There were many tiny streams. Once or twice she stopped, thinking she had heard something moving off in the woods among the recurrent bird noise. Once she looked shoreward between two groves to see a winged figure standing upon a rocky point, ready to dive into the sea. She blinked, and it was gone. It had not looked real, even at first, she told herself. Sun dazzle and weariness and being alone caused people to see things. The Noor were well aware of that. “Steppe visions,” they called them. Well, these would be “River visions.” When the sun had fallen before her, she turned to put it at her back, moving closer to the shore for the return trip.
Her mind was set on the outline of the boat, the stack of leafy branches she had placed over the fire. So it was she almost passed her campsite by, not recognizing it. The boat was shattered, great holes bashed through the planking as though by some heavy missile, a great spear, perhaps, thrust and withdrawn, thrust and withdrawn again. The fire was scattered into gray ash. The stilt-lizard meat was gone. All around the site and in the stream lay small blobs of guano, white and reeking.
Their footprints crosshatched the shoreline, coming out of nothing. Fliers. They had ruined her boat. They had stolen her meat. They had fouled her campsite and the stream. Two of them, she thought, who had walked side by side to do their hateful damage.
Worse, they had laid a trap for her. She put out her hand to coil some of the rope. She had almost touched it when a familiar glisten on the rough twist caught her eye. She put her hands behind her and bent forward, peering. A Tear of Viranel. Oh, hadn’t the Noor learned long and long ago to watch for that glisten as they walked the steppes? The Tears could not kill them, but they made nasty sores where they touched, sores that were painful for a long time and took weeks to heal. Tears would grow anywhere, sometimes here, sometimes there. The Noor spread wood ashes on any patches they found, but the danger was always there. Medoor cursed, briefly, suddenly aware of danger from an active intelligence, out there, somewhere. They hadn’t seen her except at a distance. They didn’t know she was a Noor.
There were other Tears at the site. Not many she could find in the failing light. The destroyers had not bothered to rip the canvas cover away from the boat; the blankets were untouched. She took them. The light was too poor to do more than that. Tomorrow she would return to see what else could be salvaged. She stepped carefully away from the place, watching where she put her feet, scraping them again and again through the dry sand to remove any Tear that might have clung to her shoes.
Then she was back among the trees, looking up through the boughs into an empty, amber sky. They had spied on her, without doubt, seeing her easily on that barren beach. Now perhaps she could return the favor. Medoor Babji’s lips parted in a snarl, an expression her mother would have recognized. When darkness came, she was well hidden in a copse of thick foliage, well wrapped against the night’s chill, reasonably well fed on the fruit she had gathered during the day, and perhaps unreasonably set upon vengeance.
Inside her, shut away, someone grieved anew for Thrasne, for the near-kin, for all old, familiar, and much loved things. She had no way to repair the boat. Without it—without it her whole life might well be lived upon this shore. She shuddered with tears that she would not allow herself to shed, summoning anger instead.
In the earliest light of morning she went to the beach and salvaged all the rope she could lay hands on as well as all the canvas. They had been fairly clever in placing the Tears where she might have been expected to put her hands. She dragged her salvage through the ashes of her fire again and again, meantime protecting her hands with canvas strips cut from the boat cover. She would not cut the sail. Not yet. Morning and calm showed only four planks of the boat actually splintered. Perhaps, somehow, she would think of a way to restore them.