What the Bend Hid

The road north has a rhythm to it, if you let it.

Three days of travel — mostly uneventful travel — had settled the party into something approximating a routine. Respin had seen enough of these escort jobs to know that routine was either a gift or a trap, and he'd learned to appreciate it while it lasted. The wagon rolled. The miles passed. The barrels shifted in their boxes and found their places again.

On the third night, Blix produced fire out of thin air.

Respin watched him do it with the particular expression of a man who has decided not to ask questions he does not need the answers to. The fire was warm. That was the relevant part.

The fourth day brought a Lords' Alliance patrol riding past — steady, professional — and Respin watched them the way he always watched such things: noted, filed, available if needed. By nightfall they had reached the junction and turned onto the trail proper, the sky pressing low and heavy with cloud, the first light drizzle settling in at dusk. Helluva, keeping watch before dawn, spotted a small herd of goats crossing the road heading north — five or six of them, collared, moving with the unhurried certainty of animals who know exactly where they're going. She mentioned it in the morning. Nobody was quite sure what to make of it.

The fifth day was dark and stayed that way.

He appeared from the south — a traveller, hooded but unhurried, carrying a staff and a sack with the ease of someone who has walked enough roads that one more holds no particular threat. Scruffy, middle-aged, a beard and the look of a man who needs very little. Rackios Springsoother, he said his name was. He had a hut somewhere near Waterdeep. He mentioned, in passing, that he had encountered a Firbolg — or knew of one; the precise details were easy to lose in a roadside conversation, and the road continued in both directions, and after a brief exchange they parted ways and that was that.

An hour into the morning's journey, they came around a bend.

Two horses, dead in the road. Arrows. Saddlebags turned out and searched. An open scroll-case, empty, or close enough to it that the difference didn't matter. Respin looked at the horses for a moment longer than was strictly necessary, and was very quiet when he looked up.

He recognised them. They were Gundrin and Sildar's.

He didn't say much. He didn't need to. Whatever had happened here had happened recently enough that the arrows hadn't settled, and the Goblins hadn't gone as far as they thought.

Dwomdin found one of them and drove his maul through it with the particular efficiency of a man who has been in this position before and has no intention of being sentimental about it. Respin spotted a second one up in the canopy and put a thrown handaxe through it cleanly. Then they looked at the ground.

The trail heading north told what it could: multiple Goblins, and humans dragged. Where those humans were now — whether Gundrin and Sildar were among them — the trail didn't say. Not yet.

They went north anyway.

The first snare would have snatched someone ten feet into the air. They saw it in time. Another ten minutes brought a pit trap, six by ten feet, crossed without incident. The country didn't want them here, which was usually a sign that someone, somewhere, did not want to be found. An hour on the trail. Then another forty-five minutes, the trees closing in, no sound but their own footsteps and the occasional creak of leather.

And then, ahead: the soft, steady sound of a stream.

Water over stone. Respin listened to it for a moment — the small, patient noise of something that had been here long before any of this, and would be here long after.

He kept moving.