The First King of Shannara - Terry Brooks [97]
When he could do so safely, Tay bent close to Preia’s ear and whispered, “What happened to you?”
She glanced back at him, her eyes startlingly bright amid the crosshatched damage to her face. “A trap.” Her voice was a low, angry hiss. “Kipp had gone on ahead to secure the horses at the first outpost. I was scouting against discovery by the Gnome Hunters we had determined were in the area. But they were waiting for us. I was lucky. Kipp wasn’t.”
“We found Kipp, Jerle and I,” he said softly.
She nodded, no response. He wanted to tell her what he had done and why, but he could not bring himself to speak the words.
“How did they know?” he pressed.
He could feel her shrug. “They didn’t. They guessed. The outposts are no secret. The Gnomes knew we would come searching for the Black Elfstone. They simply waited for us. They are waiting at all of the outposts, I imagine.” She paused. “If they had known our plans exactly, if they had known how to find us, they would have gotten me as well as Kipp. But I found them just before they found me.”
“You had to fight to get away, though. We found your bow.”
She shook her head. “I was afraid you would. It could not be helped.”
“We thought...”
“I dropped it fleeing them,” she cut him off before he could say what they had thought. “Then I went after Kipp. That was where the fighting took place. At the outpost, just after they seized him. But there were too many for me. I had to leave him.”
The words were edged with bitterness. It had cost her to tell him this. “We had to leave him as well,” he admitted.
She did not turn. “Alive?”
He shook his head slowly.
He felt her sigh. “I could not get back to warn you. There were too many Gnomes between us. I had to go on ahead to try to secure the horses. I knew that without horses, we were finished. I thought, too, that I could draw some of them off.” Her laugh was small and hollow. “Wishful thinking, I’m afraid. Anyway, I was able to steal a horse from under their noses last night while they slept, ride it south to an outpost beyond the valley that I knew they would not have discovered, secure these horses we ride now, herd them back again, and hide until you appeared.”
Tay stared at her, astonished. “How in the world did you manage an that in one day?”
She shrugged. “It wasn’t that hard.” There was a long pause, with only the soft thud of the horses’ hooves. “Not as hard as what you had to do.” She looked back at him once more, her smile sad and uncertain. “You did well, Tay.”
He forced himself to smile back. “You did better.”
“I wouldn’t want to lose you,” she said suddenly, and turned away.
He sat silent behind her, unable to offer a reply.
They rode on through the night and made camp just before dawn in a shallow ravine grown thick with slender-boughed ash and white birch. They slept only a few hours, rose, ate, and went on. The rain had returned, a steady drizzle, and with it a mist that clouded the whole of the land in roiling gray. The mist and the rain hid them, and so they pressed on through that day and the next and deep into the second day’s night, hidden from those who searched for them. Tay rode point with Preia Starle, using his magic to scan the heavy gloom, worried not so much that they might be discovered by Gnome Hunters as that they might accidentally stumble across them. They walked their horses most of the time, anxious to save their strength for when it would be needed and to guard against missteps in the rain-soaked earth.
Tay and Preia did not talk, concentrating on keeping watch, he with his magic, she with her eyes. But they pressed close against each other in the rain, and for Tay, that was enough. He allowed himself to imagine they meant more to each other than they did. It was a pointless exercise, but it made him feel for a short time as if he had found a place for himself