That argued for an attack; argued for attackers who might actually have trailed them some time before they landed last night, and waited for them to get into the sky again before launching a spell that would send them crashing to the ground.
So why didn’t they come see if they’d killed us? Could they have been that sure of themselves? Could they simply not have cared?
Or could they be better at hiding themselves than he was at spotting them?
Could they be out there right now?
It was certainly possible that the attackers had struck from some distance away, and had not reached the site of the crash before he and Blade were up, alert, and able to defend themselves. The kind of attack certainly argued for a cowardly opponent, one who would want to wait until his prey was helpless or in an inescapable position before striking.
Unless, of course, he is simply a slow opponent; one who was making certain of every inch of ground between himself and us before he initiated a confrontation.
He sighed quietly. There was only one problem; this was all speculation. None of this gave him any hard evidence for or against anything. He just didn’t have any facts beyond the simplest—that they had been the victim of something that destroyed their holds on magic and brought them tumbling helplessly down out of the sky.
So, for the rest of the night, he continued to scan the forest and keep his ears wide open, starting at every tiny sound, and cursing his unending headache.
Dawn was heralded by nothing more obvious than a gradual lightening of the darkness under the trees. Tad knew that his partner was about to waken when her breathing speeded up and her heartrate increased—both of which he could hear quite easily. At his side, Blade yawned, stirred, started to stretch, and swore under her breath at the pain that movement caused her.
Tad hooked a talon around the strap of the medical supply bag and dragged it over to her so she could rummage in it without moving much. She heard him, and shoved her hand in and pulled out one of the little vials; without being asked, he pierced the wax seal with his talon, and she drank it down.
Blade lay quietly for many long moments before her painkillers took effect. “I assume nothing happened last night?” She made it an inquiry.
“Nothing worth talking about—except that I think there was some squabbling over the remains of the foodstuffs.” He hadn’t heard anything in particular except a few grunts and the sound of an impact, as if one of the scavengers had cuffed another. “We ought to consider putting out snares, especially whipsnares that would take a catch out of reach of the ground. It would be very frustrating to discover we’d trapped something, but a scavenger beat us to it.”
She sat up slowly, rubbing her eyes with her good hand. “I should have thought of that last night,” she said ruefully.
“They wouldn’t have worked last night,” he pointed out. “It was raining until well after dark. Chances are, the lines would have been ruined, or stakes pulled out of the mud. If it doesn’t rain that badly today, we can put them out after the afternoon rains are over.”
She yawned again, then grimaced and gingerly rubbed her bruised jaw. “Good idea,” she agreed. “Snares are a more efficient means of getting us supplemental rations than hunting. We’ll trap the area where I dumped the ruined food. Even if there’s nothing left, animals still might come back hoping there will be. Oh, gods, I am stiff and sore!”
“I know precisely how you feel. I saved us some breakfast.” He scraped away the ashes and revealed the cakes, now a bit crisper than they had been, and a bit grimier, but still edible. I wish I had some bruise medicine that would work as well on me as hers does on her.
“Did you!” She brightened, and scratched the back of her neck with her good hand. “Well, that puts a better complexion on things! And my bruise remedy seems to have the additional value of keeping away bugs; for once I haven’t got any new bites. Do you think you want another dose of your painkillers?”
He shook his head. “I took one as soon as it was light enough to see which vial was which.” He handed her a cake, and ate the remaining three, neatly but quickly. One cake seemed to be substantial enough to satisfy her, though he noted that she did devour every crumb and licked her fingers clean afterward. Thanks to the fact that she had filled and refilled every container they had, he had even been able to get a drink without her assistance from a wide pot.
He waited until she ate, washed her face and hands, and looked a bit more alert. “Now what do we do?” he asked, as she dried off her face on her ruined tunic of yesterday. He made a mental note to have her set that out when the rains started, to give it a primitive wash.
She sat back on her heels, wincing as she jarred her shoulder. “Now—we discuss options,” she said slowly. “What we do next, and where we go.”
He stretched, taking care with his bandaged{wing, and settled back again. “Options,” he repeated after her. “Well, we both know that the best thing we can do is stay here. Right?”
“And build a beacon.” She squinted past the canvas up through the treetops, at the tiny patches of sky visible, now and again, winking through the greenery like bright white eyes. “A very smoky beacon. It’s going to take a lot of smoke to trickle up through that cover.”
“It’s going to take two or three days before they know we’re missing,” he said aloud, just to make certain he had all of his reasoning straight. “We have a shelter, and we can make it better and stronger, just by using available wood and leaves. I saw what you did with that windbreak, and we could certainly add layers of ‘wall’ that way over the canvas and wicker. If you look at the fallen leaves, you’ll see that the ones you used dry up a lot like light leather; they’ll hold up as shelter material.”
She nodded, although she made a face. “It won’t be easy, one-handed,” she warned. “And I’m still the only decent knot tier in this team. You can bite holes, I can tie cord through them, but it is still tedious.”
“So we take it slowly. I can do quite a bit, I just have to be careful.” He paused for a moment, and went on. “We’re injured, but I’m still a full-grown gryphon, and there aren’t too many things that care to take on something my size, hurt or not.”
“In that two or three days, whatever brought us down can find us, study us, and make its own plans,” she countered, falling easily into the role of opposition—just as he would, when she proposed a plan. “We have to assume we were attacked and plan accordingly to defend ourselves. This place isn’t exactly defensible.”
He nodded; that was obvious enough. There was cover on all sides, and they didn’t have the means to clear it all away, not even by burning it down.
Assuming they could. He wasn’t willing to place bets on anything. Chances were, if they tried, nothing would happen; after all, they had no way to take down trees with trunks big enough for two and three men to put their arms around. But there was always the chance that they would succeed “better” than they anticipated—and set fire to the whole forest, trapping themselves in an inferno. He had not forgotten that the green wood around the fire last night had certainly burned more efficiently than he had anticipated. No, setting fire to this place to get a defensible clearing was not a good idea.
“We ought to be someplace where our beacon has a chance of being seen at night,” she went on. “I don’t think we made that big a hole in the tree cover when we went through it.”
“We didn’t; I checked.” Too bad, but she was right. Half the use of the beacon was at night, but there wasn’t a chance that a night flyer would see a fire on the ground unless it was much larger than one that two people could build and tend alone.
“The last problem is that there’s no source of water here,” she concluded, and held up her good hand. “I know we’ve had plenty of rain every afternoon ever since we entered this area, but we don’t dare count on that. So—we’re in an undistinguished spot with no landmarks, under the tree canopy, with nothing to put our backs against, and no source of water.”
He grimaced. “When you put it that way, staying here doesn’t seem like much of an option.”
“We only have to go far enough to find a stream or a pond,” she pointed out. “With luck, that might not be too far away. We’ll get our break in the cover, and our water source, and we can worry about making it defensible when we see what kind of territory we’re dealing with. But I think we ought to at least consider moving.”
“Maybe,” he said, doubtfully, “but—”
What he was going to reply was lost in the rumble of thunder overhead—and the spatter of rain on leaves.
“—not today,” he breathed, as the rain came down again, as torrential as yesterday, but much earlier in the day.
Blade swore and stuck her head out to get a good look at the rain—a little too far, as she managed to jiggle the canvas and wicker of their roof just enough to send a cascade of cold water down the back of her neck. She jerked back, and turned white with pain.
The stream of oaths she uttered would have done a hardened trooper proud, but Tad didn’t say anything. The cold water was insult enough, but when she lurched back, she must have really jarred her bad shoulder.
“I’ll get wood,” he offered hastily, and crawled slowly out of the shelter, trying not to disturb it any more.
Getting soaked was infinitely preferable to staying beside Blade when several things had gone wrong at once. She was his partner and his best friend—but he knew her and her temper very, very well.
And given the choice—I’d rather take a thunderstorm.
Five
“Wet gryphon,” Blade announced, wrinkling her nose, “is definitely not in the same aromatic category as a bouquet of lilies.”
“Neither is medicine-slathered human,” Tad pointed out mildly. “I’ll dry—but in the morning, you’ll still be covered with that smelly soup.”
Since he had just finished helping her wrap her limbs and torso in wet, brown bandages, he thought he had as much right to his observation as she had to hers.
In fact, he had shaken as much off his feathers as he could before he got into the tent, and he was not wet anymore, just damp. “And it could be worse. You could be sharing this shelter with a wet kyree,” he added.
She made a face. “I’ve been stuck in a small space with a wet kyree before, and you are a bundle of fragrant herbs, if not a bouquet of lilies, compared to that experience.”
Supper for her had been one of the pieces of travel-bread, which she had gnawed on rather like a kyree with a bone. They had been unbelievably lucky; Blade had spotted a curious climbing beast venturing down out of the canopy to look them over, and she had gotten it with her sling. It made a respectable meal, especially since Tad hadn’t done much to exert himself and burn off breakfast.
He had gone out to get more wood, searching for windfall and dragging it back to the camp. Then he had done the reverse, taking what wreckage they were both certain was utterly useless and dropping it on the other side of their brush-palisade where they wouldn’t always be falling over it.
Blade had gone out in the late afternoon to chop some of the wood Tad had found, and bathe herself all over in the rain. He had been a gentleman and kept his eyes averted, even though she wasn’t his species. She was unusually body-shy for a Kaled’a’in—or perhaps it was simply that she guarded every bit of her privacy that she had any control over.
At any rate, she had gathered up her courage and taken a cold rain bath, dashing back in under the shelter to huddle in a blanket afterward. She claimed that she felt much better, but he wondered how much of that was bravado, or wishful thinking. She was a human and not built for forceful—or bad—landings. Although the basket had given her some protection, he had no real idea how badly hurt she was in comparison with him. Nor was she likely to tell him if she was hurt deeper than the skin-obvious. To his growing worry, he suspected that her silence might hide her emotional wounds as well.
After she was dry, she had asked his help with her bruise-medicines. There was no doubt of how effective they were; after the treatment yesterday, the bruises were fading, going from purple, dark blue, and black, to yellow, green and purple. While this was not the most attractive color-combination, it did indicate that she was healing faster than she would have without the treatments.
He finished the last scrap of meat, and offered her the bones. “You could put these in the fire and roast them,” he said, as she hesitated. “Then you could eat the marrow. Marrow is rich in a lot of good things. This beast wasn’t bad; the marrow has to have more taste than that chunk of bread you’ve been chewing.”
“Straw would have more taste,” she replied, and accepted the larger bones.
“I can bite the bones open later, if they don’t split, and you can carve out the cooked marrow. We can use the long bone splinters as stakes. They might be useful,” Tad offered.
Blade nodded, while trying unsuccessfully to stretch her arms. “You try and crunch up as much of those smaller bones as you can; they’ll help your wing heal.” She buried the bones in the ashes and watched them carefully as he obeyed her instructions and snapped off bits of the smaller bones to swallow. She was right; every gryphon knew that it took bone to build bone.
When one of the roasting bones split with an audible crack, she fished it quickly out of the fire. Scraping the soft, roasted marrow out of the bones with the tip of her knife, she spread it on her bread and ate it that way.
“This is better. It’s almost good,” she said, around a mouthful. “Thanks, Tad.”
“My pleasure,” he replied, pleased to see her mood slowly lifting. “Shall we set the same watches as last night?” He yawned hugely. “It’s always easier for me to sleep on a full stomach.”
“It’s impossible to keep you awake when your belly’s full, you mean,” she retorted, but now she wore a ghost of a smile. “It’s the best plan we have.”
His wing did hurt less, or at least he thought it did. Gryphon bones tended to knit very quickly, like the bones of the birds that they were modeled after. Just at the moment, he was grateful that this was so; he preferred not to think about the consequences if somehow Blade had set his wing badly. Not that his days of fancy aerobatics would be over, but having his wing-bones rebroken and reset would be very unpleasant.
He peered up at the tree canopy, and as usual, saw nothing more than leaves. And rain, lots of it.
“I’m afraid we’re in for another long rain like last night,” he said ruefully. “So much for putting out snares.”
“We can’t have everything our way.” She shrugged. “So far, we’re doing all right. We could survive a week this way, with no problem—as long as nothing changes.”
As long as nothing changes. Perhaps she had meant that to sound encouraging, but as he willed himself to sleep, he couldn’t feel any encouragement. Everything changes eventually. Only a fool would think otherwise. We might think we know what we’re doing, but it only takes one serious mistake out here and we’re dead. Even a minor mistake would mean that everything changes.
The thought followed him down into his sleep, where it woke uneasy echoes among his dreams.
He slept so lightly that Blade did not need to shake him awake. He roused to the sound of water dripping steadily from the leaves above, the crackling and popping of the fire, and the calls of insects and frogs. That was all. It was very nearly silent out there, and it was a silence that was unnerving.
The forest that he knew fell silent in this way when a large and dangerous predator—such as a gryphon—was aprowl. He doubted that the denizens of this forest knew the two of them well enough to think that they were dangerous. That could only mean that something the local creatures knew was dangerous was out there.
Somewhere.
“Anything?” he whispered. She shook her head slightly without taking her eyes off the forest, and he noticed that she had banked the fire down so that it didn’t dazzle her eyes.
He strained both eyes and ears, testing th
e night even as she did, and found nothing.
“It isn’t that everything went quiet, it was that nothing much started making night-sounds after dark,” she whispered back. “I suppose we might have driven all the local animals off—”
“Even the things that live up in the canopy? I doubt it,” he replied. “Why would anything up there be afraid of us?”
She shrugged. “All I know is, I haven’t heard or seen anything, but I have that unsettling feeling that something is watching us. Somewhere.”
And whatever it is, the local creatures don’t like it either. He had the same feeling, a crawling sensation at the back of his neck, and an itch in his talons. There were unfriendly eyes out there in the night, and Tad and Blade were at a disadvantage. It knew where they were and what they were. They had no idea what it was.
But if it hadn’t attacked while he was asleep, hopefully it wouldn’t while Blade took her rest. “Get to sleep,” he told her. “If there’s anything out there except our imaginations, it isn’t likely to do anything now that I’m on watch. I look more formidable than you do, and I intend to reinforce that.”
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