What plans Pepperidge has to begin her interviews, however, are waylaid when the morning reveals a missing youth, bed unslept-in, and no sign of their return. Pointed inquiries turn up shamefaced companions, a purloined wineskin for private forest revels, and a friend nobody quite remembers seeing last.
When the Professor locates Taelin's rangers, they are already embroiled in a highly organised plan to search the nearby forest. "No sign yet?" Longeye is saying quietly to an elder ranger Pepperidge does not recognise. "Well, there's plenty of forest yet. Caves, if it comes to that, though let's hope the bairn had the sense not to."
"And the river," the other says, a touch grimly.
"Ah, now, that's a long way for a daft young drunk to bother, with no other fools to impress." Longeye twitches the corner of her mouth.
"But downhill, if you're drunk and lost, and if you're drunk and lost enough for that — "
"Well, if anyone went in the river, they'll have fetched up already down at the trappers."
There's a short silence.
"Gentles," Pepperidge says softly. "Do I understand you to mean there's a human hunting camp downstream?"
Longeye cocks an eye at her. "That there is," she says neutrally.
"And that speaking to them might rule out — " the Professor pauses over it. "Outcomes."
"So it might." Longeye rubs the back of her neck. "Were we to talk to them, and were they to talk to us."
Pepperidge sighs. "And if you were able to spare someone to take me there, might it assist if there were a human to speak to them?"
"Well," Longeye says, and there is a wealth of doubt in it, "maybe so, Professor. If it makes a great difference to them that it's you asking on our behalf."
"I know only one way to find out," Pepperidge says gravely.
Taelin's rangers are not yet all out searching; and so, despite obvious misgivings, they end up wending down the hillsides and along the river; Longeye and Tiny and Princess and the Professor.
"I take it the welcome here will not be warm," Pepperidge says dryly, as they join the first distinct trail she's seen, the smell of woodsmoke in the air.
"They're upriver from the towns," Longeye says, in resigned tones. "We look around these woods and see the hands of centuries of stewards; we see *home. *They come and all they see are trees and empty space. And neither is exactly wrong, Professor, and we know this; but still and all, tell a body who's tended the life of a valley for a thousand years that you can't see what's wrong with cutting down some particular tree, it's just a tree, you wanted the wood...."
The rangers let her approach the edge of the camp alone. They hang back, close enough to lay claim to her, but far enough to make clear they're respecting some boundary between their peoples; and she abruptly misses having them shoulder to shoulder with her. The huntsmen are much as she'd expected; rough men, unused to visitors, spitting and stinking and staring.
She had not — even amply warned — expected quite such naked hatred. They see her, it is plain, as some kind of traitor, dressed as she is in a mix of stout city-bought travelling gear and outer layers of elven weaves against the Highland damp; and it takes some questioning to elicit the reluctant information that no drowned body has washed down to pools below the nearby rocky falls that they know of.
"A child, sir, we are speaking of a child!" Pepperidge finds herself shouting, red in the face, shaking with rage, and the jut-chinned trapper she speaks to simply spits on the ground between them.
"Only one of theirs," he says dourly.
She does not quite recall marching from the camp, only that when they are out of sight, she stops; takes from her belt a cheap human-made knife, bought on the road as replacement for one lost on the long journey here, and jams it deep into the rift of a cracked glacial boulder.
"Professor?" Longeye says cautiously at her shoulder.
"I know it's just a knife," she snarls, half-blind with angry tears, as she scrabbles around and comes up with a rock heavy enough to require both hands. "I know our people are not the same, and our honour's not the same, but I can't stand it, I can't stand to carry it right now — a child, Longeye — "
The knife is cheap and its workmanship best called serviceable, but neither the first blow, nor the tenth, to the handle make it break. Her fingers are numb, cut and raw from the rock, when it finally shatters.
She is shaking, she realises, and only belatedly remembers to open her cramped hands and drop the stone.
"Well, now," Longeye says, in the soothing tone one uses on terrified animals, "now that's done — "
"Your pardon," Pepperidge says. Her voice grates out of her, harsh in her own ears. "Your pardon, gentles, that was — that was a waste of precious time."
She can practically feel them exchanging glances behind her, and feels fresh hot tears well at how small and shamed and grubby she feels at her own kind's conduct.
"Where do we search now?" she says roughly.
After hours of painstakingly combing up the river's side, someone reaches them to say that the child is found and home, leg being splinted from a tipsy fall into a rocky hole, and they trail wearily back to the village.
Pepperidge is ashen with exhaustion: bloody, muddy, heartsick, wet and stained with moss.
Of course Tirina is on hand to welcome the searchers home; a person who belongs here, a beauty scare in need of glamouring. She simply looks, smirks, raises a knowing brow.
"Well," she says. "Don't you look worse for wear?"
It is all Pepperidge can do to draw a deep breath, trembling with frustration, eyes swimming with tears. And then, suddenly, she is shoulder to shoulder in a wall of rangers.
"Today," Longeye says evenly, to her left, "I have seen this little human book-scholar go double the length of a ranger training march."
"A distance which some people," Tiny says, over on her right, "fail to complete so much as once ever, puke on their boots, and fall back on their family to sort them a comfortable militia posting."
There's a pause, filled with pointed staring.
"Perhaps *some *people should shut their hissing snipe-holes," Longeye concludes, and delicately cracks her knuckles.
Tirina looks at them, thinks better of reply, and goes to greet another straggling search party.
"Ah, now, no tears," Longeye says, putting an arm round Pepperidge's shoulders. "We'll just stroll a little further and find the poet, you see?"
The Professor sniffles loudly.
"Princess, make a foot of it, will you?" Longeye tightens her arm protectively. "See if you can send the poet this way."
"Heyo, Longeye." The scout bounces from foot to foot, and bounds uphill through the lodges as if fresh from a night's sleep.
"I'm sorry," Pepperidge mumbles, attempting to wipe away tears with a sodden, filthy sleeve.
"Ah, stop. We'll get you a friendly face, and soup, and bed. Don't fret."
"Heyo, Longeye!"
No sign of Lilli, yet, or Princess returning; but the Captain comes loping down the slope. "I've pointed Princess the way to the poet," he greets them as he arrives. "Now what's all this?"
"Heyo, Captain. We went over to the trapper camp to ask if they'd seen Stadda's lass, scout out down there." Longeye sounds apologetic. "The Professor was chafing to help, so we took her — no harm in having a human to talk to the trappers, see? Being one of their people."
"As much her people as you're a Plainsman's dairymaid," Taelin interrupts acerbically.
"It didn't come to much." Longeye shrugs. "The way the poet calls her wolf — I never much credited it, Captain, but I swear we saw teeth today!" She bends close, murmurs something too quick, too quiet, too colloquial for Pepperidge to quite catch any of the elven words, though she thinks she hears knife.
The elves stare at each other, and Taelin reaches a gentle hand to rest on Pepperidge's shoulder. "Go on."
"You see the state of her, sir — she cursed us if we tried to help her up. And the questions! I'd not care to face her as a captive of battle! Do we know the child, how does the child stand with her family, do we think she's astray because she's angry, or sad, or lost, or hurt — where did I go as a child, where would I go if I were angry or sad or — I swear, sir, she wouldn't take 'I don't know', and if we said aught else she's order us there to look as well! I couldn't stop her, I scarce think the poet could have stopped her — "
"Heyo!" Princess sings out, a second before Lilli flings her cousin aside. She throws her hands up at the sight of Pepperidge, keening in horror. "What did you do to her!"
Longeye glares. "Take her, poet," she growls. "I got her home, and chased your childhood kissyface off from gloating at her. She needs you, and food, and most of all, rest."
"You are all," Pepperidge says exhaustedly, "talking about me as if I am not here." She holds out weary arms to Lilli. "Enough."
The elf gathers her up, contrite. "Amaranth," she murmurs against the professor's hair. "You look half dead."
"Nothing sleep won't cure," Pepperidge lies, certain she'll be in pain for weeks. "Help me along, bumblebee."
