Free Dragonsbane by Barbara Hambly Page B

and you hear the bushes rustle?”
    “I might.”
    “John!” Jenny’s cool, slightly gravelly voice cut across his next words. “How much longer can we travel without lights of some kind? Clouds are moving up. It won’t rain, but you won’t be able to see a foot ahead of you in two hours.”
    “ You could,” he pointed out. He felt it, too, she thought—that growing sensation that had begun back along the road; the uneasy feeling of being watched.
    “I could,” she agreed quietly. “But I don’t have your woodsmanship. And I know this part of the road—there isn’t a better place ahead. I don’t like this place either, but I’m not sure that staying here wouldn’t be safer than showing up our position by traveling with lights, even a very dim magelight. And even that might not show up signs of danger.”
    John looked about him at the dark woods, now barely visible in the cold gloom. Wind stirred at the bare boughs interlaced above their heads, and somewhere before them in the clearing Jenny could hear the whisper of the ferns and the rushing voice of the rain-fed stream. No sound of danger, she thought. Why then did she subconsciously watch with her peripheral vision; why this readiness to flee?
    Aversin said quietly, “It’s too good.”
    Gareth snapped, “First you don’t like it and then you say it’s too good...”
    “They’ll know all the camping places anyway,” Jenny replied softly across his words.
    Furious, Gareth sputtered, “Who’ll know?”
    “The Meewinks, you stupid oic,” snapped John back at him.
    Gareth flung up his hands. “Oh, fine! You mean you don’t want to camp here because you’re afraid of being attacked by a little old man and a little old lady?”
    “And about fifty of their friends, yes,” John retorted. “And one more word out of you, my hero, and you’re going to find yourself slammed up against a tree.”
    Thoroughly roused now, Gareth retorted, “Good! Prove how clever you are by thrashing someone who disagrees with you! If you’re afraid of being attacked by a troop of forty four-foot-tall septuagenarians...”
    He never even saw Aversin move. The Dragonsbane might not have the appearance of a hero, Jenny thought, but he nevertheless had the physical reflexes of one. Gareth gasped as he was literally lifted off his feet by a double-handful of cloak and doublet, and Jenny strode forward to catch John’s spike-studded forearm. With softness as definite as an assassin’s footfall, she said, “Be quiet! And drop him.”
    “Got a cliff handy?” But she felt the momentum of his rage slack. After a pause he pushed—almost threw—Gareth from him. “Right.” Behind his anger he sounded embarrassed. “Thanks to our hero, it’s well too dark now to be moving on. Jen, can you do anything with this place? Spell it?”
    Jenny thought for a few moments, trying to analyze what it was that she feared. “Not against the Meewinks, no,” she replied at last. She added acidly, “They’ll have tracked you gentlemen by your voices.”
    “It wasn’t me who...”
    “I didn’t ask who it was.” She took the reins of the horses and mules and led them on into the clearing, anxious now to get a camp set and circled with the spells of ward before they were seen from the outside. Gareth, a little shamefaced at his outburst, followed sulkily, looking at the layout of the clearing.
    In the voice of one who sought to mollify by pretending that the disagreement never happened, he asked, “Does this hollow look all right for the fire?”
    Irritation still crackled in Aversin’s voice. “No fire. We’re in for a cold camp tonight—and you’ll take the first watch, my hero.”
    Gareth gasped in protest at this arbitrary switch. Since leaving the Hold, Gareth had always taken the last watch, the dawn watch, because at the end of a day’s riding he wanted nothing more than to lie down and sleep; Jenny had always taken second; and John, used to the habits of wolves who