The Golden Princess: A Novel of the Change (Change Series) (11 page)

“And the malice of the Shadow never sleeps,” Faramir agreed. “But look at all that he did with forty-six years!”

The older Dúnedain woman went on: “So . . . there’s no point in beating ourselves up. Grief, yes: guilt, no.”

Morfind laughed. “Well, at last
someone’s
being sensible.”

“Gellon ned i galar i chent gîn ned i gladhog,”
Tathardes said to her, bowing with her hand over her heart and a wink.

“
Ai!
How come you don’t love the way
my
eyes shine when I laugh?” Malfind asked, half-seriously.

“Because you’re too young,” she replied.

“She’s my twin! I’m the same age minus fifteen minutes!”

“That’s in boy-years; they’re different, like with dogs. You’re a spotty kid, she’s just the right age for heedless play amid the spring flowers.”

“And then harsh waking to the real world ends your happy dream, willow-girl,” Morfind said dryly in the Common Tongue, punning bilingually on the meaning of Tathardes, and everyone chuckled.

The Mangjols climbed into the outpost and they all exchanged the hand-to-shoulder greeting Rangers used and helped with packing and unpacking respectively. The newcomers had more supplies and some basic cooking equipment with them because they were taking the two-to-ten shift and would be making their evening meal here. They also each had a ring-tailed pheasant hanging from their belts, gutted and headless and drained but not yet plucked of their iridescent blue and green feathers. There was very good hunting on the mountain, if you were alert and walked quietly.

Some liked to use pheasant wingfeathers for fletching their arrows, though Faramir thought it was showy and preferred goose, or seagull when it was available.

The center of the outpost’s floor held a deep pit where, with care, a cooking-fire would be invisible after dark, and Faramir noted Damrod’s eyes flick to make sure the stack of dry firewood had been replenished, along with the damp rotten branches needed to turn a blaze into a daytime fire-signal in an emergency. That was a day-shift duty.

The newcomers wore the same gear as the three cousins; loose tough pants and shirt-tunics of hard-woven linsey-woolsey twill, with leather patches on knees and elbows, mail-lined elk-hide jerkins cinched by broad equipment belts of the same, soft-sided leather boots that came to just below the knee and were fastened by horn buckles on the outside,
and cloaks that had loops sewn to their outer surfaces and loose broad hoods. All had bows and quivers, climbing ropes, round shields and light helms slung over their backs, and tomahawk-hatchets through a loop at the back of their belts; tomahawks were something of a specialty of this southernmost Stath. Two-foot brush-swords hung at their left hips or over their shoulders, straight and thick in the back with a curved, waisted leaf-shape to the blade on the other side.

Everything was colored in muted, mottled shades, mainly olive and green, steel carefully grayed, copper and bronze fastenings let tarnish. Close-up you could just see the blazon on the jerkins and shields—a tree and seven stars surmounted by a crown—but the whole faded into a blurred gray-green at more than a pace. Malfind picked up his spear in addition as they vaulted easily over the low wall to leave.

“Novaer, mellyn,”
Damrod called after them softly.

“Good luck to you, too, comrades,” Faramir replied over his shoulder.

The downward path they took was very steep in parts. As a matter of course they were taking a different route back from the one they’d come on, or that their reliefs had used. The Dúnedain of Stath Ingolf had a network of trackways over the whole of their territory, and memorizing them was part of their education. On the more level parts the packed dirt still had crumbled remains of old asphalt, for there had been a road here once. Now it was much narrower and more direct, and only reinforced here and there with log or rock to keep it from washing out in the rains of winter. Nobody brought wheeled vehicles up here anymore; backs served, or the odd packhorse.

A small group of twenty or so tawny-coated tule elk grazed on a ridge of open land covered in tall grass just turning from green to yellow. They threw up their heads and moved slowly away as they caught the humans’ scent. The herd were mostly spike bulls, young males without the antlers and heavy dark throat-ruff of grown herd-lords. The females would be dropping their calves about now. They liked privacy for that, though normally they were very social.

The three Rangers bent low to avoid being silhouetted against the sky as they went over the ridge and took a knee when they were below the
crest to look down the slope. It had been a bit wetter than average this last winter, and the waist-high grass was still heavily starred with silène, the tall stalks bearing flowers white and purple and pink, and with crimson poppy and yellow mariposa-lily. There was a strong minty aroma as they knelt, from the crushed leaves of a patch of low-growing herbs that the ancients had called Yerba Buena and Rangers knew as
athelas
.

Malfind leaned his spear against his shoulder and spoke with his hands to avoid spooking the elk further: all Dúnedain learned Sign in their earliest childhood along with the Common and Noble Tongues.
Hiril
Eilir, their co-founder, had been deaf since birth, but it was extremely useful for everyone.

Take one?
Malfind asked, flicking his eyes towards the herd.

Faramir thought for a moment. The fresh-grilled liver and kidney were the hunter’s right, and always tempting because they tasted so marvelous right out of the beast with nothing but a little salt, but . . .

No. We don’t know if they need that much fresh meat at the Wood and it’s the wrong season for salting down.

Ranger law was strict that you ate what you killed, and frowned on wasting horn, hide, bone or anything else useful about the animal unless you really had no choice, that Oromë the Lord of the Trees not be angered. Their supple, durable belts and jerkins and most of their boots were brain-tanned, for instance, and their bows needed sinew and horn and glue. Anything left over could always go for compost and then onto a kitchen-garden.

Morfind nodded.
Anyway, one of those bulls will dress out at fifty pounds for each of us, not counting the hide. Do you want to pack that for hours, brother, and without carrying frames? It’ll be dark before we get back, especially if we have to take time for a stalk, and then draining and gralloching and skinning it.

That’s a fact,
her brother admitted.
It
would
take time since they know we’re here already.

Let’s go,
Faramir concluded.
Malfind, you’re point.

They were within the Stath’s regularly patrolled territory, but rather far south; Eryn Muir was only about an easy day’s stroll from the ancient bridge, much less if you really pushed it. It wasn’t absolutely impossible
that a lone Eater might sneak across to try for a Ranger; eating the heart and bringing the head home would be strong magic and enormous status. They trotted across the savanna at a swinging pace. It was scattered with small round-topped oaks, and cinnamon bush with its pungent bay-scented leaves.

Then they took a path that cut through thick madrone chapparal. The twisted limbs were joined by coyote bush, with young golden-fleece standing like green plumes. They took care to avoid the poison oak, and the orange flowers of the sticky Monkeybush. You needed good eyes or a guide to realize it
was
a path, more an amending of naturally weak spots in the barrier of hard-leafed spindly scrub than a roadway, with an occasional inconspicuous mark in the Tengwar runes.

Then into a steep ravine, through tanbark oak with its serrated leaves, sweet-scented blueblossom and chamise with bunches of stiff white blooms, then dense Douglas fir and hemlock standing tall and thick and meeting in a canopy of scented green above. The air grew cooler and damper and smelled of wet earth, and the undergrowth was thick with moss and fern. Water trickled and tinkled.

They’d walked in silence among the chuck and birr and buzz of insects and birds, in a row each three yards from the next; Faramir was bringing up the rear, halting occasionally to glance behind them. Even their footfalls made little sound. The soles of their boots were complex constructions, tough but supple leather with a bottom layer of the increasingly hard-to-find tire-tread. That was much more expensive than conventional hobnails . . . but they also gave better traction and were much quieter. Stath Ingolf had finder’s claims on several large warehouses where their explorers had found vast numbers that had been stored away from sun and weather since the old world fell, still on their shipping pallets in buildings that were shapeless mounds of honeysuckle from the outside.

Farther down the ravine were young redwoods, or at least young by comparison to the millennia-old giants of Eryn Muir that was their destination, trees that had been ancient in human terms when the first Hispano explorers arrived in this land. This canyon here had probably been
logged a century or more before the Change, which you could see because the trees stood in rough circles where saplings had sprouted from around the long-vanished stumps. Young redwoods, the ones less than a hundred years old, put on better than a yard of height per year on a favorable site. These didn’t have the overwhelming mass of their elders, not yet, much less of their cousins in the Sierras, but while only a few were two hundred feet high many were respectably close to it. The ground beneath was open, thickly coated with their brown dropped needles and too shady for much other growth.

A stream ran down the ravine, still fresh with the spring and running quickly over brown stones, making a low chuckling music. They slid down beside it, sometimes jumping from rock to rock, and once down a sort of steep ladder carved beside the foaming jumps of a cataract-waterfall. The flow of the white water wasn’t very large, since the stream was only a few feet across, but it was refreshing in the still air of the canyon and comely enough that you half-expected to see a water-sprite tumbling in it. At the bottom Malfind leapt down and trotted half a dozen paces on to shed momentum along the shore of a small pond, prodding with the butt of his spear at muddy dirt and watching where he placed his feet.

Then he stopped, stiffened and thrust the weapon up. Faramir felt a cold prickle in his gut as he saw it. That was Battle Sign; it meant
hostile tracks
.

“Overwatch,” he said quietly to Morfind, who’d stiffened as well; then he joined her brother.

The black-haired Ranger went down on one knee and put a little draw on her bow, ready to snap-shoot as her eyes scanned the undergrowth. They’d been walking for about an hour, and the shade was dense here—the sun was far enough past noon to be partially blocked by the ridgeline to the west, but they’d have been back to base before the full night came and the stars came out in the east. The prickle between Faramir’s shoulder blades grew worse as he squatted where the butt of Malfind’s weapon pointed. Nobody hostile should be around here, not this close to the Ranger station in the Wood where his folk dwelt.

Malfind was an indifferent-good archer by Dúnedain standards, but
a fine spearman. Wordlessly he took the scabbard off the head of his spear and tucked it into his belt; it was normally worn on to keep the edges from glinting if they caught sunlight. Then he slid the round shield off his back and took it in his left hand by the central grip beneath the boss, before he faced in the opposite direction from his sister, weapon poised for the quick underarm gutting thrust.

The sharp edges did glint, a very little, though the rest of the steel was a bonderized gray. It was about nine inches long, starting out as broad as a man’s palm and tapering to a vicious point; the spearshaft was seven feet of seasoned brown-gray ashwood, thick as a quarterstaff, with a foot of stainless-steel wire wound around below the head and a similar length of butt-cap at the other end. A strong man with long arms could reach twelve paces with a single darting lunge.

Faramir opened his eyes and his mind and looked at the tracks; then he closed his eyes, thought, opened them again and repeated the process for several seconds. They called the technique
Kim’s game
in his folk’s schools, and he’d always been rather good at it besides liking the book it came from. That way he could call back and move the images like cutouts in his head, like multiple drawings, without needing to keep staring down at them. A good deal of Dúnedain training had come from Lady Astrid’s consort Lord Alleyne, and Lady Eilir’s, Lord Hordle. As youths they’d both joined an esoteric warrior brotherhood over the eastern sea just before the Change, known for some reason as the SAS.

The tracks were of bare feet. They were broad across the ball, and you could draw a straight line from the tip of the big toe of one particularly good print through the middle of the heel at the rear. There were distinct gaps between all the toes, with even the little toe turned noticeably outward. As if the foot were a hand, with the fingers splayed. Those were the marks of someone who had never worn shoes for any length of time; if you’d gone shod from childhood your foot was narrower and the toes all pointed ahead, or even inwards if the shoes were bad.

“Yrch,”
he said softly, rising. “Eaters. At least a dozen just here.”

Individual bare feet were as distinctive as palm-prints, and as easy to tell apart. That there were so many meant . . .

“Moving fast and taking chances to do it.”

The others didn’t look around, but he could feel a subliminal crackle. That sort of enemy raid hadn’t happened since the very early years of Stath Ingolf. There
weren’t
any Eater bands left north of the Bay and hadn’t been since before they reached their teens. That meant a war-party from south of the Glorannon, and that was very bad . . . and hadn’t happened in many years either.

He blinked again and the images were summoned back; the mark of the right foot was twisted in a bit from that of the left, pigeon-toed but only with one foot. An old injury that had healed not-quite-right, sufficient to affect the man’s stride just a little. Not many who ran with the Eater bands down around the Bay lived through an injury that needed time and help to heal. Not in the grisly game of stalking and hunting and dreadful feasting that made up their lives. One who did would be very tough and very cunning, and probably a leader whose followers feared losing his wits and ferocity more than they did the effort of keeping him alive until he was strong again.