Despite his mad dash through the woods, it is Bootsie, not Derek, that arrives on the riverbank first.

The further he got through the forest, the more dense the undergrowth seemed to be. When he finally makes it to where he expected to have a good, clear view of the moving water, thick holly entirely blocks Derek’s view instead. The evergreen branches with their viciously sharp leaves permit no traversal of this landscape.

Bootsie darts between the thick trunks of the lower portion of the shrubbery. She is following a path laid by some sort of beaver or badger or other creature that is smaller than a wolf but wide enough to create a tunnel theoretically useful to a human.

Derek thanks his lucky stars that he is not a large man. He pulls the hood of his oiled coat over his head, wraps the ends of his sleeves around his fists, and wriggles his way through behind the dog. The tunnel through the holly smells musty. The thick leaf litter provides a soft mat to squirm against.

When they reach the other end of the tunnel, Derek sticks his head out of the bush slowly. He checks to see if the sheriff is watching before emerging. Luckily, there is a bend in the river between there and here.

Derek fights his way through the sharp bush and tumbles out onto the riverbank in a heap. What the holly bush lacks in thorns it makes up for in extremely sharp and pointy leaves. Derek escapes with merely a few long scrapes down his arms and a few additional holes in his clothing.

The bank of the river at this point curves gently away from him. Pebbles line the shallow water, but he does not see whether he has found his target at last.

Bootsie sniffs and snuffs along the waterline. Derek holds out for her the old knit cap from his pack that has their mark’s scent upon it. Bootsie sniffs at the cap to reacquaint herself with the desired smell.

And then the dog paces up the riverbank in one direction, down it in the other. She covers both directions for a hundred paces each and then whines.

Bootsie strains at her lead and whines. She’s not a pointer, but Derek can see what she’s trying to tell him as clearly as if she were, in fact, trained to do that very specific role that there are very specific breeds of dogs who do only that.

On the opposite bank of the river, Deirdre is stuck on a rock.

Beyond her rock of safety is a much deeper channel in the water. Should she slip, it would be much more difficult to fish her out.

There’s nothing else that can be done for it. Derek charges ahead, sloshing through the shallows as fast as he can.

The water pummels his shins. He drops Bootsie’s leash and focuses on getting to the rock.

The water is freezing cold. It shoots daggers of pain into his already-aching legs as it splashes into his boots.

It doesn’t take long to reach Deirdre. She lies with her face down against the stone, arms wrapped around it. Her fingers are bright white with the effort of gripping to the mossy side of the stone. Three of her fingernails are already missing.

Derek places a hand on her shoulder, just to let her know he is there, and spots the arrow.

The bright red fletching is missing, and the rough treatment of the waves has snapped the shaft in twain. But it firmly lodged the arrow in the back of the sack he assumes Deirdre was carrying her ill-gotten gains in.

He focuses on getting her out of the river first. There would be no point in trying to treat an arrow wound if they were still in danger of being spotted or swept away by an errant current.

It takes an inordinate amount of effort to pull the lightweight woman up off of the rock. Water sucks at her legs, trying to pull her down into the embrace of cold, dark death beneath the waves. And so waterlogged, she is very much more heavy than she looks.

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But despite how tired he is, Derek is not going to let someone die. He is not.

It isn’t right.

On shaky legs, he shuffles back across the shallow part of the river.

The water that stung him with its cold talons now numbs his aching feet. It pulls the breath from his lungs, and each step is a struggle against the talons of the river that drag against his legs. Each step is a struggle to stay upright and not allow Deirdre to fall again.

It is with great difficulty that he reaches the opposite bank.

When Derek’s boots find dry land, he collapses, face first, into the pebbly shore. Deirdre’s weight on his back drives him hard into the rocks, bruising his already scratched cheek on the gravel. He takes the fall instead of risking allowing his captive to fall onto the arrow that is already lodged somewhere in her.

When he wriggles out from underneath her limp weight, he pulls her up away from the water before doing anything else. And then he checks to see how that arrow wound fares.

And there isn’t one.

The arrow has lodged solidly into a hard little apple in her sack, pierced through it, and tangled in her clothing. There is a clear and potentially scandalous hole ripped in the clothes on her back, but the many layers of cloth and the hard bones of her rigid stays prevented what should have been a fatal wound.

Derek doesn’t believe it.

But it would have been a hard shot to make, he recalls. There was a decent wait from when she tumbled into the river and when Sigismund drew the bow. It would have been a long shot at a moving target that would have been changing direction unpredictably as the current bludgeoned her between rocks. With all that in mind, it makes much more sense that there would be a miss instead of a hit. The conditions were awful for making good aim.

It would have taken a miracle to make a nonfatal shot like this on purpose.

Deirdre groans as she rolls over onto her back. Derek notes her eyes appear unable to focus, and she is favoring one shoulder. A deep purple bruise mars her throat. Derek suspects this will not fade swiftly.

She coughs, and a bit of river water escapes her lips. Deirdre winces and makes a horrible keening whine of pain. Bootsie whines in response and licks the woman’s arm.

“Hey now,” Derek tells her in a hushed tone, “it’ll be alright.” He drags himself upright onto exhausted feet. “We just need to get a little further.” He offers her a hand up.

“Sig-” Deirdre attempts to speak and fails. Instead, she accepts his hand, and then his shoulder too. She is too banged up and bruised by the fight and the tumble through the water to walk on her own.

Derek doesn’t actually know where he’s going. There’s no destination in mind except to be out of sight of the riverbank in case the sheriff tries to track down the corpse of his latest murder for whatever purposes a murderer might have. He heads vaguely toward downstream and also away from the water.

The holly, which had proved to be such a nasty foe to fight his way through, now proves to be an excellent screen from an accidental view. Derek cannot help but to keep looking over his shoulder in case they are being followed, but he spots no one.

Bootsie stays at Derek’s heels, her leash dragging through the dirt behind her.

When Derek realizes that the both of them are shivering uncontrollably and Deirdre’s breath is ragged against his neck, he knows they cannot keep moving. He finds a low outcropping where the densely entangled roots of two ancient trees have formed a dam for the downhill flow of the devastating force of erosion.

Beneath this little dam is a small circular clearing. A family of deer flees as the two humans and one dog slide down the embankment from above. An enormous hollow stump sits at the clearing’s center, and there is a ring of similarly aged trees that surround it. They must be the original tree’s children, the daughters of the old stump, still standing to pay respect to their elder.

The dead tree’s clearing has patchy damp grass, cropped short by the grazing deer.

Derek props Deirdre up against one of the daughter trees and drags himself away to collect firewood.

It doesn’t take long to find enough sticks to get a good little fire going in these dense woods. And there is no risk that they will catch too easily and burn the sheltering trees to the ground. Derek does his best to find wood that is dry enough to burn, but it is scarce.

He has to make do with rotting chunks of old log and a copious quantity of tinder twigs. Getting the fire started in the clearing is more difficult than he wishes it would be. They are both cold, exhausted, hungry, and feeling unbearably cranky. But there is nothing to be done for it except to get warm and dry.

When the fire finally sparks to life and Derek is relatively sure that it will not go back out again immediately when his attention is elsewhere, he focuses on removing his waterlogged boots and offers to help Deirdre do the same.

And it is an offer, not a command, but he does not want to see her catch her death in the cold on account of him.

When she refuses the aid, he instead assembles a meager shelter out of his raincoat, using the side of the embankment as a rear wall. It isn’t much, but it will be something to keep them both safe.

The sun has passed its zenith and heads toward dusk at an alarming rate. They are going to be stuck out here overnight, and it is going to get very, very cold.