Besides, it would give her an edge. That edge, combined with her tracking skills, should enable her to beat him to the quarry by whole candlemarks.

  The meeting point was the stables; Kero reached them ahead of both Daren and her teacher. A brief look out the window this morning had told her all she needed to know about the weather—today was going to be a typical late-fall day for these parts; cold, wet, and miserable. Even though there were no clouds overhead, Kero had seen them on the horizon, the kind of flat, gray clouds that meant an all-day drizzle. So she’d dressed for it; a waterproof canvas poncho over lambswool shirt, and heavy sweater, sheepskin vest, and wool hose and breeches, and her thickest stockings inside her boots. Daren had dressed for the cold, but not an all-day chill in wet weather; he was wearing mostly leather, which looked very good on him and would keep him warm at first, but would do nothing for him once it was soaked. His only concession to possible drizzle was a wool cloak, a bright russet that would stand out in the gray-brown woods like a rose in a cabbage patch. And which was going to get caught on every twig and thorn unless he was very careful. Kero’s gray poncho wouldn’t; it was belted tight to her body at the waist, and thorns wouldn’t catch so easily on the tightly-woven, oiled canvas. Kero hid a smirk with some difficulty.

  Tarma glanced at her in a way that Kero couldn’t read, but said nothing. Daren just took in the peasant-style clothing, and gave her an amused and superior little smile.

  Kero had been toying with the notion of warning him about the oncoming rain, but that smile made up her mind for her. If he’s too stupid to read the weather, and too cocksure to ask advice when he sees someone dressed for weather he didn’t expect, he can suffer, she thought with angry anticipation. And I can’t wait to see him shivering and chafing in that fancy wet leather.

  “I told you yesterday that this was going to be another ‘hound and rabbit’ game following Warrl,” Tarma said, interrupting her thoughts. “I didn’t tell you that it would be under different rules.”

  Kero stiffened, and dropped her thoughts of revenge. She noted that Daren lost his little smile, and fixed his eyes on Tarma as if he was trying to read her mind.

  “This is going to be a ‘hostile territory’ game,” the Shin’a‘in continued. “Rule one: you’re in enemy territory, behind their lines, following a spy. Assume that anything you do or say may give you away to the enemy. Rule two: leave no traces yourselves; assume the enemy may have someone trailing you. Rule three: this is a real scouting mission, which means you are not working alone. Rule four: both of you come back, or you both lose the game.”

  At “rule three” Kero realized what Tarma was pulling on them. At “rule four,” Daren figured it out. The glare of outrage he gave her was only matched by the exasperation she dealt him in return.

  She can‘t—I’m going to be saddled with this overbearing fool all day long? And if I don’t keep him from falling on his face, I’m going to lose the game? She wanted to tell her teacher exactly what she thought of the idea, and only one thing kept her quiet. The sure and certain knowledge that Tarma was testing her, as she had been tested at the crossroads. Only this time the test was not for courage, but for good sense, and the ability to take orders.

  Such considerations did not hamper Daren.

  “You can’t mean that!” he said angrily. “I’ve had years of training, and you expect me to drag this little tagalong and take care of her—”

  “I expect you to take the orders you’re given and follow them, young man,” Tarma replied evenly, with no display of emotion at all. “I expect you to keep your mouth shut about it. I have my orders from your father. You are to treat me as your commanding officer at all times, and I have your father’s full permission to do whatever I like with you. Be grateful this is all I’ve ordered you to do. How do you ever expect to give orders that will be obeyed if you never learn how to follow them yourself?”

  Daren stared at her with his mouth hanging open for a moment, while Kero fumed. Tagalong, am I? Years of training, hmm? Then why can’t he even follow a rabbit track a furlong without losing it?

  “I’ve given you your orders,” Tarma said, putting one finger under his chin and shutting his mouth for him. “Remember the rules.”

  She turned on her heel, and went back up the staircase, leaving the two of them alone in the stable. Daren’s stormy expression did not encourage conversation, so Kero just shrugged and headed out into the valley.

  Daren followed, overtaking her in the tunnel, so that when they emerged he was in the lead. Kero hung back, deliberately, so that he would have to wait for her. After all, under the rules, if he ran off without her, he’d lose.

  I’m beginning to see some advantages here, she thought, as her anger cooled. Provided I can keep my own temper.

  The clouds were already moving in; the sky was gray from horizon to horizon, or at least as much of it as Kero saw beyond the black interlacing of leafless trees. Daren waited impatiently for her beside the hidden stable door, and pointed at Warrl’s obvious clawmarks in the dust beside the path.

  “He went that way,” the young man said, and plunged off into the underbrush, leaving a telltale thread from his cloak on the very first thornbush he passed.

  Kero would have left it, except that she remembered the rules. Leave no traces. And since she was being graded on his moves as well as her own....

  She sighed, and picked the russet thread out of the thorns before she passed on. She was still sucking a stuck finger when she caught up to him.

  “You left this,” she said sardonically, holding it out to him before he could accuse her of lagging. He took the thread from her, his mouth shutting with a snap, and frowned. Without saying a single word, he turned back to studying the ground, ignoring her.

  She saw that Warrl’s tracks vanished here, as his trail crossed a dry streambed. The obvious answer was something any reasonably smart animal would do—run along the streambed for a while, then leave it at some point that wouldn’t show much disturbance. A bed of dry leaves, for instance.

  But Warrl wasn’t an animal.

  Kero studied the trail, and noticed that the tracks were blurred, the claws dug in a bit too deeply.

  He walked backward in his own tracks, the beast! she thought with admiration. I didn’t think he could do that!

  Instead of following downstream (as Daren was moving upstream and obviously expected her to take the other direction), she traced the tracks back, and found where Warrl had leapt out of them and into—yes—a pile of dry leaves off to the side of the trail. There were several old, wet leaves on top of the dry ones, and a few more scattered against the direction of the last winds, showing that the leaves had been disturbed.

  She waited beside the telltale traces until Daren came storming back. By that time the expected drizzle had been falling for about a candlemark; and as she had anticipated, his cloak and his leathers were soaked through. He was shivering, and the leather was probably chafing him raw wherever it touched bare skin, and his temper was not improved by his discomfort.

  “You were supposed to take downstream!” he shouted. “I had to take both! You lazy little bitch—you’re supposed to be doing something, not standing around waiting for me—”

  “He left the path here,” she said, clenching her hands to keep from hitting him. “He walked backward in his own tracks, and then jumped off the trail into that pile of leaves.”

  Daren looked at her scornfully. “I’m not some green little boy who believes in Pelagir-tales. I’m a prince of Rethwellan, and I’ve been trained by some of the finest hunters in the world. You—”

  She lost her temper, and grabbed the lacings in the front of his leather tunic, then dragged him past the pile of leaves, surprise making him manageable for the necessary few steps. “Does that look like a Pelagir-tale, little boy?” she hissed, pointing at the very clear paw-print in the mud. “Seems to me you’d better start growing up pretty quickly, so you know what to believe and what not to believe. I’ve beaten you at this game five times out of six, and you know it, so don’t you think you’d better stop playing the high and mighty princeling and start paying attention to somebody who happens to be better at this than you are?”

  He pulled out of her grip, his face growing red. “Since when does half a year of training give you the right to act like an expert?” he shouted.

  “Since-”

  That was all she had a chance to say.

  Something very dark, and very large suddenly loomed up out of the bushes just behind her. She never had a chance to see what it was; the next thing she knew, she was flying through the air, and she had barely enough time to curl into a protective ball to hide her head and neck before she impacted with a tree.

  After that all she saw was stars, and blackness.

  Eight

  This was the worst headache she’d ever had—

  —and the most uncomfortable bed. It felt like a bush. A leafless, prickly bush.

  What happened?

  Kero tried to move, and bit back a moan as every muscle and joint protested movement. It felt as if the entire left side of her body was a single ache. And her head hurt the same way it had when one of the horses had kicked her and she’d gotten concussed.

  “Well?” That was Tarma’s voice. “You two certainly made a fine mess out of this assignment.”

  She opened her eyes, wincing against the light. Tarma stood about twenty paces away; just beyond her was Daren, lying up against another tree, as though he’d impacted and slid down it. Fine mist drooled down onto her face; droplets condensed and ran into her eyes and down the sides of her face to the back of her neck. Her mouth was dry, and she licked some of the moisture from her lips.

  Looks like he got some of the same treatment I did, Kero decided, and shivered. Even wet, her wool clothing would keep her warm, but she must have been lying on the cold ground for a while and it had leached most of the heat out of her body.

  “You’ve managed to botch everything I told you to do,” Tarma said coldly, arms crossed under her dark brown rain cape. Her harsh features looked even colder and more forbidding than usual. Her ice-blue eyes flicked from one to the other of them. “First you don’t even bother to set up a plan, or agree on who is going to do what. Then you, Daren, storm off into the game leaving behind a trail a baby could follow, so that Kero has to spend twice the time she should covering it for you. Then you, Kero, let Daren waste his time in a fruitless search when you knew from the moment you saw Warrl’s tracks that he was chasing a wild hare. Then you both start arguing at the tops of your lungs. An army could have come up on you and you’d never have known it until it was too late.”

  She glared at both of them, and Kero didn’t even try to move under the dagger of that stare.

  “Keth was working with me on this,” she continued, pitilessly. “We decided to make this run dangerous for you, to teach you that if you fouled up, you’d get hurt; just like real life. You triggered one of her booby traps with your arguing. And that’s exactly what it caught; two boobies, two fools who couldn’t even follow simple orders to keep their mouths shut. Well, I have a further little assignment for you: get home. There’s just one catch. Until you cooperate, you won’t be able to find your way back.” She smiled nastily, and turned on her heel, stalking off into the rain. In the time between one breath and the next, she was gone, as if the drizzle itself had decided to step in and hide her.

  Kero struggled out of the bush she’d flattened in her fall. Twigs scratched her, as she slowly pulled herself up onto her knees, then from her knees, shakily, to her feet. Her head ached horribly, and she guessed that she was one long bruise from neck to knee along her left side. The only good luck she’d had was that she’d fallen into that bush in the first place. There had been enough dead leaves and grass between herself and the ground to keep her out of the mud. Bits of leaves clung all over her, making her look as if she’d slept in them. She brushed herself off as best she could, and waited for Daren to join her.

  He used the tree trunk to steady himself as he got to his feet; he wavered quite a bit getting there, and looked as if he felt just as shaky as she did. When he saw she was watching him, he glared at her, and limped off after Tarma without taking a single backward glance at her.

  That little bastard! she thought, indignantly. Well, two can play—

  Then she looked around.

  She had been in and out of these woods for the past several months. They weren’t that far from the back door to the Tower. It was late autumn, most of the leaves were off the trees, which should have made it easier to see through the woods in spite of the rain.

  She didn’t recognize anything now. She was totally, inexplicably, lost.

  And in three breaths, Daren came storming out of the mist, head down, limping along like a wounded and angry bull, and ran right into her.

  “Hey!” she yelled, indignantly. He caught her as she started to fall, then shoved her away.

  “What are you doing, running into me like that?” he shouted.

  “Run—you pig! You ran into me!” she spluttered.

  “You weren’t anywhere in sight!” he yelled back, turning red again. “You just jumped out of nowhere!”

  “I did no such—” but he was gone again, as fast as his bruised legs would take him, this time going in the opposite direction to the one he’d been traveling when he ran into her.

  That— she couldn’t think of any name that was bad enough to call him. That swine! That rat! Unreasonable, pigheaded, overbearing, arrogant— She looked around, angrily, dashing water and wet hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand. That vague shape looming up through the rain, beyond and above the trees—that might be the cliff of the Tower.

  I think.... It changed from moment to moment, shrinking and growing, and sometimes vanishing entirely behind the trees. Well, I have to go somewhere. I’ll bet I make it back, no matter what Tarma said. And I’ll bet he doesn’t. All I have to do is head for the Tower and watch for where we were. Or find Tarma’s tracks.

  She limped off, keeping her eyes alert for signs of disturbance that marked their travel. She found plenty of little snags of wool, a sure indicator that Daren had been there. And she found traces of his footsteps, and of her own.

  But she found nothing identifiable as Warrl’s or Tarma’s tracks, and though she stopped frequently to reconnoiter, she saw no landmarks that looked familiar, and no sign that the Tower cliff was any nearer. She might as well have been on the other side of the world. She couldn’t even tell if she was wandering in circles. The forest seemed utterly lifeless; the steady dripping of rain on dead leaves hiding any other sounds when she stopped and listened. She couldn’t even tell where the sun was; the sky was a uniform gray everywhere. Her head throbbed, and her stomach knotted with nausea; walking was torture, but at least it kept her warmer than standing. When she stopped to try and hear past the falling rain, she was shivering in moments.

  Finally, for lack of anything better to do, she took out her belt-knife, and began to mark the tree trunks. At least this should keep me from going around in circles, she thought, slogging her way through heaps of soggy leaves, shivering with the cold rain that kept trickling down the back of her neck. As long as I keep going in a straight line, I’ll come to something I recognize. I have to find the place eventually. Either I’ll run into the cliff, or I’ll run into the path, or I’ll find the stream. If I don’t do any of those things, I’ll get to the road. I have to cross either the stream, the road or the path. There’s no other way off Tower lands.

  Or so she thought. Until she stopped to ease her bruises, side aching so much she wanted to cry, and rested a while leaning up against a tree trunk. And when she felt a little less tired, and started to mark the trunk, she happened to look at the other side, first.

  And saw her own six-armed star chipped carefully into the bark as Tarma had taught her; the least amount of damage to the tree that she could manage and still have the mark visible. It was still so fresh that the wind hadn’t disturbed the fragments of bark still clinging to the tree.

  She looked around in a panic, sure she couldn’t possibly have touched that tree. The place was in no way familiar. But the mark was indisputably there.

  She clung to the rough bark, suddenly faint and dizzy. But this isn’t possible—I know I’d have seen that huge pig-shaped rock, or the little cave under it! And the tree with the hawk’s nest in the fork! And there’s no way I could forget that clump of holly, it’s the only green thing I’ve seen all afternoon!

  Nevertheless, it was her unique marking. In a place she’d never seen.

  She closed her eyes, the dizziness and nausea increasing. She fought them down, telling herself not to panic. But when she opened her eyes again, fear clutched her heart and made it pound painfully in her temples, for her sight was darkening, too.

  Then she realized that it was not her eyesight dimming—the sun was setting, dusk closing in rapidly, and she was nowhere nearer to getting home than she had been from the moment Tarma left them.

  Tarma—she can’t mean to leave us out here all night—we’re both hurt, and we haven’t eaten all day. She’ll come and get us. She’ll come and get me, surely—none of what happened was my fault. I followed the rules.

  For one moment, she let herself believe that. Then, as she thought about how angry her teacher had been beneath that mask of indifference, she knew with a sinking heart that there would be no rescue tonight. We aren’t children. One night in the forest isn’t going to kill either of us. We’ll just wish we were dead And even if I followed the rules, I didn’t make sure he did. When I saw he wasn’t going to measure up, I should have forfeited the game by turning around and going home.