She examined the bodies and the ground, finding no evidence of footprints or fingerprints. The attackers had been careful. She did find a fragment of steel that might have come from a weapon, but she couldn’t be sure. She put it in one of the cavernous pockets of her coveralls. She circled the scene, spiraling outward, stopping once to cast a protective spell on her bare feet, before continuing. The feeling of being watched itched at her until it sharpened into a pointed jab. She couldn’t see any watchers but pulled a protective shield around herself. It wouldn’t help against human weapons, but at the moment, those weren’t her major concern.
She found what she was looking for in a thick part of the woods. It appeared to be a camp. She found where several large and small giants had bedded down. There was no sign of a fire, so they’d cold-camped. Probably to help go undetected.
This time she didn’t cast a spell, not wanting to risk erasing evidence. Instead she walked carefully around the perimeter, examining every little thing she could find, which wasn’t much. She found some mounds where they’d dug holes for their waste, and that was about it.
Question was, were these the victims or the killers? She had no way to tell.
She ground her teeth in frustration. There had to be something here to tell hersomethingconcrete.
Mal tried to imagine how it had gone down. Had the giant in the garden run before or after the others had been killed and searched? Except for his hand, the wounds he’d suffered were shallow, more for pain than anything else. Nothing like the others. What did that mean? That they knew he didn’t have the talisman? Or that they quickly found it on him and stopped looking?
Having no answers and no way to find any, she continued her search, but found only a single clue twenty feet up in a tree. The bark had been scraped off in a three foot high patch. Unwilling to leave it unchecked, Mal climbed up, cursing when her fingernails broke and peeled back on the rough bark. Still, she kept going.
She was able to perch on a limb a little above and to the left of the scar. She draped herself over the limb, hanging by her hips, and eased down to look more closely at the wound on the tree.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” she murmured, her fingers running over three parallel scrapes that she hadn’t been able to see before. Each was about three inches deep, and more than a foot long. What had caused those?
The blood started to pool in her head, and she pushed herself upright to sit on the limb and think. What the hell had happened? The scrape was too high for even the giants to make, unless they had some sort of tool, which there was no evidence of, unless you counted the giant spear pinning them all to the ground like a restaurant’s order spindle. But she doubted that had made the scrapes.
She leaned against the tree, thinking. So one group brings the talisman, and the second tries to steal it, and probably succeeded, though maybe the victims had managed to hide it first.
Mal glanced around the thickly wooded area. Needle in a haystack. Needle in a dump truck load of needles. If it were here, finding it would take a lot of time and luck.
Her stomach growled and she remembered she hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and it was well past lunchtime. Not that she would get a chance to eat, but she needed to report her find to LeeAnne and Law and then go help with the search.
She took one more glance around. Where would she hide a tiny little talisman if she were being chased, didn’t have much time to hide it, and didn’t want it to be found by the wrong people but needed it to be found by the right people? Obviously that last part was crucial. Magical talismans weren’t exactly something you could get at Walmart, and if it had been especially made for this ceremony, then chances were it had taken time and effort. Mal doubted it could be easily replicated.
The attackers had thought that the victims would have hidden it within their bodies—a fact that disturbed Mal to no end and raised a whole lot of questions about giants and whether they’d ever heard of locks or vaults or even fake soup cans or books that were really hiding places for treasure—but if the victims thought they might be attacked and the talisman put at risk, wouldn’t they have come up with a different emergency plan? Something unexpected? Also a possibility: What if someone suspected a traitor in their midst and secretly hid the talisman elsewhere?
Mal nodded. All right. Assuming the victims were not stupid, what would they have done? They clearly hadn’t really had a chance to split up, so it had to be something they could do while together and something that could be uncovered by allies but not by enemies.
She chewed a ragged nail, contemplating the possibilities. Assuming that pixies and small giants gained the most from this marriage, it made sense that whoever hid the talisman would be putting it somewhere for them to find.
Pixies could fly. It made sense to hide the talisman high. Some giants, like virdanas, had magical powers, but she didn’t know how powerful, what kind, or how many might have them. So assume no magic for now. How would a small giant get high enough to hide a talisman for a pixie to find while still in the company of traitorous companions?
As a lookout? But then his companions would see where he went and look there. Throw it? That was risky unless the giant had excellent aim and could communicate the location to his pixie allies. It still left a lot of woods to search, though.
Mal looked at the marks on the tree. How would a small giant get all the way up here without anyone noticing? He’d have had to sneak away and do it before…
Crap. What if the giant had figured out there was an attack coming and decided to hide the talisman and make the mark thenight before, while everyone was sleeping? He’d have had all the time he needed to do both.
Clearly, he wasn’t stupid, so he wouldn’t have hidden the talisman too close to where he’d made the mark. It was a message telling someone how to find it. The question was, what did it say?
Mal couldn’t sense any magic about it, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. An untriggered spell wouldn’t show up until it kicked on. She didn’t want to risk another erasing spell, so she didn’t try to unmask anything.
“Use your brain, then,” she told herself. “What could these marks possibly tell someone? Not just someone, a pixie.”
For starters, they had to tell someone where to start looking. Even pirate maps said count three steps from the big yellow rock or whatever. You had to have a starting spot.
She frowned. Wait. What if the marks weren’t the only part of the message? The patch scraped clean of bark was awfully big. Overkill, really. What if it meant an open space? Like the garden?
She tilted her head and looked at the three lines, trying to orient where they might be in relation to the lay of the garden. She decided they must be located on the side opposite to where she and Merrow had found the giant with the severed hand. Mal had no idea what was there. She didn’t know if she’d forgotten or if she’d ever even known. Either way, it was time to find out.
Chapter Three
It tooka half hour to return to the garden. She found a deer path, which made it a lot easier to wend her way through the thick underbrush and forest debris. A twenty-foot border of wildflowers surrounded the garden, no doubt to make sure the edges received plenty of sunshine.
The afternoon was warm, so Mal stuck to the tree line as she jogged around to the other side of the garden. Once there, she waded through the flowers to the edge of the rows of squash and walked along, looking for something that the three marks might have referred to.
