“I know what you’re thinking, Tobe,” she said, with no sign of rancor. “You’re thinking I’m crazy. Can’t say I blame you. Here’s my thought: if we head straight across the Border, open like, and stop trying to hide the backtrail, they may think they’ve gotten confused in the dark and they’re following one of their own groups. Border won’t be patrolled that thickly here; they save the heavy patrols for farther in.”

“They do?” said a stocky girl that had just joined before the beginning of this campaign, a brown-haired, brown-eyed, brown-skinned girl with “farmer” all over her. But she had to be good, or she wouldn’t be a Skybolt. “Why?”

“Bandits,” Lyr said succinctly. “Real ones. Karsites let ‘em stay here, both to confuse the issue when their regulars come across raiding, and to discourage their own people from trying to cross over into someplace else. So there’s a kind of buffer zone along here that the Karsite patrols don’t bother with.”

The girl nodded, her lips tightening a little. “Which means that’s something we’ll have to look out for, too.”

Lyr shrugged. “It’s them, or the real Karsites behind us. Bandits would only kill us if we lost.”

“A good point,” the girl replied bleakly, and from her tone, Kero guessed that this was yet another Skybolt who had personal experience of the Karsites.

“Sounds like a good plan to me,” Kero said quietly when Lyr looked to her, and she saw several others nodding, including the brown girl.

“Then let’s go for it.” Lyr turned her horse around, and sent the beast trotting east, toward the Border. During the night, they had gone from dry, scrub-covered hills to lusher lands, thickly covered with the kind of trees Kero felt justified in calling a “tree.” The hills were taller, too, and although they were also rockier and more precipitous, the soil seemed richer here. If this was the kind of territory Karse was trying to claim, Kero could understand their reasoning, although she obviously couldn’t agree with it. Within a few furlongs, the game trail came out above a real trail, one with the signs of shod hoofprints on it. Instead of avoiding the trail, as they had been, Lyr led them right down onto it, and they rode along single file as if they belonged here. Kero, who was riding tail again, had to keep reminding herself not to turn and look behind. It felt as if there were eyes and arrows trained on her back the moment they broke out of cover, even though she knew their followers couldn’t possibly have gotten within line-of-sight yet.