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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ellinor" data-source="post: 5380931" data-attributes="member: 14561">17x01-lesta! Chelesta! Chelesta! Chelesta!Twiggy felt the tingle of a late-spring breeze on her face as the world oozed back into her consciousness.  The sun was hot, but her skin cool.  The ground rocked and wobbled below her.  Blood rushed in her ears.  Acorn’s panicked voice rang in her head.  She opened her eyes, slowly.  It was brown outside, brown and mottled.  “Mrrrph,” she said, quietly.  Her mouth felt furry.She tried to move, to feel where she was.  The rocking and wobbling were more pronounced, now, rhythmic.  She wiped her glasses.  It was still brown.  Ah.  She was on a horse, slumped forward, lashed in safely.  They were moving.  She turned her head.  Grass and trees passed by.  Moving quite quickly, she thought, considering that I’m lashed to a horse.Twiggy found her balance, grasped the lashing with her hands, pulled it over her head, and began to sit up.  Her body felt surprisingly sturdy where it should have felt tender and sore.  Savina’s healing touch was remarkable.  And Twiggy was getting stronger.  Things that would have killed her weeks ago now . . . merely almost-killed her.  Small progress, but progress.“You’re back,” said Kormick with a smile, as Twiggy began to rise.  “Rested?  Good dreams of strapping lads carrying ancient texts or whatnot?”  Twiggy managed a weak smile.  If only she had been asleep, she thought.  That dream sounded awfully good right now.  “How long—”“A while.  An hour, maybe.”  Kormick offered her a skin of water.  “Got it from the way-station, back there a bit.  Rested up a bit, grabbed a bite of food—” he handed her a ball of rice wrapped in paper, “—switched horses, and got back on our way.  Kawazu apparently did the same, a few hours ahead of us.”Twiggy recognized a few landmarks—stands of trees, peasant homes.  “It looks like I didn’t slow us down too much.”“Tavi’s horse found a shortcut through a stream,” Rose laughed, pointing at the wet hems of her brother’s robe, “but we followed, and it turned out to be a real shortcut.  So we may have caught up with Kawazu a little bit.  We’ll see.  So far, so good.”From the front of the pack, Mena looked back at them with pride.  “As I’ve been saying all along, you have trained for this.”###It wasn’t that Tavi was getting tired of hearing that he’d trained for things.  He had trained for them, although he hadn’t known exactly what he’d been training for at the time.  No, what bothered Tavi was how matter-of-fact everyone else seemed to be about the situation they were in.  Racing through the Ketkath on a mission to bring a heretic to justice, searching the trees for ambush points…he wondered why no one else commented on how strange it all was.  How different it was from what they’d expected.  It certainly wasn’t what he’d expected when he dedicated himself to protecting Rose.  Maybe I trained for this, he thought, but I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to it.Tavi turned his attention to the road ahead.  The ground climbed sharply before them into a stand of trees covering the side of a tall hill, and a steep set of forested switchbacks lay in in their path.  Tavi urged his horse ahead with his heels.Then something stung his shin.  Tavi looked down: an arrow was jutting out of his leg.  Two more hissed past his ear, and he heard Arden gasp in pain and Mena curse.  In a flash, Tavi decided it would be safer to rush straight up the hill, ignoring the switchbacks, than it would be to stay on the path and fight an unseen enemy.  He blamed himself for missing the ambushers--but they were well-hidden, barely visible even as he knew they were there.  A flash of insignia confirmed that their attackers were Tidesmen, but disappeared as quickly as it had appeared.  Tavi knew the archers would be tough to hit in this forested environment; if he could reach the top of the hill, he'd pass the stand of trees that they were using for cover.  He knew that some of the others would stay on the switchbacks rather than risk losing their footing in the trees, and he could protect them better from the top of the hill.  And he was right about the others—as he steered his horse straight up and spurred his horse faster, Arden alone managed to keep pace with him.  Despite the blood on her shoulder where the arrow had struck, she was crouched in her stirrups and readying her dagger in her right hand as her horse lunged up over the rocky terrain.  The two of them barreled ahead.  Tavi noticed—not for the first time—how deeply Arden devoted herself to their safety.  Another arrow took Arden straight through the left arm and he saw her struggle for a moment to keep hold of the reins.  Although it put her in harm’s way, she urged her horse faster and kept pace with Tavi.  An arrow glanced off Tavi's thigh.  Arden spotted where the arrow had come from, and and hurled her dagger, which vanished among the trees, caused a scream, and came flying back to her hand, bloody.  Daring, and skilled, Tavi thought.  But then an arrow chased the rebound of Arden’s dagger.  It was too dangerous to pause and look back, but he heard Arden’s cry, and the sickening thud of her tumbling from her horse.  Keep her safe, he thought, and it might have been a prayer.As Arden fell back, Mena surged forward and caught up with Tavi.  Her presence strengthened him, and she shouted encouragement and advice to the others behind them.  “Stay low!  No straight lines!  Someone help Arden!”Another arrow seared into Tavi's shoulder.  He closed his mind to the pain.  Then another, this one on the back of the arm.  It hurt—but it meant he was passing the first of the archers.  He and Mena crested the ridge and wheeled around, bearing down on the men who, from this side of the stand of trees, lacked cover.  Now he could see back on to the trail, where Kormick had pulled Arden’s limp form onto his horse and was firing into the forest with his crossbow.As the others reached the top of the hill, the archers began to flee, many with Nyoko’s arrows sticking out of their sides.  Several of them looked healthier than Tavi would have preferred.  If we let them regroup, he thought, we may meet them again on the road ahead.  But the party couldn’t give chase.  Arden was unconscious and slumped over Kormick’s horse.  Everyone but Nyoko was hurt, to some degree.  The party needed to regroup just as much as their attackers did.Suddenly, one of the ambushers—a zealot with a Tide insignia emblazoned on his armor—dropped his bow and charged at Tavi.  He tried to climb Tavi’s horse, grasping at the saddle and pulling at Tavi’s sword, still in its scabbard around Tavi’s waist.  And at that moment—somehow—it felt normal.  Tavi gritted his teeth, pulled the arrow from his shoulder, and stabbed the man with it.  “I trained for this,” he said, so only he could hear.###When Arden came to, she was on Kormick’s horse.  He was holding her up.  “I don’t know what they taught you at murder academy, but daggers are more of a tool for the ambusher, not the ambush-ee.”  He chuckled.  “So next time we have to run into an ambush of archers,” he suggested, “perhaps you should let someone with arrows take the lead?”  He patted the hand-crossbows by his side.   “I may take you up on that, Justicar,” Arden responded, and leaned forward into the horse’s mane.  Sharing a horse with a Justicar and joking about murder.  If I didn’t know better, Arden thought, I’d say I was still unconscious.They rode through the night.  By the time they reached the way station it was nearly dawn, and they were as exhausted as their horses were.  But Kawazu had passed through only an hour or two before, and there was no time to lose.  Arden had become accustomed to the fact that the way-station operators just handed fresh horses to the Inquisitors with much bowing and tight-lipped smiling, but—as much as she appreciated it—she wished it were not born of fear.  With food in their packs and fresh horses beneath them, they rode on, into a forested portion of the road.  Arden was thankful for her muscle memory, which kept her in the saddle during the mesmeric ride.  Twiggy nearly fell off hers a few times.  Savina was flagging, too.  But Mena and Kormick rode ahead, chatting, scouting, occasionally falling back with encouragement and then riding up to join each other.  As the sun rose, it blended their shadows together.    Mena held her hand up.  Halt.She pointed to a ridge ahead, and Arden’s eyes followed.  A prime spot for an ambush, Arden thought.  Mena signaled that the group should leave the road and enter the forest.  It was the right move.  After a few minutes of careful riding, they approached the top of the ridge, and found a dozen archers, facing the road, looking down, unaware of the party’s presence behind them.Arden loosened her dagger in its small scabbard.  A tool for the ambusher, she thought.</blockquote>

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