At the Queen_s command

"I get the feeling, Mr. Woods, that this will be a very long trip."

The other men chuckled and bent to their paddles. Owen continued to watch the elk until it vanished around a river bend. That the creature dwarfed any similar Auropean beast impressed Owen. Its magnificence made him smile. But there was something else there, too. The tanner, and maybe even the way the Twilight People accounted for distance, seemed so primitive.

Others would take primitive to mean backward, but Owen intended a wholly different sense. Mystria seemed a land that slumbered, still young and vital. Norisle and Tharyngia had been worked long and hard. He couldn't have gone a fraction of the distance he'd traveled in either without coming across someone or at least a signpost that indicated people lived nearby.

The earliest Mystrian settlers and explorers had called the natives the Twilight People because they tended to keep to the shadows. They'd been seldom seen except at twilight, and even then only in silhouette. They were part of the land and their reticence to be seen had been explained away as their fear of the white men and their magick.

Owen suspected it was something else entirely. The Shedashee were part of the land. They lived with it, reaping its bounty, not tearing its flesh and breaking it to their will. They'd watched that behavior in the settlers and wanted nothing to do with them, thinking them evil or insane.

And greedy, to them, is insane.

That first afternoon, with nothing but the sounds of wind, water, birds, bugs, and fish leaping, made Owen realize how far he was from Norisle. Not just in miles or walks, but in the very nature of the land. Mystria wasn't a place to be broken easily, though war could do that.

And it was his mission to lay the groundwork for that war. He would do his duty for the Crown. He had no choice. War was inevitable, especially with du Malphias somewhere out there. But, if there was a way to mitigate things, a way to save Mystria, he would seek that out, too.

If he did anything less, his failure would haunt him for the rest of his life.

Chapter Seventeen

May 6, 1763

Grand Falls

Bounty, Mystria

T hey continued up the river another four days through country that slowly rose toward the mountains in the west. They encountered rapids around which they had to portage. They brought the canoe to shore, unloaded it, carried it up around the rapids, then reloaded their gear and proceeded on upriver.

Travel was not arduous. They started out at dawn, would rest for a couple of hours during the heat of the day, then push on until dusk. Kamiskwa proved adept at hand-catching fish-what Nathaniel called "tickling"-and Nathaniel shot a tom turkey on the second day out. They roasted some of it, smoked the rest in a makeshift smokehouse, and didn't even think about hunting until they'd finished the bird.

Kamiskwa cleaned and plucked the turkey, and found a use for the various parts. The feathers went into the bag with the wurm scales. The innards got tossed into the river for fish, and after leaving bones out overnight for insects to clean, he collected them up too. Owen presumed they'd be ground for bonemeal and used for fertilizer.

He'd watched Kamiskwa work. The Altashee used the smaller of two knives. Each had an antler handle and a black, glassy stone blade. Though only three inches long, the butchering knife's blade had a triangular shape and two very sharp edges. The point where blade and antler met had leather wrapped around it so he couldn't see how it was joined.

He suspected magick.

Owen squatted next to the Altashee. "What is your knife made of?"

Kamiskwa smiled, never looking up from his work. "Your Prince calls it obsidian. In my tongue it is chadanak. It is 'shadow that cuts.' It is traded from far away and very valuable."

"Same stone as the blade on your warclub?"

The Altashee nodded. "I am afforded it by my rank."

"Yes, you are a Prince." It struck Owen as very odd in that moment that he, a common officer, and Nathaniel, a commoner, were being served by nobility.

Is this place so strange that the natural order of things is overturned?

Nathaniel laughed from where he was building a tiny smokehouse with river stones. "Now Captain Strake, don't be getting your knickers in a knot. Being a prince among the Shedashee ain't exactly like being a prince in Norisle."

"No?"

"See, the Twilight People set a store by magick. They're much better at it than we are. The stronger you are, the better they like it. Tend to want strong men to breed with their strong women. Among them, the child belongs to the mother's family, but there's a bit of sharing. If a warrior got a child on one of Kamiskwa's sisters, it would be expected that he'd return the favor."

Kamiskwa nodded. "It keeps peace between the tribes."