by Peter Plasse
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 Cinn
amon. 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
to face the Wolf. It struck him right in the eye and he went down.
Ryan and Gracie covered the short span to Maxilius, Daria, and Forrester in a matter of seconds, slicing them free.
Orie wasted no time in gathering the dead Trolls’ weapons, which he tossed with a shout to Forrester and Maxilius.
Daria, once free, grabbed up Jacqueline and raced away into the woods. A deafening thought boomed into Jacqueline’s mind from the mind of their rescuer. “Wrong way! Wrong way! Head West! West! Get to the River.”
Jacqueline shrieked this to Daria, who bent the direction of her frantic run to accommodate the order. Simply reversing it would have meant charging directly back into the hostilities, which she was not about to do.
Forrester Ragamund, Maxilius Bravarus, and the great Wolf held the onrushing Trolls at bay. “Go Ryan! Go Gracie! Follow Jacqueline!” hollered Orie as he stood his ground, now concentrating on unleashing his arrows at the officer’s tent, taking out every Troll as quickly as they emerged. The first was a lieutenant, who thought that perhaps a fight had broken out amongst the soldiers. Such fights were not uncommon among Troll warriors in the field. He was casually holding a flask of ale and sporting a look of mild confusion when he first stuck his head out, which turned immediately to awe and disbelief when Orie’s first shot struck him in the center of his chest. Next came Sliphen, holding what looked like an iron poker that glowed red-hot. He never had time to say a word as he too went to his knees, an arrow suddenly protruding from his gut. The last was General Vladimir Dumfe. He looked upon the absolute bedlam in front of him and, showing the true cowardice of his basic nature, frantically turned around to retreat back into the tent. Too late. Orie’s next arrow struck him in the center of his back, and his last one in the butt as he lay there unmoving.
Now, the Trolls that had been gathering wood and tending the cook fires assumed they were under some kind of massive attack and raced about to secure weapons. This diversion allowed the first true opportunity for the rest to escape. “Go Orie! Go!” bellowed Forrester as he and Maxilius Bravarus felled Troll after onrushing Troll. Rather than retreat to safety, they took the fight directly to their onrushing captors.
Maxilius Bravarus was a study in fighting efficiency. He had made it to the rank of Commander not solely on the virtue of his intelligence, but fighting prowess as well, and in this deadly game of warfare, on this day, there was no better, as he gave it everything he had, felling Troll after Troll after Troll. “Follow the others. We’ll be right behind you!” Forrester shouted to Orie, who held on tight to his bow and sprinted after Ryan and Gracie. The Wolf ran along directly behind him, turning back every once in a while to challenge some of the Trolls who had by now made it over to the fray from the far side of the camp. They were clearly terrified of the animal, with her fangs bared and her growl deep and threatening. The invisible boy and the great Wolf worked in concert, the Wolf’s confrontations always forcing the onrushing Trolls to pause, giving him the perfect opportunities to make easy shots. In a matter of minutes, all the Trolls that were chasing them lay dead or dying on the ground. It was a good thing too, as he was down to just a few remaining arrows.
Daria pulled up, allowing Gracie, Ryan, and Orie to catch up. In the distance the combat raged on, the sounds of bellowing, the cries of pain, and the clashing of the swords drifting to them through the trees.
In between breaths that came quick and harsh, Orie said, “You … go … on. I’m … going back for … Forrester.”
“Orie, you can’t!” cried Jacqueline. “You’ll be killed. And how will you find us?”
“Go,” said Orie. “I am not leaving him.”
“I’ll stay with him,” thought Cinnamon, the message of which was heard by both Jacqueline and their Wolf rescuer. “If I am with him, you can guide us to you.”
“We’ll stay too,” said Ryan. Gracie nodded her agreement without hesitation.
“No,” said Orie. “You all stay together. You have no weapons, and the ones the Trolls use are way too heavy for you. You all stay together. Go now.” He looked directly into the eyes of the great Wolf and saw unmistakable intelligence. He also saw confusion over the voice that spoke to them from the nothingness. “Thank you,” he said. “Now go. Keep them safe. Get them far away from here.” Jacqueline translated.
He turned and began his trek back into the lion’s den, his footfalls registering as subtle indentations on the forest floor.
The only sound was that of the King and his second conversing.
“Sire,” said Thargen, “you know I will always do as ordered by you. But, having said this, I would be remiss if I did not express to you my concern over the wisdom of removing me from the front.”
They were sitting alone behind the closed door of the same house in Utt from which Rolan had exited an hour earlier before addressing the Ravenwild troops. Andar Gall was meeting in the next house over with all of the officers and squad leaders to review, and set into motion, the plan for the trap that he had spent the last year of his life preparing for the enemy. He had given it his all, using hundreds of Gnomes who had labored for month after grueling month on the excavations. None of the vast fortune that he and Isandora had accumulated as a result of all the years they had poured their hearts and souls into the Inn, and other business concerns, was left, and he didn’t care a whit. No fortune in this life mattered to him any more. What mattered was avenging her murder, and this was to be that day or he would die in the attempt. He frankly didn’t care either way. Part of him had died with her that day …
Thargen continued. “The Troll horde will be on us in a matter of hours.” He paused and cleared his voice. They should have been here long ago, which undoubtedly means that they have been met by their reinforcements from the north for the counterattack. To be sure, if all goes as planned, it will be the most decisive victory to date in our efforts against them. But, as you know, the best of strategies can come apart in a matter of moments once the fighting starts, and if it were to go badly for us, for whatever reason, our cause would be best served were I here to help with the fallback plan. In truth, My Lord, where I should be, at this precise moment, is next door with Andar Gall. And directly involved in the planning. He is a great Gnome. Of this there is no question. But he is not a military man.”
Rolan sighed wearily. He knew his second in command was right. But this was his daughter, presently a few houses away and fuming bitterly at the fact that she was essentially under house arrest while her father finalized the plan as to how to get her as far away as he could from the impending conflict. He stood, crossed the room, and stared into the empty fireplace. He wondered when the last time it had been lit. When, if ever, a family had gathered around the warmth of the flames and exchanged pleasantries about their day …
“You are right of course,” he said. “But having said that, my decision is final. This is my only daughter, and she has told me that she loves this man. For all that she has suffered in this life, she deserves to be with him. As you point out, once the fighting starts, everything can come apart in a matter of moments. I do not want her here if that happens. I want her to be with him, far away, and the best one to get her there is you. Of all the fighting men I have ever known, yours are the skills I trust the most. It is decided. You will leave within the hour. Take as many or as few men as you feel you will need to get her there. But Thargen,” their eyes met, “get her there safely.”
They shook hands at the forearm in the military way, and Thargen left without another word. He believed it was a tactical mistake. In fact he knew it was a tactical error with the direst consequences possible. But having received his orders, he was prepared to do exactly as commanded by his King. It’s what soldiers did. They followed orders. Especially when the orders, such as these, left no room for interpretation.
He crossed over to the house where Diana was being kept. She was furious at the news and would not go without a last farewell to her father, arguing that there was a chance they would never see each other again. Once in front of him, she tried to protest, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He embraced her warmly and shooed her on her way, saying he had a battle to prepare for.
