“True enough. Save your breath, princess. We’ve got a long day ahead of us,” Desa advised her.
* * *
None of the elves noticed Sistina up on the mountainside above them, she noticed. They really should have been looking up, but she didn’t blame them. She was far away at the moment. She looked around from her high perch, not far from a long, winding cave that she’d followed to the upper mountainside. She’d have to block this route, just in case the pursuers that the princess’ guards mentioned discovered it.
As it was, Sistina had decided that she liked her namesake’s descendant. The rest of Phynis’ family she wasn’t certain about, but Phynis was worth protecting. And as such, she would take measures to ensure that the group got away safely. Opening her hand, she looked at the half-dozen bead-like rubies that she’d taken from her branches. Each was charged with a large amount of mana, including almost everything she’d received from Desa and absorbed over the past week. And all of that power was focused into a simple spell. Looking at the mountainside with an eye for fracture points, she shook her head in annoyance. This would take her a while.
It took a few hours, but she finally found a first point to place a bead gently behind several rocks. Nothing would find the spot easily, but she buried it just to be safe and smoothed the dirt to hide it, then moved on to find a second spot.
It took her most of the day, as she found three spots on this side of the ravine, and another three on the other side of the ravine as well. And then, her job done, she went back to her tree, satisfied with her preparations.
* * *
“Sistina?” Lily asked, watching her pot of boiling beans intently. “Are you actually a… I can’t remember the term they used. A dungeon, since I forgot the other word?”
Sistina paused, blinking as she looked up at Lily for a moment, considering the young woman. She must be lonely, she realized, after having company for a single day after months of being alone with Sistina. The dryad had no illusions about how good of company she was. Her preference was for things to change gradually, and she carefully considered everything before making a decision. Mortals like elves, though, were much more frantic throughout their lives. She thought it was likely a product of both how long she lived and that she was a tree. But that didn’t change the fact that Lily seemed lonely.
But Sistina got up and moved silently to sit next to the young elf. Lily looked at her in confusion as Sistina hugged her gently with one arm, giving a gentle nod.
“Ah. Then, would you hurt me?” Lily looked at her pleadingly, leaning into Sistina’s side.
The dryad smiled at that, shaking her head. She had no intention of ever hurting Lily. Unless the elf attacked her first, at least, which she didn’t think was likely.
Some of the tension in Lily’s shoulders vanished, but she looked at the pot, chewing her lip before she asked softly. “And… and the slavers? Kelvanis’ army, I mean. Will they hurt me again? Or you?”
Sistina smiled thinly, her gaze hardening, and her voice was soft but firm. “Never.”
Chapter 10
“Captain, the trail for the elven group split again,” one of the scouts reported to Captain Marath politely, his fist over his heart as he knelt before her. “They appear to have spent a day in a cave complex before continuing up the valley to the north-west. It appears we’re about a day behind them at this time, according to Lieutenant Jacobs. The lieutenant commanded the primary platoon to continue following their main trail, and wished for me to inquire if you’d like a platoon to investigate the caverns.”
Captain Marigold Marath frowned at the report in displeasure, her eyes narrowing as she looked at the jagged mountains surrounding them. Hailing from the regions of Kelvanis, dominated by plains and forests, she’d never liked the mountains much, and the Godsrage Mountains were worse than most. On the other hand, escaped slaves were even worse, so she persisted through the irritation of them. And the information the scout had brought was important enough, as it was evidence they were gaining on the escapees. If the escaped slaves had been seasoned soldiers or travelers, they might have actually gotten away with their initial lead.
“Did they leave anyone in the caves?” she asked, thinking as to why they would have stayed here for a day. They could be overconfident about getting away, but that didn’t seem reasonable to her. Whoever had commanded the raid thus far had proven rather cautious, and she couldn’t see them changing that at this point.
“We aren’t certain, ma’am. There are more than sixty of them, so they might have left a few behind without us noticing,” the scout admitted.
“Then send a platoon in. Sven! Your squad is to support the scouts in investigating the caverns,” Marath ordered one of her more reliable sergeants, then looked at the scout again. “Find where they stayed and see if there’s any sign of people left behind. If there aren’t, get your asses out of there and follow us. We’re going to try to make up more time on these miscreants.”
“Yes ma’am!” they chorused and saluted, before each of the groups began to move in turn.
* * *
It was fuzzy, looking out of the caves at the valley, but Sistina could see the group of soldiers moving through the valley at least a little. It wasn’t in her domain, though, and her body was inside, so the visuals were the best she could manage. She had to admit that there seemed to be a lot of them. More than double the number of the elves that had passed through, at least.
A few of them had poked their heads into the tunnels, revealing themselves to be humans with tanned skin and weathered armor and weapons. None of them had slave brands, but one of them, in slightly nicer equipment that bore some magic, seemed to have one of the command sigils she’d once seen on the Enforcer that had chased Lily into her cavern. They’d left after glancing around, but after a short time, she saw some of them coming toward the entrance.
Lily was safely occupied with the gardens around her house, so she wasn’t in any danger at the moment. Sistina would have to stop her if she chose this moment for a hunting trip, but that didn’t seem likely. With any luck, she’d never know there was a problem at all.
So Sistina mentally reached out to the variety of plants and animals she’d been preparing over the winter and woke them up. When Desa had called her a dungeon, she wasn’t entirely wrong, after all. Sistina simply thought of what she’d done as precautions to defend herself and Lily.
Sistina preferred to sustain herself off ambient mana from her plants and animals. But that didn’t mean she was a picky eater. If some evil slavers happened to offer themselves to her, who was she to refuse?
* * *
Private Benjamin Tailor blinked in surprise as he saw the light coming from ahead, and murmured softly, “What do you think that is?”
“Don’t ask me,” Linda Smith muttered, sniffing. Benjamin’s partner definitely had a better nose than he did. “This place is strange. I smell plants everywhere.”
“True enough.” He sighed, pausing as he came around a corner and saw a larger cave, mostly obscured by a curtain of vines over the entrance. He pointed and shook his head. “Well, that’s why you smell plants. I wonder if there’s an exit to the caverns in here?”
“Hmm… that could be bad. What if the others are following a false trail?” Linda asked, growing concerned. “Let’s go take a look. If anything looks suspicious, we call for help.”
“Yeah. I’ll take point,” he replied, leading the way forward. He drew his sword and listened for a moment at the curtain. He couldn’t hear anything but the soft burbling of water, so he pushed the vines aside with his sword and stepped into the room.
The room was lit by a large glowing orb on the ceiling, but the ground was largely dirt covered with plants, he noticed, and he took a few steps forward, shaking his head as he looked at the bushes and the small tree in bemusement. He could see another tunnel, though, so he took a step forward as he spoke. “Nope, no exit that I can see, but damn, this is impressi—”
/> “Help!” Linda shrieked from behind him suddenly, and he spun around. For an instant, he froze in surprise.
Linda was tangled in the vines, which were moving and wrapping around her body. As he watched, she lost her grip on her sword and it fell to the ground. She was being pulled upward surprisingly quickly, and his gaze darted upward, to where he saw a huge, bulbous plant nearly eight feet long and six feet wide hidden in a recess above and behind the entrance. The vines all protruded from what looked almost like the closed bud of a flower, if a bud was as huge as the plant was. Benjamin shook off his shock and charged toward her, intending to cut the vines as he wished for a machete instead of a short sword. “Hold on! I’ll—”
As Benjamin charged forward, Linda’s gaze lowered to him, and her eyes went huge as she shouted, “Ben, no!”
But at that moment, his foot came down on a surface that yielded ever so slightly more than the rest of the cavern floor. The man barely saw the two surfaces on either side of him snap upward as the gigantic venus flytrap crushed him.
* * *
“What was that?” one of the soldiers asked uneasily as he stood at an intersection in the tunnels.
“What was what?” Sergeant Sven Graves asked irritably.
“I thought I heard a scream down that way,” the man said, pointing down the corridor to their right.
Sven frowned, listening closely, and though he heard some sort of commotion, he couldn’t tell what it was. Finally, he replied, “Well, I’m hearing something. Weapons ready, men. I don’t want to be caught unawares.”
The ranged half of the squad was halfway through winching back their crossbows when they heard screams echo down the central corridor, followed by a deep roar that resounded in the tunnels painfully. Swearing, Sven turned to the tunnel in question, his longsword out and ready.
A moment later, two scouts came sprinting down the corridor, yelling. “Run! Bear! Huge bear!”
Sven gawked at the two scouts for a moment, then snorted in derision at their cowardice. “Lads, bear for dinner! Prepare for battle!”
“No, you don’t—” one of them shouted as they ran by, and at that moment, a bear came around the corner, causing Sven’s jaw to drop in sheer astonishment.
The bear was half again the size of any bear he’d seen, and if it stood up, it would stand nearly fifteen feet tall. The pile of ursine fury was charging down the hallway with slate-gray hair, rage in its eyes. Sven rapidly stepped back and ordered. “Fire!”
A flurry of hurried crossbow shots flew down the corridor at the bear, slamming into its flesh and driving almost to the fletching into its shoulders. The bear barely seemed to notice the attacks and powered through them and into the squad before they could fully get into formation. And the impact of the bear shattered their lines like the wrath of an angry god.
Sven drew his sword and stepped forward, snarling as he hacked at the bear’s head, trying to kill the damned thing. That was when the bear reared back on its hind legs, and even as he backpedaled, he saw one of the archers begin following the scouts as they fled. But before he could even begin to yell at the coward, one of those massive paws came at his head from the side.
* * *
The intruders weren’t getting far, Sistina noted with distinct satisfaction. A few of them had been trapped in pitcher plants and her hanging vine traps, which would help with a few ideas she had in mind. She wouldn’t torture them, but she also wasn’t averse to using their intrusion to help her figure out a few better defenses.
The rest were being dealt with by her bigger, stronger, and tougher bears and wolves. Maybe a dozen of them were going to escape in the end, so she instead turned her attention to outside.
It wasn’t easy to see, but she thought that the formation of troops was in about the best position she could hope for. She wouldn’t get all of them, but that wasn’t the point of her trap. The point was to stop them. So she reached out to the beads she’d set up along the mountainsides.
With a mental trigger, each of those beads exploded as they emitted a sharp spike of energy into the mountainside, into those fractures that she’d been looking for. The stone shattered, shifted, and began to slide as she watched patiently. This would be impressive.
* * *
One of the scouts heard a sharp report, and then the multiple popping sounds from up the mountainsides, and the older man went pale as he looked uphill, muttering, “Oh, shit.”
“Martin?” one of the others asked.
“Move! Run! Rockslide!” the scout yelled, charging forward in a desperate attempt to get clear. Glancing backward, he saw, horrified, that the slide was coming from both sides of the ravine.
He was toward the front of the group, but the main force of Captain Marath’s soldiers was solidly in the middle of the slide zone of the rockslide. The last stragglers of the force, as well as its vanguard, might be able to get clear, but the people in the center wouldn’t have much of a chance at all.
Martin charged out of the slide zone, then turned, along with a few others, and watched in horror as the rockslide overran over a hundred men and women. The echoing roar of rolling stone slowly came to a halt, and was replaced by a few moans and the sounds of the injured and dying who were still there.
Without instructions, the group started back into the field of broken stone to try and render aid to their fellow soldiers, but more than one of them flinched when the occasionally stone broke loose up above and bounced down the mountainside.
* * *
The slavers wouldn’t be pursuing Princess Phynis’ group anymore, Sistina decided in satisfaction. Out of their group, no more than twenty of them were uninjured, and there were nearly twice that number who were injured or crippled.
She could unleash her bears and wolves on the group and wipe them out entirely if she wanted to, but she was hesitant to go quite that far. Thus far, her actions had been primarily defensive in nature, and she wasn’t entirely happy with the thought of going out of her way to kill them. So instead, she watched as the soldiers slowly limped away, and went back to contemplating what to do with her seven prisoners.
Chapter 11
“I have to say, I’m relieved we haven’t seen any sign of a pursuit,” Vendis said, looking at the mountains behind her wearily. “Though part of me is even more worried because of it.”
“Isn’t that a good thing?” Phynis asked, feeling much better than she had at the start of the trip. “Why are you worried?”
“Because if we haven’t seen them, there’s a possibility that they’re there, but have just evaded our own sentries,” Desa replied calmly, pulling her cloak closer around herself. Phynis was slightly envious of her, since there seemed to be no major ill effects from her brand’s alteration. Admittedly, her magical power seemed to be somewhat constrained after a day or so, but from what Desa said, it didn’t seem to be reducing in strength anymore, so she was almost as powerful as before they were captured again.
They were only about halfway through the mountains, and it was more dangerous than Phynis had expected. Earlier in the day they’d encountered a nest of strange centipede-like creatures the size of a man which could spit a flesh-eating acid. They’d almost lost a couple of soldiers to the foul beasts before wiping them out. Fortunately, the healers had helped the injured, so they hadn’t actually lost anyone, but it’d been close. There’d also been an encounter with a group of extremely aggressive raptors, but the avians had left them alone after losing a few of their number.
The most fortunate thing, though, was that most of the women were finally getting used to the hiking, so they were making better time than before. They still weren’t moving incredibly fast, but they were also trying to follow a winding, slightly less dangerous path through a mountain range known for its danger.
“Mmm… I suppose. Do you think it’s likely?” Phynis asked, looking at Vendis nervously. “That we haven’t spotted them, I mean.”
“Likely? No. They would be more concerned with
catching us, not staying hidden. But it’s still something I have to take into account,” Vendis replied, taking a sip from her hip flask and shaking her head. “I’m nervous when I don’t know where my enemies are.”
* * *
“So, let me see if I have all of this right. You followed the tracks of a group of approximately sixty to seventy individuals to a series of ravines leading into the Godsrage Mountains, where they seemed to stay in a cavern complex for the night. So Captain Marath ordered a small group to scout the caves for hidden individuals while she pursued the larger group.” Adjudicator Jared spoke softly, his hands folded on the desk of his office as the sun started to sink beyond the horizon behind him. Without the trace of a smile, he watched the two lieutenants and an older scout squirm slightly on the other side of the desk. “The caverns apparently were the lair of a fair amount of plants that shouldn’t have been able to live there, as well as a hostile pack of wolves and a few cave bears, so you suspect it was an intentional ambush. Outside, the elves must have set magical charges that caused a rockslide when you reached far enough up the ravine. The rockslide crushed a large portion of your forces, and has crippled Captain Marath. Left with only twenty-two able-bodied soldiers, and with another thirty wounded, you chose to retreat here. Is that all correct?”
“Y-yes, Adjudicator,” the army lieutenant, a man named Gareth, replied nervously. “I made the final decision to do so. From all evidence the elven force managed to destroy a force of twenty guards in their initial strike. I believed it unlikely that we could overtake and defeat their force after taking so many losses. I will take full responsibility for what happened.”
The scout lieutenant opened his mouth to speak, but Jared raised his hand calmly, shaking his head for a moment before speaking, his tone level. “No, you won’t. Your opponent is obviously much more skilled than we anticipated. Not only did the elven commander masterfully ambush the caravan with no apparent losses, they also led you into not only one, but two ambushes that didn’t risk a single life of their own. I must say that I’m impressed they managed to do so well. As far as I’m concerned, there was nothing any of you could have done given the situation. I imagine that you might have done things differently in hindsight, but Captain Mareth made the decisions that led you into them. I will not censure you for following legitimate orders. My only command is that each of you consider what happened extensively, and endeavor to learn from it.”
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