9. Chapter 9 #2
Then the ground drops into a cut with a stream in the bottom of it, and the far bank is a mess of loose earth and fallen timber and about a fifteen-foot climb.
Everybody looks at it.
"Nope," says Renzo.
"We'd have to go another mile east," Freya says.
"She's been out here four hours," Declan says.
And then all five of them turn around and look at me.
"What?" I say.
Which is how — after standing in the mud for the better part of a minute deliberately not trying, getting it wrong twice, and finally giving up on the whole enterprise and just going, which apparently remains the only method that works — I end up on the far bank as a direwolf with a rope harness across my chest, hauling a stretcher and four adults up fifteen feet of wet earth while Declan calls it out step by step from below.
Slow. Slower. Hold. Hold. Now.
And I can do it.
Not easily. My back legs go out from under me twice and Declan has to brace the stretcher. But I can do it, and nothing about it hurts, and when we get to the top Torres puts a hand flat on my shoulder and says, "Good girl."
I can't answer, because wolf. But I would like to state that I'm going to bring that up again.
I don't know how to track. I don't know how to read terrain or splint a leg or find someone under a rock shelf.
But when Freya and Declan tell me what they need, I can do it.
That'll do.
We're maybe six minutes past the top of the bank when I stop.
Sophia walks into the back of my leg.
"Ow— Jessica—"
Freya stops.
I nearly walk into her.
She's staring off to the right, at what looks to me like a beech tree growing around a rock.
"What?"
She doesn't answer. She hands Renzo her side of the stretcher and walks over to it.
Of course we all follow, because apparently that's what we're doing now.
The stone is about waist height on a human, mostly buried under moss and lichen, with one side disappearing into the roots of a beech that's been growing around it for God knows how long.
Freya crouches.
"It's been cut."
I look at the stone.
"It's a rock."
"It's not." She runs her hand down one side without quite touching it. "Look."
I do.
Nothing happens.
"Jessica."
"I'm looking."
"At the edge."
There is an edge. Once she points it out, I can see it: a straight line under all that moss where there shouldn't be one, then another disappearing into the ground.
"Oh."
"Yeah."
Freya takes a handkerchief out of her pocket, because of course she carries a handkerchief, and starts carefully working at the moss.
Declan comes up behind us. "We have a casualty on a stretcher."
"I know."
"Just checking."
Ines lifts her head. "I'm fine. Apparently I'm only mildly shocky at the moment."
"Thank you, Ines," Declan says.
"Happy to help."
Freya keeps going.
It takes a couple of minutes before enough of the face is clear to see the shape cut into it. There's a shallow circular panel about the size of two hands, with a raised border running around the outside.
The middle is gone.
Not worn smooth. Gone.
The stone inside the circle is rough and uneven, covered in dozens of overlapping cuts.
Crouching beside Freya, I lean in, "What was there?"
"No idea."
"Don't touch it," she says.
"I wasn't."
"You were about to."
I was absolutely about to.
She holds two fingers just above the damaged stone. "These are tool marks."
"How can you tell?"
"Because weather doesn't do that."
That, even I can see. The border around the circle is still clean enough to follow, but somebody has hacked the entire center down below it.
"Someone cut it off," I say.
"Looks like it."
"Why?"
Freya glances at me. "That's a different question."
She stands, still studying the stone, then looks past it down the slope.
"Wait."
"What?"
She moves a few steps to the side, trying to see through the trees.
"I think there's another one."
We get the stretcher moving again and follow her down the slope. It isn't far, maybe sixty feet, before Freya stops beside another moss-covered stone almost completely buried between two trees.
This time I know what I'm looking at.
Same height. Same straight edges. Same circular panel on the face.
Same missing center.
"Oh, shit."
Freya clears just enough moss to see the damage, then looks back toward the first stone.
"Two in a line."
"Boundary markers?"
"Could be."
We keep going, slower now. The third one is farther down the same slope. Nobody says much when we find it. We don't need to.
Three stones. Three empty circles. Three centers deliberately hacked away. Freya stands between the last two and looks back along the line.
"Yeah," Freya says. "These were marking something."
I look around us properly for the first time. Old forest. No path. Nothing except trees and stones nobody has cared about in a very long time.
Except somebody cared enough to take a tool to every one we've found. And I already know whose land we're standing on.
Luftis was built on land that belonged to the Fourth House. That doesn't mean these stones belonged to them. But it sure as hell makes me wonder what used to be in those empty circles.
"Jessica," Declan says.
"Yeah."
"We've got an injured person."
"I know."
"We'll come back."
He's right, and I hate it, and Freya clearly hates it more than I do, but he's right.
Renzo takes the coordinates while Freya tears a page out of her notebook, lays it over the damaged circle, and rubs the side of her pencil across it. The raised border appears first, dark and clean. The middle is just a mess of broken lines.
"Why have we stopped?"
Brann's voice comes from behind us.
We all turn.
She's coming down through the trees, breathing harder than she was the last time I saw her. Apparently getting five people and a stretcher straight up the bank gave us more of a lead than I thought. Brann had to go around.
"We found something," Freya says.
"You also have a casualty and a clock."
"I know. Look."
Brann comes over.
Freya shows her the first stone, then points through the trees toward the others. "Three so far. Same size, same circular panel, all in a line. I think they're boundary markers."
"And somebody cut the centers out," I say.
Brann crouches.
For a few seconds she doesn't say anything.
Then she reaches toward the stone, stops before touching it, and looks at the cuts in the center.
Her face freezes. Almost in shock.
"Coordinates."
Renzo gives them to her.
She writes them in her notebook, then tears a separate sheet from the back and writes them again.
Okay. That's not weird at all.
"These go to the Chancellor tonight." She closes the notebook. "You don't come back here. Not on your own, not with your friends, not on a free afternoon."
Freya frowns. "Why?"
"Because you're on placement, not an archaeological survey."
"That's not why."
Brann looks at her.
Freya doesn't look away.
"Say it back to me," Brann says.
There's a pause.
"We won't come back," Freya says.
"Good."
"Is that normal?" I ask. "Someone deliberately cutting the marks off?"
Brann puts her pen away.
"Most of the old structures were cleared when Luftis was built."
"Most."
Her eyes come to mine.
Then Declan clears his throat.
"Still injured."
Ines raises one hand from the stretcher. "Very."
Brann stands. "Then I suggest you finish extracting her."
We reach the fire road at nine minutes to three.
The evaluation happens standing up in the cold while Ines gets her boot back on and complains about her paperback getting wet.
Freya's tracking, excellent. Sophia's casualty management, better than most third-years. Renzo's route-keeping, good. Torres, good and quiet, and Brann looks at him a second longer than she looks at anybody else.
"Declan. You nearly lost the clock."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because the bank at the gully crossing was gone and I wasn't putting a stretcher over it."
"You gave up forty minutes."
"Yes."
Brann writes something down. "That's the best decision anybody's made on this exercise in two years. Don't let it go to your head."
Declan turns approximately the color of a stop sign.
Then me.
"You need to spend more time in your shifted form," she says.
"Yes."
"You took off on different scent trails. Twice." She writes. "You also got a stretcher and four people up a fifteen-foot bank, and your team stopped treating you like a mascot at some point this morning."
"Thank you."
"That wasn't praise. It was a note."
Brann closes the notebook.
"Bus is at half past. Somebody help Ines."
Freya finds me that evening in the sitting room of my suite, where Sophia is asleep on my couch and Renzo is eating. Again.
She puts the rubbing down on the coffee table.
The border came through clean and unbroken, one hard line around the outside.
The center is a mess.
We both look at it.
"Someone really didn't want anybody knowing what was there," Freya says.
"No."
I run my finger just above the paper, following the empty circle.
Three stones that we know about.
However many more we didn't have time to find. And every one of them with the same thing missing.