Free Wildling by Greg Curtis Page B

seen the offerings there. It was likely only hunters that had been praying to the goddess for a good hunt, but the offering table had been piled high with ribbons – the traditional offering for her. This land as wild as it seemed was far from deserted.
    The party was camped in a small clearing by a stream, a fire lit for the night and some sort of meat roasting on a spit above it. Rabbit at a guess. Several of them at least. That was good. As he stood in the forest surrounded by trees and bathed in their shadow, Dorn knew the fire would make it harder for the wildcast to see him. As long as he didn't step into the circle of light it cast. But he wasn't about to do something so stupid. Staying in the darkness was always a cat's way.
    As he stood there watching, he noticed two things that surprised him. The first was that there were now four of them. Another man and a woman had joined them and were sitting by the camp fire waiting for tea along with Lorian and Rodan. It explained the extra horses though. The second was that they were bound. The newcomers and Lorian. Their hands were tied together with leather strips and then to a pole that connected all three. Two of them even had collars. They were prisoners, and Rodan – as evidenced by the simple fact that he was unbound – had to be their warder.
    A wildcast warder. That seemed wrong. Wildlings were usually the ones running from those in authority, not taking prisoners. Especially when he knew that one of the captives was a wildling. Lorian's hawk he noticed was perched in the branch of a tree not too far away.
    None of it made any sense to him. The man was a wildling. He had killed a large number of dusky elves when they had invaded Little Rock, one of the worst enemies a wildling had. Yet he had tried to kill him for no reason. And now he was taking more wildlings prisoner. Even when they all had to travel to the same destination. Didn't they? No matter how he tried to reason it through there seemed to be no sanity in his path. And maybe that was the truth. Maybe the man was crazed.
    What was he to do?
    The question troubled Dorn for a bit. The sensible thing would be to simply go around them and carry on ahead. He was faster than they were and there was never any point in getting into fights if you didn't need to. And as far as he was concerned he owed the woman nothing. She had been trouble from the moment he'd met her. As for the other two he didn't even know them. Though from what he gathered from Rodan's bragging and the collars around their necks they must also be wildlings and that almost made them kin.
    It felt wrong leaving them. He knew nothing about two of the prisoners and the third he didn't like. But Rodan he knew well enough to know he was a bad man. He did not have good intentions for those he had captured and bound. Not when all the prisoners had obviously been beaten. There was dried blood on their faces. The strange woman with wayfarer's hair had a badly blackened eye and her face was swollen, Lorian sported a puffy, cut lip, and the man had a heavily bruised face. Seeing that made Dorn angry. After what he'd done and the pain he'd caused him, he was very angry.
    Then there was his knife. Rodan had Dorn's bone handled knife in his hands, a knife that he was particularly fond of. It had cost him several silver pieces because of the good steel blade, and he sharpened it regularly. The sight of Rodan sitting there with it, occasionally testing the meat with it and laughing at the others' misfortune set his blood boiling.
    Dorn was even more angry when he heard the man telling them that his friends would be coming soon to take them away. Mainly because the friends he was speaking of were dusky elves. They were no friends of anyone let alone a wildling. Yet he claimed that the smoke he had created from the fire would bring them even at night, and that when they came his prisoners would be taken far away to serve the clan as slaves. He laughed about that