Got Alleyne to show off, hey? she signed.
You betcha, Astrid replied, with a smile of smug satisfaction. He's a wonderful guy but he's still a guy, you know? Which means he's sort of stupid at times. Besides, he looks good with his shirt off.
Little John's smarter, Eilir signed. He saw through it.
He is not! Astrid's hands moved emphatically. Alleyne just has too noble a nature to suspect anyone!
Yeah, blond, beautiful and dumb, like someone else I could name but won't – like for example you, Eilir taunted. Astrid stuck her tongue out in reply.
The friends finished their task, jumped free, checked that nobody else was in the way and waved to Crystal, who stood at the horses' heads. The girl urged them forward, and the beasts leaned into their harness. The big log swiveled across rocks, then came down onto the bike path with a thud that echoed up through the soles of her feet. It was far too heavy for the team to drag back while it remained whole, even though they had a two-wheeled lift to put under the forward end to ease the work. There was a good ton of weight involved.
We'll save the upper part, there's some useful wood there, Eilir signed.
The tree being dead already, they didn't have to do more than sketch a sign over it; you had to apologize and explain the need when you cut living wood, the way you did when you killed a beast. They were all children of the Mother and part of Lord Cernunnos' domain, after all.
The men got busy, standing on either side of the log and chopping, while a few of the Dunedain trimmed the branches further up with hatchets and saws. Eilir cradled her longbow in her arms and watched appreciatively. Alleyne was a bit over six feet, and built like an Apollo in one of Mom's books, broad-shouldered and narrow in the waist, long in the arms and legs; the muscle moved like living metal under his winter-pale skin as he swung the felling ax and chips of the rock-hard maple flew, startling yellow-white against the dark ground. Beside him Hordle looked like a related but distinct species, arms like the tree trunk itself, and a thick pelt of dark auburn hair running down his chest onto a belly corded like ship's cable; the log shook under the impact of the heavy double-bitted ax he used.
It was still seasoned hardwood, and the work went slowly. Eilir grinned.
Ah, hard honest work, she signed. It does me good just to watch it.
Alleyne's ears burned a little redder. The wood yielded, but slowly; it took only a little more to finish trimming the branches and roll the upper section of the trunk off the path for later attention.
Eilir had been deaf from birth; before it, in fact, when a teenaged Juniper Mackenzie contracted German measles in the fourth month of her pregnancy. That didn't make her other senses more acute, the way many believed; what it did do was encourage her to use and pay attention to them. She'd also spent much of her life in the countryside and amongst its wildlife, around Dun Juniper when it was just her and her mother before the Change; and in mountains and woods, hills and fields all over western Oregon in the years since, hunting, Rangering, or wandering and observing for their own sake. And she had been trained by experts, Sam Aylward not least.
All that told her that something was not quite right:
Mithrilwood had been a state park before the Change, and since then the area all about it had been mostly unpeopled, young forests and abandoned fields growing lush fodder for beast and bird. It normally swarmed with life, even in winter when many of the birds went south; upland game migrated down here from the High Cascades in this season, and everything from beaver and rabbits to deer, elk, coyote, wild boar, bear, cougar and feral tiger were common. The bigger animals would avoid the noise and clatter of humans, though not as widely as they did before the Change. The smaller would be cautious, but:
She turned and clicked her tongue at Astrid. The other woman was already frowning.
"Hsssst!" Astrid Larsson said as she turned, to attract everyone's eyes, and moved her hands in Sign as welclass="underline" Someone's near. Watching. Don't let them know they've been seen, but be ready.
Nobody froze; the dozen Dunedain continued to muscle the big log towards the waiting horses and the two-wheeled drag that would support its forward end. The forest floor was mostly clear of undergrowth, and the trees had closed their canopy long ago.
Then they casually reached for their bows; you had to know Sign as well as Sindarin to be a Ranger. Astrid's silver-veined eyes flicked about. They were in a canyon, one of the many that laced the old state park. Rock stretched up on either hand, layers of basalt cut through by millennia of rushing water. Much of that was frozen this day, on the stone and on the moss-grown limbs of the great trees. In the middle distance a waterfall toned, out of sight around the dogleg to the west, but rumbling through the cold, wet air. That white noise covered conversation, and many of the ordinary sounds of movement.
"Who?" Alleyne Loring said quietly as he donned his mail shirt and buttoned the jacket over it again.
Six heads were close together as they bent to lift the end of the long timber into the clamp and fasten the chain across it. Astrid spoke smiling, as if chatting casually among friends out to find a Yule Log.
"Yrch," she said; to the Dunedain that meant enemies. "Could be bandits, could be servants of the Lidless Eye. I saw only two that I'm sure of, so they've got some woodcraft."
Eilir Mackenzie nodded and casually stretched with her arms above her head, which gave her an excuse to look about.
I spotted him – the fir over from the boulder with the point, snow knocked off the branch, she signed. The other's behind the boulder?
Astrid nodded as she mentally tallied their strength here. Herself and Eilir, her anamchara. Alleyne Loring and John Hordle; first-class warriors, though not exactly Dunedain themselves, not quite. Young Crystal, but she didn't really count for a fight. Only sixteen, and not fully trained; brave, but the weak link, the more so as she was slight-built. Another ten Dunedain, in their late teens or early twenties, six of them Mackenzies and the other four Bearkillers. Everyone had bow and quiver, sword and knife and targe or buckler; you didn't go outdoors without, any more than you'd walk out naked. The two Englishmen had light mail shirts under their jackets; under her own she wore a black leather tunic lined with mesh-mail and nylon; Eilir had on a Clan-style brigandine, a double-ply canvas affair with small metal plates riveted between the layers. Most of the others had something similar, but none was wearing a helmet.
"We don't know how many or why," Astrid said. "So we'll all just walk around the corner of the trail up ahead, and then wait for them-double linear ambush upslope. That way we can shoot without hitting each other. They won't follow close."
Send Crystal on to the Lodge with the horses from there? Eilir signed.
Crystal's face was a little pale, but she glared at Eilir; besides being offended at the implication that she couldn't hold her own with the rest, she also had a furious crush on Astrid at the moment: which was so embarrassing. Though she was beginning to show signs of transferring it to Alleyne, which would be infuriating.
Astrid signed back: No. Too risky – they might have an ambush along the trail already. We'll go around the corner, drop the log, and : wait a minute!
The word drop triggered something in her mind. "Here's what we'll do," she began. "Remember that trick we practiced? Like the old story about how the little furry Halfling men fought the wicked Emperor's troopers?"
Eilir's eyes went from the log to the coils of rope draped around it. Her smile grew, and the faces of her companions went from grave to grinning. They were all young.
We'll have to hurry, she signed.
Twenty minutes later Astrid waited behind a tree, wishing for a war cloak, what Sam Aylward called a ghillie suit, of camouflage cloth sewn all over with loops for twigs and leaves. The wool of her jacket would do, it was woven from natural beige fiber; she breathed shallowly and slowly, lest the puff of vapor give her away, and ignored the drip of melting snow from the branches of the big hemlock. She couldn't see any of her Dunedain, though, except for Alleyne, and that was from the rear where he crouched behind a big basalt rock.