Instantly, four of the hooked thorns fastened themselves into the tough material of his cloak, holding it and him firmly in place. He cursed under his breath. He didn't have the time to deal with this delay but he had no choice. He reached behind him and grabbed a handful of the cloak. Gently at first, then with increasing pressure, he tried to pull the garment free from the tenacious vine.
At first, he thought he was succeeding, as he felt a slight give. But this was just the elastic vine itself, stretching as he pulled. Then it reached the end of its stretch and he was held firm. In fact, he realised angrily, he was now more firmly snagged than before. His movement had made the thorns bite more deeply. Worse still, the thorny vine held him trapped in a half-standing position.
There was nothing for it. He would have to take off the cloak and cut the vine away. Held from behind as he was, he couldn't reach the infuriating creeper. That meant he had to remove his quiver, which he wore over the cloak, then the cloak itself.
All of which meant extra movement, which could well give him away to the Genovesan assassins as they lay in ambush somewhere out there. Again, he cursed silently. Then slowly, with infinite care, he slid the strap of the quiver over his head and put it to one side. Unfastening the clasp that held the cloak in place at his throat, he eased the garment from his shoulders.
Hurry, he thought. Halt is depending on you getting into position!
But he resisted the panicked impulse and moved with infinite patience, knowing that a hasty movement might betray him. He had the cloak off now and drew his saxe knife. The vine had snagged high on the cloak, between his shoulderblades. He sliced through it easily with the razor-sharp blade then slowly, the cloak bunched in his hands, he sank to the ground.
Still maintaining the same painfully slow movements, he re-donned the cloak. For a moment he considered leaving it behind but the extra concealment it afforded decided him against such a course. He passed the quiver strap over his head and settled the arrows on his shoulder, adjusting the flap on his cloak that covered the distinctive feathers of the fletching. He strung his bow and was ready to move again. He took a quick look back through the forest, the way he had come. There was no sign of movement, no sign that he had been noticed. Still, he thought, the first sign of that was likely to be a crossbow bolt.
He had to assume that he had remained unseen so he moved on, staying in a crouch now, keeping low to the ground and sliding quietly from one piece of cover to the next. Several times he detoured to avoid more hanging tendrils of the innocent-looking stay-with-me vine. He'd learned that lesson the hard way, he thought grimly.
When he judged that he had come nearly seventy metres to the left, he swung right a little to parallel the path Halt was following. Any further out and he'd be too far away if anything happened. The dense wall of dead trees would block his view completely. And gradually, as he moved forward, he began to angle back in towards the path being taken by his mentor.
He was standing now, trading concealment for extra speed, hoping to make up the time he had lost with the vine. But this far out, he could afford the risk, he thought. Unless he and Halt had it all completely wrong, the assassins would be somewhere to his right, hopefully on the same side of the path and looking away from him. Noise was his main enemy now and he placed his feet with extreme care on the litter of dead sticks that covered the ground, inching and easing his soft boots between the sticks to prevent snapping them.
Fifty metres to his right, he noticed a patch of forest where the trees were more widely spaced and the trunks were noticeably thinner than the majority of trees in the forest. He slipped to a new vantage point and studied the lie of the land from behind the bole of a tree.
Nothing moved. But his senses told him this would be the place. He eased away from the tree and slipped forward for another five metres, then went behind another tree, his eyes never leaving that area where the trees thinned.
He had actually raised his right foot to step out from behind cover when he spotted a brief flicker of movement and froze instantly. He waited, foot partially raised, eyes boring into the grey ranks of trees, waiting to see if the movement might be repeated.
Then he saw them. And once he'd picked them out, he wondered how he'd ever missed seeing them in the first place. Although he had to admit that the dull purple cloaks blended well into the shadows of the forest.
He smiled grimly. It was the movement that had betrayed them. Move and you're almost certain to be seen, Halt had told him over and over as they had practised.
'You were right, Halt,' he said silently to himself.
As he had expected, the two crossbowmen were crouched behind a fallen tree trunk. They had added a haphazard pile of fallen branches to it, creating a higher barrier, but one that would still go relatively unnoticed. Both men had their crossbows levelled across the top of this makeshift parapet. They were half turned away from him. The fallen tree ran at an angle to his position and their attention was fixed on a point in the forest some thirty metres from where they crouched.
He followed the line of their gaze as best he could but could see nothing. Odds were, that was where they had sighted Halt, and now he had gone to ground, Will thought.
He heard a small sound then – a shuffling sound, of a body moving quickly over the ground, accompanied by the loud snapping of several branches. It seemed to come from the point they were watching and one of them actually rose a little higher behind the barrier, his crossbow ready and seeking a target.
The trees formed a thick screen between him and the Genovesans. He was further away from them than he'd like to be. If he had to shoot, his arrow could be deflected by any one of a dozen trees or branches. He estimated that he was sixty metres out, and he really needed to get closer to be sure of his shot.
Whatever it was that he'd heard moving a few seconds ago, and he assumed it was Halt moving into cover, had attracted their full attention. There was no risk they'd see him if he moved, unless he was stupid enough to step on a dry branch. He flicked the cover flap away from his quiver and drew an arrow, nocking it onto the bowstring. Then he stepped, light-footed as a fox, out from behind the tree that sheltered him and began to close in on the two crossbowmen.
Five metres. Ten. Another five. Still they kept their full attention on the trees to his right. If they hadn't been watching so intently, there was a chance they might have seen him in their peripheral vision. He was approaching them on an angle, just behind their right side, not from directly behind. But he could tell by their body language that they were completely focused away from him. They were like two hunting dogs, bodies almost quivering with excitement and tension as they caught the first scent of their quarry.
Another step. Feel the bent branch under the ball of your foot, gently work the toe under the branch, check that your foot is on flat ground now, then let your weight go forward onto the ball of that foot. Then start the whole process over again with the other foot. He was into a more comfortable range now. The trees formed less of a screen between him and the two Genovesans. In another few paces he'd be…
Halt stood up.
There was no warning. One moment, the forest seemed empty. Then, with a rustle of undergrowth, the grey-bearded Ranger seemed to rise out of the ground, his bow already trained, an arrow on the string and drawn back.
Will heard a short cry of surprise from one of the crossbowmen, saw Halt shift his aim slightly as the sound revealed the man's position. Both crossbows came up fractionally and Will drew and shot at the man closest to him. As he did so, he heard the deep-throated thrum of Halt's bow, closely followed by the dull slap of the crossbow string smacking into the stop.