A hush fell over the camp. All movement stopped. Into this hush, two diminutive figures on horseback rode, heads high, hoods thrown back. The jangle of harness and even the jingling of the tiny bells woven into flowing black tresses could be heard clearly as they passed slowly between slack-jawed dall, heading for the center of the camp and the cart parked there.

Joblar Bonecruncher fared no better than his fellows. Sylvans! Days from any wood, not a tree in sight, and on horseback! The world must indeed have changed while he’d been under the iron! He drew himself up and put hand to the mace at his belt, waiting for them.

Looking neither right nor left, the sylvans rode directly toward the waiting dall, hands upon their own undrawn weapons. They brought the beasts up before him and the blue eyed one demanded in a high clear voice, “what have you done with our husband?”

Joblar started before he realized she wasn’t looking quite at him, but rather past him. He turned around and the trader stood there, looking very uncomfortable.

“We were separated—” he began.

“By a dragon,” the green eyed one broke in. “We know. We were there.”

“How could you have let that happen?” the blued eyed one demanded hot on the other’s heels.

“It was a bloody dragon!” Koli spluttered. “What was I—”

“You were supposed to be watching him!” green eyes again.

Koli winced. She had him there. “I was, wasn’t I?” he admitted. “So tell me, Swallow Courting, greatest of woodrovers, how would you have stopped him.”

The green eyes narrowed and the full lips thinned. She had a temper, this one.

“Who are these females?” Joblar asked while green eyes glared.

“The Tairn’s wives,” Koli answered as though it were no big thing.

Had the trader taken Joblar’s mace and whacked him solidly in the middle with it, he might have achieved more surprise. Perhaps just a little. The smallest of fractions. The tiniest— nope. Not a chance.

"Close your mouth, Joblar,” Koli told him. “You’re drooling."

Joblar snapped his jaws shut with an audible clack. Then he looked from the trader to the sylvans, trying to determine the joke. All three parties seemed serious enough. And, too, when had the trader had time to arrange such a jape? “The Tairn was not sylvan,” he replied evenly.

“Not as such, no,” Koli confirmed.

Joblar looked back to the sylvans, for sylvans they obviously were. Then back to the trader. “They cannot be his wives.”

Koli laughed. He looked squarely at Joblar and laughed again. He got hold of himself, wiping a tear from his eye. “Then you don’t want to meet my future son-in-law.”

Joblar was getting angry. “Your son-in-law is sylvan?”

Koli had himself firmly under control now, and answered more or less calmly. “Not so’s you’d notice.”

“Trader!” That was blue eyes.

“Thrush Dancing, oh great and wise one,” Koli responded, mirth still twinkling his eyes.

“Where is Brae?”

“Dead,” Joblar supplied without thinking. Two pairs of eyes bored into him with fingers of ice. Then they returned to the trader.

“Where is he, Koli?”

“I just told—” Joblar began.

“He is alive,” green eyes —Swallow Courting— overrode the angry dall.

“He cannot be!” Joblar insisted. “I saw the dragon.”

“As did we,” Swallow reminded him.

“Impossible,” Joblar was adamant.

“Hold, friend Joblar,” Koli could see the situation sliding toward conflict, as the dall struggled to believe too many impossible things at once. He put a hand on Joblar’s shoulder and squeezed.

“How many things do you believe today that were impossible a turn ago?” he asked softly.

Joblar continued to glare up at Swallow Courting.

“It was impossible that you would escape,” Koli spoke easily. “And yet, here you stand, free. It was impossible that you would return to Griffin’s Perch, and here you stand, surrounded by those you helped to free. It was impossible that you would not be alone....” he lifted the hand from Joblar’s shoulder and held it before the dall’s face, displaying the half-healed wound in the palm. “Are you alone, brother?”

Joblar looked hard at the wound. He raised his own hand to look at the wound there. He thought of the wound that would be on the hand of the missing Tairn. Then he looked at the creatures purported to be that one’s wives. They were his sisters, then — of his clan as surely as if they’d been born of Blue Deer.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

Thrush waited out the exchange atop the piebald, hand on her hip. The saddle was hot and sticky against her naked leg, and the sun beat down upon her pale skin like a cudgel. Her mood, not sanguine to begin with, was deteriorating as the vital fluids were baked from her body. She did not smile when the strange dall turned at last to regard her again.

“You are bound to my brother,” he began in awful Turaleean.

“Speak Dall,” she told him without accent.

His eyes widened, but he continued in his own tongue. “You are bound to my brother, and so I am bound to you.” he said. “My arm is yours.”

She looked to the trader for explanation.

Koli held up his hand and Thrush drew in a sharp breath. “Are you insane?” she demanded.

Koli shrugged. “I seem lately to be striving to that end,” he told her. “But this was not my idea.”

Thrush looked to the dall, but Koli shook his head. Of course. This bore the mark of Brae all over it. She took a deep breath and gave the dall more of her attention. He was clan now, as surely as she was. As surely as Brae was. Clearbright Moonsong clan. Her clan. How had it come to this? It was cold comfort to see that the dall wasn’t taking the situation any better.

She shook herself free of the introspection and regarded the trader again. She was the rational sister, wasn’t she? She would concentrate on the chore at hand and leave the fretting to Swallow. “Where is he, Koli?” she demanded anew.

For his part, Koli could only shrug. He had no more idea where the Tairn might be than he could guess where the dragon had gone. Less, for he thought he might know in which mountain range the giant laired at least.

Then something else occurred to him. “Please,” he told the little birds, stepping forward, “climb down and partake of some shade, meager though it might be.”

The stiffness of their dismounts spoke volumes concerning what the past days must have been like for them. And had that not been sufficient, the angry red of any skin that had been left even briefly exposed would have finished the set. He led the way toward the tarp stretched out from the back of the cart, walking slowly so the limping sylvans wouldn’t be forced to hurry.

Thrush Dancing breathed a sigh of relief so spectacular as she threw off the smothering confines of the cloak that even Joblar felt a stir. The wisp of breeze blowing beneath the outstretched canvas was heaven against her inflamed skin, and she only caught herself reaching for her bodice at the last minute. Naked and alone was heaven, naked with Brae was bliss. Naked among dall was inviting oneself to become part of the evening meal.

“I wish I could offer some bathing water,” Koli apologized, joining the sweating sylvans within the shade, “but it looks to be hit or miss whether we’ll have enough merely to keep ourselves alive between here and the forest.”

“There is a sizeable wood only a little more than a day’s ride to the west,” Swallow told him, fanning herself vigorously with the open flaps of her bodice, totally unselfconscious of the effect it was having on the males nearby.

Thrush leaned forward and snatched at the silk of her sister’s bodice, yanking the flapping ends closed over her jiggling charms. Holding Swallow’s bodice closed long enough to make the point, she turned to Koli. "Tencher’s wood, I think. There are man child settlements along its edge and a few within the wood itself.”

“Yes,” Koli agreed. "I know of it. There is a smallish pack living in the heart of the wood, although, thus far the pigs have left it alone. But Tencher’s is away the hells and gone to the east.”

“Even at the pace you’ll need to set,” Swallow told him, disengaging herself from her sister’s protective grip and flashing the camp one last time in defiance, “you should be within the wood by evening day next. Traveling northwest.”

“What know you of the wood?” Koli asked, trying to get a grip on an uncomfortable feeling gnawing at the pit of his stomach. He knew but little of Tencher’s himself, save that it was there and that it was another pack’s territory.

“Only what Corporal Burly told us before we set out,” Thrush admitted. “The general lay of the place and that there are settlements to be avoided.”

“Oh,” Swallow piped up. “He drew us a map!”

Koli brightened. A map was good. The charts they’d had with them remained with the Tairn, wherever he’d gotten himself off to, and they were well outside of the territory he himself was familiar with.

Swallow leapt to her feet and limped theatrically to her horse, shirt still defiantly undone. When she returned, Thrush fixed her with a glare so foul that she relented and buttoned the garment over her nakedness. But she didn’t button all the buttons. She placed the map on the ground between them.

The map was cruder than crude, and labeled with the pictographs common on the frontier. To say that Burly was no artist might be to say that molten lava was uncomfortably warm. The wood Swallow had mentioned was a smudgy glob somewhere far to the east north-east of the thieve’s station, south of the King’s Highway, and north by north-west of the Griffin’s Perch camp, which the map depicted as being much too far east.

The wood wasn’t particularly large compared to, say, Bayel’s Wood, or Diedre’s Wood farther to the east, but it would do to hide the refugees for a bit.

“What’s this?” Koli traced a wiggly line across the cloth of the map east of the wood and skirting its southern edge.

“Uhm,” Thrush thought. “A river of some sort. I cannot remember the name. Burly says it’s low this time of the season, but flows year round.”

“And this? It looks like a pile of sticks having carnal knowledge.”

Swallow giggled. “It is, sort of. That splotch to the east is the staging area for Shelador’s southern armies, and that bit your pointing to is the harlot’s camp.”

Koli snorted. Trust Burly to know where that landmark lay. Hold a span... “this is the Staging Field?”

Thrush and Swallow nodded together. “According to Burly, it is,” Thrush told him.

“And these markings here? They’re suns?”

The birds nodded again. “They tell how many days travel,” Thrush recited, “one place to another, on horseback at a standard patrol pattern of two span walking, ha-span cantering, two—”

“I know the pattern,” Koli interrupted, eyes still on the map. “And Burly knows whereof he speaks?”

Thrush shrugged. “I’d have no way of knowing. He told us that his last posting had been as a dispatch rider and that he’d spent a good deal of time along the roads between Semda Brigade headquarters in Elion and the Fifth Regiment headquarters in Thurgen.”

“So he’d know.”

“Everything we’ve seen has been just as he’s shown it.”

“But neater,” Swallow quipped. “Not nearly so smudgy. Poor Burly doesn’t get on at all well with the charcoal, I’m afraid.” She giggled. “Like a bear trying to hold a squirming lizard to watch him draw that.”

Accurate. Great gods in the heavens! No wonder it had taken so long to reach that cursed camp, even taking the ruin of the plain and the still burning fires into account. He traced the route he and Joblar had taken to the camp and then away from it. They were a hundred stad farther east than he’d thought.

He’d never live this down! ‘The great Koli, lost in an open field’, they’d say. ‘Koli the wanderer, couldn’t find his dingus to breed his woman and it were standing up right there in front of him,’ they’d say.

“Koli?”

“Hmm?” he swam up out of his reverie. “Ah, yes. Right. Where were we?”

“Tencher’s wood,” Thrush reminded him.

“Two days hobble that way,” Swallow pointed.

“Thank you so very much.” The trader grated. Then, raising his voice, he scooped up the map and rose; “Joblar!” He was already ten paces away when the dall arrived, and they strode off together.

It was only after they’d gone that Thrush remembered that she hadn’t gotten her questions answered. Not any of them.