'Damn. Out of the mouths of babes. Good thinking, kitten.'
Which meant that the odds were high that they would strike straight south soon. Going across country to try at least to catch up was a better plan than it had seemed a few moments ago.
Plots on plots -- what if someone wants the boy to marry his girl? Getting Tilden to forbid the marriage in order to get the girls back would do that, and Sursha doesn't even have to enter into it. What if they want to make a political incident out of this, between Jkatha and Rethwellan? Making it look as if Sursha is behind it could easily do that. The trouble is -- the trouble is -- a lot of these plots end in murders.
'Warrl, we need you now,' she told the kyree, and with a groan, he jumped down off the pillion-pad behind her into the ankle-deep snow. 'We'll keep going as long as we can, then we'll stop for a rest and start as soon as there's light.'
'Footing?' Jadrie said hesitantly. 'For the horses? Shouldn't we have some light?'
Tarma followed in Warrl's wake before she answered, but this was practical knowledge for Jadrie. 'If we didn't have Warrl, or if he was fresh, or if we were on anything but Shin'a'in horses, I would agree. Warrl is too tired to make more than a walk,' she pointed out. 'At that pace, we let the horses feel their own way. I don't want to advertise our presence with a light -- in conditions like this, you could see a light for leagues. Plus if the kidnappers have a mage, he might be able to sense a mage-light.'
There was no more comment from Jadrie, so Tarma put the child out of her mind, and let Warrl lead them all onward, as the horses placed their hooves with deliberate care.
At this point, she wasn't anything more than a passenger; she folded her arms and rucked her hands into her belt, let her head sag, and dozed. If the damned sword wasn't making life too difficult for Kethry, she knew her partner was doing the same. Catch sleep whenever you can. The mares and Warrl would warn of danger long before it was visible, and they were too far behind the kidnappers for there to be any likelihood of stumbling into their camp. Of course Jadrie wasn't going to nap, and shouldn't, because she didn't have a battlemare, only a Shin'a'in-bred saddlemare. But Jadrie also had two advantages over her elders -- the first, that she wasn't expected to fight or track later and didn't need the extra sleep, and the second that she was decades younger than either Tarma or her mother and could go longer on less rest.
The horses plodded on into the thick darkness, as Tarma roused herself roughly every candlemark or so to check their bearings by Kethry and Need. As she had expected, some time within the first candlemark after darkness fell, the kidnappers turned south, and were probably on the trade road into Jkatha right at that moment. Probably camped. I hope the girls are all right, at least for now. It was some comfort to know that they were in a wagon, probably locked in there, and that the people who'd taken them were trained and disciplined. If all they were was terrified -- well, they could get over simple terror. There were other things that could happen to little girls that were harder to get over.
Including being murdered.
It was just after midnight that Warrl stumbled over a snow-covered branch, and admitted,
Both mares stopped when Warrl did, and Jadrie's horse only went another pace or two further than that. 'Right. We're stopping, Keth,' Tarma called.
Kethry grunted a vague reply, and shook herself awake. As she and Tarma slid stiffly out of their saddles, Kethry kindled a very dim mage-light and Tarma looked around for a suitable campsite. There wasn't much, out here in an area of rolling hills mostly covered with scrub and very rough grasses, but a half-circle of snow-covered bushes gave a certain amount of protection from wind and watchers. She got Jadrie to help set up the tiny tent, and Kethry got out grain for the horses and took over the three packs and extinguished the light. Then, while Kethry laid blankets down on the floor and tucked their packs inside for safekeeping, Jadrie and Tarma unsaddled the horses, rubbed them down, and gave them their rations. She didn't need to hobble the battlemares, for they wouldn't wander, and to keep Jadrie's mare from strolling off, she simply fastened her halter to Ironheart's.
The tent was very small, but big enough for all three of them to lie down together, with a little room to spare for luggage. As Tarma had known she would, Kethry had set up a spell to keep it warm all night long, without a fire. She'd also done something to make the tent poles glow faintly (a glow that couldn't be seen from outside through the canvas) so that they could see to keep feet out of faces. Their blankets were to pad the tent floor beneath them, and to keep the cold from seeping into their bodies from below, not for warmth. It was possible that a mage could sense all this, but these were very minor magics, and well within the scope of just about any earth-witch or hedge-wizard.
Without being asked, Jadrie brought in a leather pail full of snow, and rucked it into the comer to thaw, then took one of the outside positions. Tarma took the other, putting Kethry into the 'protected' position between them -- but then Warrl wriggled into the tent, somehow getting into the available space (what there was of it) and put himself between Jadrie and the tent wall. Kethry gave each of them a strip of dried meat and a piece of hard journey bread; they ate in silence and warmth and passed the water-skin back and forth until the thirst roused by salt-dried meat and bricklike bread was gone. Kethry extinguished the glow of the tent poles, and the silence seemed even deeper.
Then Kethry took a deep breath, and Tarma knew she was going to say something.
