Bounty (29 page)

“…
a pointless investigation, when we all know she wasn’t abducted from her room,” someone was saying. “Security has not gone
that
slack, and we all know Her Highness has a tendency to…wander,” he finished delicately.

“
Shall we slack in security’s place, then?” a more dedicated investigator proposed pointedly.

“
Then tell me, Captain, what good it’s going to do to scour potential abduction sites when we already know where she’s being held?”

“
Until she’s back in our possession, we glean every ounce of potential information we can – about her abductors, their possible intentions, their motivation, and anything that might give away their weak points. I cannot help that we were assigned to a potentially unlikely location.”

“
What I wouldn’t give to be where the action is right now,” the more rash guardsman remarked restlessly.

“
I doubt there is much ‘action’, seeing as His Majesty will likely be doing everything in his power to maintain peace between the opposing ranks until his endangered daughter is back in possession. Besides, I hear the Crowing Woods are haunted–”

And Godren was gone, reacting to the name like the words had pulled his trigger. He was on the ground before his descent registered in his limbs, and then he went straight for the stables. He could hear the ruckus of the guards he had stirred up, but didn’t stop to spare a thought toward the chase he had drawn after him. He just let the thrill of pursuit drive him, and set his mind on reaching the princess.

He was in and out of the stables in seconds, meeting with no resistance since the barn had been almost completely vacated in the interest of riding to the princess’s rescue. Indeed, Godren had stolen nearly the last mount present, hastily throwing on a bridle without fastening it and jumping onto the mare’s unsaddled back almost as she was already charging out of the stable.

Resistance found him then, but it was on foot and he just charged right through. Pulsing muscles thundered beneath him, sweeping him along toward the closest section of the palace wall. Jumping a hedge, Godren nearly lost his seat on the landing, but jarringly righted himself and urged the mare to gallop on. She lengthened her stride, her breath coming quicker with exertion and excitement, and he fastened his eyes on the looming wall that rose up to obstruct them.

At the wall they slid to a prancing halt, and Godren climbed to his knees, then his feet, and reached the lip of the wall from the mare’s tall back. It would not have been possible except for the grassy boost of a hillock that was posed on this, the ‘harmless’ side. Clambering over, with considerable more strain than the first time, he abandoned his temporary mount on the other side. His knees gave again as he dropped to the ground, but this time he rolled away and saved his jaw a second bashing.

He was noticed by someone then, but there was so much commotion that it wasn’t hard to lose himself in it and dart away, evading those who jumped for him.

Just shy of the alleys across the way, though, an impact jolted him senseless and sent him flying to the ground with a guard tangled up in his tumble. Thrashing to come out on top, Godren tangled with the other man and beat him back, and they were both engaged in fierce, wild combat until Godren’s desperation prevailed and the guard went down with the coat of his uniform ending up in Godren’s mindless hands, having been stripped in the fray. Godren regarded it a moment before closing his fingers around it in possessive conclusion and sprinting off to continue his quest. The uniform might come in handy later on.

Stealing another horse from the neighborhood, he swung on without a moment to lose and urged his new mount into a gallop across the cobblestones. Tearing through the city, they made for the Crowing Woods and the dire purpose that awaited them there.

Once they had left the streets behind, Godren leaned low over the horse’s neck and urged him to churn into a breakneck speed, and with a noticeable stretching of his legs, the animal responded and pumped his effort into his pace. They hurtled toward the dark gathering of trees – a daunting, solid, jagged silhouette clumped in the distance.

When he saw the camp, he slowed down. It wouldn’t do to charge in and draw attention to himself. Donning the coat he’d come to possess, Godren avoided the direct glare of the torches as he approached.

They were stationed just outside of the forest, restlessly biding their time. Scouting out the king, Godren approached his company but hung back, straining his ears to catch the status of the situation. A bloodied scout was reporting:

“
They took her to the Crone’s Cottage. Put her inside, but now…they’re just sitting outside – guarding, but they look so inoperative. They appear strangely…relaxed. Almost bored.”

“
Waiting for orders from a superior,” someone else deduced.

“
They’ve had her much longer than necessary,” the king broke in, composed but restless. “This idleness is out of place.”

Coming right into a situation deemed ‘amiss’, Godren wanted to just respond to the restless ill-boding that he instantly felt and take off into the forest to halt things before something went wrong. But he managed to suppress the urge and bide his own time, wanting to hear more – or at least wanting to come to his own conclusion first. Keeping his head ducked and angled away, he lingered within earshot, holding himself back.

“
What kind of weapons do you detect?” the king wanted to know. “What would we come up against if we raided the forest?”

“
Well, I thought the issue was the fact that they hold sway over your daughter’s fate, your Majesty. Isn’t that threat weapon enough?”

“
I’m getting restless,” the king said. “I don’t think they know what they want. Which means they could instantly decide to kill her – which we ruled out, at first, only because we took their
not
killing her to mean they surely wanted something
else
.”

“
Well,” replied the scout, “in the way of weapons, they look fairly…thoroughly…equipped.”

“
What does that mean?” the king asked without patience.

“
They each carry at least three knives on their persons, one has a sword, and the other a lash. It looks like they have a stash of throwing stars as well. And something I do not recognize. And aside from that, it is no myth that the proximity around the cottage is amply sabotaged,” he said with a brave swallow.

“
The reason for all your scratches?” the king asked.

“
Yes, your Majesty.”

‘
Scratches’ was an understatement. The scout was covered in slashes that shone in the torchlight. Godren wondered just what kind of traps he had sprung.

“
Don’t know if ghosts could be kept out that way, but I must give the witch credit for trying,” the scout commented.

“
Don’t believe every story you hear, Levine. About ghosts or Matilda’s being a witch. Stories like that can grow into as deterring a sabotage as any.”

“
Right, sire.”

The ‘Crone’s Cottage’ was a title courtesy of the stories people had told about Matilda the hermit, a woman of generations past who had gone to the extreme of moving into the ‘haunted forest’ to be alone. The scenario made for all kinds of good stories, and the stories had brewed and risen and been endlessly twisted by superstition until they began to cause superstition of their own.

“
If we took enough men to ensure we could best them, they’d see us coming, and I doubt they’d let us get away with it,” the scout said. “They’d bring out Her Highness and use her to force us back. They’re not interested in negotiating right now.”

If they weren’t interested in negotiating…things could go downhill fast.

“
If we take enough men...they’ll see us coming…”
the scout had said.
But all you need is one man ready to take on them both,
Godren thought, and he angled his mount away from the circle of men. Keeping his pace to an inconspicuous walk, he moved tensely along the edge of camp, flanked on one side by revealing torchlight and on the other by the foreboding shadows of the trees. Each angle was threatening in the opposite extreme.

Away from the meeting, Godren dismounted the steaming animal he’d ridden in, fondly ruffling its mane in parting. Forsaking the light of the camp, he squared his shoulders toward his mission and stepped into the fringes of the woods. Tree shadows swamped him, darkness melting his edges to blend with the shrouded scenery. He blinked against the onslaught of patched shadow, trying to balance everything out. When his eyes adjusted, the dominant blackness gave way to evident layers of dappled moonlight and billows of blue mist throughout the trees.

Ducking under low-hanging branches, Godren wove his swift way toward the infamous Crone’s Cottage, his safety an irrelevant concern as he anticipated being thwarted by any means of unexpected sabotage. He knew without a doubt they would come, knew he would spring something at any given moment, and that knowledge was not deterring in the least. He was ready: keenly poised, for security, but most of all just as ruled by the fearlessness he’d cultivated since awakening numb to the world. What was more, he had a greater cause underfoot here than anything he would achieve working for Mastodon. So be it if it killed him. Maybe it would compensate some of the wrongs he’d done in his own favor.

Out of the mystic darkness, a rig of disembodied tree limbs suddenly swung down to topple Godren to the ground. He caught only a glimpse of massive movement out of the corner of his eye, and a warning creak to go along with it, before he was diving out of the ram’s brutal path. The sweeping branches still clipped his legs, knocking him into a bruising spin, and he came to a rest only as his whirling body struck a tree. Senselessness didn’t even have time to register; impact with the trunk brought a wicked cage-like contraption stabbing down at him from the branches above. Heaving himself into a roll out of harm’s way, Godren disregarded the minor detail of regaining his breath and threw his senses into predicting the darkness’s moves.

A metallic clamping sound of released tension went off next to his body before he could climb to his feet, and a quick inventory of the source found the jaws of a small game trap fastened securely on his forearm. He must have rolled right into it, he thought, aghast at the wicked sight of the clamp and its punctures when he didn’t feel a thing. It was disturbing and morbidly inspiring at the same time.

He didn’t have time to think about it, though – let alone remove it. In an instantaneous decision of absolute dismissal, he tore his eyes away and sprang once again to his feet, metal jaws still attached to his arm. The surprises that the darkness kept had gone momentarily quiet – but tauntingly so.

Godren only had to move to call them back down on him. A tripped wire twanged underfoot, and then gears churned and cranked amid the trees, and with a sturdy snap an arrow sang by his head. Following that, a series of kin releases saw him careening for cover, as lethally puncturing weapons thudded into the tree trunks around him. Like a flying viper, one bit across his neck and ripped on past. Godren felt no pain, but was just aware of its grazing kiss as it tweaked his neck to the side. He didn’t check the blood though; aside from being caught up in the greater heat of the moment, he would rather he remained blissfully ignorant. There was no sense shattering the illusion of invincibility that he had effectively supporting his nerve.

The next phase of the traps consisted of nets. They were progressively strung everywhere – between trunks, up in the branches – some of them dropping or swinging down to snare their prey while others just stood in his path, creating a maze of obstructions. Like disguised spiders’ webs, some lurked in concealing patches of shadow, too, ready to catch him from his own carelessly directed path. Godren avoided them until hazardous ground limited him to certain paths, lest he tread on beds of buried spearheads or break his ankles in the roughly-concealed pits that riddled the proximity. Then, he employed his knives and cut his way through, drawing very close now to his fiercely-guarded destination. Quieting his footfalls and tempering the other aspects of his passage, he climbed mutely through the severed tatters of a net frame and lightly blew aside a patch of mist that hung before him. It ran from his breath, dissipating to bare a window through the trees, and he resealed his lips as a commitment to silence as he crept near his vague visual of the cottage. It sat in eerie, lifeless solitude in a pocket of nestled emptiness up ahead, quaint and ominous at once.

In the rapt silence, a flurry of cawing ravens, or crows, dashed through the branches above, low enough to scare Godren into a duck as feathers and tree pieces rained down on his head. Then they were past, though – but Godren watched them land on the cottage chimney and roof, settling in like characteristic sentries of the ‘haunted’ place.

Godren cast his eyes about for the silhouettes of the human sentries the scout had reported, but only caught a snatch of uncertain movement from his distance. Ducking stealthily under the tresses hanging from the tree branches without taking his eyes off the cottage, he slunk ever closer.

More ravens went by, circling the area. Their brothers called to them from the roof, the sharp sound ominously swallowed by the surrounding drifts of mist. Discouraged, the birds ruffled their feathers in an offended fashion and grudgingly, haughtily submitted to the silence – as if they’d had every intention of having their voices rudely snuffed from the beginning.