“Sailors?”

“Remember the harbors we went through? The guard sailors up on those crosspieces—the yards, they called them—standing on those ropes slung below when they weren’t walking on the yards themselves? They’ve rigged trees beside the main trails, at least in some places, and can shoot down on us.”

“That’s bad,” Devlin said. “We didn’t see anything like that in Siniava’s War.”

“No. But Alured was on our side then. These will be pirate friends of his, I have no doubt. They’ll be able to look right down and see our scouts—and our scouts aren’t looking up. This fellow must’ve been four or five armspans up—that would be no height to a sailor.”

“What do we do?” Burek said.

“Today? They’ll expect us to pursue, and they’ll try to lead us back where their aerial bowmen can attack … so we’re not going to do that. Today we take the swamp trail back south, as if we’re running away, then we’ll cut back upslope, cross the main trail, and go right over the ridge.”

Burek and Devlin both looked puzzled, but Jenits’s face lit. Arcolin gave him a quick nod. “I don’t expect we’ll run into a trailing force—though we might—but we should see evidence of their tree rigging. If we can get to the main trail across the ridge before they realize what we’re doing, we should be able to see how they get up and down, and estimate how far ahead they set up ambushes and the kinds of locations they pick. And then—”

“We can put our own archers up there,” Burek said. “And ambush them.”

“They’ll need practice shooting down at that angle,” Arcolin said, remembering what Cracolnya had always said about his cohort’s practice on rising and falling ground. “But yes. The thing is, we know nothing about rigging ropes in trees, not even what size rope.”

In the long summer afternoon, the cohort moved as Arcolin directed, encountering no brigands they could detect. Just as they crossed the main trail, Burek spotted a coil of rope tucked into the crotch of a tree. They looked up. At intervals along a nearly horizontal limb, loops of rope circled the limb, stained dark, unnoticeable to a casual glance. One end of the coil ran up the tree trunk, looking like a vine stem, to the base of a limb higher than the one that held the loops of rope.

“They climb the rope, pull it up, thread it through those loops … they must tie it off at the far end,” Burek said.

“Now we know they have trees ready to rig along the main trail,” Arcolin said. “So they can move their ambush site. We need to know how many, what kind of trees they use, how many sailors they have to climb them.”

“Our siege-assault specialists could climb it,” Devlin said, looking up.

“Later,” Arcolin said. “For now, we don’t want them to know we noticed this. We’ll go on over the ridge and look there.”