Owlflight

temporarily sealing the injury. A brief caress of power melded the end of the bandage into the wrap; the large magics were difficult these days, but the very smallest still worked reliably, making him often glad that he was of no higher power than a Master. He had always depended on the use of small magics, not large, and the loss of the ley-lines and the nodes was of no great import to him.

But he didn’t have much time. There was at least one fighter still alert and active out there, perhaps more, and he himself was now wounded and not capable of drawing a bow without breaking the wound open and making it more serious than it already was. And, also to the point, he had just dispatched two of the enemy with arrows that shouted Tayledras, as clear to read as if he had branded the corpses with the sigil of k’Vala.

So he had three things to do now. Rescue the boy, take care of the betraying arrows, and get both himself and the boy out of there before any more enemies appeared.

:Two come,: Hweel said, showing him where and how fast they were moving. Both had abandoned their horses, and were creeping toward him, afoot, and separated. :Two more, but from farther. They heard the pursuit of the boy, maybe. They do not hurry, but will come soon.:

:Can you protect me while I move toward the boy?: Snowfire asked in return.

The reply was not so much in words as in feelings, a sense of contempt that he had asked so simple a thing. Content in knowing that Hweel would stoop on anyone who got within striking distance of his bondmate, while he in turn worked his way toward the boy, Snowfire began easing his way to the other side of the rockpile. His wounded arm kept sending lances of fire up his shoulder, but he had hunted and fought with worse, and since it wasn’t bleeding badly now, he knew he could afford to ignore it until he was in a safer position.

He kept himself as much under cover as he could, but through Hweel’s eyes he saw that the boy had gotten himself under the concealment of a boulder and was in the process of stringing and readying his own bow.

Good, he thought with some satisfaction. So he’s not helpless, and he’s no coward - and he can think and plan for himself. He isn’t counting on me to come to his rescue beyond what I’ve already done.

Nevertheless, he couldn’t be allowed to take a shot. At the moment he was being ignored as insignificant while the fighters concentrated on Snowfire as the real enemy. That puny little small-game bow didn’t have enough power behind it to do much damage, unless the boy got a lucky eye shot. All that would happen was that the two fighters still within striking distance would stop ignoring him and count him as an enemy, and there was no doubt that they would not hesitate for a moment to kill him. While he was unarmed and only trying to flee, their customs counted him a noncombatant. The moment he raised an arm against them, he was a fighter, since their own boys entered a warrior-society when no older than this boy.

Snowfire got to the boy just as he stepped out of cover and prepared to fire. He reached out and grabbed the boy by the collar with his good hand and yanked him down into cover.

Again, poor lad - he must feel like a kitten being mauled by now.

Quick as a thought, before the boy could cry out, he muffled the boy’s mouth with his other hand for a moment, and put his finger to his lips, miming a message of “silence” the way Valdemarans did. The boy’s eyes were as wide and round as a pair of fat plums, and for a moment, as blank as mirrors with the shock of so rude an “introduction.” But he recovered quickly, obviously guessed at what Snowfire wanted, and nodded vigorously. Satisfied, Snowfire let him go, and he quickly got his feet and hands beneath him, and backed into hiding beside the Tayledras.

:Hweel, where are they?: he silently asked his bird.

The owl showed him; the two nearest enemy were crouched under cover of a bush, at nearly the opposite side of this rocky clearing. The other two had left their horses - which pleased Snowfire - and were making their way on their bellies to join the first two. None of them had bows, which pleased Snowfire even more.

They must be planning to jump on me all at once, he decided. The only problem for them is, I’m not where they think I am.

He thought for a moment, measured distances in his mind, and formulated a plan.

:When we run, spook the farther horses,: he told the owl, and motioned to the boy to stay where he was. He took three arrows from the boy’s quiver and wriggled his way to the first body, where he replaced the two Tayledras arrows with the boy’s.

Then he worked backward to the second body, and did the same with the last arrow.

It was a good thing that he’d picked barbless game-arrows when he blindly drew in the heat of the moment; they had broad heads, but tapered back to the shaft and were in fact meant to be easy to draw out. Barbed, man- killing arrows, on the other hand, were meant to be difficult to remove from a wound. His hunting arrows came out with very little trouble, and he inserted the boy’s arrows with no problem. With such optimal targets, someone with his level of skill would have been just as lethal with the light Valdemaran arrows as his own. The fact that the boy’s bow wasn’t heavy enough to have given the arrows the power to penetrate as far as they did was of no significance, for the enemy had seen him and knew that he had made the shots, not the boy. He only wanted them to think that he was Valdemaran, not Tayledras.