Malo paused, clearly weighing his options, until finally, he nodded in decision. “Very well. You have my word that if you help us find Rorian, no harm will come to your father.”
“And my mother?” Sabina demanded. She gestured behind her. “What about her?”
“We will pay for her care,” Malo promised. “Not only that, but I know just the man who might be able to cure her.”
In less than an hour, we were riding along the trail that led to the ridge west of Springlight. Three packhorses with enough provisions to last for five days trailed behind us, with the lead packhorse tied to the back of Sim’s saddle. It felt good to be united with Angry once again, though I could tell by the baleful glare the big stallion had given me when I’d saddled him that the feeling was mostly one-sided. I couldn’t blame the horse, I suppose. After all, he’d just spent the last few days lolling and grazing in relative luxury in a lush clearing half a mile to the south.
We came to the spot where I had seen Rorian earlier that day and halted our horses as Sabina dismounted, telling us to remain where we were. The same red squirrel from hours before—or perhaps an exuberant cousin—scolded us loudly from the trees above our heads. Angry stamped his feet and gnawed at the bit while we waited, making it clear to me that he was far from happy that his relaxation time was over. Sabina walked twenty feet away from us, then lowered herself to the ground with her head held at an angle a few inches off the trampled pathway. She was dressed in high-topped, brown leather boots, tight black hose, and a long white tunic underneath a leather vest. She had a bleached, bone-handled knife at her waist, and her red hair was parted in the middle and braided down her back.
Sabina finally started to move forward in an awkward, crab-like motion, pausing every foot or so, her face set in concentration. Eventually, she stood up and returned to her starting point, staring at the worn ground critically with her hands on her hips. She began to use her feet to measure distances, muttering to herself, and I could see by the look on Malo’s face that he was becoming increasingly impatient. I shifted in my saddle uncomfortably as we waited, trying to ease the pressure on my tailbone as I caught Baine’s eye. My friend was riding a feisty three-year-old brown mare and he shrugged at me, looking both bored and resentful at the same time. Baine had not reacted well when he’d learned that we would be going after Rorian instead of going home as we had thought.
“All right,” Sabina finally said. She lithely pulled herself up onto her horse and swung it around. “We can go now. They went south.”
“I could have told you that,” Malo grumbled, looking annoyed. “It doesn’t take any skill to figure that out. We already knew they were heading that way. You just wasted precious time coming out here for nothing.”
Sabina’s eyes flashed in anger. “Is that so?” she snapped. “Then, I suppose you also figured out what each man was wearing on his feet?” Malo looked at her blankly. “No?” she said mockingly. “How about their weight and ages, or that one of them has one leg shorter than the other?” Again, Malo said nothing. Sabina snorted. “Well, can you at least tell me how many men there are?”
“Six,” I replied, knowing Malo hadn’t even looked at the men who had passed us that morning. I remembered five others with Rorian, though I could only recall the scholar’s scarred face.
“At least someone is paying attention,” Sabina said with a sniff. She pointed down as she kept her gaze on the House Agent. “Do you have any idea just how many different tracks there are on this path?” Malo glowered back at her, starting to look uncomfortable. I have to admit that I was enjoying watching him squirm under the girl’s relentless gaze. “The only thing we know for sure is this spot was the last place they were seen. That’s why we are here. Now that I can recognize their footprints, I’ll be able to follow them wherever they go.”
“So why didn’t the other trackers find them if they can be followed that easily?” Baine asked.
“Who said it was easy?” Sabina replied curtly. “Besides, I’d bet your trackers didn’t even look here. That’s why my father had those men pose as wounded soldiers. He knew no one would be looking for them in plain sight.”
“Very well,” Malo said, looking slightly mollified. “What do you suggest we do now?”
“Now we go back to the horses in the clearing,” Sabina answered, kicking her mount into motion. She glanced at the House Agent over her shoulder. “Because I guarantee you, there will be six of them missing.”
Sabina was right, of course. Six horses were missing, with one of them being Odiman’s mount, a dappled stallion with a patch on his forehead. The horses were kept in a large, kidney-shaped clearing of rich grass that cut through the forest a half-mile south of Springlight. Malo stood a foot from the treeline, interrogating four crestfallen-looking boys whose jobs it had been to care for and protect the horses. The House Agent kept pacing back and forth in anger as the boys stared at the ground while he shouted at them.
“Poor bastards,” Putt said in sympathy.
“Maybe if they had done their jobs and stopped Rorian, we’d be heading home right now,” Baine said a little too gruffly.
Niko snorted. “Boys with crooked bows and dull knives against six armed men?” He looked at Baine in amazement. “If they had, they would be dead and Rorian would still be gone.”
“Besides,” Tyris cut in as he leaned on his bow. “You can’t blame them. How could they have even known who Rorian was?”
“They couldn’t have,” I grunted. I motioned toward the House Agent. “Malo knows that. He just needs to vent some anger at someone. Those four make a fine target.”
I looked away and shielded my eyes from the sun that was slowly heading toward the treeline. Soon it would be too dark to pick up the trail unless we got moving. I watched Sabina as she continued to methodically cover the clearing in a slow walk, working from the center and making her way outward in swooping circles. Several of the horses were following her curiously inside the rope barrier that kept them confined.
I thought back to how Baine and I had followed Carbet and the other Cardians’ pointed boots through the woods near Gasterny, eventually leading us to Shana. Neither Baine nor I were skilled woodsmen by any means, but that trail had been an easy thing to follow compared to what Sabina was dealing with now. How she could find the tracks she was looking for in all the overlapping footprints and hoofmarks scattered across the clearing was beyond my ability to understand.
Sabina crouched down near the clearing's eastern side, then looked to the trees and stood, disappearing beneath the outreaching branches. I tensed, wondering if I should go after her just as she reappeared and headed toward us. Malo had finally finished berating the four boys, and he came to stand beside me.
“I’ve found the trail,” Sabina said. She pointed behind her. “They headed east through the trees by that big aspen.”
“Good,” Malo grunted, searching the forest with his eyes. “At least now we know which coast they are heading for.” Sabina shook her head in disagreement. “What?” Malo growled.
“My father is a cautious man,” Sabina said. “Knowing him, that trail heading east is just to throw off any pursuit. I’m going back there on foot now to confirm that. I just wanted to let you know. I suggest the rest of you mount up and follow me, but don’t get too close until I find which direction they turned.”
Once again, Sabina was soon to be proven right. Our quarry had headed east through the trees in a straight line for about fifty yards, just as she’d said. They hadn’t worried about the stolen mounts’ tracks at all, and I could easily make them out even from Angry’s back. The trail meandered through the forest until it reached a shallow, slow-moving stream, where it abruptly ended. The rest of us waited on the fern-covered banks of the stream as Sabina stepped into water that barely covered the top of her boots. Small pebbles lined the stream's bed and were deposited at least six inches above the waterline on both banks. We’d had little rain recently, which explained the slugg
ish water flow, but I could easily picture this same stream gushing wildly from spring runoff or after a heavy rainfall.
“The girl is good,” Jebido said beside me, looking impressed as he braced himself on his pommel.
Sabina had initially gone up and down the twisting stream until she’d seen what she wanted. Now she squatted thirty feet away from us near the far bank, silently studying the colorful stones on the shore. Finally, after long minutes, she grabbed a single pebble and held it up. I heard her grunt in satisfaction before replacing the stone.
“They went north,” Sabina said, gesturing ahead of her. “Bring the horses, but stay behind me.”
Malo glanced my way, looking worried. If they reached the northern border, I knew they would be hard to catch. The House Agent kicked his horse into motion, splashing through the stream as the rest of us followed. We traveled slowly, staying well back as Sabina moved forward in a sweeping pattern through the trees. The light was starting to dim as we progressed, but I noticed that the trail was gradually shifting westward. Finally, we reached a dense thicket of blackberry bushes bunched around a massive oak tree. Sabina paused, carefully moving aside the thorny shoots as she peered inside. She stood that way for a long time, then glanced to the west with a slight smile playing on her lips.
“Well?” Malo demanded. “What now?”
Sabina turned, ignoring the House Agent as she crooked a finger at me. Malo frowned and I shrugged at him, then dismounted and approached the girl.
“See there?” Sabina said, holding aside a branch thick with black and red berries.
I looked inside, but all I saw were more berries. “What am I looking for?”
“The shoot at the top there,” Sabina said. “Look how it is completely free of ripe berries.” She let the branch go, then carefully pulled aside another. “Same thing here.”
“So?” I said. “Birds and animals eat berries all the time.”
Sabina let the shoot fall back into place. “That’s true,” she agreed. “But birds won’t fight their way through the thorns when there are plenty of berries to pick from in front.” She grinned. “As for animals and insects, they nibble away here and there. Rarely if ever, do they take the entire berry, let alone all of them in the same spot.”
“Your father?” I asked.
“Without question,” Sabina said. “They’re not heading east or north.” She pointed to the west. “They are heading that way.”
We followed the trail for the rest of that day until the fading light forced us to make camp, and the next morning we were back on it the moment the sun rose. By the time we were twenty miles from Springlight, our quarry had mostly given up covering their trail, which meant we were able to move much faster. I was sure we would catch up to Rorian after that, but as each hour drifted into the next, our quarry somehow managed to stay ahead of us.
On the third day of the pursuit, the trail suddenly broke off into three sets of twos just as we reached the overgrown banks of a dried-out riverbed that headed north. One set of tracks broke off to the east, one to the north, following the riverbed, while the other turned west. Sabina crouched down beside her horse at the break-off point and absently ran her hands along one of the hoofprints. She looked up, examining the land as the breeze toyed with her long braid.
“My father knows someone is following them,” she finally said. “They split up here to confuse us.”
Malo’s face turned dark at the news. “How could he know that?” he asked, looking at her suspiciously.
Sabina shrugged. “Probably a gut feeling. He gets them sometimes.”
“So, what do we do?” I asked before the House Agent could comment.
Sabina stood and dusted off her hose. She pointed along the riverbed. “The man with the short leg and the one that spits phlegm went north. The one who squirts bloody shit ten times a day went east with the skinny one.”
“Which means your father and Rorian went west,” Malo said, looking in that direction. “And that’s the way we go.”
Sabina shook her head firmly and motioned to the riverbed. “No, we go north.”
“What?” Malo snapped. His horse fidgeted beneath him and it took a moment for him to calm the animal. “I’m not letting Rorian get away again.”
“He won’t,” Sabina said confidently as she swung back into the saddle. “My father is going to cover his trail so well now that even I won’t be able to follow it.” She looked to the riverbed again. “But those two fools out there couldn’t hide their trail in a rainstorm.” She glanced meaningfully at the rest of us. “Catch them, and I’m sure with the right persuasion, they will gladly tell you where Rorian and my father are heading.”
And she was right. They did.
6: The Cove
The hidden cove—called Mouth-On-The-Sea—was almost a half-mile long, with magnificent, sun-bleached limestone cliffs overlooking it that rose at least three hundred feet. A crescent-shaped shale beach stretched out far below me, where I lay peering over the cliff’s edge. I shaded my eyes against the setting sun, just able to make out the forms of three boats beached at the far northern end of the cove. Several roaring bonfires burned higher up on the beach, flickering wildly in the wind. I could see the faint silhouettes of men as they moved around on the ships and shore. It appeared to me as though they were preparing to set sail, and I knew we didn’t have much time left if we wanted to catch Rorian.
The wind whistled in my ears and flapped at my cloak as great-beaked seabirds screamed and cawed above me, filling the sky. I could hear the sound of the surf even above the calls of the birds as the water broke along the shoreline, rattling the millions of tiny shale that blanketed the beach. A long, thin ridge of limestone joined the cliff where I lay and curled around the southern end of the cove, cutting off the beach as it jutted out to the west at least two hundred yards into the sea. The ridge dipped down at the end almost to the waterline, then swept around to the north before it flared upward dramatically to form two impressive arches of jagged rock. An enormous hole had been worn within each archway, courtesy of thousands of years of tidewater wearing away at the limestone.
Thousands of gannets packed the top of the ridge and the arches. Each bird looked identical to the next with their light-brown heads, white bodies and black wing-tips. The seabirds appeared fat and ungainly at first glance as they flapped their wings and jostled for space on the arches. But I realized that awkwardness was just an illusion, broken the moment they sprang into the air and dove bill first into the water with blinding speed and grace.
“Mother’s Eyes,” Jebido said from beside me, following my gaze. “Some believe it is a doorway to the world Above.” Beneath me, the sea surged madly around and through the twin openings as the waves slapped against the stone, sending white foam spraying upward toward the gannets lining the ridge. “Legend has it that if you can swim through the right eye,” Jebido continued, “then make it back through the left, all your sins will be absolved and you will be transported directly to The Mother’s side.”
“Really?” I said in surprise, trying to imagine swimming in those treacherous waters. “Has anyone ever made it?”
Jebido grinned. “Only corpses so far.”
“Maybe it’s just a big rock where fools go to die,” Baine grunted from my other side, looking unimpressed. “Did either of you two stop to consider that?”
I glanced at Baine’s sour face and sensed Jebido shrugging beside me. Baine’s mood had grown blacker over the days as we made our way westward, but there was little that I could say to help. I knew my friend desperately wanted to return to Flora, but I needed his bow and experience with me right now, so he was just going to have to deal with his anger on his own. I turned as I felt a hand tap my shoulder.
“Sim found a way down, my lord,” Putt said, crouching low behind me.
Jebido, Baine, and I withdrew from the edge of the cliff, careful not to break the skyline. The men below hadn’t posted guards as far as I could tell. M
ost likely secure in the knowledge that they were safe from attack where they were. But, like Jebido was always telling me, it was better to be overly cautious and stay alive, than be careless and find yourself dead.
We retreated to the remnants of an ancient stone fortress that sat fifty yards away from the edge of the clifftop. The fort had been built long before the First Pair's birth, back when frightful beasts and godless bands of savages were all that roamed the land. There were many such relics spread across both Southern and Northern Ganderland, though no one seemed to know for sure who had built them.
Crumbling limestone foundations covered in moss and lichen rose behind the fortress where once a small town must have stood. Twisted vines, long swaying grasses, and thick bushes covered in prickly thorns grew wildly throughout the ruins. Sabina was grooming her horse near the fort’s decaying northern wall, while the rest of my men waited near the western gates' skeletal remains.
“You found a way down?” I asked Sim as we approached.
Sim nodded, but I could see worry lying heavily on his face. “Yes, my lord. There is only one. A steep, narrow gulley with landings and stairs chiseled into the stone in places. It’s a tough descent, but leads all the way to the beach.”
“That’s good news,” I said. “So why do you look like you just found a goat turd floating in your beer?”
Sim grimaced and swept the ground with his boot, clearing a section of scrub-brush as the rest of my men joined us.
The big outlaw crouched and dug his finger into the dirt, drawing a curved line. “This is where Rorian’s boats are, my lord,” he said, making a mark at the northern tip of the curve. He made a similar mark at the opposite end. “And we are here.” He made a third mark close to the boats. “The top of the gully begins here. But unfortunately, it cuts down the face of the cliff at an angle, heading back to the south.”
The Wolf On The Run (The Wolf of Corwick Castle Book 3) Page 10