Veyra Flintstep's Arc

Chapter 3 of 14

They loaded the sled at first light. Veyra set the four spare poles and the bundle of blue strips under a hide, then tied a spear across the top for Giloa. The western ridge would wait. Without the rest of the shaman's dye, forty poles and eighty strips would only mark a stretch and stop. Better to earn the full two hundred first. She led the raptor out past the last houses and turned it uphill, toward the moss beds and the forest above them. "Long way for a favor," Giloa said, walking at the raptor's shoulder. "It's not a favor. It's the price." "Same thing, uphill." The raptor picked its way over frozen scree, its thick feathers ruffed against the wind. By midday they reached the great patch of lichen that fed the shaman's dye pots. Blue and pale green crusted the boulders in wet, velvet layers. Veyra crouched and pressed a thumb into it. Thin. Shahndiin had not lied. Above the patch, the ground rose into dark pines standing close together, their crowns black against the sky. They tied the raptor at the tree line and went in on foot. The grove swallowed sound. No birds. No small game moving in the needles. Giloa stopped once and pointed with the butt of his spear at a track pressed into old snow. Wider than a bear's. Three toes. He looked at Veyra and said nothing. They followed the tracks a hundred paces. The prints crossed a second set, then a third, all moving in the same direction along the slope. Whatever it was traveled in a group and traveled often. Veyra counted six clear prints before she stopped counting. At the edge of a clearing, she found a pine stripped of bark from the ground to twice her height. Long gouges ran down the wood. Sap still ran. "Fresh," Giloa said. "Today fresh." She stood there a long moment, watching the shadowed spaces between the trunks. Nothing moved. But something had, and would again. She backed out of the clearing the way she had come, keeping her eyes on the trees until the raptor was in sight. They did not speak until they were down past the moss beds. The sled runners chattered on the stone. "The ridge waits longer now," Giloa said. "She needs to know before anyone else goes up for moss." Shahndiin was at her fire when they came in. Veyra set it out plain: the stripped pine, the tracks, the count. The shaman's hands went still on the cloth in her lap. "How many?" "Six prints I was sure of. More I wasn't." Shahndiin folded the cloth and set it aside. "Then the moss harvest stops until I know what walks up there. No one goes to the beds. Not my gatherers. Not you." "I need the dye." "You'll have none until the forest is safe." She looked up. "You brought me a bigger problem than you were sent to find." Veyra was silent a moment before answering, “Perhaps we should ask the Chieftain to ready warriors.”