“Your gods may not have heard you,” he said in a low voice. “But I did.”
It was that hint of amusement in his voice that made her realize he was looking at her as if she was some silly curiosity, a Halfling complaining about grubs in the forest, while she might as well have been a rabbit trapped in a snare. She had been so focused on the sharp points of his tusks she couldn’t see his smile.
A shaky breath started to tumble out of her, but a large green finger pressed quickly over her mouth.
She watched the orc’s eyes shift further in the clearing.
Suddenly, there was something larger and much scarier in the woods than an orc.
Bianca heard the faint rumble of its breath before she saw it. She almost didn’t realize what it was, she’d never seen one not made out of paper.
A huldira, drooling over dagger-long teeth, a thick plated hide down its massive back and fur more matted than a bear or boar’s, sniffing through the underbrush. Searching, likely, for little morsel-sized creatures like herself.
Not even a breath.
Bianca took a step away from the beast without even realizing, crouching down into the weeds, snatching her basket up off the snowy ground. She didn’t know why, it wasn’t any good as protection. She didn’t have anything else with her though, no weapons, nothing besides a little pocket knife, blunt from use and best for hacking at roots.
She glanced between the huldira and the orc, and took in the longbow and quiver full of arrows slung around the orc's shoulders that she hadn’t noticed before. He drew one, sharp and nasty with some kind of pitch coating the tip, notching it in his bow, not yet taking aim.
Perhaps there was less immediate peril beside this danger, than there was the one that could swallow her whole.
Bianca bit down on her tongue, willing herself to disappear into the ground. Maybe there was a safe, unusually large rabbit burrow she could curl up in.
No such luck. The orc met her eyes again, and Bianca held a hand over her mouth. He gave her a brief nod, before taking aim at the beast.
His arrow parted the air almost silently, carving a path through the thick falling snowflakes.
With a screech that shook a hundred birds from the trees, the huldira reared back on its haunches, tearing swipes through the nearby greenery with its massive front claws. It was reacting as if it had been bitten by something, she realized, only a secondbefore the orc’s hand grabbed the cowl of her cloak and started dragging her to a nearby bush.
“That wasn’t enough to kill it?” She whispered, looking frantically at the orc. He pulled another pitch-tipped arrow, notching it as the beast raged on.
He didn’t answer, keeping his attention trained on the huldira. The beast continued to scream and snap and stomp around, looking for what could have pierced its shaggy hide, and the cover of the bushes felt like little more protection than wet paper. Bianca whispered, “Where do we go?”
He looked back at her, assessing a moment, before he glanced up at the trees nearby.
“What am I, a squirrel?”
It fell out of her mouth in indignation, before she even realized it was a mistake.
She caught the way his eyebrows raised in surprise before the beast roared, and began stomping towards them. In less than a heartbeat, he was standing, drawing the string all the way back to his cheek.
She couldn’t stay here, in the beast’s path. The orc took aim again, as she shuffled back in the brush. After a few steps, Bianca got to her feet and ran, not caring what direction her camp was in. Assuming he didn’t get eaten, the horse could figure it out too.
She heard the arrow whistle through the air a second time before the huldira gave another piercing scream.
Bianca ran for several minutes, until she saw another, deeper thicket she could hide in, crawling under the branches. She sunk down onto her haunches and put her head between her knees. Then she choked out a cough as her heart tried to figure out how to resume normally, having already presumed the death of her.
2
The hairs standing up on her arms were finally starting to go down.
Bianca waited a while in her hiding spot, listening intently for anything that might have followed or found her. When her heart finally stopped thudding in her chest, she hoped it was safe enough to make her way back to her troupe’s camp.
Horace wasn’t anywhere in sight, and neither were any of the tracks he’d made on the way into the woods.
For the next hour or longer, she scrambled through full, prickly bushes with the quickly fading light, stumbling shin-first through many plants.
One thicket of trees was so dense and so wide she supposed to herself that she had turned entirely around the other way trying to get around it.
