Chapter 4

“How soon do you think they will take a look into the Holding?” Borromeo wondered aloud. It had been several hours since they’d left the Holding. A dry wind pushed the dust across the hard pan, but that was the only movement in the darkness except for them, Corinn, and the horses.

“Shortly after daybreak,” Herzerr said quietly. “We set a couple of unserviceable guns to fire shortly after dawn. That should buy us a bit more time.”

“Every bit of time will be precious, more for the other group than us,” Borromeo said.

“When they don’t get fired at, they’ll send someone up close,” Herzerr said. “I would never want to be the man who does that.” He thought a bit. “Any chance they will send more than scouts after us before then?”

“Hard to say.” Borromeo shrugged. “Depends on who’s leading them. Depends on how lucky we are. Who knows, maybe one of their fire arrows found something really burnable, and the whole place is ash by now. Then they would know we are gone.”

Corinn saw Borromeo turn and spit. She thought much the same. Likely, they would have seen the glow from a blaze that big. She knelt and put her ear to the ground. “Nothing,” she said after a brief moment of intense silence.

“You can’t hear anything that way,” Herzerr said scornfully. Borromeo snorted, recognizing an old warrior trick. Corinn looked up, watching Borromeo.

His face was unreadable in the shadows. “The main column is cutting inland away from the river,” he said. “Maybe we need to go further inland, too. I don’t want to be trapped against the river.”

Corinn shook her head. “We must continue trying to look like a large group of people. A large group would keep going beside the river and stay on the high ground. That way, they would always have good places for a fight and always have water close at hand for the horses. After the raiders have seen how few of us there are here, then we can lose them in the river and go to join the others. We are not trapped against the river. The river helps us.” Herzerr tossed his head irritably. Corinn ignored him. She watched Borromeo.

The older man finally nodded. “Even from a woman, that makes sense. We will keep to the high ground.”

Herzerr snorted derisively. He kicked his horse and turned north, parallel to the distant river. The older warrior did not move or speak for a long moment.

“Are you tired?” Borromeo finally asked her, quietly.

“Would it matter if I was?” Corinn did not wait for him to answer. She tugged on the reins of her spare mounts and packhorses and followed Herzerr. The old warrior watched her for a moment and then whispered low so only his horse would hear. “Watch that one carefully, lad.” The horse ignored him. He grinned silently in the night and urged his mount after the others.

They stopped twice more to rest. The second time, with the fuzzy patch of light directly overhead, Corinn handed the men food and water. Then she opened one of the packs and began emptying it. Borromeo took one sniff and chuckled.

“What is ... is that what I think it is?” Herzerr asked suspiciously, stepping away upwind. He sniffed his food before shrugging and making it vanish.

“Shit,” Borromeo confirmed and also moved upwind. Chewing thoughtfully, he watched as Corinn buried small bits all around their stopping place. She opened a pack filled with horse droppings and scattered those around them as well. “This will help convince the raiders that a large party was here.”

Corinn led her train of animals around the clearing several times, making certain she walked over her own footprints more than once. Finally, she dropped to sit for a moment, eating her food, then moved, sat a while longer, and moved again. By the time she was finished, Borromeo knew he would have been convinced a troop of dozens had rested and taken a meal here.

Herzerr shook his head and rinsed his mouth with a swallow of water. “It is a good thing you are not a man,” he told Corinn. “You would be a demon to fight.”

Corinn said nothing, gathering the reins of their extra horses instead. Without a word, she started north.

“Was it something I said?” Herzerr asked Borromeo, a puzzled frown twisting his face.

“She is a star woman,” Borromeo reminded him, as if that explained it all. He looked back the way they’d come. In the faint light of the smallest moon, he thought he could make out a distant thin pillar of dust. “Someone following us,” he said at last.

Herzerr saw it too, and nodded. “Small party. They are not sure yet.” He took his bow out of its sheath. “I think I will pay them a visit. I will follow you and rejoin as quickly as I can.”

“Don’t kill them all,” Borromeo warned. “We want someone alive to keep the others following us. Rejoin us at the Point of the Rocks.”

“I will only kill enough to make them want to follow us,” Herzerr replied. He grinned menacingly. “Shellenas thinks I cannot do this. I will show him he is wrong.” He clucked at his horse and turned south.

Borromeo watched the younger warrior for a moment, nodding slowly, knowing precisely the challenges Shellenas had laid before Herzerr. It had not been so many winters since a younger Borromeo had laid the same challenges before a younger Shellenas. Borromeo smiled thinly and kicked his own mount to a trot. He quickly caught up with Corinn.

“If the woman mounted a horse, but stayed behind me,” he said in a conversational tone as if he was talking to someone else, “then I could not see her do it.”

“It is against the rules,” she told him flatly. “And everyone knows women don’t ride.”

“There are many things everyone knows, but that does not make them true,” he replied. “I cannot enforce what I cannot see, and we will make better time. The sooner we get where we are going, the sooner we can rest.”

He rode ahead of her and swung out to the left. He heard no break in the horses’ rhythmic steps, but he also no longer heard the near-silent thudding of her bare feet on the ground. He urged his own horse to move faster and listened carefully to be certain hers kept pace. He smiled to himself, shaking his head. “Dangerous as gunpowder,” he muttered. “But just as useful.”

Dawn brought no sign of Herzerr. Borromeo kept them on the river’s side and just below the top of the high ground so the gathering light would not show them against the skyline. He slowly and obviously turned to his left to look behind them. When he turned again, equally slowly, to glance over his right shoulder, Corinn walked ahead of the extra horses, her expression hard and her eyes on the ground in front of her.

They slipped over a rise, and he stopped. “See that small rocky hill?” He pointed at an outcropping covered with trees on a small peninsula jutting into the river. Some of the trees leaned out over the river, and rocks poked out from between most of the rest. She nodded, silent. “We will camp there. I remember a good place in the middle of that jumble. I will check our back trail.” She looked at him and nodded again. She knew he wondered the same as she did. Where was Herzerr? He rode back to the top of a nearby ridge, making no attempt at concealment. She continued on to the hill.

Behind them, he could see two columns of dust, one thin, the other thicker and farther away. That had to be their pursuers. Even if all her guesses and Shellenas’ were completely wrong, that second column of dust had to be big enough to cover all the raiders who had surrounded the Holding, and then some.

Borromeo smiled to himself. Now that we have them, he asked himself, how do we lose them? Several ideas came to mind. He carefully examined the nearby hills. There was still no sign of Herzerr. Borromeo didn’t know whether to be worried or not. At least there had been no sound of gunshots yet. He scanned the other hills again--nothing. He nodded to himself and turned back to the rocky, wooded lump of hill above the river.

On the way, he stopped and examined the tracks they had left behind them. Shellenas would be well pleased. It looked like more horses than Borromeo knew were there, and none of them looked lame, even to his experienced eye. Here and there, he could see the star woman’s footprints in the ground. She had even managed to walk across her own tracks sometimes, seeming like several women walking one after the other.

Borromeo stopped once, noticing a faint trace of color in the dirt. He bent low over his saddle to get a closer look. There was a touch of red in some of her tracks, as from a cut or maybe a blister. He sighed and rode back across their trail, guiding his horse into the rocky jumble where he hoped to rest for a few hours.

She was bathing her feet in the river when he dismounted. She quickly scrambled out to stand on the bank, wary and watching him. “Your hooves first,” he told her gruffly. He turned away and stretched to get the kinks out. There was nothing like a dusk-to-dawn ride for making his old leg wound hurt something fierce. He glanced back at her over his shoulder. “After your hooves are clean, check the horses’ hooves.” Wordlessly, she sat down on a big rock and put her feet back in the pool.

The horses, he saw, had all been watered and their packs removed. She had loosened their bridles but left them on. They all needed grooming and feeding, but that could happen later. He unsaddled and watered his own horse, then checked each hoof carefully for stones or bruises. Nothing killed a man quicker than ignoring the little things in a situation like this. The animal tended to, he climbed to the top of the rock pile and checked their back trail again.

Point of the Rocks was an ideal spot for a tiny party to camp. There was good defensive cover, plenty of water, plenty of fuel for a small fire, and no easy way to approach unseen. The ground around this stony upswelling was the same dusty, dry range they had ridden over all night long. The only drawback to the place was that it was too obvious. Every Outrider knew of Point of the Rocks. Anyone heading north in pursuit of escaping Holders would automatically check here. Borromeo settled himself in a good place to watch.

Herzerr came in well before midmorning. Blood crusted his jerkin, but he had a pair of ears dangling on a leather string at his belt and carried a gun he had not taken out with him.

“Bastards had more scouts than I thought,” he muttered by way of greeting. He touched the gun and showed his teeth in a cheerful grin. “They have two less now.”