“Get down!” Till hissed, grabbing Kane's arm and yanking him back behind the fallen tree.
The young man had been about to stride out from cover. He didn’t resist her; he did as she had bidden - but he did raise an eyebrow. Doubting her. So she glared at him.
“What part of stealth are you finding so difficult to understand?”
His rather young green eyes looked hurt, just for a second - she almost regretted snapping at him. But he had wanted to come on this mission; and it was for him that she was on edge, she realised - not herself. She hadn’t wanted him to come - could see the look in his mother’s eyes now if she let any harm come to him.
He needed to learn. And remember.
“I thought you said we were still a mile from the camp!” he murmured.
“I told you that was my best guess,” she whispered urgently. “We don’t know exactly where it is. And we definitely can’t assume they never leave it! Clark said he saw them near the road.”
Kane nodded meekly - so she forgave him. At least he could swallow his pride.
“We’re in enemy territory,” she continued calmly. “If we’re not careful, they’ll see us before we ever see them. They’re not clever - but they are cunning. We have no backup. We find the goblins - and we get out, unseen. Or they’ll be picking bits of us out of their fangs for weeks.”
He nodded again. She hoped he’d got the message. Cautiously, she peered over the top of the pine-trunk - raising her head just enough to see over. Found what she wanted. Tapped him on the shoulder, and beckoned for him to do the same.
Kane copied her, peering over the trunk. She pointed towards a juniper bush.
“There,” she breathed. “Cover to cover. All the way now. Come on.”
Furtively, she darted from behind the tree, and made it to the bush. She looked back, waiting for Kane, chewing her lip - and he followed: surprisingly sneaky, despite his broad frame. She nodded.
“Good,” she breathed. “Next one.”
So they continued - darting and scurrying from tree, to bush, to rock, to tree. It was all uphill now: they were climbing out of the valley bottom (where the road led north out of Ost Forod towards Forochel), and up into Tyrn Fornech, the Northspine. The sun had already sunk below the crest of the ridge, and they were shrouded in shadow.
The only problem was, their quarry had the same advantage. Once or twice, either Till or Kane thought they saw movement - but it inevitably turned out to be nothing: Till held them up for a full minute over a magpie; Kane startled a deer. But as they began to approach the crest of the ridge, Kane touched her arm.
“Listen,” he mouthed, and pointed. “Do you hear that?”
He was a good few years younger than her, not yet twenty - the idea that his hearing might be better than hers crossed her mind; but when she held her breath, she could hear it too - very faint, and intermittent over the murmur of the wind: the sound of drums.
Silently, and even more carefully, they followed the sound. Before long, it became easy - and presently, just as they were about to crest another ridge, Kane suddenly grabbed her arm and yanked her back.
She almost yelped - only to find he had also clasped a hand over her mouth. For a split second, her instinct screamed to punch him in the gut and place her knife at his throat - until she saw the fear in his eyes. She slowly removed his hand from her mouth.
“Fire,” he mouthed. “Goblins.”
She nodded to show she understood, and he let go of her arm. Getting down on her belly, she crawled up the slope like a snake; and, straining her neck, peered over the crest.
A campfire. A goblin on the drum, making an absurd racket. Another goblin prancing around the fire, waving some kind of crude staff. The firelight glinted on rusted iron weapons on the ground nearby.
That was it. Kane had seen the fire first simply because he was taller. Till looked left and right, up and down; her eyes raked the undergrowth. There was nothing else to see.
Just two goblins. Unprepared.
Till crept silently back down the slope to Kane. She had made up her mind, he could see: her dark eyes glinted. She held up two fingers; then cocked her head towards the fire; then, smiling, drew a line across her throat with her hand.
Just a couple of screams, and the deed was done. Till had retrieved her javelin from the prancing goblin’s heart - it had almost rolled into the campfire as it writhed, before she finished it off with her knife; Kane was still recovering his arrows from the drummer a few paces away, where he had finally shot it down as it tried to flee.
She turned her attention to their possessions - the pile of weapons she had noticed earlier: two daggers, a battleaxe, a pair of large scimitars. She assumed the prancing goblin’s staff-cudgel was also a weapon. All were crude: poorly made, and poorly maintained, though the metal wasn’t actually rusted - it just hadn’t been cleaned since the last time it drew blood. If part of her had felt a little guilty for attacking the creatures at unawares, this now swiftly evaporated.
She began to gather them up, wrapping them in cloth unceremoniously ripped off a fallen goblin. Kane returned, and helped her. Iron was iron - essential for all manner of tools and weapons; and there were no mines in these parts. The people of Ost Forod survived mainly off hunting, gathering and trade - they certainly knew how to scavenge; and they wasted nothing, looting the corpses for anything that could be of value. The bodies they left for the beasts.
Night by now had fallen; but the moon was bright, the stars were out, and the two of them felt quite relaxed. They drifted homeward, chatting quietly, a watchful owl following curiously overhead.
