Chapter 181 The Hunting Ground

Deep in the Gift, north of the Howling Mountain Pass, on the edge of the Frost Whisper Wood.

The forest here was like the rest of that country, thin and twisted, its branches furred with moss and lichen, and against the patches of unmelted spring snow it looked gloomy and altogether dead. The wind came through the bare wood making a sound very close to keening, which did nothing for the place. The air held rotting vegetation, cold wet soil, and under both of those, faint and deliberately covered over, the smell of blood.

A hunting party of some ten Battanian bannermen moved through the trees like grey-green shadows that had agreed to belong to the landscape. Their cloaks matched the ground exactly; their faces were smeared with a paint of mud and plant sap; their steps made almost no sound at all.

Old Weasel led them. The veteran skirmisher’s eyes had the flat attention of a hawk’s, and every so often he would stop and crouch to examine a print barely worth the name, a broken grass stem, a scratch on bark that a man could have looked at all day without seeing.

They had been working this ground for three days, sleeping in cold camps without fire, eating what they carried. The task was to find, follow, and kill any Vale infiltrator they came across, and with them the inside men who dealt with the Vale and worked to stir the free folk into rising, Bone-Breaker and Rat-Eye first among them. Torren’s orders had been short and were not open to interpretation: no prisoners, no survivors, and the bloodiest and most frightening method available, so that the whole country would understand that this land was the hunting ground of the new soil and not the back garden of the Vale’s snakes.

“Here.” Old Weasel stopped beside a thick old pine with split bark and brushed away a film of moss with a gloved finger, uncovering the edge of a shallow print already half filled with dirt. “A boot. Not a wildling’s grass shoe or hide boot. The depth says he was carrying weight. Heading northwest, toward the Bonebreak Track.”

The Bonebreak Track was a rough mountain road that ran toward White Harbor. An entire caravan had gone under an avalanche there once, according to the story, and nothing of them had ever come out again, which was how it got the name. Remote, difficult, and for a man who wished to avoid the trade roads and move quietly, an excellent choice.

“Follow them,” Old Weasel said.

The party dispersed again without a word, like a wolf pack that had done this many times, and took the trail northwest.

The tracking ran most of the day. Whoever they were following knew how to be followed and had planned carefully against it: the prints came and went, streams and stone were used properly, and there were several simple tripwires and bell lines set behind them for warning. But the men of the hunting party were the Battanian army’s best at woodcraft and mountain war, and Old Weasel in particular had spent years working this country and knew its ground and its sign the way other men know a room in their own house. They peeled the fog away a strip at a time and closed the distance the way patient hunters do.

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By evening, when the sunset had turned the wood an unpleasant red, they found it.

The camp sat in the angle between two ridges with a great rock wall at its back, sheltered from the wind. Several fires of damp wood were putting up thick smoke, and around them were perhaps twenty men. Most, by their dress, were free folk in mismatched furs and worn hide. Seven or eight were plainly something else: uniform dark grey studded leather under windproof cloaks, and good weapons, standard hand axes and short spears. They sat together, talking quietly, watchful. And around them the free folk, Bone-Breaker and Rat-Eye at their head, were arranged in the postures of men reporting to someone, or asking for orders.

“One, two, three. Eight Vale men, at least fifteen turned free folk.” Old Weasel lay behind a bush studying the camp through a hollowed wooden tube, and spoke without lifting his eye from it. “Look at the gear. Vale mountain infantry, and their best. And Bone-Breaker and Rat-Eye are both sitting there. Good. We take all of it.”

“Boss, they outnumber us three to one, and they’ve a camp,” a young Fian archer murmured beside him.

“Outnumber us.” A cruel line bent Old Weasel’s mouth. “We’re the hunters. They’re the meat. Remember what Lord Torren said, the bloodiest and most frightening method there is. Archers, up the trees, take the high ground both sides, and wait for my whistle. Your first shafts go into the Vale men, and into Bone-Breaker and Rat-Eye. The rest with me. We come in from the flank and behind, and we take the sentries and the strays with darts and hand crossbows and no noise at all. And hear this: nobody walks away. The Vale men above all. Not one of them gets out of this hollow.”

The order went down the line quickly and in silence. Two Fians went up the trunks on either side of the camp like apes and vanished into what foliage there was. Bowstrings were drawn back and held. In the failing light the poisoned heads had a faint dull shine.

Old Weasel took the other seven, split them into two groups, and brought them down along the ground behind rock and scrub, working around toward the shadow at the camp’s back.

On the perimeter, two free folk sentries leaned on a boulder with their crude spears and dozed. They plainly believed that here, deep in the Gift, with Vale allies at the fire behind them, there was nothing in the world to be afraid of.

The sound the darts made was almost nothing, and the wind took most of that.

Both men jerked. Their eyes came open with an expression of complete disbelief, and then their pupils blew wide and they folded to the ground without managing a sound. The poison on the darts had come to Oath Keep through trade with Dorne and it did not take long about its work.

Old Weasel and another man came out of the shadow like something the dark had produced, dragged the bodies into deep grass behind the rocks, and covered the wet ground with dead leaves. It was clean, it was quick, and nobody at the fires looked up.

They went on inward. Two more free folk, one relieving himself and one simply wandering at the edge of the light, were dealt with in the same way and just as quietly. Without anyone in the camp noticing, its numbers had fallen by nearly a third, while the Vale men and Bone-Breaker’s people went on arguing around the fire about something that no longer mattered in the slightest.

“Those grey-green bastards are looking for us. We can’t sit in one place.” Bone-Breaker’s voice carried an edge of nerves.

“What is the hurry?” The Vale squad leader, a faint knight’s crest worked into his shoulder plate, cut him off without patience. “This hollow is well hidden. They will not find it quickly. We move when it is fully dark. Ser Donnel Waynwood has sent word that new gifts and new instructions are coming, and when they do there will be something in it for you. Until then, look lively and keep your watch.”