By unspoken agreement, Zandra took the lead, slipping between trees and down game trails like a ghost, always remaining ten or fifteen feet ahead, never turning to make sure Megs still followed. Megs suspected Zandra had no need to turn around; she could probably hear each of Megs’s clumsy footsteps as she tried to keep up.
It wasn’t that Megs was a disaster in the mountains – she’d been here for going on four years, after all – but she was still a farm girl at heart, with more years of experience carrying a scythe in a wheat field than a sword in a forest. She’d learned the ways of the mountains better than most, but she’d never be a native like Zandra.
When she wasn’t busy keeping her eyes on the trail a few feet ahead of her, Megs studied Zandra from behind. As usual, Zandra’s long, dark hair had been gathered into a single rope-like braid that swayed gently above her quiver of arrows while she moved with a cat’s silent grace down the trail. Unlike Megs’s, Zandra’s feet seemed to find each new step through intuition rather than intention.
Megs didn’t know much about her scouting companion, only that Zandra was an ex-soldier like her, and before joining the Imperial Army, she’d lived in a village north of the Meravin Forest, which was about as far north as a person could go before entering the Unknown Lands. Other people Megs knew from that region (and there hadn’t been many; she could count the number she’d met on one hand) were a lot like Zandra: silent, humble, and hard in a way that was difficult to describe. Hard like they had been carved fully formed from the granite of the Sunrise Mountains themselves.
Or hard like they’d lived through warring and raiding with the mountain men long before the rest of the East had. Which was true.
Zandra’s silence didn’t bother Megs. After feeling like she’d somehow become the surrogate mother of the seventy or so souls who made up the camp, Megs found Zandra’s taciturn manner to be a welcome respite from the constant clamoring for her attention. Scouting trips with Zandra always gave Megs a feeling of being able to breathe again. Not this time, though. Between Azza’s despondency and Clovis’s warnings about what lay in wait to the west …
Megs would move camp when she and Zandra returned from this trip, regardless of what they’d discovered. They’d been in the same place for more than a year, and that was entirely too long. She’d known it was too long, but she’d wanted her people to remember what it was like to live without running, to gain a sense of hope for the future.
A hope she wasn’t sure she believed in herself anymore.
Ahead of her, Zandra came to a sudden stop. Megs nearly collided into her back.
Shaken from her rumination, Megs shifted into a fighting stance and reached for her sword.
But before she could draw it, Zandra spun into a crouch, nocked an arrow, and let fly into the tree above to their right.
Something sack-sized fell from the tree, landing with a soft thud onto the forest floor. Apparently satisfied, Zandra slung her bow back over her shoulder and walked to where the thing had fallen, drawing her dagger as she went. Megs followed, confused, arriving in time to see Zandra stoop to drive her Imperial rune-marked dagger into what looked like an oversized squirrel.
“Tree marten,” Zandra said to Megs without turning around. “This one’s bigger than most. Meat’s a bit tough, but the pelts are good. They make for warm winter hats.”
“Ahh,” was all Megs could say. Her rapidly thudding heart gradually slowed to a normal speed.
Zandra cleaned the blood from her dagger with a clump of leaves, extracted the arrow from the marten’s flank, and hung the creature from her belt.
Well. Megs supposed it made sense. They’d been camping tonight, and why use rations when they could cook a fresh tree marten instead? Zandra was efficient that way, turning a scouting trip into an impromptu opportunity to hunt and gather fur for a winter hat.
With that, she was off again, heading west down the nearly invisible game trail. Megs raised an eyebrow at the woman’s back, then followed.