Suddenly, a piercing female scream reverberated through the trees.
“What the bloody spirits was that?” Kegohr asked.
I glanced at my two friends as I unsheathed my sword. “Let’s find out.”
Vesma grabbed her spear, and Kegohr hauled his giant stone mace over his shoulder.
“Time to be the hero?” Nydarth whispered as I moved down the stream toward the location of the sound. “How positively noble.”
Chapter Three
We raced through the forest, following the sound of the screams.
The trees increased in number, crowded together amid thick undergrowth. Vines snagged my legs and thorns tore at my clothes as I ran full tilt through the greenery. Vesma, small and nimble, darted around the bushes and slipped through narrow gaps, while Kegohr flattened anything that stood in his way like a stampeding animal. Birds scattered from the treetops as we surged through the woods, and animals scurried among the vegetation.
We continued toward the intermittent screaming and found ourselves at a river that was picking up speed and swirling as it approached a waterfall.
“Which way?” Kegohr asked as he held his giant mace aloft.
The scream sounded again, across the river and down the drop to our right.
“That way,” I said.
I moved toward the water’s edge, ready to swim across, but Vesma stopped me and pointed to the left. Only 50 yards away was a log bridge across the roiling waters. Moss clung to its pillars, and creepers wrapped around them.
We sprinted for the bridge, but Kegohr paused before he could step onto it.
“I don’t think it’ll take my weight,” he said as he pressed a foot on a log.
Despite the age of the bridge, it seemed in excellent repair. “It looks maintained,” I said. “Come on; we don’t have a lot of time. That woman could already be dead by now.”
Kegohr put his entire weight on the log, and it snapped with a loud crack. The broken log surged along the river toward the waterfall as the half-ogre stumbled and almost fell into the water, but he righted himself before stepping back onto the land.
“Ugh,” he groaned. “You guys better go along without me.”
“Not an option,” I said.
I didn’t know what exactly we’d face when we found the woman, but I wanted Kegohr by my side. I stepped back onto the riverbank and stretched my hands over the log bridge. Vigor sprang from within me like the creeping vines that entangled the bridge. I twisted my hands a little and manipulated the direction of my Plank Pillars so that they stretched from one side of the bank to the other. Making the planks thick enough to sustain Kegohr’s wait took quite a lot of Vigor, but I still had more than enough if I needed to fight.
“Hurry!” Vesma said from the other side of the makeshift bridge.
“You go first,” I said to Kegohr.
Admiration touched his eyes as he nodded and proceeded to storm across the bridge. Every footfall made the pillars shudder, but he made it to the other side without incident. I followed after him, and we continued until we reached the waterfall. There was no easy path down, just a steep face of boulders and jutting rock, damp with spray and with moss and flowers growing out of the gaps. If the woman was at the bottom, we would have to climb down.
“I haven’t heard anything for a while,” Vesma said above the sound of water crashing and spraying a hundred feet beneath us. “She could be gone by now.”
Another scream drew my attention to a pool directly in front of us, mostly hidden by ferns. I moved so that I could peer through a gap in the foliage and saw two men in tunics. They had grabbed hold of a naked woman with deep brown skin and a mark much like Kegohr’s on her back. Her long braids whipped around as she writhed in her captors’ grips. I noticed that the weapons hanging from their belts weren’t drawn, and my stomach churned as I realized what we’d stumbled upon.
“Let’s gut these fuckers,” I growled between my teeth.
Vesma grabbed my shoulder and prevented me from charging toward the men. “Not yet. Look, there’s more than just those two.”
I followed her gaze to a third man who stood watching, a spear in his hand.
“There might be more,” Vesma cautioned.
“Then, we’ll deal with them,” I said as I gently removed her hand and started toward the pool.
The woman had stopped screaming and was now putting all of her effort into breaking free. She got an arm loose and punched one of her attackers, a blow that sent him staggering back. She tried to dive into the water, only for the other one to grab her around the waist and haul her kicking and squirming off her feet.
Now that I was closer, I could also see that her hair was decorated with seashells and coral, pale shapes against her black braids. Bronze bands wrapped around her forearms and shapely thighs. Whoever she was, she clearly displayed her wealth, and it had probably been the reason why these bandits had assailed her.
Her attackers were half-human half-fish, with ridges running back along their heads and gills flapping in their necks. Knee-length trousers revealed scaly legs that ended in bare, webbed feet. As they struggled to subdue the woman, they called out to each other in a speech that seemed almost unintelligible, made near-nonsense by the flapping of their wide mouths. I managed to catch the word “princess,” and they said “Qihin” several times, but that was all I could understand.
Then I noticed a detail that I’d missed before. At least two of the attackers had “Wild” birthmarks like Kegohr’s, one visible on the side of his neck, the other through a gap that had been deliberately made in the arm of his tunic. Instead of hiding them as Kegohr had done, they were dressed to emphasize these markings. There were even images of the mark impressed on the backs of their tunics.
Vesma came up beside me,
