4
They reached the place Clovis had marked on his crudely drawn map in late afternoon, an hour or two before the sun would begin to fall. The tribe was supposedly setting up camp in a valley beside the Wo’Yushe River, the river that cut southward down the spine of the Sunrise Mountains and eventually dumped into the Adessian Sea at the port city of Reit.
When Megs and Zandra neared the ridge that would give them a good view of the whole valley, Zandra slowed her pace and signaled towards a cluster of boulders. Megs nodded. The boulders would obscure them from anyone who happened to look up. Adrenaline spiking, Megs crouched low next to Zandra as they both crept towards the boulders. Then they flattened onto their bellies, peering down into the valley.
It was shaped like a funnel, wide at the base of the mountain where Megs and Zandra hid, then narrowing as it approached a dense forest that climbed up more mountains on the other side. A river ran through its center, following the curve of the valley towards the forest. Every part of the valley that was not river was covered in tall grasses, dark green tipped with light brown as late summer transformed into autumn.
Plenty of grass, but no mountain men. No patrol, no lonely tribesman sent out to scout, and certainly no tribe.
Megs cursed loudly and stood up. She’d known Clovis hadn’t been telling her the whole truth. But why bother with the elaborate lie about the tribal gathering? How did he stand to benefit from sending them on a scouting mission while he stayed behind in camp, bound hand and foot?
Unless he’d been the scout himself. A scout who was confident that even if he was bound hand and foot, he’d be able to get himself free. The remnant of adrenaline in Megs’s veins curdled into a sick fear.
But if that was true, why was he injured? Who’d injured him?
All this flashed through her mind in the two seconds it had taken Megs to stand and curse, but in the very next moment, Zandra was seizing her wrist, pulling her back down into a prone position on the boulder, and, a look of annoyance crossing her typically stoic face, gesturing for Megs to shut up.
Zandra used a series of rapid hand signals:
I see.
Down.
Trail.
Megs looked where Zandra pointed but saw nothing. She frowned at Zandra to show her puzzlement. Zandra put her hand on Megs’s head and rotated it slightly, then pointed again. She made an impatient trail gesture again.
Megs followed the line of Zandra’s finger. There – the faintest of lines drawn into the reeds and waist-high grasses growing on either side of the riverbank. Someone had crossed the valley recently. No, not just “someone.” To make several parallel lines like that, it had to have been a whole group of someones.
A group the size of a patrol, at least. Maybe a group the size of an entire clan. But not big enough to be a tribe.
Zandra pointed once more – this time over Megs’s right shoulder. Then she made another series of hand gestures. Us. Walk. Trail. Down.
Megs turned her head. Ten yards off, a game trail wound down the side of the mountain, a path probably created by generations of deer and bears and wild goats making their way to drink from the river below.
Megs nodded that she understood, then followed Zandra as silently as she could down the trail. Half an hour later, they stood among the reeds along the edge of the river.
Zandra crouched beside the water, touching her index finger to an indentation in the mud. It was unmistakably a hoof print. It wasn’t cloven like an ox or deer or cow, but it was too small to be a horse.
Which meant that the print belonged to a pony, and ponies belonged to mountain men. Zandra took a step closer to the river, then crouched again. Her eyes flashed up to Megs – a signal that Megs should look for herself – and then back to the mud again. Zandra’s expression was troubled.
Megs stepped closer, then quickly understood what had troubled Zandra. The second print was clearly a horseshoe. And mountain men didn’t use horseshoes.
The rest of the riverbank was a muddy mess of prints. Paw prints that might have belonged to local wolves, foxes, and mountain leopards; long slashes that had to have been made by wagon wheels; boot prints from both Imperial-style boots and the flatter mountain man style.
Zandra followed the tracks away from the river’s edge, disappearing into marshy reeds that reached a foot over her head. Megs trailed a few steps behind, taking care to step only where Zandra stepped. They climbed away from the river bank, the reeds transitioned into stiffer grasses, reminding Megs of her family’s wheat fields.
Zandra stopped, backtracked to Megs. Then she spoke for the first time since they’d left their hiding spot behind the boulders.
“They were chasing someone,” she said quietly.
“When?” Megs asked.
Zandra considered the question a moment. “Yesterday. Two days ago at most. But look.” She pointed at the place she’d turned to. Megs didn’t see anything. “She fooled them.”
She?Megs’s brow crinkled in confusion. What was Zandra talking about?
“She led them that way,” Zandra said, pointing through the meadow of wheat-like grass towards the line of spruce trees at the far edge of the mountain they’d just descended. “But then she backtracked.” Zandra pointed down at the tracks before them, which were much harder to see in the tall grass than they’d been at the river’s edge. “Walked backwards in her own footprints. Then turned. Here.”
Megs followed Zandra’s gaze to the left, but the only thing she saw were a couple unnaturally bent stalks of grass about five feet from where they stood. Then she looked again, bending forward to get a better look. There it was – the sign that had made Zandra stop and back up.
Another trail, perpendicular to the main one, led north through the valley, following the river up the valley’s narrowing funnel, towards the forest at the far end.
“How do you know this is a she?” Megs asked.
“Size of the prints. Depth of them,” Zandra answered. “Could be an adolescent male, but … I think adult female, more likely.”
Without waiting for a response from Megs, Zandra turned left and started following the second trail. Megs went after her.
Zandra took a stalk of grass between her fingertips, running the pad of her thumb over its end. She grunted. “Injured.”
Megs looked at where Zandra’s thumb had been. A reddish brown painted the tips of a few blades of grass here. Blood.
“The strange part …” Zandra glanced back over her shoulder at the main trail, then turned again to the perpendicular trail she’d been following, the one marked with blood. “There’s a gap between the tribesmen’s trail and this one.” She crouched. “No prints. No broken grass. It’s like she … jumped. Sideways. From there –” Zandra pointed to the main trail a foot behind Megs “– to here. Without touching anything.”
Megs shook her head. Zandra was the best tracker she knew, but that explanation didn’t sound plausible. The grass they were standing in – the grass the woman would have had to jump over without touching – came up past their hips. In some places, it went as high as their chests.
“Sideways?” Megs asked.
“Sideways,” Zandra nodded. “Because her last set of prints on the mountain men’s trail … She didn’t turn and face this way to jump.”
“No,” Megs said, shaking her head again. “That doesn’t make sense. Unless she’s an acrobat.”
Zandra gave a one-shouldered shrug as if to say, So maybe she is an acrobat.
Traveling performers came to the East sometimes, before the war. But that was another time, a time Megs tried not to think about anymore.
“The boots she’s wearing,” Zandra said. “They’re Imperial style.”
She held Megs’s gaze, leaving the question unsaid. What do you want to do? Zandra’s eyes asked. Follow an Imperial woman who evaded the tribesmen, while injured, by walking backwards in her own prints and then leaping sideways over chest-high grass? Or follow an unknown number of mountain men to an unknown destination?
Megs weighed her options. Clovis had lied, but he’d left some truth in what he said. There had been a large group of mountain men in this valley not long ago, precisely where he’d said they were. But not big enough to be a tribe, and they’d never made camp here.
Why had he lied? Had he been traveling with the acrobat woman, running with her from the mountain men? Maybe he’d lied to protect her? But what if it was the opposite? What if Clovis had been helping the mountain men track the woman?
Or what if he’d been telling the truth, and had just mistaken the size of mountain men who’d been gathering in this area?
A cold weight grew in the pit of Megs’s stomach. Too many questions. Not enough answers.
“We fight the mountain men, we protect the citizens of the Empire,” Megs said at last. It was the guiding mantra her people always used. The enemies of their enemies were their friends, at least until proven otherwise. “We should see if we can help her.”
“Alright.”