Gwenhwyfar_ The White Spirit - Mercedes Lackey [144]
But if they got downwind of her, they would find her without finding her trail, so she needed to either get downwind of them or get something between herself and them that could confuse the scent.
She was hoping for a nice swamp, or some other pungent way to break her trail, when she realized that there were some sort of animals in the woods ahead of her, for she heard slow footsteps and the occasionally breaking twigs. She froze as she heard snuffling, then relaxed as she recognized the sound as a herd of deer rather than the vastly more dangerous herd of swine. She altered her course to find them, pushing through more underbrush, until she surmounted the top of a little ridge, crouching to keep from making a “human” silhouette that would spook them.
When she did spy the herd, grazing on twig ends, she realized she had made a mistake, but a fortunate one. Not deer. Goats. This was much, much better than deer. Probably the fighting had driven them away from their usual pasture, and their pungent smell would surely cover her scent, and they should be used to human beings. There were about twenty of them, brown and gray, still shaggy with their winter coats.
Cautiously, she stood up. They looked at her calmly, the sure sign that they were not feral. With a grin, she walked toward them and clucked at them. “Come on,” she whispered, making a little shooing motion. “We need to go, you and I. There are dogs coming, and you won’t like them any better than I do.” The lead goat looked at her with his strange goat eyes, snorted, and stamped his foot. The other goats all looked up at him and stopped eating. He bobbed his head, then led the herd off in the direction she wanted.
They let her get right in among them. She began to wonder after a few moments if this was something more than an ordinary goat herd . . . because not only were they going the way she wanted to, but very soon the leader was taking them at quite a brisk pace, and the rest were not protesting at all, nor trying to stop to graze. He took them to a track that was wide enough that she wasn’t being slapped by underbrush and kept them on it. She was able to trot along in the middle of them quite as if they had accepted her as one of them.
Even as she thought that, the leader turned his head over his shoulder and looked at her. There was a green flash as his yellow eyes with their kidney-shaped pupils became laughing green eyes; there was a shiver of Power, and she almost stopped dead in her tracks at the shock. Then they became goat eyes again, and the he-goat continued shoving his way through the underbrush beside the path. She hurried to keep up with them.
The Ceffyl Dwr, she thought to herself. The Water Horses sometimes took on the aspect of other hooved animals than the horse. The green eyes were a good clue as to what they were, and so was the fact that this path they were on was never very far from a stream. As they pressed on, he increased the pace again until they were trotting and she was really stretching her legs. It had be a long time since she’d walked this far. Her legs started to hurt. Ah, gods, if only he would be a horse so I could ride!
But she knew that was impossible, for he would be keeping his distance from her because of the iron ax and knife. And she dared not abandon the only weapons she had. But “Thank you!” she called softly. The he-goat bobbed his head but did not look back at her again.
Behind them, the sound of the dogs faded with distance, then died away. If they hadn’t lost the trail before she joined the Water Horses, they surely had now.
Her side ached; she pressed her elbow into it and kept up.
He could be taking