He wondered how many brigands were actually good at climbing trees and standing on ropes to shoot crossbows. The ones they’d just killed all wore conventional shoes or boots. He remembered the sailors aloft being barefoot, remembered asking someone about that. Boots were too slippery when they got wet, he’d been told. Bare feet callused by hard use and salt water clung to the ropes and spars.

They reached the crest of the ridge, and Arcolin looked back at the slope they were leaving, the furrow in the trees that showed where the main trail ran. He could not see the trail itself, but someone aloft in one of those trees could signal to a watcher here without being seen from below. A troop, no matter how quietly it moved, still made enough noise to cover the sound of a crossbow’s string … and a bolt fitted with a ribbon could be seen from here.

On the far side of the ridge, they moved cautiously through woods as the light slowly waned into twilight. Scouts reported a clearing ahead with rigged trees covering the opening.

“Looks like a camp—maybe for twenty, by the size of the jacks.”

“How recently were they there?”

“Hard to say, sir. Not yesterday, but within the last hand of days, most like. Fire-pit has bones in it, but there’s a pile of offal still downslope. It’s been dragged about by vermin but not consumed yet. They’re planning to come back this way sometime; we found a barrel of meal hidden in a brush pile.”

“We’ll camp here tonight,” Arcolin said. “They’re sure to notice us, but we can’t move far enough before dark to be out of their range, either. So they’ll attack, but our people will be up the trees, not theirs.”

“All night?” Burek asked, looking up at the trees.

“Better than theirs sneaking in and having the height on us,” Arcolin said. “Short watches, since there’s no way for anyone to rest up there.”

That, it turned out, was an error. The first climbers sent into the trees found fishing-net hammocks tied into the crotches of each rigged tree, water jugs with lines tied to their handles.

“They could stay up in the trees for days,” Burek said. “That explains how our scouts missed them.”

“That and not imagining such a thing,” Arcolin said. “Siniava’s people never did anything like this, so none of us even considered it. And yet—I saw those ships, the last year of Siniava’s War. And I knew Alured had been a pirate.”

“Risky,” Burek said. “But we hurt them today.”

“We’ve hurt them before,” Arcolin said. “Ordinary brigand bands would have retreated by now. There’s something keeping them in this area, and they’re being reinforced.”

The best climbers in the cohort went up the trees and tested out the rigging. Nothing happened through the early and midnight hours of darkness, and Arcolin finally woke Burek and lay down at the foot of one of the rigged trees. So far none of his climbers had fallen.