Then he closed the door, and once again, closed in the cold darkness, they heard the bar drop across it outside.
Well, this time at least we have food and water, that nice fur robe, and we've padded the floor. She didn't want to risk making any conversation that might be overheard, so she curled back up in the still-warm fur robe and after a moment of hesitation, Meri curled up beside her. She shoved their padding aside until she found the chink in the floor by the thin, weak light that came up through it, and got the knife, the paper cone, the bits of white silk, and the silver beads out of hiding.
Then they waited, listening to the sounds of the men moving around the camp outside. Some of them were speaking a language Kira didn't know, but Meri nodded when she looked askance at her sister. Jkathan, then. So why have Jkathans kidnapped us? It was all a frustrating puzzle.
Finally there were the sounds of jingling harness and horses' hooves, and the wagon moved as at least two horses were hitched up to it. There hadn't been a driver's seat on the front of what was essentially a plain box, so Kira decided that the kidnappers must be controlling the horses with one man riding on the near-side beast. That was the way that prison-wagons were often harnessed so that the prisoners inside would not get a chance to kill the driver; it would make sense for their kidnappers to use a prison-wagon to hold them. There was no chance they would be able to break out of it, and nothing for them to use as a weapon inside. As for getting attention or help from strangers, most people avoided prison-wagons like a curse, and if anyone did hear screaming and calling from one, they'd ignore it, even if it sounded like children were doing the screaming. There were plenty of ways a child could end up in a prison-wagon, all of them perfectly good reasons to lock such a child up. Madness, for one, which would make it highly unlikely that anything they shouted would be heeded or believed.
Well, she didn't need to make any trouble for their captors in here -- she'd already made enough out there. If everyone ate at least some of the beans, in a couple of candlemarks, they'd start to feel the effects. We only ate two seeds each, and there must have been dozens, maybe hundreds, in that bag. But they were cooking all night, and that might have weakened the brew. Or would it have concentrated? I wish I knew more about these things.
Finally the wagon lurched forward and bumped onto the frozen surface of the road. Meri got the journeybread out of hiding and offered her some. They shared the waterskin between them, but drank sparingly; neither of them doubted that their captor had been telling the truth, and that there would be no stops until nightfall. Well, no planned stops.
When she'd finished her tasteless chunk of bread, she laid the patch of floor bare, and under cover of the fur, began dropping beads and bits of silk to the road below. If the seeds affected their kidnappers at the same rate she and Meri had been affected, right about noontime things would start to get interesting.
* * *
In the uncertain light of false dawn they woke and packed everything up hastily. Warrl had recovered his strength completely, and was ready to go before they were, so he took the opportunity to run down a bunny for his breakfast. They were back on the trail before true dawn.
As Tarma had bleakly expected, the trail dead-ended on the traderoad, which had thawed and re-frozen, leaving an unreadable, hard, rutted surface. There was no trace of the wagon or the horses they'd been following. Even Warrl couldn't get a scent on a surface like that.
That would have been all right, since with Need to guide them, they knew which direction to go, but they hadn't gone a league before the road split into three, all of them going south. Pick the wrong one, and their quarry would get so far ahead they'd never catch up. She sat and swore, silently, staring at the damned triple-fork, as Warrl scouted ahead on the frozen surface, hoping for a trace of scent or some other miracle to give them a clue. Then, beyond expectation, the miracle occurred. :Mindmate!: the kyree called excitedly. :Here, the middle road! I have a patch of Kira's and Meri's scent!:
Now Tarma swore happily. "Warrl has a scent!" she called to the other two, and sent her mare loping down the uneven surface as they followed the kyree. Warrl went on ahead, reporting tiny patches of scent at uneven intervals, confirming that the first patch wasn't a fluke.
"What is he picking up?" Kethry asked, wonder-ingly. "What could he possibly be picking up?"
"I don't know," Tarma began, "Maybe one of them managed to rub a hand on a wheel, but you'd think he'd have picked that up before this-"
"I think I know!" Jadrie suddenly said, and urged her horse ahead of theirs. She dangled down from the saddle in a trick Tarma had taught her and snatched something tiny off the top of a rut without pausing, then turned her horse and came back to them. "Look!" she said in triumph, holding up a tiny thread of white. It didn't look like anything.
"What in-" Tarma went cross-eyed trying to look at it.
Jadrie grinned. "It's the white silk embroidery thread I gave Meri for Midwinter. Remember, you've trained Kira, and she knows she has to leave us something to follow. I bet they're cutting it up and dropping it out of the wagon."
"I bet you're right." She turned her attention to the kyree and thought at him. Warrl, if you lose the trail, check to either side of the road. You're following bits of silk, and they might blow off the road itself.
:Clever girls!: was his comment, and with that sure guide, they were able to increase their pace to the ground-eating lope that best suited the kyree, even when the road branched, and branched again.
By midmorning, they came upon the kidnappers' camp, with the scent of the girls all around it. The ashes of the fire were cold, but Tarma knew the kidnappers couldn't have increased their lead by much, if anything. Warrl reported that the girls had been sick, which didn't surprise Tarma at all, and didn't worry her too much. That was a natural reaction to what had happened to them, and it was encouraging to know that Warrl reported no signs that the children had been mistreated in any way -- no blood, no torn-out hair, the scent of fear but only what he would have expected. He would be able to scent a drop of blood too small to see; even bruised flesh would leave a "different" odor to his keen senses. And as for other kinds of abuse -- well, those would have left clear scents as well, and Warrl found nothing of the sort.
They didn't spend too much time at the campsite; there wasn't much it could tell them that they didn't already know. The snow was too trampled to tell how many men they were facing, though Warrl's guess was around twenty. There was one place where a small tent had clearly been set up, and that meant these kidnappers had a leader, someone who considered himself too superior to the others to sleep beside the fire with the rest of them. There was no scent of the girls at that spot, and it wasn't likely they'd be allowed out of their prison, especially at night, so the tent had to belong to the leader.
They set off in much less than a candlemark, and when the road forked again, Warrl ranged up both forks until he found another bit of silk, giving them the right direction. But it wasn't until they came across a horse-dropping that was still faintly warm that Tarma knew for certain that they would be able to catch up to the kidnappers.