The woman said bitterly, "For Orbs' sake, at least carry me in some fashion that won't expose quite so much of me to the thorns!" She paused and added as an after-thought, "You mudhead!"
He hitched her around and held her curled to his chest, faintly conscious of the smooth body, but concentrating on protecting her from harm; he thought suddenly that he was treating her as if she'd been a ruck woman, instead of one of the gentry, the loathed and feared squirarchy. Was he putting too much importance on the physical attractions that had made him take her?
Jerran was leading him now along a tunnel-like passage of twined, arched shrubbery that made them stoop low. "It'd help if you walked, Lady," he said.
"You may not have noticed it, miner, but I have on just one slipper, and it doesn't have a heel." She scowled up at him. "And when I say one slipper, I mean that's all."
"You look fine," he grinned. "No silk and satin looks as attractive as your own pelt, my lady."
They traveled for upwards of half an hour, sometimes down forest lanes that allowed free passage, other times through thickets that ripped their flesh and slowed them to a swearing, sweating crawl. Always there was a screen above them of natural growth, shielding them from the buttoned sky.
At last before them there opened a huge amphitheater of the forest, a hollow with gently sloping sides, covered by a gigantic roof of twined willow wands and twigs. Jerran said, gesturing upward, "That's the biggest piece of camouflage we ever did! The top of it is planted with grass and scrub, rooted in square sods of earth cut from the woods' floor in many places. From above it looks like a round hill rising out of the trees. Took us a year to perfect it."
"Jerran, who is 'us' and—"
"Why, lad, the rebels."
Revel stared at the little man. Could Jerran, the straw-colored stringy fellow he'd worked beside all these years, the quiet one who'd preached serenity and dragged him out of a hundred brawls, could he be a rebel? Fantastic....