The Silver Gryphon

use for them. If they were forced to leave, there was a lot of potentially useful and immediately useful gear they would be forced to leave behind.

If. That was the trick. She could not for a moment forget that something out there had drained away their magic without any warning at all. If the wreck made a good target for searchers to find, it also made a good target for other things to find—including whatever knocked them out of the sky. Assume it’s an enemy, and assume he attacked. That was the wisest course of reasoning and the one she had to begin planning for.

For that matter, there was no telling what prowled the forest floor. Just because they hadn’t yet run into any major predators, that didn’t mean there weren’t any. The longer they stayed in one place, the easier it would be for predators to locate them.

“Thank goodness for Aubri,” came a muffled sigh from her right, and Tad came up out of his pile of seeming- rubbish at the same moment. He held in his talon a nonmagical firestriker, and Blade put aside the pile she’d been sorting to take it from him. Now she could make a fire with the dry, shellac-coated splinters of the basket and pile damp, green wood around that fire so that it could dry out enough to burn.

Tad remained with his pile; evidently he’d found the box that had held all of the nonmagical gear that Aubri had insisted they take with them. She eyed the improvised shelter for a moment. Think first, plan, then move. If you ruin something, there’s no one around to help with repairs. And not much to make repairs with.

She wanted a way to shelter the fire from the rain, without getting too much smoke into the shelter. And she didn’t want to take a chance on ruining the shelter they already had.

Right. There’s the tent flap. I bend those two saplings over and tie them to the basket, then unfold the tent flap and tie it down—there. And I think I can do that with one hand. Then maybe we can create a wind barrier with long branches and some of those big leaves. Plan now firmly in mind, she one-arm manhandled the saplings into place, then pulled the flap of canvas out over the arch they formed to protect the area where she wanted to put the fire. Carefully she tied the end of the tent flap to another broken tree, fumbling the knot several times; if it wasn’t caught by a big gust of wind, it would hold. At least they wouldn’t be lacking in wood, even though it was very green. They’d brought down a two or three days’ supply with them when they fell and they also had spare clothing to use for kindling. Build the fire first, then see about that barrier.

She scraped the leaf-litter away from the ground until she had a patch of bare earth, then carefully laid a fire of basket-bits, broken boxes, and some of the leaves she found that were actually dry. With the striker came a supply of tinder in the form of a roll of bone-dry lint lightly pressed together with tiny paper-scraps. She pulled off a generous pinch and put the rest carefully away, resealing the tinder box.

The firestriker was a pure nuisance to operate, especially one-handed. She finally wound up squatting down and bracing the box with one foot, and finally she got a spark to catch in the tinder and coaxed the glowing ember into a tiny flame. Frowning with concentration, she bent over her fragile creation and fed the flame carefully, building it up, little by little, until at long last she had a respectable fire, with the smoke channeling nicely away from the shelter. At that point, everything ached with strain.

Breathing a painful sigh, she straightened, and looked over at Tad to see what he’d found. The thing that caught her eye first was the ax. That, she was incredibly glad to see! It was small enough to use one-handed, sharp enough to hack through just about anything. And right now, they needed firewood.

She got painfully to her feet and helped herself to the implement, then began reducing the debris around their improvised camp into something a bit more useful to them.

She tossed branches too small to be useful as firewood into a pile at one side. If they had time before darkness fell or the rain came—whichever was first—she’d make a brush-palisade around the camp with them. It wouldn’t actually keep anything out that really wanted to get at them, but animals were usually wary of anything new, and they might be deterred by this strange “fence” in their path.

And anything pushing through it is going to make noise, which should give us some warning. Now just as long as nothing jumps over it. When Tad needs to urinate, we’ll collect it and spread it around the perimeter, the scent of any large predator should scare most foragers and nuisance animals away. And other than that, it is a perfect day, my lord.

The branches holding huge leaves she treated differently, carefully separating the leaves from the fibrous, pithy branches and setting them aside. When she had enough of them, and some straight poles, she’d put up that sheltering wall.

Every time she swung the ax, her body protested, but it wasn’t bad enough to stop her now that she had some momentum going. If I stop, I won’t be able to move for hours, so I’d better get everything I can done while I’m still mobile.

Evidently Tad had the same idea; he was sorting through the supplies with the same single-minded determination she was feeling. He’d found her two packs of personal supplies, and his own as well and put all of them in the shelter; laid out next to them was the primitive “Aubri gear.” In between swings of the ax she made out candles and a candle-lantern, a tiny folded cook-stove, canteens, two shovels, and three leather water bottles. Two enormous knives good for hacking one’s way through a jungle lay beside that, also a neat packet of insect netting, fishing line and hooks, and a compass. He’d gotten to the weapons they’d carried with them as a matter of course, and she grimaced to look at them. They were largely useless in their present circumstances. Her favorite bow was broken; the smaller one was intact, but she couldn’t pull it now. Nor could she use the sword Tad was placing beside the oiled-canvas quivers of arrows. Beside that he laid his set of fighting-claws—which might be useful, except that he couldn’t walk while wearing them.