Dane held Witt’s gaze, his mouth set in a disgruntled line before bending and picking up his pack. Shea kept her gaze focused on the map while Dane busied himself fussing with its straps.
Witt squatted down next to her. “I’d like to say the boy is entirely wrong, but if James and Cam were taken by Edgecomb, they don’t have a lot of time.”
Shea nodded and rolled the map up before sticking it in her pack. “No, they don’t. A day or two at most.”
“How long would the detour take?”
Shea quirked her mouth and shook her head slightly. “Depending on the trail sign, anywhere from a couple hours to half a day.”
“You’re the pathfinder so we’ll follow your lead.”
Witt stood and walked to his pack where he finished arranging the last of his supplies.
“I am the pathfinder.”
All that meant was that if she made the wrong decision, she would be the one with blood on her hands. She scrubbed a hand over her face and turned to the other two as they settled their packs on their backs. The long barrel of a boomer stuck up over Dane’s head from where it was attached to his pack. Witt’s weapons consisted of two short swords on either hip.
Looked like everybody was ready.
“Pathfinder.”
Shea turned to see Elder Zrakovi watching her sourly. Taller than her by a few inches, he was a burly man whose muscle was just beginning to turn to fat with age. She knew it must bother him to have his son’s fate resting in the hands of a woman he’d done his best to get rid of since she arrived.
“I trust that, despite our differences, you’ll do your job and bring my son back.”
She nodded shortly. The gate was raised just high enough for her group to walk under it.
“Don’t screw this up,” Zrakovi said as she passed under the gate.
She raised a hand in acknowledgement and adjusted her pack one last time before lengthening her stride to catch up with the other two.
There was one thing the elders had gotten right. Shea’s presence here was a punishment. But, it wasn’t them who was being punished.
Chapter Two
Shea quickly took the lead and set a punishing pace as the other two fell in single file behind her, Witt bringing up the rear. They had a lot of ground to cover before nightfall. It would take the rest of the day to reach the stretch of cliffs that marked the Highland border.
Reaching them would be a test of the group’s stamina and endurance. In essence, it would be a gut check. Doable, but not fun.
The cliffs, often referred to as Bearan’s Fault, spanned nearly the entire border. Most of it so steep it was as if a god had lifted the Highlands up onto a shelf, setting them above their neighbors. They were the reason people called everything above the cliffs the Highlands.
Not exactly original, but descriptive.
Approaching them always felt like walking off the edge of the world.
Located on the most southwestern edge of the Highlands, Birdon Leaf claimed some of the only habitable land in a mountainous territory pitted with ravines, steep hills and granite monoliths. To live up here, one had to be stubborn. And maybe a little crazy.
Not many had the sheer bone headedness to settle out here on the edge.
Food was scarce and company even more so. Unless you could do for yourself, well, it didn’t get done. People here were independent, hard headed and convinced that the only way to do something was the way their grandfather’s grandfather had done it. As a result, they didn’t welcome strangers. Even ones they asked to be here, like Shea.
The first leg of the journey was easy enough. They were lucky Birdon Leaf was situated on rolling hills. To the north was a pair of mountain ranges so high that snow covered the tops nine out of the twelve months. To the west, deep ravines bit into the land, creating a spidery network of valleys and ridges throughout the Highlands.
One of the reasons pathfinders existed was because it was so easy to get lost up here. It was as if the land itself didn’t take kindly to outsiders and tried to push out any it sensed didn’t belong here.
People’s sense of direction tended to go screwy and the distances played mean mind games. Sometimes you traveled further than you intended, and other times it was as if you’d barely moved.
There was a crash, and Dane rocketed past Shea’s narrow perch. He grunted as he caught himself on a particularly hard boulder.
“Is there no other way besides falling down these infernal hills?” he growled. “No, you can’t even call them that since they’re nearly as steep as the cliffs.”
“Going down a cliff would be easier,” Witt said as he slid past, snagging an exposed tree root before he could careen out of control. “At least then, we could simply secure a rope to something and slide down.”
Shea stepped off her perch to slide to her next target.
“This is the path we’re taking,” she informed them once she had stopped.
“Even uphill would be better,” Dane muttered. With a vexed groan, he leapt, then slid, to his next tree. He crashed into it and nearly bounced off before grabbing hold.
“If you have time to gripe, you have time to move faster,” Shea returned.
Internally, she echoed their frustration and agreed, the only thing worse than having to climb up a mountain was having to find the way down it.
It would be all too easy to break something tumbling down the steep terrain, and none of them needed the added challenge of an injured companion.
She just hoped the mist held off until they were safely back in Birdon Leaf.
The mist was a bedtime story parents told their children to discourage them from wandering off into the untamed expanse. Only, as any person who’d spent time outside the well-crafted towns could tell you, it wasn’t a story. It was real and very dangerous.
Even Shea’s parents had told her stories when she was young, though for her, they’d been less of a tale and more of a cautionary warning of what waited for her out here. Her parents had told her of brave pathfinders and their charges who were swallowed by the mist, never to be seen again. No one knew where they went or how it happened. One moment it would be the sunniest of days and the next, the mist would have swept every living thing from the area, wiping it clean.
Oh, the villagers dismissed such stories as superstition or a gambit to squeeze more money out of them. They’d only ever felt the very edge of its power. You could only experience the true horror of it in the depths of the wilds.
Shea felt a slight shiver, thinking of the mist she’d experienced only a handful of times. That had been more than enough.
The other danger they faced were beasts, which were thick on the ground up here. The Highlanders originally used the term to describe predatory animals, but over time it had come to mean anything that didn’t fit with society’s notion of natural.
There were many types, so many that it would be impossible to list them all. The secondary part of Shea’s position was to catalogue beast habits, territory and hunting patterns and give settlers advice on the safest ways to deal with them.
Too often people didn’t listen.
That’s when they died.
Shea looked at the sun, judging it to be near midafternoon. Time to call a halt. She’d timed it so their journey put them next to a small mountain spring. Since they weren’t carrying a lot of water, they needed to replenish at every opportunity. And, they could use a short break.