Matti grinned at him across the rushing distance, hunched forward on her cob-and that stolid gelding looked as if it was starting to enjoy itself too. They passed the Dun again with faint cheers ringing from the gate-towers. Now the two children had drawn ahead, Epona's sheer speed as she took one hedge after another and the girl's lighter seat on her gelding leaving Liath and Aoife trailing; the women had their war-gear on too, of course, adding thirty pounds or better to their riding weight. Ulf and Fenra were between the guards and the children, dashing at their best pace and sparing a little breath for a bark now and then. A big lean dog-or a wolf-could keep up with a horse in a short sprint, if not longer.
The meadows narrowed around them as they thundered westward, trees drawing in on either side and the ground getting steeper. They went past the tannery with its smelly vats and the bark-mill, where an ox walked in a circle pulling a great, toothed wheel that crushed tanbark from hemlocks; soap was made there too, an equally stinky trade. Now Dun Juniper was tiny in the distance, walls bright as the afternoon sun tinted the stucco that coated the walls. Epona cleared a last hedge, but Mathilda's cob was ahead of them-even Epona couldn't travel as fast jumping fences as the other horse could gallop down a nice straight road. The roadway didn't end, not right away; it went on through the forest for a couple of miles to the lookout station at the westernmost tip of this ridge of hill, where it gave a wonderful view over the valley below. That had been just a foot trail in the old days, but since then it had been widened and leveled to take carts.
"Catch me if you can!" she taunted, and vanished under the trees.
Rudi grinned and followed, ducking his head reflexively as the first of the branches flashed by overhead, even though it was far too high to hit him. There were big Douglas firs on either side, and Garry oak, silver fir, and hemlocks. They kept the undergrowth down, save for some thickets of berry bushes, so he could see the hoof-churned surface of the dirt track as it twisted this way and that ahead, and the ruts of the oxcart that took supplies out to the lookout station. He was gaining on Mathilda; the girl was very nearly as good a rider as he was and a bit lighter, but Epona wasn't just faster, she was more surefooted and confident on the narrow, winding path, and he leaned into the turns as effortlessly as the mare made them. The trees flashing by made the speed even more fun than it had been in the open meadow; glimpses through the forest like a world of green-brown pillars with sunlight filtered through the canopy into a soft translucent glow, but touched by beams of fire where there were breaks in the roof of boughs. The air was full of the deep, cool scent of fir sap and moist earth, the first yellow blossoms of twinberry catching the light and the green tips of the new ferns pushing up through last year's litter. They'd made more than a mile since they entered the woods, and soon they'd come out together on the little clearing there at the end; there they could lead the horses back and forth to cool them, and give them a drink from the spring.
Then something pricked at him. Matti's stopped, he thought, feeling an interior sensation like an ear cocking. Epona's hooves made a muffled drumbeat in the cathedral silence, and the two warriors were coming up fast behind him, but: I can't hear her horse at all.
"Whoa," he said, and shifted his weight back in the light saddle. "We don't want to run into her."
Epona slowed as they approached the next twist in the road, but the dogs belted on past, tongues lolling out of their smiling jaws. There was a huge black walnut there, planted by his mother's great-uncle all those years ago and with a spreading crown a hundred feet high, just leafing out now for the new year; it had rolled its nuts downhill through lifetimes, and there was a teardrop of smaller trees and then saplings down the slope. A little shrine to Herne stood near its man-thick trunk.
An explosion of birds went up from the huge hardwood's branches as he turned the corner, and Ulf and Fenra were barking furiously. Then they fell silent-not before he heard one of the dogs give a howling whine of pain, and he heard Mathilda's voice shouting protest.
"Wait-" he began, alarmed now, and tried to halt the horse.
It was too late. Around the tree he had just time enough to see Mathilda sitting her horse, white-faced and shaking with armed strangers in mottled green-brown clothes about her, before a rope snapped up in front of the mare's feet. Even Epona couldn't stop that quickly, but she managed to leap it, with a hopping crow-jump nothing like her usual grace. Rudi lost a stirrup, and then a branch hit him painfully in the chest just as Epona hopped again, half in protest and half to get her feet back under her.
He felt himself toppling, knew he couldn't recover in time, and kicked his other foot out of the stirrup as he came off, tucking himself into a ball as he flew, landing loose and rolling. His brooch burst; his plaid came loose and wrapped itself around his legs, and his bow flipped him onto his face. Something rapped him painfully as he slid to a stop in the wet, loose leaves and fir needles, knocking the wind out of him. He smelled blood as he landed, the thick copper-iron scent of it heavy and rank like butchering-time, when a carcass was hung up to drain into the oatmeal-filled tubs below.
And as he fell, a crossbow bolt whined through the space he'd occupied an instant before, hammering into the hard, dense wood of the walnut with a sharp crisp tock! sound.
Just beyond him, behind a bush, Fenra lay dead with a great slash in her neck and the red still ebbing out of it, her lips curled back from her fangs in a last snarl. The shaggy leaf-strewn shape beyond with the stiff plastic flight feathers of a crossbow bolt showing against its flank must be Ulf. Epona reared and bugled as she stood over him, milling her forefeet in the air like steel war-hammers, her nostrils flaring as she took in the scents of death. And men in camouflage clothing were running towards them. One stopped and bent to span his crossbow so that he could reload; others were raising theirs.
"Epona!" he shouted, trying to make his will into a dart, the way his mother had taught him. "Home, Epona. Home! Go home!"
The horse came down and turned in the same motion, bounding forward with that astonishing jackrabbit leap she had, going from a standstill to a gallop in less time than it took to draw a breath. Four of the men shot at her; three missed, and one bolt scored across her withers just as she turned the corner and vanished back eastward on the road to Dun Juniper. Hands grabbed at his hair. Rudi drew his dirk and slashed back and up. The keen edge hit flesh; he could feel it part under the steel, and a man swore: "Jesus, the little bastard cut me!" Christians, Rudi thought, rolling erect and kicking his feet free of his loosened plaid. He felt calm somehow, and everything was very slow, like swimming underwater in the pool by the mill. More closed in on him, grown men, with hoods and masks of the same mottled cloth as their jackets and pants. The others laughed at the man clutching a slashed arm, with blood leaking from between his fingers. Not bandits. From the Protectorate.
"Watch out, the little fuck's quick as a snake!" the wounded man growled; he was thickset and bearlike, with a fringe of reddish hair over hazel eyes.
"Don't you hurt him!" Mathilda screamed, and a woman's voice answered:
"Take him alive if you can."
"Aoife! Liath! Danger!" he shouted-once, and darted a thrust at a slim olive-skinned man advancing with his arms spread wide to grab.
The man-at-arms grunted as the point took him in the belly, but there was mail under the jacket, and the hand that closed on his wrist was quick and troll-strong, twisting the knife out of his grasp. Rudi kicked-neatly, the way he'd been taught-but his toe hit a box protector and produced only a pained grunt, not a scream. Then a hard hand clouted him on the side of the head, and everything went gray and remote as he slid to the ground, not quite unconscious but not connected to the world. A pad of cloth went over his mouth, fastened with a strip of priceless duct tape, and another twist pinned his wrists in front of him.