Free The Petitioners by Sheila Perry Page A

death, or a few stray sheep panicking, but I didn’t have any claim any expertise in interpreting tracks or any other kind of bush craft.
    Fighting to the death…
    ‘Is there any blood?’ I added.
    ‘We couldn’t see anything that looked like that,’ said Declan, after a slight pause that made me wonder if they had in fact found bloodstains and he was trying to protect me. If he was, it would be the first time ever.
    We stood and stared at the patch of ground for several more unnecessary minutes.
    ‘Which way did they go, then?’ I asked.
    ‘We think there’s a trace over here, sir,’ said one of Tanya’s team. I wished they would stop calling me ‘sir’. It was hopelessly old-fashioned and made me feel about a hundred. I tried to imagine Dan calling anybody ‘sir’, and failed. That was cheering in a way. I quite liked the idea that he wouldn’t easily give into anybody. Although of course there were times when that could be the sensible thing to do.
    I hoped he was being sensible right now. Maybe Fiona could help him with that.
    We all went to look at the trace. After peering very closely, I discerned a slightly bent clump of grass there. Maybe the others could see things I couldn’t. If only I had got my eyes tested when that was still an option. Let that be a lesson to me.
    I followed the rest of the party as Declan and another expert followed the trail only they could see. We went up over the top of one hill and then down a bit and up another. There was always another hill to climb, much as there usually is in life.
    We walked and climbed for most of the morning, and then it turned out that Tanya and her team had provided cheese sandwich capsules and some kind of condensed drink for everybody. I hoped that didn’t mean we were going to be out for the whole day. I was definitely beginning to flag, and I still wasn’t entirely convinced we were on the right track. Wouldn’t it be funny if we got back to our own camp and found Dan and Fiona there waiting for us?
    No, it wouldn’t be funny, exactly. It would be a miracle, and one that I wished I could believe in.
    Sure enough, when we finally turned and trudged back home again as darkness fell, only the four or five guards we had left behind were waiting for us. We hadn’t seen any sign of a marauding band that might have seized Dan and Fiona.
    ‘At least we know they’ve had practice in looking after themselves,’ said Declan, trying to cheer me up as we sat in the kitchen together after supper. He gave me a chocolate capsule. ‘Pity they don’t make whisky in capsule form – you look as though you could do with it.’
    ‘You should have brought back a few bottles of the real thing when you were on one of those damn raiding parties,’ I grumbled at him. ‘We were bound to have an emergency sooner or later.’
    ‘Maybe we should have gone further afield today,’ Declan mused. ‘They might have been camped over the next hill.’
    ‘Are we planning to do the same again tomorrow?’ I asked him. I had run out of ideas and energy. The only thing keeping me going at all was the overwhelming wish to find Dan – to be able to bicker with him once again in our temporary home, and to dream of the family being reunited in the foreseeable future. I didn’t know if he would come to any harm with the other group, if indeed another group had taken him as everybody seemed to have concluded. It still seemed strange to me that they would take him at all unless they wanted him to work for them in some way. If they had been planning to kill him and Fiona, surely they would have done it right away on that hillside – or would they? I said as much to Declan.
    ‘Surely they would,’ he said with a nod. ‘And there aren’t so many able-bodied young people left that anybody can afford to waste them, now, are there?’
    That explained why he wasn’t as distraught as I might have expected.
    Or there could have been another explanation.
    Tanya woke me up at