Dragonspell - Donita K. Paul [30]
“What’s wrong?” asked Dar just behind her.
“I thought I saw something.”
“So you sat down to watch for whatever it is?”
Kale took hold of a vine roped around a tree and pulled herself to her feet. Balancing on the root, she still stared at the trailing moss.
“Kale.” Dar tugged at her sleeve.
“What?”
“There’s nothing there.”
“I heard a hiccup.”
“A hiccup?”
“Two, and a hiss.”
“Two hiccups and a hiss.” He put a hand in the crook of her arm and pulled her around to face the direction they should be going. “Come on, Kale. It was probably a beater frog.”
“I saw something move, and it was too tall to be a frog.”
“Okay.” Dar’s tone said he was going to be patient. “Use your mind. Reach out and see if there is anything besides Leetu Bends and myself close by.”
“I don’t think I know how to do that.”
Dar shrugged and started after Leetu.
“Wait,” Kale called, and he stopped. “Couldn’t you smell something? I mean, you smelled the grawligs coming.”
“Everything in this swamp smells the same.” Dar wrinkled his nose.
“Well, I suppose I’d smell a grawlig. Nothing can disguise the smell of a grawlig. But right now, Kale, all I smell is wet and mildew and stagnant water and decaying vegetation.”
Kale sniffed the air and looked around. “It doesn’t smell that bad.”
Dar clicked his tongue and shook his head. Once again he started after Leetu, speaking over his shoulder, “Oh, to have the horribly deficient olfactory equipment of an o’rant.”
Kale gave one last look at the place she thought she’d seen something and followed Dar. After only a few minutes, she felt the little hairs on the back of her neck rise.
Someone is watching us.
She stopped and listened. She heard the footfalls of Dar ahead of her but nothing from the nimble-footed Leetu. Insects and birds sounded natural enough. Occasionally, she heard a distant splash as if a small fish had jumped, or something fell in the water. Nothing like the human hiccup and the snakish hiss she’d heard before. As if conjured up by her thoughts, a shiny green snake slithered along a tree limb to her right. Her eyes went from the snake to Dar many yards ahead of her. Kale gave up trying to figure out anything but how to keep up with the doneel.
The trees grew thicker and the water deeper. Less land poked up through the marsh, and Leetu led them upward to walk through The Bogs on the lowest branches of the cygnot trees. At regular intervals on each huge trunk, limbs stuck straight out and twined with the limbs of neighboring trees. This made floors of tightly woven greenery in a network of strong branches.
Walking over this network was actually easier than walking among the roots and water below. Usually the space from one layer of branches to the one above was five or six feet. Dar and Leetu were both short enough not to be bothered much by the limbs above. Dar, surefooted as he was, had no problems. And of course Leetu’s foot landed without fail on a strong branch.
Kale struggled. Her skirt and cape caught on twigs and wrapped around her legs. She was just tall enough that her hair got snagged, and occasionally she had to crouch. Between watching where to put her feet and keeping her head out of the upper layer of branches, she fell behind.
Each time she approached the trunk of the next tree, the thicker limbs provided easier steps, and she hurried. Most often the trees grew close enough together that it was hard to tell where one tree left off and the other began. But a few cygnots were spaced far enough apart that thin limbs interlaced in a shaky floor. Here Kale knew one misstep would send her crashing through to the water below. She had just eased herself over one of these areas when she glanced up to see