Stopping the scout was up to Amara. Bernard was right in that-their mission was already dangerous enough. Should the Vord learn that they were in the area and dispatch even a relatively small portion of their forces to hunting Bernard and Amara down, that mission would become impossible. As Amara had demonstrated to Bernard only that morning, if the Vord knew more or less where they were located, no amount of stealth would provide protection for long.

Amara gained a little more altitude, the better to look ahead, and saw that the fleeing Vord’s straight-line path crossed a clearing in the woods, up ahead. That would be the best place to strike. She was a fair hand with a bow, for someone without any appreciable skill at woodcrafting, but hitting a target racing among the trees while she herself rode a gale-force wind was out of the question.

Of course, one would have to be mad or desperate to stand in the path of a fleeing grass lion armed only with a medium-weight hunting bow-much less that of a Vord-possessed grass lion. Amara supposed she qualified as at least one of those things, though she did not care to examine too closely which one. She poured on the speed, flashing ahead to the clearing, and touched down in the open grass.

She had little time. She drew two arrows from her quiver, thrusting one into the earth at her feet and setting the other to her string. She took a deep breath to steady herself, raised her bow, and the Vord scout came crashing out of the brush.

She called upon Cirrus to borrow from the wind fury’s swiftness, and time seemed to slow, giving her ages and ages to aim the arrow.

The possessed lion ran with its half-rotted tongue hanging out. Its ears, which would normally have been stiff and upright, flopped and wriggled like wilted leaves of lettuce. There was some kind of greenish mold or lichen growing on its fangs. Its shoulder struck the edge of a windfall as it came into the clearing and a small shower of woodchips exploded into the air with the sheer power of the impact, ripping the insensate flesh with no noticeable effect whatsoever.

Amara loosed the arrow. It leapt gracefully over the forty yards between her and the grass lion, struck its skull just over the brow, and glanced off the hard bone to bury itself in the powerful, hunched shoulders.

The Vord scout did not so much as twitch.

Amara snatched up another arrow.

Clods of earth flew up from beneath the lion’s feet, propelled by the raw power of its legs. Amara tried not to think of what would happen if a battering ram of four hundred pounds of rotting meat and hard bone slammed into her at the rate the beast was moving. She set another arrow to string as the lion’s passage startled a covey of birds from the grass, sending them up in a slow-motion panic of feathers and beating wings and glassy eyes.

She dropped to one knee, drew the arrow to full extension, and held it, waiting, timing each plunge of the taken lion’s ruined body, tracking its motion, waiting for the timing to be perfect.

Twenty yards. Fifteen. Ten.

When it was ten feet away, she loosed her arrow and flung herself flat to one side.

The shaft stabbed out and vanished into the lion’s open mouth, its broad point plunging into the back of its throat.

The lion’s front limbs suddenly went loose, and its jaws and muzzle snapped down, smashing violently into the earth, plowing a shallow furrow as its momentum carried it forward. Its spine and hindquarters twisted and flipped up and over, then came smashing down onto the earth as well, forcing Amara to jerk her knees up to her chest, lest her legs be crushed underneath the beast’s descending weight.

The impact ruptured the grass lion’s innards, and an explosion of noxious fumes washed over her. Her stomach twisted in revulsion, and she scrambled away as it began to empty itself.

She looked back at the lion several unpleasant seconds later, to see it still twitching, and realized that she could hear… something, making a tinny, wheezing sound of pain. The Vord taker. When one of them inhabited a body, it was usually somewhere inside the skull. The arrow must have wounded the thing.

The job wasn’t done. The grass lion had never been the danger-the taker was. It could not be allowed to return to the rest of the Vord.

She looked around until she spotted a stone a little smaller than her head. She took it up, steeled herself against the stench, and walked back over to the still twitching corpse of the grass lion. She lifted the stone and, with all her strength, brought it smashing down on the grass lion’s skull.

The wheezing scream of pain stopped.

She looked up to see Bernard plunge from the trees and draw his horse to an abrupt halt, bow in hand. He stared at her for a moment. Then he simply slid his bow back into the holder on his saddle and nudged his horse into a walk again. Her own mount had followed his horse once she had left it, and came following along.

She walked over to meet him and get out of the stench.

He passed her a flask of water. She rinsed and spat the bad taste out of her mouth, then drank deeply.

He studied the grass lion gravely. “Nice shooting.”

From him, it was no idle comment. “Thank you,” she said.

He clucked to her horse, who docilely came over to his outreached hand. He collected the reins and offered them to Amara. “We’d better get moving. Where there’s one scout, there will be more.”

“Bernard,” she said, staring at the corpse. “I don’t want to end up like that. I don’t want them to use me against my own people. I’d rather die.” She turned her face to him. “If it comes to that, I want you to make sure of it.”

“It won’t,” Bernard said.

“But if it does-”

His eyes hardened. “It won’t,” he said, with harsh finality, and all but threw the reins at her chest. “No compromises, Countess. Not for anyone. Including the Vord.”

“The art of diplomacy is the art of compromise,” Lady Placida said calmly, as the wind coach began its descent to the Shieldwall. “The key here is finding the compromise that will satisfy everyone involved.”

“That presumes that everyone involved is willing to compromise,” Isana replied. “The Icemen have been at war with Alera for centuries. And I can’t imagine that the lords of Antillus or Phrygia will be particularly inclined to be gracious, after generations of combat with the northern tribes.”

Aria sighed. “I wasn’t presuming. I’d hoped you hadn’t realized it. I thought perhaps that a positive attitude on your behalf might put everyone sufficiently off-balance enough to allow you to get something accomplished.”

Isana smiled faintly. “What can you tell me about Antillus Raucus?”

“He’s a great fighter, probably the most accomplished tactician in Alera, almost unquestionably the most practiced battlecrafter in the Realm. He’s won significant battles against-”

Isana shook her head, frowning as the air grew noticeably colder. She drew her cloak tighter around herself. “Not that,” she said gently. “That isn’t what I need to know. Tell me about him.”

Aria closed her eyes for a moment and shook her head in self-recrimination. “Of course. I’m sorry, I’ve been thinking in military terms for most of the trip. How to make sure I can keep getting food and supplies to my husband and his men, that sort of thing.”

“Understandable,” Isana said gently. “Raucus?”

Aria folded her hands in her lap and frowned out the window for a moment. “Passionate,” she said, finally. “I don’t think I’ve ever known a man more passionate than Raucus. That’s partly what makes his firecrafting so strong, I think. He believes furiously in whatever it is he’s doing. Or only does whatever it is he believes in most furiously. I suppose it depends upon one’s point of view.”