surveying the mad rush to pack and head out.
“-were heading southeast anyway,” his father was saying as they approached. “Why shouldn’t we see what they want to show us?”
“Because we don’t know what their intentions are!” Walter answered. “What if they’re leading us to the rest of their people? We have the advantage of numbers now. We might not if they take us to one of their villages or towns.”
Colin’s father glanced toward Walter and said grudgingly, “You have a point. But then why would they try to get us to turn back?”
“So they wouldn’t have to deal with us at all! But since we refused to turn back-”
“I don’t think they live on the plains,” Arten cut in, and all of them turned toward him.
Walter snorted. “Why not?”
Arten shrugged. “Their clothes, their swords. Their breeches make sense, but their shirts aren’t made for the plains, and their boots are too high. Half of us don’t even wear shoes anymore, they’re too painful. It’s easier to go barefoot. And their swords make no sense at all. We haven’t killed anything with the swords since we headed out.”
“But they have bows,” Colin’s father said.
Arten nodded. “Which makes sense if they intend to be here for a short time. They’d need them to hunt with. But if they lived here permanently, they wouldn’t need the swords at all.”
Sam appeared out of nowhere, breath short. “We’re ready to leave. Paul’s stowing the last few things into Tobin’s wagon, with Ana’s help, but they’ll be done by the time their wagon has to start moving.”
Tom nodded and turned to Walter. “We’ll follow them, but we’ll be cautious. I don’t see any reason not to trust them at this point. They know the plains better than we do.”
Walter didn’t argue any further, storming away to where Jackson waited with their horses.
Tom put two fingers in the corners of his mouth and whistled, the sound piercing the commotion of the rest of the wagon train. “Let’s move out!” he shouted, motioning with one hand over his head. Men climbed up into their seats and snapped the reins, and the lead wagon creaked forward, heading toward the gap between the two banks.
“I think we should stick close to Aeren,” Tom said to them all, then turned to Colin. “He seems to have bonded with you, possibly because he’s younger than the rest of his group. Hell, you two may even be the same age, I can’t tell. But see what you can find out about him and his people.”
Colin nodded.
They passed through the gap and found Aeren and his guard waiting on the far side. The rest of Aeren’s group had vanished into the plains.
“We’re ready,” Tom said as they approached the two strange men.
Aeren nodded, watching the first wagon as it began to ford the stream, wheels splashing through the water. He eyed the horses intently, not without a little fear, and Colin realized he hadn’t seen anything like horses here in New Andover. The closest animal had been the deer.
But then Aeren motioned toward the south. “Suren,” he said, in his own language.
“Suren,” Colin’s father repeated as they began walking in that direction.
Aeren grinned and nodded, then pointed north, east, west, and south, as he said, “Nuren, est, ost, ai suren.”
Tom followed suit. “Nuren, est, ust-”
“Ost.”
“-ost, and suren?”
When Aeren smiled, Tom repeated the directions in Andovan, Aeren frowning seriously as he listened, repeating the words as they both pointed, the directions getting more complicated as they started doing southeast, northwest, southwest, and northeast. Aeren’s guardian scowled until Aeren threw him a dark look. Everyone else smiled or chuckled.
“Eraeth,” Aeren said, pointing to his guardian, who scowled again, pointedly ignoring Aeren. Colin saw Aeren’s mouth twitch. Then Aeren motioned to Karen, his eyebrow raised.
“Karen,” Colin said. “Her name is Karen.”
Aeren paused and gave Karen another of the formal bows, almost the same he’d given Tom but slightly different. He said something in his own language, and even though no one except Eraeth could understand him, Karen lifted her head higher and blushed.
They traveled through the morning, pausing to rest on occasion, Aeren pointing out animals and plants and flowers as they went, speaking mostly to Colin and Karen, trading the names of each object in the two languages. At one point, Aeren began quizzing them all, and Colin discovered that Karen was more adept at remembering the new language. The strange deer were called gaezels by the Alvritshai, the name of Aeren’s people. Colin couldn’t determine exactly where the Alvritshai were from, but after numerous attempts he thought they came from a range of mountains to the north. At least, Aeren kept pointing to the mountains to the east, making jagged up and down motions with his hands, then shaking his head when Colin or Karen pointed east and saying nuren instead.
Eraeth listened to all of this disapprovingly, keeping his eyes on Arten and Tom. Sam had drifted away to help one of the wagons when it got stuck in a low spot.
Toward midafternoon, both Aeren and Eraeth grew quieter, Eraeth speaking to Aeren in a low voice, as if trying to convince him of something. Aeren kept shaking his head but otherwise didn’t argue with him. Until at one point he grew exasperated and said something short and curt, raising his arm across his chest, his hand in a fist near his shoulder. The band of gold around his wrist gleamed in the steady sunlight.
After that, Eraeth kept silent, his face studiously blank.
It was after this altercation that Walter and Jackson approached the group, drawing their horses up sharply. Both of the Alvritshai stepped back, distancing themselves from the animals, their eyes slightly wider than usual, although they showed no other signs of fear.
Walter ignored the two of them completely. “Jackson says that, according to his map and calculations, we should be nearing the river that leads to Portstown, assuming it kept the same general course. He estimates the Bluff and Falls are about two, maybe three, days travel to the west.”
Colin’s father raised a hand to his eyes to shade them from the sun and scanned the horizon. “I don’t see anything.”
“What about that?” Arten pointed toward the southeast, where a darker line appeared on the plains, blending into the heat waves on the horizon.
At Aeren’s quizzical expression, Colin tried to explain the river. Eraeth snorted and said something in Alvritshai, and Aeren motioned them forward, but not toward the darker spot Arten had seen. They continued south, the dark line spreading, until they were close enough to see that it was a low ridge where the plains were interrupted by a line of trees and brush cutting its way almost directly east. As they drew closer, Colin heard a strange rustling, then realized it was the leaves of the trees brushing against each other in the breeze. He hadn’t heard the sound in so long, he barely recognized it.
“I don’t see the river,” Walter said, standing up in his stirrups.
“Do you feel that?” Arten said.
Everyone stopped at the edge of where the grass grew thicker and greener, the verge of the thin line of trees.
“What?” Karen asked.
“In your feet. The ground feels like it’s trembling.”
Colin focused on his feet and thought he could feel a faint trembling in the earth. He stepped forward, moving in among the trees themselves, and the sensation increased. When he stood in the middle of the copse, he knelt, then lay flat against the earth and pressed his ear to the ground, closing his eyes.
Through the shuddering earth, he could hear a dull roar. He frowned, pressing harder into the earth, heard a few of the others approaching as he strained to figure out what the sound was And then he jerked his head away from the ground.
“What is it?” his father asked.
Colin looked up at them in wonder. “It’s the river. It’s underground, beneath the trees. You can hear it, like
