Ravenwild: Book 01 - Ravenwild (85 page)

“Oh, this is all too much,” she thought. “How could any of this be?”

She remembered distinctly the day that they had made it to the border, the howling winds tossing them violently around in the snow. Then, that’s right, she remembered now, it had gone precipitously calm… and there had been something else, something that, if she could remember it, might explain these oddities. But she couldn’t.

She finished her apple, tossed the core, and continued along.

She walked for the remainder of the afternoon, setting up a crude lean-to well off the main trail as dusk approached. Flopping down on her bedroll, she was about to drift off when she heard the screams.

It was a woman’s voice, crying out in desperation. She sprang to her feet and listened carefully to determine the precise direction from which it was coming.

“
Noooo, please … ”
the voice pleaded. “Take the cow. Take the goats. Leave my children! Please! No! N … ”

As the last word got cut off, she knew that the woman doing the screaming had suffered some sort of terrible ill fate. At least she had a good fix on the direction. She knew if she went straight back out to the roadway she would find her, assuming she was among the living. She crouched low and slowly made her way back in the direction from which she had come, checking her sword more than once on the way to be sure it was free in its scabbard. It was night now, but bright with the illumination of the two Inam'Ra moons, both of which were full, and she had no trouble finding the young woman that lay facedown in the dirt alongside the road. She listened for a long time before she did anything, to be sure that whoever had done this was no longer about. Hearing nothing, she dragged her out of the ditch and ten feet up into the surrounding woods. She noticed she was breathing, and her skin was warm. So far, so good. She tried shaking her, but did not call out to her for fear of being overheard. Creeping back to the area where she had set up her little camp, she gathered up all of her things and then moved silently back to where she had left her. She had intended to soak the woman’s head with cold water from her waterskin in an attempt to get her to wake up, but when she got back to where she had left her, she was already sitting up, her back against a tree, holding her head and groaning loudly.

“Shhh,” whispered Doreen, squatting down beside her and putting her arms around her. “Hush now. If they hear you, they’ll come back. Shhh. Quiet now. It’ll be alright. We’ll get them back for you. Shhh.”

The young woman, obviously beside herself with anguish, started noticeably at Doreen’s approach, but calmed down quickly, enough to take a sip of water from the waterskin.

“My name is Doreen,” she said quietly, offering her hand.

“Crystal,” said the other, accepting it limply.

“What happened?” asked Doreen, “Who took your children?”

“Towners,” said Crystal. “To sell to the Trolls. I might have known it would happen. Towners are rotten, clean clear through. I hate them.

“They would sell their own mothers for a promise.” She reached out and took Doreen’s hands, squeezing them hard. “We have to get them back,” she said. “We have to.”

“How many children are there?” asked Doreen.

Crystal seemed detached, disconnected, almost as if she didn’t hear her. “Oh … two,” she finally answered, lucid for a fleeting moment and then slipping quickly back into her impassive state.

“Keep it simple,” thought Doreen. “Keep it simple.”

“How old are they?”

It took Crystal several seconds to answer her as she rolled her head all this way and that, chewing at her fingertips and looking wildly all around them in terror.

“How old are they?” Doreen repeated.

“The boy is eight, the girl, nine.”

“Tell you what,” said Doreen, “first we’ll have something quick to eat. They’ll be watching for you to come after them. We’ll give them a little time to let their guard down. Don’t worry. We’ll get your kids back, and your animals too. How many of them are there?”

“Animals?”

“No, Towners.”

“Not many. Four or five.”

She seemed to focus a little better at the mention of something to eat.

“Are they armed?”

“No. Knives maybe. No swords or bows or anything. They are scrappers, though. We’ll have a fight on our hands, that’s for sure.”

Doreen opened her pack and began placing food out. Crystal helped herself without waiting for Doreen to finish, immediately cramming her mouth full of anything in front of her. She ate more like an animal than a Human, smacking loudly and grunting the entire time. Doreen raised her eyebrows slightly. “Go slow,” she cautioned her. “It looks like maybe you haven’t eaten much lately. We can’t have you getting cramps.”

Crystal ignored her and continued to gorge, forcing Doreen to repack anything she had not already eaten.

Cinching her pack back up, she walked back out to the road. With the two Inam'Ra moons, it was easy to make out the trail the Towners had left.

They began to follow them. Doreen figured that at some point they would camp and bed down for the night, and that’s when they would take them. Sure enough, in a couple of hours, they heard the Towners whooping it up ahead of them. In a few more minutes, they could see the light of their campfire. Doreen pulled Crystal off the roadway, and they came up with a plan. They would wait until the Towners had settled in for the night, when they would undoubtedly post guards. Doreen would take care of the guards. Crystal would circle around to the back and cut her children free. If they were able to sneak away without waking the rest of them up, that would be best, but if not, Doreen asked her if she was capable of killing if she had to. Crystal assured her that she was, but only if she absolutely had to.

Doreen mulled this over. It was one thing to offer a helping hand. It was another to put her life on the line, and if this young woman couldn’t do what was necessary …

Doreen made sure she understood that this was a case where they certainly might have to, and while the thought of killing wasn’t something that she relished, if it happened in the course of rescuing a child that a Towner had kidnapped to sell to the Trolls, it really wouldn’t bother her, either.

So they waited, the early spring warmth fading quickly to the chill of a late winter evening. Just as they had thought, soon after the hollering and hooting stopped, two guards appeared in the moonlight. They didn’t look to be much more than children themselves, but by the way they were positioned, with their arms folded tightly against their chests, and scanning constantly up and down the road, it was clear they meant business. Doreen drew her sword as she waved for Crystal to start moving in. She never got a chance to use it as a huge set of arms wrapped themselves around her, and the deepest voice she had ever heard warned her that if she struggled, she would die without ever seeing the sun come up again. Two more Trolls appeared in front of her, one dangling Crystal out in front of him like a rabbit. Her head hung in front of her at an awkward angle. The brute had snapped her neck!

Doreen’s eyes widened in terror as the Towners strolled over from their camp.

“Wow,” said one. “We were trying for one, and we ended up with two. That should earn us some more, yes?” He looked expectantly at the Troll holding Doreen.

“Same price,” he said. “Not a mark more. Don’t ask again.”

He fastened irons around Doreen’s wrists behind her back, removed all of her weapons, and tossed them into the woods. Her sword in his hands looked more like a toy than a weapon. He pointed down the road, saying, “March,” and gave her a swift kick in the thigh to let her know he wasn’t about to wait too long.

The blow landed with a heavy thud and propelled her along, but it surprised her that it didn’t hurt much. At all, really. She decided it must be because she was badly shaken.

They walked for the rest of the night, stopping into a crude roadside shelter as the sun’s early morning rays were starting to streak the dawn sky with bands of color. She was given some water to drink and some thick gruel in a crude bowl. Then she was allowed to relieve herself, after which she was shoved roughly into a barred enclosure equipped with irons into which she was fastened, and loops, through which four of the Trolls passed long carrying-poles. She was hoisted onto their enormous shoulders and carried for the next several days, now stopping only in the evening, where the ritual of the day before repeated itself. She was allowed to drink her water, eat her gruel, and relieve herself, only to be shoved back into the box and chained in.

Despite the fact that she could easily peer through the wooden poles that made up the walls of her cage, it surprised her that she recognized nothing of the countryside through which they traveled. The mountains were completely different in appearance than she remembered when traveling north with Jared and Diana. She began to wonder if her mind was failing.

On the morning of her sixth (or was it her ninth?) day of travel, she awakened when her cage was set down at the front gate of a walled facility of some sort. In a few minutes the gate opened, and she noticed that it looked like a fort, or maybe a prison. Trolls in dirty, shabby uniforms wandered all about, most appearing as though they were looking for something to do. Her cage was once more heaved skyward.

She was carried through a small courtyard and set down again at the corner door of a building of rough-sawn lumber. While she was being hauled out of it, the door to the building opened. A Troll, whose uniform was slightly less dirty and tattered than those of the others, approached. Squinting in the bright midmorning sunlight, he eyed her up and down while her four handlers snapped to attention.

“This is she?” he asked.

“Yes, Sir.”

“And you’re sure she is the one?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Very well,” said the captain. “Take her to her cell in the back. She is still in irons. Good. Lock her in her cell and leave them on her. We will take no chances with this one. That’s it. Good. Careful now. She is not to be injured or roughed up in any way.”

“Excuse me,” she said, as two of her handlers grasped her by the arms, and the other two took up positions in front of and behind her. “What is your name? Where are we? Where are you taking me, and why?”

The Troll in front of her raised his hand, looking like he was going to slap her down. She braced for the blow that never landed.

“Stay that arm,” ordered the captain, who walked stiffly over to her. Then, out of the side of his mouth, he breathed, “Are you out of your head?

“So this is the one,” he muttered, looking like he was trying as hard as he could to not make eye contact with her.

“Never mind my name,” he answered. “You will not be alive long enough for it to matter to you. Suffice it to say that I am a captain, and ranking officer of this garrison. We are taking you to a holding cell pending your execution in the morning.”

Doreen started to panic. “Why are you executing me?” she cried. “What have I done to deserve that?”

“Done?” he asked. “Done? What do you mean, done? You haven’t done anything. You are Human. We are Trolls. We eat Humans. You are here. We need food. That is all. Take her away.”

They led her to a cell in the rear of the garrison. It was in another building much like the first one she had seen, although smaller. She was thrown inside, arms in irons behind her. The large oak door was slammed behind her and locked. She peered out through a grate and noticed that two of her escorts had stayed behind with her, standing guard right outside of her door. Something was very strange about all of this. First of all, why had she been allowed to live at all? Why hadn’t they killed her back in the woods with the Towners? Well, that much was simple. She was meat, and fresh meat was better than spoiled. Secondly, why had they carried her all this way? Lastly, why did they need two Trolls to stand guard over her? She was shackled and locked securely in a cell. They seemed almost afraid of her. She was sure of it. The captain, anyway. But why? And what was that business about her being, ‘the one’? The one what?

Chapter 29

A low rumble of thunder growled its way across the skyline while storm clouds grew like gigantic mushrooms in the western sky. The waves of the Western Sea began to build, slowly at first, then faster and faster until they reached monstrous heights, driven by the offshore winds. And the rain, which started out as a mild-tempered mist-drizzle, turned itself into fat drops that seemed almost reluctant to break apart on landing, then changed again into sheet upon sheet of driving torrents that seemed to want to drown the very land itself.

The lookout, watching from his hiding place in the beach scrub, hardly dared to blink as he awaited the signal. It had to be today. It was the perfect day, and everyone, back in the cavern where the Mexyl Wyn still lay hidden, knew it.
There it was
! A solitary flaming arrow, shot from the shore to the north, traversed the sky in a magnificent arc before disappearing into the enraged surf. “In the name of the Old One,” he quietly offered to the winds as he walked slowly towards the secret cave entrance, glancing all about to be sure there were no enemy eyes upon him.

To the north, crouched together in the weather-madness, the Ravenwild troops awaited the order to attack. Hidden within the insanity of the maelstrom it finally came, screamed first by Thargen to the line-commanders, who screamed it to the lieutenants, who screamed it to the sergeants, who screamed it to the men, who screamed it to each other as they made their wild charge. The Trolls, sleeping soundly in their tents while weathering the storm, never heard them coming over the riotous noise of the wind and thunder and were caught totally unaware as the Human, Elf, and Dwarf soldiers slashed their way through canvas and hide to get at the enemy within. Troll after Troll died while searching for a weapon, any weapon, to wield against their assailants. Some did manage to arm themselves, chasing after their attackers who fled as quickly as they had come, but most of these were cut down as soon as they made it out into the open by the bowmen, Gnomes all, who had been placed in strategic locations along the escape routes. Each fired several shots, most of which struck true, then quickly fell back to new positions.