“What will we do?” Tinn asked.
“Study the map first,” I said. Londe settled beside Marces. Colete was on the other side of him. With my family close to my side, our friends shuffled near and plopped down right in front of us like furry balls. They looked like boulders, which would help if there were any spies in the distance. I pulled the map out of my pack.
Unfolding it carefully, I traced a finger. “We are here.” I showed our dots. All six of them.
And the two I’d led us parallel to. They hadn’t moved, thankfully. But could they have minions who wouldn’t show up on the map?
Two. I wracked my brain, but I could not think of who they could be. Enemies I’d made? Beings who were bent on evil the likes no one would speak of or tell me the result?
No one used unicorn magic. No one.
But they’d taken mine. Twisted it. Subsumed my soul with a taint that had been killing me before I gained the power to shift from a witch and cut off that leak. What kind of Beings would do that?
Why would they need my magic? The magic of all the Beings they’d stolen?
Three unicorns. A locus. Some pixies. And now that I thought about it… a dryad. “I hate to ask you to relive what you went through, but we need to know what kind of Beings were there.”
“You think that had something to do with it?”
“Like they needed a special assortment of magic, not just any and all magic they could get their hands on? They were trolls,” Londe said.
“And we know they weren’t collecting for themselves.”
“Dwarves. I remember you telling a story about them once,” Colete said.
I remembered them. The two dwarf women, who were almost indistinguishable from the men, barring beards on their faces. They were strong, capable. Formidable, even, if they had weapons to hand. Their cage had been the hardest to open.
“And a faun.” I’d released that too.
“There were two fauns, before,” Marces whispered.
Colete made a sound, and I stroked them both. I didn’t ask before what. There had been that… smell coming out of the cave. Not all of it had been the stench of the trolls themselves and the caged Beings.
“Gnomes were hiding with the griffin, and he sheltered them. I thought they knew each other. Or they’d been caged together for a while. Sometimes the griffin would talk to me,” Marces said, after he’d lifted his head from my lap. He was so brave, always facing his fears head on. I ran my fingers through his mane.
“You saw the dryad, but she was captured with a nymph from a small pond.”
“Was the nymph there?” They really didn’t do well away from water. In a hot cave, with stinky trolls? She’d have been very, very ill.
“No. That thing took her away right before you came.” Colete looked back the way we’d come.
I sighed. A faun, a nymph. How many others had this evil Being harmed? “I wish I’d gotten there fast enough to save everyone.”
Colete nudged me right as Marces plopped his head back into my lap. I couldn’t hold back a small smile.
“You cannot protect or save everyone,” Londe said. “You are doing your best, Chasen, and don’t forget, you were hurt by these foul creatures too.”
As always, his wisdom came when I most needed it. I closed my eyes and tried to let go of some of the guilt. I opened them and said, “Thank you, mate.”
Through this conversation, Tinn and Wenn had studied the map I’d left on the ground between us.
“They are moving, the dots.”
“What?” Not closer, but not farther away, either. The dots were… circling. Tiny spins I could barely see were actual circles.
“The circles are getting bigger.” Wenn bent closer, his ears quivering. “Watch.”
It only took a few breaths to see he was right. The circles were getting bigger, but by tiny increments.
“What do you think it means?”
I sighed, pursing my lips, puzzling over it. How I wished Maize had been able to share more than just the map that tracked my enemies with me! The two circles got slightly farther apart, but their edges continued to overlap as they moved.
Then it came to me. Moving. Tracking. They were tracking, or searching, for something. Or someone.
Me? Us? Did they know about the Being we killed somehow? Were they looking for my family?
I shared my theory quickly and was dismayed when the others agreed. “We need to find a place to hide the young. Then we need to prepare.”
“Prepare?” Tinn asked.
“They,” I gestured toward the map, “are coming to us. So let’s greet them with all the welcome they deserve.”
The map did give us another benefit. “Do you see that?” I pointed to a small group of triangles. It was close to us, about the same distance we’d moved from the spot we’d been ambushed.
“Something there?”
“I saw those before. They’re rocks. Unless the Being is some sort of master Earth or Water manipulator, that should be helpful to protect the young. And we can use the surrounding landscape to make some traps.” Water lay on one side, hopefully deep. I saw some trees. We could make some stakes, traps.
Weapons. “I think we have a day. Two at the most. We need to move.”
The young were antsy but stayed close. Londe and I both touched them repeatedly, soothing them.
Wenn and Tinn chittered. I wasn’t sure what they could do with their small bodies, but Londe was strong and I had some things I’d made in my pack that would help. And my human body had been honed with blacksmithing.
These bastards were about to pay for everything they’d done.
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