Tavis raised his brow. "Can't you look after her?"
"Of course, but that doesn't relieve you of your duties," Morten insisted.
Tavis studied the bodyguard's bearded face and was surprised by what he saw there. Instead of peering down his nose with his customary sneer, Morten met the scout's gaze evenly, his expression one of hope and need rather than disdain.
"You're afraid!" Tavis burst out.
"Don't be ridiculous," Morten replied. "Death means nothing to me."
"But failure does," the scout surmised. "You've lost the princess once, and you're afraid it'll happen again."
Morten's cheeks reddened, and he inclined his head in acknowledgement. "I can only kill our foes," he said. "You can avoid them."
Tavis silently cursed the bodyguard's deficiency, but said. "I'll stay."
The princess furrowed her brow. "What about your friend?"
"Basil can look out for himself." Morten said. He spoke too quickly, frightened Tavis would change his mind. "The life of a verbeeg thief is of no importance."
"It is to me," Tavis said, his voice bitter at Morten's callous attitude. "But don't worry, I know where my duty lies."
In accordance with the plan. Tavis led the way west. Though he probably could have persuaded Brianna to turn south right away, traveling toward the giant lands would misdirect the ogres. It would also put some distance between the scout's company and their pursuers. Just as important, this was the direction in which Basil was most likely to flee. As Morten had pointed out, Tavis's primary duty lay in protecting Brianna, but he also had a secondary obligation to the runecaster. If he happened to run across the verbeeg's trail while guiding the princess, he might be able to meet both responsibilities at once.
The forest floor remained flat and open, save for the scattered heaths and waxy carpets of kinnikinnick. Every now and then, when a thicket looked too dense or they came across a crag of rock jutting up from the ground, the scout would stop and listen, slowly creeping up on the suspicious terrain until he was certain none of Goboka's warriors had circled in front of them.
Tavis did not even try to hide their trail. Had he been alone, he could easily have passed through the forest without leaving any spoor the ogres could follow, but his companions were hardly capable of traveling over even open ground without leaving traces of their passage. As inexperienced trackers, they probably couldn't name even half the many marks a creature left as it moved across the ground, much less avoid leaving those signs themselves.
Eventually, the ground developed a slight upward slope, and the looming white wall of a snowy ridge began to peek over the treetops. The breeze grew damp and fresh, the heavy scent of pine displaced by the chill touch of faraway ice fields. Soon, the distant roar of rushing waters rose among the lodgepoles, and the scout knew they were nearing one of the cold rivers spilling down from the Gray Wolf Mountains.
Tavis brought his small procession to a halt. "We'll use the river ahead to make our break south," he said. "It's time to convince the ogres that we're heading for hill giant country."
"How?" Morten asked.
"You'll carry Avner," Tavis said. "He's light enough that he won't make a difference in the depth of your tracks; the ogres will think he's suddenly taking care to leave no spoor."
"What about the rest of us?" Brianna asked. "Morten can't carry us all."
"You and Morten try to avoid leaving tracks. Stick to solid ground and walk on rocks when you can. Stay away from thickets and dust," Tavis said. "There will still be plenty of signs, but it'll look like you're trying not to leave any, and that's what's important. My own trail will all but disappear, and well take a crooked path, laying a false trail heading northwest. The ogre trackers will think we're trying to lose them."
"And how do we really lose them when the time comes?" Avner asked, climbing onto Morten's back.
"We'll lay another false trail on the other side of the river, then float away," Tavis explained. "There won't be any signs for the ogres to follow."
"Good plan," grunted Morten.
"Of course," said Avner. "Tavis will get us back to Hartsvale. He knows everything."
"Not everything," Tavis corrected. He didn't know how to make Brianna trust him, and until he could do that, nothing else mattered. "I know the mountains, but that's not everything."
With that, Tavis turned and resumed the journey. Moving more slowly now, the scout led the group on an erratic course that took them more or less northwest. Whenever the mood struck him, he would make a sharp turn, sometimes heading east, sometimes west, and occasionally even back the way they had come. Always, he kept a sharp eye out for any disturbance caused by the large, flat foot of a verbeeg, and he listened carefully for the sounds of someone clumsy moving through the forest.
Tavis did not confine his steps to hard ground or rocks as he had advised Brianna and Morten to do. Nor did he take a pine bough and brush away his tracks as foolish humans sometimes did, for such nonsense only made it easier to follow quarry. The sweeping action wiped the actual footprints away well enough, but it also left the ground so disturbed that the trail became as easy to follow as a deer path.
Rather, Tavis moved with careful, light steps, keeping to the pine needles covering the forest floor, placing his feet down as slowly and gently as he could. With each step, he listened intently to the sound of his supple boot soles settling on the ground. Every now and then the soft crack of a snapping twig or the muffled crackle of crumbling pine needles came to his ears. Whenever he heard such a sound, he stopped to retrieve the object that had made the noise, slipping it into his cloak pocket. Then he would look over his back trail to see if he had left any other obvious signs of passage. Occasionally, he would spy a small dip where his foot had rested too long in one place, but these depressions did not worry him. The pine needle carpet was spongy enough to return to its normal state long before their pursuers came.
Soon the scout's wandering path came to a steep bank that descended to the river's refuse-littered flood plain. Solitary boulders, carried ashore by winter ice, lay interspersed among jumbles of old weathered logs strewn over the small flat. Here the forest's regal lodgepoles gave way to trees more suited to the boggy ground, shabby black spruces carrying as many tangles of dead gray branches as they did live green boughs.
The river itself was close to a hundred paces wide, racing down a broad, cataract-strewn channel lined with driftwood and round, moss-blackened stones. Where the waters were not a churning mass of froth and foam, they appeared dark and cold, moving with a strong, steady current that would carry the group swiftly down the valley and, if their ruse was successful, away from the ogres.
The scout sent Morten and Brianna directly down the bank to a log pile that, via a tangled network of crisscrossing boles, led to the river's edge. After wiping his soles clean, Tavis descended the slope by climbing down the barren trunk of a fallen lodgepole and, upon reaching a place where the dead bark still clung to the bole, he jumped to a nearby boulder. That was where, in the wet ground at the rock's base, the scout saw the track.
It was a hoofprint. The horse's leg had sunk close to a foot in the black mud, leaving a round, postlike hole half filled with water. A long line of similar craters led to the river's edge. By the slow rate at which they were filling with seep water, Tavis estimated the tracks were between thirty minutes and an hour old. Given the harsh terrain of the surrounding mountains and the proximity of a elan of hill giants-who prized horse meat as a delicacy only a little less desirable than halfling flesh-the scout did not think it likely a wild horse had left the print.