Page 75 of The Summer Pass

It was odd to have a mission presented like that, as a question, not an order. Lill knew he must consider it as a real question, too, and not pretend it was an order.

“I think we can try,” he said.

Chapter 26

Tracking Game

If he had climbed up the rafters of the hall in the Tagra Degra great house to escape someone, Vanu knew where he would have headed after that: out one of the narrow clerestory windows onto the roof. Lill said that was where he had been heading himself when he climbed up there.

“He probably expected a flat roof like they have in the lowlands,” Vanu signed as they stood looking at the steeply sloping eaves of the great house from a shadowed corner at ground level.

Lill winced. “No sign that he fell, though.” He looked up at the building behind them, which was the armoury. “I don’t guess he would have tried to make that jump?”

Vanu looked up too, not knowing what Lill meant at first. The jump between rooftops? “I hope not.”

“Mm. Then he’d probably head to the back of the house first, to look for an easier way down.”

“There used to be a shed at the end of this wing,” Vanu offered. “Though it’s probably been torn down by now.”

He led the way to the back of the hall, the roundabout way he used to go as a boy when he was trying to avoid being seen. Lill crept along soundlessly by his side, like a little shadow. He’d changed his clothes. He had on a grey-green jacket of Otoni’s, from her days as a solitary huntress. Now Vanu thought that grey-green suited him best of all colours. He had put Lill’s hair into a braid for him before they left and helped him lace on the woven bast shoes that were the only footwear they could find to fit Lill’s small, slender feet. Lill had lamented the loss of his boots. “I’ll have another pair made for you,” Vanu had assured him.

And then something had clenched in his chest, because he was talking as if he knew that when he was back in a place where he could order boots for someone, Lill would be with him. But he didn’t know that.

The shed at the back of the great house was still standing, though only just. The roof was badly caved in, and to judge by the freshly splintered timbers poking through the tumble of decaying thatch, the collapse had happened recently. The door hung half off its hinges.

“Well, this is how he got down, all right,” said Lill, peering around the door. “That must have hurt.”

“Which way did he go after that?” Vanu wondered.

Lill studied the ground around the outside of the shed. “How are you at tracking game?”

“Only so-so. I never spent much time hunting. You?”

“Oh, I don’t know the first thing about following animals.” Lill squatted on the packed earth, looking at something. He shook his head. “I don’t think he went this way. Though it’s the way I’d have expected him to go—heading for the granaries at the back there. That would be a reasonable place to hide. Maybe he did go there and I just can’t find any traces.”

Vanu held out a hand to help Lill up. “Check the other direction,” he suggested.

Lill nodded. “‘Endeavour to think like the foe, but never forget that the foe may not think like you’—though in this case it’s a friend, not a foe, we’re trying to track. That’s from Master Moon. Have you read him?”

“No.”

“You probably know a lot of his wisdom already, from experience. But we must see if we can find you a copy anyway. Ah! Here, look.” He was pointing at a rusty smear on the corner of the great house wall. “It’s blood—he hurt himself falling through the shed roof and put his hand here to lean against the wall. I don’t see any drops on the ground, though, so we can hope he wasn’t too badly hurt.”

“You think he was headed there?” Vanu indicated the walled yard behind the nearest building, a house that had belonged to Danu Tsunakharu, one of his father’s hearthmen. His son or grandson would probably own it now.

“It depends what time of day he broke out,” said Lill. “If it was dark, he could have gone straight along here—and he might not have seen that gate in the wall. But if it was light, he’d have gone for that, wouldn’t he, as the safer option? Unless there are animals on the other side.”

“Geese,” said Vanu, suddenly remembering. “They used to have a flock of geese. Some breed from the lowlands—they were very proud of them.”

“I don’t hear any geese from here.”

“That was the thing about them. They were quiet, for geese. Until they saw someone they didn’t like.”

Lill started down the path toward the garden wall, keeping in the shadows. Vanu followed. He motioned Lill to stop, then put the toe of one boot between two stones of the wall and hopped up to look over the top. The yard beyond was just as he remembered it, full of fat, feathered grey bodies. He dropped down beside Lill.

“The geese are still there.”

“Yes, I can hear them now. Do you think they’d like Artayarasha? Because I’m afraid he did go in. Look.”