Pathfinder's Way(38)

He was silent as he looked back down at the small notebook clutched in  his hands. Shea started to turn away when he pulled her into a bear hug  and squeezed tight.

"Thank you. I'll cherish it."

Once she'd recovered from the surprise, she smiled and patted him on the back before pulling away.

"I'm glad you like it."





Chapter Eleven





"Your timing couldn't have been better," Perry remarked.

Fallon observed the controlled chaos as his men walked from revenant to  revenant putting any that still drew breath out of their misery. Men  tended the injured, cleaning wounds, sewing them up, and in a few rare  cases, setting bones.

Perry's men had taken heavy damage. Few, if any, were uninjured.

"For a minute there, I thought I'd be meeting my ancestors," Perry confided. "Little bastards are cunning."

"They adapt quicker than expected," Fallon said. "We'll have to clear as  many as possible from these hills, or they'll just breed more. Better  to deal with them now while they're weakened, than wait for them to  regain their strength."

"I'll get my men right on it."

"No. Let them rest. They deserve it. I'll have Darius send a company to  destroy any dens later. I need you and your men with me in the west."

"Understood. Our mission?"

"A couple of the local villages have decided not to meet their tithes. We'll need to educate them otherwise."

Perry sighed. "Stupid fools. I'd feel sorry for them if they had even the tiniest pair of balls."

Fallon grinned. It was a sentiment echoed often among his men.

"We'll just have to force them to gain some."

Perry's expression soured. "That would be like trying to stuff a rain drop back into a cloud."

"Surely not as difficult as that."

"Not nearly as useful either, no doubt," a man said crossly, coming to  stand by Fallon's side. He was a short, stocky man with a barrel chest.  Half of his brown hair was pulled tightly back to tame the wild curls.  The skin below the half pony tail was shaved. Unlike most of the other  Trateri who had brown hair and eyes, his were a startling blue.

"Caden," Perry said, nodding in respect.

"Perry." The greeting was returned with the same respect. "Your men acquitted themselves well."

"We lost many, but all went down with sword in hand."

"Sometimes that's all you can ask for."

There was a short silence in respect for the lives lost.

"When should I have my men ready to move again?" Perry asked. "We'll  have to send out a team to round up the horses first. I had the men cut  their strings when the revenant sent out its battle cry. Figured the  horses running around might be enough of a distraction to get our men to  the rendezvous point."

"I can send a few of my men out to see how many we can recover. We also  brought a few extra mounts if we can't round up all of the horses. We'll  stay the night here," Fallon said. "You chose the place to make your  stand well. It's easily defensible and will provide decent shelter from  the night's cold."         

     



 

"Pure dumb luck we made it this far," Perry admitted. "One of the scouts  you sent happened to have a little knowledge of the area, which allowed  us to make it far enough to find a defensible position."

"Oh?" Fallen asked.

"Damnedest thing," Perry said. "Evidently the creatures can't see worth  shit. They rely on their nose. If you can fool it, you can sneak past  them."

"Didn't seem to help you here," Caden said, looking at the fallen.

"If it hadn't been for those berries, we would have made our stand much  sooner. Probably would have all died too. We wouldn't have stood a  chance without decent cover at our back. Whoever you send to get rid of  these beasts should be warned. It might prevent death."

"Agreed. Write up your observations, and I'll send them along with my orders. Darius can pass it to his men."

"Appreciate it."

"Tend to your men and give them the news we're staying the night," Fallon ordered in dismissal.

Perry nodded once more.

Caden waited until he was out of hearing distance to say, "This pack was much larger than reports indicated."

"Yes."

"Much larger."

Fallon grunted.

"These men are lucky your ghost woman made her escape. If she hadn't  disappeared, we would have lingered in camp and been too late  rendezvousing with them."

"Yes. That is one way of looking at it."

Caden took in the carnage. "This gives me a bad feeling. You think there might be a traitor in our midst?"

Fallon didn't answer as he watched the men drag the revenants' dead bodies off into the trees.

His silence was answer enough.

"Well. Shit," Caden said. "That'll make things difficult."

A ghost of a smile crossed Fallon's face.

His attention caught on a slim figure lurking by the horses. It was the  boy he'd pulled a revenant off of in the battle. He was a tiny thing but  brave as fuck.

Fallon had seen him tangle with that monster, sure the boy was dead  before he hit the ground. Somehow he'd managed to survive and was in the  process of killing the beast when Fallon guided his hand in the  deathblow.

Something about the boy was familiar, but he couldn't quite place it.  His coloring said he wasn't Trateri. Lowlander, maybe? He'd never seen a  Lowlander with hair so oddly colored. It was a matted black and stuck  straight up from his head in clumps.

He was a scrawny thing with barely anything to him. If Fallon hadn't  seen his bravery in battle first hand, he would have had his trainers  defending their reasons for putting someone like that in one of his best  units.

The boy noticed him and froze, his eyes going wide and slightly panicked  before he abruptly headed for the big man directing several soldiers.

Hm. Definitely a Lowlander.

Ah, well. Maybe he was familiar because Fallon had conquered his village or something.

Dismissing the boy from his mind, Fallon joined Perry and his second in command to discuss plans for the morning.





Shea glued herself to Eamon's side and kept her head down.

That was close. She shouldn't have panicked like that when she found  Fallon's eyes on her. She might as well have put a sign on her that said  "guilty party here."

She needed to act like one of the guys and that meant not acting like a  squirrelly Daisy who had never set foot outside the fence.

When nobody pulled her out of the group, she relaxed slightly. The first  meeting with anybody new was always the worst. Once they accepted she  was a guy, they never thought to look deeper.

It looked like her luck still held.

Eamon finished giving his orders to the men.

Shea quickly fell behind him. "What do you need from me?"

"Oh, so you're talking to me again?"

She paused. "I wasn't aware that I'd ever stopped."

He gave her a stony look.

She wished she could achieve that level of withering scorn and disappointment with just a look.

"What?"

"You've been acting like a little bitch since I bandaged you up."

"You call that bandaging? More like a mauling," Shea muttered.

"I let you get away with your little tantrum," Eamon continued, not  responding to her comment. "You're Lowlander. You don't know better, and  normally you're a damn good scout. However, you're Trateri now, and I'm  you're superior. Word of warning, you'd better sort yourself out and  straighten up, or this life is going to get a whole lot more difficult  for you."

Shea listened, stunned and a little more than insulted. She had not  thrown a temper tantrum. She didn't even think she'd thrown them at the  age where they were considered the normal behavior for children.         

     



 

This was the most she'd heard Eamon speak, except maybe when he was  ripping her a new one right after the fight. She didn't know what had  set him off this time.

"All I asked is if you needed me to do something," she said in her  defense. She hadn't even copped an attitude. She even made sure her face  was perfectly neutral. She knew better than to challenge someone's  authority like that.

Eamon's anger took on a near physical intensity.

"You know perfectly well what I'm talking about."

She did too. Though, nobody had ever complained about the  non-challenging way she had of challenging someone. After all,  everything she did was in line with the correct behavior of a junior  addressing a senior.

She gave him a confused expression and frowned as if she was thinking hard. "I have no idea. I was just trying to do my job."

The air got even tenser.

Perhaps pushing him wasn't the best idea.

He pinched the bridge of his nose. "Forget it. Buck, keep the Daisy busy and out from under foot."

Eamon turned his back on her and moved away.

Shea stared after him, a little baffled. That was it? After that scolding, that's all he had. She was expecting more.

"Sometimes, kid, you're really not too bright," Buck said, shaking his  head. "It's pretty amazing given how smart you are in other things."