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Astrid nodded solemnly, setting her long white-blond braids bobbing in the shadowed gloom, the overcast winter sky shedding only a silvery-gray shadowed light through the branches and needles above them. Then she looked up at Eilir, a twinkle in her strange silver-shot eyes; not many could have seen it there, but they'd been inseparable since they'd met in the fall of the first Change Year, when the Bearkillers came west over the High Cascades. Eilir's hair was raven black and her eyes green, nose shorter and mouth fuller, cheekbones not so chiseled; apart from that they were similar in looks as well, both tall at five-eight or so, moving with whipcord grace.
"It'd be hard work cutting this to a useful length," Lord Bear's sister-in-law said casually in the Sindarin her Dunedain used among themselves, as if addressing the air. "We need about, oh, ten feet." The thick bottom section of the trunk was fifty feet long before it frayed out into a tangle of crown, lying half on the old state park trail and half off it. "We'll have to break out a whipsaw: too tough for ax-work."
"Hordle and I can handle it," Alleyne said. "Shouldn't take long if we spell each other."
Eilir cocked one leaf-colored eye at Hordle, whose great hamlike countenance assumed a woebegone grimace; that turned into a grin at her as she giggled silently.
I'm glad Astrid finally found a fellah, she thought, and pushed down wistful thoughts about Alleyne's handsome countenance. Though it must be sort of frustrating for the poor guy, stuck on first base while he's courting a skittish virgin. I'm pretty sure she still is, too, from the signs. I love you dearly, anamchara, but that's sort of slow off the mark and he won't wait forever! Get your legs locked around him before he escapes!
The two men stripped to the waist; it was cold, just around freezing with the ground a mixture of melting snow and mud, but working hard in jacket and shirt just got you sweaty and then chilled. They were down at the bottom of a cleft in the basalt rock, anyway, and well out of the wind; you could see the banded layers in the steep slope to the north, and the creek ran behind them with clumps of ice around the rocks in it. Streamside and slope and the rolling hills higher up were densely grown with big trees; fir and hemlock on the upland, maple and cottonwood and alder lower, yew and chinquapin, with the blackened stems of ferns sticking up out of the leaf litter and duff. The smell of decaying leaves and needles was pungent as boots disturbed them, suddenly intensely aromatic as someone crushed the branch of an incense-cedar sapling.
Eilir smiled at her friend as they moved the two-horse team they'd brought along and wrapped a chain around the thicker base of the tree.
Got Alleyne to show off, hey? she signed.
You betcha, Astrid replied, with a smile of smug satisfaction. He's a wonderful guy but he's still a guy, you know? Which means he's sort of stupid at times. Besides, he looks good with his shirt off.
Little John's smarter, Eilir signed. He saw through it.
He is not! Astrid's hands moved emphatically. Alleyne just has too noble a nature to suspect anyone!
Yeah, blond, beautiful and dumb, like someone else I could name but won't – like for example you, Eilir taunted. Astrid stuck her tongue out in reply.
The friends finished their task, jumped free, checked that nobody else was in the way and waved to Crystal, who stood at the horses' heads. The girl urged them forward, and the beasts leaned into their harness. The big log swiveled across rocks, then came down onto the bike path with a thud that echoed up through the soles of her feet. It was far too heavy for the team to drag back while it remained whole, even though they had a two-wheeled lift to put under the forward end to ease the work. There was a good ton of weight involved.
We'll save the upper part, there's some useful wood there, Eilir signed.
The tree being dead already, they didn't have to do more than sketch a sign over it; you had to apologize and explain the need when you cut living wood, the way you did when you killed a beast. They were all children of the Mother and part of Lord Cernu
The men got busy, standing on either side of the log and chopping, while a few of the Dunedain trimmed the branches further up with hatchets and saws. Eilir cradled her longbow in her arms and watched appreciatively. Alleyne was a bit over six feet, and built like an Apollo in one of Mom's books, broad-shouldered and narrow in the waist, long in the arms and legs; the muscle moved like living metal under his winter-pale skin as he swung the felling ax and chips of the rock-hard maple flew, startling yellow-white against the dark ground. Beside him Hordle looked like a related but distinct species, arms like the tree trunk itself, and a thick pelt of dark auburn hair ru
It was still seasoned hardwood, and the work went slowly. Eilir gri
Ah, hard honest work, she signed. It does me good just to watch it.
Alleyne's ears burned a little redder. The wood yielded, but slowly; it took only a little more to finish trimming the branches and roll the upper section of the trunk off the path for later attention.
Eilir had been deaf from birth; before it, in fact, when a teenaged Juniper Mackenzie contracted German measles in the fourth month of her pregnancy. That didn't make her other senses more acute, the way many believed; what it did do was encourage her to use and pay attention to them. She'd also spent much of her life in the countryside and amongst its wildlife, around Dun Juniper when it was just her and her mother before the Change; and in mountains and woods, hills and fields all over western Oregon in the years since, hunting, Rangering, or wandering and observing for their own sake. And she had been trained by experts, Sam Aylward not least.
All that told her that something was not quite right:
Mithrilwood had been a state park before the Change, and since then the area all about it had been mostly unpeopled, young forests and abandoned fields growing lush fodder for beast and bird. It normally swarmed with life, even in winter when many of the birds went south; upland game migrated down here from the High Cascades in this season, and everything from beaver and rabbits to deer, elk, coyote, wild boar, bear, cougar and feral tiger were common. The bigger animals would avoid the noise and clatter of humans, though not as widely as they did before the Change. The smaller would be cautious, but:
She turned and clicked her tongue at Astrid. The other woman was already frowning.
"Hsssst!" Astrid Larsson said as she turned, to attract everyone's eyes, and moved her hands in Sign as well: Someone's near. Watching. Don't let them know they've been seen, but be ready.
Nobody froze; the dozen Dunedain continued to muscle the big log towards the waiting horses and the two-wheeled drag that would support its forward end. The forest floor was mostly clear of undergrowth, and the trees had closed their canopy long ago.
Then they casually reached for their bows; you had to know Sign as well as Sindarin to be a Ranger. Astrid's silver-veined eyes flicked about. They were in a canyon, one of the many that laced the old state park. Rock stretched up on either hand, layers of basalt cut through by mille