Firebrand

She mounted up and coughed. Eyes watering, she looked to Bane. “Keep an eye on things here, will you?”

He stomped a hoof in response. Karigan reined Condor around and rode toward the Lone Forest.

• • •

She tried to keep as close as possible to the copses of trees that made small islands of themselves on the rocky plain. She either trotted or cantered Condor in the spaces between, hoping speed would reduce the chance of watchers spying her approach. Of course, speed potentially made her more visible if watchers happened to be looking her way at just the right moment, but Estral had perhaps hours on her and she had to make up for it. If luck was with her, Estral had ridden at a much more sedate pace.

In one copse, she spotted hoofprints in the thin, gravelly soil that had accumulated between rocks. She could not say for sure if they belonged to Coda, but they looked fresh. She also found a pile of fresh droppings.

Her apprehension grew the closer she got to the forest. She tried to detect Estral ahead, but could not. It was when she reached a thicket of spruce and scrub within what she figured to be a half mile of the forest that she found Coda. He nickered at their approach. He was haltered and hobbled, his girth loosened, Estral nowhere in sight. She patted Coda’s neck. He seemed content enough, nibbling on sparse grasses.

She could, she surmised, always ride to the edge of the wood. If Estral was on foot, she could maybe still catch up. Or, she could return to their campsite and wait for Enver; then the two of them could decide what to do. But she had come this far, and much could happen between then and now.

Reluctantly, she haltered and hobbled Condor. She would walk into the Lone Forest, scout as she had intended originally, and return to their campsite whether or not she found Estral. When she did find Estral, she intended to give her a piece of her mind.

“Be ready for my return,” she told Condor. “We may need to ride fast to get out of here.”

He nibbled at her sleeve as though to hold her back. She kissed his nose, and left the cover of the thicket for whatever awaited her in the forest.

THE LONE FOREST

The stretch between the spruce thicket and the forest proper was more lush with thatches of tall, yellow grass and scraggy trees. Karigan ran, bent low, stopping now and then to hack and catch her breath. All the good her morning’s rest had done was quickly fading away.

She splashed through a stream and clambered over boulders, and when at last she reached the edge of the forest, she threw herself to the ground gasping, and coughed into her arm in an attempt to muffle the sound. It would be a great way to announce herself to Second Empire. When the fit passed, she saw that a sooty residue speckled her sleeve. The next ghost who tried that again . . . Maybe, she thought, trying to keep positive, all the running would help expel the last of the smoke from her lungs.

When she caught her breath, she sat up to take her bearing. Beneath the eaves of the forest, the light dimmed, the air felt closer, all sound muted. It had an age to it that rivaled the oldest parts of the Green Cloak. She peered into the shadows, past deadfalls, and through matted, low-hanging branches bearded with stringy lichens, but she saw no one. She glanced back the way she had come, across the gray land, back toward the thicket where Condor and Coda waited. It seemed so very far away.

With a sigh, she stood, adjusted her swordbelt, and walked into the woods. It was dark enough that she could more than half fade if she needed to use her ability, and that provided a certain level of comfort.

She hunted for any sign of Estral and soon found a partial footprint in deep moss. The woods were tangled enough with deadfalls and brush that she figured Estral would have taken the path of least resistance, and she was rewarded with another footprint. Farther along, she found a fresh gouge in a decaying log that lay on the forest floor. She guessed Estral had stepped on it to get to the other side, as she did now.

She continued on her path and began to think it was all a little too easy. She recalled how following a deer path had once brought her face-to-face with a monster out of Blackveil. But what choice had she but to go forward if she wished to find Estral? The feeling of being funneled into the center of a spider’s web, however, was strong. She paused and drew the bonewood before continuing, looking warily around herself.

She came to a clearing where there was still snow and found more footprints. She followed them through the clearing, squinting in the sudden light, until she was once more shadowed by overarching boughs. She made little rock cairns to mark her trail the deeper she went. She needed to be able to find her way out. It would be a dead giveaway to a Second Empire tracker, but she felt she had little choice in the matter.

Something Captain Treman had warned her about began to niggle in the back of her mind about the dangers of the Lone Forest. Something about—

“Karigan!”

She looked up, startled, and there high above, balled up in a rope net strung from a tree, was Estral.

“Estral?” She took a step forward.

“No!” Estral cried. “Don’t—”

SNAP!

Steel clamped Karigan’s ankle and she fell from surprise and pain. It was a bear trap.

“Fekking hells!” she cried. Traps. That was what Captain Treman had warned her about.

The bear trap was bolted into a huge rock by a length of heavy chain. Fortunately, it wasn’t the kind with teeth, which would have pierced right through the leather of her boot and into her flesh. As it was, she was relieved it hadn’t snapped bone.

“Are you all right?” Estral asked.