“And you certainly made an impression on the leader,” Tad observed, cocking his head to one side.
She smiled faintly. “Just making it clear which of us is the meanest bitch in the valley,” she replied lightly. “Or hadn’t you noticed the leader was female?”
“Uh, actually, no. I hadn’t.” He felt his nares flush with chagrin at being so caught in the creature’s spell that he had completely missed something so obvious. “She’s really not my type.”
Her grin widened. “Makes me wonder if the reason she’s keeping the pack here has less to do with the fact that we killed one of her pups, than it does with her infatuation with you. Or rather, with your magnificent . . . physique.” Her eyes twinkled wickedly.
Whether or not she realizes it, she’s definitely recovering. But I wonder if I ought to break something else, just for the sake of a little peace?
He coughed. “I think not,” he replied, flushing further with embarrassment.
“Oh, no?” But Blade let it drop; this was hardly the time and place to skewer him with further wit, although when they got out of this, he had the feeling that she would not have forgotten this incident or her own implications. “You know,” she continued, “if we had even a chance of picking her off, the pack might lose its cohesiveness. At the very least, they’d be spending as much time squabbling over the leadership position as stalking us.”
He scratched the side of his head thoughtfully. She had a good point. “We have to be able to see them to pick one particular wyrsa,” he pointed out. “And traps and rockfalls are likely to get the least experienced, not the most. But it does account for why they’re being so persistent and tenacious.”
“Uh-huh. We got one of her babies, probably.” Blade sank down on the stone floor of the cave, and watched the underbrush across the river. He turned his attention in that direction himself, and was rewarded by the slight movement of a bit of brush. Since there wasn’t a breeze at the moment, he concentrated on that spot, and was able to make out a flash of dark, shiny hide before the creature moved again.
“Interesting.” Blade chewed on a nail, and regarded the brush with narrowed eyes. “I don’t think we’re going to see them out in the open again. They learn quickly.”
That quickly? That was impressive; but he called to mind what Aubri had told him about the pack’s collective intelligence. If there were many more than just the knot that he’d seen, it would mean that as a group, the pack might be as smart as a makaar, and that was pretty smart.
Regardless of what Father claims.
The bushes moved again, and he caught another glimpse of slick black hide. A cross of greyhound and snake . . . I can’t imagine anything more bizarre. But then, Blade would tell me that my imagination isn’t very good. 1 wonder what kind of vision they get out of those strange eyes? Can they see in the dark? Could that white film be a screen they pull across their eyes to protect them from daylight? Can they actually “see” magic? Or scent it?
“I wonder what we look like to them,” he said, musing aloud. Blade shot him a sharp glance.
“I suppose I looked fairly harmless until I whipped out my sling,” she replied. “But I suspect that you look like a movable feast. After all, you are burdened with a magical nature, and it might be rather obvious to them.”
“You mean—they might be more interested in me than you as prey?” he choked. She nodded.
“Probably as someone they’d want to keep alive a while, so they could continue to feed on your magic as it rebuilt. They’re probably bright enough for that.”
He hadn’t thought about that.
It did not make him feel any better.
Amberdrake stood beside the leader of their party and wrung more water out of a braid of hair. He waited for the fellow to say something enlightening. Fog wreathed around them both, and shrouded everything more than a few paces away in impenetrable whiteness.
“I wish I knew what was going on here,” Regin muttered, staring at the pair of soggy decoys wedged up in the fork of a tree. “There’s no trail from the camp, which looks as if the Silvers were trying to conceal their backtrail. But there isn’t a sign of anything hunting them, either. And now—we find this.”
The ground beneath the tree was torn up, as was the bark of the lower trunk; but there was no blood. There was a deadfall rigged of wood that had been tripped, but there was no sign that anything had been caught in it. They might have passed the site by, thinking that it was just a place where some large forest creature had been marking his territory.
Except that there was a human-shaped decoy and a gryphon-shaped decoy wedged high in a tree.
That isn‘t very enlightening.
“They might have run into some sort of large predator,” Drake pointed out. “Just because we didn’t see any sign of a hunter, that doesn’t mean they weren’t being trailed. That would account for why they tried not to leave a trail. Maybe that’s even the reason why they left their camp in the first place.”
This was the first sign of the children that any of them had come across in their trek toward the river. Amberdrake took it as a good omen; it certainly showed that the duo had gotten this far, so their own party was certainly on the right track. And it showed that they were in good enough health to rig something like” this.
“Maybe. But why decoys?” Regin paced carefully around the trunk of the tree, examining it on all sides. “Most forest predators hunt with their noses, and even in this rain, the trail from here to wherever they did spend the night would be fresh enough to follow. I wonder what we can learn from this.”
“I don’t know; I’m not a hunter,” Amberdrake admitted, and let it go at that.
Skan didn’t, however. “Whatever tore this place up is an animal—or at least, it doesn’t use weapons or tools,” he pointed out. “It might just be that the—that Blade and Tad wandered into its territory, and they built the decoys to keep it occupied while they went on their way.”
“Maybe.” Regin shook his head. “Whatever it was, I don’t recognize the marks, but that doesn’t surprise me. I haven’t recognized much in this benighted forest since we got into it. And I’m beginning to wonder how anything survives here without gills.”
With that, he shrugged, heading off into the forest in the direction of the river. Amberdrake followed him, but Skan lingered a moment before hurrying to catch up lest he get left behind and lost in the fog.
“I don’t like it,” he muttered fretfully as he reached Drake’s side. “I just don’t like it. It didn’t look right back there, but I can’t put my finger on why.”
“I don’t know enough about hunting animals to be of any help,” Drake replied bluntly. He kept telling himself that the children were—must be—still fine. That no matter how impressive the signs these unknown creatures had left were, the children had obviously escaped their jaws. “All I know is that whatever made those marks must be the size of a horse, and if I were being chased by something that size, I probably wouldn’t be on the ground at night. Maybe they put the decoys up one tree and then climbed over to another to spend the night.”