The Misty Mountains and the Great River had long since faded into the far blue horizon of the west. The tangled greenbriar and birdsong of the forest edge had days ago given way to the green twilight of the deep woods. Sian looked up at faint glimmers of sunlight trickling through the canopy a hundred feet above. The swift grey shape of a hawk, broad winged and long tailed, one who belonged to the heart of the forest, flashed out of the shadows ahead. Sian marked the explosion of feathers from the smaller bird who had just become its lunch. "At least someone's eating on time today."
"Where will we stop Lady?" The young man, riding just behind her, was far more concerned with the state of his stomach than the three mules that were his responsibility.
"At Thranduil's halls." She looked back, a train of twenty more mules sprinkled with other wranglers and armed horsemen wound out of sight on the sinuous trail. Pacing ahead, like great grey shadows were the two wolfhounds, Efa and Dewi. Behind them rode two of her best men, Seath and Ieuan, mailclad, with shields bearing the sign of a black hawk; stout, broad-winged, with a short, boldly striped tail. Her sign; a sign telling any who would covet the goods carried by this caravan that it was under her protection. A sign that had earned her such respect in lands to the east, that her guards had for years, only raised their weapons in practice.
The young man (she could not remember his name, he was one of the mule wranglers from Caer-Gaint), looked up uncertainly at the densely woven canopy. They had been traveling under its tangled tapestry for nearly a week. Even now, close to the Elvenking's halls, it seemed only a little lighter, a bit less ominous. "I've heard there are giant spiders here...." he trailed off uncertainly.
"Fairy tales." Sian snorted. "And no match for our archers, if they aren't." She had seen their webs two days back, well off the trail which was cleared and protected by the woodelves. She had seen their glittering eyes in the dark, but that was all. She glanced back at the wrangler's face, sixteen maybe, wide-eyed with wonder....or fear? Had she ever felt that way? She couldn't remember that far back.
"It's rather...murky, for archery." he said uncertainly.
"That would be why it's called Mirkwood."
"I heard it was once called Greenwood. Greenwood the Great. Before the dark things came. Did you know it then?"
She turned in her saddle, fixed him with a steely look, "I'm not that old." And this was her first journey through it, though that did not seem like a wise thing to tell him right now. These western lands were new to her. Forests she understood, the river cottonwoods and the coastal mangroves of her homeland. But this! This place was like an annoyed serpent, stirred from its hibernation, shabby with shedding skin. Sian had been riding all morning, senses on the alert, waiting for the serpent to strike. The Knowing, her grandmothers called it, that forewarning she had sometimes of things about to happen.
Something in the gait of the mouse-dun gelding under her shifted. She felt the sudden tension, the tucking of his blue-grey haunches under him. Ahead the wolfhounds had stood up just a little taller on their toes, ears gone from half mast to full alert.
Sian spun her horse on the narrow trail, knocking the mule-wrangler's bay cob aside. She let out a shrill whistle, a perfect imitation of a kestrel's alarm call.
Her men moved. Twenty-three mules moved, in none of the directions Sian needed them to move. She swore mightily in three languages, none of which had ever been heard in Mirkwood. She had briefed the wranglers on emergency procedures, but none of it had sunk into their placid farm-raised, corn-fed heads. She uttered three more oaths, one Dwarvish, one orcish and one she'd got from an Avari tracker. She grabbed the headstall of the young mule-wrangler and shoved his mount into the trees.
The look of startled confusion on his face shifted to disbelief. And pain.
His thigh had sprouted a short, black, ugly arrow.
The air filled with the thwipp thwipp thwipp of more arrows. Sian drove the wrangler and his horse up against the protective bole of a huge liriodendron. "Stay!" She plunged back onto the trail, yelling, in orcish, that she was Sian DuCudyll and she would stack their heads at the gates of the Elvenking himself. She called them cowards and craven and lower than pondscum and threatened them with tortures unimaginable as she slid among the trees on the nightshadow dun and found them one by one and hewed them down with her longsword. Few of them stood against the onslaught of this...they were not sure what. They were used to woodelves and lakemen, and the odd Dwarvish party, but this travel stained woman in leather and wool and raw silk, little bigger than they, with her long light blade wheeling silver circles around her like a falcon put the fear of unknown magic in them. They fled, or died.
Orcs. Damn their rotten hideous hides. Their black souls. If they actually had souls. Sian was sure they didn't. She had never seen so many as here in the west. And hadn't the folk of Caer-Gaint said they would be the biggest danger? Normal bandits could be swayed by her very reputation. Or if they had never heard it, they could be driven off easily. But these...creatures of the nameless dark...
Around her arrows fwipped and whined off tree bark, or thunked into flesh, not all of it orcish. Her men had melted into the trees, slipping silently from them to shoot or hew with sword as they had been trained. The wranglers were a different matter, a few had short hunting bows or knives. One was armed with two small hatchets which he was throwing, with some accuracy. But they were not warriors. And the mules, wisely, were attempting retreat. Orcs ran everywhere, like a drop-kicked nest of nest of hornets. Sian couldn't count them exactly, but there had to be three dozen if there was one. All was in confusion.
The attack ended as abruptly as it had begun, there was the thunder of vanishing hooves down the trail, a few last shouts in orcish (somewhat dimished in numbers), and the cries of the wounded.
Sian, now on foot, whistled again, the plaintive call of a young falcon. Men, wolfhounds and one big mouse-dun gelding materialized out of the woods.
"They're gone, Lady." the chain-clad guard named Ieuan said. "Except for those." He nodded to a few orcish carcasses sprawled over logs and rocks.
"And so, it would seem, is our mule train." She counted heads, all of her guards, a few with minor wounds, half of the mule wranglers. "Find the rest." she said. And called one of the dogs to her, the big female, Efa. Together they combed the ferns and rocks and fallen logs till they had found the rest of the wranglers, fallen or hiding where they could.
"At least none are dead." she finished the wrapping on the leg of the young wrangler.
"Yet." Ieuan said. Sian passed her hand over the wrangler's body, like a hawk gliding over a field. Something her grandmothers had taught her, realigning the body's energies. It would aid the healing. She touched his brown curls. He looked paler than he should for such a simple wound. She looked up at Ieuan, "Poisoned?" She said in her native tongue, one the kid wouldn't understand.
"Maybe. I do not know enough about these western orcs"
"Get them to Thranduil, as fast as you can." she said that in the common tongue, so the boy would hear. "The woodelves will be of more help than us."
The boy forced a smile through his pain. "Their leaders are Sindarin. The Sindar have good healers I have heard."
Sian smiled back at him, a smile that didn't quite make it to her eyes.
They rounded up four of the mules, packs gone or listing hard aport. Sian's men had most of their horses, and the wranglers had half of theirs. Gear and packs were ditched, a few young trees were sacrificed for travois poles, long shafts dragging behind mule or horse, with a platform to carry the more seriously wounded.
Sian turned to Ieuan, "Move with all speed, do not stop for anything. Send Gwylan ahead, he's got the fastest horse, other than Eos. Tell Thranduil to send some reinforcements if he wants his shipment back in one piece."
"Trackers?" Ieuan asked.
"They're orcs. It won't take a woodelf to track them. I could use a few dozen of their best archers though. These orcs will likely have friends a little farther down the road."
"Orcs, with friends?" Ieuan raised an eyebrow.
Sian almost smiled, slapped him on a hard shoulder. Winced and thought better of it. "Get a move on."
It had been years since she had lost a shipment. That alone was like a thistleburr under chainmail. But the mule packs contained only wine and cloth, flour and fruit, and other things the Elves could not get from their forest home. It was the mules themselves Sian was worried about. Mules and four good horses in the tender loving care of a pack of orcs. She would hunt each one of those....she thought of a few more complimentary curses for them in a few more tongues aquired in her travels...down and personally put his head on a stake. For each mule, each horse, and each of the men under her care wounded by their black hearted arrows.
It would be useful, however, to have help.
Evening light was still slanting warmly across the fields beyond Mirkwood, but here under the trees, the shadows were as dark and green as the bottom of a lake. A wide winged shape floated soundlessly across the trail, flapped once, twice, mothlike, and vanished. Far away the hoo hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo HOO! of its mate echoed through the trees. Ahead, the dim grey shape of the wolfhound Efa drifted along the trail.
Efa stopped, cocked her ear back along the trail. Sian reined in the dun, held her breath, listening. Nothing, nothing a human could hear. Soundlessly she dismounted, gave Eos a gentle slap on the rump, sending him down the trail at a slow trot. She circled quietly back through the woods alongside the trail. Dim light, great tree trunks, the distant ghost horse whinny of a screech owl.
Then light trotting feet on the trail. A dark grey horse flickered into view between the trees. Sian slipped behind an ancient oak, then a shaggy hickory, like a hunting panther.
She stepped onto the trail behind the horseman. Definitely not an orc, or giant spider, but someone who should have been riding with a bit more care on a dangerous trail. She raised her short horseman's bow. "If you were an orc," she said, "you'd be dead now."
The grey horse spun in place, and stood as still as granite. A mare, of a breed Sian didn't know, but the midnight-grey color suggested a young horse, two or three years at the most, not the near white of a mature grey horse.
And she was wearing no tack. No bridle, no saddle, no harness of any kind. Not even the jaw ropes used by the tribes to the south of Sian's native land, or the neck rope she sometimes used for training. A filly, green, barely trained, and no gear. Sian's bow drooped in amazement. In the dusk, the rider was a dark, cloaked shape, a longbow and quiver slung at his back. No sword either. Not a horseman's weaponry. Efa stalked up to him and stood, nose sniffing his soft-soled boots in fascination.
"Sian DuCudyll?" the voice was male and sounded like forest twilight and wind in the trees and water on rocks and morning birds.
Sian shook herself, strode up to him, looked up, somehow a faint shimmer of moonlight seemed to have found its way into his shadowed face. A face with the kind of calm sharp-edged beauty of a falcon. He looked a bit like the Avari trackers she'd encountered in the east. A bit, the way the great silvery gyrfalcon resembles the small dark kestrel. Efa grinned up at him with a look of pure canine adoration on her face. He leaned down and laid a gentle hand on her broad head. .
"Thranduil sent you?" Sian asked.
His eyes glimmered faintly, like distant stars. "Yes."
"My men?"
"Safe in our halls."
"Where's the rest?"
"The rest?"
"The other couple of dozen archers I could use."
"Here." he gestured to himself.
"What?" she looked around, half expecting a hundred Elven archers to materialize out of the trees. She'd seen the Avari, the East-elves, do exactly that once.
Nobody materialized. "You're it?"
He nodded, a shadow of puzzlement in his face.
"You're kidding." She looked up at a face which didn't look any older than her young mule wrangler. "What in all the four corners of the world"?!? She swore then by darkest depths, and heights and roots of mountains in a few languages the rider apparently didn't recognize,"was that pea-head of an Elvenking thinking, sending me one kid with a longbow?" She said a few other things in total and complete frustration that she would have thought better of if she hadn't been tired and hungry and sore and worried about her men, not to mention wondering if the horses and mules had been cooked for dinner by the orcs. When she had grumbled something to Efa about Thranduil could just get his own damn caravan back, she turned to find her one archer had gone.
But...she was brave enough to go chasing off after a dozen orcs, if the tales of her men were not exaggerated. And Thranduil had assumed they were. After all, did not his people keep the dark well at bay so close to his halls? He breathed a long centering breath, let it out with the rest of his annoyance. She wasn't really angry with him, she didn't even know his name. She was tired, hungry, sore in a way only the Edain could be. He could feel that, as surely as he could feel the breath of the filly he was riding. The first thing Sian DuCudyll had asked was how her men were. That, at least, showed compassion and concern, even if her words (many of which he did not understand, except for the emotion behind them) showed a serious lack of diplomacy, decorum, and understanding of his people.
And there were times when the Elvenking did have his head at the wrong end of his digestive system. This might be one of them. The King had sent only Celinte to Sian's aid, and she would not have even the aid of Celinte's most inept student, if he returned to Thranduil's halls now. He had misdirected a message to the king, and to Celinte, and, well, bent the truth to at least half a dozen other people of the court so he could prove, what? That he would let anger and the hasty words of one of the Edain turn him from this quest he'd so eagerly sought? That he could not fulfil even the simplest of missions? He tensed his back, shifted his weight, the filly stopped. He turned, stared back down the trail into the dark wishing for owl sight. The filly's ears flicked, forward, then back. "That's what I think, Ithilin." He said aloud, in Sindarin, turned her and rode back the way he'd just come.
Sian knelt, hands sprawled on the warm earth, studying the cratered ground beneath her feet. A blind Dwarf could have followed this trail, what she wanted to know was how far ahead they were. Too far, even though, thanks to the fine smooth floor of Mirkwood, she had not slept much. Still, the orcs were lousy horsemen, and unless they wanted to carry all the stolen goods themselves, they would keep the horses and mules awhile longer. She had found a few items dropped by the wayside, but probably much of the caravan's goods would be useful, even to orcs. And despite her men's prowess at arms, judging by the tracks, there were still nearly two dozen of them left.
Thwipp. The unmistakable sound of an arrow lodging nearby. She found herself staring at a long green-feathered shaft stuck between the first two outstretched fingers of her right hand. Her eye traveled up the Elvish runes on the shaft and along the arrow's trajectory. She eyed a maple branch, half hidden by summer leaves, stood slowly, pulling the arrow up with her. "Ok." she called, "I get your point." She was answered with silence. She studied the tree where the shot had come from, the woods surrounding it. Only the usual forest rustlings and birdsongs. She frowned.
"If you were a dozen orcs, you would all be dead." The voice came from directly behind her. Sian whirled, the arrow raised like a dagger, hand on her sword hilt. He stood there on the trail, dappled with early dawn light filtering through the green canopy. All green and brown and silvery like beech and birch, hair the color of winter grass, eyes the color of the sea. As if the spirit of the forest itself had taken the form of a person. There was an unreadable expression on a face that still looked about sixteen and a half. Maybe twenty, but that was pushing it. Without even so much as a whistle, the grey filly wandered into view.
Sian looked at the tree branch whence the arrow had come, eyed the arrows in his quiver; same ones. "Where's the rest?" she nodded toward the branch. The other archers, she meant.
"I'm it." he said, echoing her earlier words.
"I suppose you shot this from over there and magically paffed yourself over here."
"Magic? That's what your people always say when they don't understand something."
His face was still unreadable, but there was a glint in his eye, like a clean-whiskered cat by an empty cream bowl. He held out a hand; long-fingered, chiseled, strong-looking as a hunting greyhound's feet. Sian delivered his arrow into it. "Hmmph." Well, he had come back, if indeed he had ever gone far. He was still not two dozen archers, but he was better than none. She eyed the tree where the shot had come from. Maybe a lot better than none. "Well," she said, "You may not call it magic, but that was a shot my guards would remember. And if you can do it again, one archer may be all we need." It was as close as she could come to an actual apology.
Sea grey eyes and earth brown met and locked.
Sian did not know these woodelves well. Most were Avari, perhaps not unlike the ones she'd occasionally met farther east. Simple earthy folk, and even they seemed to be made of treewind and starsong. But this one...there was something in those sea-grey depths that didn't quite match the childlike naivety and innocence of the face. Like looking at a mountain, half hidden behind grey mists.
He knew only a little of the lakemen, but there was something in the dark hawk eyes of this woman that was different. The face was as weathered as a strong mountain, and she met his eyes unflinching as no Adan he could remember ever had. Underneath it ran another thing, like a merry stream seen from a mountain height. A quiet smile broke over his face. As one they nodded to each other, a brief, cautious bow.
"Coming?" She had already turned toward her horse, caught his reins with one hand. "I was sent to give what aid I could."
"I'm sure it will be...enough." She wasn't really sure at all. But it had been a good shot. And he would know more of these woods than she. Sian lifted a foot into the stirrup and swung onto Eos. "You know my name, I don't know yours.
" He hesitated, there were times when it was better to be someone other than himself. And it was Celinte who was supposed to be here, not him.
She gave him a sharp look, like the dark night-seeing gaze of a fierce little barn owl. He glanced away, then back, "Legolas." He said softly.
A few badly blocked blows, and partial knowledge of many languages had left Sian with a tendency to freely reinvent anything she heard. Besides, she was still starving. "Eggless?" she said.
"Leh-go-loss" he enuciated, somewhat louder.
She had already nudged Eos into a light trot, she glanced back at the Elf, "Eggs'n'toast???"
He shook his head, half smiling, "In your tongue, Greenleaf." He swung up on the grey filly, light as a leaping cat, wondering what she would do with that one.
"Hey kid,"she said, "bring any breakfast with you?"
Sian was hungry, but there was also the problem of feeding a creature the size of six large men, one who would normally spend most of its day stuffing itself with salad. There had been little for Eos to eat, and less now. The grain had been packed with the mules. Efa could go longer without eating, but she had been eyeing every squirrel that passed overhead, to no avail.
The Elf had, in fact, brought breakfast. Sian munched the waybread he handed her with delight. Nothing like the cram of the Dales. Light, sweet, with a sprinkling of nuts and dried fruits that tasted like the forest smelled. There was a darker, harder cake for the horses. And Efa approved heartily of Elvish baking.
They ate it with the horses moving at a brisk, ground-eating trot, Sian floating above Eos's back, heels hard down in the stirrups, leaning a little over his neck. She glanced back, the Elf just sat, his filly sailing along like a boat on flatwater. Sian remembered the filly's name, Ithilin, she never forgot a horse, especially one as fine as this, but the kid's name escaped her. What was it again?
"Hey, this stuff is great," she said between mouthfuls, "If there's any of my personal stash of wine left, when we catch those," she broke into a string of words, unfamiliar to the Elf, and as pleasant sounding as greenbriar feels, "I owe you one. Several, Lettuce."
"Legolas."
"Umm hmm."
There was no room to ride abreast on the narrow forest trail, so he followed her lead, studying her, as he might study an unfamiliar forest fungus. Dwarf-short, and not much slenderer. Not much more couthness either, it seemed. Yet her wolfhound glanced at her with affection, and her horse did more than suffer her presence. She had a kind of grace, like those agile little forest hawks that occasionally blasted through the birdfeeders leaving behind only a small blizzard of sparrow feathers. She matched the look of her shield sign; the strong, broad winged hawk that lived in her native land. And her men spoke of her with respect.
But then, he did not much understand the ways of Men.
The trail widened, passing under great grey trunks, like the vaulted halls of some ancient High-elven king. Sian dropped back beside the grey filly, slowed to a walk to rest Eos. "How do you do that?" she asked.
"Do what?"
"Ride her without even so much as a neckrope?"
Legolas gave her a blank look. One might as well ask how do you breathe? How do you sing? "How do you do that?" he countered, gesturing at the reins in her hand.
She looked down, perplexed. What she wanted was a concise, step by step dissertation on Elvish Horse Training 101. What she got made her think of that old saying about not asking Elves for counsel; yea, nay, yea, neigh. She rode in silence for a dozen hoofbeats. A hundred. As if explaining to a child, she said, "you pull the rein, the horse's head turns, he follows his head." She looked over into grey eyes like sun on water, with a glint of amusement in them. One gull-wing eyebrow cocked slightly. And?
"You use the natural tendency of the horse to follow his head." she elaborated, "You teach him, through slow and gentle stages, to accept the bridle and bit, to respond to the slightest whisper of a pull. You think of where you want to turn, you tighten a muscle, pull the rein, tighten the bit in his mouth, and he turns.You use your body as well, he follows the shift of your weight, the movement of a leg." She looked hard at the Elf, "Your turn." "You think, she turns."
"But how do you get there. You can't get on a horse you've never seen before and just do that..."
He gave her a long look, an eagle peering down from its eyrie.
He could. Of course he could. "Explain." she demanded.
There were words in his own tongue, whole songs that told of the kinship between Kelvar and Olvar and Quendi, but nothing in the common speech that could bridge the gap between Edain and other lifeforms. He rode in silence for what seemed to him like a moment, a few breaths. Then he noticed her growing impatience. A brief and hasty folk, one of his teachers had said. How true. He saw something other than impatience in her eyes though, a kind of hunger, a curiosity. She really wanted to know. There was no way to tell her, except in his own people's songs, and she would not understand them. He glanced at her again, her eyes falcon sharp, as if trying to bore a hole through him to the truth.
Well, hadn't Finrod Felagund sung wisdom to the First Men? He began, softly, uncertainly, like the first trickle of a stream at the top of a mountain. The song grew, soon flowing under its own weight.
She turned in the saddle, one leg slung over the pommel, letting Eos pick his own way. She did not know the words, although now and again one sounded a bit like the few Avari words she had picked up. But the song went beyond mere language, weaving its memories and images of older, purer times, when the Quendi first learned the languages of birds, and woke the trees. It drifted away into birdsong and treerustle and muffled hoofbeats on leaf litter. Sian rode on in silence, the quiet wood sounds in the wake of the song left her with an aching longing, like the distant wailing of gulls. That song was like drifting over a clear sea, seeing flashes of things far below that she couldn't reach. She felt that he could sing her a hundred songs and she would only have caught one shining fish. Only understood one hair on the whole horse.
"You're older than you look, aren't you." she said.
"Why are your people so concerned with age?"
Sian shrugged, "A mark of your experience. Your wisdom." she wrinkled her brow as an ache from yesterday made itself apparent, "Your ability to sleep on rocks and eat bark and bugs, and still hunt orcs in the morning."
His eyes took in the fleeting expression of pain. She was neither old nor young, as the Edain judged such things, but already she was showing signs of that oddness that made his people long ago give hers the name Engwar; the sickly. Some of the wise said it was like Death, a gift from the One. Why? What was the point of it? Not even the wise seemed to know. His eyebrows dropped like falcon wings and he studied the backs of Ithilin's ears.
Sian studied him, chiseled cheekbones and strong jawline softened by the wintergrass mane flowing around his neck. He looked so young, and in the light of day, not so different from any beautiful young man. But no boy of Caer-Gaint, or of her own land beyond the sunrise, could have sung that. She had heard Elves lived longer than the trees, maybe forever, and that age only touched them slowly, if at all. She had seen three score Avari melt into the trees without leaving so much as a footprint. Maybe it was the way the old the tales said, they were just spirits catching light, imitating human form. But spirits didn't eat, or leave sweat marks on horses. And she had traveled far and heard many tales, not all worth believing. "Hmmmp. I guess you were probably learning the names of every lichen and salamander in the forest when my great-great-granny was in diapers."
Legolas looked up, "No.Only your mother."
She raised both eyebrows. Leaned forward and legged Eos into a long-strided trot. "Come on, Legolam, we're not getting any closer to those orcs."
"It's Lego..." his words were lost in a whirl of leaves and dust.
The first hint Sian had that something in the forest had changed was the Elf squeezing beside her on the narrow trail, and Eos stopping as if he'd run into a wall. The two horses stood, shoulder to shoulder, staring down the trail, ears forward, then back, then sideways in uncertainty. Efa stood ten yards away, looking first up the trail, then back at the two people on the horses, as if asking for an explanation. Sian held up a finger, the wind was from behind them. Neither Efa nor the horses could smell anything. She looked at the Elf, but he was already on the ground and moving silently into the trees. Had he stopped them? He turned toward her, "Stay here."
"Legoland!" she hissed. Maybe he knew this forest, and maybe he was learning the names of its trees when her mother was in diapers, but she was still responsible for this mess, which made her the one who made the decisions and the one who would get shot at first. She dropped to the ground and moved after him. Almost as quietly. She caught his shoulder, spun him neatly around. The first look in his eyes was that of a cat who has been picked up when it was about to leap on a bird. He took a long breath through his teeth, "it would be better if one of us stayed..."
"While the other does what? Gets himself killed?" She wasn't at all sure he could get himself killed, but just the same, " What did you hear? See?"
Her grip on his shoulders was far stronger than he'd expected for a woman her size, and she had to reach up to hold him. He thought of shaking her off, but her eyes reminded him of Celinte's. Or a badger whose prey has been stolen by a raven. He let out a slow breath, shook his head, "I...feel...something..." He found himself at an unusual loss for words, but he would not have had to use words with one of his own folk. He pointed down the trail, "dark..." he finally said, and it sounded totally inadequate. "Death." The image in his head was unclear, but the feeling was strong, strong enough to make him want to go in any direction but ahead.
Sian released her grip, kept one hand lightly on his shoulder, "Stay with me. If you hear this, " she let out the hunting hawk cry, "start shooting at anything that isn't me or a horse or a dog. If you hear this," she made the kestrel alarm cry, "get your tail out of there." She gave him a couple more signals; hand and sound, for moving left or right, or going into the trees, the ones her guards had practiced over and over. She hoped the Elf had a good memory.
He hesitated, frowning into her dark eyes. He was not one of her guards to be ordered about thus. He was...
...he was supposed to render what aid he could. He could hear the voice of his teacher, clear as if she was here, 'in conflict, be fair and generous, in leading you must learn to follow'. There was no time to argue, and by the look on her face, he wouldn't win anyway. He set his jaw and nodded.
She was already moving into the trees beside the trail.
Silently they parallelled the trail. Out of the corner of her eye, Sian saw how the Elf slid noiselessly past branches, stepped among the roots and moss covered rocks. He used no magic she could see, but he was quieter and more fluid than anything she'd ever known. If they both got back alive from this, she would ask him to explain this too.
That would probably be about five hundred more songs.
The green twilight brightened, a hole appeared in the canopy where a forest giant had fallen in a storm. A tangle of young trees blocked the trail from view. Sian heard the raucous sound of partying ravens. The wind shifted and a terrible scent came to her nose. Legolas chirped to her, the squirrel sound she'd just shown him. He pointed up at one tall pine. Sian flicked her hand, like a hawk banking for a turn. He leaped up and vanished into the foliage. She peered through the brush, feeling better that a quiver full of highly accurate arrows was backing her up. The scent of extremely dead orc wafted to her on the breeze.
"Bleaarghh!" she stepped out from behind the shrubbery. Made a quick study of the ground. Called; the slow, measured knock-knock-knock of a female raven. Before her, a mob of young ravens whirled and scrambled out of the way, vanishing into the trees, the bolder ones backing down the trail a few yards. Behind her Legolas landed with all the noise of a hunting cat. Some empty mule packs and three dead orcs littered the trail. She turned and caught him making a worse face than hers. He looked, in fact, a little paler than even a woodelf should look.
"They're," he half choked, "...they're even worse than I imagined."
"Imagined? You mean you've never seen orcs before?"
He looked up, straightened his face to something almost resembling calm, "I have not had much opportunity for travel."
"Spending too much time learning all those fungus and lichen and salamander names, I guess."
He did not honor that with a reply, or even a glance. "What happened?"
"What do you think?"
"They're dead."
"How?"
"Not by our folk." He wished he'd spent more time listening to Celinte's tracking lectures. He looked at Sian, kneeling by one of the corpses, poking at it with a stick. He forced himself to look closer. They had to be hideous alive, they were even more hideous in this semi-dismembered state. They made his skin crawl and his stomach twist like a ball of courting serpents. "Sword blows."
Sian nodded. "What kind?"
"What?"
"...kind of sword?"
He gave her a blank look.
"Not a light one like mine." She kicked at the side of one of the orcs, its leg fell off revealing a scabbard that looked like it had been made of things abandoned at the bottom of some foul city's garbage midden. She pulled out a short, exceedingly ugly blade, heavy, crooked and toothy. She held it up, raised a questioning eyebrow.
He was beginning to get the picture when she whacked the orc blade into the same body, producing a dark oozy gash identical to the ones that had already shredded it. She looked up to see her archer vanishing into the woods. She could swear she'd never seen a woodelf turn green before.
"You ok, kid? Legless?"
He was leaning against a large oak, eyes closed. "Legolas." he said without opening them. "I saw wrong. We were in no danger." And if he saw wrong again, they could both be dead. Perhaps he was foolish, coming on this journey, after all. "They were killed by their own kind, who are now far down the trail."
"Maybe. Maybe not. Come." she touched his shoulder, gentle as a wren landing.
He opened his eyes and followed her back to the trail. The ravens fell back at Sian's approach, but closed in curiously behind the Elf.
Sian knelt on the ground, pointing to the tracks left by their prey. "What can you tell from this?"
It was a trampled mess, he could vaguely pick out a hoofprint or two, and the heavy boots of the orcs. And a lacework of raven prints over it all. He shook his head, feeling about as intelligent as moss.
"Here." Sian pointed to a globby blur, "overlapping hoofprints, mule, at a slow trot, dragging her toes, scuffing the dirt a little, Molly, I think, she had a toe crack, right here. And these orcs," she pointed to another smudge, "are getting steamed because they can't make the mules go any faster. Somebody," she moved down the trail, poking at more blurs, "got peeved and started a fight, a couple of packs got ditched, and a couple of orcs got dead. More goodies for the ones who survived."
"How old? How long ago were they here?" he asked.
"Half a day. But the mules are slowing. They don't like being driven, and like orcs even less. So they will either slow the whole caravan down enough for us to catch up or they will get themselves eaten for dinner."
"How do you know...how old the trail is, I mean?"
"The weathering in the tracks: wind, ant trails, bugs, squirrels," she glanced up, eye to eye with a young raven, head cocked inquisitively to one side," the clean-up crew. And these," she stood, kicked at a pile of mule droppings, "definitely fresh."
He nodded. They mounted their horses, leaving the ravens to their job.
Part 2....
