I pointed at the symbol. “This bow is hexed.”
“I know,” Pil said.
I handed the weapon back to her. “Peck would have depended on it, so hexing it made sense. Have you shot a bow before?”
Pil nodded. “Although it’s not as if I was the greatest archer around, I wasn’t even average most of the time—which sounds odd, because average means averaged across all the times, but I think you know what I mean.” She talked fast, and the slurring from her teeth made understanding her a challenge. “I wasn’t truly all that good and I probably killed that horrible man today with a lucky shot.” She clenched her teeth and scowled at the ground when she said it.
Peck and the two dead archers had left more than forty arrows behind. Pil snatched one off the ground, nocked it, and stopped.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Is the hex something bad?”
“No, the hex makes the arrows fly true.” She pointed across the clearing at a modest tree. Six arrows were clumped in a space smaller than my palm.
I nodded. “That’s pretty damn handy. Hang on to that weapon, young woman. The world isn’t full of fellows ready to have their brains scrambled so that you can have a hexed bow.”
Pil bit her swollen lip and winced. “What do you think would happen if I took a hexed bow and enchanted it too?”
That was a novel thought. I couldn’t remember seeing something that had been hexed and then enchanted. “It might be an irresistible weapon. Or it might turn into a snake and crush you to death. There’s no good way to know.”
“Yes, there is. At least I think it’s a good way, or probably the only way. Would you like to find out? I enchanted it while you were asleep.”
I almost said no. Something catastrophic might happen. It was an unknown endeavor. But I nodded and stepped all the way back to the water’s edge. “All right. I want to see you shoot a dragonfly in the eyeball.”
With a creased brow, Pil fired toward the tree she’d already used for a target. The arrow missed the tree trunk by two feet.
“Don’t feel bad, Pil. It was an uncertain effort to begin with.”
Pil pushed out her jaw, grabbed another arrow, and fired again. She struck the trunk right in the middle. The arrow bounced off.
“Entertaining,” I said. “Not too handy.”
Pil was already grabbing another arrow, and a moment later, she fired at the tree again. The arrow sailed twenty feet wide and a hundred feet into the marshy water, where it slammed into a shocked stork. The bird screeched and tumbled into the water, leaving a few feathers in the air. Pil already had another arrow in her hand.
“Wait!” I shouted.
The next arrow smashed into the tree and kept going, splitting the trunk all the way up. Half of the tree creaked, listed, and then groaned as it fell, hammering the water and soaking Halla along with the prisoners.
I expressed my opinion as an expert fighter. “Well . . . that’s . . .”
Pil stalked over and shoved her reddened face right in front of mine. “It’s a damn disaster, that’s what it is. And I enchanted it! It came out of me! What have you done to me?”
I kept my voice matter-of-fact. “Not a thing, Pil. This was your idea. I was asleep.”
Her chin trembled. “What did you make me do to myself?”
“First of all, let’s squash this notion deader than that stork. Nobody makes you do anything to yourself, not the gods, not your old mama, and sure as hell not me. You are the architect of your own glory or destruction.” I pushed her out to arm’s length, and not too gently. “Second, there’s probably nothing wrong with you. Hexing and magic just may not agree with one another.”
Pil nodded as she grimaced. “I’ll make something else then, something not hexed ahead of time, and that’ll show me one way or the other.”
“That’s the right idea. Keep trying. But first pitch that bow into the next mudhole we see before it cuts somebody in two.”
An hour later, Whistler and Bea had found a stout root from some unwholesome tree to serve him as a crutch. He experimented, slipping a few times before he found his stride and crutched along steadily. By the time we marched north on the tenuous trail, Whistler was moving pretty fast.
SEVENTEEN
For the twentieth time in ten minutes, Vang tripped on a rock or in a hole. Whenever he stumbled, he cursed, “Bloody piles!” or something like it. Now and then, he tossed in a “Raw bloody piles!” or “Your mother’s bloody piles!” Once when he sounded like ten sacks of flour hitting the ground, he growled, “Bloody piles of the gods and their leg-humping wolves!”
I peered in the man’s direction as he bumbled ahead of me under the merest starlight. “I admire a man who’s loyal to his profanity, Vang. It argues that you had a happy childhood.”
“Shit! Damned rocks! Damned ground! There’s a reason I’m a horseman, you know!”
Halla’s energetic whisper came from off to my left. “Maybe this man’s friends have interesting curses too. They might be happy to teach them to you while they kill you.”
“Coward,” I answered, but hardly loud enough for her to hear. She was right to chide me. I had gotten bored with tramping across this dark, stony plain just north of Graplinger Bog. We were walking a huge circle around the place where Vang had said his fellow soldiers were sitting watch while they argued and gambled. The
