Owlflight

Nevertheless, Snowfire was not about to slacken his pace, especially not here, where the ground cover was so thin and sparse that the horse could gallop safely through it. Snowfire guided the running horse in among the trees, allowing it to set its own speed. At the moment, it was so spooked by his appearance and his cavalier handling, that it just wanted to run, and he was disposed to let it. He simply used reins and weight to control where it was going, weaving his way in and out among the massive, columnar trunks, his main effort bent toward herding it in the direction of the stream he and Sifyra had passed on his way here. As soon as he thought they were well out of reach, he planned to slow the beast and take it into the streambed to break their trail.

Gradually, at about the moment when he was ready to slacken their pace, and he was quite certain the boy was long past ready, the horse slowed of its own will. Hweel had been trailing behind them, keeping watch on their backtrail, and had reported no followers. Now he sent the owl back to see if the barbarians had managed to organize themselves. He hoped not; he hoped they’d cut their losses and report to whoever was in charge of them that a huge force of Valdemaran warriors had used a child to lure them into an ambush. He rather doubted that they’d tell the truth, not with two dead and then-horses run to exhaustion and nothing to show for their efforts.

By the time they reached the stream, the energy and excitement that had sustained him had worn off, and his wound was bleeding freely. It had soaked right through the bandage and was going to make a right mess of his tunic if he didn’t do something about it soon. Hweel reported no pursuit at all - the horses were evidently not at all fond of their masters, and were nicely evading capture. The men didn’t have anything with them to tempt the horses into allowing them near enough to grab the reins either, which was certainly a mistake on their part.

That argued further for their being barbarians out of the northern mountains. They weren’t used to horses or riding up there, and wouldn’t have figured out that if your horse didn’t like you, he wasn’t disposed to coming back to you once he’d gotten rid of you, and if that happened, your only chance of catching him was to have something the horse wanted on your person.

The horse he was on didn’t much want to wade into the slippery streambed, but Snowfire used a little Mindtouch to persuade it, muttering to it absently, reminding it with images and feelings how good the cool water would feel on its hot legs. Finally, it stepped gingerly down into the water, and Snowfire allowed it to pick its way carefully among the rocks.

Interestingly, the boy hadn’t so much as uttered a sound in all that time, and he didn’t squirm or show any sign of discomfort, though he had to have been beaten raw by now. Snowfire hoped that his Valdemaran was equal to dealing with the child; he had picked it up mind-to-mind from one of the Guards at the next-to-last site his group had worked, but until he tried to talk to the boy, he wouldn’t know if it was equal to communicating with a possibly terrified child.

Of course, if the boy allowed, he could rectify that quickly enough with another mind-magic session. That was how he knew some of the dialects of the northern barbarians; he’d picked them up from a bold fellow who actually went up there to trade for furs. Snowfire had gotten a great deal of information from that hardy soul; he’d learned, for one thing, that once the barbarians accepted a person as a bona fide trader, he had near-immunity among them. “It’s an extension of their traditional immunity granted to tale-spinners and history-singers,” Shan had told him, and laughed. “But I suspect that it stems more from their greed for pretty baubles and fine fabrics than it does from any real interest in news of the outside world. At least they’re bright enough to know that if they kill the trader who brought the goods, there won’t be any more to follow him.”

The question in Snowfire’s mind was, what brought northern barbarians down into Valdemar? He hoped that there were only a few of them, and not an army. There had been trouble on the northern borders before, and that was when they knew that it was guarded by the Forest of Sorrows. If they had learned that Sorrows was no longer tenanted. . ..

Well, he would concentrate for now on the immediate problem; what to do with the boy, stopping his bleeding, and getting back safely to his base camp.

Snowfire pulled the horse to a halt after they had ridden for several furlongs through the streambed itself. By now the horse was cool enough that he could allow it to drink, and he really needed to rebandage that wound before the blood loss became a serious impediment to his performance. He got them all over to the stream bank, coaxed the horse up onto solid ground, let the boy get off, then dropped off the horse’s back himself.

What he really wanted to do was to lie down, but he wouldn’t be able to do that for a while. His arm hurt like fury, and besides needing to get the bleeding stopped, he wanted to get some cool water on it to ease some of the pain. There was only so much pain-dampening he could do, after all, on limited endurance. Tayledras scouts were durable, but he had just been through a fight, and the aftermath of a fight could leave anyone feeling as if they’d run the length of the Pelagirs,

He looped the horse’s reins around a branch with his good hand, and tied them off, giving the beast just enough slack that it could get a drink and snatch at a few bites of grass. Poor thing - it looked at him with astonishment (perhaps because he’d given it that freedom, or perhaps only because he hadn’t beaten it yet) and then buried its nose deep in the cool water. Then he knelt beside the streambed and carefully unwrapped the bandage from around his upper arm.

He let the wound bleed a little more while he put one end of the bandage under a rock in the sparkling clear stream, letting the swiftly-flowing, chill water wash it out for him. Then he splashed water on the wound, giving it a little rudimentary cleaning, and made certain that it wasn’t any more serious than he had thought.

It wasn’t; it was just a very simple penetration wound, and not a nasty-looking one as deep wounds go. There didn’t seem to be anything left in it, no signs of poisons visible, and as he had recalled, the knife had not seemed dirty or rusty. He reached into the water for the bandage to redo the job one-handed. It never even occurred to him to ask the boy to help.

Before he could do anything else, the boy was already at his elbow and had taken the bandage out of his