Smoothly, Saun strung his bow. Less smoothly but just as quickly, Dag unshipped and strung his shorter, adapted one, then swapped out the hook screwed into the wooden cuff strapped to the stump of his left wrist, and swapped in the bow-rest. He seated it good and tight, clamped the lock, and dropped the hook into the pouch on his belt. Undid the guard strap on his sheath and made sure the big knife would draw smoothly. It was all scarcely more awkward than carrying the bow in his hand had once been, and at least he couldn’t drop it.

At the bottom of the dell, Dag could see the clearing through the trees: three or four campfires burning low, tents, and an old cabin with half its roof tumbled in. Lumps of sleeping men in bedrolls, like scratchy burrs touching his groundsense. The faint flares of a guard, awake in the woods beyond, and someone stumbling back from the slit trenches. The sleepy smudges of a few horses tethered beyond. Words of the body’s senses for something his eyes did not see nor hand touch. Maybe twenty-five men altogether, against the patrol’s sixteen and the score or so of volunteers from Glassforge. He began to sort through the life-prickles, looking for things shaped like men that…weren’t.

The night sounds of the woods carried on: the croak of tree frogs, the chirp of crickets, the sawing of less identifiable insects. An occasional tiny rustle in the weeds. Anything bigger might have been either scared off by the noise of the camp below, or, depending on how the robbers buried their scraps, attracted. Dag felt around with his ground-sense beyond the tightening perimeter of the patrol, but found no nervous scavengers.

Then, too soon, a startled yell from his far right, partway around the patroller circle. Grunts, cries, the ring of metal on metal. The camp stirred. That’s it, in we go.

“Closer,” snapped Dag to Saun, and led a slide downslope to shorten their range. By the time he’d closed the distance to a bare twenty paces and found a gap in the trees through which to shoot, the targets were obligingly rising to their feet. From even farther to his right, a flaming arrow arced high and came down on a tent; in a few minutes, he might even be able to see what he was shooting at.

Dag let both fear and hope fade from his mind, together with worries about the inner nature of what they faced. It was just targets. One at a time. That one. And that one. And in that confusion of flickering shadows….