Ravenwild: Book 01 - Ravenwild (93 page)

A voice from behind him told him that at least one of those guarding him was aware of his having awakened.

“You sure gave us a run for the money,” said the voice from over his shoulder. “I hope it doesn’t make you too tough. Well, not to worry. The Humans and the nice looking Troll will probably last us today, and the general may decide to save your sorry carcass for tomorrow. We wouldn’t want to let good food go to waste, now would we?”

Sliphen Wedor ’eum came around from behind the tree and sneered down at Maxilius. “Tell me, Troll, what ever made you think you could escape capture by your Emperor’s army? You of all Trolls should know how unrelenting we are in tracking down traitors. Did you honestly think we would turn away? Forget about you? I must say, you must be a persuasive bloke, because the ones you converted a few days ago seemed quite taken by your cause, right up until we had them for dinner of course.” He laughed harshly.

When Maxilius declined to engage him, Sliphen delivered a vicious kick to his ribs.

“Now there I go doing a dumb thing,” he said. “The general will be most upset with me if I spoil the meat.” He laughed again and moved off towards the general’s tent. Three other Trolls, all dressed in full battle gear, moved out of the shadows of the trees to stand watch over him. These did not look like they were the least bit interested in converting to his cause.

Forrester Ragamund dove to the ground and forcefully pulled Jacqueline down with him. Cinnamon had to dive hastily away to prevent being crushed under his massive frame. He quickly crawled a few feet off of the trail and up into the trees, pulling her along with him. With one eye on the trail and one eye on the tell-all at all times, he had seen Orie’s frantic waving. He asked her in a soft whisper if she was all right. He saw her nod, “Yes” and focused again on the tell-all. He felt her shivering with terror beside him and wrapped her in a warm hug. Orie was making his way slowly, silently back towards them. Too late, Forrester heard Cinnamon’s warning screech as two sets of Troll hands locked around his arms. He had crawled right to them!

They jerked him viciously to his feet, and one put a dagger to his neck. “Make a move, and I will kill you right here,” came the terse warning. He knew better than to resist. Tempted though he was, he knew it would surely be the end of Jacqueline. They would kill her immediately to prevent her possible escape while they fought him. So he did not move while they stripped him of his weapons.

He wasted not a second in self-recrimination for having walked right into their hands. Instead, he concentrated on their every move. He studied them. He wanted to know who was smart. Who was not. Who was skilled with weapons. Who was less so. The biggest one was clumsy. He would die first. The next biggest was quick. Agile. His movements were fluid. Coordinated. He would be skilled in fighting. The smaller two appeared bored. Uninterested. They lacked focus.

“Let the girl go,” he said. “She is just a peasant girl, and I was bringing her back to her home. It’s not far from here. She has no part in this war.”

Jacqueline’s eyes grew wide with fear as one of them reached down and poked her in the belly with a giant finger. “Let her go?” he chortled. “I am sure the general will want
her
for dessert.”

He looked Forrester in the eye.

“We know who you are, Forrester Wiley Ragamund. You are an escapee, and you are a traitor to the Troll nation, and you will die for this. You will not like the death. It will be slow. There will be many screams.”

She wriggled backwards until the one who had poked her grasped her by the front of her jerkin and forced her up. Giving her a rough kick in the backside, he shouted, “Move!”

As they marched up the trail, they came within ten feet of Orie. He slowed his breathing and tried to hush the hammering of his heart as they passed by. He was tempted to flee when the squad of four stopped right in front of him, but wisely held his position. One of the Trolls lifted his snout. “Do you smell that?” he asked.

“I do.” answered another. The other two nodded in agreement. “We’ll find him,” said the one who had spoken first. “He’s out there. We’ll find him.”

They continued on their way, heading north. In about an hour they entered the camp, where Maxilius and his sister, Daria, Ryan, and Gracie were all still tied up.

“Ryan! Gracie!”
shouted Jacqueline.

“Jacqueline!”
they answered.
“You’re alive!”

Interestingly, the Trolls made no effort to restrain her as she raced to the tree to which Gracie and Ryan were tied. She buried herself in their crude embrace, which was basically that they leaned in on her as best they could.

One of the Trolls walked over to them, removed a stout cord from a pouch on his weapons belt, and said, “Well, you all seem to know each other. Enjoy the time you have together. There isn’t much left.”

Forrester was led away for questioning while Jacqueline was tied to the tree. Then they left them be.

It was an unlikely reunion, these three friends from a different world now lashed to a common tree and facing a future as uncertain as it gets. For a while none could speak. Jacqueline sat and stared straight ahead. Gracie started to say something and was surprised when Jacqueline responded with a loud “Shhh!” She glanced at Ryan who shrugged and wagged his head, “No” slightly. His expression seemed to say, “She’s in shock. Let her be for a while.”

Then the screams started from the tent into which Forrester had been led. They were horrific, long wails that frightened the children to the bone. Ryan and Gracie kept glancing at each other and back to Jacqueline. Somehow she seemed to be tuning it all out. Rather than fear, the look on her face was more that of a student working on a complicated homework assignment.

The screams stopped as quickly as they had started, and Forrester was led out of the tent. He was limping badly and offered no resistance as he was thrown down and lashed to a tree about ten feet from both theirs and that of Maxilius, who had been tied to the same tree as his sister. His head nodded forward. Blood could be seen dripping from his right ear.

“Forrester,” said Ryan gently, “are you all right?”

Forrester, in way too much pain to consider answering any questions, nodded his head slightly up and down, and while it was not a convincing answer to the question that he was, in fact, all right, this simple gesture did offer a ray of hope that he might in due time recover. The problem was, time was something out of which they were quickly running.

Jacqueline, meanwhile, was having a running conversation with Cinnamon. Taking advantage of her newly acquired talent of communicating in the way of the Wolves, she had already learned that both her beloved cat and Orie were alive and unhurt and that Orie was working on a plan to rescue them all. The problem at the moment was that while the Trolls could not see him, they could smell him, and all of his efforts so far had been directed towards avoiding capture himself.

“Have you been able to reach Brutus or Patriachus?” she thought.

“No dear,” she answered. “Way too far. But I will continue to try. You try too. Try hard. I have to go now. I need to find your brother. Don’t worry. We’ll get you out of this. Have faith. I’m only a thought away. I love you.”

“I love you too, Cinnamon,” thought Jacqueline. “Please hurry.”

“I will.” Her last thought sounded in Jacqueline’s mind, falling off into a vast void of silence.

Jacqueline leaned over to Gracie and whispered directly into her ear. “I just now talked to Cinnamon. Orie’s okay. He’s going to rescue us. Tell Ryan. We need to be ready when he comes. You won’t be able to see him. He’s invisible.”

Gracie looked at her as though she had completely lost her mind. “Cinnamon?” she whispered back. “Your cat?” then, “He’s invisible?”

Jacqueline nodded, “Yes,” sharply, and gestured abruptly that she should pass on the message without delay, whispering, “It’s a long story. I’ll explain later. Pass it on.”

She did, and Ryan looked as taken aback by the message as Gracie had. He did nod, however.

Orie considered his next move. Something his father had said to him, when he was younger, had saved his life not five minutes earlier. ‘When you’re in the woods, if you’re ever being chased by a bear, climb a small tree. They can climb a big one every time, but they can’t get the necessary purchase around the trunk of a small one to climb it.’ Evidently it was the same with Trolls, so that’s what he had done when he found them bearing down on him from four different directions.

So now, he found himself standing on the slender branches of a tree with a girth of about eighteen inches, some twenty feet above four of them. They milled about below him. All could be seen sniffing the air this way and that.

“Where did he go?” asked one.

Nobody answered.

“I say we go back to camp and tell the commander that there was nothing here after all. If we tell him there was something here and we bring back nothing, it ends up being our turn in the cook pots.”

“I agree,” said another. “How can we be expected to return with something that was never here?”

The remaining Trolls grunted their assent and they all walked away. Suspecting it might be a ruse, Orie waited a good long time before sliding down the tree up which he had shinnied, dropping silently to the forest floor. He checked his sword immediately to be sure it was free in its scabbard.

He spied their tracks as soon they left the main trail, and following their footprints back to the camp was easy enough, thanks to all the time he had spent learning to track game with his father in the woods as a youngster.

When he could hear the camp sounds, he made sure he swung around it so that the wind was in his face. Now he knew they could smell him, and he knew he had but one chance to pull this off.

He studied the site through the forest vegetation from about twenty feet away.
There they were!
Directly in front of him. Off to the left was a tent, undoubtedly the officer’s tent, and off to the right, in the distance, he could see a number of Trolls setting up large cook pots. Several brought armloads of wood, dumping these in large stacks close to where the fires would be. He tried to swallow, but found he had no spit. He looked down and noticed a large pile of animal spoor, probably Troll or, perhaps, bear. He reached down and grabbed a handful of it, smearing it slowly all over himself. He was careful to not leave out an inch. He was hoping that this might protect him from his one glaring weakness, his smell. As he finished, he heard a slight rustle off to his right. His right hand dropped to the hilt of his sword, which he started to ease from its scabbard. It was Cinnamon, who tiptoed to his side. He leaned down close to her and rubbed her all over with the terrible stuff. She rolled her eyes as if to say, “I suppose,” but did not attempt to move away. Then, slowly, they began to inch forward.

“Jacqueline,”
thought Cinnamon, “
We are right behind you. Twenty feet. Get ready.”

Jacqueline hastily whispered this news to Ryan and Gracie, who both nodded.

Orie looked at Cinnamon. This was going to be tough. No question about it. They might get close enough to sever the ropes that bound the six captives, but there was little, if any, chance that they would be able to escape from this assemblage of some twenty Trolls by outrunning them. And they would be essentially weaponless. But a one in a million shot was better than the certain death that awaited them if he did not act now. So they kept moving forward, an inch at a time, until he and Cinnamon were positioned in the forest scrub behind the very tree to which Gracie, Ryan, and Jacqueline were bound. Close enough to the three Trolls that stood guard over them, Orie could hear their breathing. One leaned to the other and said, “You stink. Go wash your backside. I can’t stand to be near you.”

“It’s not me,” said the other. “I thought it was you.”

Cinnamon communicated their position to Jacqueline, warning her to not look their way. She, in turn, whispered this news to Ryan and Gracie, who each sat up a little straighter and prepared to bolt.

Then a very strange thing happened.

A Wolf, an Agden Wolf for sure judging by its size, blasted out of the woods and seized one of the guards by the neck, snapping it like a pencil. The second Troll gasped and went to draw his sword. Cinnamon raced up the tree and gave a strong leap, landing on his head. Claws bared, she tore viciously at his eyes, leaving him blind and shrieking in pain, then leapt away to safety before he had a chance to reach up to fling her off. Orie sprang forward and slashed the leather bindings of Ryan, Gracie, and Jacqueline. Shoving a dagger into the hands of both Gracie and Ryan, he withdrew an arrow and nocked it, firing it with deadly accuracy into the face of the one remaining guard, who had drawn his sword and squared off