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“Shades!” Ivar croaked. “Shadows. Evil things! What are you doing here?”
Baldwin gulped but could not answer. Ivar swung off his horse and handed the reins of his pair to Baldwin before dashing up the path to kneel beside Johannes. With an effort, he got the leg free, but shook his head.
“Dead. Broke his neck, I suppose.” He lifted a dart off the path. “Just a scratch.” He tossed it aside and dragged the corpse into a thicket of lush honeysuckle.
Out of the empty woods a horn call rose, shrill and insistent. He grabbed Johannes’ horse, mounted, and started riding. Baldwin pressed up behind him and, as they came to the switchback, they halted in order to tie the spare mounts one behind the next.
“There’s a break just there,” said Ivar. They tied the horses to a tree and pushed through the underbrush to a rocky outcropping that rode above the treetops. The wind roared off an escarpment, which plunged the height of five or six men, the face giving a vista of forest into the south, but they stared west, back the way they had come. They saw a haze on the horizon, and obscuring trees. Below, it was possible to see the last clearing through which they had passed, with its pair of lichen-stained boulders and its open space grown with green grass. Here came a score of Eika jogging in tight formation, pushing up from the lowlands. Light winked above them: a shower of arrows raining out of the woods. These fell among the Eika, and perhaps some struck, but the dragon-men did not slacken their pace at all, and none fell to the attack. Animal-headed creatures darted out into the clearing and threw flashing javelins and darted away again into the shelter of the trees.
“Best go,” said Baldwin, tugging on Ivar’s arm.
“God have mercy,” he said.
They traveled that day at a bruising pace, speaking little. One of the spare mounts threw a shoe and began to limp, so they let it go. When it seemed they would blow the horses if they did not stop, they rested near a stream where there was also some grazing, but they pushed on soon after until it grew too dark to travel without light.
Ivar led them off the track until he felt sure no one could see them from the road.
“We could lash twigs together, make torches to walk by,” suggested Baldwin as they rubbed down the horses.
“Light will give away our position. If they catch us, we’re dead.” They got the horses settled. Ivar threw down his cloak, and sat on it. “Why did you come after us?”
Baldwin smiled placidly. Somehow, miraculously, the dregs of twilight filtering through the trees managed to illuminate his perfect face and solemn expression, as serious as an angel. “Biscop Constance told me to hurry after and catch up with you.”
“What of Ermanrich and Sigfrid and Hathumod?”
“She ordered me to go.”
“Why?”
Baldwin sat beside Ivar. After a moment, he touched Ivar’s knuckles, a fleeting brush that made Ivar shiver and remember old times. He bent his head, as though he was ashamed.
“Ivar.” He hesitated.
There was so much they had never spoken of, one to the other: the affection they had once shared, the changes that time had carved in them, the sacrifice Baldwin had made because of his love for Ivar and the others. Ivar’s rescue of Baldwin that Baldwin had, by his unexpected cleverness, turned into a successful rescue of Constance. Only, of course, it had all fallen apart in the end.
As usual.
“I’m sorry, Ivar,” Baldwin whispered at last. “I love you best of all, I truly do, If … well … if there was something else you … I mean, peace is all I’ve ever really sought to be left alone. I hate being pestered all the time.”
“Never mind it,” said Ivar hastily, surprised to find himself both relieved and disappointed by this confession. “Peace you shall have, if I can get it for you. Although I doubt I can.”
“But you’re so brave! You always know just what to do!”
These words made Ivar smile bitterly, although Baldwin wasn’t looking at him. “You never answered me. Why did Biscop Constance send you after me?”
Baldwin sighed, and slumped to sit back to back with Ivar, shoulders and heads touching like comrades who, having no secrets, are entirely easy and trusting each with the other. “She told me that I, at least, must not be captured.”
“Captured! Are they going to be captured? Killed?”
Dreamily, Baldwin went on. “She thinks I am something I am not. That’s why she wanted to save me. I don’t know how to say ‘no.’”
Ivar wiped his eyes. Certainly it was true that, with Baldwin as his traveling companion, he did not have the luxury for panic or indecision.
“Never mind it, Baldwin. You did your best. We’ll stay quiet here, and hope for a little sleep. Do you want to take first watch?”
They were, after all, both too tired to watch and too wound up to do more than doze. They huddled in darkness, with no fire, off the road under the canopy of trees. Late at night a wind roared up out of the southeast, rattling branches and brush. Later still they heard voices and the clopping of horses and saw a torch bobbing in time to a man’s swinging walk. Too afraid to move, they held their breaths and prayed that the horses would stay quiet. The party passed by, moving east along the road, away from Autun. The night wind sighed and the forest creaked and muttered around them.
Of Biscop Constance and the others there was no sign.
