Saya found it.
She had been running the tree line for the third time, lower than before, the grey-white wings folded for a faster pass through the gaps between the older oaks, when the wind shifted and her ears went flat.
Arthur caught it in the diagnostic half a second later — life force signatures, multiple, clustered in a depression about four hundred meters into the forest. He had been running the passive scan the whole afternoon out of habit, and the cluster had been at the edge of range and moving slowly enough that he had filed it as wildlife.
At this distance it was clearly not wildlife.
He signaled the others with the thought that moved through Shadow's connection and the linked network — the impression of: stop, gather, now. Lyra banked immediately, Saya was already pulling up from the tree line, and the three of them came together in a hover above the meadow's eastern edge.
'You felt it,' Saya said. It was not a question.
'Fourteen signatures,' Arthur said. 'About four hundred meters northeast. Nine of them grouped close together with a quality I associate with armed people who are alert. The other five are — ' He ran the diagnostic again, more carefully. 'Separate from the main group. Lower energy. Confined.' He looked at her. 'You smelled something.'
'Smoke. Old fire. And — ' She hesitated, the way she hesitated when she was going to say something she wished she did not have to say. 'People who have been frightened for a long time.'
Lyra was quiet. The silver wings were still, holding her in place, and her expression had gone to something that was not the expression she wore during ordinary problems.
'A camp,' she said.
'A camp,' Arthur confirmed. 'With the county road half a mile west of it. This close to the harvest season.' He did not say the rest of it. They were all already there.
Lyra looked at the tree line. She looked at Arthur. 'We need to look.'
'Yes,' he said. 'We do.'
◆ ◆ ◆
He sent two copies in first.
Shadow could move through the forest without sound when she chose to, one of the capabilities she had developed from the avian absorptions — the specific silence of something that understood how to avoid disturbing air. The copies went in low, using the undergrowth, moving from shadow to shadow through the trees in the way that Shadow's copies moved when Arthur was asking them to be invisible rather than fast.
The camp was in a natural hollow — a depression in the forest floor where a stream had once run and left a flat basin surrounded by a low ridge on three sides. Someone had chosen it specifically for its concealment. From the road it would be invisible. From the air, with the canopy above it, it was nearly invisible. He had only found it because Saya's nose and his diagnostic had both been pointing at the same place.
The copies sent back what they saw.
Nine men, armed, some awake and some not. A fire in the center of the hollow, the banked slow-burning kind that produced little smoke and less light — another deliberate choice. Crates and sacks arranged against the ridge walls, the accumulated material of what looked like weeks of road work. He could see the corners of strongboxes. Fabric. A merchant's seal on one of the crates.
And at the far end of the hollow, against the ridge, three iron cages of the kind used for transporting large animals. They had not been built for this. They had been repurposed for it. Two of them held two people each and one held one, and the five people inside them were alive and were in poor condition and had the life force quality that Saya had described from above — the low, worn signature of people who had been frightened for too long.
Arthur looked at what the copies were showing him and felt the temperature of his attention go to the same place it had gone when the bandit leader's eyes had moved towards his sisters on the road. Rage.
He pulled the copies back.
◆ ◆ ◆
They landed in the meadow and stood in a circle.
The wings were still active — none of them had thought to deactivate them, and the three pairs caught the afternoon light while they talked, which was the kind of thing Arthur would normally have noticed and commented on and currently did not.
'Five people,' Lyra said. 'In cages.'
'Yes.'
'And nine armed men.'
'Nine. Spread through the hollow. Some sleeping.'
'Then we go in, this is what you've trained us for. I know I was scared last time but I won't be that way this time, I promise,' she said. Simply, as if this were already decided, which Arthur realized it was. It had been decided the moment they heard what Saya smelled.
'We go in carefully,' he said. 'Nine armed men even half-asleep can do a lot of damage to cages before Shadow and Tsuki can reach them, and I want the people in those cages out before anyone starts making noise.' He looked at both of them. 'The illusion construct. Same one I used at the guild. I run it on all three of us — we go in looking like adults, we get to the cages, I get the locks open. Shadow and Tsuki move on my signal. By the time anyone understands what is happening it's already done.'
'Wings down,' Saya said, already deactivating hers. They folded and vanished as the construct released. 'They'll see us coming from a hundred meters.'
'Wings down,' he agreed. His went. Lyra's went.
'The illusion,' Lyra said. 'You can hold it on all three of us while also managing Shadow and Tsuki's signals and monitoring the diagnostic?'
'Yes.'
She looked at him for a moment with the expression that occasionally crossed her face when she remembered precisely what her little brother was. 'All right.' She straightened her coat. 'What do we look like?'
'Young adventurers. Around 18 years old. We're hunting and heard voices.' Looking at Saya with her ring on, blue hair blowing in the wind. The illusion making her face look more mature, her height now tall for a woman, around 175 cm, her jawline more pronounced and her legs long and thin. A light blush appearing on Arthur's cheeks as he took in her beauty for a moment which he managed to keep hidden. 'If anyone asks , you're my wife.'
Saya blushed and puffed out her chest in triumph at the thought, then spoke a clear: 'Understood.'
'If anyone speaks to you directly, be brief. Confused. We are out on a hunt while we are visiting Calmere and we are unfamiliar with the area.' He looked at both of them. 'Stay calm. Stay close. The moment I have the cages I whistle and then move fast.'
Lyra and Saya looked at each other. Something in the look had the quality of two people who understood this was not a game and were ready for it not to be.
◆ ◆ ◆