To hell with it, she told herself and faked a stumble, cursing. The scrunching in the brush stopped.
Limping ostentatiously, Starhawk hobbled to the side of the track and sat down in the dense shadows of the brushwood. Under cover of Fiddling with her bootlaces, she tied the burro’s lead to a branch. Then she slithered backward into the brush, snaked her way down the shallow, overgrown ditch, and climbed up onto the scrubby hillside beyond.
The night was clouding over again, but enough starlight remained to give her some idea of the shape of the land. Her pursuer moved cautiously in the scrub; she focused on the direction of the popping of cracked twigs. Keeping low to better her own vision against the lighter sky, she scanned the dark jumble of twisted black trunks and the mottling of grayed leaves.
Nothing. Her shadow was keeping still.
Softly her fingers stole over the loose sandy soil until they found what they sought, a sizable rock washed from the stream bed by last winter’s rains. Moving slowly to remain as quiet as she could, she worked it free of the dirt. With a flick of the wrist she sent it spinning into the brush a few yards away.
There was a satisfactory rustling, and part of the pattern of dark and light that lay so dimly before her jerked, again counter to the general restless movement of the wind. The vague glow of the sky caught the pallid reflection of a face.
Very good, the Hawk thought and eased her dagger soundlessly from its sheath.
Then the wind changed and brought to her, incongruous in the sharpness of the juniper, the sweet scent of patchouli.
Starhawk braced herself to dodge in case she was wrong and called out softly, “Fawn!”
There was a startled shift in the pattern. The shape of the girl’s body was revealed under the voluminous folds of a mottled plaid cloak—the dull, almost random-looking northern plaid that blended so deceptively into any pattern of earth and trees. Fawn’s voice was shaky and scared. “Starhawk?”
Starhawk stood up, clearly startling the daylights out of the girl by her nearness. They stood facing each other for a time on the windswept darkness of the hillside. Because they were both women, there was a great deal that did not need to be said. Starhawk remembered that most of what she had said to Ari had been in Sun Wolf’s tent; of course the girl would overhear.
It was Fawn who spoke first. “Don’t send me away,” she said.
“Don’t be foolish,” Starhawk said brusquely.
“I promise I won’t slow you down.”
“You can’t promise anything of the kind and you know it,” the Hawk retorted. “I’m making the best time to Grimscarp that I can, over some damned dirty country. It’s not the same as traveling with the troop from Wrynde to the Peninsula or down to the Middle Kingdoms and back.”
Fawn’s voice was desperate, low against the whining of the wind. “Don’t leave me.”
Starhawk was silent a moment. Though a warrior herself, she was woman enough to understand the fear in that taut voice. Her own was kinder when she said, “Ari will see that you come to no harm.”
“And what then?” Fawn pleaded. “Spend the winter in Wrynde, wondering who’s going to have me if Sun Wolf doesn’t come back?”
“It’s better than being passed around a bandit troop and ending up with your throat slit in a ditch.”
“You run that risk yourself!” And when Starhawk did not answer, but only hooked her hands through the buckle of her sword belt, Fawn went on. “I swear to you, if you won’t take me with you to Grimscarp, I’ll follow you on my own.”
The girl bent down, the winds billowing the great plaid cloak about her slender body, and picked up something Starhawk saw was a pack from among the heather at her feet. She slung it over her shoulder and descended to where the Hawk stood, catching at the branches now and then for balance, holding her dark, heavy skirts out of the brambles. Starhawk held out a hand to her to help her down to the road. The Hawk’s grip was like a man’s, firm under the delicate elbow. When they reached the road together. Fawn looked up at her, as if trying to read the expression in that craggy, inscrutable face, those transparent eyes.
“Starhawk, I love him,” she said. “Don’t you understand what it is to love?”
“I understand,” Starhawk said in a carefully colorless voice, “that your love for him won’t get you to Grimscarp alive. I elected to search for him because I have a little—a very little—experience with wizards and because I believe that he can be found and rescued. It could easily have been any of the men who came. I can hold my own against any of them in battle.”
“Is that all it is to you?” Fawn demanded passionately. “Another job? Starhawk, Sun Wolf saved me from—from things so unspeakable it makes me sick to remember them. I had seen my father murdered—” Her voice caught in a way that told Starhawk that the death had been neither quick nor clean. “I’d been dragged hundreds of miles by a band of leering, dirty, cruel men, I’d seen my maid raped and murdered, and I knew that the only reason they didn’t do the same to me was because I’d fetch a better price as a virgin. But they talked about it.”
Her face seemed to burn white in the filmy starlight, her body trembling with the hideous memories. “I was so terrified at—at being sold to a captain of a mercenary troop that I think I would have killed myself if I hadn’t been watched constantly. And then Sun Wolf bought me and he was so good to me, so kind...”
The hood of her cloak had blown back, and the stars glinted on the tears that streaked her cheeks. Grief and compassion filled Starhawk’s heart—for that distant, frightened child and for the girl before her now. But she said, with deliberate coldness, “None of that means that you’ll be able to find him safely.”
“I don’t want to be safe!” Fawn cried. “I want to find him—or know in my heart that he’s dead.”
Starhawk glanced away, annoyed. She had never questioned that she should look for the Chief—her loyalty to him was such that she would have undertaken the quest no matter what Ari had said. Her own unquestioned prowess as a warrior had merely been one of the arguments. Her native honesty forced her to recognize Fawn’s iron resolution as akin to her own, regardless of what kind of nuisance she’d be on the road.
The older woman sighed bitterly and relaxed. “I don’t suppose,” she said after a moment, “that there is any way I could prevent you from coming with me, short of tying you up and dragging you back to camp. Besides losing me time, that would only make the two of us look ridiculous.” She stared coldly down her nose when Fawn giggled at the thought. “You know, don’t you, that you might cause the troop’s departure to be delayed if Ari takes it into his head to search the town for you?”
Fawn colored strangely under the starlight. She bent to pick up her pack again and start toward where the burro was still tethered, head-down against the wind. “Ari won’t look for me,” she said. “For one thing, you know he wouldn’t delay the march north. And besides.. .” Her voice faltered with shame. “I took everything valuable of mine. Clothes, jewels—everything that I would take if I were running off with another man. And that’s what he’ll think I did.”
Unexpectedly, Starhawk grinned. Fawn might not be able to reason her way past their arguments, but she certainly had found a matter-of-fact means of discouraging pursuit. “Don’t tell me you have all that in that little pack?”
Startled at the sudden lightening of the Hawk’s voice, Fawn looked quickly up to meet her eyes, then resumed her smile ruefully. “Only the jewels. I thought we could sell them for food on the way. The rest of it I bundled up and dropped over the sea cliffs.”
“Very nice.” Starhawk smiled approvingly, reflecting that she was evidently not the only person in the troop to hold possessions lightly. “You have a good grasp of essentials. We’ll make a trooper of you yet.”