They raced across the open field, scrambled up and over the raised roadbed and down the other side through the dry stubble of a harvested rice field. As they sprinted through the grassy verge to the steep bank, a shout of alarm cut the air. Sis splashed through the swirling shallows, hands underwater as if feeling along the rocks.
A horn's call shrilled. Shouts clamored.
Sis whooped and beckoned, then plunged in as Brah dragged Shai over. Beneath the water, attached to the rock facing, was a chain. He grabbed hold and took a step, was at once in over his head, the current tearing at his body with an intensity and power as shocking as the cold of the water. His knives and baton were torn loose as he went under.
Merciful One protect me!
He came up coughing and hauled himself along the chain, kicking to keep his head above water. Twice perhaps he heard a horn's call but it was difficult to be sure with the river thundering in his ears. The blanket tangled in his arms and for a moment he thought it was going to choke him; then the current slackened and he found a toehold and clambered up the far bank, heaving. An arrow skittered over the churning surface and was borne downstream. The soldiers had returned, running toward the chain; the two archers knelt, the better to make their mark.
Brah was thrashing in the shallows and abruptly a dull snake slithered away into the current: the wilding had released the end of the chain. He climbed up beside Shai, the two wildings laughing as a pair of arrows plunked into the nearby shallows and the archers bent their strings for a new volley.
Sis whooped a warning. Downstream, a dozen men with swords drawn were running toward them on this side of the river
along a cart track. Brah and Sis broke into a run, Shai at their heels, as the soldiers pursued. The trees here had been harvested, replanted, pruned, coppiced — managed by human hands. They leaped over old stumps, crashed through tangles of woody shrubs.
A snap of breaking branch whipped Shai's head around; a body slammed into him, and he fell hard with weight atop him: that sour breath was definitely human. He shoved up with a hip, braced an arm within the gap that opened, and flipped the bastard; backhanded him with a ringed fist so hard the man grunted and went limp. Shai wrested a spear out of his hands, spun just in time to knock away a spear thrust from another soldier. Spears and staffs were poor weapons to bandy about in undergrowth. He charged, and tripped the man while catching him under the chin with an elbow strike, knocking his head back. The idiot went down hard. He hadn't even unsheathed his short sword. Shai grabbed the sword, sliced the belt, and tugged belt and sheath off the unconscious man. Then he ran, still gripping the spear in his other hand; he wasn't sure where to go, only that he must go deeper in and find a better place to hide. The wildings had vanished, and the villagers in this part of the world had done a hells lot of wood management because the woodland breaks went on and on, never quite giving him enough cover to risk a halt to catch his breath. Soon his lungs were heaving and his legs as heavy as if filled with water from the river crossing. At least his feet were by now as tough as leather.
Racing footsteps rattled through the undergrowth behind him. He cast a look back: three, at least, were gaining on him. A form hurtled out of the air and smashed into the leading soldier, the impact carrying both bodies into a tangle of vegetation. The second soldier was knocked sideways as the bare feet of the other wilding crashed into the man's shoulder. Sis somersaulted in midair, like an acrobat, and landed upright a short distance away. Shai feinted with the sword as the third man hesitated, not sure which target to strike. Shai darted inside the reach of the man's spear and struck him a hard backhand, sword hilt to temple. The man collapsed.
Whoop! Whoop!
The wildings danced out of the foliage and slapped him on the back, coughing with laughter. It was all a game to them.
An arrow rattled through leaves and bounced harmlessly on the earth. The male scooped it up and snapped it in half, still
coughing laughter as the female's ears flicked straight up. Men advanced through gaps in the managed forest.
'Where do we go?' Shai cried.
Another arrow tumbled closer, an archer getting his measure.
The male slapped Shai on the shoulder and lit out running. Shai bolted, following him, but at least twenty soldiers were swinging in to cut him off. The burn in his chest as he ran sucked away his air. A whistle fluted on the wind. Ahead rose a curtain of thorns like the end of his hopes.
Yet Brah's pace did not flag. It was not a solid wall of thorns but rather a lacework growing over ancient trees whose vast limbs traced the contours of the ground like a massive fence on which brambles twined. They ducked under a limb and skipped over a skirt of knobbled roots.
Behind, a man shouted. 'Heya! Weron! Come back! No man is permitted to cross into the wild-!'
'I've got them!' shouted a voice so close that Shai dropped to his knees, thinking it the only way to avoid death.
He rolled, but bumped against a tree as a soldier loomed with a triumphant grin, sword raised for the strike. A smear of movement flashed in the air. The man took two steps and convulsed. He was dead before he hit the ground. Seen through the lacework of the brambles and the fence of limbs, the other soldiers stumbled to a halt.
Shai had not rammed up against a tree but rather a pole decorated with a skull. In the clearing beyond the fence of thorns, each of a dozen such poles boasted a grisly head, most skulls affixed with rope but two were fresher, the eyes eaten away but sinews still making a semblance of a memory of a face. Eight wildings dropped into the clearing. The light was changing rapidly as twilight settled. The sergeant gave an order, and the soldiers fled back the way they had come.
The wildings looked him over, blinking to turn their eyes from colored facets to jet black. He glanced up at the skull. Its jawbone was missing; he spotted, in the gloom, a span of white cradled within the cushion of a fern.
Kartu Town seemed very far away right now.
Slowly, he set down sword and spear and raised his hands, palms open and empty.
No man is permitted to cross into the Wild. He had broken the boundaries, just as his scouting party had in the Lend, only this
time he had no Eridit to entertain them with a chanted tale and no horses to lose in exchange for food or his life.
One of the newcomers picked up the spear and broke the stout staff over its knee, keeping the iron point and tossing the sword to a companion. Then it gestured to Shai: This way. Come.
As night fell, he followed them into the Wild.
Ten days more it took Marit, flying into the cold and empty north. She had seen the Eagle's Claws once, at the end of her first year as a reeve when with a more experienced reeve she had flown a circuit of the Hundred so she might learn the breadth and length of the land she had sworn an oath to protect. She was not sure what she was looking for in this wild rocky outpost where forest-covered spines of land dug like talons into the windswept sea. She flew north into the Claws as dense forest gave way to sparser pine woods with an underlayer of rhododendron and myrtle. There were no villages, no goats, no shepherds or fisherman ranging, nothing but wind and waves and a lonely emptiness like the weight of a heart which knows itself to be alone without clan or hall.
Naturally the thread of smoke near the tip of the southernmost talon caught her attention. Along the ridges and cliffs rested huge nests, torn by wind and weather, evidence that the great eagles had nested here in the past. A cluster of ruins emerged, the clear imprint of an old reeve outpost, smaller than a hall but larger than a way station like Candle Rock. Training grounds and landing spaces had been cleared, grown over by a layer of rattle grass. Rubble marked old cotes and outbuildings, but the crude rock hall's thatched roof was in good repair. An odd white growth stubbled the nearby brush and rocky fissures.
In a hollow tucked away in a tiny bay below the compound, a crude stone hut sheltered against the cliff. A fire burned in a pit ringed with stones, and skewered meat raised tongues of flame where grease dropped. An eagle dove into view so suddenly she yelped in alarm and then laughed as the raptor swung up hard and thumped down on a rocky outcropping. Aui! How she missed Flirt!
A young man unhooked from the harness and dropped awkwardly to the ground, steadying a covered basket. He paused to scan sea and shore, looking past her as she approached. Satisfied, lie released the eagle's jesses and
