002 - 002 - Losing Count

Elyria grabbed her cloak. The sun would be going down in a few hours and the caves would be cold. She folded the cloak and wrapped it around her waist to free up her hands, tying it with a piece of rope.

Fendor left the shed cleaner than when he came. He cleared out the old, used, wet straw, along with the animals’ wastes. If she didn’t know better, she would think the place had always been empty. No clue showed on the years old, hard packed floor.

When she went to the back wall to get her traveling gear, she noticed that Fendor had taken some of the dried, salted mutton. She pulled down a water sack for herself. She gathered a fist full of meat strips and added them to the hard biscuits in her backpack.

Stepping out of the shed, she checked the ground from the entrance of the shed to the outside well. She saw several hoof prints in the damp earth. She also caught signs of Fendor’s hard-soled Roman style boots. He had filled up his drink bladder with water from the well just as she was doing now.
When looking around for signs of Fendor’s trail, she saw three freshly killed and skinned rabbits hanging high in a tree. He had gotten her fresh meat.

She found tracks that led from the well to the most direct and shortest path to the caves. Elyria wondered how Fendor had chosen this less obvious route. The bushes grew around its mouth, obscuring it from view. Most people took one of the other two paths, each of which looked more inviting and friendly. She ducked under the branches shielding the path and began the two-hour trek up the mountain. She might even catch up with Fendor quickly. She did not have pack animals with her and she breathed easily up in the mountains. Fendor and the horses would take several breaks in their upward climb.

After a couple of hundred feet, the brush thinned around the path and the sun shone through the trees. She whistled as she hiked. She held her face up to the sunlight, enjoying the warmth after the past several days of rain and cold. The birds sang in the trees and twittered in the bushes. The pups must really be having fun romping through the woods on a day like this.

Once she made sure the sacred areas had not been disturbed, she would let someone from the village know that Fendor had gotten her drunk and he roamed around the area. The villagers would scare him off. They didn’t need his kind in the area.

About an hour after she had started out, she had gone half as much more than half way. She checked the ground for continuing signs of Fendor’s passing and came to an abrupt halt. Mixed with the tracks she recognized as Fendor’s and his animals, she saw paw prints. Moving along the path more slowly, she saw that the ground appeared torn up as if a struggle had occurred. She stood up and scanned the area. It was then that she noticed how quiet it was. The birds had stopped singing. Into that stillness came the call of a golden eagle, piercing into her. She looked up into the sky and saw three of them circling above the path in the area around the upcoming bend.

She took her time moving forward. She did not know what awaited her ahead, but the circling birds were not a good sign. The birds were calling to the dead. She moved against the tree at the corner of the path as it turned to the right. She peeked around the trunk and let out a cry. She dropped all of her belongings and ran to the carnage she saw up ahead. In the path, amid the chaos of the torn grass, dug up dirt and dislodged stones, lay the mutilated bodies of One and Two, their throats cut.