"We surely won't if we spend all day having sex in the woods."
"You can't be sure of that, Ufalla," she said slyly.
"What of safety?' Ufalla asked.
"I will cast warning bells. Seriously, Ufalla, I really am tired. Just a few minutes?"
It took considerably longer than a few minutes and by the time they had gotten dressed and back on their horses it was near midday. Jestia rode beside Ufalla just watching her silently for a long time.
Ufalla laughed. "Jestia, we are supposed to be looking for sign and . . . What has happened to you?"
Her tongue deceived her again. "I think I actually love you. I think that's what's wrong with me," Jestia spit out. Ufalla looked at her, and the look of pure ecstasy on her face was so beautiful that Jestia wished there was some way she could keep it. Her heart broke. "We have to go home, Ufalla, both of us, today. Back to the Kartik."
"I don't know what you've dreamt, Jestia, but we can't go home now—abandon our post and our brothers—at least I can't. And how would we get you back from here? Is this the only reason you've been with me, the only reason you profess to love me, so that I'll take you home?"
"Of course not."
If I tell her what I've dreamt then it must come true and if I don't she will never go with me. I've started to go home alone even made arrangements when we were at the garrison, but that didn't change the outcome of the dream, and now . . . Before, I don't know if I could have taken it and now I know I can't. She's the only person who has ever loved me, the only one who ever will, and I love her, too. I don't know when or how it happened, but I do. I feel as if she is me, as if I am her, and . . . I don't know what to do. Except love her while I can.
"I'm tired. I need to rest again," Jestia said, giving Ufalla a wry smile.
Ufalla looked at her and laughed. "Jestia, we aren't helping. We won't find anything with you not even trying and stopping every few minutes to make love."
"We've had this argument before. I won then, too, and . . . It's been more than a few minutes."
They tethered their horses and again clothing and armor was shucked with reckless abandon and they pleasured each other until Ufalla let out an excited yelp and tossed Jestia to the side like some discarded toy. Ufalla jumped to her feet, pulled on her boots, and went running into the woods otherwise naked like some long-legged wood nymph.
"Ufalla what on earth is wrong with you?" Jestia asked, not at all liking feeling like anything was more important to Ufalla than she was.
"I've found something! Come here."
Jestia at least put on her gambeson with her boots before walking over to where Ufalla stood bent over pointing to something just inches from her finger. Not twenty feet to the right of where they had been riding a piece of red cloth was hanging on a thorn. It was so small they never would have seen it if they'd just ridden past it. Ufalla pointed to other obvious disturbances—turned rocks, moss side down, broken limbs—probably evidence of some sort of struggle. Of course dead the villagers would have been dead weight and alive they most likely wouldn't have gone that easily.
Jestia smiled and kissed the back of Ufalla's head. "See? I was right. We never would have found it if we hadn't been stopping every few minutes to make love." She reached out and snagged the piece of cloth in her fingers. She held it out in front of her between two fingers. "Direction." The cloth blew obviously to the west.
"We were going north, so northwest from the camp."
"Yes," Jestia said, looking at the little piece of cloth with a sense of dread.
"We'd better get back to camp as quickly as possible," Ufalla said happily. Then she stood completely up and slapped Jestia on the ass. "Good thing we aren't very damn far from camp. Come on, let's get dressed."
* * *
"Come on, let's get dressed," Jabone said. "We need to head back now." It would have been frustrating to come out only to find nothing if it wasn't for the fact that it gave him a chance to make love to Kasiria. He smiled at her, kicked what was left of the rabbit out of the way and started dressing. Kasiria was just pulling her sword into place when she turned to him and asked, "Do the Katabull marry, or have some sort of other symbol of a union?"
"We exchange things," he said. He was still fastening his kidney belt into place.
"Exchange things?" Kasiria asked.
He had finished buckling his belt and he gave her his full attention. "Things that have meaning to us, things of value to us such as . . . " He pulled up the vambrace on his left arm and removed the leather cuff with the eagle tooled onto it. " . . . this. The eagle is a strong symbol to our people. It is said that the eagle protects the wearer. My mother made this for my madra and my madra gave it to me when I left for the Jethrik." He took her hand and put the cuff around her wrist.
"Jabone," she looked into his eyes as her own filled with tears, "I can't take this."
Jabone smiled back. "The idea of the exchange is to give away that with which you would never part because if I never mean to be parted from you then I'm never parted from it."
Kasiria seemed to think about it only a moment then she reached into the top of her gambeson and pulled out a small chain. On the end of the chain was a very intricate gold medallion. "I have had this since my birth; it was given to me by my father." She put it around Jabone's neck.
He smiled and then kissed her gently on the lips. "And now two are one."
* * *
As they neared the camp they could hear it—it was too loud. Kasiria looked at Jabone and he nodded. Without having to speak a word they both put their horses into a trot, skillfully guiding them around trees and rocks and stumps. They pulled up short just outside of camp and as they looked on Kasiria realized what they heard had not been disaster but celebration. They took care of their horses and then started for the heart of the camp.
"What's going on?" Kasiria asked of one of the fellows as she got close.
"Jestia and Ufalla have found the Amalite's trail and we will ride in the morning."
"What about the supplies?" Kasiria asked.
"They arrived with pack horses just minutes ago."
Kasiria found the rest of her unit all talking and laughing and realized, not without some disdain, that Eric seemed to have permanently attached herself to her unit. Kasiria and Jabone joined them. "How'd you find the trail?" she asked Ufalla.
"We had stopped to rest," Ufalla said. Kasiria guessed they had done more than just rest, but how could she even start to disapprove when she and Jabone had stopped to "rest" twice that day themselves? Ufalla told them what she had found and Kasiria guessed that Jestia had done a spell to see in which direction they'd gone. This group wasn't going to ask questions because they were hungry to find the trail, find the Amalite stronghold, and then go back to tell the rest of the Jethrik so that they could assemble the army and attack in force.
No one held any illusions anymore that they alone would be able to stop the Amalite horde. They knew now that they numbered in the hundreds if not thousands. They were a scouting expedition now, nothing more and nothing less.
Kasiria noticed then that far from looking happy Jestia looked angry. She was hanging on Ufalla's arm, leaning on her back, and if any of the Jethrikian men were angry about it they weren't showing it. What had happened in the last few days that had everyone accepting them, all of them?
As she thought her eyes fell on the ruins of the village and she knew that was at least part of the reason. Now that they had a common enemy, none of their differences seemed to matter. Now they truly were all the same. They shared the same living conditions; they'd all eaten hard tack, been rained on, and caked in mud. Now though they had yet to face their enemy they knew them, knew what they were capable of. The enemy wasn't some made-up entity in a bard's tale anymore. They'd been camped by this ruin for over three days now, and it was a constant reminder of their enemy.
Perhaps there was something else that had changed the men's feelings towards her and her unit. Her eyes feel on Tarius, who was now weaving yet another tale of the Great War.
He is an asset I did not realize I had. He tells them stories of great women and Kartik fighters and the men now see us not as a potential problem but a solution. They know we may be face to face with our enemy soon and if that is to be the case then they're glad to have us at their backs. And we've proved ourselves twice now, once when we saved Tarius against all odds and now it is part of our unit that has found the trail.
Her attention turned once again to Jestia and she shuddered.
I have read her features wrong, She's not mad; she's miserable. At our hour of triumph the witch looks as if she is expecting doom. That couldn't be good.
She decided she would talk to her later but she never got the chance to as she was dragged off to a meeting with Derek, Jason and Thomas and by the time they had finished strategizing and she got back to the tent all the others, even Jabone, were fast asleep. Tomorrow would be a long, hard day and so she just unarmored and lay down beside Jabone.
* * *
When day broke they rose, broke camp, and started into the woods. There was, of course, no road heading where they wanted to go, so they were forced to ride into the woods and that meant the going was slow. They had to take pack animals and leave their wagons behind. Trying to stay together they only covered about half as much ground as a single rider might have covered and knowing they were getting ever closer to their enemy there was little talking. They had each put their helmets on and then had slowly started taking them off again when their necks started to hurt and they got tired of not being able to see. But the Kartiks kept their helmets on and Kasiria wished more by the minute that she had a Kartik helm instead of the barrel helm she had, especially since Jabone kept insisting she wear it.
"But I can't see a thing," Kasiria complained.
"I'd give you mine but it would have to be repadded to fit your head," Jabone said. "Ufalla give Kasiria your helmet, you never get hit in the head anyway and if you did your head is so hard it would break a blade."
"Don't you dare," Jestia ordered. Then she rode up along side Kasiria. "Give me your helm."
Kasiria took the helmet off and handed it to Jestia.
"Is anyone looking?" Jestia asked.
Kasiria looked around. "Not right now."
"Change helmet," Jestia ordered, and the helmet changed. It wasn't black like theirs but silver, and where the leather was chain covered it. She handed it back to Kasiria and Kasiria put it on. It fit as well as her old helmet had and she could actually see.
"Don't you think someone will notice she's got a completely different helmet?" Ufalla asked scoldingly as she rode up on the other side of Jestia.
Jestia just smiled at her and said, "It's the same helmet just reconfigured. They'll just think she had two."
"If you keep just throwing spells every few minutes then they'll find you out and burn you at the stake or some primitive thing."
Primitive
? Kasiria almost laughed, that was the second time she'd heard one of the Kartiks refer to the Jethriks as primitives. They considered Jethrik ways and customs to be the way of a primitive, someone who didn't understand the modern world. When Kasiria thought about the differences in their cultures, the Kartiks did begin to look much more advanced than the Jethriks. Oh the Jethrikians had built huge monuments, temples and cities, and cleared whole forests, but did tearing down and building up make a people more or less advanced? Maybe when all things were considered the greatness of a people was tested by how they treated the land and each other, not by what they built.
When Derek called a halt to set up camp for the night they had covered only about one and a half times what they had on their individual treks each day. They had stopped only briefly that morning to examine the trail Ufalla and Jestia had found and then deciding they were right about the direction they had moved on from there.
There was just no way to move faster through the woods.
They were driving the stakes in for their tents when Jabone grabbed her arm. He sniffed the air. "Do you smell that?"
She lifted her head and sniffed. She did smell something peculiar.
"It's the Amalites. Tell the others, I'll go tell Derek."
* * *
Derek didn't hesitate. When the Katabull told you they smelled Amalites on the wind you acted. He sounded the alarm through the camp and the soldiers were quickly armed, armored, and mounted. But as he heard them, saw them running through the woods towards them, his heart filled with dread as it never had before in battle. There were hundreds of them. He had less than sixty men including the support crew, and there were hundreds of them covering the woods in all directions. They looked more like a mass of spiders than men.
He looked briefly over at Richard where he was on his right, and the look on his face told Derek he'd come to the same conclusion he had.
He didn't have time to even shout a single order before they were on him. He swung his sword, connecting every time, and they just kept coming. He saw them drag Richard from his horse and then they were dragging him off his. Daggers drove into his flesh even as he kept swinging. And then they were just gone running away. Beside him Richard looked as if something had stomped his guts out of him and he was already dead. When he looked up, Jabone stood over him his sword in his hand and he was the Katabull.
There was no time to think about whether to incite the change or not. There was simply do it or die and it didn't matter anyway because beside him Kasiria had already made the change. If she was exposed he might as well be. The Amalites were attacking their horses, and the woods was no place to be on horseback. The horses weren't helping them here, in fact the Amalites were using their own horse to their advantage, knocking them over or pulling the men from them and then crawling over their riders like bugs. There were that many of them.