“I don’t believe he can,” the paladin answered as he measured lengths of clean white fabric and cut them with Maellas’s dagger. “I’ve not been able to heal any of the werewolves harmed by silver weapons-Quillion or Pater. It may not be possible. Perhaps the Flame will not aid those to whom the touch of its sacred metal is anathema.” He shrugged and began dressing Maellas’s shoulder, taking care not to wrap the wound too tightly.
Catching Greddark’s quizzical look, the paladin shrugged.
“We don’t want his blood attracting predators.”
There was a rustling sound from the pine Irulan had climbed, and the shifter appeared out of the foliage, sliding down the last few feet of naked trunk, shedding bark as she went. She landed lightly on her feet and shook the pine needles from her hair.
“So where are we?” Greddark asked. They had exited Lamannia at a different place than they’d gone in, and she’d been hoping to discover both their approximate location within the forest and-more importantly, as far as Greddark was concerned-how long it was going to take them to get out.
“I can’t be certain,” she replied, picking at a few stray needles from her braids, “but I think we’re only a day, two at most, from the edge of the wood, and closer to Angwar Keep than Olath. Ostra’s guide must have taken us to the southernmost boundary of the manifest zone. It probably cut a good three days off our journey. Maybe more.”
Thank the Host! He was getting tired of the trees, oppressive green, and interminable biting insects. The forest made him feel insignificant and, well … dwarfed, and he had to agree with Andri-the sooner they were out of it, the better.
“I also brought us some food, if anyone feels like eating,” she continued, pulling three large blue eggs out of her tunic. At the mention of food, both his stomach and Andri’s grumbled.
Irulan laughed. “I’ll take that as a yes,” she said and set about cooking the eggs, adding the last of their salted pork and the caps of some mushrooms she found growing in the shade of a large rock.
After they’d eaten, Irulan drew out a tiny bell and a bit of silver wire from her pouch. Whispering a few words, she set an alarm spell around their camp.
“We don’t need a repeat of the other night, especially now that we don’t have the dire wolf to guard us.”
“Not that he helped much,” Greddark muttered, earning himself an annoyed look from the shifter.
“You didn’t fare so well against the shifters yourself,” she reminded him, before climbing up from her spot by the fire and grabbing her bow.
“I’ll take the first watch, “Andri said, the first words he’d spoken since before dinner, other than a mumbled thanks when Irulan had handed him his plate of eggs. Irulan frowned at him as he stood.
“Are you sure?” she asked. “You haven’t gotten much sleep in the past few days.”
None of them had, but Andri’s short naps had been particularly restless. From the words he murmured as he tossed and turned to the occasional moan or whimper, it was clear that the revelations of Shadukar still haunted his dreams, even if he didn’t speak of them during daylight hours.
“Paladins are trained to go days without sleep, if necessary,” he replied. “I’ll be fine.”
Irulan still looked skeptical, but she finally acceded.
“Just stay within the radius of the alarm spell. I don’t want to be woken up if I don’t have to be.” Her words were gruff, but her concern was obvious. Greddark wondered if the tormented young man even noticed.
“I will,” Andri answered, and by the gentleness of his tone, Greddark realized the paladin wasn’t quite as oblivious to the shifter’s feelings as he might appear. “Sleep well.”
After he had gone, Irulan walked over to where Maellas was, double-checking his bonds and his gag. When the Bishop made a noise, Irulan just grunted.
“Right. Like I’d be stupid enough to unmuzzle a rabid wolf. We’re only a few days from Aruldusk. You won’t starve. Think of it as penance-Flame knows, you’re in need of it.”
She turned her back on the priest, whose green eyes narrowed in anger as they followed her. But there was little else the elf could do besides glare-the silver manacles were enchanted to keep him from changing forms, and the chains were strong enough that he couldn’t break them, even with a werewolf’s might. He was at their mercy. Or rather, at Andri’s, since both Greddark and the shifter woman would just as soon kill him now and let the priests in Aruldusk pull their answers from his corpse.
Irulan remarked on the paladin’s forbearance as she laid her bedroll out by the fire.
“Why didn’t he just let the werewolves kill Maellas and be done with it? I’m sure he could have persuaded what’s-her-name-Daimana-to do it.” She said the female werewolf’s name with the same distaste she might reserve for a piece of meat that had gone bad. She didn’t wait for Greddark to answer. “Justice,” she snorted. “As if the Church could deliver that to one of its own. You don’t need a trial to ensure justice. All you need is a sword.”
“I’m not sure his motives are all that noble,” Greddark said, hiding his amusement at her venom. It was probably a good thing she spent most of her time in the woods. Her way of speaking exactly what was on her mind wouldn’t endear her to those who were used to at least a pretense of civility.
One of Irulan’s eyebrows rose. “Why, then? It would be so much easier to just get rid of him here, where there are no witnesses.” She stopped short. “Oh.”
Greddark nodded. Not having witnesses was exactly what Andri was trying to avoid.
“No one in Aruldusk is going to believe Maellas is infected if they don’t see it for themselves. It would be the situation with his mother all over again,” she said, shaking her head. “Poor Andri.”
“We are all forged in the fires of our past,” Greddark said, by way of agreement. It was an old dwarf saying; a favorite of his father’s, judging by how many times the old dwarf had said it the day he exiled Greddark.
Irulan look surprised, then thoughtful.
“Yes, I suppose we are.”
It took Greddark a long time to fall asleep. His hand twitched toward his sword at every frog’s croak and cricket’s chirp. When he was awakened from a fitful slumber some hours later by the frantic ringing of a bell, his first thought was-Host! What did I do to deserve this? His second was-Not again.
As he and Irulan scrambled to their feet, grabbing their weapons, Greddark cast a quick eye over to the tree where the Bishop was tied. Still there. Then he turned his attention back to the forest, just in time to see Andri step into the small clearing they had chosen for their camp.
“Andri!” Irulan’s voice was sharp with reproach and relief. She lowered her sword at the sight of the young paladin. “I told you not to trigger the al-”
“He didn’t,” came another familiar voice. “I did.”
D’Medani stepped out from behind the paladin, her war spikard pressed up firmly against Andri’s back.
“I’ll thank you to drop your weapons now, unless you’ve got another paladin handy to heal this one when I skewer him.”
“Flame!” Irulan swore as she bent and placed her sword on the ground. “What, do we have some sort of magical beacon floating over our heads that only our enemies can see? Here we are, come ambush us?”
“Well, actually, in this case, you do,” the half-elf replied, nodding towards Greddark. “I believe it’s called a locator charm, and it’s attached to my quarry’s back, there.”
Locator charm? It couldn’t be!
Greddark dropped his blade and reached over his shoulder, fingers brushing lightly over his coat. There. He pulled a small spiky object out from the weave and held it up, scrutinizing it in the firelight.
The little metal device was designed to look like a bur, down to its brownish coloring and its carefully-crafted casing of spines. It would be inconspicuous on a traveler’s clothes, overlooked until it was too late. Inside the casing, the “seed” was in fact a tiny Siberys dragonshard imbued with a location spell that was linked to a ring on d’Medani’s finger, which also sported a golden shard. A variation on the standard location spell, the charm linked the ring to the bur so that, once the bur was planted on a subject, the ring-wearer could follow at a considerable distance without worrying about interference from running water, or lead, or even other spells. A powerful tool in the hands of a bounty hunter or an inquisitive, this prototype was the only such charm currently in existence.