“A party,” Lewen said. “A dozen warriors, one of the antlered monsters, some bogglins.”

An antlered former-man lay at the irk’s feet, a single heavy shaft all the way through the thing’s head at the height of the brow ridge.

“I followed Tessen and Cynthia,” he said with a shrug. “Just to cover them. I found these.”

Monts, the royal forester, went past, stopping only to lay a hermetically charged wand on the corpse and then springing to his feet.

“Don’t get caught in a counter-ambush,” Aneas called. He felt like someone’s father, sending them to their first tournament; a foolish reaction, as Monts had probably seen more battle than he had.

*

By the time the sun was high, the last six canoes were coming together as fast as Irene’s work party could supply pine roots, which they were tearing from the ground in handfuls. The vessels were twenty-four feet long; their hulls were made from the bark of whole trees; each boat had spruce gunnels, forty or fifty ribs, and stems made from trees that had been warped by wind and weather. Aneas had never even seen one built before, although he’d seen them, full of furs, moving on the Great River in his youth.

Ta-se-ho was an exacting builder, and he’d ordered a whole hull unlaced and redone because he didn’t like the wrinkle in the hull. Aneas had the sense to let the older man have his way, and the old man pronounced himself satisfied at noon.

Monts returned without loss, having run down a pair of northern Morean turncoats but no more.

Aneas nodded. “It’s not so bad, brothers,” he said. “If he has patrols looking for us . . . then he’s not atop us. Double the guards; pack. We’re off at last light.”

He watched Irene and Looks-at-Clouds gathering more spruce root; saw Quill Garter (his own name for a particularly tall Outwaller woman) gathering the tips of spruce trees in a net bag, watched four bogglins stripping a patch of mushrooms. By midafternoon, most of the rescued canvas was dry; the food, such as it was, was packed; a group of Nita Qwan’s Outwallers were weaving baskets to carry food in the boats, and Aneas had seldom felt so useless. He rolled his own blanket roll very tight, and then spent almost an hour of real time casting about in the aethereal.

Late in the afternoon, a wyvern returned, looking smug, which in a wyvern was a certain contracting of the skin around the eyes and beak, and brought Aneas word of two Gallish ships in the river, just off the mouth of the Cranberry River.

“Twenty leagues,” the young wyvern said, as if extremely proud of this feat of counting in human terms. He said it six times.