Pathfinder's Way (3 page)

Shea held up a sixth pair of socks. Did she
really need them? The route they were taking was relatively clear
of any water. The weather had cooled as summer loosened its grip,
and fall took its place. Still, it was vital to keep feet dry
during a long journey and would be much more comfortable
besides.

An extra pair of socks in her bag wouldn’t
really make a difference but as packing progressed those little
extras really added up.

The supplies ready and her bag packed, Shea
slipped her arms through the two loops and lifted it onto her back.
Bending forward, she tugged on the bottom of the straps, tightening
the pack until it hugged her back and wouldn’t flop around while
she was running.

She grabbed one of her maps off her desk and
headed out the door. As always it took a few steps to get used to
having a pack’s weight, but by the time she reached the front gate
she was able to ignore it to focus on other matters.

She arrived at the front gate carrying her
sack of supplies, mostly food, but some odds and ends. Two men
watched her approach. One had taken a seat on an overturned bucket
and was using his knife to peal a piece of fruit. The years had
carved crow’s feet in the corner of his eyes and grooves around his
mouth. His skin was leathery, and his brown hair was pulled back
away from his face.

His companion was much younger, probably a
little younger than Shea, with curly reddish-blond hair that barely
reached his ears. His forehead was broad over sky blue eyes that
made the girls in the village swoon every time he smiled at
them.

“Witt. Dane.” Shea gave a respectful nod as
she stopped in front of them. “You know why you’re here?”

Witt, the elder of the two, nodded and
flicked a peel off his knife. Dane smiled at her, his eyes
twinkling merrily. She’d worked with both before. Witt wasn’t so
bad. Just surly. But he listened when she had something to say and
was handy in a fight.

Dane might be a problem. He tended to flirt
his way out of work and was under the impression that he knew more
than he did. Too bad she couldn’t leave him behind this time.
Unfortunately, he was good with a boomer and the only man in the
village able to use one. She would need that if they ran into
trouble.

“Good.” She set the supply sack on the ground
and withdrew some rations, handing each man his share.

“This is barely a day’s worth of food,” Dane
complained, holding up the meat wrapped in loaves of bread. “It’s
not enough.”

“It is,” Shea corrected him. She held out two
canteens of water to him and gave Witt the other two. “You’ll have
to ration your supplies. There are several pieces of fruit in that
bag as well as dried meat that you can eat while on the road. We’re
traveling light this trip. We can’t afford any extra weight if we
want to get to Edgecomb before mist fall.”

“What route are we taking?” Witt asked.

Shea pulled out her map and unrolled it
carefully on the bucket Witt had just vacated. It was made from a
sturdy stock of paper and drawn with a careful hand and an eye for
detail. The geography of the land was done in blue, red and black
ink with several closely drawn lines signaling elevation and
further spaced lines meaning flatter land. It had been treated with
a kind of oil to ensure the marks didn’t fade over time. Shea could
still make corrections, but the treatment meant those could be
erased with a bit of spit and elbow grease. It made it handy to
make notes on various trails without permanently damaging the
integrity of the map.

“This trail would get us to Edgecomb
quickest,” Shea said, running her finger along the path in
question. “But the last time I was up that way I noticed some signs
that beasts had settled close to there.”

“What kind?”

“Red backs.”

Witt nodded grimly without taking his eyes
from the map.

Red backs were a beast that walked on all
fours for the most part. However, when killing, they rose onto
their hind legs, and would tower over the tallest man in Birdon
Leaf by several arm lengths. There were always two, usually mates,
and they had claws that could cleave a man’s head clear off his
shoulders. They were named for the red fur on their backs. The fur
on the rest of their body was usually grey. Once they moved into a
territory, they usually didn’t travel out of it unless prey became
scarce.

“Who cares if there are red backs?” Dane said
with the food still in his hands. “You just said we have to get to
Edgecomb as fast as possible. If we run into any problems, we’ll
just kill them. Their pelt fetches a nice price in the
Lowlands.”

“Maybe you could flirt them to death, puppy,”
Witt drawled, giving Dane a dismissive glance. Shea hid a grin.
“Red backs are incredibly difficult to kill. A boomer’s lead won’t
penetrate their hide. You have to get close, with knives or swords,
and cut them open.” Witt stood and mimed a slash in demonstration.
“They’re bigger than us, faster than us and one hit will crush your
chest until you’re exhaling blood.”

Dane held Witt’s gaze, his mouth set in a
disgruntled line before bending and picking up his pack. Shea kept
her gaze focused on the map while Dane busied himself fussing with
its straps.

Witt squatted down next to her. “I’d like to
say the boy is entirely wrong, but if James and Cam were taken by
Edgecomb, they don’t have a lot of time.”

Shea nodded and rolled the map up before
sticking it in her pack. “No, they don’t. A day or two at
most.”

“How long would the detour take?”

Shea quirked her mouth and shook her head
slightly. “Depending on the trail sign, anywhere from a couple
hours to half a day.”

“You’re the pathfinder so we’ll follow your
lead.”

Witt stood and walked to his pack where he
finished arranging the last of his supplies.

“I am the pathfinder.”

All that meant was that if she made the wrong
decision, she would be the one with blood on her hands. She
scrubbed a hand over her face and turned to the other two as they
settled their packs on their backs. The long barrel of a boomer
stuck up over Dane’s head from where it was attached to his pack.
Witt’s weapons consisted of two short swords on either hip.

Looked like everybody was ready.

“Pathfinder.”

Shea turned to see Elder Zrakovi watching her
sourly. Taller than her by a few inches, he was a burly man whose
muscle was just beginning to turn to fat with age. She knew it must
bother him to have his son’s fate resting in the hands of a woman
he’d done his best to get rid of since she arrived.

“I trust that, despite our differences,
you’ll do your job and bring my son back.”

She nodded shortly. The gate was raised just
high enough for her group to walk under it.

“Don’t screw this up,” Zrakovi said as she
passed under the gate.

She raised a hand in acknowledgement and
adjusted her pack one last time before lengthening her stride to
catch up with the other two.

There was one thing the elders had gotten
right. Shea’s presence here was a punishment. But, it wasn’t them
who was being punished.

Shea quickly took the lead and set a
punishing pace as the other two fell in single file behind her,
Witt bringing up the rear. They had a lot of ground to cover before
nightfall. It would take the rest of the day to reach the stretch
of cliffs that marked the Highland border.

Reaching them would be a test of the group’s
stamina and endurance. In essence, it would be a gut check. Doable,
but not fun.

The cliffs, often referred to as Bearan’s
Fault, spanned nearly the entire border. Most of it so steep it was
as if a god had lifted the Highlands up onto a shelf, setting them
above their neighbors. They were the reason people called
everything above the cliffs the Highlands.

Not exactly original, but descriptive.

Approaching them always felt like walking off
the edge of the world.

Located on the most southwestern edge of the
Highlands, Birdon Leaf claimed some of the only habitable land in a
mountainous territory pitted with ravines, steep hills and granite
monoliths. To live up here, one had to be stubborn. And maybe a
little crazy.

Not many had the sheer bone headedness to
settle out here on the edge.

Food was scarce and company even more so.
Unless you could do for yourself, well, it didn’t get done. People
here were independent, hard headed and convinced that the only way
to do something was the way their grandfather’s grandfather had
done it. As a result, they didn’t welcome strangers. Even ones they
asked to be here, like Shea.

The first leg of the journey was easy enough.
They were lucky Birdon Leaf was situated on rolling hills. To the
north was a pair of mountain ranges so high that snow covered the
tops nine out of the twelve months. To the west, deep ravines bit
into the land, creating a spidery network of valleys and ridges
throughout the Highlands.

One of the reasons pathfinders existed was
because it was so easy to get lost up here. It was as if the land
itself didn’t take kindly to outsiders and tried to push out any it
sensed didn’t belong here.

People’s sense of direction tended to go
screwy and the distances played mean mind games. Sometimes you
traveled further than you intended, and other times it was as if
you’d barely moved.

There was a crash, and Dane rocketed past
Shea’s narrow perch. He grunted as he caught himself on a
particularly hard boulder.

“Is there no other way besides falling down
these infernal hills?” he growled. “No, you can’t even call them
that since they’re nearly as steep as the cliffs.”

“Going down a cliff would be easier,” Witt
said as he slid past, snagging an exposed tree root before he could
careen out of control. “At least then, we could simply secure a
rope to something and slide down.”

Shea stepped off her perch to slide to her
next target.

“This is the path we’re taking,” she informed
them once she had stopped.

“Even uphill would be better,” Dane muttered.
With a vexed groan, he leapt, then slid, to his next tree. He
crashed into it and nearly bounced off before grabbing hold.

“If you have time to gripe, you have time to
move faster,” Shea returned.

Internally, she echoed their frustration and
agreed, the only thing worse than having to climb up a mountain was
having to find the way down it.

It would be all too easy to break something
tumbling down the steep terrain, and none of them needed the added
challenge of an injured companion.

She just hoped the mist held off until they
were safely back in Birdon Leaf.

The mist was a bedtime story parents told
their children to discourage them from wandering off into the
untamed expanse. Only, as any person who’d spent time outside the
well-crafted towns could tell you, it wasn’t a story. It was real
and very dangerous.

Even Shea’s parents had told her stories when
she was young, though for her, they’d been less of a tale and more
of a cautionary warning of what waited for her out here. Her
parents had told her of brave pathfinders and their charges who
were swallowed by the mist, never to be seen again. No one knew
where they went or how it happened. One moment it would be the
sunniest of days and the next, the mist would have swept every
living thing from the area, wiping it clean.

Oh, the villagers dismissed such stories as
superstition or a gambit to squeeze more money out of them. They’d
only ever felt the very edge of its power. You could only
experience the true horror of it in the depths of the wilds.

Shea felt a slight shiver, thinking of the
mist she’d experienced only a handful of times. That had been more
than enough.

The other danger they faced were beasts,
which were thick on the ground up here. The Highlanders originally
used the term to describe predatory animals, but over time it had
come to mean anything that didn’t fit with society’s notion of
natural.

There were many types, so many that it would
be impossible to list them all. The secondary part of Shea’s
position was to catalogue beast habits, territory and hunting
patterns and give settlers advice on the safest ways to deal with
them.

Too often people didn’t listen.

That’s when they died.

Shea looked at the sun, judging it to be near
midafternoon. Time to call a halt. She’d timed it so their journey
put them next to a small mountain spring. Since they weren’t
carrying a lot of water, they needed to replenish at every
opportunity. And, they could use a short break.

Witt nodded willingly enough and dropped his
pack. Dane looked like he might argue, but in the end kept his
opinion to himself. He must have been more ready for a break than
she’d thought.

As the others caught their breath and
refilled their canteens, she pulled out her map, comparing the
scribbles on it to the surrounding land.

She gazed out at the landscape sprawled below
her. No matter how many times she saw it, the lonely beauty of the
wild back-country always managed to rip her breath away. It made
her pause for a moment, secure in the knowledge that she was just a
tiny piece of a greater whole.

It was the sort of view that gripped the soul
and said ‘see? This is what it’s all about.’ Moments like these
made dealing with the land’s hardheaded inhabitants bearable. Most
of the time.

“We’re making good time.”

They were, in fact. Much better than she had
anticipated. For all that Dane was a peacock, he had stamina.
Though the question remained: could the group hold this pace?
Should she start looking for a place to make camp or push on and
see if they could make it to Bearan’s Fault by nightfall?

Continuing after dark increased the chance of
someone falling and breaking something, further slowing them down,
or they could disturb one of the red backs. Shea wouldn’t be able
to see well enough to know if they were straying too close to their
den.