It had then been six o’clock. Outside it was already dark.
“I think we had better go on,” Ben said slowly. “After all, it was you who said we wanted Frisky’s nose, not her eyes… and I, for one, would testify before the throne of any King in creation that Frisky has a noble nose.”
Frisky, sitting in the doorway, barked as if to say she knew it.
“All right,” Naomi said.
He looked at her closely. It had been a long run from the camp of the exiles, with little rest for either of them. He knew they should stay… but he was nearly frantic with urgency.
“Can you go on?” he asked. “Don’t say you can if you can’t, Naomi Reechul.”
She put her hands on her hips and looked at him haughtily. “I could go on a hundred koner from the place where you dropped dead, Ben Staad.”
Ben grinned. “You may get your chance to prove it, too,” he said. “But first we’ll have a bite to eat.”
They ate quickly. When the meal was finished, Naomi knelt by Frisky and quietly told her that she must take up the scent again. Frisky didn’t have to be asked twice. The three of them quit the farmhouse, Ben with a large pack on his back, Naomi with one only slightly smaller.
To Frisky, Dennis’s scent was a blue mark in the night, as bright as a wire glowing with an electric charge. She began to follow at once, and was confused when THE GIRL called her back. Then it came to her; if Frisky had been human, she would have slapped her forehead and groaned. In her impatience to be off, she had started sniffing up Dennis’s backtrail. By midnight she would have had them back at Peyna’s farmhouse.
“That’s all right, Frisky,” Naomi said. “Take your time.”
“Sure,” Ben said. “Take a week or two, Frisky. Take a month, if you want.”
Naomi cast a sour glance Ben’s way. Ben shut up-prudently, perhaps. The two of them watched Frisky nose back and forth, first across the dooryard of the deserted farm, then across the road.
“Has she lost it?” Ben asked.
“No, she’ll pick it up in a minute or two.” I think, Naomi didn’t say aloud. “It’s just that she’s found a whole tangle of scents in the road and she has to sort them out.”
“Look!” Ben said doubtfully. “She’s off into the field there. That can’t be right, can it?”
“I don’t know. Would he have taken the road to the castle?”
Ben Staad was human, and he did slap his forehead. “No, of course not. I’m a dolt.”
Naomi smiled sweetly and said nothing.
In the field, Frisky had paused. She turned toward THE GIRL and THE TALL-Boy and barked impatiently for them to follow. Anduan huskies were the tame descendants of the great white wolves the residents of the Northern Barony had feared in earlier times, but tame or not, they were hunters and trackers before they were anything else. Frisky had isolated that bright-blue thread of scent again, and was in a fever to be off.
“Come on,” Ben said. “I just hope she’s found the right scent.” “Of course she has! Look!”
She pointed, and Ben was just able to make out long, shallow tracks in the snow. Even in the dark Ben and Naomi knew the tracks for what they were-snowshoes.
Frisky barked again.
“Let’s hurry,” Ben said.
By midnight, as they began to draw close to the King’s Preserves, Naomi began to regret the crack she’d made about how she could go on a hundred koner from the place where Ben dropped dead, because she had begun to feel as if that might soon happen to her.
Dennis had made the trip in better time, but Dennis had set out after four days of rest, Dennis had had snowshoes, and Dennis had not been following a dog who sometimes lost the scent and had to cast about for it again. Naomi’s legs felt hot and rubbery. Her lungs burned. There was a stitch in her left side. She had taken a few mouthfuls of snow, but they could not slake her raging thirst.
Frisky, who was not burdened by a pack and who could run lightly along the snow crust, was not tired at all. Naomi was able to walk on the crust for short distances, but then she would strike a rotten spot and plunge through the crust into soft snow up to her knees… and on several occasions, up to her hips. Once she plunged in waist-deep and floundered about in a tired fury until Ben worked his way over and pulled her out.
“Wish… sled,” she panted now.
“… wishes… horses… beggars’d ride,” he panted back, grinning in spite of his own weariness.
“Funny,” she gasped. “Ha-ha. Ought to be a court jester, Ben Staad.”
“King’s Preserves up there. Less snow… easier.”
He bent over, hands on his knees, and gasped for breath. Naomi suddenly felt that she had been selfish and unkind, thinking about how she herself felt, when Ben must be even closer to the point of exhaustion-he was much heavier than she, especially with the weight of the larger pack he carried added into the bargain. He had been breaking through the snow crust on almost every step, leaping through the long fields like a man running in deep water, and yet he had not complained or slowed.
“Ben, are you all right?”
“No,” he wheezed and grinned. “But I’ll make it, pretty child.”
“I am not a child!” she said angrily.
“But you are pretty,” he said, and put his thumb to the tip of his nose. He wiggled his fingers at her.
“Oh, I’ll get you for that-”
“Later,” he panted. “Race you to the woods. Come on.”
So they raced, with Frisky chasing along the scent ahead of them, and he beat her, and that made her madder than ever… but she admired him, too.
104
Now they stood looking across the seventy koner of open ground between the edge of the forest where King Roland had once slain a dragon and the walls of the castle where he had been slain himself. A few more snowflakes skirled down from the sky… and a few more… and suddenly, magically, the air was filled with snow.
In spite of his weariness, Ben felt a moment of peace and joy. He looked at Naomi and smiled. She tried a scowl but it wouldn’t fit her face and so she smiled, too. A moment later, she ran her tongue out and tried to catch a flake of snow. Ben laughed quietly.
“How did he get inside, if he did?” Naomi asked.
“I don’t know,” Ben said. He had grown up on a farm, and knew nothing of the castle’s sewer system. Probably every bit as well for him, you might say, and you would be right. “Perhaps your champion dog can show us how he did it.”
“You really think he did, don’t you, Ben?”
“Oh, aye,” Ben said. “What do you think, Frisky?”
At the sound of her name, Frisky got up, ranged along the scent for a few feet, and looked back at them.
Naomi looked at Ben. Ben shook his head.
“Not yet,” he said.
Naomi called Frisky softly, and she came back, whining.
“If she could talk, she’d tell you she’s afraid of losing the scent. The snow will cover it.”
“We’ll not wait long. Dennis had the snowshoes, but we’re going to have something he didn’t, Naomi.”
“What’s that?”
“Cover.”
105
In spite of Frisky’s growing restlessness at being checked on the scent, Ben made them wait fifteen minutes. By then the air had become a shifting cloud of white. Snow frosted Naomi’s brown hair and his own blond hair; Frisky wore a cold ermine stole. They could no longer see the castle walls ahead of them.
“All right,” Ben said softly, “let’s go.”
They crossed the open ground behind Frisky. The big husky moved slowly now, her nose constantly at the snow, puffing it up every now and again in cold little bursts. The bright-blue runner of scent was dimming, being covered by the white no smell stuff from the sky.
“We may have waited too long,” Naomi said quietly beside him.
Ben said nothing. He knew it, and the knowledge gnawed at his heart like a rat.
Now a dark bulk loomed out of the whiteness-the castle wall. Naomi had moved slightly ahead. Ben reached out and grabbed her arm. “The moat,” he said. “Don’t forget that. It’s up here somewhere. You’ll go over the side and land on the ice and break your ne-”
He got just so far and then Naomi’s eyes blazed with alarm. She pulled out of his grip. “Frisky!” she hissed. “Hai! Frisky! Danger! Drop-off! “She darted after the dog.