Page 60 of The Warrior's Oath
“I’m following your lead.”
He nodded once then trotted toward the trees, his feet silent on the soft ground. They pushed deep into the woods, tracking the footprints until they diverged at a small boulder.
Nyota looked at the prints, human, Nimenni, and Raxxian. At the landing site she could make sense of them, but here? Here it was beyond her skillset.
“They go both ways. What do we do?”
Korvin cocked his head and listened a moment. “I hear something, but I am not sure what. Remain here. There is a space between this rock and the shrubbery. You will be concealed there.”
“Where are you going?”
“Do not fear, I will be back shortly. But I require a tall tree from which to get a better view of the area. We are at a disadvantage here, one I would seek to negate.”
With that he turned and jogged off into the woods, leaving Nyota on her own.
“Well, fuck,” she grumbled, then slid into the hiding place he’d shown her to wait as long as it took. “This is not how I pictured today going. Not at all.”
CHAPTERTWENTY-THREE
Nyota sat as quietly as she could for nearly fifteen minutes, nestled in her cramped hiding place, more than a little irked at Korvin’s insistence she not come with him. She understood his concern, but she wasn’t the same person he’d carried from the crashed ship. Not by a long shot.
Nyota was new and improved now.
She focused hard, forcing her ears to pick up more sounds than she was normally used to. The enhanced rune behind her ear had definitely gained extra potency from the Skrizzit’s repair job and she actually discovered she could sort of zoom in on certain sounds even better than before.
Animals, birds, the wind, all of them were slowly separating from one another as she strained her senses.
There were sounds of nature, but that was all.
“This is stupid,” she grumbled. “He shouldn’t have just left me behind like that.”
She hesitated a moment. He would be annoyed with her, even mad, perhaps, but just sitting there doing nothing, she felt useless. Helpless. And as she had just learned, her new runes were giving her abilities she hadn’t even realized she had. It made her confident, wondering what other things she could do now.
“Screw it.”
Nyota slid around the rock and back into the open. She looked at the ground in the direction Korvin had headed off following the tracks. Naturally, he had chosen the path that had Nimenni footprints.
While his own prints quickly vanished into the trees, she knew where he would have been going, and this was an obvious enough trail that even she could follow it with relative ease. She took a moment longer to really consider her actions, then made a decision.
“This shouldn’t be too hard,” she muttered to herself, then headed into the woods, following the remains of the muddy prints.
The terrain shifted from dirt to stone a few times, each of them forcing her to scour the area for where the footprints picked up again. A few times she nearly panicked, wondering if they were gone entirely. But she eventually found traces at the edge of the rocky area.
“Shifted direction,” she noted, wondering if this had been a pursuit or a natural, meandering change of course.
There was only one way to find out. That, and Korvin had surely followed the trail with far more ease than she had. He was up ahead, somewhere. All she had to do was catch up.
Nyota walked quickly, pivoting her feet as she stepped as she had observed him doing, the motion spreading her weight as she moved, quieting her footfall. Amazingly, even without actual training, it seemed to work, at least to a degree. She was nowhere near as quiet as he was, but she didn’t sound like some beast crashing through the woods.
She walked a good ten minutes when a faint rustling caught her attention. It was just ahead behind a patch of dense foliage.
“Korvin?” she quietly called out.
The sound ceased.
Nyota felt the hair on her neck stand up as she began to think maybe this was not such a good idea after all.
“Got one!” a gruff voice shouted as a meaty, green-scaled hand grabbed her arm from behind.
