Authors: Michelle Paver,Geoff Taylor
Tags: #Good and evil, #Death, #Animals, #Wolves & Coyotes, #Juvenile Fiction, #Philosophy, #Prehistoric peoples, #Battles, #Fiction, #Voyages and travels, #Good & Evil, #Prehistory, #Adventure fiction, #Historical, #Fantasy & Magic, #Demoniac possession, #Friendship, #Murder, #Enemies
Now they had to wait till dawn, and hope the plan worked.
They didn't have another.
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***
In the darkness, firelight flared.
Renn gripped Torak's arm. The Auroch camp was much closer than they'd thought.
Torak was mystified. Why waken one from scratch when you could take a burning branch from the first? And they weren't using strike-fires. One man spun a stick between his palms, drilling it into a piece of wood which he held down on the ground with one foot, while he kept the drill straight by means of a crossbar clamped between his teeth. It worked. Smoke curled. The second man fed the flames beard-moss, then kindling. When the fire was fully awake, everyone knelt and touched their foreheads to the ground.
Torak broke out in a cold sweat. Gaup was right. 96 These people were different. And yet they were setting spits over the fires, and soon he smelled the delicious, familiar smell of roasting wood grouse, weirdly at odds with the silent camp. "Why don't they speak?" he whispered.
"I think it's to make them more treelike," breathed Renn. "That's what Deep Forest people want above all: to be like the trees."
"I can see more shields down there than men."
She nodded and held up three fingers. Three hunters still out there, stalking the Forest. They'd been right to climb the lime.
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time, Thiazzi was getting away.
Gray light seeped into camp, and Torak made out humped shelters around the central beech.
The Aurochs had seen them. Men were pointing, running for weapons and shields.
Swiftly, Torak and Renn climbed down to earth. Wolf appeared, his fur wet with dew. They headed for the river.
Willows overhung the Blackwater, holding in the night. There was no sign of Aurochs. Torak prayed that they'd all been drawn by the decoys. Yanking off their boots and tying them to their sleeping-sack rolls, they made their way down the bank and into the reeds, moving cautiously, so as not to startle any water birds into betraying them. The shallows were choked with leafy
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saplings felled by a flood farther upstream.
"Good cover," murmured Renn.
They risked strained smiles. Maybe this was going to work.
The Blackwater wasn't as sleepy as it looked. It was a struggle to resist its stealthy underwater pull.
Suddenly Wolf veered, and came swimming
toward
them, his ears pinned back in alarm.
"What's
that?
" whispered Renn.
Torak's belly turned over. Those logs in midstream: They were floating
upriver.
And some of them had eyes.
One raised its head. Torak saw a fierce green face tattooed with leaves. A brown headband. Long hair braided with horsetails.
A Forest Horse raiding party. Heading straight for them.
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She had. She surfaced soon after he did in the same patch of reeds, and they waited, gritting their teeth to stop them chattering. The Forest Horses hadn't seen them. The green men lay on their bellies, paddling silently with their hands, knives clamped between charcoal-blackened teeth. Not far from Torak, Wolf hauled himself onto the bank and shook himself noisily.
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Eyes flicked sideways in leaf-tattooed faces, then back again. A lone wolf was no concern of theirs.
Unless he could steer both sides away from them.
"Head downriver," he told Renn in a whisper. "Wait for me past that bend, I'll meet you there."
Her eyes widened. "Where are you going?"
"No time to explain! Watch out for traps!"
Telling Wolf to stay with the pack-sister, he started toward the Auroch camp. When he was as close as he dared, he crouched and whipped two arrows from his quiver. Then he took out his medicine horn and quickly smeared the arrowshafts with earthblood. He had no idea what those red branches meant to the Aurochs, but they were easy to spot, which was all that mattered.
Still crouching, he nocked the first arrow to his bow and waited.
He glimpsed a Forest Horse hunter coming ashore:
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stealthily, keeping upright so that the water ran noiselessly down his body rather than pattering on leaves.
Torak took aim. He wasn't as good a shot as Renn, but he didn't need to be. His arrow thudded into a holly a good distance away.
The tattooed head turned to follow it.
Panting, he collapsed against the tree, and as her fingers slipped from his, he gave a shaky laugh. "That was
too
close!"
No reply. He was alone in the tree.
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Who
was
that?" hissed Torak. "Who was who?" demanded Renn. His disappearence had shaken her badly, and she was struggling not to show it. "Someone took my hand. I thought it was you."
"Well it wasn't."
He grabbed her hand. "Yours is cold, the other was hot."
"Of course I'm cold, I'm soaking wet! Where did you
go?"
From the Auroch camp came shouts, a scream of pain. 104 "Tell you later," said Torak. "Let's get across while we can."
"There's no one here," he said. "I think they've all crossed to attack the camp."
Hastily they dried themselves with grass, stuffing more down their boots and inside their clothes, to warm
105
up. Torak cut some horsetail and scrubbed the green stain off their headbands, while Renn tended her poor, soaked bow.
She tried to convince herself that this was a forest just like the one where she'd grown up. She saw a spruce tree whose fissured trunk was studded with cones jammed in by woodpeckers, so they could peck at the seeds. Open Forest woodpeckers did that, too. She spotted a pile of leaves near a badger's sett; the badgers had been cleaning up after the winter, and had dragged out their old bedding. All familiar, she told herself.
It didn't work. The trees murmured that she didn't belong. The woodpeckers were black.
Torak had found something.
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Renn nodded. "Fin-Kedinn says there are creatures here that survived the Great Cold. I think they're called bison."
He frowned. "So they're prey?"
"I think so. But sometimes they charge."
In the distance, an owl hooted:
oo-hu, oo-hu.
Renn caught her breath. In her mind, she saw the dread wooden face of the Eagle Owl Mage.
Torak was thinking the same thing. "Could they be working together?" he said in a low voice. "Thiazzi
and
Eostra?"
"Torak," she said, "what happened at the Auroch camp? What did you do?"
Briefly, he told her how he'd set the two clans against each other. It was clever, but his ruthlessness shocked her. "But--people might have been killed." "That might have happened anyway."
"Maybe. Or maybe the Forest Horses were only
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scouting, you don't know."
"I warned you. I said I'd do whatever it takes to get Thiazzi."
"Starting fights? Getting people killed?"
Wolf glanced doubtfully from one to the other.
The ground climbed steadily, and black spruce gave way to beech. They waded through waist-high nettles and clambered over rotting tree trunks blistered with poisonous mushrooms. Renn noticed that the trees were taller than in the Open Forest, which would make them harder to climb; and the wood-ants didn't build their nests only on the south sides of the trunks, but all around, which would make it easier to get lost.
No sign of people.
And yet...
Behind her a branch swayed, as if someone had edged out of sight.
She put her hand to her knife-hilt.
The branch stilled. If it were Forest Horse hunters, she thought, we'd know it by now.
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Torak had gone ahead, and was kneeling to talk to Wolf. She ran to catch up. "I saw something!" she panted.
"And Wolf smelled something," said Torak. "He says it smells like the Bright Beast."
"That means fire."
"It also means ash. The one who took my hand ... it felt hot."
Their eyes met.
"Whatever grabbed my hand," said Torak, "it's followed us across the river."
As the light began to fail, they decided to strike camp under a yew tree.
They'd reached a valley where beavers had dammed a stream to make a narrow lake. Renn saw the beavers' lodge in the middle: a sturdy pile of branches, some streaked yellow where they'd gnawed off the bark. She guessed it was still occupied, as a few willows remained along the shore. Fin-Kedinn said that beavers liked to eat all the willows before moving on.