Wild Blood (Book 7) by Anne Logston Page B

riverbank, even Cyril eager to stretch his legs after the long wagon ride. Poking in the rushes at the river’s edge, Ria saw a length of what looked like rope tied to a stake driven into the bank and trailing into the water. She nudged Cyril.
    “What’s that?” she asked, pointing.
    Cyril pulled on the rope, eventually drawing to light a sort of woven basket of willow switches.
    “It’s a fish trap,” he said. “The elves must have set it. It’s too far from the city.”
    “Then there are elves here,” Ria said, delighted. “We’ve come around most of the forest edge. I thought they’d all gone away or something.”
    Cyril gave a short chuckle of derision.
    “Where would they go?” he said. “A whole forest full of elves? They’re not like the elves in the eastern cities. They wouldn’t fit in anywhere else, and they don’t know anything outside their own forest. There’s nowhere else they could go, even if they wanted to.” He glanced toward the forest, then gasped, pointing. “Look!”
    Lord Sharl and Lady Rivkah were riding away from the forest as fast as the terrified horses could run. Ria could see what looked like flies buzzing out of the forest after them; then Ria realized that what she saw must be arrows. Guards rode out to meet them, but Lord Sharl and Lady Rivkah were fortunately already out of range of the deadly missiles. One of the guards, more heavily armored, risked the lethal rain to ride in closer and retrieve one of the arrows.
    Lord Sharl examined the feathered fletching and the painted band on the arrow shaft and shook his head grimly.
    “This isn’t a Brightwater arrow,” he said. “It looks like Blue-eyes to me. Gods know I’ll never forget the arrows we pulled out of ourselves and our horses and—” He glanced at Ria and did not finish whatever it was he would have said. “That’s bad news. It means that the Blue-eyes must have claimed a good part of the border lands, as I’d feared.
    The Brightwaters might have dealt with us peaceably. The Blue-eyes will never let us close enough to be heard, no matter what gestures of friendliness we make, and getting past those lands to even try to reach Rowan is going to be difficult.”
    Ria could see that her foster parents were sorely disappointed by this turn of events, but there was nothing to be done. They quietly returned to the wagons and continued along the river.
    Once they rounded the southern edge of the forest and turned back to the northwest, Ria caught her first sight of the city of Allanmere. Again, she was disappointed. The size of the wall indicated a large city indeed—larger even than Cielman, it appeared—but the wall was crumbled and ruined in many places, the great stone gates fallen into disrepair. Ria could not see much over the wall, but the few structures she could see through the crumbled gaps were fallen in and roofless. Ria remembered from the histories how the city had been bombarded with boulders and fireballs by the barbarian army before the wall had finally collapsed in places to admit the invaders. She shivered. Had they come this far only to live in a ruin?
    “It’s not as bad as it looks,” Lord Sharl said kindly, riding beside Ria. “A good part of the inner keep has been rebuilt. Most of what you’re seeing now were barracks and guild halls. The west and north sides of the city are in much better shape, and the wall’s almost entirely intact along the river and the swamp. The south and east sides of the city were the worst hit, and those buildings will be the last repaired, too. Most of the people moving into the city want houses nearer the market at the center.”
    “How many people are in the city now?” Ria asked dubiously. Could anyone live in a city as tumbledown as this one appeared? There was certainly nobody to be seen—no, surely those tiny moving dots atop solid sections of the wall were guards, or possibly stonemasons.
    “In the city itself, somewhere between a thousand