He did not want to go.
“We have food enough if we leave now,” she said in a quietly reasonable voice without any hint of anger. “I’ll get more in the sheep camp and bring it out to you for your trip back to the garrison. I’m expecting a message from Marthatown, and it will have arrived by the time we return.”
He stared southward. “It’s necessary,” she said. He mumbled something. She turned and began packing the donkey.
“When we planned this, you said months,” he complained.
“Originally, that’s what I thought. However, there’s another team exploring eastward, so we needn’t go farther in that direction. It’s clear that going farther south would be dangerous. That needs a large force, not just two people.”
“You’d planned to travel months with him.”
“I didn’t plan anything, Chernon. I did not plan this trip. It was planned before anybody even considered my doing it. It was planned before I talked to the women in the sheep camp. It was planned before I heard about the people spying on the camp.” She said all this patiently, knowing by now that any display of anger or impatience on her part would only make him dig in his heels. “I had to change the plans when we found out about that.”
“One or two more days.”
“We have food enough if we leave now,” she repeated. “This is not country we can live off of, Chernon. I recognize only a few things that are edible, and you would not relish them.” She realized how much she sounded like Morgot, as Morgot had used to talk to her when she was very young.
He folded his blankets, punishing her by not talking. She snarled silently to herself in exasperation. He was like a small child. Like Jerby had sometimes been. Like Myra’s oldest. All sulks and silences, pretences and games. It didn’t matter. No longer. Simply let there be an end.
They started back, down a hooked valley which led them slightly southward and into another which led them farther southward still. When they stopped for a midday meal, she climbed to the top of a hill, spying out the way they would go. The fold would lead them too far south to suit her, but the ridges to their right were too precipitous to climb. “No fire tonight,” she advised Chernon when she returned. “We’re too far south.” She had warned him repeatedly about the dangers of the south, but did not do so again because of his moodiness.
They ate a cold supper and slept. Deep in the night she awoke, smelling smoke. A fire glimmered in the shade of the trees. “Chernon!” she demanded, outraged.
“I wanted some tea,” he said defiantly. “I’m putting it out right now.”
The glimmer had been enough to guide Cappy, Doots, and Rel to the right area. They had been searching the folded hills for some days, several times just missing Stavia and Chernon by passing before them or behind them.
“There,” breathed Cappy, pointing to the starlike gleam in the shadowed ripple of trees. “Got ’em.”
“You goin’ to kill him?” asked Doots.
“Maybe not right away,” Cappy replied. “Maybe ask him some stuff first. He didn’t come out of that place, you know? She met up with him somewhere else. Could be he’s a different kind than those down there at the town.”
“Devil men,” Doots cautioned. “That’s what Papa says.”
“Wouldn’t hurt just to ask him some things,” Rel offered in Cappy’s support. Leave it up to Doots and nobody’d ever do anything at all.
The three of them worked their way silently through the trees at first dawn, when the sky was still so dim that stars glimmered weakly through the gathering light. They found Chernon and Stavia lying side by side under blankets. Stavia was facedown, Chernon faceup. After a whispered conference, Cappy threw himself onto Stavia, holding her down while the other two dealt with Chernon.
Reliable was a skinny, wiry boy, strong but not heavy. Doots, on the other hand, was what the Elder Brome called “pure stove wood.” All in all, the two who had attacked Chernon had an easier time of it than Cappy did.
In the open, Cappy would not have occupied Stavia for long. She had learned how to fight, as all girls did in Women’s Country: how to wrestle and kick-fight and disarm or disable an opponent. She had never learned how to do so when covered and entangled in a blanket. In the end it was the blanket which conquered her. She tripped and fell, knocking the breath out of herself, and Cappy, bruised and breathless, managed to get a rope around her wrists and force her to her knees.
“Y’got some bruises,” remarked Doots. Cappy was fingering his left eye which was already beginning to discolor and swell.
“Devils can really fight,” Cappy offered.
“Devils!” Stavia spat. “Are you calling me a devil?”
“Not a decent woman, that’s for sure. Hair hangin’ down. No clothes.” Cappy was having some trouble with the fact that Stavia was largely unclothed. Among the three brothers, he was not alone in this regard.
“She belongs to me,” said Chernon very clearly. “Do you understand that?”
“Whyn’t you keep her decent then?” Reliable asked.
“You let her loose and shell get decent quick enough,” Chernon said.
“Don’t want to have to chase her.”
“She won’t run. You won’t run, will you, Stavia?” he asked, nodding at her.
She thought about this. There were three of them, two holding Chernon, one ready to jump her again. “No. Not if he’ll let me get dressed.”
It wasn’t what Cappy wanted to do, but he had not thought this far in his plans. Doots and Rel were looking at him, waiting for a signal. If Cappy did what he wanted to, right now, then the others would want to do it, too. That way, they’d have to kill the man first, to keep him from interfering. Also, he wasn’t sure he wanted them watching him. His object was to take the woman
