figured they might get over.
Plum stumbled along for the first mile till she started to cry, was carried by her papa, still weak from bog ague, for the next two, then was passed off to Vio, and finally, as the family fell behind, was handed on to big Ash. Fawn figured the relay: between Ash, Sage, Finch, and Whit, they could likely pack the poor slip of a child over this barrier.
The young men could spare the gift of energy, now. But later? Let’s hope there’s a later.
The moon rode high, lighting their way. Such as it was. Their line of seventeen people began to snake up the steepening slope. Neeta and Remo, ahead, scouted paths by eye and groundsense, breaking the trail and dodging dead ends and drop-offs. Sumac, tense and wary, brought up the rear. Fawn trudged just ahead of her.
As Fawn bent and climbed, the sharing knife swung and bounced on the end of its cord, and she tucked it inside her shirt, below the walnut pendant. That didn’t stop the distraction. The sweat between her breasts made the cord slippery, and the sheath rubbed against her belly, bringing to mind her other burden. So welcome-till now, when all her fears seemed doubled. Her pregnancy had drained away a freedom to take risks that she’d scarcely been conscious of before. Lakewalker customs of knife sacrifice were so careful about binding and assent.
Her own state seemed a strange inversion, binding her not to death but to life. When she’d lain with her husband she’d made an irrevocable choice, and she could not now go back on it.
She rubbed her marriage cord. Where is Dag? Prisoner, injured, escaped?
Was he struggling to get back to her, just as she was going away from him? The thought hurt her heart, thumping hard and fast in her chest.
Fawn spared a glance upward to find the company strung in a zigzag across an exposed patch-whether burned over in the recent fire or always barren, she could not tell in this milky light. Across the weedy slope, a shadow rippled, like a wavelet on water. Then another. Fawn blinked rapidly, wondering if she was passing out from the breathless climb. Then she realized what she was seeing, and spun around, looking up toward the high blue face of the moon. Across it, another shadow fluttered, and stars winked in and out.
“They’re back!” she gasped. Mud-bats, a dozen of them. Of course they could fly at night.
Sumac followed her gaze. Rasped, “Blight.” Raised her face and bellowed up the incline, “Archers, alert! Everyone, close up under that outcrop! Grouse, give that blighted boar spear to someone who can swing it”-Grouse had mainly been using it for a walking stick, poling his shaking legs up the hill-“trade with Ash, take back your youngster!”
At the shouting and scrambling, Plum began to cry again.
People abandoned the path and started to climb for the twenty-fivefoot- high face of stone, silver gray in the pale light, that promised some protection. Hod and Hawthorn shouldered under Bo and boosted him upward. Sage grabbed Calla, who grabbed Indigo, and they chained over the rugged rises. Remo, Neeta, and Whit slid down toward Sumac, bows brandished.
Out of the sky, disturbingly quiet, a vast shape descended and settled upon the outcrop overlooking them. It had twice the wingspan of the other mud-bats. It stretched out its arms to the sides like black sails, and folded them in again. A whiff of its unmistakable scent, a dry cellar smell, rocked Fawn back in realization.
That’s not a mud-bat. Oh gods, oh gods…
The malice turned its dark, chiseled, elegant face upon them. Great eyes glimmered in the moonlight, and pointed ears twitched against its faintly ridged skull. Soft, batlike fur covered its body; its legs, anchored by clawed feet, were longer and more manlike than those of the mudbats.
The weight of its gaze fell like a war hammer.
Fawn had seen the Glassforge malice face-to-face, an early molt, ugly as mud. The Wolf War malice was said to have acquired a strange man wolf form before its end. The Raintree malice had been breathtakingly beautiful, Dag had told her, a tall warrior shape of surpassing glamour.
This malice, too, had its own appalling beauty. Fawn stared upward, entranced with terror.
Sumac, frozen beside her, made a weird little noise that might have wanted to be swearing, but was squeezed thin by awe. She found her voice only to whimper, “It flies…”
But her words broke both of them out of their shock. Fawn was already scrambling in her shirt as Sumac hissed, “The knife, give me the knife!” As Fawn fumbled it into her hands, Sumac’s legs bunched to launch her up the slope, angling around the rock face.
Three bows lifted, aimed uselessly at the commanding figure staring down over them in cool curiosity. Remo was so shaken that he almost tried to shoot it anyway, but at the last moment turned and found a circling mud-bat instead. His arrow tore through a wing; the creature shrieked and fluttered sideways. A few more mud-bats darted near and banked away, not so much seeking to grab prey off the hillside, Fawn thought, as to drive it before them toward their master. The spread-out company’s dash in all directions changed to a drawing-in.
Fawn saw it coming before Neeta and Remo did. Ash, upslope, turned and raised the boar spear. Took aim, but not at the malice or the mud-bats.
“Remo, duck!” Fawn screamed.
The heavy, steel-tipped pole hissed downslope. Remo dodged barely in time; the point grazed his shoulder instead of lodging in his throat.
The spear clattered to a stop against some rocks below. At least Ash had thrown away his weapon, temporarily. He looked confused, blinking and shaking his head. Finch, Sage, and Indigo drew up beside him. Only Calla tried to back off, jerking like a balking horse, but ended up falling to her knees.
Above, Sumac burst onto the outcrop. The malice merely spread its wings and fell forward, sliding away as she swung wildly. Two buffeting flaps and it rose, wheeling upward once more. Sumac pitched over the edge, breaking her own plummet with skin-tearing grabs at bushes clinging to cracks in the rock face. The bone knife spun from her hand, rising futilely after the malice and arcing outward. Fawn gasped and tried to move beneath it-if that bone breaks on the stones-with a crackle of twigs, the knife came down in a buckthorn bush. Fawn raced to retrieve it. Whit, after a moment’s hesitation, followed after her, crossbow swinging in his grip as he ran.
Sumac landed in a shower of leaves, rolled downward past the farmer boys, found her feet, and kept on going, braking from handhold to scrubby handhold. Sage, looking puzzled, knelt and picked up a rock, and threw it after her. Finch and Indigo, after a moment, followed in clumsy imitation. Hod and Hawthorn turned back to join them.
“Hawthorn, no!” screamed Berry in dismay as he, too, scooped up a missile, launching it with rather better aim. It clipped Remo’s ear.
Neeta’s bow wavered around to point at the farmers.
“No!” yelled Sumac, breathless, still scrambling wildly downward.
“We can’t fight them! Cut and run!” Remo had half fallen; Sumac pulled him up, stared around, spotted Fawn scrabbling through the buckthorn after the knife. Tried to make for her.
A line of mud-bats went for Sumac, one after another, and she broke the other way, ducking through the scant shelter of the scrub. All the mud-bats circled to concentrate upon the three Lakewalkers, who retreated southward.
“Berry, over here!” yelled Whit. Berry’s white face turned, saw him; she gave up yanking at Hawthorn’s arm just barely in time to evade Ash and Sage closing in on her, and bounded down the hillside toward them. Whit caught her as she almost plunged past, the walnut pendant bouncing on her collarbone.
“The malice.” Fawn, scratched bloody, clutched the knife to her heaving chest. “The malice has taken everybody’s minds.” She stared at her brother and sister-in-law, gaping back in horror. “Except ours…” In the moon-washed dark the mud-bats whirled; their master soared above them, so close, so out of reach. “Sumac’s right. It’s time to run.”
“But-Hawthorn,” choked Berry, looking back as Fawn turned north toward the nearest trees. “Bo…”
“We can’t help them now,” Fawn gasped over her shoulder as Whit grabbed Berry and dragged her along. “They’d turn on us, too. Best hope is to all stay alive till the local Lakewalkers arrive and bring down the malice.” Would the local patrol be expecting this? Did they even know about the night-sky terror that had burst upon the Trace? What if the rest of the company was made to be soldiers against them? Unlike Sumac and their own Lakewalkers, the Laurel Gap patrollers wouldn’t see the farmers as captured friends, only as dangerous enemies. Tears tracked down Fawn’s face at the vision, but she bit her lip and dodged onward. The ground came up like blows under her fleeing feet, and whipping strands of her hair caught in her open mouth. Running beside her,
