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He stood and ran his eyes over the area, first one way and then the other. He didn’t say a word. Then, he hopped over to a patch of ground strewn with leaves.
“Have you found something?” I said.
I joined him and peered at the same area he was. I straightened up and turned away.
“There’s nothing there,” I said.
“Not to the untrained eye,” he said, not taking his eyes off the patch of soil.
“They went that way,” he said, pointing.
“What?” I said. “How can you know that?”
“Because they left tracks,” he said.
Tracks.
“There’s something in my past that’s a little… dark.” Wasn’t that what he said? Could that darkness he told me about be linked to battle or war? And maybe he could read tracks because he had been trained to?
I didn’t care how he could do it. If it pointed the way, I was willing to forgive anything he might have done in the past.
“Then let’s go!” I said, climbing into Snorter’s saddle.
We traveled much slower now. We didn’t have the arjaths’ incredible sniffing ability and instead had to rely on Waev’s tracking skills. He made sure he never lost track of the direction we were headed.
We wound through the trees and I felt the tension ratcheting up one notch at a time. Slowly. Painfully.
The sun had yet to rise. That, I assumed, was a good thing. Cleb could only travel so far on foot. He would need to take a rest. And if Bianca had to carry him, it would tire her out so she had to stop too.
A bird screeched and flapped through the trees a yard in front of us. It spooked the arjaths. Their ears perked up and shifted left to right independently of each other, hearing things we had no awareness of.
The arjaths were skittish. Maybe they sensed we were getting close too, I thought.
I ran my hand comfortingly over Snorter’s fur to calm him down. He pushed on, stepping slowly across the forest floor.
I was certain we’d long since passed through the boundaries of my land and into my neighbor’s. Heading in our current direction would put us on Quill’s land. He already knew we were out there looking for Bianca and Cleb.
With any luck, his men wouldn’t shoot us.
“Whoa,” Waev said, pulling his arjath to a halt.
He swung his leg over and dismounted. He moved to a tree and tied his arjath to it. I followed suit and joined him.
“What is it?” I said.
“A clearing up ahead,” Waev said.
We crept through the foliage. I made at least three times the noise Waev did. He got down on his stomach and crawled along the ground. I followed him up to a thick copse of leaves. Waev pulled a single leaf back to peer through. I did the same on my side.
We’d reached the edge of a wide clearing. How Waev could have known that all the way back there was beyond me.
There, across the way, hidden largely by overgrown hedges and climber plants, it was a watchtower. Sections of the wall were missing. Stairs were visible like a skeleton’s ribcage through a deep gash in its side. A room was at the top of the tower. It appeared to be in relatively good shape.
“If you were on the run, where would you hide?” Waev said, nodding to the tower.
“If they are up there, how are we supposed to get them out?” I said. “We can’t take the risk the kidnapper might hurt them.”
“He won’t hurt them,” Waev said.
