He hadn’t the strength to do anything but take huge, gasping breaths that burned his lungs and brought a stitch to his side.
He could not believe what he had just seen, and yet the scene was etched into his memory as indelibly as if the fires Justyn had called up had scorched the image there.
He still couldn’t think clearly; conflicting emotions warred in his mind for the upper hand. Rage grappled with heart-shattering grief and kept him from breaking into helpless tears. Fears warred with confusion and kept him from going on, despair battled with determination and urged him to crawl into the nearest hole to hide. Where was he to go? What was he to do? How was he to get away from these madmen? For madmen they must be; why would anyone in his right mind want to attack an impoverished, dying backwater like Errold’s Grove, a place where so few people had even a single copper coin to their names that most of the village transactions were run on barter and tally-sticks?
A single small, sane voice spoke up amidst the confused babble of thoughts in his head. Get off the path, stupid! If they’re still following you, that’s how they’ll come!
He straightened up with difficulty, trotted a few, stiff paces farther along the wall of underbrush, and wriggled through a set of vines whose springy tendrils would snap back behind him, rather than breaking, leaving no trace of his passage.
Unless, of course, they have some sort of tracking beast, the voice reminded him. This is no place to hide. Collect your thoughts, and think of something better.
He wriggled underneath some bushes and huddled there, breathing hard, each breath stabbing the bottom of his lungs like a red-hot poker, and listening. There was plenty of noise behind him, but nothing immediately around him.
Where did I get into the woods? Through the wheat-field; that was on the back side of the village, next to the corn and away from the bluff. So I won’t be striking the river if I keep on this way, but I also won’t have to climb. Will these people have a tracking-beast? Do armies have such things with them? He hadn’t seen any dogs, but that didn’t meant they weren’t there. He tried to remember what, if anything, Justyn had said about the armies he had been with, but he couldn’t recollect enough. Now he regretted not listening to the old man’s stories; they’d seemed so irrelevant at the time, but now - !
Now I only hope I have more time to regret not listening to him!
His next thought was to climb a tree, but he dismissed it immediately as a bad idea. If the enemy had a tracker, he’d be trapped. No, he had to get as far away from the village as possible.
And then what?
One thing at a time; get away first, worry about what comes next after you’ve gotten away.
He stayed where he was until his sides and legs didn’t hurt as much, listening cautiously for sounds that meant pursuit. That didn’t just mean the sounds of someone coming down the path behind him; it meant the lack of normal sounds from the small birds and animals nearby, and the warning calls of birds that had been disturbed by intruders, cries that would come from higher up in the trees.
There was nothing immediately around him but silence broken only by a few faint rustles and mutters, and he decided with some reluctance that he ought to go back to the path. It was true that anyone hunting him would have to use it, but it was equally true that he would make much better time if he didn’t have to fight his way through the undergrowth. His passage would be quieter, too.
I can wait until I’m deeper into the Forest before I get off the path. A bit farther on, the undergrowth thins, and I can move through the trees a great deal easier.
That would make for another danger, though. Thinner undergrowth would mean a better chance of being spotted if the enemy had also gone off the path. Just because he knew the Forest, it didn’t follow that the enemy was ignorant of it.
Nevertheless, sitting here only made being caught more likely. He shook off his doubts, wriggled out of his cover as branches and twigs caught at his hair and clothing, and found his way back to the path he had abandoned, trying to make a minimum of disturbance to the underbrush.
His tough, bare feet made no more sound on the path than the falling of a leaf, and he trotted along with an arrow nocked to his bow, all senses alert, for what seemed like an eternity. His nerves strained to the breaking point, so much that he shivered, like a nervous hare, and started each time a birdcall broke the silence. Every deeper shadow seemed to hide an enemy, and every cracking twig might be the sound of a heavy foot.
What’s ahead of me in this direction? He thought about the path for a while, and decided that one of his storm-shelters was - a pile of rock slabs in the middle of a rock-strewn clearing, with enough room under three of them piled together for him to squeeze himself and a small fire beneath. According to the villagers, at some point - farther than any of them had ever cared to go and farther than he had been able to penetrate - it became Hawkbrother territory. Well, weren’t they supposed to be Valdemar’s allies? Shouldn’t they do something about these invaders? If he could get away, maybe he ought to try to find them.
If he could get away from the invaders in the first place. A posthumous revenge was not going to be very satisfactory from his point of view.
The undergrowth thinned, as he knew from past explorations that it would, and he put his arrow back in the quiver, fastened the cover over it, and unstrung his bow, slinging it over his shoulder. Now that he could see for some distance, he knew that he no longer had much of an advantage with his bow - if he saw an enemy now, it would not be a case of surprise at short range, and the enemies were armored. He might be the best shot in the village, but a small-game bow had no chance against armor. His only chance of felling one of these men would lie in a lucky shot through the helm-slit, and today did not seem a good day to trust his luck.
He picked up his pace into the lope his father had taught him for covering the greatest amount of ground with the least effort. Now it was possible to see for some distance under the trees; what growth there was here was composed of thin, delicate bushes with slender leaves, a few sparsely-leaved vines with stems as thick as his leg, and some pale-green weeds liberally festooned with prickles. There wasn’t a great deal of cover, and it was the huge tree trunks themselves that blocked vision. He got off the path, and under the trees, hoping that he would be able to see trouble before it saw him.
A few furlongs farther on, he ran into the enemy’s second line. He literally ran into it; a patrol of three mounted men - he rounded a huge tree trunk and suddenly there they were, their horses shying away from the unexpected intruder.
That was all that allowed him to escape them. As they fought their startled horses, he dodged between two of them, and ran, darting in and around the trees, feeling the place between his shoulder blades crawl as he expected an arrow to hit there at any moment.
After the initial surprise, they seemed to treat his appearance as something of a joke. He couldn’t understand their language, but their laughter was plain enough - cruel though it sounded. Evidently they thought that hunting him was going to be an entertaining way to pass the time. As he ran and dodged, hoping to get to his rockpile and hide, they pursued him without putting their horses into a lather, and before too many moments had passed, it was obvious to him that they were making a game out of herding him before them.