Lira took one look at the bloodless body and immediately froze, planting her feet in the grass exactly where they were.
The one movement she made was to turn back and point the end of her bow towards the two girls. "Both of you, stop moving!"
Thea stopped dead, grabbing Anya by the arm and pulling her back. Anya cursed at her, but Thea kept a firm grip on her.
"What--" began Thea, right before her eyes dropped to the body lying awkwardly in the grass. Her hand lifted to her throat. "Oh, Sovereign. That's--that's Ciroc."
"I was hoping it'd be the other one," muttered Lira, slowly turning back towards the body.
"I've seen dead bodies before," said Anya, still trying to shake Thea off unsuccessfully. "Let me go, I'm not--"
Lira flashed her a glare. "What did I say about moving? This entire area is probably trapped, you idiot, or are you trying to get both yourself and Ryn killed?"
Anya hesitated, squinting suspiciously at the trees around her. She pulled her hand that cradled Ryn a little closer to her chest. "Trapped?"
"You're in more danger now than you were yesterday when I pulled your sorry behind out of that fire," hissed Lira. "I don't know if you've realised exactly what's going on yet, kid, but I need you to sit down, shut up, and do whatever I tell you without arguing about it until we get out of these cursed Wilds, preferably alive."
Anya glowered, but she also shut up.
Lira turned back to the body, and after checking the grass around her feet, crouched down for a closer look.
The body was still mostly whole, the skin only just starting to turn gelatinous. It couldn't have been inside the plant for more than an hour or two. They'd stripped the fighter of all his equipment, leaving him in nothing but a few, fresh bandages and his underclothes.
What had her worried was the strange, spiral blood seal carved into his chest, and the thin spiritsteel wire wrapped around the ankle.
Lira followed the wire with her eyes, quickly locating a trap above the plant that had failed to trigger. Carefully, she stood up, moving her feet one at a time until she was close enough to the wire. It wouldn't be the only trap in the area--poachers always left a series of them--and they were usually linked. Sure enough, as she disarmed the first trap, she found a wire leading to the next.
This was dangerous. So, so dangerous--not just the traps but the entire situation. If it'd just been her and Shari, she'd have retreated to the forest. Tracked the group at her own, controlled pace and taken her time as she hunted them all down.
But it wasn't just her and Shari. They had two girls who would struggle to survive the Wilds alone, let alone a fight with a hostile group. Not only that, but the hostile group presumably had hostages. How much did she risk trying to save them?
"Lira?" called Thea. "Lira, what happened?"
Lira grimaced. That was the question, wasn't it? How did a well prepared group that included a spirit hunter, a spirit mage, and an annoying if tough-looking fighter get overpowered?
She glanced back at the body, taking a second to look it over for clues before she went back to disarming the second trap--nasty, snap-close jaws that had enough pressure to bite through to the bone, dug into the ground. "Those bandages are fresh. They stopped for the night. He hasn't been in the plant long and they bothered to trap the area, which means whoever attacked them is still close. There'll be scouts around."
Shari rumbled, drawing Lira's attention, then glanced at the ground in front of her. Another trap, a trip wire.
"You sound pretty sure," said Anya.
"I've dealt with poachers before," muttered Lira, following the trip wire. It looked like it was almost spring-loaded, designed to entangle whoever set it off in a mess of sharp, barbed wire. "That should be--"
A distant screech made her pause.
Shari's head jerked up, her ear flicking, trying to catch the sound. She bared her teeth in the direction of the screech but stayed silent. A second screech--closer this time. Lira sheathed her knife and crouched low to the ground beside a thick, leafy bush, motioning behind her for the other two to do the same. Her eyes never left the trees, an arrow on her bow, ready if--
Spirit energy flashed through the canopy, so quick that Lira almost missed it. No, not just spirit energy--it was a spirit. A hawk. It wasn't flying smoothly. Every flap was a struggle to stay in the air, a fight not to crash into the branches, but it was heading straight for her, because it knew her. It knew--
Lira barely had time to lower her arm and hold out an arm before Arin crashed into her, completely overshooting her arm and collapsing against her chest. His claws clung to her tunic, his head drooped over her shoulder. He was panting and exhausted, making soft, pained cries that broke her heart.
Reactively, Lira laid an arm against his back, soothing him, calming him. Her hand came away, covered in spirit blood from the spiritsteel arrow through his wing. Fury swelled in her chest, a rage that numbed her to anything else.
Then she heard the voices.
"It went this way! See the blood up there?"
The rage hardened. Cold. Calculating.
With a steadying breath, Lira strode back towards Thea. She gently pried Arin's claws from her tunic and passed him to Thea. The voices were closer, but her little trio was quiet, hidden behind a few bushes. Shari was nearby, even if Lira didn't know exactly where. She could hear Arin's pursuers calling out that they'd heard something in another direction. Baited and lured, just like they'd done to Sovereign knew how many spirits before.
Lira pointed at Anya, then at Arin. "Use the knife. Cut the arrow in half, pull it out. Gently." She looked at Thea, who was quiet, staring at Arin with wide, disbelieving eyes. Lira roughly shook her shoulder, making sure she had her attention when she said, "If anyone gets near you, you shield."
Thea swallowed, giving her a shaky nod in reply.
Anya glanced to where the voices were coming from. "But what are you going to--"
"I'm going to take care of the problem."
Lira stood up, arrow resting across her bow. She stayed low as she moved, footsteps silent on the undergrowth of the living Wilds around her. This was her territory--her home ground, gifted to her by Shari so many years ago, and these invaders would be eliminated.
It didn't take Lira long to locate the group. Five poachers. They were spread out through the trees, no doubt trying to figure out which tree Arin was hiding in, completely unaware that Shari had drawn them away.
"It has to be around here somewhere!" said one of them. "It couldn't have gone far, not with that arrow in its wing."
That was the first one to go. Lira stood, drew, and fired her arrow. It punched through his throat, the head of the arrow going clean through the skin and out the other side.
He collapsed in a gurgle of his own blood.
"Well I don't really wanna climb every damn tree just to find a damned bird!" said another one. He paused, no doubt expecting a response. "Fredrick? You there?"
Another arrow. Draw. Fire.
The second poacher went down, his throat pinned to the trunk of the tree behind him for a moment before his own dead weight pulled him down.
The remaining three poachers were aware of her now. They ran to each other, weapons drawn, shouting and pointing and trying to place a tree between where her second arrow had come from. Unluckily for them, she'd already moved, already had a third arrow nocked. She fired, but with their alert up, they were shifting around. Her shot missed the archer's throat, sinking deep into the back of a swordsman beside him instead.
The swordsman cried out and went down. The two still on their feet whirled around to face her. The archer released a panicked shot that sailed wide. The knife-fighter roared and charged towards her. Lira stepped out from behind the tree, nocking a fourth arrow and firing it into the thigh of the charging knife-fighter, as at the same time, Shari descended from the branches above the archer and sank her teeth into his neck.
The knife-fighter fell. Lira strode up to him. He tried to swipe at her. She kicked his elbow, resulting in a sharp crack that left his arm bending the wrong way. With her boot, she pinned his shoulder to the ground, aiming another arrow point-blank at his chest.
"Where's your group?" she asked. He attempted to spit at her, ending up with a gob of saliva across his cheek. To emphasise her question, Lira moved her boot to his elbow and pressed her weight into it. He screamed, and she asked again. "Where's your group? Where's the spirit hunter and the mage you kidnapped?"
"Like--like I'd tell you," he said with a feeble laugh. His eyes were glassy, but they were pinned on her left arm. "The spirit-armed demon doesn't leave survivors. Funny, I didn't even think you were real."
"No survivors," said Lira quietly. "Just a matter of what condition I leave the corpses in. I'm sure you've heard stories."
Something cracked in his expression, and Lira knew she'd won. "T--they're headed to the spirit tunnel nearby. I--I don't know where after that."
"How many in your group?"
"Fifteen now, I think. But some are scouting, They won't all be with the main group."
Lira took her foot off his elbow and shoved her arrow back in the quiver.
For a brief moment, hope flashed across the poacher's face, right before Lira drew her hunting knife and slashed it across his throat.
She pulled her arrow out of his thigh as he died, quickly checking his body over for anything useful. His weapons weren't particularly high quality, but even so, had she not been on a time-sensitive mission while babysitting in the Wilds, she'd have taken them. Spiritsteel was spiritsteel. It sold no matter where you went.
Lira glanced over at Shari. Her bond partner had bright, crimson blood all over her muzzle, having dealt with the archer and the swordsman. Lira retrieved her arrows, wiping both them and her hunting knife on the chest of one of the bodies before she sheathed them again and headed back to Thea and Anya.
They weren't exactly where she'd left them, a little closer to the fight than before. The arrow was out of Arin's wing, and the spirit hawk was sitting on Anya's shoulder. He didn't look as bad as he had a few minutes ago, which was something. Arin might not have been very big, but he was strong. It'd take more than one arrow through a wing to bring him down.
Lira offered her spirit arm to Arin.
He hopped on. As it always was, the connection between them was easy, straightforward.
Arin showed her what he'd seen, with a vision so perfect and sharp that it felt like she could see the world for miles. A group of seventeen poachers moving through the Wilds, straight towards the spirit tunnel. Arden, the mage, the fighter and the map guy were blindfolded, bound and bleeding, but they were alive. Arden's weapons were bundled into a small cart.
She watched as Arin dove, felt the desperation in flashes of looming memory where around the coals of a campfire at sunrise, Arden had yelled at him to fly. He'd followed from above, hoping for a chance to help Arden escape until finally, the arrow had struck him, guided by the glow of a ruby blood seal from the ground.
"We'll get him back," said Lira softly, running a gentle hand over Arin's back, who crooned in reply. Lira lowered Arin down to Shari, who held out his wing as Shari licked it over several times. "Group of poachers, at the very least. They're headed to the spirit tunnel nearby. If they--"
"You killed him," said Thea, almost dazed. Her staff was planted in the ground in front of her, her eyes off where the dead poachers lay. "I watched you--you disarmed him, he was down, and--and you just killed him anyway."
Lira drew in a breath through her nose. She recognised hysteria when she saw it, and she didn't have time to be nice about it, even if she couldn't exactly blame Thea for it. "What did you expect me to do with him?"
"I don't know, but not just kill him like that," said Thea. "I--I just--"
"You want me to tie him up?" said Lira. "Bring him along when we're in the middle of the Wilds, keep him prisoner, take him to the capital to answer for his crimes, where he can just say he was at the wrong place at the wrong time, that he's just a simple carpenter or some other blatant lie who got lost in the woods?"
Thea's mouth pressed into a thin line.
"They have Arden," said Lira flatly. "They have Arden, and your other spirit mage buddy, along with that idiot fighter and the map guy. If they get into those tunnels, we never find them again. They're gone. If you want them back, people are going to have to die. You get that, right?"
"I'm not stupid," muttered Thea.
"Never said you were," said Lira. "But we're in the middle of the Wilds. I need you not to panic. I can deal with the poachers, but I need you to protect them." Lira pointed at Anya, who held Ryn's tiny, bird-like body of delicate, damaged feathers in her hand, now stained with Arin's silver-blue blood. Lira looked back to Thea. "I need to know that you're not going to fall apart on me and get someone else killed."
"I don't need protecting," said Anya, putting her free hand on the hilt of her borrowed knife. "If she won't fight, I will."
"No," said Lira, looking her directly in the eyes. "Your job isn't to fight. Your job is to make sure that no matter what, they don't get their hands on Ryn."
"I can--"
"Right now, you are the only thing keeping Ryn alive," said Lira. "Your bond to him is everything. You do not put him down for a second, not for anything, until we get back to the capital. Understood?"
Anya snapped her mouth shut and nodded, dropping her gaze down to Ryn.
Lira huffed and turned away, wondering if this was all going to be for nothing. If they couldn't catch up to Arden before the tunnels, none of this would matter anyway. Shari couldn't carry them all, but she couldn't leave these two behind, not with Thea looking like she might freeze at any moment.
"They have names."
Lira turned, finding Thea glaring at her. "What?"
"The spirit mage, and the fighter, and the map guy," Thea said. "They have names."
Lira studied her for a moment. Thea's every muscle was still tight, her knuckles white around the length of her staff, but she'd found something to hang onto, something to focus on. She raised a careless eyebrow. "Probably, but I don't care about that. Why don't you tell me?"
Thea drew in a sharp breath through her nose. "Balnor, Edric, and Griffin."
"I'm not great with names," said Lira, giving her a half shrug. "You'll just have to keep reminding me if I forget." Thea didn't reply, so Lira asked, "Think you can do that, Miss 'I've never been out of the city before' spirit mage?"
"I'll remind you so much that you'll be muttering them in your sleep," said Thea.
"Good," said Lira. She pressed a fist against her forehead. One headache down. "Now, we've just got to somehow reach those idiots before a group of second-rate poachers pull them through the spirit tunnels."
Thea took a few steps forward, placing a hand against the trunk of a nearby tree. She ran her palm along an overhanging branch of a nearby tree. Lira could have sworn she saw a flash of gold beneath Thea's fingers, but it was gone too fast for her to be certain.
"The Sovereign will help us," said Thea softly. She lifted her staff and in a clear, if uncertain voice, called out, "Sovereign, speed us!"
Golden energy flooded out from the jewel in her staff as the Sovereign spell took hold, engulfing them all in a golden mist. Lira felt it as the spirit energy sank into her legs, leaving them tingling the same way her spirit arm often did around excessive amounts of spirit energy.
Shari's fur glimmered with the Sovereign's power. Arin screeched, flaring his wings and looping in the air at a ridiculous speed.
"Well, we can't disappoint the Sovereign," said Lira. She gave Shari a feral grin. "Shall we go hunting?"
Her bond mate growled in response, fangs bared as she unleashed a roar that shook the Wilds, a warning to anyone who could hear it.
They were coming for blood.
*+*+*+*
A/N - Got a little stuck with the future planning, took a few days to p l o t and WELL LETS SAY IF THINGS WORK OUT, WE'RE GONNA HAVE AN INTERESTING TIME OF THINGS