Woven Steel

CHAPTER 9: Lady Business

First came a man being pulled by four brown-and-white speckled hounds. The strained at their leather leads, dragging the man behind them at a jog. Next came two men on horseback- A knight in a chainmail hood, with a twelve-foot lance sticking straight up in his right hand. Kestrel saw his young face framed in a chainmail hood.

His features were delicate, pretty as a girl's. A pale blond imitation of a moustache was just visible in the sun. Kestrel was surprised to find she thought it endearing rather than ridiculous . His shield was checkered red and black. Another man on horseback- a boy, really, with a tunic of the same red-and-black pattern. Six halberdiers in leather armor and livery cloaks came next, carrying their weapons over the shoulder. Behind them was a score of peasants in straw hats and woolen ponchos. All were visibly armed- a few with hunting bows, the rest with spears or clubs.

One of the peasants called to the knight, begging him for a quick rest. The knight assented with a contemptuous, disgusted little nod, and when he turned his pack to look upslope the peasant made a rude gesture at him. The four hounds were are pulling towards the righthand stream, the one the ogre had gone up and Kestrel, until moment's ago, had been coming down. One of them almost certainly had her scent, but his signals were lost among the general clamor caused by his compatriots.

If the hunters managed to catch their quarry, it wouldn't go well- not for either party. Kestrel had seen an ogre in combat before. The young cavalier would certainly die. Such a waste of a pretty face. But he would no doubt insist on charging in first, as befit his rank, and would be ripped limb from limb. But then would come the soldiers and peasants and their spears, with the hounds worrying at the ogre's limbs. Some of them would die too. Maybe most of them. But twenty was a great deal, and if they pressed the attack to the end, they would bring their quarry down.

If they could catch them. Kestrel looked up at the sky. The sun was still far up from the jagged, tree-blanketed horizon. Sir moustache would drive his men hard- he was already circling his horse and calling an end to the brief halt. The peasant men were rising and stretching with deliberate slowness, but they would be moving shortly. Kestrel gave even odds that they could catch the ogre before nightfall. And if even if they didn't- with hounds, and if they knew country well, they could keep the pursuit up overnight. Atla and Umara would both be out tonight, and Umara would be near the full.

She lay still on the forest floor, thinking, while the fallen leaves crackled underneath her. Whatever she was going to do she had to do fast. In a minute, they would be moving again, firmly on her trail. She got up, moving quiet and careful at first, then faster as she got out sight. One of the dogs barked at her but was told unceremoniously to shut up.

She crossed the little rise to the other streambed, the wrong streambed, and worked quickly. Luckily she wasn't wearing her hunting dress, which would instantly mark her as a native of the barbarous west. In her current clothes, she could reasonably pass for Latain. She removed her bow and quiver, tucking them behind a fallen trunk where they would be easy to find again.

After running up the stream fifty yards or so, she took the grey rabbit off her back and laid it on a flat stone. One quick cut down the middle, with her thick triangular knife and thick half-coagulated blood was oozing out of it. She removed the last handful of jerky from her bag, and smeared it in the blood. She took the rabbit in her right hand and the cured meat in her left. Back in the meadow, a second hound was barking. Good. That would help.

She ran further up the creek bed and started dropping pieces of the meat in the brush as she went. As she ran, she sang the last verse of the song, singing fast and with urgency now. How the girl went to the peak of Uroalla to seek wisdom from the Puma Goddess. How the goddess gave her the obvious advice, to find another boy, for fucks sake. How the girl refused to listen, and while the puma goddess was talking, stared at the her lustrous coat, and thought what a wonderful cloak it would make. Picturing how grand it would look on the boy's broad shoulders. How she attacked the diety, with predictably dire results.