He had an easier time finding his way back to Naf’s encampment.
He overflew the woods, searching, searching, while wolves howled beneath. The wolves were complaining of men to the northwest devouring all the deer.
Naf’s men must have moved—or perhaps they’d learned not to light campfires where the roc-riders could see.
Or he was too late, and his friends had been destroyed.
As he passed over thickly wooded hills on a blustery afternoon he heard a hunting horn—or so it seemed. He turned, following the sound. A flaming spark streaked up from the trees.
He altered course, saw another streak of flame rise.
He searched the sky, looking for the Queen’s riders.
It was all very well for them to indicate where they were hiding in the forests. He was considerably larger than a flaming signal arrow. For a dragon to land there risked breaking a wing.
He had to settle for a messy, painful landing on top of the green canopy, quickly folding his wings as the limbs gave way . . .
Six kraaaks, a cascade of snick-snaps, and a very loud swoosh-thunk later, he stood on the forest floor, smelling the spring growth and the hearty rotting smell of last year’s leaves breaking into detritus.
He righted himself and shook the twigs out of his griff, hoping he hadn’t landed on anyone.
Coming up the slope, he heard running water and followed the sound to a camp at a creek curled up next to a tumble of water that was neither rapids nor waterfalls but something in between. But there were rocks aplenty and tree trunks placed upon them so men might cross without wetting their boots.
“Pfew!” a sentry on a high, twiggy platform whistled. “His lordship’s dragon’s back.”
Men and their adaptive abilities. They could sound like birds when they chose. Run like horses by riding, fly like dragons by taming savage beasts, even dragons. They even had a desire to be turtles, judging from some of the armor he’d seen.
AuRon saw Naf’s tall form standing in the center of a warren of crude huts, part tent, part shack, part burrow. The smell of cooking meat and boiling laundry rose from the camp.
He glided across the river and landed in a central strip of green that smelled of horses.
“It’s fortunate for us that tail of your body is as distinctive as the tale of your travels,” Naf said, smiling in his usual cheery manner. Naf could fall into a dungheap and have his house collapse and still find something to laugh about. “At first we were afraid you were one of the Queen’s dragons. I’ve asked my cook to heap a shield with sausages and deer-vitals as a welcome. I’m afraid I lack the more civilized seasonings, but there’s salt and some rosegift and butterbloom—”
“I see you’ve shifted camp again,” AuRon said, trying to keep his mouth dry at the thought of sausages after so much flying.
“We were found again by the roc-riders, the fabled gods know how.”
“I have an idea about that,” AuRon said, wondering if he could manage a takeoff through a break in the foliage above the stream. “Naf, cling to my back. You must fly!”
“What have you seen?”
“Nothing. It’s what I have done.”
Naf raised an eyebrow to match the corner of his mouth. “I wouldn’t leave my men! You must know that.”
“Then run away with them. Just leave this place. The Queen is coming!”
Naf whistled, and gave a few orders. The men began to wake up and go to work gathering their possessions and harnessing their pack animals.
“How do you know?”
AuRon thought it the best compliment of all that Naf had issued his orders first and asked questions later. If there were more such men, he wouldn’t be keeping them at a cold, stormy sea’s distance on the Isle of Ice. “The last time we met, I had a necklace. The Queen saw whatever I saw, heard whatever I heard, through it. Some magic of hers.”
“It didn’t do her much good. My scouts report riders to the south and north, but they’re back searching the column rocks and sweeping through the mountains, where we’d last been camping.”
“Their columns would not be closing on these hills as they search the mountains?”
Naf’s eyebrows narrowed. AuRon had been too long away to determine if that meant he was interested or suspicious or vexed. “Yes, they’re passing close. But the search is proceeding in the other direction.”
“Last time I was here you told me you had volunteers joining you, a steady stream.”
“Yes. Some stay, others I send on to seek refuge in Hypatia. What’s left of the elves at Krakenoor are happy to have men to help rebuild their city.”
“Search your recruits who have joined since I visited you, or just before. I would not be surprised if one has a crystal similar to the one I wore.”
Naf frowned. “Most of my men are Dairuss. A few Ghioz with reason to hate the Queen, some from the horsedowns who’ve lost their grazing lands . . .”
“A Dairuss or one of those others couldn’t play you false, using a stone such as I wore about my neck?”
“I’ll have some of my men search the most recent arrivals for such a stone. If one has it, they’ll find him hanging when they close in on the camp.”
“Naf, I unwittingly gave the Queen a view of your camp. If there is a spy in your camp, he may be just as unwitting. You’re better off just burying the crystal, or better yet, smashing it.”
AuRon had a thought. “Or better yet . . .”
He offered a suggestion for a way to turn the Red Queen’s insight against her. Naf’s smile widened as he thought the matter over.
Naf put a few of the men who’d been with him longest to searching the recent arrivals as the others broke up the camp.
A detail of six men rigged AuRon with a drag of beams, hoof on sticks, and a sort of rolling log rigged with worn-out footwear. AuRon could do his part in making a false trail, whatever the outcome of the search.
They turned up a Dairussian youth, in his first beard, in possession of a triangular chip of crystal set in a wrist-bracer for his sword arm. They showed it to AuRon, and he guessed it was of the same vintage as the stone he’d worn about his neck. Naf ordered the ornament removed and stuffed deep into a bag filled with clattering herb-bottles—no telling if the Queen could hear as well as see through the thing.
The boy said the bracer had been given to him by his uncle, a veteran of a term with the old Red Guard who’d retired with an allotment on the Queen’s land-grant yet seemed strangely encouraging of his nephew’s desire to join the rebels. The boy thought the leather looked rather new for such an old war trophy, but his uncle told him he’d replaced the sweat-stained old leather, keeping only the buckles and the attractive talisman.
“I wonder what the uncle receives for this service,” Naf said, after assuring the boy that he was not in danger. “A perfect spy,” Naf said. “He’s intelligent and energetic. And he can both read and write. I was considering making him the messenger of my best scouting team, once he gained a little more woodcraftiness scraping his toes and rounding down his bootheels.”
To be sure, they searched the rest of the new arrivals. It would be just like the thorough Red Queen, who always had another plan in place if the first failed, to infiltrate Naf’s camp with multiple spies in case the first was discovered.
As they did this, a breathless scout arrived, panting that the Ghioz columns had turned and were moving hard against the camp from two directions.
Under Naf’s direction and the guidance of a scout with the legs of saplings and the body of a scarecrow, AuRon dragged the contraption downstream, along with a pair of mules distinctly unhappy at being forced to walk in the odiferous wake of a dragon. When they weren’t complaining of the stench, they were hazarding guesses as to which of the pair the dragon would eat first.
“You the plumper, Nok. Dragon eat you raw and juicy. I’m stringy. He smoke me good for later.”
“I’m not eating either of you, as long as you step lively,” AuRon said over his wing.
“Quicker we get there, quicker we’re eaten,” Nok said. “Hope I’m a bird in the next life. I’ll find this gray stinkbomb by the smell and dump on him.”
“I don’t think birds can smell,” AuRon said.
A sii-score of Naf’s men walked ahead of him in a tight bunch, one wearing the bracer under a long piece of waxed canvas meant to keep it out of the rain. Through it, he gave the crystal a view of the backs of the men in front of him and an occasional look at the cliffs the river cut through above.
Another flaming marker arrow sputtered down, hissing as it struck the rushing water. AuRon looked up at the cliff above, a deep notch with trees growing on it cleaving the rock face into a shape like a pig’s hoof.
The man with the bracer wrapped his canvas cover around it and stuffed it back into the bag with the clanking medicine bottles. They hurried along, with AuRon dragging his trail-creating contraption and the mules bellowing in protest. And so they came to a trio of fallen trees, cut from a wooded notch in the cliffside and blocking the path.
