Ilikas was of Solonor and I was of Mielikki.

Meriel noticed too, though not at first. She had enough eyes upon her already and too many needs dragging at her sleeves. People brought her questions because her name had once meant shelter and still might mean judgment. They brought her blame more quietly. A cart delayed them, and some looked to her. When a man coughed blood after walking half the morning, they watched Meriel as if noble blood had ever learned to mend lungs.

She moved among them better than I expected. Softness would have been wasted by then. She remembered names where she could, let retainers handle what retainers understood, and stopped twice to help with work that no one wanted a lady’s hands upon. Her cloak was muddy to the hem, and she had stopped caring about it.

Ilikas watched her too often. He still read ground, placed watchers, and corrected routes with a mind trained to hold under strain. Solonor had a disciplined servant in him. Yet his attention found Meriel before danger sometimes did. When the column halted, he looked for Meriel before making sure no one had fallen behind. She was grateful for his protection, I think, but weary of every choice bending back toward her safety.

Rauthen’s men were behind us, though for a while they remained more rumor than bootprint. Travelers coming from the east spoke of armed men asking after Meriel under lordly colors. They passed our column without knowing they had found her. Her household banner stayed rolled, and she wore nothing that marked her as Lady Thornmere. The men behind us called the witnesses fugitives and promised safe return in ways that convinced no one. They were not close enough to force us yet, but the reports kept sleep thin.

Kolandir and Ilikas spoke over the western route before the envoy road was chosen. Suldanessellar would not open because Tethyr had bled itself across the roots. No one expected that. Ilikas wanted leave through the guarded pass, enough for the column to cross under elven protection and continue toward the Thornmere holding beyond. It was no small request. He was asking his people to extend safe passage to a mixed company of refugees whose quarrel was not theirs, and his place among the elves did not give him leave to speak for Suldanessellar.

Kolandir could ask where Ilikas could not, or where Ilikas asking would have carried too much of Meriel with it. His closeness to Meriel made his request harder to separate from her cause. The elves might hear Kolandir as one of their own before they heard the need he brought. Rauthen would have to catch the column before it reached the pass or decide whether his orders were worth bringing the elves into the quarrel.

That was why, on the fourth day, Kolandir and I left the column behind and went west.

Several candlemarks passed before he returned, and my legs had stiffened from sitting too long. He came back without haste, which told me less than I wished.

Leave to use the pass had been granted. Granted was the word we used because it fit better than welcomed. Once inside, the column would remain on the marked way under elven watch. No one would approach Suldanessellar. Fires would be kept where permitted, and only when permitted. Those who fell behind would have to be brought forward by their own people. The protection began at the entrance to the pass, and Rauthen was unlikely to cross it. He was loyal, not foolish, and the lord he served had enough enemies without adding Suldanessellar. If anyone crossed into the pass in force, the matter would change, though no one said into what.

Kolandir gave me the terms while we walked back. He gave them plainly.

The column took the news quietly. An older woman asked whether the wounded would be allowed to rest if they could not keep pace, and no one answered quickly enough.

Meriel answered, then sent her retainers through the column to shift the loads and lighten two of the carts. What could not be carried was argued over before being left beneath the brush.

We began moving before the next dawn had fully broken. The pass still lay near three hard days ahead. The route bent us through heavier growth and broken ground that would have hidden a smaller party well. Wheels struck roots. People who had learned roads in villages and fields began to hate every fern that brushed their legs. Kolandir moved ahead and returned often, sometimes seen and sometimes only proven by a fresh cut of bark or a stone turned pale side up. Ilikas kept nearer the middle than he liked. Meriel walked more than she rode, which helped until others tried to do the same with less strength.

It was during one of those marches that she came near me. I was working a knot free from a drag rope where a cart had slewed sideways near a wet hollow. The rope had burned two men’s palms before they gave it over. Meriel waited until the wheel was free and the cart moving again. She did not ask for comfort. She had too little time for it and too much sense.

She wanted to know why I remained. She did not put it so plainly, but the question was plain enough. I had no bond to Thornmere, no oath to her house, no place in Tethyr’s quarrels that anyone living there would recognize. To her eyes, perhaps, I must have looked like a man who had walked into another family’s burning house and begun checking the beams.

I gave her the answers I had. Kolandir was my old teacher. Ilikas was a colleague in the work, though we served different beliefs and tenets. Like Kolandir, we carried much the same charge, even if we went about it differently. Rauthen’s men had made fugitives of people whose greatest crime seemed to be surviving what they had seen. Those answers were true, but they were not the whole of it.

The root was simpler. We were under Mielikki’s trees. People had lost their way in them, and fear would make them harm themselves and the wood if left unguided. I was a Needle of the Forest Queen. Guiding the lost to safety was not a tale for shrines only. Healing what was wounded did not always mean poultice and prayer over clean linen. Sometimes it meant moving a fire three paces, binding a foot before the blood filled a boot, and telling frightened people which branches they could cut without killing what might shelter them tomorrow.

Meriel listened without looking away. The column moved around us in pieces, slow and dragging.

She gave me her own answer after that, or part of it. She had taken the witnesses under her protection because sending them away would have been the same as handing them back. Once she offered protection, their claims became her burden to carry forward. Her name could make men listen where common voices would be dismissed as fear, lies, or rebellion. I understood less of the legal path than she expected me to. Claims, testimony, standing before houses that would rather hear anything else ran together in places, but I understood what was at stake.

She had placed her name between armed authority and people who would otherwise have been dragged back east. In quiet years, those voices were testimony to check a neighbor’s ambition. In war, they were just rebels, and Meriel’s roof was conspiracy.

It made her dangerous. It gave Rauthen lawful words to use while hunting her.

If she reached the right ears, those words might not hold. The conduct of his lord, and the orders Rauthen had carried out in service to him, could be examined beside what had been done beneath them. He might have been a loyal man following command, but loyalty did not leave his hands clean.

The last of those days wore hard. One of the pack animals went lame near midafternoon, and its load had to be split among people already carrying too much. Ilikas wanted to press farther before camp. Meriel ordered a shorter halt first, not long enough for comfort but long enough to keep the weaker walkers from failing where the ground narrowed.

Kolandir came back near dusk with two fingers raised and no sound.

I saw Ilikas change before most others knew there was danger. His hand went to his sword rather than his bow. That told me the ground ahead had closed in. I moved left through the brush, low enough that my cloak caught on wet thorn, and found the sign Kolandir had marked. A scuffed patch beneath fern. Boot pressure where no one from the column had stepped.

Scouts. They hadn’t come to fight a column of refugees. Sensible men wouldn’t. They were there to count heads, mark our speed, and leave. A fool with a raised sword spends himself where he stands, but a scout only has to run once to bring an army down on you.

Kolandir had found them before they found enough, though not by much. Ilikas took three retainers and two refugees who had proven steady with spears. I took the flank where the ground fell toward a shallow run of water. Kolandir moved ahead through trees thick enough that I lost sight of him after the first ten steps.

The first scout died without shouting. I heard the wet break of brush, then the short scrape of steel. Kolandir came into view beyond him with a blade in each hand, moving in close where bow work would have snagged and failed. Another scout turned from him and found Ilikas in his path. Ilikas’s longsword caught the man’s cut and answered before the man had room to turn the answer aside. Then the woods lost their silence.

A horn started and stopped halfway through its first breath when one of the Thornmere retainers drove a spear into the man holding it. A refugee with a wood axe swung too wide. My arrow took the scout moving toward him under the arm where leather gapped. The man fell into fern and dragged half a bush down with him.

Two others broke away. I followed the first downslope, but alder closed between us before I could cut him off. My arrow struck him high in the shoulder. He staggered, kept his feet, and disappeared through the brush. The second fled through a wash where roots roofed the mud. Kolandir went after him and came back with blood on one blade, but no certainty in his face.

We searched until the light gave out. Four scouts lay dead. One had been taken alive long enough to prove whose colors had sent him, though not long enough to tell us anything else. Two had escaped, and we had to assume they would make it back to Rauthen. The column gathered tighter while we searched. People watched the trees with the dull look of those who knew they had been found.

Meriel stood beside Ilikas when the last of us returned. Kolandir wiped one blade clean, then the other. I had another arrow nocked before I realized I had drawn it.

The scouts who ran did not need the whole truth. They had seen Meriel’s people moving west toward the elven pass, whether they understood our destination or not. They had seen enough to give Rauthen a direction.

By morning, the road behind us would have teeth.

[Lambe]

5 - 61



The last stretch of road is often the least forgiving.

We moved before the sun had climbed high enough to warm the damp out of the leaves. The column had slept little after the scouts escaped us, and most of what sleep they found had been the kind a body takes because it has no choice. By morning the talk had thinned. Most kept their questions to themselves and listened whenever something moved behind us.

The way west had once been a road, though the Wealdath had nearly taken it back. Roots had lifted through the old ruts, and briar filled the wheel-lines wherever a break in the canopy let sunlight reach the ground. Ancient trunks stood close on either side, with younger trees crowded beneath them. A cart could still pass if enough people lifted, shoved, cursed, and cut only what had to be cut. The wounded rode where they could while those who could walk did. Children were carried until arms failed, then set down and carried again.

Kolandir had gone ahead before first light with Ilikas and two of Meriel’s retainers, close enough that we did not feel abandoned and far enough to check the way ahead. We had marks to follow, though most of the column would never have noticed them. A nick in bark where no careless blade would strike, or a fern bent against its growing habit. Suldanessellar had granted us a way through, not shelter where we stood. The protected reach began at the pass. Until then, Rauthen Dalmor’s men could still take us if they were fast enough, and we were not fast.

A wheel cracked before midmorning. It held, but the sound went through the column like a bowstring snapping. By the time I reached the cart, sacks were already coming down and an iron-banded chest sat among the leaves. The fevered girl remained aboard. Meriel watched the men leave the chest behind and did not tell them to take it up again.

By the second hour after dawn, I knew we were losing the race.

The trees crowded tighter along a rise where stone broke through the moss. Great roots crossed what remained of the track, some too old and thick to belong to any tree I could have circled alone. A winter-fallen beech lay across one side, its crown lost beneath thorn and saplings that had already begun growing through it. Water had cut a shallow channel along the lower edge, enough to turn an ankle if crossed too quickly. Young ash and hornbeam filled the little space left between older trunks. A man could pass if he chose his steps. Numbers could not rush through cleanly.

I slowed while the column passed. Men shoved a cart over the worst root and did not notice me studying the ground. One of the older men walking guard did. Garric Hale looked at the rise, the column, and the way behind us, then shifted his shield higher. Men who survive long enough in that work often see a decision before it is spoken.

One of Meriel’s retainers came up from the carts with a fresh scratch across her cheek. Jessa Vard was a shieldwoman and had been keeping people from bunching at narrow turns, using her shield more often as a gate than a wall. A hunter followed her, bow in hand and breath quick from running the mule line back into order. His name was Harl Bracken.

The sound behind us changed while he was still catching his breath. You learn the difference between a forest waking and men moving through it. Men trying to be quiet leave gaps in the usual forest noise. Once I heard one, I began hearing the others.

Rauthen had closed far enough to force the choice. I sent word forward with a Thornmere boy who could still run. Kolandir would understand a short message better than most men understood a long one. Then we let the last cart pass and took the ground behind it. No one called it a stand. We only needed to hold them long enough for the carts to gain ground, though none of us knew how long that would be. I had called myself a Needle for years. What else could a Needle be but a thorn in a man’s side? We had always been good at making a nuisance of ourselves where the forest needed one.

Harl wanted a cleaner shooting lane. I gave him one gap through the branches and a fallen limb to kneel behind. Anyone coming straight at him would have to step over a root thick as a man’s thigh. Jessa took the lower side near the channel. Garric stood where the beech narrowed the middle. I moved between them long enough to set small trouble in place. A cut vine held back a branch, and dead leaves covered slick clay near a loosened stone.

There was time for only the brief words that called what I had prepared that morning. The forest’s edge drew over me until bark, wool, and shadow took me as their own. A sharper ward settled beneath my cloak and jerkin. Bark might have suited the place better, but thorn suited the day.

Three scouts crossed where the buried track dipped beneath hazel and the lower branches of an old oak. One kept left with a short bow while another moved low near the channel. The last stayed back and watched the trees instead of the way ahead.

Harl drew too soon in his mind, though not with his hands. I touched two fingers down, and he held. The low scout found the clay. His foot slid hardly more than the length of a thumb. He shifted his weight, and my arrow took him under the jaw before he finished correcting it. Harl struck the bowman high in the chest. The shaft turned him, and Garric stepped from behind the beech and hit him with the rim of his shield.

The third scout slipped behind the hazel and worked his way toward Harl. I crossed behind two young trunks and caught him before he cleared the brush. His knife was already drawn when I put an arrow through his ribs.

We left before the larger body reached us. Garric called the break with one lift of his shield. Jessa backed from the channel with her face to the road, and Garric dragged Harl by the jerkin when the hunter tried to steal another shot. Shields knocked brush behind us. Men cursed around the bodies we had left in their way.

We caught the column’s churned trail and followed it until the ground offered us another place to slow them. Old stone rose from the slope beneath the canopy, with a gully bending away below it. Harl took the ground above the gully, Jessa held the middle, Garric stayed near the stone, and I moved higher among the trees.

Rauthen’s men reached us in pieces. The first were scouts, then shield men and soldiers carrying spears shortened for the woods. From the trampling below, the outriders had left their horses behind.

I let them see Garric. An older man near the stone looked like the easiest place to press. Two soldiers shifted toward him. Garric drew them over the hollow, where the first sank to one knee as the crust gave way. He split the man’s cheek with his shield and cut his thigh before stepping back. Jessa caught the second man’s rush and turned him into the stone hard enough that his helmet rang.

Jessa was better than I had first guessed when we found the column. She knew how to use a shield for more than taking a blow. A man tried to crowd past her toward Harl, and she stepped in, drove the shield into his shoulder, and turned his feet toward the gully. Harl’s arrow took him while he fought for balance.

Then I called the briar into the ground around them. The oldest growth tightened first, roots and thorn drawing close before new shoots rose through the leaf mold and deadwood. Men spreading through the brush found it tightening around their boots and shield straps. Some hacked at it. Others tried to force through and lost time doing it.

A scout worked his way up through the brush toward me, careful enough that I caught only pieces of him at first. A branch eased back where no wind had touched it. Leaf mold shifted below a root. I followed those small betrayals until he showed enough of himself, then put an arrow through him.

The purge spell I had called around myself earlier came alive off to my side. An invisibility spell broke, and another man appeared among the trees. He knew at once that his cover was gone and rushed me before I could turn fully. By the time I brought the bow across, he was almost within reach. I barely had room to draw. Two arrows were already against the string, and I loosed both into him before his blade came across.

Rauthen came into sight after the second push faltered. I had not seen him before, but there was little doubt who he was. He was broad through the shoulders and strongly made, with a soldier’s neck and a face weathered by more than one campaign. His shield was scarred and practical. His sword favored reach but was not so long that the trees made it a task.

He looked over Garric, Jessa, and Harl before turning toward where my last arrows had come from. A man began working around the upper side while movement tested the brush below. A shield pair pressed toward Garric. Rauthen kept others back and waited for us to show him more. I killed the upper man when he tried to cut around the briar. Rauthen saw the shaft strike, lifted his shield, and took my next arrow on wood and iron.

After that he moved toward Harl. Harl had done well, but he was still a hunter who had once stood levy, not a man built by years of close fighting. Rauthen saw it too. Men came hard at the lower side, forcing us to spend ourselves keeping them from him.

Harl shot one in the throat. Another took an arrow in the shoulder and kept coming. A third cleared the root Harl had trusted. Jessa moved before I could call her back, putting herself between Harl and the rush. She caught one man on her shield while Garric left the stone to cover her flank. Harl’s boot slid into the gully, and the wounded soldier reached him before my arrow reached the soldier.

The blade opened Harl’s thigh. He went down with both hands over the wound. Jessa dropped over him with her shield high, and Garric killed the man trying to finish it.

Rauthen used the opening. He came through the center with two shield men behind him, then left them when the briar caught at their legs. I shot one under the arm as he fought free. The other raised his shield against Jessa, and my arrow took him in the face. Rauthen turned my next shot on his shield. Another struck near his shoulder and stayed where the armor failed to turn all of it. I put one more above his hip before he reached the stone. He shortened one step, then drove on.

I let the bow fall against its cord, drew Howling, and brought the shield from my back to my arm. The blade came free with its low shiver. Rauthen adjusted his grip. He had reached archers before, I think, and he knew how to take away their advantage. He did not rush to close the distance. I pointed at him and spoke the mark.

He came in behind his shield. The impact drove through my arm and into my shoulder. He used the shield as a ram, trying to put me back over the stone before his sword came down. I gave half a step because refusing all of it would have broken something useful. His cut followed, short and strong, adapted so the blade would not catch on the trees.

Howling caught it, and the sound cracked between us, sharp enough to feel through teeth and bone. Rauthen’s eyes narrowed when the force came back through his sword. He pressed anyway. His next cut went low. I turned it with the shield and answered across his forearm where armor joined glove. Howling bit and sang. He pulled back before I could open it deeper.

He tried to crowd me toward a knot of roots. I let him think he had the turn, then stepped over the root instead of around it. His shield followed where I should have been. Howling struck the side of his helm hard enough to stagger him, the blade’s cry ringing through the metal and into his skull.



He hit my shield shoulder with the rim of his own shield. Pain flashed down my arm. His sword came across a breath later and opened my torso through coat and leather. Hot blood ran beneath the coat. The ward answered through the blade, and his hand recoiled.

My cut across his ribs did not go deep enough. Rauthen was strong beneath his armor and kept his anger under control. He drove in with short blows, taking away space and forcing me toward the wider patch of stone.

I could have slipped farther back if I had been alone. Harl was behind and below us, with Jessa over him and Garric trying to watch both the briar and the men pressing through it. Backing away would have put Rauthen among them. So I stayed where I was.

Rauthen’s next stroke numbed my shield arm and nearly took my fingers as the blade slid down the rim. I caught the strap beneath his guard and cut it, though not through.

I remember pieces after that, though not their proper order. Howling struck his shield and sent the shock back through iron and wood. I found the gap above his knee when he tried to drag my guard aside, and his boot drove me against the stone after I took it. Garric cursed somewhere to my right, and a man screamed in the briar. Rauthen kept coming, but the wounds were troubling him by then. His shield no longer returned as cleanly as it had.

I stopped trying to meet his weight. He came for the bad shoulder again, and I turned with it. Howling struck the same damaged line along his armor until the buckle gave.

Rauthen knew it. He drove forward with everything he had left, shield first and sword close behind. His shield hit mine and pain burst through my shoulder. His sword cut across my side again, shallow only because I turned with it. The cactus ward bit him for the contact. His breath caught.

Howling went beneath his shield and into the opening in his armor. The sound was low and ugly. Rauthen staggered, tried to turn the fall into another step, and failed. He went down on one knee, then one hand. The men behind him faltered.

I stood over him with my shield hanging half-useless and blood warm beneath my jerkin. I did not strike again. His sword lay beyond his hand, and his shield was under him. He lifted his head, found my eyes, and reached for the knife at his belt. I ended it before he drew.

The wood remained full of hurt men and held breath. Someone groaned from the gully. Howling’s song faded. Garric kicked Rauthen’s sword farther away and turned his shield toward the soldiers still in sight. Their captain was dead, and the briar held those who had not already begun pulling back. One veteran dragged another by the harness. A younger soldier took two steps forward, saw me looking, and stopped.

I retrieved the bow because habit survives battle. My fingers did not want to close, so I made them. The men nearest us gave ground. Some carried wounded. Others disappeared downslope, and I did not follow them to learn why.

Harl was pale by the time I reached him. Jessa had bound his thigh tight enough to make him curse without sound. Her cheek was swelling, and blood from someone else had dried along her shield. Garric had taken a cut above the ribs and pretended it was less than it was. He did that badly. I drank one potion and gave another to Harl. It tasted of bitterness and honeyed rot, but Harl kept his down.

Jessa watched while the magic slowed the worst of my bleeding. Her eyes moved from my shoulder to Rauthen’s body and back. Garric did much the same while pretending to check the road. They had expected what most people expect when a heavy war captain closes on an archer. I had been closed on before, and there was no time to explain the difference.

I had fought crueler men on the Coast, and stranger things besides. Necromancers with blood-drinking servants, Malarite hunters who thought cruelty was a prayer, spies pressing too close to borders they pretended not to cross, and land-dwelling pirates who had learned too late that the woods were no safer for them than the roads. Rauthen was different in rank, discipline, and purpose, but not in the part that mattered then. He had brought men into the woods to hunt people under my charge. He had meant to reach them by going through ground that favored me.

Rauthen carried a field packet inside his coat, wrapped in oiled cloth. It held a list of fugitives as his lord named them, Meriel among them, with several witnesses marked for recovery alive if possible. Others were listed as armed resistors. There were route notes, force counts, and a folded order bearing a dark wax seal. Meriel would need more than our word when the days ahead turned back into names, claims, testimony, and the long poison of noble memory. The packet was proof that the pursuit had been ordered.

Harl could not put weight on the leg, so Garric took one side and Jessa the other while I walked behind with an arrow nocked. No one followed close. Once I heard men downslope, gathering wounded or arguing over who held command. They did not press. They had lost Rauthen and too many men on ground they had never wanted to fight over. The pass ahead belonged to powers they knew better than to test.

Kolandir’s signs found us before he did. A broken twig stood upright in moss, followed farther on by fine cuts in a young ash. The forest changed near the boundary, though it did not glow or open like a gate. It remained bark, fern, damp stone, and the close green shadow beneath the canopy. Behind us, men had been trying to make themselves unseen. Ahead, the watchers did not need to try.

An arrow stood in the ground beside the path where none had been a moment before. Its fletching was white. Garric stopped, and Jessa nearly stumbled under Harl’s weight. Kolandir waited beneath a beech whose roots held a stone marked with old elven work. He counted the four of us with his eyes and turned into the pass.

The protected way was narrow enough that the carts had scraped bark from both sides. Someone had packed mud over the worst of it. Beyond the tightest bend, we found the column waiting. Bundles still lay in people’s arms, and the wounded were being tended, but no one was running farther.

Meriel came when she saw us. Her eyes went first to Harl, then to the blood on my coat and the packet in my hand. She did not ask what had happened. I gave her the packet, and her hands closed around it as if paper and wax could weigh more than iron.

Two men and a woman who knew something of wounds took Harl. Someone put me on a stone, and I found I had no objection. A boy brought water. Jessa sat in the dirt with her shield across her knees. Garric leaned against a tree and admitted his ribs needed binding.

Kolandir crouched near me and checked the cut at my side with more care than I thought it deserved. His fingers were steady while he worked. I remembered them cutting the ropes from me years before, though I doubt I remembered the hands themselves until then. I almost laughed and did not have the breath.

The pass did not lead us to hidden towers or silver bridges. Suldanessellar remained unseen. Our way bent south and west through forest that permitted us to cross and nothing more. Most of the watchers kept their distance, though now and then I caught a pale fletching between branches or movement high among the trunks. Once, a child wandered after a moth and came back crying before any of us saw who had turned her around.

By dusk we reached Thornmere’s refuge, though the forest had done its best to hide that anyone had ever lived there. Old boundary stones leaned beneath moss and roots. The hall had only half a roof, and saplings grew close enough to brush its walls. One of the two wells needed clearing. The cattle shed leaned badly enough that I would not have trusted its rear wall in a hard wind. What cleared ground remained was already narrowing beneath fern and thorn.

The first night, most slept where they stopped. My shoulder had stiffened, and the cuts pulled whenever I breathed too deeply. The cloak worked slowly beneath the bandages, so I helped it with another potion after midnight.

In the days after, Meriel’s people still startled at branches. One man nearly drew steel on an owl. Children hid bread in sleeves, bedrolls, and beneath stones. We found some of it only after it had gone hard.

I walked the edges as soon as my side allowed it. Ilikas came with me at first, though his attention returned to the holding whenever Meriel was out of sight. We found old paths beneath bramble and a spring that needed clearing. One stretch of ground would take a cart wheel as soon as the rain came. Farther upslope, stripped roots had left enough loose earth that careless cutting would bring part of it down.

Kolandir left on the fifth day. Suldanessellar’s leave did not stretch into caretaking a human refuge, and he had duties of his own beneath the trees. Before he went, he watched me show two Thornmere boys how to set a snare without taking every small life that passed through it. He did not smile. Kolandir rarely wasted one where a look would do. For a moment, showing the boy where he had gone wrong, I thought of my father teaching me much the same. Then I saw that he had looped the snare cord around his thumb and pulled his hand free before it tightened.

The holding changed by handfuls. I watched one part of the hall roof close against the weather and helped clear the better of the two wells. The broken cart became timber for a lean-to. Names were counted again because panic and grief had left some uncertain. Meriel spent long hours with Rauthen’s packet and the people named inside it. Testimony, law, rights of shelter, and old blood debts followed. I left that work to them.

So I did ranger work. I walked the boundary and checked snares, then showed them where digging would not poison the well. I helped find a missing goat and wished I had not, because the beast had more stubbornness than sense. I taught one of the older girls to read hoof pressure in soft ground. Harl listened from a stool with his leg bound straight and corrected me once about a local trail name. He was right.

Jessa returned to drills once she could lift the shield cleanly. Garric watched from the side and pretended not to approve. Ilikas stayed near Meriel, though not always beside her. Whatever lay between them had survived pursuit. I left the rest to them.

By late Tarsakh, smoke rose from more than one hearth in the morning. Children argued over chores instead of keeping quiet. Someone had hung a strip of blue cloth over the hall door, not a banner, but more than nothing. Harl could stand with a crutch. Jessa had stopped looking toward the road whenever a branch cracked. Meriel still looked tired. By then it came from long days over repairs, stores, and the names in Rauthen’s packet.



I waited until the roof no longer leaked in three places, the well was clear, and Meriel had enough people around her who knew what needed doing. Then I went north. I did not return by the pass. An old path left the holding and bent north through the deep Wealdath, crossing buried tracks and ground where the canopy seldom opened before it reached the roads beyond the forest.

The Wealdath closed behind me branch by branch, keeping what it meant to keep. Ahead lay the road back toward the Coast and the familiar troubles of home. When I had begun calling it my home, I cannot remember, but it is the one I return to.