ran a hand over Little Teeth’s snout before fixing her gaze upon his. After a short pause both bear and shaman blinked in unison before the animal loped away into the gloom, making for the south-facing stretch of the stockade wall.
“What now, Uncle?” Ellese asked in a whisper that drew a sharp glance from Vaelin.
Use your hands! he signed in annoyance.
She lowered her head, hands moving in reluctant contrition. Sorry.
Now we wait, he told her, nodding at her bow. Be ready.
He watched her nock an arrow to the string, slender but firm hands grasping the intricately carved stave. The weapon was a true thing of beauty, fashioned from wych elm decorated in various martial motifs carved by an expert hand. A bow of Arren, Reva had called it. Quite possibly the last in the world. I lost her sister in the Boraelin Ocean. There’s a standing reward of a hundred golds for anyone who brings me another. As yet, no one’s claimed it.
He knew the weapon was said to possess some form of divine blessing, the more ardent followers of the World Father and his Blessed Lady ascribing preternatural power and accuracy to what was, in essence, a length of shaped wood. However, the feats he had seen Reva and her daughter perform with this bow often gave him cause to wonder.
He switched his gaze to Iron Eyes, seeing the empty cast to the woman’s gaze as she lay immobile at her husband’s side. Her mind, he knew, was elsewhere. The sight provoked a rush of memory, another woman sitting on a hillside far away in both time and distance, her eyes empty as her soul soared free of her body . . .
Vaelin turned away, flexing his fingers to banish a sudden tremble before nocking an arrow to his bowstring.
“He climbs . . .” Iron Eyes said a few moments later, eyes still unfocused and voice little more than a hiss in the darkness. “He reaches the top . . . There is a man . . .” A spasm passed over her features, her lips drawing back from her teeth in an echo of a snarl before the placid mask returned. “Now there is not . . . The air smells of drink and five leaf . . . Men sleep and snore, others walk the walls . . . All eyes are turned out, not in.”
Lines creased her brow and she cocked her head a little, as if straining to hear something. “Voices . . . two men in argument . . . They speak of scouts . . . of men who should be here but are not.”
“The gate,” Vaelin said, although he doubted she could hear him in this state.
Iron Eyes lapsed into a silence that seemed to stretch for many minutes when it could only have been seconds. Vaelin nudged Ellese to silence as she let out a soft groan of impatience.
“He is there . . .” Iron Eyes whispered finally. “The gate is sealed with thick rope . . . His teeth are little, but they are sharp, his jaws are strong . . .”
Vaelin’s hands moved in front of Ellese’s eyes. First and second from the left, he told her before pointing at the sentries on the wall. Moving to Tallspear’s side he put his mouth close to the Cumbraelin’s ear, speaking in a low murmur. “The two on the right. Loose when I do.”
As Ellese and Tallspear rose to a crouch, Vaelin readied his own bow, fingers hooking the string on either side of the arrow’s base. He focused on the two men standing directly over the gate, still arguing and oblivious to the bear busily gnawing through the ropes below. The distance was a little under a hundred paces. He may not be the finest archer ever to emerge from the House of the Sixth Order, but he was far from the worst.
He heard Iron Eyes let out a soft sigh followed by the creak of the gate swinging open to reveal Little Teeth contentedly chewing on a length of rope. Vaelin, seeing the men on the wall suddenly forget their argument, drew and loosed an arrow at the tallest. Ellese and Tallspear both loosed a fraction of a second later, arrows streaking through the night air to send the sentries tumbling from the wall. The shorter of the two outlaws reacted quickly, subsiding into a crouch but not before Vaelin’s second arrow took him in the shoulder. He fell