Deep in the Forrest of the Shun and early on the
following day, Jaysh the woodsman found it necessary to put the day’s events on
hold and take a moment to collect his thoughts.
Until
then, the day had proven no worse than the previous three days—not a good
day, by any stretch of the imagination—but at least it hadn’t been so bad that
he couldn’t cope.
For
example, when he awoke this morning to find his pack gone, his arrows scattered,
and his pet missing, he had coped. He had found the shadow standing with the
statues, he had given the horrible thing a passing scowl, and he had gone
patiently about fining his gear.
Later
that morning, when his regularly scheduled hobby—Hunt Day—turned out to be
another regularly scheduled disaster, he had coped again. He had taken
the vine from his shirt, he had bit a piece from the end, and he had let the
juices do their work.
Later still, after wasting half the
morning by traipsing through the Shun and finding nothing but empty runs and
barren meadows, he’d continued to cope. He’d bitten off a little more of
the vine and he’d chew it a little longer and he’d told himself that
things had to get better. Sira knew
they couldn’t get worse…Could they?
A few empty valleys later, he found a pack
of scabe-wolves scattered about a clearing, and realized that things could
get worse—a lot worse. And if there was any doubt, it was quickly
squashed when he marched two valleys deeper and found what appeared to be a
shaggy mound of fur lying in a heap.
It was then that his day finally reached
the breaking point and he could no longer cope. Because it was then, after spending
some time poking the blob of hair with a stick, that he realized the scarcity of
wildlife in the Shun had nothing to do with withering resources or changing
seasons. The deer hadn’t left the wilderness in search of edible vegetation and
the geese hadn’t migrated in search of acceptable climes.
They had fled.
Jaysh laid the stick down and stepped back
from the lump of hair, unable to look away. After some time, his despair got
the better of him and he had to look away. He found a place several
yards away from the shaggy lump and dropped himself in the leaves, his head
spinning.
He stared at the crunchy brown carpet
between his moccasins and waited for the dizziness to fade. It was not the good
kind of dizziness associated with the vine. It was the bad kind. The kind
associated with puking up his guts and lying nauseated on the ground. The
dizziness did not abate.
For a fleeting moment, he felt an urge to scan
the woods for the lump’s maker, to run his eyes along the clogging underbrush
and the colonnade of trunks, positive that the thing was still here in the
forest and creeping upon him from the rear.
He resisted the urge, reminding himself
that the creature he sought had crept upon, and dispatched, two major predators
of the Shun, leaving behind no tracks or markings in the process.
Instead, he turned his gaze to one of the
shattered trees above, the closet being a young birch that looked to be as
thick as a man’s thigh at its base and not much smaller at the place where it forked
into its boughs.
Jaysh couldn’t imagine the force necessary
to snap the thing in two, but that was exactly what had happened. His eyes scoured
the area where the top of the tree now hung down from the trunk. There, the
wood had splintered into a broad fan of wooden teeth, some of the splintery
shards as long as his forearm.
On his very best day, he couldn’t have
torn the smallest of those shards from its base. And yet something had cracked
the whole of the tree like a campfire twig, and had done so without leaving a
single track in the soil.
After crawling around the lump of fur, the
only clue Jaysh could find involved the oval of flattened undergrowth in which
the mound lay, the leaves smashed flat, the briars laid smooth, the dead fall
broken and driven deep into the dirt. Seeing it, he could not help but think of
the circle of matted reeds in the Sway,
Jaysh tried to imagine how something like
that had happened and could only think of the grist stone from the mill. He imagined
someone unhooking it from the gearing and rolling it into the Sway, then the
Shun. He spat vine juice from the corner of his lips and let the matter go
Thinking about it was exacerbating his
dizziness, and he didn’t think he could handle much more without spilling his
breakfast in the leaves. He let his mind wander and his eyes lose focus, listening
to the forest to the north.
Someone up there was moving around.
Jaysh had been hearing snippets of the
intruders for quite some time, but hadn’t given them much thought. For one
thing, he’d been too busy with the blob and, for another, they had hadn’t
sounded threatening. Lost, perhaps,
but not threatening. They would wander to the east for awhile, march back to
the west for a time, then stop abruptly and turn back the east.
The chances were good that these were not
Jaysh’s people, meaning that they were not trappers or hunters or scouts. More
than likely, they were city folk who’d wandered off the trail and gotten lost
in the woods. In which case, Jaysh would have to lead them back to the Lathian Road
On most occasions, he did this to get them
out of his woods and away from his game, but today he’d be doing it because
leaving them there would be nothing short of murder. And he was already having
enough trouble sleeping at night without murder on his conscious. Unless of
course they were merchants…
If they were merchants, he’d have to think
about it.
He absolutely hated merchants. The last
band of wayward travelers had been merchants and they’d nearly bartered
him out of the shoes on his feet and the shirt on his back. They’d hassled him
for his knife, his pack, asking him what was in his pack, asking him if
he had anything at home he would like to trade.
Judging by the jingling of their packs and
tinkling of their bags, Jaysh didn’t reckon they dealt in pelts or roots or
shiny bits of rock, and surely to goodness they could take one look at the
woodsman and see that he did. Never the less, the hounding had continued and
Jaysh vowed to avoid them at all cost.
Or in this case, he mused, to keep
em from treadin over the top of me.
Moving behind a giant elm, Jaysh stilled
his jaw and cocked an ear to the side, listening for the telltale sounds of
clinking metal wares and clacking wooden goods. What he heard instead was the
sound of voices, the sound of grown men speaking in the forest.
Jaysh shook his head and wondered what in
the world the man could be talking about. Outside of trees, briars, and the
occasional dead fall, there wasn’t much going on out here. He held his breath
and sat up straight, squinting at the voices and, at first, seeing nothing more
than distortion in the
leaves. But after a few moments more, the outline of two men emerged from the trees.
Jaysh slid behind the elm and released a
sigh. Merchants never traveled in tandem and seldom in groups smaller than five.
In this way, merchants reminded Jaysh of the dead scabe-wolves he’d found a few
valleys over, always traveling in packs so that the hounding was more
efficient. But if’n they ain’t merchants, he wondered, what are they?
For a time, Jaysh toyed with the idea that
they were hunters or scouts who had heard about the attacks at Westpost and who
had decided to watch each other’s backs. But the more he thought about it, the
less likely that seem.
Hunting wasn’t the sort of hobby one
performed as a couple. First of all, the less noise and body odor one brought
into the woods, the better. And second, hunting by one’s self cut way back on
mistaking one’s friend for a prized buck and shooting them squarely between the
horns. So if they weren’t hunters…
Jaysh peaked back around the elm and found
the strangers no more than twenty paces away, close enough to see that he was
correct. They weren’t hunters. Hunters never wore that much chain mail and body
armor and they seldom hunted with throwing knives and short swords.
These two buffoons were soldiers—officers,
judging by the green feathers pluming from the one man’s helmet and the three
jagged stripes chiseled into the other man’s shoulder plates.
From where they were walking now, Jaysh
could see these markings as plainly as he could see the green battle-axes on
their chest plates and the long dark hair of the man without the helmet, the
man who was apparently leading the procession and who’s mouth couldn’t hold
still for…longer than…
Oh, no.
