by Spoor, Garry
“Who did this to you Alex? Who jumped you?” Carter asked as he finally sheathed his weapon.
“That’s just it, I didn’t see anything.” Alex said, bucking his pants. “It was a big blur. I was just… well I was… you know, and then someone or something pushed me into the tree and the rope just kept running around and around, and before I knew it I couldn’t move.”
“And you didn’t see anyone?” Daniel asked.
“No, that’s just it. You… you don’t think the woods are… are haunted do you?” He asked as his eyes began to roam over the shadows of the trees that now seemed to grow even larger.
“I seriously doubt it.” Carter replied.
“Then why do it?” Daniel asked. “What purpose does it serve? A practical joke? If it was, it’s wasn’t very funny.”
“Maybe it’s part of the test.” Murphy said as he struggled to catch his breath.
“What, you think one of the instructors did it?” Carter asked. “It still doesn’t make any sense. Like Danny said, for what purpose.”
“You know… maybe to test how alert we were.”
“I’m sure if it was part of the test they would at least let us know how poorly we preformed.” Daniel added as he began to coil the rope. “Otherwise, what do we learn from something like this. No, I think it was one of the other groups, and I think I can guess which one.”
“But again, what for? There’s still no reason for it. Were they hoping we didn’t find him so quickly?” Carter asked.
“You think we were supposed to spend all night looking for him or maybe not notice that he was missing until the morning. Then what? We waste time searching for him?”
“If that was the case they should have gagged him so he couldn’t call out.” Carter suggested.
“Damn.” Kile said as she finally shoved her foot into her boot.
“What? Something in there with you?”
“They wanted us out here because all our stuff is back there.” She yelled as she turned and ran back through the forest. She heard Carter cursing behind her as he started to catch up, but it was too late. As they reached their makeshift campsite, it was completely bare of all supplies, only her hat remained in the middle of the small clearing by the river.
“Damn, how could we be so stupid?” Carter shouted as he pulled at his hair and spun around like always did when he got mad and had nothing to lash out at. “They got everything, everything.”
Kile walked to the center of the clearing and picked up her hat. “Not everything.” She said as she revealed the small ebony box.
“Nothing like sending us a clear message.” Carter replied as he snatched the box from the ground.
At that moment Daniel and Alex arrived, followed closely by Murphy.
“What did they get?” Daniel asked.
“What didn’t they get?” Carter snapped as he tossed the box to Alex.
“I’m sorry guys.” Alex replied. He clearly felt bad and responsible for the situation.
“It’s not your fault.” Carter assured him. “It’s mine.”
“Oh come on, it’s either all of our faults or nobody’s faults, and I’m leaning toward nobody.” Kile said.
“I should have stayed behind; I should have protected the camp.”
“Your responsibility is for the protection of the members of the group.’ Daniel told him. “Items can be replaced, lives cannot.”
It was a nice sentiment, a little over the top since no lives were really in danger, but it was nice sentiment all the same.
“So, we find out what we have and we work from there.” Kile replied.
“We have nothing, we’re out of it, we’ve lost. We might as well pack it in. Just open the box and let’s go home.” Carter said in defeat.
“Spoken like a true hunter.”
Carter spun on Kile, his hand actually reaching for the hilt of the short sword. Daniel quickly stepped between them.
“There’s no use arguing among ourselves, nor is there any point in giving up so soon.”
“Maybe we can find them, track them down and get our stuff back.” Alex suggested. “They can’t have gone that far.”
“We don’t know who they are, or which way they went.” Murphy finally chimed in. “I hate to admit it, but maybe Carter’s right you guys, maybe we’ve had it.”
“Not yet we haven’t.”
Kile pulled the leather cord from around her neck, the key dangled on the other end. “If we still have this, then we’re still in it. I don’t care if we come in dead last, I don’t believe in quitting.”
“Agreed.” Daniel said. “You two guys did survive the first exercise and you had less than what we have now.”
“But that was only for one night.” Carter reminded him.
“One night or five, I’m willing to go for it.” Kile said as she tucked the key back under her tunic. “How about you?”
It was a clear challenge, one that she knew Carter could never refuse.
“Fine, I’m in.” Carter agreed reluctantly, “but where do we start now? Do we at least still have the map?”
“Sorry guys.” Murphy said, looking down at his feet. “I left it in my pack.”
“Well, we might as well get some rest while we still have time, there’s nothing we can do about it tonight.” Daniel said as he sat down in the grass where his blanket used to be.
“They’ll only get farther ahead of us then.” Carter added.
“We can’t go stumbling around in the dark, we have no lantern, we have no idea which way they went, and we don’t even know what’s out there. We just have to wait until morning. Hopefully we’ll be able to see something by the morning light.”
As much as Kile hated to admit it, Daniel was right. Even it they were able to pick up their trail, how could they follow them in the dark? None of them knew their way around this area. They could easily walk off a cliff without knowing it, at least not until the hit bottom. There was nothing they could do until the morning.
She returned to her spot by the river. They hadn’t left anything, and what was worse was that her last good tunic was in that pack. She would have to beg the Quartermaster for another set, or wear the one she had on until the end of the summer. Of course some of her unmentionable were also in there and the thought of some guy messing around with them was humiliating enough. Then there were all the supplies she was carrying, such as her knife, her utensils, even the rope. There was also the matter of the food, okay, forget about the food, she still wasn’t that hungry, but there was the water skin, and then of course…
“Vesper.”
She quickly searched around her area, hoping that he hadn’t decided to come back early and take a nap in his pouch, but the yarrow poked his head out of the tall grass when he heard his name.
“You alright?” She asked him quietly as she scooped him up in her hands.
-Vesper alright.-
The yarrow replied casually.
Had he been here all the time?
“What did you see Vesper, show me what happened here.”
The morning didn’t come too soon for Carter who was pacing the grounds, and probably had been for most of the night. Kile watched him as he walked back and forth, not so much as a guard on his post, but as a man who was seriously annoyed with himself and the people around him. She had seen her father pace the kitchen floor like that some mornings and knew that it was time to slip out of the house and start her chores as quickly as possible.
“Did you get any sleep?” She asked as she got up slowly. She wouldn’t have imagined that a blanket would have made that much of a difference, but it does. She ached all over as she tried to stretch it out.
“Yeah, a bit.” He replied.
The sun was just peeking through the trees, casting a hazy mist across the morning landscape. Daniel, Alex and Murphy were still asleep and she wondered if she should tell Carter what Vesper had told her last night, but the way Carter was acting, it would probably do more damage t
han good, so she figured it was best to stay silent on the matter, for just a little longer.
She headed into the woods to; as Alex had so eloquently phrased it, find a tree.
“Where are you going?” Carter asked.
“None of your business.” She replied.
“You shouldn’t go off alone.”
“Believe me, what I’m going to do, I want to do alone.”
“What… oh… OH, oh okay.” Carter stammered. She had to admit he looked kind of cute when he was embarrassed. She grinned at him and then walked into the woods a good distance, to be well out of sight of the camp before visiting her tree.
From what Vesper had told her last night, it was Eric and his group that had stolen their supplies, no big surprise there, they pretty much already knew that, or at least that was what they believed. He had waited until they all ran off to save Alex, and then raided their campsite of everything that they could carry. It took them all of five minutes, especially one of the cadets that had moved at such a tremendous speed that she had an idea of how Alex had been tied up so quickly. The boy was just a blur from what Vesper could see and she figured that it must have been the boy’s edge. What sphere rapid speed fell under she didn’t know, and at the moment she didn’t really care.
This was not a simple random act committed by one group against another just for the sake of minimizing the competition, this was more of a personal vendetta, since it may have actually started before they even left the academy. Thinking back over everything that had occurred since yesterday morning, when they were first informed about the test, she couldn’t help but see little signs that she had missed, which lead to the real question. How much did Murphy know? She was starting to like the big man, in spite his inability to stand on his own two feet, and although she wanted to believe he was ignorant of the entire incident, she knew that wasn’t the case.
He had tried to lead them the off in the wrong direction when they were looking for Alex, and before that he had wanted to secure their supplies against wild animals the night before. Had it actually been wild animals that he was worried about, or did he just want to get all the supplies in one place to make it easier for Eric and his cronies latter that night.
From his demeanor over the last two days, Kile was sure that Murphy wasn’t a willing participant in Eric’s schemes, but the fact that he went along with them didn’t help matters. At the moment he was a liability to the group and the group’s success, but as long as she knew that, maybe she could do something about it.
As she headed back to camp she was stopped by the grumbling in her stomach. She hadn’t eaten since yesterday afternoon that is if she didn’t count the block of brown food substance that she had taken a bite from and for some reason she just couldn’t count that as eating. Had she reached that point of hunger where even the hard tack would have tasted good, no, nowhere near that point, but she was still hungry.
“Food is all around you, you just have to know where to look.” She said, quoting Master Folkstaff, but it was easier to quote than to do. From where she was standing there was no food to be seen, although she didn’t really expect to see a street side vender in the woods.
“Whenever you find yourself in a new town and you need a place to eat, you ask the locals.” That was another quote, one from the traveling mystic that visited Riverport, one that made more sense giving the situation.
Birds were plentiful, but not very informative from what she had experienced and their diet was not something she found appetizing. Kile fell into her edge and stretched out her awareness through the forest and what she did find was a mother deer and her fawn out for their morning walk.
It didn’t take her very long to actually find the deer; her edge was able to give her a rough idea of where they were located.
“Excuse me.” She said holding her hands out to her side as to not frighten them anymore they already were.
The fawn slipped behind his mother and peeked out from around her back legs. The mother deer’s muscles tensed as Kile approached. She was torn between the natural instinct to run in the face of an approaching vir, or stay and see what this particular vir wanted. The doe must have seen or sensed something since she decided to stay.
“Could you direct me to a place to eat?” She asked.
She wasn’t sure how to address a deer, or any animal for that matter, but if it worked for the vir, why wouldn’t it work for those of the natural world. The mother deer cocked her head and blinked her large dark brown eyes as she slowly approached Kile. She looked the girl up and down sniffed at her tunic, and must have found something she liked in the cadet since she began to relax.
-Berries.-
Kile wasn’t sure if the doe was offering her food, or telling her that was what she smelled like, but the feelings that came with the word filled her head with a satisfying sweetness.
“That would be perfect.” She replied.
-Follow.-
The Doe answered, and the word hit Kile with a feeling of warmth and comfort as the mother deer led her fawn through the forest.
Fortunately they didn’t have to go very far as the doe stopped and motioned Kile toward a small clearing in the woods filled with familiar looking bushes.
“Here?” She asked as she got closer. “These are edible… good to eat… not poisonous?”
-Safe.-
That would have been the easiest word to use.
The little fawn came up alongside her and ate one of the berries from the bush as if to prove to her that his mother did not lie.
-Good.-
He told her.
She stroked the fawn’s head.
She thanked them as they moved off to one of the other bushes to eat.
They were wild raspberries, something that she should have recognized, and probably would have if she hadn’t been so preoccupied with the fact that she was talking with a deer. She had picked wild raspberries back home, down by the river, during the late summer, and the memories made her feel a little homesick, but only for a moment, and it was the fact that it was so fleeting a feeling that worried her the most.
Carter quickly jumped up from where he was sitting when she came walking into camp with a hat full of raspberries.
“Where have you been?” He asked.
By now everyone was up and ready to go, not that there was much of a camp to break down to get ready. They seemed to have been waiting on her.
“I picked up breakfast.” She said as she held up her hat.
“Where did you find those?” Carter asked.
“I asked the locals.” She responded, and only Daniel knew that she wasn’t joking.
They divide the raspberries up as best they could but since nobody had anything better to hold them in other than their hands, Kile had to go without her hat for a little while longer.
“So, anybody got any ideas where we’re going.” Alex asked.
“Well, I figured we should probably follow the river further north.” Carter suggested.
“That way.” Kile said, pointing off toward the west. “The mark on the map was west of the bend in the river and that the direction our stuff went in.”
“Are you sure?” Carter asked. He was starting to have doubts, not in her but in himself.
“I’m sure.” She assured.
It wasn’t so much that she remembered it from the map, she had only seen the map that one time, and It wasn’t the fact that Vesper thought their stuff had gone in that direction, although he saw who, he didn’t actually see where they had taken the supplies. Kile hated to admit it, but she could smell Eric. He had passed through their camp, staying long enough to pick up a few things and headed in a westerly direction. She had detected it last night when she was trying to get to sleep without her blanket, and now she was picking it up again. It wasn’t as strong, but it was there and she could follow it. Of course if Morgan was right, and she was just channeling this ability from Vesper, then it was the yarrow that could follow it. She woul
d like to think that was closer to the truth.
With the yarrow on her shoulder Kile lead them through the woods for the better part of the afternoon until the scent she was tracking began to wane. No mater how hard she tried, no matter which direction she went, she couldn’t pick up on Eric scent, or was that Vesper could pick up on Eric scent, or was it just that the connection between them had been broken. The ability was still rather new to her, and she had yet to master it. Either way she lost the trail as she began to slow down.
“What's the matter?” Daniel asked as he came up beside her.
“I lost him, I can’t… smell him any more.” She replied. They were far enough ahead of the others that she didn’t have to worry what they would think if they had heard her say that.
“Nothing?” He asked, then began to look around as if hoping to find some sign that she may have missed. “Well… we got this far, we’ll think of something.”
“What’s the hold up?” Carter asked as he made his way closer.
“Just taking a break.” Daniel replied.
Carter didn’t argue, which meant, in his own mind, he had given up. He had relinquished command of the group and it looked as if he had given it to Kile as he waited on her every word.
“We’ll rest here for a few minutes.”
She was hoping that the delay would give her enough time to pick up on Eric. Maybe if she went ahead without the others she could find the trail a little easier, at least she wouldn’t have the added pressure of them watching her and wonder what she was doing.
Carter sat down beneath one of the trees and stared at his feet, not making eye contact with anyone. Alex sat across from him, turning the small ebony box over in his hands. He had been carrying it all the way, not that he had a pack to put it in, but he refused to part with it. In many ways each member of the group was blaming themselves for being so careless so soon into the exercise, but there was only one person who really deserved some of the blame.
“Murphy.” She called out, and the big man looked up from where he was sitting. “Come on, we’re going ahead a bit to see what we can see.” She said.