Tavis thrust his hands deep into the snow, arresting his fall before it had the chance to build momentum. He looked up and peered over Morten's huge back as the serac tumbled down the slope. The scout couldn't see on the other side of the spire, but the rumbling of the block of ice couldn't overpower the shrieks of the terrified ogres, and Goboka's angry scream was the loudest of all.
Tavis rose to his feet, then reached down to help Morten do the same. "Now we can run."
A series of clumsy, flat-footed steps pulsed through the open ground of the montane forest. The footfalls were as enigmatic as they were fleeting, bouncing from the bole of one tree to another, until the palpitations seemed to come from many directions at once and no place in particular. They were also distant, so feeble that Tavis barely heard them drumming above the incessant lisp of the wind. Still, the ungainly rhythm was unmistakable. Basil was out there somewhere, running across an outcropping of bedrock.
Slipping his fletcher's tools and a handful of osprey feathers into his belt pouch, Tavis laid aside the arrow he had been crafting. Gathering his bow and the handful of arrows he had already made, he stood, trying to guess from the maddening echoes where he would find Basil.
Beside the scout, Brianna was tending to the festering wound on Morten's neck. She had already washed the yellow ichor away and purified the gash with blessed water, and was now placing her goddess's talisman on the gash.
"I don't know what good this will do." Morten kept his voice to a soft whisper, for the wind had been carrying faint whiffs of ogre to them all morning long. "Simon already healed it once."
"It's not uncommon for bite wounds to fester," Brianna replied, equally softly. "We may have to do this many times."
The princess uttered her incantation, drawing a sharp hiss from the bodyguard as Hiatea's fiery magic poured from the talisman into the ulcerous sore.
On the other side of Brianna, Avner and Earl Dobbin were dozing in the midmorning light, sitting with their backs against a sun-baked crag of black basalt. Between them lay the remains of that morning's meal, a pile of raw squawrat that Tavis had dug up as they crossed a meadow.
The outcropping was not a large one, rising less than a quarter as high as the towering pines around it, but it made an ideal resting place. Not only did it catch the warm rays of the morning sun, it stood just high enough so that Morten could peer over the top to inspect the group's back trail-as he had been doing all morning, until Brianna awakened and decided to heal his throat wound.
A broad expanse of lodgepole pines surrounded the crag, their thin bare trunks as straight as horse lances. Though the boles were not densely packed, their sheer number created the impression of a gray, foglike wall through which any manner of evil spirit might walk at any moment.
"Wait here," Tavis whispered. "I'll be back soon."
As the scout moved to enter the depths of the gray forest. Morten's large hand clasped his shoulder.
"Where are you going?" Morten asked. All that remained of the wound on his neck was an ugly red scar resembling a huge boil. This is no time to go wandering."
"Don't you recognize those steps?" Tavis whispered back. "It's Basil."
"How can you be certain?" Brianna demanded. Even as she asked the question, the verbeeg's distant footfalls faded away, and there was no other sound in the forest except the wind slipping through the pine boughs. "I can hardly hear them."
"He's moved onto softer ground," Tavis explained. "But I'm certain it was Basil. I recognized his gait."
Brianna and Morten exchanged doubtful looks.
"Basil's done as much to rescue you as anyone," Tavis reminded her.
The princess's expression became fretful. "That's not the issue," she said, still speaking softly. "It's whether you really heard him."
"You think I'm lying?" Tavis gasped.
"No, of course not!" Brianna's reply was quick and emphatic, but no sooner had she uttered it than she gave the scout a sideways glance and added, "Not this time, anyway."
"Not ever! I've always been truthful," Tavis insisted. "I had nothing to do with the theft of Earl Dobbin's books!"
"Then why did the princess find them in your barn?" whispered the lord mayor, opening his eyes to join the conversation. "And why are you now willing to risk you life-indeed, all of our lives-to go off searching for the verbeeg who took them?"
Brianna quickly interposed herself between the scout and Earl Dobbin. "We don't need to discuss your books now." She scowled at the lord mayor, then added, "At the moment, I don't care if Tavis and his verbeeg took your ancestral jewels. The important thing is to return to my father's castle, and Tavis Burdun is the only person who can get us there alive."
