6 Saun 721
continued from here
The search party had -albeit hesitantly- returned to the Ranger Headquarters, leaving Oram with Sh’ron Ng’yi to track the thwarthides they believed to have Priscilla. Though the pair could not know it once they parted ways with their comrades, the Rangers returned and promptly told Bear what had happened. The senior ranger immediately told them to get their weapons and gear up for a raid, but wisely held back on actually sending them out before Hop and Jim got back to debrief the search party.
Cooler heads prevailed on what to do next. After a meal and a short rest, the party would indeed go back into the Sweetwine. To anybody outside the Rangers, the story was to be that they were simply continuing the search. Should anyone ask why they were arming, they would reply that it was Ranger policy to arm if they were spending the night in the field. Such had indeed been their practice of late, although that was more due to their posture during the Slag’s Deep incident than to any long standing policy. Once in the Sweetwine, they would make camp and start to patrol the nearby area, under guise of continuing the search. Should Oram and Sh’ron fail to return in two trials, the patrols would become more probing…
Oram and Sh’ron knew nothing of this, as they made their way back to the ambush site, although possibilities weighed upon the hunter’s mind the whole time. They were on foot, with Oram leading Mule. Oram stopped to peer once more at the tracks where Priscilla had emerged onto the wood trail. She had been wandering through untracked woods for some time before then. Oram found some tears of fabric on branches, probably from her clothes. Finding the wood trail was a stroke of luck for the girl, or should have been. She had turned down the trail and walked a hundred paces or so before she reached the clearing. Her little stride, to that point, had been steady, even resolute, surprisingly so for a small girl who had been walking for some time and was lost.
Peering about the clearing, Oram visualized the events based on the traces he saw. The thwarthides had surprised Priscilla; she had been walking quickly at that point, not cautiously. She had stopped initially, shuffled around. She had not tried to run right away. Had she tried to talk to them? the hunter wondered. But eventually, she had tried to run, to escape. Oram noticed that some of her running prints were made over the thwarthide prints, obscuring them; the creatures already stood around her by the time she decided to try to flee. By then, of course, it had been far too late.
The rangers who had first found the scene had left their own prints, which complicated things a bit. Initially, the pair could not determine where the tracks led off to, but after a while they managed to find them. There were three pairs of hoof prints. They had obviously picked the girl up; her own footprints did not lead out of the clearing. Oram asked Sh’ron to lead Mule; he himself was the better tracker of the two, especially with Choir to help him.
The tracks led southeast into the forest. While the thwarthides did not follow any mortal-made paths, they did follow clearings and other natural seams in the terrain. ”They’re making a beeline to somewhere,” Oram determined. The party hadn’t been concerned about being tracked, it seemed. No doubling back or looking for rock outcroppings to walk on. No unnecessary creek crossings.
After a couple breaks, Sh’ron and Oram noticed the smoke rising from the trees, white in the Saun glare. Oram turned to notice that Shron and Mule were both sweating. He sometimes forgot that everybody didn’t have his tolerance for heat. ”Let’s find some shade and water before we get any closer,” he suggested. ”Then we can plan how to approach that fire site.”
