by AC Cobble
Tucking his thumbs behind his belt, Rew told them, “Survival isn’t going to be easy, so your practice shouldn’t be, either. For today at least, I don’t much care whether you hit the target or not, but I want to see you trying. Maybe you miss them all, Zaine, and maybe you still can’t cast that far when we’re done tonight, Cinda, but work at it until you can do a little bit better than you could this morning. Tomorrow, we’ll strive for a little bit better than today. I can’t make you experts at your craft in only a few days, but we can start you on the journey.”
Grumbling under their breath, the two girls began trying to attack his sticks. Zaine was right; her aim wasn’t near good enough to hit the slender targets, and Cinda’s first attempt at casting barely made it three paces past her own feet before a shower of hot orange sparks fell on the lush turf, but the important thing was that they were trying.
Rew offered pointers to Zaine on how she was gripping her bow and where she should be aiming. He encouraged Cinda, and then Anne arrived and began giving more specific instruction. As the sun set, it cast their shadows in front of them, and the small targets became even more difficult to see.
Zaine released her bowstring, and her arrow flew half a dozen paces wide.
A raucous laugh sounded, and the party turned to see a narrow ketch floating down the river. Its sails were lowered, and the current was carrying it at a leisurely pace. A man, a long, floppy boatman’s cap on his head, loose trousers on his legs, and a thick tuft of dark hair sprouting from his open vest, called out, “Nice shooting, lass!”
Zaine scowled at him and nocked another arrow. She fingered it but didn’t raise her bow.
“You can’t shoot a man for having a jest at your expense,” said Rew quietly.
“Hope you trained them better in the bed than you have with that bow, my man,” crowed the boatmen, turning to a companion who was slumped in the front of the craft, cradling an open jug. “Hey, now, there’s two of us, and you’ve got three women. What say we come ashore for a bit and give y’all a little entertainment. Six coppers a tumble?”
The man at the front of the boat cackled, and Zaine flushed with anger. She did raise the bow now, and Rew pulled it gently from her grasp.
“I don’t lay on my back for anyone!” snapped Zaine. “That man needs to be taught a lesson.”
“It’s the way things are, sometimes,” murmured Rew. “I’m not saying you have to like it, just that you can’t shoot a man over a comment.”
“Yes, but six coppers?” gasped Cinda with a chuckle. “He ought to be offering Zaine gold!”
The boat was floating down directly next to them now, and the standing man called again, “Hey, armsman, you can’t possibly need all of that woman-flesh, and we’re on a strict timeline. How ‘bout you rent us one of the lasses? We’ll drop ‘er off down the river in Umdrac. I’ll let you name your price for that, and she’ll be in good enough condition once we’re done. Though, I can’t promise she’ll be able to sit right for a few days after. How about the dark-haired girl? She looks like she’d do it free of charge and pay for our drinks in the village as thanks.”
Cinda’s mouth dropped open, and Zaine chortled at the noblewoman’s expression.
Rew raised the bow, drew back the string, and let loose an arrow. The women gasped. The arrow zipped out over the riverbank, and before the boatman man could react, it flashed over him, tearing into his floppy knit hat and ripping it from his head. The arrow and the hat splashed into the water on the other side of the ketch, and the boatmen stumbled, falling onto his companion, cursing and spitting.
His companion pushed him off and flung his broken wine jug to the other end of the ketch. His stomach was stained purple, and from the look of things, he was demanding the first man buy him a new jug of wine.
Rew watched the ketch float downriver until the current took the boat around a curve and out of sight. He murmured, “Zaine was right. The man needed to be taught a lesson.”
“That shot!” exclaimed the thief.
“Confident,” said Anne, shaking her head. “Over confident. You could have hit the man in the head if you’d missed even a little.”
“Maybe hitting him in the head was what I was trying to do,” retorted Rew.
Anne rolled her eyes and turned to go check on their supper.
Rew handed Zaine her bow. “I can protect you from rude, randy boatmen, but I can’t protect you from everything. Each night, you’ll practice until you can make that shot yourself. Cinda, the same goes for you and your magic. I’m afraid strangers acting as pigs is going to be the least of your worries.”
“Understood,” mumbled Cinda.
Zaine simply nodded, her bow gripped tight in her hands.
The ranger followed Anne back to the camp while Cinda and Zaine turned to make use of the last few minutes of daylight and squeeze in some more practice. Behind him, Rew heard them whispering, and he grinned. It had cost an arrow, but it’d been worth reminding Zaine and Cinda what was possible if they put in the time and the effort. And besides, that boatman did deserve it.
3
The next day, they found another of Raif’s cold, lonely camps, but instead of quickly assessing it and moving on, Rew stayed there, studying the confusing evidence he’d found or, more accurately, the lack of evidence.
“What?” asked Cinda. She pointed to a track of bent grass that led from the road to a man-sized flattened patch. “Even I can see this is where he slept. What’s the problem, Ranger?”
“Yes, that’s where he slept,” agreed Rew, “and over there are his tracks to get here from the highway, but where are the tracks going back?”
Cinda blinked at Rew. “Maybe he could have walked the same path?”
“What are the odds your brother would follow his exact footsteps from the night before when he returned to the road in the morning?” asked Rew. “The odds are nearly impossible unless he was very carefully making the effort to retrace those steps, but why would he do that? The signs he left through the grass to get here are obvious enough, and even you can see he spent the night in this spot. Why the sudden turn to stealth? And perhaps more specifically, is your brother someone who has ever tried to hide his passage through this world?”
“But it could be random chance, right?” asked Zaine, though she didn’t sound confident. “If that’s the quickest way to and from the road…”
“If he didn’t walk back to the road, where’d he go?” wondered Anne.
“Exactly,” said Rew, glancing at the forest in front of them that Raif had camped beside.
Without speaking to the others, he walked along the edge of the trees, studying the ground, but quickly, he saw there was nothing. Raif walking into a forest without leaving signs was even more unlikely than him retracing his footsteps back to the highway. Rew looked toward the road and the trampled trail Raif had left coming from there. Was it possible the boy had followed his own footsteps back?
Nothing Rew knew about the nobleman suggested he would be proceeding with that kind of caution, and if he was, then he’d done a terrible job and left obvious signs of his passing. Rew clenched his fist and turned back to the forest. The nobles had been confounding him since he’d first seen them in the jail cell, and after a month of them in his life, the ranger was… He frowned, rubbing his scalp.
The women shifted uncomfortably, and Cinda toed a rock, nudging it out from the dirt. They were anxious, perhaps unsure of what he was thinking but not wanting to interrupt him.
Rew stepped toward the forest again. The nobleman hadn’t left the jail cell on his own. He had been carried out of it. The ranger walked along the edge of the forest again, studying the same area he had before, and again saw nothing. He smacked his fist against a tree. Something was amiss, but he couldn’t put a finger to it. He knew that if he ignored his instinct and they started along the road, they could miss some point where Raif had turned away, and then they would never find the boy until he arrived in Spinesend. It would be to
o late, then.
Rew put his arm on the tree and rested his forehead against it. If he couldn’t trust his instincts, what could he trust? What good was he? The ranger stood back up and brushed his hand off, shaking loose the bark that had stuck to his palm when he hit the tree trunk.
He frowned. The boy had been carried from the jail cell. The river otter. Could another animal… He began walking along the edge of the forest again. Finally, directly next to where Raif had made his bed on the grass, Rew saw a scuff on the bark of a tree. He looked up and found a thick branch just above his head. He reached up and pulled himself into the tree.
Climbing slowly, Rew studied the bark and saw more scuffs, more marks, and then, twenty paces above the ground, a few strands of coarse hair. Around the hair there were half a dozen scrapes on the tree as if a one-sided struggle had taken place. Rew pulled the hairs from the bark and rubbed them in his fingers. He sniffed them and then climbed back down to the women.
“What is it?” asked Anne, picking up on his expression.
“I believe,” replied Rew, “that Raif was abducted by a large animal.”
“What!” exclaimed Cinda. “How? Why? Do you think it was some sort of Dark Kind?”
“Not Dark Kind, no,” said Rew. “They’re not known for abductions, for one. Besides, aside from a valaan, none of the Dark Kind have the intelligence or strength to do something like this. You saw the narjags and the way they behave. It could be a conjuring, like the imps I fought in your father’s throne room, but I don’t think so. Imps rarely have the intelligence for such a feat, either, and they don’t have hair like this.” He held up the strands he’d plucked from the tree. “This looks natural. Native to our world.”
“What creatures could lift a man Raif’s size and carry him into a tree?” questioned Anne.
“A simian, for one,” replied Rew.
Cinda gasped and covered her mouth with her hand.
Quickly, Rew added, “I don’t think it sought him as prey, for what that’s worth. Simians don’t carry their catches back to a lair. They eat where they kill.”
“Are simians common around here?” wondered Zaine, peering into the forest. “I’d never heard of anyone seeing one until we were in the wilderness with you.”
“No,” responded Rew. “They’re not common here. Not at all.”
“S-So…” stammered Cinda, dropping her hand. “What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” said Rew, glancing into the forest. “I—I don’t want to speculate.”
“You have to tell me what you’re thinking,” protested Cinda. “One of those things we saw may have my brother!”
“The northerners have learned to train river otters and other small animals,” said Rew, “but I know a man who has taken it further. It doesn’t make sense, though. There’s no reason for him to be here. He shouldn’t be here.”
“Who is he?” asked Cinda.
Rew shook his head and did not reply.
Tracking the path through the upper branches of the forest proved to be a difficult and painstaking process. The creature, which Rew decided was indeed a simian, was moving twenty paces above the ground and making leaps between trees that Rew could not duplicate. It meant he had to follow from below as best he was able, looking up into the canopy and guessing the most likely path of his quarry. Periodically, he would climb up a tree and look for signs that they were going the right direction. Fortunately, it seemed Raif was not going quietly, and more than anything, Rew found himself following the marks of the boy’s struggles.
As they progressed, Rew became certain he’d made the right decision. If it wasn’t Raif they were following, he couldn’t fathom what else it would be. Someone was being carried by the simian, and they were fighting every moment of it.
The trees were old and sturdy, but in several places, Rew spied branches that had been cracked, areas that were disturbed by the passage of something large. There were marks that could have been boots kicking against tree trunks or branches that might have been grabbed by a captive as they passed. Raif, despite being a terrible woodsman and an impetuous fool, was a fighter. He wasn’t giving up. There wasn’t much blood, though, which was a relief.
As the sun set, they hadn’t found Raif or anyone else, so Rew called a halt. At night, the subtle signs of an animal’s passing through the upper forest would be impossible to follow even for him.
“A fire?” asked Zaine, slinging off her pack and rolling her shoulders. “I know we didn’t cover half the distance, but weaving through these trees was a great deal more effort than travel on the road. I could use a good meal.”
Rew shook his head. “No fire.”
“You’re worried the simian will smell it?” asked Cinda.
“Not the simian,” said Rew, shaking his head. “I worry about its master. It’s likely they don’t know we’re on their trail, and we don’t want to give ourselves away. If he’s—If there is someone controlling a simian, we cannot be too cautious.”
Anne tended to the girls, granting small healing and then laying out a simple, cold meal. The empath carved off hunks of salted ham, cheese, and then shared the last of their bread. It was already getting stale, and it would be best to eat it before it turned.
“With no fire…” mumbled Zaine in complaint. Then, she stopped and sighed. “I suppose no one said it’d be easy.”
“We did not,” agreed Anne. “You’re doing the right thing, though.”
The thief nodded curtly, and Cinda reached over and put a hand on the other girl’s leg. “After we find my brother, we’ll go to Spinesend and find my father. We can’t do it without you, Zaine. We need you, and I’m glad you agreed to come.”
Her eyes shining in the faded light of the sunset, Zaine nodded. “Of course.”
That night, Anne took the first watch after putting the girls to sleep. Rew napped a few hours before she woke him. It wasn’t enough sleep, and his steps would be a fraction slower the next morning, but he didn’t trust the girls to watch over them while they were pursuing something that could snatch Raif off the ground and barely leave a sign.
As Anne tucked her bedroll around her, Rew shivered at the chill autumn air. It was heavy with moisture but carried a clean scent. He inhaled deeply and decided it wouldn’t rain, not that night, at least. He started a series of stretches, forcing blood to pump through his body, warming himself and chasing away the stiffness from a few hours of sleeping on the ground. In the distance, he heard the calls of night birds. Otherwise, it was quiet.
The hours stretched long, and Rew’s thoughts trudged down narrow, gloomy lanes, taking a meandering path to every conceivable culprit but largely avoiding the one he suspected. He didn’t know why the man would be involved, didn’t like to consider what it meant if he was, but one by one, as the hours passed, Rew considered and dismissed every other possibility.
Bandits would have slit Raif’s neck and left his body where it lay. Enemies of Baron Fedgley would have likely done the same. It’s not as if they could offer the boy back to the baron for ransom, given the baron’s own predicament. It could not be random chance, which meant Raif had been taken because of the Investiture and by someone who had knowledge Raif was traveling from Falvar to Spinesend. But even then, it wasn’t clear why.
Despite his pedigree, the boy had no high magic to call upon, which Rew thought anyone would know if they were close enough to have learned of Raif’s flight. With his father in captivity, it was true Raif effectively had the rule of Falvar, but he’d left the city. To prevent Raif from issuing commands to his army, a foe could have simply let him carry on his way.
What did the boy’s capture accomplish?
The truth was, Raif was of little use to any of the serious players in the Investiture, which meant he must have been taken as leverage or for interrogation. With Baron Fedgley taken and the boy’s mother dead, the only person Raif’s capture would concern was Cinda. Rew glanced at the sleeping girl. She had potential, but she wa
s untrained. What could Raif’s kidnapper hope to make her do?
He ran his hands over the short stubble on his head, wishing they could have started a fire to warm him on the cold, long night. Perhaps the boy had been taken for an interrogation. Raif was nearly useless for any other purpose to the serious players in the Investiture. Did Raif’s captor want to know what had happened in Falvar or where Baron Fedgley had been taken? Did the man want to learn more of Cinda?
Grimacing, Rew shoved his boots out in front of him. It was the thought he’d been avoiding all night. Had the man somehow deduced the reason Fedgley had been captured by Alsayer and followed to the conclusion that Cinda would be a threat as well? It might not be the case, but if it was…
Rew sighed and stood from the rock he’d been sitting on. He stopped halfway to his feet. Turning his head slowly, he looked at the trees surrounding them. He thought he’d heard a subtle thump, a flap of wings. The tracks of a river otter, the simian, and now this. He stood the rest of the way and watched the trees, waiting patiently.
It took a quarter hour, but finally, he spotted what he was looking for. Twenty paces from their camp, halfway up the trunk of a leafless oak tree, was an owl. Rew met its bright-eyed stare. The bird blinked, raised its wings, and fell off the branch to drift away silently.
“Blessed Mother,” grumbled Rew.
When the sun rose, and the girls awoke, blinking sleep-clouded eyes and cracking their jaws with exhausted yawns, Rew was already cooking their breakfast.
Zaine stood and looked down at the campfire he’d started. She asked him, “I thought you said no fire?”
“I know who we’re tracking, and he knows we’re coming,” said Rew. “There’s no point hiding.”
“If they snatched Raif, are they not a danger to us as well?” wondered Anne, returning from making her morning ablutions.
Rew scratched his beard. “I said there’s no reason to hide because they know we’re here, not because they are no danger to us.”