They do like a swamp, the stripe-kitties, when they can get it. Big snowshoe feet and they swim well too. Is it my imagination I can smell him? No, it’s there, like a tomcat, but even more rank. A male then, and big, warning off his brothers. The wind’s in my face, right from the woods, so he can’t be too close or the horses would be acting up more than they are. I wish we had Edain and Garbh along, she’s the best tracking dog I ever met.

The lead party had halted. They’d be looking at her with Astrid’s Zeiss binoculars, an heirloom from her father Kenneth Larsson. Ritva remembered her grandfather with affection—he’d died in a boating accident when she was about fourteen—and he’d loved gadgets, having been an engineer as well as a very wealthy man before the Change. The 20x60 S-type monstrosity was typical of the sort of thing he’d collected, with an utterly ingenious mechanical stabilization system that hadn’t been in the least affected by the Change, and it would make nothing of a thousand yards. She pulled herself back into the saddle with a flex of the leg, then slipped her bow back into the scabbard at her left knee and the arrow into her quiver, stood in the stirrups and brought her hands before her face, palms in.

Then she made claws of the fingers and raked them outward sharply, twice, making the gesture broad and obvious. That was Sign for tiger, and her honorary Aunt Eilir had made the visual language part of the Dúnedain curriculum, back when she refounded the Rangers together with Astrid in the years after the Change. That was probably because she’d been deaf since birth, but also because it was extremely useful to be able to exchange complex information silently.

Two more of the party trotted back on the other side of the remuda, pushing the beasts towards the marsh and its fringe of woodland despite their unease. The commanders came up; Hiril Astrid was casing her binoculars in their padded-steel case.

“That was good scouting, Ritva,” she said with a nod.

“Thank you, my lady,” Ritva acknowledged.

Which was a bit formal, but they were in the field, not sitting over wine in Stardell Hall listening to a song or a reading from the Histories. The four older Rangers looked a little more worn than their followers; not that they were anywhere near their limits, merely that there was more discomfort behind their hard-held faces.

“Scout net,” Astrid said, and two more of the Rangers trotted away.

Alleyne brought out a map, and everyone else squatted around it with their reins looped through their belts and their horses occasionally taking a nuzzle at their hair.

“This marsh isn’t mapped, but I think it’s here,” he said, tapping a spot. “The wetland’s probably recent. Within the last twenty years from the trees, though cottonwoods grow bally fast.”

“And this St. Hilda’s place should be about six to eight miles south and west,” John Hordle rumbled, his finger moving over the waxed linen like a sausage with auburn fuzz.