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.