She started forward, and Sindak said, “I’ll be right behind you.”
“No,” she replied. “I want you and Towa to stay out of the clearing for as long as they let you. Be ready to grab your weapons when the fight starts.”
“The sooner the better.”
The men who formed the circle at the edge of the trees shifted as Koracoo walked toward Gonda, altering their aims to follow her. Her souls were doing a mad dance, calculating strategy, trying to find some way …
Kotin didn’t mention Cord. If they’d captured a Flint war chief, Kotin would have boasted about it.
As she made her way into the firelight, her glance searched the shadows, praying he was out there watching this, waiting for his chance.
Thirty-nine
Cord silently eased through the moonlit trees east of the campfire. He’d followed Odion’s path to the place where the boy had been captured, studied the two sets of tracks, then backed away and taken the long way around. After he’d followed the river south for a few hundred heartbeats, he’d circled back to the east to approach the fire through the woods rather than the noisy brush. A dense stand of maples surrounded him. The bed of moldering leaves that covered the forest floor was damp and quiet to walk upon.
He slipped from behind the trunk where he’d been hiding and moved to the next. The earthiness of freshly fallen snow suffused the air. From his new position, he could see the low fire built in the hollow beneath the uprooted tree. It cast reflections upon the long, crooked roots. But he saw no one sitting around the flames.
Was the fire a lure, meant to draw in the enemy? He suspected that the first man to walk into the light would find an arrow through his heart.
Somewhere close by, one or two warriors would be watching the fire. Where?
Dark shapes covered the ground; most of them were bushes, or saplings, but a few might be hunching men. His gaze lingered on those shapes, searching for movement. Even the most diligent warrior moved on occasion, adjusting his cape, shifting his weapons, drinking from his water bag. Unless of course, he knew he was being watched; then he froze. But in that case, Cord would already be dead.
Down the incline near the place where Odion had been captured, a vague ripple touched the darkness, like a voluminous coal black cape whipping in the wind. When the figure moved toward Cord, floating across the snow as though weightless, Cord’s fist went tight around his war club.
Black Cape moved into the trees and seemed to hover between the tree trunks as though examining the tracks that led to the fire.
Cord hesitated. He had his bow and quiver. He could have easily shot the man, but … he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. A man, for certain, but he moved with an almost eerie grace. Barely a whisper of his cape disturbed the stillness as the figure glided behind the trees and continued at a leisurely pace up the hill to the northeast, starting and stopping often enough to convince Cord he was following a trail.
Cord remained perfectly still, watching until the man disappeared over the low hill.
Then Cord faded back across the leaf mat to the shadowy well behind a maple trunk and waited, listening. His four summers as a war chief, and ten summers as a warrior before that, had trained him well. He could smell peril; the forest stank of it. The silver brightness of the moonlight winking from the snow made the stillness all the more ominous. But he had the odd sense that this man was not the source of it. Something else was out here with them, and it breathed the darkness like a hunting bear.
Keeping to the tangle of shadows that weaved latticelike through the moonlight, he softly crept along behind the man, who seemed completely unaware of Cord’s presence. His black cape swung when he looked down.
Cord eased behind a sycamore.
The man never turned. He kept walking straight north, paralleling the river.
Conscious of the weight of his body, Cord moved a few steps, then halted, careful not to snap twigs buried beneath the leaf mat. By angling his head, he could see through the dense trunks to a moonlit meadow ahead. The man appeared to be heading for it.
He followed.
Long before he reached the meadow, Cord was aware of the sound of children’s soft voices. The hair at the nape of his neck stood up. As he crossed the ice-skimmed leaves, silvered by the night, he felt something. No sound accompanied it, no smell. It seemed to drift around him in the cold air. He shivered, trying to shake it off, but the sensation grew stronger, until it was almost overpowering. He didn’t know how to explain it … . It was a … a hunger, a hatred that would outlive the passing of centuries, a need for vengeance that went far beyond his comprehension.
But it called to his warrior’s blood like the singing of a thousand bows fired at once.