She’d learned on their first campaign together not to let Parno choose their camps. He always stopped too early, and so the journey took half again as long as was needed. Twice, Dhulyn turned down likely looking places without comment before settling on a hollowed clearing nestled in a small copse of half-grown pine trees.
“Toss you for it?” Parno dismounted and shook a cramp out of his left leg.
“No,” Dhulyn said, “you go ahead and set up the perimeter, I’ll help the Dove.” As with the roadbread, Dhulyn watched Mar before offering any advice. It didn’t take long to see that the town bred girl knew nothing about travel. She was clumsy with her bedding, shy about her personal needs and, Dhulyn sighed, no doubt useless as a cook. And how could she not be? Weavers were not known as great travelers. And those like Guillor Weaver traveled less than most, since her business was in a port town, and trade would come to her.
Not for the first time Dhulyn wondered what it would have been like to grow up with walls that did not move. Not a tent or a ship or the back of a horse. Where the same people were there every day.
“That is not the way,” Dhulyn said when she’d finished laying out her own bedding with Parno’s and turned to where Mar fumbled with hers. “First, if you put your bed there, you will lose the benefit of the fire.”
“But I’m closer to the fire than you are.”
“And I’m closer to this tall brush that will reflect the fire’s heat down on me,” Dhulyn responded. “Put your bedding here, next to ours. No, a good layer of these old needles first. You’ll find the ground quite hard enough the first few days, I’ll wager.”
The girl eyed Dhulyn’s own bed. “Don’t you have to sleep alone?” she asked shyly. “I mean, your vow?”
“My vow’s over, but I will be sleeping alone,” Dhulyn said, grinning. “I’ll sleep when Parno’s on watch. Then he’ll sleep while I watch. When it gets colder, the two not on watch will sleep together for added warmth.”
“Colder?” squeaked Mar.
“Colder as we move into the mountains, closer to the pass.”
Both women turned as Parno followed his voice out of the darkness, a skinned rabbit hanging from his hand. “Then warmer again once we’re through. That’s why we want to get through as quickly as possible.” Parno took in the campsite with a quick glance and nodded. “Who is cooking tonight?”
Dhulyn skewered the cleaned rabbit on a short iron rod and propped it between carefully set rocks close to the fire.
“There are traveling tools, then, for every thing,” said Mar watching closely. “Just like at home? Things to cook with and clean with?”
“Not so much cleaning on the road, as you’ll find out,” Dhulyn said, sitting down cross-legged within easy reach of the spit.
“Not that you’ll notice after a while, since we’ll all be equally dirty,” agreed Parno. “I once traveled without the benefit of cooking rods, pots, or skillets, however.”
“What did you do?” said Mar.
“Roasted rabbits, just like today,” he said. “But I used my sword for a spit.”
“Doubtless all it was good for,” Dhulyn remarked solemnly.
Mar shook her head, but Dhulyn saw the ghost of a smile on the girl’s lips and relaxed.
“How did you learn to do all of this? Find your directions by looking at the sun? Learn where to set up your camp? How to cook?”
“We have close to twenty years of Brotherhood between us,” Parno said. “Much of that time spent on campaign. Not surprising that we should know how to set up camp.”
“Are you so old, then? Old enough to have been Mercenaries all that time?”
“I have seen the Hawk Moon twenty-six times,” Dhulyn said, unsure what prompted her to answer in the Outlander’s roundabout way. “Parno, to be sure, is an old grandfather next to me.”
“Alas, too true,” Parno said, shaking his golden head. “And yet there’s no respect for my ancient bones and hard-learned wisdom.”
“You don’t look like town people,” Mar said. “I couldn’t guess your ages. I’ve seen the… the Hunt Moon eighteen times,” she added, smiling at the Wolfshead.
“Still not old enough for me,” said Parno lying back on the bedroll. “So you may rest easy. Wake me when the food’s ready, would you, young ones?”
When Mar awoke that first morning in camp, there was something very hard bruising her left hip, her back felt sore, and her nose was cold. And there was an odd, rhythmic chuffing sound, familiar, and yet too quick to be the sound of the loom. She sat up, suddenly remembering that her mornings might never start with the sound of the loom again.
Lionsmane was blowing on the embers of the fire, but that wasn’t what Mar had heard.
Movement caught her eye, and Mar saw sunlight flash on the edge of the blade before she saw the woman who wielded it. Suddenly she realized that the rhythmic sound was Dhulyn Wolfhead’s breathing. Little puffs of fog left her lips as she danced around the clearing where they camped. Mar had seen the City Watch doing this once, also early in the morning when she had been unable to sleep and had volunteered to fetch the early milk. Shora, it was called. A kind of mock combat that could be practiced alone or with others. But the City Watch’s practice was clumsy beside what Mar saw now. The Wolf-head’s every movement was precise, fluid and effortless, like the running and leaping of a deer, and with something of the deer’s grace and heart-stopping beauty. The swords moved faster and faster, the blades disappearing as the air around the Wolfshead blurred, until they abruptly took on form once more as she regained perfect stillness.
And the Wolfhead’s breathing never changed.
Mar released the breath she was holding, truly frightened for the first time since she had received the letters from Gotterang. Looking at the Mercenary woman’s cold face, it seemed that what Mar had agreed to do might be considerably more dangerous than she’d thought.
“Practice, practice, practice,” Lionsmane said in a comfortable voice. “And yet it was I who saved Dhulyn Wolfshead from death at Arcosa, the day we met.”
Mar turned her eyes away from the motionless Wolfshead, relaxing into the warm rumble of Parno’s voice. She looked again at the expression on his face as he watched Dhulyn. That’s why I’m safe withhim, she thought with a sense of awakening even further. That’s why he says I’m too young. Because he can look at her like that. Mar took her bottom lip between her teeth. If Ysdrell had ever shown her such a look, she thought, she might have ignored her Tenebro letters, and none of them would be here-or would Wolfshead and Lionsmane be on their way to Imrion just the same? As if he could feel her eyes on him, the Lionsmane shook himself and looked back at her.
“You’ve never seen the Shora practiced?”
“I’ve seen the City Watch.” She glanced back. The Wolfshead had lowered her blades and was automatically wiping them clean, though there was no blood on them. “But it wasn’t like that, exactly.”
“The difference you cannot explain is the difference between Mercenaries and ordinary soldiers. I know,” he added as she turned to him, “because in my time I have been both. The word Shora means patterns in the old tongue, the tongue of the Caids, as our friend there would be the first to tell you, and there are eighty-one of them. Each with at least three, but some with up to one hundred and eight separate moves. Shora for the sword-single-or double-handed-Shora for the knife, the dagger, the razor, the club, the stick, and the stone. Shora for the hands, feet, and head. For anything held in the hand, as well as for the hands alone. Shora for breathing, for smell and sight and hearing. I know the basic twenty-seven that all Mercenaries must know to be considered Schooled.” Parno Lionsmane shrugged. “Maybe a few others. The Wolfshead knows over fifty. If she lives, she will know them all, and she will School others.”