“Another finger’s width to the right, and mebbe the arrow would have passed me by for your ugly face.” Hydallan hawked, and spat to one side. “Don’t go a-borrowing trouble, pup. It is what it is. And we have enough of a problem a’ready.” He kicked at the raider’s splayed legs.
They did at that. Kern had already noted the lack of a cuirass or bedroll. And an empty provisions sack. Just a war bow and an arrow case full of hunting shafts, and a good knife on his belt.
“More where he came from,” Kern said, nodding. Then he glanced around at the men with him. “Sure there was just the one?”
Gard shrugged. “Ehmish thought so. And this one, he looks as if he was out looking for game stirring before night’s fall. Hunters like to work alone.”
Brig nodded in silent agreement. Then, “The rest of them, though, they won’t be far off.”
“I spread the others forward and to either side,” Wallach informed Kern. “Just in case they were close enough to hear, and come running.”
“Good. As needs be, we fall back toward the river or push deeper into the woods.” Running? Only as a last option. “If we can scout them out before nightfall,” he thought out loud, “we might hope to surprise them in a quick attack.”
“Evening comes on fast, this close to the Black Mountains.” Brig, again. He tried to find a sliver of sky through the massive spread of branches. “Mayhap we have time to search, but only in one direction if’n you want more than a league out of us before nightfall hems us in. Guess wrong, and we could be put at a disadvantage come morning and they find us first.”
Then they were all trying to talk, arguing for the size of patrols, and the number of them. Wondering aloud if it wouldn’t be better to find a good stretch of ground—dry ground!—for sleep and a hard defensive stand come the daylight. As needs be. If they did not want to run on luck, which so often was a fickle choice to rely upon.
Kern heard their arguments, their passion. He spoiled for a fight, not wanting to give the raiders a free pass, but it was the worst timing. Especially with one of his warriors already badly hurt—though he was too stubborn to admit it or let it slow the pack down for even a moment. Kern saw no way to ease the problem. An unfamiliar land and no friends as yet. Could he let his own bloodlust make such a decision?
It was a touchy choice, and one Ehmish saved him from making. A rustle of branches announced him, and he slipped up to the group without much more than a nod to Kern and a warm clap on the shoulder by Hydallan. He listened a moment, then smiled. It wasn’t a particularly pleasant grin, but it did raise a light behind his eyes that caught Kern’s attention.
“Ehmish?” he asked. “You have something to add?”
He nodded. Then shrugged with obvious pride to have jumped one step ahead of the others.
“I know where they are,” he promised with such easy conviction there was no doubting him.
And that decided it.
AS EHMISH TOLD it, when Wallach’s call reached him—the sharp, fierce barks of a coyote, which warned them the danger was over and they should all regroup—he had been set in place beneath a tall ponderosa with an arrow nocked and ready. He’d guessed pretty close to correct, and had placed himself right along the path of the raider’s retreat. Only Reave and Brig got to him first.
“So I started thinking about what would come next. And I—” He’d paused in his explanation. Waited until Kern nodded for him to continue. “I heard Kern’s voice in my head. As if I already knew what he’d say, and how he’d say it.”
Kern knew more than he wanted these days, about living with other voices in his head. He didn’t want Ehmish to dwell overlong on it.
“What did I say?” he asked.
“You said, ‘Get up a tree, boy, and tell me what you see.’”
Ehmish said this last in a rush, as if wanting to get through it. Bad enough, apparently, that he’d tried to second-guess Kern. Worse, the way “Kern” had said it.
“It was the right idea, no matter how you came about it,” Kern said, with a strong nod.
What Ehmish had seen was smoke from a campfire set a little too early for the gray wisp to be lost against a darkening sky, and a little too late that he couldn’t also pick out a few bright wisps of flame in the distance. Which was how Kern’s warriors came to be skulking through the nearby forest well after dark, guided in by the light of their enemy’s fire. They must have felt extremely confident, to set such a lax guard.
Kern smiled grimly. He intended to make them pay for that with their lives.