Chapter 142: The Counter-attack

"My lord?" Merrick said, quietly.

"Stay in sight of each other. I can’t sense beyond forty feet."

Merrick said nothing. He shifted his grip on the reins.

They found the camp where the trail bent down toward the river.

It sat in a shallow hollow ringed with flat stones. Emeric saw the stones first. They were dark and wet, the last of the frost long melted. Then he saw the rest.

A bedroll was kicked into the mud. A pack lay on its side, half its contents spilled. A cooking pot sat in a cold fire, upside down. Someone’s boot lay a few feet away, empty.

He dismounted. Gaius dismounted beside him.

"Nobody touch anything," Gaius said. "Merrick, take the east side. Perrin, west."

Emeric crouched by the fire. The ash was soaked and flat, trampled by something with claws. Next to it lay a leather map case. It was Isolde’s, the one she had pressed into Ashe’s hands at the gate. The clasp was torn. Inside, a few sheets of paper were stuck together with damp.

He peeled the top one apart carefully. It was Pell’s work. A neat, tight sketch of a cut riverbank, and across it a long pale line drawn in white ink and labeled in a cramped hand: seam, 3ft+, continues N-W, Brokk says DO NOT TELL ANYONE.

Emeric folded the page and put it inside his jerkin.

"My lord." Perrin had called from the western edge, his voice flat. "Blood."

It was a lot of it. Dark smears across the stones and the grass, and a long, ragged trail of it leading toward the trees. Emeric followed it for ten paces, his stomach tight, and stopped.

"No bodies," Merrick said behind him.

"No."

"Drag marks." Merrick pointed. Two parallel furrows in the mud, wide apart. "Boots. They’re going in the same direction. Away from the river."

"They weren’t dragged. They walked." Emeric studied the prints. "Or they were walked."

"By what?"

"By whatever herded them."

Brennan swallowed audibly. "But they’re alive, aren’t they, my lord? If there are no bodies?"

Emeric didn’t answer. He looked at the wet ground, at the long red stains, at a single glove lying on its side.

"Yes," he said. "I think so."

Doss had left the trail. Emeric would have missed it without the Thunderhoof.

The animal stopped beside a tall oak and pushed its nose against the bark. Emeric dismounted and ran his thumb across the spot. Three small, clean nicks, cut at shoulder height with a thin blade.

He stepped back. Twenty paces on, another oak. Three nicks.

"Lirael," Gaius said. He had come up beside him. "She’s marking it."

"While they were being herded." Emeric stared at the next tree. "She cut the marks without anyone noticing."

"Or she did it for us."

"She didn’t know we were coming."

"She knew someone would."

Emeric nodded slowly. The elf had walked into a trap, and some part of her had still been counting trees.

They followed the marks. Every few hundred paces, three nicks. Every time, the Thunderhoof found the next one before Emeric did.

The first stake stood at the bottom of a shallow gully.

It was as long as his forearm, driven into the soil at a slant, wrapped in bands of pale bone. A faint hum came off it, more felt than heard, a vibration against the roots of his teeth. Frost still clung to the ground around it in a perfect circle, a hand-width wide.

"Don’t," Gaius said, when Emeric reached for it.

"I have to know what it is."

"It’s the thing that froze them."

"It’s the thing that tells me how." Emeric knelt, careful to keep his knees out of the white. He held his palm over the stake, an inch from the bone. "Stay back."

He reached with Empathic Resonance.

EMPATHIC RESONANCE (C)

Target: Bone totem. Residual Emotion Detected.

This was no ordinary totem. It had an imprint of the owner attached to it.

The images came slowly, like water filling a cup.

Cold. A cold so deep it was almost gentle. Then patience, a long, unhurried patience, the kind that waits for a kettle or a sunrise. And then, underneath it, something Emeric hadn’t expected.

Curiosity.

A kind of bright, careful interest, the way a scholar looks at a rare specimen under glass. The caster had planted this stake the way a naturalist pins a butterfly. There was no malice in it at all.

Emeric yanked his hand back.

"Well?" Gaius said.

"He’s not angry." Emeric rubbed his palm against his thigh. It had gone numb to the wrist. "He wants something. He’s looking for it."

"For what?"

"I don’t know. But he isn’t looking to kill them."

Gaius stood very still. "That’s worse."

"Yes."

The beasts came out of the green as the light began to fade.

Wolves first. Bark-grey and bulky, three of them, red eyes steady, moving in a loose crescent through the underbrush. Then boars, low and rattling. Emeric counted eight before he stopped counting.

"Form up!" Gaius barked.

The knights wheeled. Horses reared. Brennan’s mount screamed, and he fought it down with both hands.

Emeric drew his sword. He knew the odds. Seven men against a pack, in tight woods, with a mage possibly watching. If the wolves broke the line, the knights would be torn apart. They couldn’t win this head-on.

Unless they never knew we were coming.

He reached for the new power, the cold one. It answered at once, a thin dark pull behind his sternum.

VOID AFFINITY (D)

[I should warn you that this is the first time you have used it in combat. I do not know how it will behave.]

"Gaius." Emeric kept his voice low. "Everyone move on my signal. As quiet as you can."

"Quiet? They can see us!"

"They can hear us. That’s the part I can change."

He pressed his free hand to the ground. The magic poured out of him in a slow, dark ripple, spreading outward across the roots and moss. Where it passed, the sound went with it.

The horses’ hooves stopped ringing. Gaius’s boots, shifting in the leaf litter, made no noise. The wolves, still growling, paused, one ear flicking forward. They had stopped hearing the thing they were hunting.

Emeric lifted two fingers. The knights came forward in a line.