Chapters (28)
He raised dripping head and shoulders from the water some time later to find Koris missing. Though he was sure that the Captain had followed them out of the Hole of Volt.
“Koris?” he asked Tunston. The other was rubbing his face with handfuls of wet grass, sighing in content, while Jivin lay on his back beside the stream, his eyes closed.
“He goes to do what is to be done for his man below,” Tunston answered remotely.”No Guardsman must be left to wind and wave while his officer can serve him otherwise.”
Simon flushed. He had forgotten that battered body on the beach. Though he was of the Guard of Estcarp by his own will, he did not yet feel at one with them. Estcarp was too old, its men — and its witches — alien. Yet what had Petronius promised when he offered the escape? That the man who used it would be transported to a world which his spirit desired. He was a soldier and he had come into a world at war, yet it was not his way of fighting, and he still felt the homeless stranger.
He was remembering the woman with whom he had fled across the moors, unknowing then that she was a witch of Estcarp and all that implied. There had been times during that flight when they had had an unspoken comradeship. But afterwards that, too, was gone.
She had been on one of those other ships when they had broken out of Sulcarkeep. Had hers fared as badly on the merciless sea? He stirred, pricked by something he did not want to acknowledge, clinging fiercely to his role of onlooker. Rolling over on the grass he pillowed his head on his bent arm, relaxing by will as he had learned long ago, to sleep.
Simon awoke as quickly, senses alert. He could not have slept long for the sun was still fairly high. There was the smell of cooking in the air. In the lee of a rock a small fire burned where Tunston tended some small fish spitted on sharp twigs. Koris, his ax his bedfellow, slept, his boyish face showing more drawn and fined down with fatigue then when he was conscious. Jivin sprawled belly down beside the streamlet, fast proving that he was more than a master of horsemanship, as his hand emerged with another fish he had tickled into capture.
Tunston raised an eyebrow as Simon came up. “Take your pick,” he indicated the fish. “’Tis not mess fare, but it will serve for now.”
Simon had reached for the nearest when Tunston’s sudden tension brought his gaze to follow the other’s. Circling over their heads in wide, gliding sweeps was a bird, black feathered for the most part save for a wide V of white on the breast.
“Falcon!” Tunston breathed that word as if it summed up a danger as great as a Kolder ambush.