missing, but he was still alive, his big chest rising and falling.
‘Poor Fen,’ Rab croaked mournfully. ‘Sig help Fen?’
‘Aye,’ Sig grunted, ripping a strip from her cloak and soaking it in the stream, then setting to washing out the hound’s wounds, fingers gently probing for broken bones. Footsteps thudded around them as Elgin and a few others joined them.
‘Tracks leading on into the hills,’ Elgin said. ‘My tracker says ten, maybe twelve of them. Looks like your man was still alive then. He tells me they’re maybe one day ahead of us, so we’ve gained on them.’ He looked at the big hound, the shallow rise and fall of its chest. ‘We should be after them.’
‘A few moments,’ Sig said. ‘Keld will take his axe to me if he hears I left his Fen to die.’ She was rummaging through her pack, crushing dried comfrey and lavender in her big fists, drizzling honey into the mix and packing it into the hound’s many wounds. Fen whined, lifted his head to look at Sig, then slumped back down. Sig wrapped bandages where she could.
‘One man to stay and guard him. Give him water.’ Sig unstoppered her brot bottle and poured some into the strip she’d torn from her cloak, squeezed a few drops into Fen’s mouth. ‘And give him this.’
‘One man to guard a dying hound? Can we spare him, not knowing what lies ahead?’ Elgin frowned.
‘This is no ordinary hound, as you well know. Storm’s wolven blood runs in his veins, and Keld will not be best pleased if we abandon him while there’s breath in his body.’
‘I am not convinced of the wisdom,’ Elgin said.
‘Fen one of US!’ Rab squawked, shaking his wings at Elgin.
‘Trust me on this, and I’ll not forget the favour,’ Sig said, holding Elgin’s gaze. The battlechief rubbed his bearded jaw, finally nodded and bellowed up the slope to his men.
‘Rab, after Keld,’ Sig grunted and the crow leaped into the air, flapping and rising. Sig bent and stroked Fen’s head. ‘Live,’ she whispered, ‘Keld still needs you.’
The hound whined and then Sig was climbing the slope; Cullen was waiting for her at the top. She handed him Keld’s axe. ‘Look after this for Keld,’ she said. ‘He’ll be wanting it back.’
‘I’ll keep it warm for him, maybe crack a few skulls with it before I put it in his hand,’ Cullen said.
Sig crawled uphill through the grass, doing all she could to hide her bulk, her breath sounding to her as if it would wake a sleeping draig. Four of Elgin’s men were with her, the rest back on the path, waiting for the signal. For three days she’d cursed the rain, but now that it had stopped she wished that it was still falling, knowing it would have served to hide their approach better than the clear sky above her, slipping from blue to purple as the sun sank into the horizon.
Dusk settled about them, that time when shadows were thick as mist, and up ahead Sig saw the darker shape of a cabin, a handful of outbuildings, a pig pen, judging by the smell drifting down the hill to her. Behind and above the cabin on the hilltop there was the silhouette of a large mound, with patches of the sun’s last rays gleaming through it.
What is that? An unlit bonfire?
Rab had returned, after scouting ahead, with the news that Keld was only half a league ahead. The crow had seen Keld dragged by his captors into the cabin that stood before Sig now. Sig’s first instinct was to charge in, screaming death and murder at her enemies, but she knew Keld would be the first to have his throat cut. So she was hoping stealth would serve them better; Elgin and the others were still mounted and waiting a short distance away for the sound of battle.
What are they doing here? Why is Keld still alive? Why didn’t they just kill him back on the path with his hounds?
She crawled closer to the cabin, maybe a hundred of her long strides away, then closer still, grass tickling her nose.
A scream rang out from the cabin, raw and full of pain.
Keld.
Sig was on her feet before she realized it, the others a few heartbeats behind her, and then she was running at the cabin, drawing a knife from its sheath at her belt.
A plan will only take you so far.
The thunder of her iron-shod boots, every breath loud as a drumbeat in