I wish I shared his confidence. Or the confidence of any of them three. Nothing could make me rush into a stupid camp by myself. I lost sight of Finna earlier, but now I spot her darting into the tent the mage went in earlier. The two other mages stand in the middle of the plaza. They have stopped waving their hands. One starts walking towards the tent where Finna and the mage are. I rise to scream a warming, to start running toward the camp, but Rworg slaps a hand on my back.

  The weight presses me back down to the ground. “Tell me what is happening.”

  “The mage is going to find her and the other mage. That’s the tent they went in!” I hiss.

  “Ah, I thought something had already happened.” He squints toward the camp, the hand on my back tense. “We stay until we know we can’t. Keep talking.”

  I focus my eyes on the tent, ready for any movement or sign of combat. “There’s nothing happening now. Wait, the third mage may have heard something. They started walking toward the tent as well.”

  The hand on my back stays firm, presses a bit harder.

  “There’s no other movement. None of the other people seem to have heard. The two guards on the other edge of the clearing stayed where they were.”

  “Maybe a coincidence. We let her handle it.”

  He stays there, lying down, hand resting on my back. He’s not even looking in the right direction. The third mage reaches the tent and disappears behind it.

  Nothing happens. I can only imagine the mage lifting the tent flap and seeing what is inside. Whatever that is, it’s probably not pretty.

  Rworg’s hand presses down on me, squeezing me so I puff out air from my lungs. “What is happening?”

  “Nothing! I think the mage went in. No one has come out. The guards are still just standing around, so at least no one is screaming in there.”

  “The day is quiet. We would hear the screaming ourselves.”

  He’s right. Now that everyone has left, the camp is drowsy. Even the guy chopping wood has stopped and gone off somewhere.

  Then the back wall of the tent splits in half and Finna slithers out from the slit. She disappears behind another tent immediately, but I let out a breath and a laugh.

  “You see her?”

  “Yes, she’s coming between the thin line of tents on the left side. You can see her every time she passes between the tents.”

  “I trust you with that,” he says. At least he takes his hand off my back and I can breathe properly again. “I can’t see that far. You have to tell me.”

  I glance at his eyes, squinted into tiny slits. “Aah, I see,” I say.

  “No need to gloat.”

  I chuckle, the tension making me twitchy. I lose Finna for a moment, but when I spot her again, she’s already in the middle edge of the camp. The moment one of the Kertharians is around, she freezes in place, waits for them to pass. She seems to see around the corners, but I guess she must just be listening to footsteps or breaths or something, because otherwise I have no idea how she knows there’s someone around.

  The two guards at the center are still just standing around, talking to each other. I roll to take a look at the sky, but it’s still clear above our stake. “How long does it take for the auroras to appear? How much longer do we have to stay here?”

  “We still have time. They only come at the very end.”

  I turn back to search for Finna and see a one man just about to reach a corner of a building she’s hiding behind. She’s already ready for him, waiting him out, but I can see another Kertharian approaching from the other direction, moving toward her hiding spot. I’m higher and can see him coming, but I’m not sure if she does, as there’s a large tent between her and the man, opposite to the building.

  I close my fist around a tuft of yellow grass, snapping under the grip. “She’s going to get found out.”

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  I still can’t see her face, but her head turns this way and that. Did she notice the other person coming?

  “Have you seen Finna work before?” Rworg asks.

  “Well…” I say, but then I do.

  She lops something high, arcing into the air. Finna jumps toward the tent and grabs a beam at its corner with both hands. The tent leans to one side, the beam bending. The thing she threw, maybe a rock, lands behind the man just as he’s turning the corner. Finna’s feet land on the beam between her hands. She jumps, and I can hear the beam twang faintly. The man turns around to look at the rock. Finna sails to the roof of the building, only slightly giving herself more speed by gripping the railing with her hands.

  The Kertharian picks up the rock and peers at it. He lifts it at the other Kertharian coming towards him. They both start talking and shrugging, pointing at the sky and the ground. Finna slides off the roof on the other side of the building, crossing to the other side of the tents.

  “Whoa,” I say.

  “What did she do?” Rworg says, squinting.

  Finna dusts off her pants and lowers the hood back down. She pushes it back under her collar and shakes her wild black hair loose. “Easy,” she says.

  Rworg crosses his arms over his chest and nods. “I told him so. But Folke is not much of a storyteller, so I do not know how easy it was.”

  “I didn’t know I’d have to narrate the whole thing,” I say. I could’ve told it better, described every detail, but oh well. It’s his own fault for not telling me sooner his eyesight is so bad. “So you really can’t see that far?”

  Rworg drops his other and thumps his fist on his chest. “Who needs to see far when problems are best handled face to face?”

  We’re standing just behind the hill, out of sight from the camp. So far, anyone hasn’t noticed whatever happened to the mages. The auroras to the north are maybe dimming or at least they aren’t growing anymore. I wonder how long it has been. Is Mandollel already on the way back? It has been maybe a while since his auroras appeared. I glance at the sun, but it’s impossible to estimate how much time has really passed.

  “Let’s go measure some handwidths,” I say. “I want to know how long we still have to stick around.”

  “We could just leave?” Finna says. “No one’s going to come dig up the stake, now that the mages are dead.”

  Rworg rubs his head. There’s already a stubble on the sides of his head that scritches as he does. “Do you want to explain it to the elf? Or try to lie to him?”

  “Hmph, fine!” She turns to stomp down the hill. She nearly misses a step when the screaming from the camp stars.

  The wailing reaches up over the crest of the hill. It’s not an anguished cry over finding someone dead, it’s the rage filled howl of a madman hungry for blood to be spilled in anger. I run up the hill and dive to take a look at the camp.

  More voices raise up, raving and loud. Heard from afar, it sounds even more terrifying. What syllables there might be, bleeding into each other, blending into a steady stream of hate, more voices joining it in a ripple that soon reaches the edges of the camp. The two guards who watched the sand cloud closest to us throw back their heads and scream at the sky, weapons spread wide. Do they even know why they are shouting? Can the shouting carry some message about the dead mages? Someone must have found the corpses, otherwise nothing makes any sense.

  I look back at Rworg and Finna running down the hill. They’ll raise a hell of a sand cloud, which the Kertharians might be able to…

  It doesn’t matter. The auroras blaze over the sky above me. The green and the purple swim like oil on water against the bright blue of the sky, stark and obvious even against the blazing sun.

  Rworg waves a hand, beckoning me over to our backpacks and gear. Behind me, the first Kertharians are already running toward the hill, kicking up sand into a brown wall that is so thick it casts a shadow on the ground.

  Thoughts spin in my head as I stumble and slide down the hill, sand in my mouth. Do we run while we still can? Do we hold for a moment, so the Kertharians can’t find it and stop the process? Wait, how do we even know the stake is ready? Last time the auroras started to fade, but it was Mandollel who told us when the time was.

  I hit the end of the slope and start sprinting. The new arrows should last me for a while. I could climb to the hill on the opposite side to get a better angle and shoot down at the Kertharians once they are closer, but that would make me an obvious target, a single figure against a yellow hill.

  “Do we stay or run?” I shout as I run past them.

  Rworg is shaking his arms, testing his fingers against the sword’s grip. Finna drags the backpacks away from the stake, organizing them in a way so that they can be picked up easily.

  She makes sure they are all closed, pulls the straps tight. “We stay for a moment. The Peacock is going to complain all the way back to Tenorsbridge if he hears we left the stake unguarded. Rworg checked the time. It’s just 15 minutes.”

  15 minutes is a long time to spend fighting. The camp still had maybe fifty people in it, even if most of them didn’t look like soldiers. Fighting against crazed farmers and their wives sounds almost worse than fighting soldiers. No way around it, this is going to be both dangerous and terrible.

  Two Kertharians crest the hill. They are the two guards, still ahead of everyone else. They raise their swords and shields into the air, yowling down at us. The constant thrum of the rest of the Kertharians shouting behind them gets louder every moment. The way the hill between us muddles the sound doesn’t make it any less disturbing. It’s as if a wave of boiling spittle was going to roll over us. The image is vivid and weird and I shake my head to clear it.

  There’s room for nothing else now. I nudge the quiver and take a moment to choose an arrow. One that Mandollel made, the spiral around its shaft intricate and flowing. The first shot up the hill won’t be easy, and I want to know how they fly. I keep my bow low, arm relaxed, and watch the top of the hill.

  “Well?” Finna shouts at me, waving at the two guards running down the hill.

  “It’s just two. They will reach us before all the rest,” I say, nodding my head toward Rworg. “It won’t be a problem.”