That caused a few to smile, and when we left, there was no true order to the ranks. Instead, men moved to travel with those they knew best. I didn't want to say friends, because we weren't supposed to acknowledge those. We all had them, but few of us would admit it.
Immediately, Elijah moved to my side, shielding his eyes from the setting sun. "So, we're attacking Dragons again?"
I grumbled, but when Jeshiah, Timon, and Uriah pulled in as well, I decided I had nothing left to lose. These men had treated me with respect. They'd said enough around me to be punished if I repeated it, but none of them had tried to make a complaint about me first. Combined with how strange these objectives were, I decided I had nothing left to lose. I might as well trust them - a bit.
"We're not hunting," I said, keeping my voice down.
"Uh, we are," Jeshiah pointed out.
"No," I said. "We're on a mission. Hunting is collecting food. I was just told there's no need to collect meat. Mr. Peterson doesn't think we'll be able to collect women either."
"So why are we here again?" Uriah asked.
"To push back the demons so they are not blocking us from the food the Righteous need." And I lifted a brow looking at each of them. "That's what I was told."
"Why don't we just go around?" Timon asked.
"Because the enemy extends further than we know," I told him.
Timon looked at Elijah first, then over to Uriah. "I can't be the only one who heard men talking last night, can I?"
"Most ofus," Jeshiah said, clearly teasing me, "were in the hunter's lounge last night. Not our own rooms."
"Most of you," Elijah told him, "didn't get promoted either. Tobias deserves this."
Timon grunted, annoyed at being ignored. "Some of the guys were saying their squad found the end of the line on the left side! Gentlemen, that means we can go around!"
"Maybe they were talking about the opposite end?" I suggested, because Timon was usually pretty gullible. I wouldn'tput it past the other hunters to get him rambling, then laugh at him for it.
"That's the wild men's farm," Uriah pointed out.
Yeah, I knew that part. The goal of this multi-day operation wassupposedto be to find the end of this line they'd made between us and everything else. There was no way they'd send us out if they already knew how to get around.
Never mind that the mark on my compass was just to the right of the N. Just a bit over from straight outside our compound. In other words, right where the most Dragons and wild men would be waiting.
Timon had to be wrong - otherwise, why was my entire team being sent to a point in the middle of this mess?
Eighty-Four
Tobias
We walked for two hours before the light finally faded from the sky. The whole time, the men around me chattered. I caught details here and there, but most were things I expected, like how Gideon had taken the rest of the hunters with him.
But once the sky was dark, my men relaxed. Their conversations grew louder, and since I wasn't constantly trying to silence them, their words grew a bit more brazen. By the time the world began to grow still, they were talking without any restraints.
"They took a cart."
"Man, I wanted to be onthatteam."
"Yeah, but we're the least respected of the hunters," another man pointed out.
His friend agreed. "Barely made the cut. Only here because we haven't died yet."
And that made me look around at the men I'd been assigned. I'd wondered about my squad before, but Harald's was decent, weren't they? And yet, I recognized a few faces who'd made glaring mistakes in training.
Matheos's group had no discipline at all. Even though I wasn't chiding them for it, Jonnas's men and Harald's were at least keeping their voices discreet. Then again, Jonnas's men were mostly injured - and badly enough they shouldn't have been let join this attack. A few were actually limping.
But we'd been walking long enough to be in range, so I pulled the whistle from my shirt and stuck it in my mouth. For a while, I walked like that, just messing with the thing so no one would worry about it.
