On their fifth trip to the marsh, Mav smelled the strangers before he saw anything.
It had become a habit. Each time they stepped out of the arch, he reached for Ivy and borrowed her skill, and for one hour, he could read the landing island like a page. Scent was the strangest thing that he had ever borrowed. The mud was full of old trails, and each of them had its own smell, as clear as a color.
[You have borrowed a skill: Scent.]
Most mornings, he found the same trails. They belonged to other parties of students, and to the two hard-looking men with their dogs.
This morning, there was a new one, and it was only an hour old.
He followed it for a few steps, and the hair rose on his arms. Six people had come through the arch at dawn. Five of them were men, and one was a woman. They hadn’t gone hunting. They had walked 50 steps to a group of dead trees, and they had waited there, in a place from which they could watch the arch.
They weren’t there anymore. But they had left only minutes ago, and they had gone in the direction that Mav’s party took every morning.
’They know where we hunt. So somebody has been watching us for days.’
"What is it?" Ronald asked. He had seen Mav’s face.
"Six people were waiting for us here, and they’ve gone ahead of us, toward our island." Mav kept his voice low. "I think that they’ll be there when we arrive."
Tamsin went pale, and she looked back at the arch.
"We could leave," she said. "The arch is still open. We could go home right now."
Mav thought about it seriously, because it was the safe answer.
Then he thought about what would happen next. Six people didn’t wait at an arch at dawn by accident, so someone had paid for this. If the three of them went home today, the same six would be here tomorrow, or next week, at a time and a place that they had chosen.
Today, Mav knew that they were coming, and they didn’t know that he knew.
"If we run, they’ll come back on a day when I can’t smell them," he said. "I would prefer to choose the ground myself. But your lives are in this too, so I won’t decide alone."
Ronald looked at Tamsin. Tamsin looked at her slate, and then she put it away.
"The causeway," she said. Her voice shook, but she said it. "I mean the long one, between the two deep channels. It’s narrow, so they can only come at us from the front, and there’s water on both sides."
Mav smiled at her. It was exactly the place that he had been thinking of.
-----
They reached the causeway by a different path, and they had almost an hour to prepare it.
It was a strip of firm mud, 200 steps long and only six steps wide. It ran between two channels that were deep enough to hide Seven.
Ronald cast his hillside across the middle of it, and then he showed what his talent was for. He gave one order, and his 16 boars began to dig. Mav had never really watched them do it. They dug the way other beasts ran. By the time Tamsin had placed her moths, the boars had cut a ditch across the whole causeway, as deep as a man and four steps wide, and they had piled the mud into a wall behind it.
"My talent makes them dig three times faster," Ronald said, a little shyly. "It isn’t much."
"Today, it’s everything," Mav said.
He put his dome at the far end, where the two channels met behind them. Then he placed his people one by one.
Two took Twelve’s 40 needlefish and Eighteen’s 10 spined fish into both channels, with the two spitters. Seven went into the left channel. Log sank into the right one until only his eyes showed. It was the first time that Mav had brought him to the marsh. Log’s lock had held for a week, and Mav trusted it now.
Moss, Fern and Reed lay down in the reeds along the causeway, in front of the ditch, and they disappeared. Six stood behind Ronald’s wall with Ivy and Oak. Tamsin’s 15 moths waited in her piece of dark forest, at the very back.
Then there was nothing to do but wait.
For Mav, this was the hardest part. He wasn’t afraid for himself anymore, and he trusted his Subjects. But if he had read the ground wrong, Ronald and Tamsin would pay for it.
-----
The six came down the causeway a little before noon, and they didn’t try to hide.
A young man in a yellow coat walked in front. He was about 19, tall and wide, with a heavy jaw and a black ram’s head sewn on his chest. He carried a long hammer over his shoulder, and he walked as if the marsh belonged to him.
Four men followed him. Mav knew two of them at once. They were the hard-looking men from the landing island, with the same flat nose, and their dogs ran around their legs. So they were the ones who had been watching. The third man was huge and bald. The fourth was thin, and he wore a net over his face.
The sixth person stayed far behind. She sat down on a fallen tree at the very start of the causeway, 200 steps away, and she opened a small notebook on her knee.
She was a woman of about 30, in a gray coat, with brown hair tied back. Mav looked at her face, and a moment later, he couldn’t have described it.
He had never seen her before. But Pell had told him about her, on his knees in Tamsin’s forest. A woman who worked for Dorian’s father had been following Mav since the market.
’Rhea Calder.’
"The one in yellow is Leoric Dunmoor," Tamsin whispered. She was reading from her memory now, because her slate was in her bag. "He’s a second-year at Evergrove, and his house is sworn to House Ashgrove. His World is rank D."
Mav took it in calmly. A World of rank D meant three species, and a body that was a full letter stronger than his own. He had taken a beast of rank D- with a canteen, so a full letter didn’t frighten him.
"And the other four?"
"I don’t know them. But they’re too old to be students. I think that they’re hired men, the kind whose Worlds stopped at rank E years ago. They sell their beasts by the day."
So each of the four had two species and probably two skills, like Dorian. That made five enemies, and together, they were far stronger than he was.
Dunmoor stopped 30 steps from the ditch. He looked at the ditch, at the wall of mud, and at the dome of water behind it. Then he laughed.
"You were expecting us! That’s good. I was afraid that this would be boring." He let the head of his hammer drop into the mud. "Maverick Silkborn. Do you know how much Lord Ashgrove is paying for you? I didn’t believe the number at first."
"I’m sure that it’s a large one," Mav said. He stood on top of the wall, where everyone could see him, and he kept his voice calm. "He lost 20,000 Essence to me not long ago."
Dunmoor’s smile became a little thinner.
"He wants you alive, if possible. He has some questions about your beasts." He looked past Mav, at Ronald and Tamsin. "He didn’t say anything about the other two."
Ronald’s hands closed into fists. Tamsin didn’t move.
Mav looked over Dunmoor’s shoulder, at the woman on the fallen tree.
"The woman who pays you is sitting 200 steps behind you," he said. "She hasn’t brought a single beast. You should ask yourself why she wants to watch this from so far away."
For a moment, Dunmoor almost turned around. One of the two brothers did turn, and he frowned.
Then Dunmoor shook his head, and he lifted his hammer again.
"You talk well for a boy from Wildroot," he said. "But we aren’t in the Nexus, and there’s no Arbiter in this mud to see what happens."
Behind him, five Manifestations began to rise out of the marsh.
"Out here," Dunmoor said, "nobody will ask what happened to you."