After Tris left, Rialla sat up again. It would be good to have some time to herself again; she wasn’t used to being continuously around people. In Sianim sometimes she would go for days without talking to anyone except her horses. The past month had left her little time to herself, and she was beginning to feel suffocated.
Tris negotiated the dark forest as if it were daylight; his eyes were well adapted to the dim light of the moon. He chose to follow their backtrail, checking carefully for signs of being followed. After traveling a respectable distance, he broke the stalks of grass into small pieces and scattered them on the trail he and Rialla had left. Histweed would be even more effective than pepper for irritating the nasal tissues of any animal tracking them. When he had used the last of the herb, he dusted his hands clean and looked around.
He had reacted without thought this afternoon when he realized Rialla had exposed herself to such danger. When she’d backed away from his anger, her fear had tugged at the link that bound them together and triggered an atavistic rage for which he’d been unprepared. Although he’d been told a threat to the bond could cause such a reaction, he’d dismissed the warning when Terran’s rape had called forth nothing unusual. Apparently the rape hadn’t qualified as a threat to their bond. He’d been able to control the rage this afternoon long enough to continue his attack deliberately, hoping she would fight back. If she had run from him… He would rather not know what could have happened. His laughter had been as much relief as amusement. He needed this time away from Rialla to collect himself.
Their backtrail covered, he decided to find the Uriah; it would be helpful to know where it was so they didn’t waste time avoiding it unnecessarily. Without Rialla’s human presence, he was free to travel by sylvan ways. That would let him find the Uriah and return to Rialla before she started to worry about him.
Humming under his breath, he called to the magic around him, and spun it swiftly to form a tunnel before him. He continued to spin as he walked into the shadowed way that lead straight through the hills and valleys lying in his path. The abundance of yew and oak here heightened the effect of his magic, and it took him minutes to cross the distance it had taken half a day to travel.
When he reached the place where he and Rialla had last seen the Uriah, he closed the tunnel and emerged near the stream they’d followed most of the day. He set off in an easy lope through the trees. It didn’t take him long to find the kilclass="underline" a moose. Its bones were scattered along the path the things had taken—from the tracks it seemed that there had been more than one Uriah.
Tris stumbled over half of one of the heavy leg bones, snapped neatly in two; he marveled briefly over the strength needed to crack the dense bone. He spared a moment to be glad the creatures had happened upon the moose rather than him and Rialla. The Uriah’s trail was easy to follow, even in the dark. Broken branches and torn-up sod where several had briefly scuffled over something were as clear to Tris as a chalk arrow drawn on the trees.
Topping a hill, he caught sight of a small fire to his right. He dropped to a walk and left the Uriah’s trail to investigate the camp.
As he neared the fire, Tris caught the salt-sweet smell of horses and was careful to stay downwind as he approached. The animals shifted uneasily at the noise he made climbing a tree, but they calmed down when he made no aggressive moves.
From his vantage point, he could see there was no one in the small clearing, but the wood in the fire hadn’t been burning long. Tris assumed that whoever had built it would return, and he settled in for a long wait.
He made out Winterseine’s voice first, as the campers returned.
“… don’t understand why you insisted on leaving the guards behind. This is a dangerous place.”
“Precisely, Father. The more people that are running around the more likely we are to attract the attention of any brigands or Uriah that are in the area. I can handle thieves or Uriah, but I can’t protect a troop of men from them.” Terran’s voice sounded more decisive than Tris remembered.
Tris crouched where he was and watched as Terran and Winterseine returned to camp with several cleaned fish on a string.
“We can’t afford to let her get to Sianim with that dagger. If I am implicated in Karsten’s death, it would keep me from controlling Darran. Are you sure that you know where she is? We haven’t seen as much as a footprint.” From Winterseine’s intonation, Tris received the distinct impression that it wasn’t the first time that Winterseine had questioned the direction he and Terran were going in.
“I told you, she’s stopped a league or two southwest of here.” Terran’s voice had a bite to it. “We’ll catch up with her sometime tomorrow. You haven’t seen her tracks because we’re not following their trail. This route is more direct than the one they’ve been taking.”
Winterseine asked the question that was foremost on Tris’s mind. “What do you mean their trail? I thought she was alone.”
Terran grunted then said slowly, “No. She’s been traveling with someone else. I can’t quite see who it is—he may be a magician of sorts.” He paused, then commented, “He’s not with her now, but he was most of today. I suspect that he might have helped her get out of the hold.”
“You mean that she’s traveling with a magician?” asked Winterseine in arrested tones.
Terran nodded and began to prepare the fish for the fire.
Winterseine had his back turned so that Tris couldn’t see his face, but tension coiled in the human’s stance. “She stole my grimoire. We need to find them as soon as possible, before the magician realizes what he has.”
Terran stopped working with the fish and looked at his father intently. “And just what is it that he has? Your spellbook? The one taken was the one that you wrote as an apprentice; certainly there is nothing there which a magician wouldn’t already know.”
Tris, watching unseen, thought about the sheets of parchment that had fallen out of Winterseine’s spellbook and wondered.
Winterseine hesitated. “There were some spells there my old teacher gave to me that I would rather not pass down… and I do not relish the thought of another wizard paging through the book.”
Those pages must be important, thought Tris with satisfaction.
Terran turned his attention back to their dinner, and Tris took advantage of the moment to leave the tree. He eased quietly back into the forest and lost himself in the shadows.
Thoughtfully, he resumed his search for the Uriah. The search had more urgency now, as it seemed that he and Rialla would be traveling tonight, and he didn’t want to be stumbling into a group of Uriah in the dark.
He smelled them long before he saw them and, remembering tales of their acute senses, used his magic to draw the darkness more tightly around him and cover any sound he might make before he approached more closely.
There were six of them sleeping; Tris was struck by how human they looked at rest. When he’d seen the one before, he hadn’t noticed the resemblance; they didn’t move like humans any more than a wolf moves like a dog. At rest in the dark, they seemed nothing more than a filthy group of people.
Tris found another tree to climb, one that gave him a clear view of the Uriah. All of them were male, but Tris had expected that. He’d never heard of a female Uriah.
On the far side of the pack, one of them had used the root of an old oak as a pillow. There was a heavy branch above it that looked sturdy. Closing his eyes, Tris felt for the magic that connected all of the trees in the forest, then he looked for the particular tree he wanted. When he found it, he traveled along the flow of magic, reemerging on the branch of the oak, with the Uriah sleeping just below him.
As he looked down, he realized he was closer than he’d ever been to one of them; a shiver ran up his spine. Irritated with himself for his uncharacteristic fear, he craned his neck until there were no leaves between him and the sleeping creature. That was when he noticed something around its waist. A sturdy leather belt hung loosely on the Uriah’s hips; the broken strap of a sword or knife sheath was still attached to it, though the sheath was gone.