Prince Nera Mossveil's Arc

Chapter 23 of 23

Nera pushed the fawns deeper into the spruce and let the horse pick its own line. The needles were thick underfoot and the light dropped to green. Aldric walked with a hand on the horse's flank to keep his feet. Luminara paced at the rear, watching the trail behind them. The dragons were gone, but the wood was not empty. Nera had smelled the mark on a pine bole a quarter mile back. A cat had scored the bark chest-high and rubbed scent into the cut. It was hunting, and it had their line now. He stopped the string in a small clear place between three fallen trunks. The fawns bunched at his knee, breathing hard through their noses. Six of them. Too many to carry, too slow to outrun a cat in cover. "There is a lynx on our scent," Nera said. "It has been pacing us for a half hour. In this brush it will take one from the tail and be gone before we turn." Luminara set her palm on the nearest fawn's back. "I have star-dust for stone, not for living scent. I cannot blank them." Aldric shook his head before Nera asked. "The pouch is empty. One working was all I carried." Nera swung down. He had one thing left that a predator would read before it read the fawns. He opened the saddlebag and took out the last two scent cloths Tempo Flux had brought from the animal fairies' house, the linen still damp with milk and the healing fawn's coat oil. He had used them as a lure. He would use them now as a lie. He tied the milk-soaked cloth to a low branch at the edge of the clearing, upwind. Then he took the dry scent cloth, wrapped it around a stone, and threw it hard through the brush along the slope, away from the line he meant to travel. He drew the fairy-blessed dagger and cut a shallow line across his own forearm. He pressed the cut to a third strip of cloth and staked it beside the milk cloth. Fawn scent, milk, and fresh blood, all in one place, none of it moving. "Walk the fawns straight north on the moss," he told Luminara. "No talking. I will catch you at the next ridge." He waited behind a trunk with the dagger out. The lynx came fast and low, drawn by blood over milk, and went for the staked cloth without checking the wind. Nera did not fight it. He let it take the bait, watched it seize the rag and bolt with it back down the slope toward the thrown stone. He counted to twenty and followed the fawns north on the moss, wiping his arm on his sleeve. The trail he left now was one man walking. The cat was carrying his old scent the other way. He caught Luminara at the ridge with all six fawns still on the rope, and turned them toward the valley where the older herd had gone to ground.