We should have made our rendezvous today or tomorrow, so by tomorrow or the day after, the Silvers we’re relieving will know there’s something wrong. They have a teleson; they ‘II let Judeth know, but it would take a team of rescuers coming at full speed another two or three days to reach here. So— what does that make it? Another two or three days before help will have a chance of being here at best. More likely a week.
So there’was no point in looking for a shelter and a place where they could set up a good signal fire. Shelter alone would do for today and tomorrow.
Nothing presented itself for another mark—except the first signs she had seen yet of large animals on the forest floor. She came across a place where a pig had clearly been rooting at the base of a tree, searching for underground fungi, and with regret she saw that the trail went off into the north and not the west. A pig would have been very welcome to both her and Tad.
But she was not going to risk going off in a different direction on just the chance that they might be able to bring one down.
The heat was oppressive; when the rains came again, she had every intention of soaking herself and her clothing. If she didn’t, by tomorrow morning her tunic and trews would be able to stand by themselves, they were so saturated with sweat. She was grateful to Tad for his subterfuge with the plant scent for more reasons than the obvious; without the pungent aroma of crushed leaf hanging around her, she would be smelling herself by now.
On the other hand, maybe if I smelled bad enough, our trackers would be offended and leave us alone. Hah!
Sweat trickled steadily down the back of her neck, and her hair itched unbearably. For that matter, so did her feet, shins, armpits . . . any number of tiny forest insects were finding her tasty fare, and she was covered with itching, red welts. Something she had forgotten was that their original tent not only set itself up and took itself down, the spells on it protected them from insects. Without that protection, she seemed to be the only source of food for every bloodsucker for furlongs about, except for the ones buzzing about poor Tad’s eyes and ears. Her bruise-medicine eased the itching enough for her to sleep, but she would have given a great deal to discover a plant that rendered her inedible to bugs. Every time she paused, she found herself reaching inside her clothing to scratch at another itch.
She kept reminding her herself to rub, not scratch. If she broke the skin, she opened herself up to infection—if she bled, she added a particularly tasty scent to her own, and one the plant juice would not cover.
Something near her ear buzzed, landed, and bit. She slapped and swore, as Tad crept into cover beside her.
We may not need stalking beasts to finish us off. The insects may nibble us to death.
“Ants,” Tad muttered in her ear.
“Is that what just got me?” she asked without turning her head.
“No. That had wings and a long nose. I am reminding myself to lie on an anthill, if we can find some of the small brown ones. It will be irritating, but they will rid me of any passengers I may be carrying. Their secretions, when the ants are angered, drive away mites and other small pests.”
She felt a twinge of raw envy; if only it could be that easy for her! But lying on an anthill would do her no good since most of the bugs that plagued her were winged, and the subsequent ant bites would be just as irritating as her current crop of bites and stings.
She couldn’t wait for the afternoon rain; sweat made the bites itch worse, and standing in the pouring cold water gave her the few moments of complete relief she got from the incessant itching.
Time to move. Maybe we’ll find a stream today, and I can go to sleep lying in it! Then again, given our current luck, if we found a stream it would be infested with leeches.
Never mind. The one thing they had to do was keep moving, and cope with whatever came up. It couldn’t be more than a week until help came.
All they had to do was to survive that long.
Six
Ah, hells. This isn’t easy, one-handed. A bit off-balance because of her injured shoulder, Blade threw her final bundle of branches over the canvas of tonight’s shelter just as the first rumbles of thunder began in the distance.
Ah, damn! That hurt!
Blade doubled over despite herself. Her chest felt constricted, as if cinched tight with rope. Thunder rumbled again, nearer. She’d finished just in time, though not too soon so far as she was concerned; she was ready for the rain, more than ready by now. As she straightened up, she had no doubts that she was ready for rest as well.
This shelter was both superior and inferior to the last one; like last night’s, it was also based on the remains of a fallen tree, but this tree had fallen quite recently. The splintered wood of the trunk shone fresh and pale against the greenery, which was how she had spotted it in the first place. Although there were no hollow places in the trunk or snag to shelter in, the tree had taken down another right next to it in its fall, and there was an intersection of the two trunks, providing a triangular area with two man-high “walls” of wood. Stretching the canvas over the top of this place made a roof; piling branches on top of the canvas disguised their presence. A further barricade of brush hid the entrance, and they would even have the luxury of a small fire tonight, screened from view by the brush. More branchlets over a pile of big leaves made a springy floor, giving them more comfort tonight than they had enjoyed since the accident.
Now if only she could find something in her medicines to numb these damned insect bites!
Thunder rumbled again, overhead this time. In the course of gathering their branches, she had stirred up many tiny animals; mice, lizards, snakes, and frogs. She had caught and killed as many of those as she could, and tonight she and Tad would supplement their dinner with these tidbits. Individually, they weren’t impressive, but she had collected an entire sack of them, enough to give Tad much-needed supplements. She’d probably appropriate a couple of snakes to roast and give some flavor to her flavorless bread, but the rest would go to Tad.
She would be adding insects to her ration, for she had found grubs of a wood-borer that she recognized, ant pupae, and crickets, all of which she could choke down so long as they were toasted. When she had been going through survival training, she had never really pictured herself putting any of her training into practice!
Well, I have this much revenge; if the bugs are eating me, I’m eating the bugs! Insects were really too small to do Tad any good, so by default they went to her.
Tad was inside the shelter arranging things and getting the fire going, and she thanked the Star-Eyed that he had enough magic to light fires again. With the help of magic, even the greenest, wettest wood could be coaxed to burn. Without it—they’d have a poor fire, or none, and she could not bear the thought of eating untoasted bugs.
I’d rather go hungry a bit. I might get hungry enough to consider it, but not now.