Tavis brought his small procession to a halt. "We'll use the river ahead to make our break south," he said. "It's time to convince the ogres that we're heading for hill giant country."

"How?" Morten asked.

"You'll carry Avner," Tavis said. "He's light enough that he won't make a difference in the depth of your tracks; the ogres will think he's suddenly taking care to leave no spoor."

"What about the rest of us?" Brianna asked. "Morten can't carry us all."

"You and Morten try to avoid leaving tracks. Stick to solid ground and walk on rocks when you can. Stay away from thickets and dust," Tavis said. "There will still be plenty of signs, but it'll look like you're trying not to leave any, and that's what's important. My own trail will all but disappear, and well take a crooked path, laying a false trail heading northwest. The ogre trackers will think we're trying to lose them."

"And how do we really lose them when the time comes?" Avner asked, climbing onto Morten's back.

"We'll lay another false trail on the other side of the river, then float away," Tavis explained. "There won't be any signs for the ogres to follow."

"Good plan," grunted Morten.

"Of course," said Avner. "Tavis will get us back to Hartsvale. He knows everything."

"Not everything," Tavis corrected. He didn't know how to make Brianna trust him, and until he could do that, nothing else mattered. "I know the mountains, but that's not everything."

With that, Tavis turned and resumed the journey. Moving more slowly now, the scout led the group on an erratic course that took them more or less northwest. Whenever the mood struck him, he would make a sharp turn, sometimes heading east, sometimes west, and occasionally even back the way they had come. Always, he kept a sharp eye out for any disturbance caused by the large, flat foot of a verbeeg, and he listened carefully for the sounds of someone clumsy moving through the forest.

Tavis did not confine his steps to hard ground or rocks as he had advised Brianna and Morten to do. Nor did he take a pine bough and brush away his tracks as foolish humans sometimes did, for such nonsense only made it easier to follow quarry. The sweeping action wiped the actual footprints away well enough, but it also left the ground so disturbed that the trail became as easy to follow as a deer path.

Rather, Tavis moved with careful, light steps, keeping to the pine needles covering the forest floor, placing his feet down as slowly and gently as he could. With each step, he listened intently to the sound of his supple boot soles settling on the ground. Every now and then the soft crack of a snapping twig or the muffled crackle of crumbling pine needles came to his ears. Whenever he heard such a sound, he stopped to retrieve the object that had made the noise, slipping it into his cloak pocket. Then he would look over his back trail to see if he had left any other obvious signs of passage. Occasionally, he would spy a small dip where his foot had rested too long in one place, but these depressions did not worry him. The pine needle carpet was spongy enough to return to its normal state long before their pursuers came.

Soon the scout's wandering path came to a steep bank that descended to the river's refuse-littered flood plain. Solitary boulders, carried ashore by winter ice, lay interspersed among jumbles of old weathered logs strewn over the small flat. Here the forest's regal lodgepoles gave way to trees more suited to the boggy ground, shabby black spruces carrying as many tangles of dead gray branches as they did live green boughs.

The river itself was close to a hundred paces wide, racing down a broad, cataract-strewn channel lined with driftwood and round, moss-blackened stones. Where the waters were not a churning mass of froth and foam, they appeared dark and cold, moving with a strong, steady current that would carry the group swiftly down the valley and, if their ruse was successful, away from the ogres.

The scout sent Morten and Brianna directly down the bank to a log pile that, via a tangled network of crisscrossing boles, led to the river's edge. After wiping his soles clean, Tavis descended the slope by climbing down the barren trunk of a fallen lodgepole and, upon reaching a place where the dead bark still clung to the bole, he jumped to a nearby boulder. That was where, in the wet ground at the rock's base, the scout saw the track.

It was a hoofprint. The horse's leg had sunk close to a foot in the black mud, leaving a round, postlike hole half filled with water. A long line of similar craters led to the river's edge. By the slow rate at which they were filling with seep water, Tavis estimated the tracks were between thirty minutes and an hour old. Given the harsh terrain of the surrounding mountains and the proximity of a elan of hill giants-who prized horse meat as a delicacy only a little less desirable than halfling flesh-the scout did not think it likely a wild horse had left the print.

Tavis scampered across a network of stones and toppled tree trunks to the rocks on the river's shore. Here, the prints no longer sank deep into the ground, but on the stones he saw several rusty red streaks where an iron horseshoe had scraped over the surface.

Brianna and the others peered over his shoulders. "What are you looking at?" asked the princess.

"Your mare's trail." Tavis pointed to the signs he had discovered. "She seems to be moving upstream."

"Blizzard?" Brianna gasped. "Here?"

"She's the one who led us to Morten in the first place," Tavis said. "And she's been following us since. We saw her on the Needle Peak glacier shortly before we rescued you, and here she is again."

Brianna's face lit up. "Can we catch her?"

Tavis hesitated before answering. Recovering the horse might help him win Brianna's favor, but it would also increase the ogres' chances of tracking them downstream.

"Finding Blizzard right now wouldn't be wise," he said. "As intelligent as she is, I don't think we could convince her to float down the river with us. And if she starts following us along the shore, the ogres will spy her in an instant. That would ruin our whole plan."

"We can change plans," Brianna suggested.

"No," Morten said. The bodyguard cast a wary glance at the raging river. "This is the best plan. The ogres will never expect us to float down that."

"I'm sure there are other ways," Brianna insisted. "Blizzard's a very special mare."

"Not that special," Morten objected. "I won't put you in greater danger for the sake of a horse."

"You're not putting me anywhere," Brianna snapped. "This is my own choice."

"That may be, but what of the danger to Avner and Earl Dobbin?" Tavis asked. Although he was thinking more of the princess's welfare, he knew Brianna would find this objection difficult to overcome. "Are you also willing to risk their lives on behalf of your mare?"

Brianna fixed a cold glare on the scout and did not answer. Her icy expression suggested she understood Tavis's strategy, but the knowledge did nothing to lessen the validity of his point. She searched her mind for a suitable alternative, finally lowering her gaze when it became obvious there wasn't one. Without speaking, she turned away from Blizzard's trail.

Tavis wanted to offer her some reassurance about the horse's welfare, but to do so would have been to lie. Even if there had not been hundreds of murderous ogres in this valley and a clan of horse-eating giants in the next. Blizzard had to be close to starvation by now, and montane forests were not good grazing grounds.

The scout went over to a log tangle and snapped eight-foot sections off three treetops. He handed one of the makeshift staffs to Brianna and Morten, keeping the third for himself.

"We'll wade upstream until we find a safe place to cross," he said. "Use these to brace yourselves, or the water will sweep your feet from beneath you."