She yawned again, then grimaced and gingerly rubbed her bruised jaw. “Good idea,” she agreed. “Snares are a more efficient means of getting us supplemental rations than hunting. We’ll trap the area where I dumped the ruined food. Even if there’s nothing left, animals still might come back hoping there will be. Oh, gods, I am stiff and sore!”
“I know precisely how you feel. I saved us some breakfast.” He scraped away the ashes and revealed the cakes, now a bit crisper than they had been, and a bit grimier, but still edible. I wish I had some bruise medicine that would work as well on me as hers does on her.
“Did you!” She brightened, and scratched the back of her neck with her good hand. “Well, that puts a better complexion on things! And my bruise remedy seems to have the additional value of keeping away bugs; for once I haven’t got any new bites. Do you think you want another dose of your painkillers?”
He shook his head. “I took one as soon as it was light enough to see which vial was which.” He handed her a cake, and ate the remaining three, neatly but quickly. One cake seemed to be substantial enough to satisfy her, though he noted that she did devour every crumb and licked her fingers clean afterward. Thanks to the fact that she had filled and refilled every container they had, he had even been able to get a drink without her assistance from a wide pot.
He waited until she ate, washed her face and hands, and looked a bit more alert. “Now what do we do?” he asked, as she dried off her face on her ruined tunic of yesterday. He made a mental note to have her set that out when the rains started, to give it a primitive wash.
She sat back on her heels, wincing as she jarred her shoulder. “Now—we discuss options,” she said slowly. “What we do next, and where we go.”
He stretched, taking care with his bandaged{wing, and settled back again. “Options,” he repeated after her. “Well, we both know that the best thing we can do is stay here. Right?”
“And build a beacon.” She squinted past the canvas up through the treetops, at the tiny patches of sky visible, now and again, winking through the greenery like bright white eyes. “A very smoky beacon. It’s going to take a lot of smoke to trickle up through that cover.”
“It’s going to take two or three days before they know we’re missing,” he said aloud, just to make certain he had all of his reasoning straight. “We have a shelter, and we can make it better and stronger, just by using available wood and leaves. I saw what you did with that windbreak, and we could certainly add layers of ‘wall’ that way over the canvas and wicker. If you look at the fallen leaves, you’ll see that the ones you used dry up a lot like light leather; they’ll hold up as shelter material.”
She nodded, although she made a face. “It won’t be easy, one-handed,” she warned. “And I’m still the only decent knot tier in this team. You can bite holes, I can tie cord through them, but it is still tedious.”
“So we take it slowly. I can do quite a bit, I just have to be careful.” He paused for a moment, and went on. “We’re injured, but I’m still a full-grown gryphon, and there aren’t too many things that care to take on something my size, hurt or not.”
“In that two or three days, whatever brought us down can find us, study us, and make its own plans,” she countered, falling easily into the role of opposition—just as he would, when she proposed a plan. “We have to assume we were attacked and plan accordingly to defend ourselves. This place isn’t exactly defensible.”
He nodded; that was obvious enough. There was cover on all sides, and they didn’t have the means to clear it all away, not even by burning it down.
Assuming they could. He wasn’t willing to place bets on anything. Chances were, if they tried, nothing would happen; after all, they had no way to take down trees with trunks big enough for two and three men to put their arms around. But there was always the chance that they would succeed “better” than they anticipated—and set fire to the whole forest, trapping themselves in an inferno. He had not forgotten that the green wood around the fire last night had certainly burned more efficiently than he had anticipated. No, setting fire to this place to get a defensible clearing was not a good idea.
“We ought to be someplace where our beacon has a chance of being seen at night,” she went on. “I don’t think we made that big a hole in the tree cover when we went through it.”
“We didn’t; I checked.” Too bad, but she was right. Half the use of the beacon was at night, but there wasn’t a chance that a night flyer would see a fire on the ground unless it was much larger than one that two people could build and tend alone.
“The last problem is that there’s no source of water here,” she concluded, and held up her good hand. “I know we’ve had plenty of rain every afternoon ever since we entered this area, but we don’t dare count on that. So—we’re in an undistinguished spot with no landmarks, under the tree canopy, with nothing to put our backs against, and no source of water.”
He grimaced. “When you put it that way, staying here doesn’t seem like much of an option.”
“We only have to go far enough to find a stream or a pond,” she pointed out. “With luck, that might not be too far away. We’ll get our break in the cover, and our water source, and we can worry about making it defensible when we see what kind of territory we’re dealing with. But I think we ought to at least consider moving.”
“Maybe,” he said, doubtfully, “but—”
What he was going to reply was lost in the rumble of thunder overhead—and the spatter of rain on leaves.
“—not today,” he breathed, as the rain came down again, as torrential as yesterday, but much earlier in the day.
Blade swore and stuck her head out to get a good look at the rain—a little too far, as she managed to jiggle the canvas and wicker of their roof just enough to send a cascade of cold water down the back of her neck. She jerked back, and turned white with pain.
The stream of oaths she uttered would have done a hardened trooper proud, but Tad didn’t say anything. The cold water was insult enough, but when she lurched back, she must have really jarred her bad shoulder.
“I’ll get wood,” he offered hastily, and crawled slowly out of the shelter, trying not to disturb it any more.
Getting soaked was infinitely preferable to staying beside Blade when several things had gone wrong at once. She was his partner and his best friend—but he knew her and her temper very, very well.
And given the choice—I’d rather take a thunderstorm.
Five
“Wet gryphon,” Blade announced, wrinkling her nose, “is definitely not in the same aromatic category as a bouquet of lilies.”
“Neither is medicine-slathered human,” Tad pointed out mildly. “I’ll dry—but in the morning, you’ll still be covered with that smelly soup.”
Since he had just finished helping her wrap her limbs and torso in wet, brown bandages, he thought he had as much right to his observation as she had to hers.