“Bastard,” Lora cursed.
“Danger now is riders coming from northern wardtowns like Kodiz,” Kard warned. “We’re over a hundred miles from Carlon but only fifty from Kodiz. Carind will have made sure the word spread to all of the wardtowns, and some Hunters will ride out and circle, just in case.”
“So, we’re in danger until we’re well away from anything Unity,” Teer figured.
“We are,” Kard said. “But there’s a lot of prairie out here. We’ve got a good chance of making it to the Venedor Hills without interception.”
“And if we don’t?” Lora asked.
“We will protect you,” Teer promised.
“Most people in our business know who I am,” Kard told them. “Courtesy and tradition say they won’t attempt to take another Hunter’s bounty. You’re officially still our prisoner, Miss Lora, which protects you.”
“And if they figure you’re smuggling me out?”
Kard exhaled a long sigh and stared into the fire.
“Teer and I will protect you,” he agreed grimly. “I hope it doesn’t come to that.”
Teer took the first watch, keeping an eye in the direction of both the nearby wardtown and the bridge over the Irigo. He took the time to check over his guns, something he didn’t do as often as he probably should.
The long hunter needed a bit of polish, but it hadn’t been fired in over a tenday, not since he’d gone hunting to feed the prisoners they’d taken from Boulder’s gang. He carefully went over the barrel and mechanisms, but everything in the breech-loading rifle was still solid.
His quickshooter had some build-up from being used against the wolfen. Disassembling it by the light of the three moons, he grimaced as he looked over the parts. The gun was still entirely functional, but there was more wear on the parts than he’d expected.
Part of that, he suspected, was that he could see it better than he once had, and the gun was old. It had also suffered from the use he’d put it to against the wolfen. The revolver wasn’t intended to fire as fast as he’d emptied it that day, and Teer knew the gun was, bluntly, cheap.
The metal of its parts was inferior steel compared to the quality of the hunter, and the wear was showing in ways he hadn’t expected. It had been a secondhand gun, passed down to a boy of fourteen turnings when he’d first gone riding the ranch.
There weren’t going to be any opportunities for him to replace it, but he realized he needed to be cautious. Another attempt to empty the gun like he’d done with the unnatural predators hunting Lora could easily wreck the weapon.
For now, he cleaned the parts and reassembled the gun. It would hold up for his purposes for long enough, he figured. They’d be in a wardtown soon enough. He didn’t know how long they’d be spending with the Kota after they delivered Lora to safety, but it wouldn’t be forever.
Then they’d leave the young woman with Doka’s people and ride on. That thought bothered him a bit, but he didn’t see much choice to it. He went where Kard went, and he didn’t think the El-Spehari was going to settle down anywhere.
If Teer was reading his partner and master as well as he thought, Kard figured anywhere he settled was a target.
His gear was cleaned and put away by the time his watch ended, and he roused the older bounty hunter.
“Thirdmoon is going down,” he murmured once Kard was awake. “We won’t get many more bright nights like earlier tonight.”
“Better that way,” Kard told him. “Worst comes to pass, you and I can guide the horses in the dark. Few others can.”
“True.” Teer knew he could, anyway. He wasn’t so sure about Kard—the El-Spehari had better senses than most Arani, but they weren’t as good as Teer’s newly awoken eyes.
“Go rest, Teer,” Kard ordered. “More long days riding ahead. We all need all the sleep we can get.”
Teer chuckled and obeyed—and was somehow unsurprised to discover that his bedroll was no longer on its own in the shade of the tree he’d set it up under.
Lora was wrapped up in her blankets and half on top of his bedroll. She was fitfully twitching in her sleep as he approached, and jerked awake before he even began to lie down.
“Hey,” he greeted her. “Pretty sure that’s not where we put your blankets.”
“Not sleepin’,” she confessed. “Feels silly…but…can you hold me again?”
“You’ve still a watch and Kard will come looking for you,” he warned. “But if you need, yeah.”
She half-laughed, half-sobbed.
“Thank you, Teer.”
14
Three more days passed in a pattern that blurred together. Thirty-plus miles a day through the plains, with few landmarks or items of interest—not least because Kard was navigating them around every town or claim farm on his map. A campfire with a stew made from canned beans, dried meat and dried spices…and Teer spent at least a third of each night holding Lora while she slept as a shield against her nightmares.
Around midday on the fourth day—their seventh since turning north toward the Venedor Hills—Teer spotted a change in the ground ahead of them.
“Unless we’ve been riding faster than I figure, that’s not the Venedor Hills, but the ground is much less flat ahead,” he told the others. “Something on your map, Kard?”
“Yeah. We’re not into anything really named, but we’re leaving the plains and entering rougher ground,” Kard confirmed. “The Venedor Hills are big, could almost be mountains. You’ll know them when you see them.”
Teer chuckled.
“We’ll need to be careful as the ground gets less clear,” he admitted. “I’m sure both Star and Clack are smart enough to watch for trees and gullies, but…”
“We do our part,” Kard agreed. “Come on. After the last day or so, the shade of even those scrubby trees sounds tempting.”
As the El-Spehari had warned, it had grown warmer as they’d drawn north. Riding across the unsheltered plains hadn’t been truly bad, not yet at least, but Teer was watching the horses and his own water levels.
Shade would be good.
They urged the horses up to speed and Teer strained his eyes, trying to pick out a smoother section of the broken ground ahead for them to enter. None of it looked particularly difficult, but easier would be better.
He blinked when he heard the noise from behind him, his straining senses confusing him for a moment as he tried to figure out what he’d heard and from where.
Then it hit him. Voices. Multiple voices behind them.
“Hold on,” he murmured to Lora, turning Star to allow him to look behind them more easily. They were still concealing their campfires, but that was as much to prevent fires as anything else. There was nothing they could really do to hide the track of two horses, one of them carrying double weight, through the dry dust of the plains.
And now Teer could see, at the edge of his vision, a group of riders following that trail.
“Kard!” he shouted. “Riders behind us on our trail. Half a dozen or more.”
“Pillars take them,” Kard snapped. “Ride for the hills, Teer. As fast as Star can carry the both of you. We’ll meet them on rougher ground, give ourselves control of the situation.”
“You think it’s Hunters?” Teer asked.
“If you say they’re following our trail, then they’re either Hunters looking for Lora—or worse things.” Kard shook his head. “Most people outside the Unity are just people. Some, though… Some live down to the Unity’s worst fears of barbarians.”
Thankfully, people that Teer could barely see turned out to not be able to see them.
He lost sight of their pursuers quickly enough as he set his heels to Star’s flanks, urging the mare up to a canter. They couldn’t sustain that pace forever, but hopefully for long enough to reach the nearby broken ground.
They were throwing up more of a dust cloud at this speed, and Teer worried that would be visible to the riders behind them. For now, getting away was more important.
“We need to get lost in here,” Kard told them. “My map only has the roughest of details on this area. Hopefully, theirs isn’t any better and we can lose them—but the more confusing our trail is, the better.”
“So, water?” Teer asked, remembering Lora’s attempts to escape pursuit fleeing Carlon.
“Not a bad idea if you can find some,” Kard agreed.
Teer stretched his senses and then pointed.
“Stream of some kind that way,” he told the older man. He could feel Lora’s confusion, but he just smiled as Kard took his direction instantly.
The two horses set off through the hills, making sure to stay on the lowest ground as they hunted the water Teer could hear. It was less than half a mile away in the end, a broad and shallow brook that contentedly burbled its way eastward through a sharp gulley it had cut for itself over the turnings.
“Ride east,” Kard ordered. “With the water, for at least a few miles. Then we swing north again and see if we can find more water to ride west in.”
Teer urged Star into the water. The heat of the day was still thick in the air, and the horse resisted less than he expected. He didn’t stop the mare from pausing to drink, even as he listened hard.
“I don’t hear anyone, but they could still be behind us,” he told Kard.
“They’re behind us,” the Hunter said grimly. “If they managed to find us at all, they’re not going to lose us just because the ground got rough. Water will help, but the more tricks we find space to pull, the better.”
“How can you hear people so far away?” Lora asked Teer.
“Magic, we think,” he admitted. “It’s part of why I’m going to Tyrus and the Kota.”
She didn’t seem to know how to respond to that, joining him in watching the water in front of Star’s hooves to make sure there wasn’t anything visibly dangerous to the mare’s feet.
Somehow, riding along the stream while listening for pursuit felt like it took longer than riding a mile in other conditions would have. Teer could tell from the sun that it hadn’t been the candlemark it felt like, but they were going more slowly.
Riding in water wasn’t great for the horses, after all. He breathed a sigh of relief as Kard turned Clack to the north, pulling out of the water across a graveled bank. A thin forest of trees and scrub covered the ground and hillside ahead of them now, with enough clear ground that they could ride without damaging the bushes.
The loam picked up their tracks far too well, though, Teer realized—and then he swallowed as he realized their trail was vanishing behind them, orange lights flickering through the loam as it shifted to erase the hoofprints.
He looked up at Kard, who wasn’t wearing his illusion for once. Instead, he was riding with one hand splayed out behind him, and sparks of orange light flickered from his fingers into the dirt.
That would help. Between erasing their trail with magic and riding through the water, Teer figured that they had to lose their pursuers.
It was almost dark when they found the second stream Kard had been hoping for. This was a wider and deeper waterway, also heading east. The two streams probably met up somewhere on the edge of the hills and went on to join one of the many rivers cutting across the plains.
For now, the brook was still shallow enough and calm enough for them to ride through, though the rapidly fading light made it riskier.
“Ride west, for as long as we have light,” Kard instructed. “We can’t risk a torch or anything else, either. It’s sun or moons’ light for us until we’re sure we’re clear.”
Teer didn’t argue, urging Star into the new waterway. The mare whinnied in complaint, but she obeyed, and he patted her neck around Lora.
“It’s all right, girl,” he told the horse. “Everything’s all right, I promise.”
Lora made a wordless sound of amusement, but she also seemed to draw some reassurance from his words as the water rippled up around Star’s knees and the bottom of the Merik’s feet.
“Deeper than I thought,” Kard said. “Let’s move quickly, get ourselves on dry soil and see if we can find a source to grab clean water from.”
They rode through the water for as long as they had sunlight. Teer figured they were pushing it too hard, but he was afraid. He wasn’t going to admit that aloud, but he’d seen their pursuers and the other two hadn’t.
They’d looked like Hunters, the same kind of Unity-sponsored criminal-catcher that he’d chosen to become. Part of him rebelled against being on the opposite side from them—but the rest of him figured that anyone who was a true professional Hunter was going to be able to follow them.
And he wasn’t sure if he and Kard could handle six equally well-armed Hunters, all of them more experienced than Teer. Even if they could, he wasn’t sure how they could do it without killing anyone.
He was afraid for Lora. He was afraid for himself and Kard. He was afraid that even if they managed to get out of this, he’d be adding blood to his own hands…blood he was much less confident of the justice of.
But Kard eventually pulled them out of the water, the El-Spehari tilting his head at a sound.
“You hear that, Teer?” he asked. “To the west.”
Teer focused and picked up the noise. It didn’t sound like anything he’d heard before.
“Water? But…I don’t know what that is.”
Kard laughed, a surprising moment of honest amusement in the dark night.
“You wouldn’t, would you? Come on. I’ll show you both, if you haven’t seen one of these before.”
15
The trio followed the north side of the stream another half-mile under the light of a single moon. The stream tucked between two of the lower hills and then opened into a small pool amidst several sharp cliffs—and at the far end of the pool, Teer saw the source of the strange falling-water noise.
The stream came over one of the cliffs, the water plummeting at least twenty feet to fill the basin it had cut for itself over time.
“I think I see a cave over there,” Teer told Kard, pointing to the cliffs on the south side of the basin, around the hill and out of sight from the water. “That should give us enough cover for a small fire.”
“I’d still like to avoid open flame,” Kard said slowly, but he followed Teer’s pointing finger. “Let’s check it out.”
They urged the horses into the water one more time and investigated the spot Teer had found. The entrance was only really visible from the gulley leading into the waterfall pool, and it was a decent size. Enough for them to tuck themselves and the horses in and, as Teer had figured, to have a small, concealed fire.
“We’ll have to be careful with the smoke,” Teer said, “but we can have a warmish meal still.”
“All right,” Kard conceded. “I’ll do the fire and the cooking, I’m the only one I trust to handle keeping that small enough. You two rub down the horses and get everything else set.”
They set to work with a will. Teer took a minute every so often to step out to the exit and check the path outside. He couldn’t hear much of anything over the waterfall nearby. He’d vaguely known such things existed, but he’d never seen one before.
The area around Hardin’s Ranch, where he’d managed cattle with the rest of his mother’s husband’s hands, had been very flat.
Once the food was done, Teer and Kard set to work on the dishes as Lora stepped outside. As they finished, Teer realized she hadn’t returned.
“I should go check on her,” he said aloud. “Just in case.”
As he was rising, she stepped back into the cave. The reflected light of the single moon was enough for Teer to read the resigned and frustrated look on her face as she walked forward somewhat awkwardly.
“Do we have some soap and hot water I can use?” she asked. “I ne
ed to go wash my clothes.”
There were a dozen reasons that could have become much more urgent, Teer knew, and he didn’t hesitate in pulling free a spare bar of the soap they were using for the dishes.
“Not the best, but should work,” he said as he offered it.
“Not much left of the hot water,” Kard added, but he slid a collapsible bucket with what they had over to her. “I don’t want to risk a new fire.”
“It’ll do,” she said grimly, grabbing both and vanishing back out the cave exit as quickly as humanly possible.
Teer and Kard shared a look.
“There are Hunters nearby,” Kard said quietly. “None of us should be on our own. Go keep watch for her.”
Teer could easily figure what the consequences of Lora washing her one set of clothing would be. That sounded almost as awkward as standing guard over prisoners handling their call of nature.
“And you’d be alone,” he pointed out.
“I’m more capable of handling myself than either of you,” the El-Spehari reminded him. “They don’t have an army. Go.”
“Yes, sir,” Teer conceded.
The second moon was just beginning to come over the horizon as Teer followed the canyon toward the pool. He found the bucket at the edge of the waterfall pool, the last of its heat helping soap bubble around the shoved-in clumps of Lora’s clothing.
There was a spot of blood on the rock next to the bucket and he had a moment of panic…before he realized why Lora had needed to wash her clothes, and sighed.
He followed the sound of splashing, just barely detectable beneath the waterfall, and took a seat on a large rock next to the moonlit pool. He took enough time to locate Lora in the water and then carefully looked anywhere else as he softly called her name.
“Hey, Teer,” she replied, the sound of her swimming changing as she started to tread water. “I’m fine.”
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