She touched her hand to the hilt, and felt a kind of tingle, as if her hand had a mild case of “pins and needles.” There was something there, all right, even if she didn’t know what it was.

On the other hand, she wasn’t too certain she wanted to find out while she had other options available.

She settled herself carefully in her saddle and opened the protections on her mind. Slowly, this time. The last thing she wanted was to let that slimy thing know she was behind them.

She caught a lot of stray thoughts, full of violence and not very clear or coherent; and when she opened her eyes, she found she was facing westward. Very well, then, west it would be.

Each time she lost the trail, she found it again by cautiously lowering her protections, and “listening.” But then the road she followed turned into a path, and the path itself dwindled away to nothing, and it was too dark to try and track the bandits by ordinary means.

Now she had no choice. Reluctantly, she eased the blade halfway out of its sheath, and relaxed.

The darkness about her began to lighten, and soon she could see as well as if it was near dawn. For a moment, as she looked around herself in astonishment, she thought she might be having some kind of fit—there were little sparkles of sullen light leading off over the hills. Then she pulled her hand away from the hilt of the sword, and she realized that the little sparkles vanished, as did her ability to see so clearly, the moment her hand left the sword.

So this means, what? She dismounted and put her hand back on the sword. The sullen light reappeared, and as she examined the hard ground, she saw the faint traces of hoofmarks there. This, then, was the direction the bandits had taken.

And the moment she found their trail, the light disappeared, although she could still see as well as before.

It’s letting me do what I can do. It‘s—playing tutor, I guess. But the moment I’m in a position where my own abilities can handle things—then it just sort of steps back and makes me take care of myself.

She took the blade in her right hand, the mare’s reins in her left, and followed the trail until—something—told her to stop. It just didn’t seem right to go on farther.

Maybe it’s about time to see what they’re up to. She opened her mind, leaning against Verenna’s warm, sweaty neck and closing her eyes to do so, and went “looking” for bandits.

She found them all right. An entire encampment of them, with sentries posted all around the little valley they’d taken for their own. Drunk, most of them. Wild, disconnected thoughts. Dierna was there, and still alive—and relatively unharmed. But with her was—

Kero slammed her protections shut, convulsively. He was there with her, that cold, slimy, evil presence she’d felt before. This time he hadn’t sensed her presence, but that was because he was preoccupied. But she had inadvertently come a lot closer to being detected than she really wanted to think about.