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  After that, no one came down to the river, and from upslope came the sounds of men making camp. Or at least, that was what Mags assumed the sounds meant. Wood chopping, digging, hammering, the voice barking orders, the sound of a couple of mules—mules and not horses, as he heard one of them bray, startlingly loud in the absence of other animal sounds. The men were sent back down for water again, which made sense now that he knew about the mules, since the mules would need as much water as a couple of men. They had probably used up a goodly share of the water from the first run setting up a watering trough for the mules and taking care of cooking and washing needs. This would be the water that would hold them through the night. Then, as the sun began to set and the valley filled with shadows, there was the sound of at least one fire, the smell of woodsmoke and cooking, and men talking. It was impossible to hear what they were saying over the rushing river below him, but the cooking smells nearly drove Mags mad. It seemed a punishment designed specifically to torment him, to be cramped in his damp little cave, chewing on a raw cattail root, while above him were men warming themselves at a crackling fire and eating cooked food.

  He reminded himself of all the times he’d smelled the good dinners the Pieters were eating while he and the other kiddies huddled over their watery soup and single piece of bread. And he had food. He’d filled up on redbugs before he stopped, and he still had lots of hickory nuts and cattail roots. He muffled a nut in his blanket, cracked it between two stones, and ate it slowly, reminding himself to enjoy the rich taste. He peeled and ate another root, then another nut. He concentrated on how good they tasted, the rich taste of the nut, the slightly sweet crunch of the root, and how much more satisfying they were than soup that had barely one sad shred of cabbage in every four spoonfuls. It helped; in fact, it helped tremendously.

  He didn’t dare sleep, however. Despite the officer’s order that no one was to leave the camp after dark, he didn’t dare take the chance that someone would, anyway. So instead of sleeping, he dozed as lightly as he could, listening for the sound of clumsy footfalls coming down the hill over the sound of the river.

  He was startled awake by the blat of an inexpertly sounded horn at dawn, and he spent the next couple of candlemarks listening intently. Four men came blundering down the slope this time, laden with waterskins. Halfway up, he heard someone curse. Someone else said, “Leave it. It’s probably bust in the fall.”

  His heart leaped. Was there a chance, was there even a chance—

  He maintained his silent vigil, however. If it was a waterskin that the man had dropped, it might very well have broken in the fall, and he had no way of mending it. Or the captain might send someone down after it anyway. Or it might not have been a waterskin after all.

  So he peeled a root and ate it, slowly, taking tiny bites. Peeled another and ate it. Ignored the smell of hot food as best he could, although the smell of cooking meat was extremely hard to take. Listened as hard as he could and watched through his curtain of weeds.

  Finally he heard what he had been hoping for: the jingle of harness, the rattle of wheels on rock, and the tramp of feet. And all of it going downstream, away from him.

  Had this been the same group that had stopped his kidnappers?

  He was pretty certain they were just patrolling, not looking for him specifically. His kidnappers had kept him carefully concealed, after all, so unless for some reason he’d been taken on the orders of someone high up in the chain of Karsite authority, no one in Karse knew he was here. So these fellows might be looking for interlopers, bandits, and troublemakers, but not specifically him.

  He’d been very, very careful about the traces he had left behind. He’d tossed everything he couldn’t eat into the river to be carried away and scattered. When he pulled up cattails, he was generally using the fibrous leaves to make twisted cordage while he walked, the redbug shells from the bugs he ate vanished into the river immediately, and so did the cattail peelings. There was nothing in the places where he’d slept to show that it hadn’t been an animal that had denned there. He didn’t leave tool marks on anything, because he didn’t have tools. He’d walked on rock to avoid leaving human footprints.

  He didn’t think they’d find any trace of him.

  And even if they did, they were not the ones hunting him. They had come from the opposite direction of his kidnappers. He just had to hope his kidnappers didn’t meet up with them.

  He hoped, even if they did find something, they would assume he was a native Karsite, a hunter or a vagabond. It wasn’t as if they had any way of telling the nationality of whoever had left some broken nutshells.

  He waited a good long time before moving out of his shelter, and when he did, it was cautiously. With a careful eye uphill, just in case someone came back, he crept down to the river until he found the spot where the men had been filling their skins. He looked upslope. Their path was painfully obvious, with torn up weeds, bare patches where they had dug their feet into the soil, and everything trampled. Slowly, telling himself not to hope, he worked his way up the slope, examining their path for a couple of arm lengths past the trampled area, looking for whatever they had dropped.

  And his heart leaped when he spotted it—a round, brown shape caught in the middle of a scraggly bush, hidden from above by the leaves but visible from below. They’d have had to get down here to spot it. No wonder they hadn’t wanted to go back.

  Scarcely daring to believe his luck, he worked his way into the thorny tangle, suffering his fair share of scratches on the way in before his hand closed around it. And he shed a bit of blood on the way out, too. But when he drew it out, he could have shouted for joy.

  Not a waterskin, but a water gourd, which was probably why they hadn’t bothered to go after it. Gourds were easily grown, easily replaced, and cheap. This one wasn’t broken, and the stopper was still rammed securely in the neck. It was obvious what had happened—the carrying-strap had snapped. A Sun-In-Glory had been inked with a stamp onto the side, meaning it was Karsite army issue and not someone’s personal property—probably part of the equipage for the mules. Another reason why they wouldn’t care. If they had lost someone’s personal waterskin, there would have been words at the very least, but losing a bit of the army equipment was unlikely to generate any repercussions.

  A water bottle! He had a water bottle! That was the second of his needs taken care of!

  Emboldened by his luck, he climbed up to the camp. Who knew? They might have left something else behind. When you have plenty of equipment, you can think about leaving things that are broken.

  They had at least piled their trash in a tidy heap, which showed good discipline—but when he took a stick and poked through the remains of the fire in the fire pit—there were still coals!

  Something about coals twinged something in his memory. What was it?

  Was there a way to carry coals with you to start a fire when you didn’t have a fire-starter? Yes! That was it!

  While he waited for his mind to relax enough for the information to come to the surface, he built the coals back up a little. As long as he had a fire, there was no reason not to roast some cattail roots. And while he waited for them to bake, he turned over the trash pile and found treasures.

  Half a knife blade. A real knife blade! It looked as if some idiot had been using it to try to pry something apart and had snapped it in half. He could make himself a wooden handle, and he’d have a short, but usable, knife. Two broken water gourds, one snapped off at the neck and one cracked across the bottom. An assortment of broken or worn pieces of leather; from the looks of things, the men had been put to work mending some of their gear and the mule harness. Some torn, stained, burned cloth. In short, between last night and now, he had been given virtually everything he had asked for.

  That was when his memory finally let the information about carrying fire float to the surface. />
  He hunted for damp moss, and when he found it, he carefully lined one of the half gourds with it, the one that had the crack across the bottom. Then he scooped up one of the best coals with a clamshell and rolled it into the gourd, then covered it with hot ashes and more moss. He made a carrying net with bits of cordage and fitted it to the gourd, then did the same for the intact water gourd. He wrapped the leather and cloth around the knife blade and smaller bits, stowed all of that in the other broken gourd, then tucked that in the back of his blanket sling with his other sparse gear. Last of all, he really put out the fire, tidied the trash pile, ate his roasted roots, then made his way down to the river again, carefully making sure to step in the same places the Karsites had.

  That night, he had the first cooked meal he had enjoyed since the drugged soup.

  The fire that he made was tiny, and he made certain to build it under the shelter of the overhanging rock he camped beneath to disperse the smoke. He ringed it with his sling pebbles, and when they were hot enough, he teased them away from the flames and used a clamshell to scoop them up and drop them into the other broken gourd, which was now full of water and redbugs. While the redbugs steeped in hot water, cooking slowly, and his cattail roots roasted in the fire, he whittled down a split piece of branch into a handle for his new knife, fitted it to the blade, and bound the whole tightly with his vine cord.

  “Redbugs” were actually green or greenish brown when alive; they turned red when cooked. Cooking them in the barely simmering water heated by the stones was the best way because it didn’t take very long to cook that tiny amount of meat, and the more you cooked it the tougher it got.

  Mind, he’d have eaten leather, and enjoyed it, at this point.

  He sighed with satisfaction as he ate his bugs and his roots, drank the slightly gritty, bug-flavored water, then banked the fire for the night. Now he had everything he needed as soon as he was forced to stop following the river. Cookpot, water carrier, fire, and a knife.

  He was one step closer to home.

  He slept very well that night.

  10

  It was a good thing that he’d found the Karsite camp when he had, because by afternoon of the very next day, the river took an abrupt turn to the west, and when he climbed the slope and a tree above it to see where it was going, it appeared to be heading straight west for as far as he could see.

  He got down out of the tree and had to sit for a moment, as he found himself completely overcome with panic.

  All this time, he’d been following this watercourse, and it had been a reliable source for water, food, and shelter. Now he would have to leave it. And now he would be completely at the mercy of the Karsite lands.

  And, of course, he was increasing his chance of running into Karsites themselves.

  He told himself to stay calm, but it didn’t help. He was scared. This wasn’t something he’d ever done before. All of his ability to survive depended on things he had learned at the mine, where he’d had a reliable source of water and learned how to catch slow-moving things he found in the ponds and pick wild, growing things he could rely on. He didn’t really know what the Karsite lands would or could offer. He was pretty sure he would be a terrible hunter. Once away from the river he had no idea how he was going to find water. He wasn’t sure he was ready to hunt for shelter away from the riverbank, which provided a lot of overhangs. Aside from the cattails, hickory nuts, cress, and redbugs, there hadn’t been much of anything he had recognized as food.

  And he had no idea how to find his way if the trees got too thick to see the sun.

  Nor did he have any notion of what animals out here were dangerous. Were there wolves? Bears?

  He wouldn’t have worried if he’d still had Mindspeech, or, at least, not so much. He’d have been able to sense animals before they got close, and he would hear peoples’ thoughts in plenty of time to get out of sight. Now . . . he was half blind, and the thought made his mouth dry with fear.

  But there was no hope for it. He had no idea where in Karse he was, except that it couldn’t have been more than a fortnight by wagon south of the Valdemar Border, because he was pretty sure he hadn’t been unconscious for much more than that. He could walk at about half the speed of a wagon, and he wasn’t confined to roads. So by that reckoning, he didn’t have much more than half a moon before he’d be home and safe. Or, at least, he’d be reasonably close to the Border.

  But if he went wandering off his northward path, there was no telling where he’d end up or how long it would take him. He had to get across before the snows began. He didn’t think he could survive too many winter nights with just a blanket.

  He took a last, longing look at the river, which had become a sort of friend. Then he turned his back on it and headed northward.

  As the sound of the waters faded away, he reminded himself to always go downhill if he could. He would have the best chance of finding more water in the low spots. Water must be his first concern now; you could go quite some time without food, but no more than three days without water.

  If he hadn’t found that gourd . . .

  Head north . . . try to stay downhill.

  And now he discovered yet another “try to stay . . .” because the mine-kiddies had scoured the immediate area of the mine so thoroughly that it was—he suddenly saw—nothing at all like a wild forest. There was a lot of undergrowth. And he was trying not to leave traces of his passing.

  His estimate of how long it was going to take to get to the Border shot alarmingly skyward.

  No hope for it. I just have to take it one step at a time. Literally.

  Keeping the sun at his right, he began picking his way across the forest floor.

  It was hard not to feel both frustrated and discouraged. There had to be a hundred things around him that he could use to help him, if only he knew what they were. He didn’t dare touch the mushrooms he passed. He did find an oak tree and gathered a lot of nuts, but until he found more water than what he was carrying, he had no way to get the bitter taste out of them. He could hear squirrels scolding him, but he couldn’t see them to try to get a shot off with his sling. He had to stop when the sun was overhead, so he checked on his coal (it was still glowing) and climbed a tree to try to scout out his path.

  He couldn’t get high enough to actually see anything without the tree swaying alarmingly, so he climbed back down and had a sparse meal of cattail roots.

  By midafternoon he hadn’t come across any sort of shelter or water, and he was beginning to feel unease. Should he count on finding water in the morning and try to make some sort of crude shelter now? Or should he try to find water and hope there was shelter nearby?

  The distant growl of thunder decided him.

  This time the storm was relatively slow moving. It didn’t arrive until after nightfall. He had managed to find an evergreen tree with flat, frond-like “needles,” and had stacked cut branches three layers deep on a lean-to frame lashed between two trees. He’d piled more of the branches on the ground beneath it to keep him—hopefully—up out of the water and mud. He got his little fire started in what he hoped was the most sheltered part of the lean-to, and by the time the storm arrived, he had cracked and roughly ground up two handfuls of acorns, which were now tied up in bags of that burned and stained cloth he had salvaged, waiting for the rain to wash the bitterness out of them. He’d eaten two roasted cattail roots and was wrapped in his blanket, just waiting for the storm to hit.

  When it did, he was glad that fear had invested his preparations. Some people would probably have thought that he was using up too much cordage on lashing down his shelter. Some people might have told him that three layers of branches were too much.

  They’d all have been dead wrong.

  There were leaks, but the only bad one was providential—he put his waterg
ourd right underneath it and let it fill before poking at the branches cautiously until it somehow went away. His fire remained, burning bravely, although it gave out no warmth at all. He was very glad for the layer of green boughs on the ground.

  It was cold. Although there were no major leaks on him, a mist of fine rain came at him through the open side of the lean-to.

  He told himself all the ways he was lucky. He had water to wash out the acorn meal, so he had food for tomorrow. He had basic shelter, so he wasn’t going to get soaked and freeze. His fire was safe. Nothing was going to be out hunting in this weather. Bears, wolves, or whatever—they were doing the same thing that he was, crouching down in their shelters and trying to get some sleep.

  He did sleep, though he didn’t dare sleep much because he had to keep feeding his little fire bits of things to keep it alive.

  Finally, at some point during the night, the storm moved out, although as far as he could tell, the sky remained overcast.

  There wasn’t anything he could do about “not leaving traces” now; he planned on taking the shelter down, and had carefully used his cordage in such a fashion that he could salvage it all, but there was going to be a ravaged tree and a pile of cut branches when he was done.

  On the other hand, it wasn’t as if he’d seen any signs of humans here. There hadn’t even been anything like a trail to follow.

  With the storm gone, the sounds of the forest began. Slowly at first, and mostly the steady dripping of water through the trees. But after a while he heard other things. Small rustlings in the underbrush and through the leaves. Noises up in the trees above his head. The sound of something larger, farther away . . . it sounded as if it had hooves, there was a sort of subtle thump to its footfalls. It was moving off, though, so nothing to worry about, and if it was a deer, then that meant there weren’t any wolves or bears or whatevers nearby.