Page 94

She blinks, then lowers her hand to her belt. “Fine.”

I fold the cloth and walk past her down the path. She follows, and a few steps later I hear her laughing.

We mark a few more places down the valley, each one farther from the climb home. Kestria picks one herself, a fallen trunk where the path splits, and I rub the cloth on the end pointing away from the den. She’s good at this.

By the last one she’s propped against a tree rubbing her thigh. “Rauk. I think—” She has to stop for air. “—this is good.”

I fold the cloth up. “It is.”

We turn back together and follow our own new trail as far as the bare rock. She steps where I point and stays off the loose dirt between the stones. Keer will still find us on this.

The first rain reaches us near the top.

A drop hits Kestria’s cheek and she looks up. “Wonderful. All that work, and now it rains.”

The next ones spot the cloth in my hand. I look back, and I can’t see the far trees for rain already. “It may spoil some of the marks.”

She looks at the cloth. “You’d better protect your precious bloody cloth, then.”

I tuck it under my arm. She won’t let that go.

We make for the pines, and the rain gets through them before we do. It comes off the needles in strings and runs down the fur at my neck, and the cold goes all the way down my back. I’ll be wet till morning. I can’t hear the slope anymore. My ears fill, so I shake, and Kestria gets the spray and gives me a look for it.

Worth it.

She’s no drier. Her hair’s stuck flat to her head, and she pulls a wet strand out of her mouth, then gives up on holding her hem clear and lets it drag.

“I’m soaked anyway. I want a proper wash when we get back.”

“I have something for you at the den.”

She turns her head toward me. “If it’s more rags for me to bleed on, you can keep it.”

“It isn’t.”

“Then what is it?”

I don’t answer, which she hates. She huffs at me, steps around a puddle, and puts her foot into another. I offer my hand for the last climb, and this time she takes it before looking at the rocks.

Where the trees thin out, water’s pouring off the ledges above us. I take her around the shoulder of rock under the entrance instead of up it, toward the big tree at the edge of the open ground.

She tugs my hand. “The den’s up there.”

“Here first.”

The oiled hide I put up yesterday is still stretched between the outer branches, sagging with water, and it’s holding. Good. I built it between trips for wood, and there was nothing to test it with before the rain. The low corner runs off into the old trough I wedged across two forks, and the trough’s filling faster than the leak at one end can empty it. I’ll have to see to that leak.

Kestria stops beneath the tree and tips her head back. I tug the strips tying the hide to the forks anyway.

“What have you done?”

I point to the thong hanging beside the trunk.

“Pull that, and the water comes down here.”

She looks at the flat stone under it and back up at the hide.

“To wash under?”