Bren folded his arms for comfort and waited, Ilisidi not saying a thing, but then the formidable cane reached across the aisle and thumped his seat. He looked. Her face was utterly lost in the darkness, just a glimmer of silver about her hair.

“Aiji-ma,” he said in the lowest of voices.

“You are very quiet and contemplative tonight, Bren-paidhi.”

“One apologizes, aiji-ma. One is extremely concerned for the situation.”

Silence. Lengthy silence in the dark.Then the cane went softly thump! on the bus deck.

“If they harm him,” Ilisidi said, “they are dead. And there will be retaliation.”

“Aiji-ma,” he said. That was all. He was the peacemaker, the bridge, and in all his career, he had never been able to make headway with the South.

He had damned sure not read the boy accurately. God, where had an eight-year-old suddenly got the notion to grow up on them and take his own way?

Even atevi hadn’t seen this coming—maybe because they’d attributed the unorthodox behavior to a human influence they were trying to diminish in the boy. Aiji-born: Cajeiri was apt to do any damned thing, was what, and neither species was going to predict him. A brilliant, if erratic prospect.

If he lived to grow up.

The conference forward broke up. Cenedi came back solo, a looming shadow in the dark, and said, to Ilisidi, “We consider that Banichi and Jago have likely moved all the way to the house by now, nandi. There has been no sound of fire. We have gotten the regular signal from them.”

They would use a simple blip on a given frequency, nothing that could be easily read by the opposition, who probably were using their own signalsc which their security would be simultaneously trying to pick up. Tano and Algini had broken out gear of their own, and he would about lay a bet it was involved in trying to do exactly that.

Himself, he took Cenedi’s information for comfort, and kept his own observations quiet: it was Ilisidi’s call, if orders were to follow. Guild operations were not the paidhi’s domain.

“If we were to move closer to the house,” Ilisidi said, “we might more likely draw out persons of interest.”

“No, ’Sidi-ji,” Cenedi said with no doubt at all, and added: “Besides, we cannot leave this road open. This is our task: we have simply to sit here.”

Thump! went the dowager’s cane, a quiet and very dissatisfied thump. But she did not countermand her bodyguard. So they sat some more.

Two, and now four shadows moved silently through the woods. Cajeiri hunkered down with his companions and held his breath. They had been lucky so far, having made as much noise as they had, and having rushed through the woods headlong getting away. When the Guild had investigated why that sensor-thing had jammed in the orchard tower, the rusty claw was as good as a written note to say, “Someone was here.”

But then, the people occupying the house had just had a man slide down the roof, whether or not the man had actually gone off the edge, and if that man was able to say he had been hit by something before he lost his balance, that was a reasonable and very noisy indication in itself that someone had been spying on the house, someone who did not much mind a man falling off the roof. It was possible that man would not talk, and would never talk, and one had the luxury to somewhat hope he had not killed the man; but he had shot someone before this, so it would not be the first, and if this was the man who had tried to assassinate them he was not going to have bad dreams about this one. He was determined on that. He would not be sorry in the least, if this was the man who had tried to kill nand’ Bren. He had been desperate. And he had had to do something fastc had he not? He had hadto.

They moved now, the three of them, without saying a thing to each other. They did their best to sound only like the wind moving, and to avoid breaking branches—a very un-windlike sound.

Here was where the Taibeni were expert, and he tried to learn from them, never letting a branch snap back, bending every opposing twig gently and passing it to the next behind, to release very, very softly. He copied their way of setting the feet down very surely, and with as little disturbance as possible; and sometimes stopping—just suddenly stopping cold, frozen, so they could hear, Jegari informed him, touching his own ear—clearly meaning he should listen, too. They had seen four men pass them. They had no way of knowing if there were more coming behind them.

And the shadows were moving in the direction theyneeded to go, which said to him that they were going toward nand’ Bren’s estate. Nand’ Bren was meanwhile almost certainly coming here, to find him; and these people were going there, or maybe to the train station, which was also in that direction, up to no good at all. If all these men wanted to do was just to get away after they had been exposed for what they were, they could go the other way, south to the Township and the big airport, completely away from nand’ Bren’s estate. Or right where they could lay hands on it, there was Lord Geigi’s yacht, which, supposing theyknew how to run it, could carry them out of the bay and down the coast or most anywhere. So it was clear these skulkers were on their way to work mischief, and he could warn nand’ Bren’s people and they could send somebody and call nand’ Bren home, fast, and protect Great-grandmother.

They could phone his father, too. His father had probably sent people here as fast as planes could land them. And theywould be moving inc maybe from the little airport near Najida, maybe from the much larger one near Dalaigi, to come in and cut off these scoundrels from one escape.

That was what hewould do, if he were aiji in Shejidan. He would cut them off in one direction and have nand’ Bren and mani cut them off from this side—with a little help from the local airport.

And he and his companions meanwhile had to stay out of the hands of these people. So they had gathered ammunition more serious than fertilizer stakes. At one place where they had crouched down, which had happened to be at a rocky little streamside, there had been a nice supply of little water-smoothed stones, just the right size. He took a nice lot of them, never minding the gravel they brought into the pocket of an already hard-used coat. And Jegari had gotten himself a sturdy stick, while Antaro had just pocketed a fair number of rocks.

And meanwhile they just kept moving and moving toward nand’ Bren’s estate.

The scary thing now was that the woods were playing out on them: they reached the edge, and the woods gave way to brush, and the brush to tall grass, where the trail the men had made going through the grass was perfectly plain to see. Jegari bent some grass down himself and stood watching it a moment. It recovered a bit, but not much; and Jegari looked at Antaro, who looked as if she were absorbing things, too.

So were they reading it, somehow? Could they tell things? How fast they were going? How long?

Jegari started walking exactly in one of the tracks the men had leftc so, Cajeiri thought, following, there would be only one track, if anybody was behind them. That was clever. He began to think they were doing everything right.

It was getting harder, however. He had been tired and sore all day from their adventure on the boat, and now hiding all day and creeping through the woods, and he had no idea where to go or what to do. Nand’ Bren and mani were in terrible danger, and he did not know how to reach them.

They were out there somewhere, moving on the estate, now that it was dark.

Maybe they had been fools to have left.

But it still seemed safer to be out here. Out here they had some choices, and they had not gotten caught in the crossfire. Still—

Jegari slowed to a stop, leaning on his hands, catching his breath, and then folded down into the tall grass. They all did, squatting low. “They seem to be avoiding the road, nandi. If we get onto the road and go beside it, we can move faster: we can run.”