It was a weak bough that bowed as Renaut’s bird, Chirpers, sat upon it. Unless they were careful the limb would snap up when they took flight.  That would rustle the trees and draw the attention of those orcs below.  “Stupid sun-starved trees,” Renaut groused as she looked to the trunk.

Bringing her attention back to the two travelers below, she was reminded that one of them was actually a goblin.  The size difference between him atop his aged boar and the orc, who rode a buffalo, was laughable.  As the goblin yammered on she considered he probably wouldn’t notice if Renaut set a tree ablaze, let alone left a branch swaying.  Fortunately his noise made him easy to track. 

The branch shook.  Turning toward the tree trunk again, Renaut beheld a squirrel stalking toward her.  Barbed, black quills stuck out from the grey fur.  As it snarled, it bared curved, yellow incisors.  With each step it’s black claws raked the delicate tree skin which curled up and fell away.   

“A savage place,” Renaut said.

Chirpers began to hop from one foot to another, anxious to take wing but waiting for her rider’s command.  Renaut stroked the side of her sparrow’s neck, drumming her fingers against the brown and black feathers to soothe her steed.

Renaut leaned to the side, daring a glance at her quarry below.  Deciding they were far enough away to not notice a quick fight, she slipped one hand into her satchel.  Inside, she probed with her fingers an inside found a packet.   With her eyes set on the drooling, chittering squirrel as it approach she pushed aside the leaf wrapping and plunged her hand into the sticky load it held.

Known as blade sap, the resin dried into a brittle crust that broke into small, sharp pieces.  Clumsy travelers who fell into piles of leaves tainted by it would find their face and hands cut up.  This lead to the mistaken legend among elves and humans that sprites dwelt in the rotting forest floor. 

Slowly moving her hand out of the bag, her fingertips coated in sap, Renaut puffed her cheeks.  She flicked her wrist at the creature to send a flurry of droplets at it.  As the droplets whisked through the air she blew a whistled imbued with sprite magic from her lips.  Her breath rushed towards the resin and hardened it mid-flight. 

The squirrel turned away from the attack.  The flung daggers struck the squirrel’s left side, each impact causing the rodent to shudder as the yellow blades sunk into his fur with a thunk.   The left leg spasmed violently as muscles were cut. The squirrel foot slipped away and the animal fell from the branch.  Chittering wildly it scrambled to grab a branch, its claws scratching a deep white gash in the bark before the animal plummeted to the forest floor, where it disappeared among the ferns.

Her breath held in anticipation, Renaut turned to look down the road.  Neither of the riders, well past the tree where she was perched, appeared to notice the crashing quilled squirrel behind them.  The goblin was babbling about some other goblin named Ottis or something.  Must be a friend of his.  “Odd name for a goblin, though,” she mumbled. 

By hitching her heels against her bird’s sides she commanded Chirpers to take flight.  The bird flew off, and Renaut noted the rainfall-like sound of the leaves shaking as the branch bounced behind her.  She flew past her enemies, high above so as not to be seen, and proceeded far up the road.   Chirpers dove down to hide inside a leafy shrub at the side of the road.  Hidden in shade, Renaut hopped off her sparrow and examined some dark blue berries clustered near the forest floor. “They’re not yet ripe, but they’re edible,” she told Chirpers, pointing at the food.  The sparrow hopped over and eagerly pecked at them.  With a fruit caught in her beak she plucked it off and tilted her head up to swallow.  Renaut patted her right wing and cautioned the bird not to wander.   

By spreading the leaves apart with her arms Renaut was able to poke her hooded head through the shrub to peek down the road.  The goblin and orc wouldn’t pass for a little while; she had time to eat.  The sprite plopped down, her voluminous patchwork robe billowing about her as she did, and pulled a plump yellow kernel from her satchel. 

The sprite threw her hood back before she nibbled on the corn.  As she chewed she listened to the monsters’ approach.  This goblin named Ottis seemed a rather interesting fellow, she mused.  More interesting than either of these riders, who hadn’t strayed from the road save for delivering their goods to the camps. Even those visits had proven brief and uninteresting.  If this was a part of the Dread Lord’s campaign then they either did not understand what made a game fun or was too clever for the sprite’s comprehension.  She doubted it was the latter.

A crow disturbed her bush as it landed in a flurry of wings and leaves knocked from branches that spiraled to the ground. Renaut watched her brother dismount the crow, named Cawcaw.  While Henri needed to work on his landings—he was not the most cautious of riders—he was an excellent hunter; or at least he never failed to find her. 

“Where are they now,” Henri asked as he sat beside his sister.  His coats stirred up a dusty gust that rustled Renaut’s antennae.  Behind them, Cawcaw yelled at Henri for his poor landing with shrill squawks as he kept his wings spread.  Crows were smarter than most birds and eager to exercise their extensive vocabularies.  She thought she heard an elven curse mixed among his string of expletives.

“Up the road,” Renaut answered around a mouth full of chewed kernel.  She handed him one that was blue in color; he’d always said those tasted better.

“There’s a camp some way down the road. They should arrive there by nightfall.  It’s like those other two camps they stopped at along the way; well fortified and crawling with orcs.”

“Hmph,” Renaut responded.  The more they observed of it, the less sense this campaign made.  It was being done out of order: placing the keystones in defended positions should happen before revealing the lures and keystones.  Now, the prison was open to them and one key was still in transit, protected by a fat orc and a goblin she doubted could fight a dead slug.

Were Bonnelle not so wary of angering the Dread Lord, even if their campaign was a mess, she and Henri could have taken two of those keystones from the orc and goblin shortly after they delivered the first one, when the sprites caught up with these errand boys.  Then Bonnelle and the others could assault that camp to collect the third and they’d all proceed to lay waste to the disorganized forces defending the Prison’s tower, where the lures were. Not that they would need the key stones given the barrier around the prison. Bonnelle insisted on collecting them to show the Dread Lord they followed the rules to ensure against the Dread Lord’s fury. 

“I don’t think anyone here knows what they’re doing,” Henri said.  He took a big bite of his kernel, enough so that his face reddened as he struggled to chew it before it choked him. 

“That’s generous of you.”

“I don’t think they’re aware the key stones are activated! If they were, then these two delivering them wouldn’t be moving so … slow.”

They watched wordlessly as the hooves of the buffalo and boar passed and, above, the goblin talked while the orc grudgingly listened.   It was then that Renaut realized Henri’s crow was still squawking in anger at their botched landing.  Gritting her teeth, she looked back and hissed for the bird to be silent. Crows were ornery and being told to quiet down was the best way to ensure they wouldn’t.

“The birds in this part of the woods sure are noisy,” the goblin said. 

“There’s much to bother them: razor tails, eight-legged snakes … or goblins who won’t shut up,” the orc growled.

“Sounds like it’s right over here,” the goblin commented.  His boar came to a stop while the orc continued atop his buffalo. 

“Blighted trees,” Renaut cursed as the goblin dismounted his animal. 

Amidst a flurry of flicking antennae, head shakes, nods, and shrugs the two communicated in that way special to siblings.  As the green pipsqueak wandered over, Henri pulled out two slabs of tree bark from a coat pocket.  He pinched them between his lips and blew a series of notes.  Anything bigger than a cat was deaf to these notes but their birds heard the order to take flight, perch above, and return when so signaled.  Even the crow respected the urgency of the command.  The birds erupted from the bushes and into the treetops.

The goblin gawped at the near miss with an awe-filled “wow.” While he was distracted, Renaut kicked dirt toward Henri.  Through pursed lips she blew into the soil as it hung between the siblings. When her breath hit, it exploded over the two sprites. 

The cloaking spell made the sprites appear as nearby plants the way some insects looked like twigs or leaves if they stood still.   Each sprite pulled in their bulky robes by cinching the belts.  They raised up their arms and let the baggy sleeves droop.  As they did, the dirt caked them with the land to color and shape them.  The sleeves stiffened and lifted up, twisting and puckering to form leaves sprouting from the sprites’ spindly arms while from their waists down the multicolored coats billowed and browned like the dirt piled at the base.  When the goblin pushed aside the bush’s branches to poke his head in, all he saw were two seedlings starved for sun. 

The two had become experts at hiding over the years.  Renaut’s earliest memory was of she and her brother, barely more than larvae at the time, squirming away from the Mother Spider hunting them.  Their fear of that gangly sprite left them to grow up wild in the woods instead of trapped in the stuffy tribes.  None of those sprites would ever be so bold as to journey into the Dark Lands, nor have the wits to survive if they did.  Most, when she and her brother told them of their months’ long journeys across the Broken Sea, became distressed at the thought of the nearest trees being the wood used to construct those big sailing ships and no land in sight for weeks in any direction.

“I wonder what was bothering those birds,” the goblin mumbled as he poked about, his face being slapped by twigs.  He lingered for too long, and as he did a pain built at the base of Renaut’s neck.  It flowed up to the front of her head.  Holding her breath became a challenge, as pressure built in her nose as though stuffed with pollen.  Renaut considered roaring like a bear to scare off the monster, although she supposed the chittering of an angry rat might be enough to force this goblin to flee.

The goblin walked away, rubbing his cheek where an errant sprig had struck especially hard, and rejoined his boar on the road.  As the goblin patted the animal’s head, he pulled a slab of black stone from one of his toolbelt pouches and spoke into it: “there’s nothing here.”  A moment later his voice repeated from the device in his hand, sounding slightly hollow.

Up the road the orc yelled: “I don’t care!”

“What were you looking at?” The voice came from the slab of stone, unbidden. 

“Who was that?” Renaut discarded her camouflage as her robe unwound from being a thin, brown twig to thick cloth of purple, blue, and orange, stitched together from snatches of cloth stolen from elves and dwarves.  She crawled to the edge of the shrubbery to peer at the monster.  Her brother stood beside her.   

The goblin answered the device in his hand, explaining that he’d heard some distressed birds. The device thanked him for the update, cautioned him not to poke his nose in places in the woods, and wished him luck on his trip to the Northern Camp.   

“That’s the one up ahead,” Henri whispered to his sister. 

The goblin climbed atop his boar, kicked the animal’s bulging sides with his heels, and rode off.

The sprites stepped back.  The tension drained, they slumped into the dirt, leaning against each other, back-to-back, as they did. 

“It’s remarkable.  That device in his hand lets him talk to someone a great distance away! I’m pretty sure he was talking with that orc, Hohza, back at the tower,” Henri said, his voice giddy.

“And he talks to himself,” Renaut said.  The device’s insistence on repeating your words seemed cumbersome.  Perhaps it was a limitation of the magic.

“Imagine what it could do for warfare! We wouldn’t need to memorize codes or signal flare meanings.  Instead, we could send complex messages with no risk of a bird or courier being intercepted or the flare meanings being known by the enemy,” Henri babbled while he continued chewing the big bite of kernel from before.

Renaut enumerated the Rude Rubies’ established signals on her fingers: “A clap of thunder once all three keys have been delivered, red star to retreat to the camp, lighting in the shape of a frog orgy if Ayara is in trouble …”

“And what if something came up that we didn’t have a signal for?”

Renaut threw her head back for a haughty little laugh.  “We improvise!”

“What if we could deliver detailed information to our team? Something more complex than can be figured from a signal? This could change everything!” He rubbed his head.  “I wonder if those things are why I was getting a headache?  Did you feel anything when he was near?”

Renaut nodded. “You think that was the cause? I just figured it was because those goblins stink.”

“We’ve fought goblins before. Never felt my head buzz like that, though.  Feels like when we get caught up in the wrong kind of pollen!”

“Something to consider,” Renaut said.  “The plants here are different from those on other half of The Map, so maybe it is the pollen.”  She sat down in the dirt, stretching out her legs across the dirt.  “Do you want to rest?”

“We know where they’re headed.” Henri looked up, although he wouldn’t be able to see much past the shrub they hid under.   “I’d imagine they’ll spend the night there rather than try to get back to the prison right away.  Even at full speed, I doubt they’d get back to the tower before noon tomorrow.”

“Speed has not been their priority!”

“Which still makes me think they don’t know the keystones are active.”

Renaut flopped onto her back and held her stomach through the layers of clothes. “I’d love to see the faces on those dumb orcs when they try the activation spell, and then nothing happens!” She pounded her heels against the dirt as she laughed. “They’ll have to re-collect the key stones, dispel the enchantments, and distribute them again!” She hunched forward, her hands clasped over her gut, and continued tittering so hard her cheeks turned red. “Not that they’ll get the chance to do all that! We’ll be at the prison, key stones in hand before they have any idea what’s going on!”

Henri shook his head, a broad smile etched across his face, as he joined in his sister’s mirth.  Between laughs, gasping for air, he managed to add: “They’ll beg us to kill them rather than face their Dread Lord in humiliation!”