Blade looked back regretfully at fine slender living trees curling and cracking in the rolls of smoke, and he felt for that wood. He could feel the trees hurting. That surprised him, because he had not realized that his magic was that much like Derk’s.
To add to their troubles, most of the animals, not only the sheep, were causing concern in different ways. They lost Big Hen the first night. Everyone glumly assumed that the missing soldiers had taken her with them to eat. “I hate to think how Dad will feel!” each of them said at intervals the second day.
Then, that evening, when they had just, at last, succeeded in getting the soldiers into the proper camp they should have reached the day before, there was a whupping of powerful wings overhead. Everyone looked up, expecting Callette. “How are the clues going?” Kit screamed up into the darkening sky.
“It’s not Callette, it’s me,” Lydda answered, gliding in a circle overhead. “I daren’t land. I’d never launch again. I just came to tell you that Big Hen got home this afternoon. Do you want her back with you for eggs or not? Mum says she’ll translocate her if you do.”
“Leave her. I hate eggs,” Kit called.
“But I like them,” Don said piteously.
He was overruled
, which was not unusual. “Keep her now she’s back,” Shona shouted upward. “Is Mum at home then?”
“She dropped in to see the dragon,” Lydda called back. “I’m supposed to tell her where you are. I’ll tell her you haven’t got too far yet.”
She circled away, and her wingbeats died into distance amid a strong silence.
“I don’t think she meant to be rude,” Blade said.
“We’ll keep to schedule after this if it kills us!” Kit vowed.
So they struggled on, trying to go faster, dragging the reluctant soldiers across fields and pastures, and the third day they were delayed by having to bury one of the dogs and to tow the corpse of a Friendly Cow behind two of the horses. The soldiers had killed them both, for being too friendly. Briney, the dog, had simply gone up to one of the soldiers on the outside of the mob, wagging his tail and trying to get acquainted. That soldier had calmly drawn his sword and cut Briney’s head off. One of the cows had followed Briney to see what was going on and run into a wall of slashing swords. Blade was nearly in tears.
“Never mind,” Shona said to Kit. “You and Don will get plenty of meat tonight.”
“We can’t possibly eat all that before it goes bad,” Kit squawked. If griffins could cry, Kit would have been near tears, too.
“We can try,” Don said.
After that they had to keep the cows well to the rear of the ungainly procession—which was not difficult—and keep a stern eye on the other dogs—which was not so easy. The dogs had brains, because that was how Derk had bred them to be. They knew what had happened to Briney, and they now hated the soldiers even more than Blade or Shona did. They were planning to tear out throats. Blade had to keep them leashed on more bespelled threads from Shona’s robes.
That night they roasted lumps of Friendly Cow over a large fire, while the soldiers in the camp beyond chanted, “We want roast beef, we want roast beef!”
“I’m not giving them a shred!” Shona said. “I know it sounds mean, but they’ve got their own supplies in there, and I don’t care!”
They made you mean, these soldiers, that was the trouble. By the fourth day, when the soldiers still chanted that they wanted roast beef, mixed in with whistles and jeers whenever they saw Shona, Blade realized that being alongside so many nasty people had a bad effect on you. Don, he discovered, felt the same.
“I don’t know what does it,” Don confided to him, “but they make me feel weak and depressed and vicious all the time. I don’t know how Kit stands it. They really hate him!”
This was true. By now the soldiers had realized that Blade and Don were only young. Shona was female, so they called remarks at her. But they could not believe that four young people, one of them a girl, could control several hundreds of them. Kit was enormous. He looked savage—and behaved savagely when they did not do what he told them—and he was sinisterly black beside the golden Don. The soldiers decided that Kit must be a powerful full-grown magician of a truly evil kind who had them all enslaved. And they hated him for it. They hated Kit with such ferocious unspoken hatred that Blade could feel it, like acid on his skin, whenever he and Kit chanced to be near the soldiers together.
He felt he should warn Kit. “I can tell they’re thinking up horrible things to do to you if they ever get loose,” he said. “Can’t you feel it at all?”
Kit answered with an open-beaked gurgle of laughter. “Perfectly well. I rather like making people afraid of me.”
“It’s a bit more than that,” Blade said anxiously.
He would have said more, but this was the point where Pretty disappeared completely, and they never got back to the subject again.
They had had to bring Pretty. Beauty, when she discovered that they would be away for weeks, refused to let Shona or anyone else ride her unless Pretty came, too. Since Pretty could now flutter into the air quite well, whirling his dizzying black and white wings—which grew stronger every day—and he could graze and eat oats in a messy, inexpert way, nobody thought he needed his mother that much and they had wanted to leave him with Old George. But Beauty insisted Pretty needed her. Pretty himself was sure he needed nothing. He was having a wonderful time frisking from side to side of the procession, teasing the dogs, chasing cows, and, every so often, alarming Beauty thoroughly by just disappearing. Every time Beauty lost sight of him, she was convinced the soldiers had killed Pretty, too. Since the one piece of good sense that Pretty ever showed was in never going near the soldiers, nobody took Beauty’s panics very seriously, but they always caused a long delay.
This time when Pretty vanished while Blade was trying to warn Kit, he really was nowhere to be seen. Beauty soared into the air, with Shona on her back. “Sohldiers! Bhad sohldiers goht Prhetthy!”
“No, they haven’t!” Shona said, exasperated. The reins holding the sheep were cutting her fingers, she had lost a stirrup, and she had nearly fallen off. “You know he never goes near them. Go down!”
“Fhind Prhetthy!” Beauty trumpeted, circling higher and stretching the reins almost to snapping point.