“That, too. Regardless. All three of us are expendable. You are not.”
“But—”
“That’s anorder,Learned Edmund,” she said, and filled her voice with every ounce of steel she possessed.
He stared at her. She stared back, unblinking. The rats danced and skittered behind him.
“If they’re expendable, why are you going after them?” he asked her.
Slate jerked. On her shoulder, a sudden spike of pain, as if small ink jaws had clamped down on her skin.
No! I’m not betraying the mission! I have to go after them! The odds of success are much better with them than without! And I’m not risking Edmund, see? See?
Perhaps in response to her frantic thoughts, the tattoo loosened its grip. The painful pressure eased.
“Go,Learned Edmund,” she growled.
He rose to his feet, and then, slowly, bowed his head. Slate nearly sagged with relief herself.
“Where are you going, then?” he asked.
She rose to her feet, already moving down the slope to the river. The knot in her stomach had loosened. She knew what she had to do.
“To follow the rats, of course.”
CHAPTER 13
RIGHT ABOUT THE TIMEthe Learned Edmund was losing his potato, Caliban and Brenner finally exhausted their mutual recriminations and looked around for something else to do.
They were hog-tied on a dirt floor, inside an earthen lodge that looked like it was built by a magpie with ambition. The wattle-and-daub walls were studded with junk: bits of straw, feathers, small stones that might have been a mosaic if there had been more of them, snake skins, bright glass and colored string. Nets with glass fishing weights hung from the ceiling, illuminated by the flicker of a fire near the entrance.
There were also bones. Some were individual bones and some were whole articulated skeletons, from a number of small, unfortunate animals.
Brenner and Caliban were in the middle of a sunken circular area. Wooden posts rose to waist height around them, holding back the rest of the floor. Their captors had taken their weapons and, for some odd reason, their shoes.
“You know,” said Brenner, for approximately the fiftieth time, “none of this would have happened if you hadn’t been—”
“Shutup, Brenner,” said Caliban, who was learning why that was Slate’s favorite phrase.
“I’m just saying.”
“You were trying to kill me!”
“…I was only gonna cut you a little.”
After they’d been netted, their captors had shoved gags of splintered bark in the men’s mouths, tied their hands, picked them up, and begun to run through the forest. They were inhumanly fast, which made sense because they hadn’t been human.
Flattened against the bottom of his net, all Caliban had been able to see was a sickening lurch of landscape going by. If he craned his neck, he saw…legs.
Greenlegs, with fine swirls of brown hair on the calves, ending in large, cleft hooves.
That did not fill him with confidence.
When they had finally been dumped out onto the ground, he looked up into a circle of a dozen faces, none of which were human and all of which were green.
They looked like deer, mostly. They had long-muzzled faces and broad, flaring nostrils. The spacing of their eyes was wide and unsettling, but the eyes held a deep and uncanny intelligence. Mobile ears flicked back and forth at every sound.
The males were broad-chested and had antlers. Two of them carried Caliban between them as if he weighed nothing. The females were slenderer, with shallow breasts and patterns of dark green scars circling their eyes. Both sexes wore necklaces, armbands, and loincloths. All carried spears.
