Rod swallowed. "I promise," he whispered, so softly that he could barely hear himself.
Taeauna nodded approvingly, leaned even closer, and breathed into his ear, "A particular haystack."
"A-?" Rod swallowed the "what" even before her finger came up to tap him sternly on his lips.
The Aumrarr dropped her hand down his chest to his arm, and trailed down that arm to his wrist, which she pulled on, gently, and led Rod into deep, branch-tangled darkness.
He concentrated on ducking and weaving as best he could, to avoid shattering every branch, and kept his mouth shut, even when Taeauna lost her balance and sat back hard on his shin and the boot below. She patted his knee by way of apology, and towed Rod on into the night, leaving him smiling at nothing and thinking about how he'd been alone and quite happy about it three nights ago, and now couldn't properly recall how he'd never had Taeauna the Aumrarr in his life.
He blinked. He didn't even know her last name. If she even had one. No, he hadn't ever given the Aumrarr surnames, had he?
Or to put it more honestly, he'd never even thought about it.
Quite suddenly, they came out of the woods, and over a low stone wall made up of boulders and smaller stones, all heaped together in an overgrown ridge, and into a field that was like a bright blanket of silver under the moon.
And there, halfway across it, was a haystack.
It was a heap of hay bigger than some of the cottages they'd walked past, leaving Hollowtree. Taeauna took firm hold of Rod's hand, pointed down and gestured until he understood what she was indicating. He was to walk between the rows of whatever crop had been sown here, following her lead.
There was even a ladder waiting for them, leaning against the huge, shaggy mound. Taeauna stopped him, shaped the haystack with her hands, then moved one hand to indicate that the stack was hollowed out like a bowl on its top. Then she mimed sleeping, her head on her hands. Right, they'd sleep up there. Then she pointed at Rod, at the ladder, and then up.
He shook his head, pointed at her, and then up the ladder. Ladies first.
She repeated her gestures more firmly, frowning at him.
He shook his head, and repeated his gestures.
She shrugged, waved one hand in a contemptuous "whatever" gesture, and went up the ladder. Rod noticed she carried her sword ready in her hand, something he certainly couldn't have done without falling off the ladder.
As Taeauna reached the top of the ladder and clambered forward into the bowl of the stack's summit, there was a sudden commotion.
This particular haystack, it seemed, was occupied.
CHAPTER SEVEN
As Rod stared up into the moonlight, fear growing in his throat again, Taeauna's elbows thrust ' up into view, one after the other, one of her feet kicked, and…
A Dark Helm, helmless and trailing blood from his stabbed face, came hurtling forward off the top of the stack and crashed headfirst into the field right beside Rod. His neck broke with a loud and horrible splintering crack, he convulsed for a flailing moment, and then lay still.
There was a grunt of effort from atop the stack, a gasp, and another Dark Helm fell into view, sagging over the edge of the stack with his arms dangling. And more blood spattered down from his fingertips and then from the rest of him. His throat had been opened like a slaughtered hog's.
Taeauna grunted, high and sharp, and then her bloody face appeared over the edge of the stack so she could order Rod curtly, "Get out of the way."
He stepped back, taking care to keep in the rows, and she shoved the dangling Dark Helm, and then a third one, off the stack to crash down in front of Rod. Then she came back down the ladder, dug into the side of the haystack, and started thrusting the bodies in, crawling atop them and tugging at them unconcernedly.
She didn't move as if she'd been hurt, but Rod asked her anyway, when she'd finished shoving the last boot out of sight beneath the gently tumbling hay. The stack hadn't taken kindly to all her tunneling, and now sagged a bit on the ladder side.
Taeauna pointed at her sliced and streaming forehead. "Just that. One of them had his dagger out to cut his nails."
Rod solemnly drew his dagger, sliced the palm of his hand, and held it out to her.
She swallowed. "Lord, waste not your power. We may both soon need so much more."
"Stop being so cheerful," Rod growled, "and drink up. You think it's easy for me to just cut myself open?"
She thanked him with her eyes, bent, and sucked.
Rod watched the blue fire lighting her hollowed cheeks from within, felt desire stirring in him again, and… the moment passed. She was healed, his wound was gone, and she gave him a grateful smile and started up the ladder again.
Rod rose from his knees before he realized he had even sunk down on them. "Where are you…?"
"We're sleeping up here, as I told you."
"B-but with them down here, lying dead right underneath us?"
She stared at him blankly for a moment, and then shrugged. "Yes. Why not?"
Rod grimly started to climb the ladder. "In Falconfar," he growled aloud, "I guess you-uh, that'd be I-can get used to anything. I hope."
"Lord, Daern and his men are missing from their posts! I-"
"I know," came the cold reply. "They are elsewhere at my command."
The burly seneschal in the doorway swallowed a startled curse. "Lord?"
Baron Murlstag sighed, his yellow eyes gleaming a warning of rising irritation, and turned from his lamplit desk and the ledgers spread open on it. "If you must know, Authren, I sent them to the Arvale border. To a haystack."
"A haystack?"
"Seneschal, I do not take it unto myself to question His orders, and I suggest you also refrain from doing so. They are to intercept two travelers, a wingless Aumrarr and a man walking with her, and bring them here. If you are wiser than I was, you will not ask why. If you are a fool and ask anyway, rest assured I cannot give you an answer; I was furnished with none except a promise to take my life from me slowly and painfully, if I dared ask again."
"Oh," the seneschal of Morngard told the floor in front of his boots gruffly. "One of those matters."
Baron Murlstag nodded. "One of those."
Rod's eyes felt as if someone had poured sand into them, his mouth was as dry as a clay kiln, and his throat itched. Inside.
Something very bright was trying to leak in, all around his eyelids, and something else was pinching his left earlobe repeatedly. He brushed whatever was pinching away, or tried to; it seemed to be made of unyielding, unmoving stone.
"Come down," shouted an unfamiliar voice-a rough, mature man's voice-from somewhere nearby, "or we'll loose our bows!"
Whatever it was pinched Rod's ear again.
He yielded, rising into wakefulness with an irritated swat at that something. Which caught his hand in an iron-strong grip and announced firmly, in Taeauna's voice, "Stop flailing around, lord, or I'll throw you off this haystack."
Haystack? Oh. Oh, yeah. Oh, shit.
Rod sat up suddenly, blinking in the bright morning sun. He could barely see over the edges of the untidy bowl of hay he and Taeauna had slept in. At least, he presumed they'd slept; he remembered nothing at all after lying down on his back and turning his head slowly to stare up at the full canopy of unfamiliar stars overhead.
The haystack was surrounded by unfriendly faces, of armsmen in chainmail and helms, with loaded and aimed crossbows in their hands. Aimed at Rod, now.
Only one man in the ring didn't have a bow; he was the one on a horse, with a drawn sword in his magnificent gauntlets. He glared at Rod as if sleeping on a haystack was a torturing-to-death offense. He was a broad-shouldered, burly sort, with a jaw-fringe-with-little-point beard, and he wore a golden gorget and the largest gauntlets Rod had ever seen, even including all the more fanciful sword-and-sorcery illustrations that adorned the covers of his books and everyone else's shelved in the same section of the bookstores.