Lost in the Woods

Synopsis

They crossed Loshev’s ancient bridge and opened the waterproof case Tariq had given them: five crude sketches and five names on cheap plains papyrus. Malik, a Loshev troublemaker of long standing, had led them and was already dead: Koa had killed him at the wagon. Samir and Zara were hunter-trappers; one was a traveling tradesman; the fifth, Leila, was the only other who lived in town.

Two of the sketches landed harder than the rest. Koa knew Samir on sight as the archer who had got away from him and put the arrow in Phil Nye’s throat. Aldo, turning his memory over, placed Leila in the guardhouse during his four days of shaking: she had been sitting on Dan’s lap. She was Dan’s, then, and Dan was suddenly attached to the people the town had sent them to kill. The plan bent around it: take as many alive as could be managed and let a courtroom do the rest, with Samir the exception: he had run once already. Aldo said plainly that he was not a murderer and would loose a bolt in self-defense and no other way, which sat badly beside Koa’s reason for being there.

The going was poor. The map was near useless; they struck east meaning to sweep south, and Koa put them half a day north before he caught the error, so that their first landmark was a tree they named the piss tree. Mikhail played his lute badly there and Aldo answered with a song about the tree, which was better, and the three of them were a little less like strangers afterwards. Mikhail also told Koa he practiced the arcane: lights, a hand that is not a hand, the reading of written magic. Koa was raised among the Free Folk, who tolerate anything inside their few rules, and thought nothing of it. Aldo privately concluded the man was lying.

Then the woods did something. A stretch of forest, no different to look at, left the wine watered, the bread sodden, the hardtack crumbling and every garment soaked through. They accused one another of tampering with the drink before it became obvious that nothing carried through that ground stayed dry. Beyond it the leaf litter crunched again and the water they drew ran impossibly clean. Koa came out of it with a cough he could not put down.

Past it there was game and no sign of men; Aldo dropped a deer with one bolt and they took a night to cook and dry out. The following day Koa found what they had come for: bootprints, and branches hacked apart with shortswords rather than cut. They camped near the trail without a fire and set watches under two full moons.

Aldo spotted the lookout tree first, its bark scored with climbing marks. Mikhail went up and found rope, a plank seat and iron spikes driven into the trunk, with a clear view of the trail bend and, beyond it, a camp. Creeping in, he caught Koa’s arm a step short of a wolf trap hidden under the leaves. The camp had been stripped of everything worth carrying, and the fire pit still held enough warmth to say the fire had burned the previous night and been doused early in the evening. The crew had gone in a hurry, not long ago, and somebody in Loshev had been quicker than the party. Three or four sets of tracks led south.

They ran the gap down over a day, and with both moons full voted to close that night rather than wait. Koa was ready to call a halt from exhaustion when he saw the fire ahead with four figures around it. They worked into position in the moonlight. A woman got up and walked into the trees; Aldo watched her long enough to be sure she was only going to relieve herself, recognized Leila, and let her go.

Koa charged. Mikhail ringed one of them with dancing lights to take the fight out of him and Aldo put a bolt through another’s side. Mikhail talked Zara into lowering a drawn bow by pretending to give himself up; when she raised it again, Aldo’s next bolt took her through the face, which Mikhail did not forgive quickly. Aldo shouted into the dark that Leila’s bounty would be dropped if she came back with something worth hearing about Dan. The wounded man who had surrendered turned out, in the firelight, to be the one who had robbed Mikhail on the Forven road, and Mikhail apologized to him for nothing at all. Koa ran Samir down and killed him with the greatsword, and said, over the body, that Vroga would be pleased, but that this one was for Phil.

Leila walked out of the trees a few minutes later, hands wide and empty.