Chetiin. Dagii reclaimed his own sword and wrenched the helmet off the head of the bugbear Ashi had killed. It was his helmet, she realized, now so dented it was unwearable. “Sorry,” she said.
“I wouldn’t have been able to use it anyway,” he said, spinning it around to show her the crack that had been opened in it to fit over the bugbear’s head. He hurled it away into the darkness.
“Don’t just stand there,” ordered Geth. “Grab as many torches and pitch pots as you can carry.” He already had three steaming pots dangling by their leather straps from his gauntleted hand and another two, presumably cool, slung over his shoulder along with a strange, bloody bundle. Two unlit torches were jammed into his belt. A third, burning bright, was in his other hand.
“What?” Ashi asked. “Why?”
“For the trolls. We’re going back into the valley.”
“When?”
He nudged another pitch pot with his toe, touched the burning torch to the pitch within, then kicked the pot against the wall of the hut in which they had been imprisoned. The clay of the pot shattered and burning pitch spattered across the wood. “As soon as the camp is on fire.” he said. “Burn it and the bugbears won’t have anything to come back to.”
Ashi stared, then went after him as he moved around the camp, setting fire to the huts. “Not the longhouse!” she said. “The tribe’s children-”
“I know,” he said. “Chetiin and I saw. We came in over the barricade on the other side while Midian had the tribe’s attention. We’ll leave the longhouse, but everything burns. If they’ve got nothing to come back to here, it will make it easier for us to get out of the valley again. Now hurry! We don’t have much time.”
Ashi started grabbing pitch pots. The huts roared up into columns of flame that lit the night. Shouts came from the forest as the bugbears realized that they’d been tricked and that their camp was burning. No sound came from the longhouse, and she could imagine the bugbear children huddled inside, staying silent in the hope of avoiding attention-maybe they even had another way out through the slope the house was built against. She hoped so. “How did you get the horses to the other side of the camp?”
“We didn’t,” said Chetiin, coming up on the other side of her with an armload of torches. “The horse you saw was Midian’s pony. He had the horseshoe in his pack.”
“What about the horses the bugbears smelled?”
“The shaarat’khesh preparation that kept our mounts calm around Marrow,” he said. “If we escape, I’ll have to ride well away from you on the return journey.”
Ashi stared at him. “Midian couldn’t have spread all that around himself.”
“He had help. We brought Marrow into the plan, too. She’s helping Midian keep the bugbears distracted.” He looked around. “Are we done?”
All of them were laden with torches and pitch pots. The huts were burning. Even the barricade was on fire, the pine pitch that had smeared the sharpened logs set ablaze. “We’re done,” said Geth. “Let’s go.” He headed for the gate in the barricade, the only part of the ring that wasn’t burning. Chetiin jogged back toward the great firepit, flung something into it, then sprinted away. An instant later, a ball of white flame burst from the pit with a piercing whistle and streaked high into the night sky.
Somewhere in the forest, a wolf howled. It seemed to Ashi that there was a malevolent joy in the sound. The shouts of the bugbears grew louder-then one of them turned to a scream before ending abruptly.
“Marrow’s reward,” Chetiin said as he emerged from the flames. “Once she’s finished hunting, she’ll go back to keeping watch over the horses.”
Ekhaas and Dagii were already over the slope and down into the valley. Geth followed. Ashi stopped outside the burning barricade, a sudden hollow in the pit of her stomach. “Makka-the chief-he still has my sword!”
Geth looked back at her, then at Chetiin. The goblin shook his head. “We can’t wait, Ashi,” he said. “We need to be out of sight before the bugbears come back. We can’t fight all of them.”
“But my sword-” She turned to Geth. “It was my grandfather’s. It was Kagan’s.”
“I’m sorry, Ashi,” said Geth. “We have to leave it. We have to go.”
“Your sword or our lives,” Chetiin added.
Marrow howled again, closer than she’d been before. Ashi looked over at the edge of the forest, just in time to see Midian pop out of the trees and run like fox across the fire-lit vale.
“What are you waiting for?” he shouted. “Go! Go!”
Ashi pressed her lips together and ran down into the valley.
For the third time, Ashi plunged into the thorns that ran along the forest edge. There was a path through them now, thanks partly to their hacking a passage on the way out and partly to the trolls’ headlong pursuit of them. The brambles were bent and chopped, twisted and trampled, and getting through them was no longer a torturous ordeal. Ashi barely noticed. The loss of her sword, the Sentinel Marshal honor blade that had been her first connection to House Deneith, ate at her like sorrow.
Geth kept only a single torch burning so that she could see, extinguishing the others before the light could reveal them to the bugbears. They heard the tribe return to the burning camp just as they cleared the thorns and made it into the cover of the trees. Shouts of fear and anger drifted down into the valley, followed by shrieks of joy- the children of the tribe must have emerged from the longhouse. There was also one long roar of rage. Ashi knew in her gut that it was Makka, furious at the destruction wrought in the rescue of his prisoners. His wasn’t the only voice of rage to rise from the camp, though. The tribe, it seemed, was angry with their chief. She wondered if they would consider killing him with the stolen sword and leaving it and his body behind as they fled.
The dream was comforting, but unlikely.
“Sage’s shadow,” said Midian as they paused at the inner edge of the forest. “Did any of you happen to carry my everbright lantern out of the camp?”
“Quiet, Midian,” growled Geth.
“I’m not going to be happy if those bugbears still have it. That lantern was really useful.”
The shifter turned on him. “I said, quiet!”
Midian flinched and closed his mouth. Geth caught Ashi’s eye as he turned away from the gnome. She gave him a grateful half-smile.
“You know, we may have fire now,” said Dagii, “but I still don’t like the idea of fighting through the trolls to get back to those stairs.”
“We’ve got another deterrent.” Geth pulled off the bloody bundle that he’d carried across his back and opened it. A troll’s head stared at them. Dagii’s ears twitched back.
“We cut off two of those before,” he pointed out. “It didn’t even slow the other trolls down.”
“This one’s different,” Geth said. He pulled out a long torch, hacked the wooden shaft into a long, sharp stake, and stuck it into the stump of the troll’s neck. Holding the head up like a gruesome standard, he said, “This one’s dead.”
“Dead?” asked Ekhaas. “Dead dead?”
“Dead and not coming back. We found a way to kill them.”
“Maabet! Why don’t we use it?” said Dagii.
“We will if we need to,” said Chetiin. “It will be even better if we can keep the trolls from attacking us in the first place, though.”
Geth-troll head in one hand, Wrath in the other-and Chetiin led the way into the dark forest. Ashi, Ekhaas, and Midian followed with smoldering pitch pots and relit torches. Under the trees, they didn’t need to worry about the bugbears seeing the light, and the open flame was something else to give the trolls pause. As he had before, Dagii came at the end of their party, watching the trail behind.
Ashi carried a pitch pot in each hand, slowly swinging them back and forth in their leather slings so that the thin veil of blue fire atop each hissed and popped. Pungent, resinous smoke made a faint, swirling trail behind her. The forest felt somehow less disturbing the third time through, Ashi thought. Maybe she was getting used to the silent atmosphere. Maybe she was numbed by the loss of Kagan’s sword. Maybe she was just exhausted-she would have happily camped for the remainder of the night and continued in the morning, but there was nowhere to camp. Caught between the bugbears and the trolls, their only choice was to keep going all the way back to the mysterious stairs.
Hiss, went the pots as she swung them. Hiss, hiss, pop, hiss-
Chetiin stopped. “Troll,” he said softly.
