The trail ahead opened up into a clearing; suddenly there were stars overhead instead of interlacing tree branches. Kero picked out the sounds of many horses and a few whispers, and deduced that Icolan had decided to halt them.

“What’s up?” she whispered, as soon as she came within range of the closest shadow-shape.

“Conference,” the shape whispered back, one hand on its horse’s nose to keep it silent. Not a halt for rest, then. That was a disappointment, but hardly a surprise. Kero turned Hellsbane around and pointed her head along the backtrail, making use of the mare’s superior senses to keep watch for the rest of the party. “Guard,” she said into the gray’s ear, and slipped the rein over her arm, leaving Hellsbane relatively free. While the mare guarded the trail with ears and nose, Kero slipped her water bottle off the front of the saddle and took a long-wished-for drink. Her stomach was too knotted with fear and tension to even think about eating, but some of the others had taken advantage of the brief rest to snatch a mouthful or feed a handful of grain to a horse.

Finally the word went around the circle; “There’s a fork in the game trail. We’re splitting again.”

Kero sighed; it was a logical move, but not one she relished. And it meant they’d be moving on into the night. She patted Hellsbane’s neck comfortingly; the mare wasn’t going to like this either.

They split twice more during the grueling, half-blind trek through the darkness, and when dawn-trickled pale pink light over the hilltops and through the thick trees, there were no more than twenty riders left in Kero’s group. She didn’t know any of them terribly well, except for the leader, the head of all the scout-groups, a colorless woman known only as Lyr.

She mounted with the rest at Lyr’s signal, and they formed a group around her. “I know you’re all tired,” the scout-leader said in a flat voice, “But we still have at least one party on our tail. I’m going to try something; back there in the dark they may have lost track of who was following what, and if you’re with me on this, I want to head straight across the Border into Karse itself.”

The hard-bitten man in worn leathers on Kero’s right coughed as if he was holding back an exclamation or objection. Lyr turned her expressionless eyes on him for a moment.