It was hard to know what Tumna might spy out: a deer, a bandit, an honest traveler. She tucked her knees up to her chest and scanned the earth. There sparkled a pond lined with mulberry trees, and a neighboring settlement, not more than six houses, storehouses and sheds flanked by an orchard and rice fields. This time of year the fields should have shone with green shoots working up through muddy water, but the fields lay brown and untended. No one had planted. From the air, the place looked abandoned.

Tumna dropped, and she shrieked and planted her feet on the training bar even though the harness held her. Aui! So far to fall!

Color flashed where the trees thinned by a stream. She knew in the crudest sense how to rein the eagle; she tugged the right jess, and Tumna responded with a tight circle that attracted Volias’s attention. Fumbling in the pouch strapped to the harness, she got a hand around the red flag. As she yanked it free, her grip slipped, and it fell, brought up short by a leash.

She cursed, grabbed and waved it clumsily, trying to show where she had seen a person moving in the forest. Volias and Trouble plunged past her like a dropped stone, and Tumna’s circling movement cut off her view. As she turned in her harness trying to get a clear line of sight, something happened because as they came around she saw Volias and Trouble had set down in a narrow patch of cleared ground stream-side and he was gesticulating to a person—a woman with a baby—who was possibly hysterical or furious.

Pil had gotten Sweet to come around at an altitude rather higher than Nallo and Trouble; he had a far better grasp of reining and leashing. He had barely settled into a holding pattern when Volias launched, the eagle beating upward until she found a rising current that would lift her. Volias set a course eastward over countryside smoothing into a plain that stretched to a cloudy horizon.

It was going to rain soon. She shivered, wondering what had happened below.

Volias stayed aloft late into the afternoon, not stopping as he usually did for an early camp and a lesson in short-range maneuvers. They passed over extensive forest lands and, increasingly, villages set amid fields and ponds and orchards and attended by the occasional temple building or compound. Every one of these had thrown up around it an earthwork or palisade, flimsy-looking barriers from this height. Folk worked in the closer fields, or hauled dirt as others shoveled.

According to the tales, fertile Istria boasted ten and a thousand villages, and it looked to Nallo like every one of them was surrounded by fresh fortifications.

Late in the afternoon, they set down in a clearing well away from village or temple. She followed Volias in checking her eagle’s harness and feathers and then, like Pil, hooding the bird for the night, making sure the two raptors remained at opposite sides of the open space. Volias released Trouble to hunt. Nallo trudged farther into the woods.