That first evening on the track from Far Cry Hold, once the stewpot was heating over the fire and the men were unrolling their sleepbags, the troop leader, a forester whom everyone, with varying degrees of respect and admiration, called Swacky, came over to Jayge. Swacky was a bull-necked man with massive arm and chest muscles from twenty Turns of logging; he had a bit of a belly on him from drinking ale whenever he could get it and eating huge amounts of food, but he was nimble-footed and long-eyed, with a sparse fringe of brown hair and a rough-featured, long-jawed face. When the men had been gathering wood for their cave fire, Jayge had seen Swacky throw an axe at a piece of wood, splitting it neatly down the center. He was told, and he had no trouble believing it, that Swacky could axe wherries out of the sky. The burly man wore a variety of blades, ranging from light throwing hatchets to the two-handed axe strapped to his saddle.
To Jayge’s complete surprise, Swacky thrust a wad of well-thumbed sheets at him. “Memorize these faces. Them’s who we’re lookin’ for. Any or all. Recognize any from your brush at the ravine?”
“Only the dead ones,” Jayge said, but he studied each face carefully, matching it up with his memory. What he held were copies, executed so hastily that they had none of the vitality of the original sketches.
“How’d you know which was dead?”
“I was with the trackers when they found the six with their throats slit. That Telgar woman…”
Swacky caught Jayge’s shoulder in a painful grip. “How’d you know that?” He had lowered his voice, and his expression warned Jayge to keep his answers soft.
“Armald, Borgald’s son, one of those that got chopped down, recognized her when she met us.”
“Tell me,” Swacky said and sat, folding his legs up to his chest, his back to the others.
So Jayge told him, leaving nothing out but the fact of Readis’s astonishing appearance. “I still don’t know who saw a dragonrider,” he added. “I heard later that a sweeprider saw the train stopped and thought it had been caught in a landslide.”
“It had, hadn’t it?” Swacky’s eyes crinkled up in a mirthless grin. “I took a good look, trying to figger that ambush out so we’d avoid such like.”
“And? I was pretty busy helping my folk.”
“Well…” Swacky shifted his bulk, took a knife from his boot, and began to draw a diagram in the dirt. “That ambush was well planned. They was waitin’ for you. How come you never put out no point?”
“We did. We found her dead, pushed over the bank. Couldn’t ride flank. We were close enough to Far Cry by then.”
Swacky waggled the dagger point in admonishment. “Until you’re in the hold, you’re not close enough. Any rate, there were ten deadfalls ready, spaced out to crunch each of your wagons.”
“If they’d been spaced out in the usual intervals,” Jayge broke in, holding up his hand, “as they had been on the flats at the sky-broom plain the day we met…she planned it then, I know it!” And Jayge tasted hatred in his mouth, sour and acrid. “If I catch her, I’ll cut her throat.” His hand went to his dagger.
“Then it’s over too quick, lad,” Swacky said, tilting his long head, his eyes glittering with a malice as savage as Jayge’s. Then he tapped Jayge’s knuckles lightly with his dagger. “If you catch her while in my patrol, you turn her over to me. She hasn’t killed often or lately in those raids of hers, but you’re not the only one wants to see her dead. You was lucky your wagons was strung out up that steep slope. Another thing shows she’s slipping. Your wagons didn’t tip as easy as she thought they would. But—” He held up the blade again. “She’s getting careless. Or desperate.” Swacky did not sound so sure of that. “Lord Asgenar’s been over the waybills on the trade goods you carried, and he can’t find anything she’d have such bad need of she’d take such risks to get.”
“How would Asgenar know what she’d steal?”
“Lord Asgenar,” Swacky corrected, tapping him smartly on the knuckles, his expression severe. “Even in your own head, boy. And Lord Asgenar knows ‘cause he’s been making it his business to find out what she’s been lifting, what she’s got in that base camp of hers, what she might need. Besides a little girl who hears dragons.”
Jayge was indignant. “Thella only mentioned a thief she was after. And I doubted her then, but she was angry.”
“Is that what she told you?” Swacky asked, surprised.
“A girl hearing dragons was the reason for attacking us?”
Swacky nodded his head wisely. “That’s what I was told by that young bronze rider. Such a girl would be very useful to someone like Thella, you can bet your last bootnail on that.”
“That’d be useful,” Jayge admitted. He wondered why the Weyrs had not already Searched her out for one of their queen eggs. “You know, Armald recognized her. But he only called her ‘lady.’ He didn’t say her name to her face, though he told us later.”
“Well, Armald is now dead, you took your share, and you said yourself that your aunt and the fourth man who met her that day damned near got killed, too.” He held his hand out to take back the sketches. “You’ve seen her, boy—you’ll be helpful. That runner of yours good on hills?”
“The best, and he’ll murder roosting wherries, give him the chance.”
Swacky got up to return to his own bedroll. “Well, that’d cause undue noise, boy, and we want to move as fast and as quiet as we can, never knowing what we’ll find.”
“One thing, Swacky. The man who drew those sketches. How do we know who he is? We might kill him by mistake.”
“We’re not to kill anybody is m’orders. Capture ‘em. And keep looking.”
“What are we looking for?”
“Best possible find’d be their main base, but any caves, hiding places, are a help.”
“She won’t be moving anywhere in the snow.”
“Aye, true, but cave holds stand out in snow, don’t they? Then we map ‘em, check ‘em out, and if there’re supplies hidden or buried, we fix ‘em so they can’t be used come spring.”
And with that Swacky moved off.
Toric in a rage at any time was a problem for his household. Toric fuming in the midday summer heat, without the calming influence of either Sharra, who had gone to the Healer Hall at Fort Hold, or Ramala, who had gone to midwife a difficult birth down the west coast, was a burning firestone looking for something to char.
Piemur and Saneter locked eyes and, with a few deft harper signals passing between them, elected to take a positive—and humorous—tack.
“Well, for sure, they’re all inlanders. Never been in so much as a rowing boat before,” Piemur exclaimed, casting a jaundiced eye over at the limp figures on Master Garm’s deck. “Wilted, that’s what they are. Wilted northern lilies. Ah, we’ll take them in hand.” He beckoned to a youngster hovering nearby. “Sara, go get some numbweed to slather on their sunburns and some of those pills Sharra uses for stomach disorders. Your mother’ll know which ones.”
“Master Garm,” Toric said, seething with wrath and indignation. “You will pause only long enough to deliver the cargo from your hold and then you will take those—those excrescences back where they came.”
“Now, Holder Toric,” Garm began placatingly. The sea crossing had been rough, and his passengers had deafened him with their complaints, threats, and unwelcome eruptions. He was certain he would never get the smell out of his big aft cabin. He did not care how much he got paid to take the puny bastards south—he would not go through it again. Those he had smuggled in for Toric had kept their distress to themselves. The pampered lot he had just legitimately brought over had bitched the entire crossing! “Toric, they’re still alive! When they gets over being so sick, you can get a lot of work out of them! Well growed! Fed well, too, to judge by what came up the first day out!”