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The campfire snapped and popped, echoing off the barn’s decaying wooden planks. Acrid curls of smoke drifted toward gaping holes in the roof or streamed out the missing doors on either end. One of the mares was already down in her stall. Heavy eyelids on the other two horses signaled they would soon be joining her. The children, exhausted from an eventful day, were out cold, as was LT, who had drifted off understanding that he would be taking the last watch.
“You covered your face,” Autumn said to Scout as she entered with an armload of firewood. “Then you spent all night out in the dark, chopping firewood.”
Scout said nothing as she added the wood to a small pile near the fire.
“They got history,” Hunter said, barely present, staring deeply into the fire.
Autumn looked at Hunter, then back at Scout, who approached to take a stump by the fire. “It’s complicated,” Scout said, closing the door on that topic. “You got a plan?” she asked Hunter.
“Got options,” Hunter confessed. “Ain’t done figuring yet though.”
Autumn and Scout both nodded. They understood the floor was open.
“Couldn’t let the gnolls have them,” Scout began.
Hunter nodded, his unblinking amber eyes sparkling in the firelight.
“Couldn’t save everyone,” Autumn reassured him. “Had to make choices.”
“Weren’t no choice,” Hunter replied softly. “But now what?”
“We’re not taking them to the Chateau,” Autumn said confidently… to silence. And then… alarmed by the silence: “Are we?”
“Might could be the only thing to do,” Hunter continued to stare.
Autumn’s mouth opened and his eyebrows drew in. He searched the elf’s weathered cedar face for clues to his state of mind before speaking again. “You’re serious.” He gasped.
“They’ll be here day after tomorrow,” Hunter said, breaking contact with the fire and turning to Autumn, “looking for their slaves.” His amber eyes had lost their sparkle. “If they don’t get ‘em, there’s no telling what they might do.”
Amber was too young to remember, but he knew the story. Milton, the burned out, long abandoned village that held the barn in which they were presently seated was a monument to the Chateau’s vengeance. Along the road up from the stone bridge, they had passed a few poles that once displayed the bodies.
“It’s less than a week until The Beard closes,” Autumn reminded him. “Then we’ve got six moons to get them to the Free Lands.”
“A lot can happen in a week,” Scout rubbed her thigh from her hip to her kneecap along her outstretched leg.
“We can hide them for a week,” Autumn was confident.
“What if they don’t go back?” Hunter asked, challenging Autumn with a look. “What if they send a squad… a couple of squads… to Old Mill and tell them to find the kids and bring them back when the Beard reopens?”
Autumn signed, disappointed, frustrated with the impossibility of it all.
“They won’t kill the kids, will they?” Scout seemed puzzled.
“Naw,” Hunter replied. “They property. Kids be good. But they’ll kill anyone who messes with their property or anyone what helps us get their property to the Free Lands.”
Autumn’s shoulders slumped and his head hung as he stared into the fire. “There’s no way to get nineteen children from here to the Free Lands without anybody seeing, is there?”
Neither Hunter nor Scout answered because the answer to the question was obvious.
“We have the day tomorrow,” Hunter said after a long, thoughtful pause. “We could take them to the church in Old Mill.”
Autumn squeezed his temples between his thumb and index fingers. At the same time, he clenched his teeth behind his lips and sucked on them. Smoke from the fire tickled his nose and burned in his eyes, making them water.
“Would the Butchers help?” Scout asked.
“You know they would,” Hunter replied. “But that’d be asking them to risk their lives… and the kids they got left.”
Autumn had no blame for Hunter. If they had known this was coming, he could have planned for it. The gnolls did this. Gnolls in The Devil’s Beard, he thought. Nobody expected that.
Hunter stood up. He looked around at the horses and saw they were near sleep.
“I gotta talk to Amanda,” he said. “Be back before morning.”
*****
Saltwater waves lapped on the rocks and thudded gently against the side of the launch as its floating aft section swayed in the surf. A length of rope extended over the beach to where it had been secured around a large rock. The single-masted fishing boat from which the launch had originated lay anchored offshore, riding low from the water it had taken on over the past three days.
Three of the crew’s four men were walking over the rocky shoreline in the full moon’s bright light. They stopped before a pile of rocks to examine it.
“Just rocks,” said a sailor through blackened teeth.
“I don’t know,” said the first mate, squatting down for a closer look.
“This is my sixth time off these shores,” said black teeth. “Never seen smoke, boats, people, nothing. Came ashore a few times, never seen footprints neither,” he added.
“What do you think?” the captain asked his squatting first mate.
“Could just be a pile of rocks,” he admitted. “Or it could be rocks piled up to claim territory.”
The captain looked up at the exceptionally white mountain looming before him. The moonlight on its snowy peak made it sparkle and glow against the star-crowded sky backdropping it.
“I swear, Captain,” black teeth pleaded. “If there was anyone here we’d know it by now.”
“What about wildlife?” the captain asked. “Or creatures?”
The first mate stood, listening curiously for the coming answer.
“Can’t says I know anything about that, captain,” he admitted. “But there’s three of us. We got weapons. And” – he gestured – “we got the launch.”
The captain was hesitant, but the ship was taking on water. It’s not like he had a choice.
“Five days?” he confirmed with his first mate.
“Six at the most,” the blonde mate replied. “Unless it rains.”
The captain sighed.
“What?” said the first mate. “If it doesn’t rain tomorrow, we’ll finish the kiln and start the fires before nightfall. At that point… as long as we don’t get crazy rain… we’re fine.”
“How long until we have pitch?”
“We’ll have enough to start in two days. If it doesn’t rain, we’ll be done in five or six.”
“Fine,” said the captain, surrendering to the inevitable. “We’ll get started on the kiln at first light. We’ll bring her in close on the high tide and set camp on the beach.”
*****
It was too dark for horses and too dangerous to travel by ground. Travelling in the canopy was faster and there were fewer large predators to watch for. Plus, he was less likely to be seen by nosey humans up there. The bright light of the full moon made little difference to his night vision, but it did set a pretty scene.
He was barely out of Milton when a new wrinkle jumped to the forefront of his thoughts. The governor was sure to offer a reward for the coffle, if it went missing. That would sharpen every eye in the valley and turn every friend into a potential betrayer. Collecting the reward and then turning it over to one of the governor’s enemies – the Granite Brotherhood, for example – might be fun. Certainly risky… but potentially satisfying.
Getting the children out of the Haff-land would be substantially riskier. Taking them to The Wood would require traversing the entire length of the valley. What were the odds of pulling that off? Two Bears was an option. That was only half of the length, but it was also the full width. Then after that, there was the trek across the glacier. He wondered about the logistics of walking nineteen children as young as seven across a glacier.
Turning the children in at the church was the easiest solution. Giving the governor’s property back to the governor carried the lowest amount of risk. But it was the wrong thing to do. Doing that would betray every principle for which he stood. But doing otherwise would require help he did not know he had. Doing otherwise would require many people to risk their lives, their property, their families. He had no right to ask anybody for that.
Tanner would do it, he smiled. Tanner would do it in a heartbeat. So would his grandfather. They were both men of action who took it for granted that everyone was required to do the right thing. Neither of them thought twice about risking others lives because they never thought twice about risking their own.
Junior was different. Artemon Junior was more elf than human about these things. He preferred diplomacy and spycraft to direct action. If the thing could be accomplished behind the scenes with less risk, he was prepared to take as much time as it took to do it that way.
Amanda? John? He couldn’t predict their responses. He’d known them since they were children. They were good people, honest people – tapped into their community, inclined to do the right thing. But his partnership with her parents started the year after the war ended. So the subject of freeing slaves had never come up with them.
As he arrived in Old Mill and descended from the canopy to ground level in the darkness behind their shop, Hunter had no idea how they might react to what he was about to tell them. But since there was a possibility that one of the children in the coffle might be theirs, he knew he had to consult them.
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