Stalks of flax brushed Verra's lower legs as she hurried across the field. Blue flowers fluttered to the ground in her wake. The unreaped hectare should have sweetened her mood with the prospects of harvest, but it stood now as a hindrance, retarding her progress to the woodland beyond. Lifting her skirt higher, she quickened her pace, heedless of trampled plants.
"Pertto!" she called again. No answer.
The tightness inside rooted more deeply, seizing her belly in an echo of the pangs she had suffered birthing the boy, thirteen summers gone. He could not, would not, be worrying her for the sake of mischief. He was not that sort of son.
The sun puddled behind the treetops to the west. Pertto should have long since been home, measuring out the dyer's-weed she had sent him out to find, helping determine how much more they would need to color her most recent batch of cloth. By nature he would be entreating his Aunt Linna for a taste of the coney stew she was preparing for supper. He was never late for meals.
Trees enveloped her as the tilled area gave way to native forest. While her eyes adjusted to shadow, she carefully examined the verge.
There. Footprints.
That much was as it should have been. The tracks were still plain in the dust, obscured only by the recent passage of a stoat on its way to the brook. A few of the impressions revealed the dimple in his left heel, what the clan healer had called the moon's kiss because its crescent shape mirrored that visible in the sky the night Pertto--only five years old then--had gashed the foot falling from a tree.
Verra worked her way deeper beneath the boughs. Her son had come along the edge of the flax, taking the long way around in respect of the crop, and had turned in by the deer trail that led to the patch of greenweed that would have been his prime destination.
The signs led on without detour to the nearest cluster of the shrubs. Disrupted, fragrant soil revealed where he must have yanked plants loose to stuff into his sack.
Her breath caught. The sack itself lay ahead beside the trail, unlaced, contents scattered. The loam was scarred by the divots and fantails of abrupt struggle.
Ambush.
Twilight muddied the details as Verra hurried on, but she saw enough to confirm the worst. Footprints made by large men in shoes led away from the patch of greenweed, the traces overlaid by a double channel of disturbed soil, such as would be made by a pair of dragging heels. On the far side of the nearest knoll, the signs were replaced by the hoofprints of burdened horses, one set pressed noticeably deeper than the others.
In Verra's small hamlet and the adjacent farms, only the headman was rich enough to own a horse. He had only one. It was a big-footed beast that pulled a plow willingly enough, but would not tolerate a rider.
Strangers had kidnapped her child.
As suspicion became certainty, her anguish nearly seized control of her. Hurrying twenty paces to the brook, she flung water on her face. Three, four, five scoopings. The bracing splashes quelled the feverishness, drove the beeswax softness from her knees and from her spine.
With a clarity that rivalled the droplets trickling off her chin, she banished the temptation to run back to her hut to enlist the aid of her sister and nieces. Her home was in the wrong direction. She had to run onward, in the wake of the kidnappers. Help was needed, but it had to be found along the way, where it might be near enough to give Pertto a chance to be rescued.
She picked herself up and raced into the forest.
)
