He didn’t know why his brain was still madly trying to calculate risks, because his hand was already moving. Dropping bow and quiver and excess gear. Positioning his sharing-knife sheaths. Swapping out the spring-hook on his wooden wrist cap for the steel knife. Testing the draw of his war knife.

He rose and dropped down over the side of the ravine, sliding from rock to rill as silently as a serpent.

It had all happened so fast…

Fawn hung head down, dizzy and nauseated. She wondered if the blow she’d taken on the other side of her face would bruise to match the first. The mud-man’s broad shoulder seemed to punch her stomach as it jogged along endlessly, without stopping even when she’d been violently sick down its back. Twice.

When Dag came back to the valley farm—if Dag came back to the valley farm—would he be able to read the events from the mess her fight had left in the kitchen? He was a tracker, surely he’d have to notice the footprints in plum jam she had forced her captors to smear across the floor as they’d lunged after her. But it seemed far too much to expect the man to rescue her twice in one day, downright embarrassing, even. Imagining the indignity, she tried one more time to break from the huge mud-man’s clutch, beating its back with her fists. She might have been pounding sand for all the difference it made.

She should save her strength for a better chance.

What strength? What chance?

The hot, level sunlight of the summer evening gave way abruptly to gray shadow and the cool smell of dirt and rock. As her captor swung her down and upright, she had a giddy impression of a cave or hollow half-filled with piles of trash. Or war supplies, it was hard to tell. She fought back the black shadows that swarmed over her vision and stood upright, blinking.

Two more of the animal-men rose as if to greet her three escorts. She wondered if they were all about to fall on her and tear her up like a pack of dogs devouring a rabbit. Although she wasn’t entirely sure but what that shorter one on the end might have been a rabbit, once.

The Voice said, “Bring her here.”

The words were more clearly spoken than the mud-men’s mumblings, but the undertones made her bones feel as though they were melting. She suddenly could not force her trembling face to turn toward the source of that appalling sound. It seemed to flay the wits right out of her mind. Please let me go please let me go let me go letmego…

The bear-man clutched her shoulders and half dragged, half lifted her to the back of the cave, a long shallow gouge in the hillside. And turned her face-to-face with the source of the Voice.