The rain was slick on the trees, warm like tears as it sprinkled down from above. Rusty blinked, wearily as they started out into it, with the Grach out on point and the satyrs bringing up the rear. They were moving out far earlier than they’d originally planned to, but according to Clerigg, they couldn’t pass up this chance. The rain would conceal them from the elves, a little.
Their hearing was just a little too sensitive; even a gentle rain hindered them. And against elves, one needed every advantage one could get.
Just ahead and to the left of Rusty, Ran Tan the Merill Janniseva Dok paced through the brush, moving with an easy silence that he knew he couldn’t muster, not if he trained for years. But he tried anyway, and the rain was forgiving of minor mistakes.
A little to the left, Beth did her best to sneak, too. She was smaller and a little lighter, and had an easier time of it. But he winced every time her frayed shoes came down on a tangle of brush, or kicked a small rock.
Behind him, stretching out their formation into the shape of a loose circle, Alice and Ken slunk along, eyes sharp and mouths shut. Listening.
So far they’d done pretty well, moving in formation. Even if it did slow everyone down a lot, it was important to keep the rough shape of a circle going.
This was the only practice they were going to get, and it was going to matter a LOT, once they were in serious danger.
His thoughts were interrupted, as the Lion cleared his throat. Rusty stopped and looked up to see that Ran had lifted her hand, calling for a stop.
They stopped. They waited. Finally, Ran nodded, raindrops flying from her horns, as she moved forward, pulling aside a long patch of reed-like plants to reveal water, not far beyond. She pointed at it, tapped her eyelid with one finger as the rest of them caught up. They hadn’t discussed this sign in particular, but it was pretty easy to spot.
“Yeah,” Ken murmured. “That’s got to be the river, all right. From here on out it gets dicier.”
“Beth,” Rusty whispered, trying to be just loud enough to be heard over the pattering of rain. “It’s time.”
His sister nodded, and dug into the small satchel that the satyrs had given her. She came up with a length of rope, and worked on the twine ties. Rusty forced himself not to push her, but the moments seemed to stretch on as her fingers fumbled with the rapidly-wetting twine.
Around them, the grach crawled low out of the bushes, slipping into the water. He saw the silhouettes of satyrs slipping through the trees, disappearing behind the brush. All but Ran, who lay down on the ground and crawled through the mud as adeptly as the grach had. Rusty watched her for a bit, then looked away, blushing. She didn’t have panties or anything under that skirt. Yeah, it was pretty much all fur from the waist down, but still, it seemed rude. He half expected the Lion to say something about how he was being dumb, but the elder being was too busy prowling around the clearing. Listening with his ears. Watching with his eyes. Moving to directions he wanted Rusty to look in.
“There,” Beth whispered, and tugged the rope free, moving around and handing it to each of them in turn. Rusty swallowed as he took it, and looked back toward the river.
Ran’s arm came up, and waved. Once. Twice. That was the signal, and Rusty started forward, with the rest of the group following, holding the rope.
The river was larger than he expected, swollen with rain. For a second, Rusty remembered the creek at home, remembered going swimming with his brothers. He remembered the wizard Terathon appearing before him, telling him the first lie. And nothing had ever been the same, since.
“Not the time,” Roz murmured.
Rusty pushed it from his mind and focused on getting down the bank without slipping. He managed; they all did, then Ran joined them, standing up to grab one side of the rope and lead the way into the river.
Say this, at least the river was shallow for its size. It only came up to his sternum. Beth was struggling a bit, but the others were managing. Rusty and Ken did their best to anchor the rope, giving the girls something to brace against.
This was the most dangerous part. And they had to do it without magic, because assensing didn’t care about rain. If they crossed with magic active, beyond the internal enchantments that Rusty was running, then they trusting to luck that the elves didn’t have a scout watching this patch of river. And Rusty didn’t like trusting to luck, it really hadn’t done too well for him overall.
But Clerigg thought this ford was too far north for the elves to spare a watcher.
And evidently Clerigg was right, because they managed to slog through to the other bank without getting arrowed.
The second they hit the bank, Rusty nodded to Beth. “Do it,” he whispered.
Beth was shivering. Rusty wasn’t sure why… the water wasn’t that cold. He’d taken baths that were colder. Then he saw her face, and oh, he had to look away.
She hadn’t been through what they had gone through. She hadn’t been put through the training, hadn’t been told over and over again she was the Chosen One. She hadn’t been… well, groomed, to go out and go on quests over the fate of the world and stuff like that.
She was fifteen and she had never planned to be here for long in the first place, and she was scared.
Yeah, Rusty was younger than her and he was handling it fine, but she hadn’t gone through what he had.
So he stepped in, and hugged her. She squeaked in surprise, and hugged back. He felt her shiver, and whispered, “You got mud on your face.”
“You’re an ass,” she told him, and shoved him away. But she wasn’t on the verge of crying anymore. And there was a little gratitude in her eyes.
“Cht!” Ran hissed at them, and Rusty waved back, tightened the rope in his hand as he took his point on the circle.
Beth took a breath, grabbed each end of the rope in either hand, shut her eyes, and mouthed the words of the spell. And though Rusty didn’t hear it, he knew what she was saying, had helped her rehearse the words back in the fort.
Make arrows miss everyone inside this rope circle.
There was no feeling of the spell taking hold, but then why would there be? They weren’t arrows, and the spell only affected arrows.
Beth opened her eyes to see all of them looking at her expectantly. She fumbled with the rope, gave a thumbs up.
Ran nodded back, gave her a grin, and led the way down the river. And all around them, with the grach under the water and concealed, and the satyrs using what charms and skill they could to hide, the war party proceeded south down the riverbank.
*****
The biggest gamble was Beth’s anti-arrow spell.
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The Lion had a lot of experience with spells. Even if a lot of his memories were elsewhere, he could give them a rough, ballpark figure of about how much chakra a particular effect would cost, so long as it was an effect he’d used or seen used before. And in the case of a circle that would protect everyone within it from arrows, he had told them that it would be fairly cheap. About three or four for the size they had in mind. That wasn’t a problem for Beth’s chakra pool.
The real trick would come when the arrows started falling. Those would start eating into her chakra pool, so long as she sustained it. Every arrow that the spell caused to miss would eat up a fraction of a chakra point. The faster and harder to turn in midair, the bigger the fraction.
Neither of those two factors were a problem. And using rope to define the circle would actually save a little chakra in the initial casting, as well as make it plain to the kids when they were safe and when they weren’t.
No, the big problem came from the fact that they would have to move the circle.
Because the circle was a type of enchantment called a ward, it preferred to remain stationary. The Lion tried to explain why altering a world’s fundamental physics was much easier when you were only affecting a set area, and how the forces that enforced the physics tended to “push back,” more when that area was mobile, but the explanation was way above Rusty’s pay grade. And the other kids were confused as heck, so Rusty didn’t feel too bad that he didn’t get it.
But the long and short of it was that a moving circle would gradually eat away at Beth’s chakra pool. Yeah, she’d be regenerating some of it as they went from just being alive and her body naturally renewing its chakra, but the constant draw would outpace it. The Lion had done some math and figured out that for a circle of the area they were intending, they’d have maybe about three hours before it ran her out of juice. Heck, even getting near that point meant that it would be almost useless when they ran into trouble.
All that had factored into the plan.
After they’d finished the math part, they’d gone to Clerigg and replayed the memories a couple of times in front of his best rangers. The satyrs had more or less sorted out the area the hidden gate had to be in, though they didn’t know it specifically. And they figured that the group could get there within two hours. The problem was that they’d have to start from the place that the elves had forded the river bank to be certain of finding the tree the gate was in. And that area was probably watched or patrolled pretty regularly. It was on the edge of the elven lines… well, sort of. The elves didn’t really have proper “lines.” They just had areas that they controlled, and if the satyrs went into them, bad things happened. And after bad things happened, the elves moved the “lines,” forward.
So they’d have to go far north up the areas the grach controlled, then cross at a ford that was probably unguarded, and come down the elven side of things as quietly as they could for as long as they could. And in the meantime, the satyrs and grach that could maybe identify the crossing point that they needed would see it, then let them know it was time to head inland. Once they did that, they’d keep going until they found the tree.
The tree would be guarded— of that there was no doubt.
Judging by how Clerigg had explained the elven means of controlling their zones, the way there would be relatively clear if they were sneaky enough. Unless they were unlucky enough to run into a patrol coming the other way.
The entire trip, estimating for short legs and the group’s requirement to stay sneaky, would probably take two hours. If nothing went wrong.
But of course, that didn’t happen.
They weren’t unlucky enough to run into a patrol coming the other way, but they sure as hell weren’t ready for the patrol that was on its way back.
*****
The first sign that they were under attack came when a sudden breeze whipped Rusty’s hair to the side.
The second sign was a mighty THOK, as an arrow quivered in a tree directly ahead of them.
“Run!” Roared the Lion.
Rusty opened his mouth “They’re behind—”
This time he saw the arrow, saw the black streak that flicked past him at the last second. He didn’t turn in time to see where it went, but the rope tugged hard against him, and he barely kept his feet as he scrambled and realized that Ran Tan the Meril Janniseva Dok was booking it, and dragging the rest of them with her.
Beth squeaked as she DID fall, and for a second Rusty’s heart leaped into his throat, but Alice scooped her up as she passed by and got her hand in hand running in the center of the circle. Well, loose circle. It was getting distorted, now that they were moving and Rusty sure hoped it was circular enough to keep the magic going.
Evidently it was, because they managed to get to cover without being ventilated. They put a very large tree between themselves and the direction the arrows were coming, while Rusty took a deep breath, and looked right to see the Lion a few feet from his face, crouched on a low hanging branch and staring down at him.
“You know what we must do,” the Lion rumbled.
Back the way he came, he heard the snap of bowstrings, and calls as the Satyrs returned fire. One of them screamed, screamed loudly and long before being cut off with a gurgle.
Rusty shut his eyes, as arrows whistled and whacked into trees, and yeah, he knew what he had to do. And he hated it.
A few words and his imagination got the spell working, and the whining of the arrows stretched out and dulled. And as the words flickered through his vision, telling him how much of his personal strength he’d expended, Rusty pulled out his knife and went hunting, now that he was moving at super speed.
They were pretty far back, back through the trees and out of immediate sight, so Rusty circled and tried to close in…
…and gasped as one of his charms burned hot against his chest as the shadows in front of him went funny.
“To the side!” the Lion shouted, and Rusty threw himself to the left and rolled, looking back to see one of those blasts of pure light snap into place where he’d been standing a microsecond ago.
This was a thing elves could do, he knew. Their magic wasn’t like human magic, but they had some kind of trick that let them fire arrows that turned into golden laser beams.
“That came from behind!” the Lion said, as Rusty scrambled on his hands and knees, outrunning the beam just barely, managing to roll into cover. He kipped up to his feet again, glanced around the finger of rock he’d managed to end up next to, and nearly caught a faceful of laser light.
“Yeah, they came around the side, too!” Rusty said, looking around wildly. There was a satyr, crouched in a bush. There was a horned corpse in a puddle of blood, arrows all up and down it. And there… there was a trail of singed vegetation where the light beam had swept around and chased Rusty.
“Okay, let’s go get the flankers,” he whispered.
“Beware,” the Lion said. “They are hunting for US.”
Rusty felt a bit of relief at that.
“What?” the Lion was startled.
“If they’re hunting us, then I don’t have to worry as much about my friends.” Rusty grinned at the Lion.
Then he was off.
He managed to get one, reaping two chakra from its death, but the others fell back. The satyrs were pressing their assault as well, seemed to take heart as he blurred past them, drops of elven blood falling and slowing to almost complete stillness in midair as they got far enough away from him for regular physics to take over again.
Rusty tried not to think about the way that elf had died. How it had looked into his eyes right at the last second.
It… hadn’t been any easier, but he didn’t have time to throw up again. Didn’t have time to cry.
But they were trying to kill his friends, kill his sister, and this was what he had to do.
The satyrs accounted for one, managing to bring it down as it was trying to get up into the branches, taking advantage of a rotten one snapping under its foot and shooting it as it struggled to rise from the ground. Rusty swerved back around then, swinging wide and heading back to where his friends had taken shelter…
…and smiling, as he saw a mound of gravel surrounding the tree they’d ended up behind.
He almost caught an arrow in the face, as he ran up the side, peered down, and saw Ran swinging a bow around in his direction. He waved his hands frantically and she jerked the bow aside, as the arrow hit the gravel and buried itself a foot into the loose rock, sending stone shards flying.
Rusty slid down the berm, and canceled his speed boost. “They’re gone,” he told them. “We need to hurry, but I think we can do… this…” his voice trailed off, as he saw Alice and Ken crouching down next to Beth. “What happened?” Rusty burst out, seeing her lying there, as the other two kids fanned her.
“Easy,” Ken said, glancing back at him. “She deflected too many arrows is all. Ran herself out of chakra.”
“Budgie says I’ll be okay,” Beth said, her voice so low that Rusty could barely hear it. “I stopped when I hit zero. I’m just… really tired.”
She had that wobble in her voice that usually meant she was fibbing. But Rusty didn’t dwell on it, couldn’t dwell on it right now.
“It does portend ill for your primary plan,” Ran said, peering cautiously above the gravel, and shooting hand gestures that were presumably for the satyrs outside. “Now the elves are cognizant of our presence, and we have misplaced our protective bubble of arrow avaunting. How shall we venture forward to our goal?”
Rusty took a breath, and let it out as he considered.
And he knew the answer, the only answer that he could give that would guarantee that the people who were depending on him would survive the next few hours.
“I’ll go alone.”