During the morning, I was planning possible rune-combinations and formations for my new toys. At the same time, Lenore and Ylva were scouting in the forests around us, looking for any clue of where the dryads were. Ylva was quite happy with the fact that Rai’s presence forced us to walk, as we still did not want to show him our mounts due to my paranoia, whereas Lenore was quite annoyed with my paranoia, because I had asked her to stay outside her Hallow and more or less out of sight as another possible hidden card.

As I lacked the abilities necessary to seriously look for tracks, I was able to let most of my attention zone out, focusing on my work. And what an interesting project it was. I was quite sure that I had a working rune-combination but sadly, I was lacking the means to test it. For a short moment, I eyed Rai’s neck but Adra would be upset if I used our guide as a guinea pig. And I was not quite sure it worked as I wanted it to, it would be hard to explain Giro that I had accidentally turned his son into a mental vegetable. Not that the son had all than much mental capacity to lose, but it would be a hassle.

No, I would have to wait until we caught us some dryads, I wanted at least two test-subjects as I had two different fuel-mechanisms in mind. One mechanism was to be simply fueled by a controller, meaning me, the other was a little more ingenious. My idea was to add small, thin thorns to the inside of the collar, not large enough to cause wounds, just large enough to draw blood, and inscribe the runes to slowly draw magic out of the wearers blood, using their own power to fuel the magic keeping them under control.

Well, more or less, under control. I had a layered formation in mind, three seven-rune main-formations, linked together into a triangle, each similar to each other and each reinforcing the others. Each seven-rune formation would consist of two triangles, forming a star of david and a single centre-rune. The centre-rune would be a blood-rune, inscribed in the blood of the target, setting the target. One of the triangles around it would be made out of curse-runes, describing the medium which is used to affect the target. And the other triangle would be different for each of the three main-formations, one using torpor to weaken, slow and dull the mind and body of the target, one using disorientation to further befuddle their mind and the final formation made out of madness, to take the last coherence from their mind.

If I could tweak the magic just right, I thought, I could make them drooling, zombie-like idiots that could be guided with a simple leash. Like that, we should be able to smuggle them into the Jonari-camp and have them die in glorious combat with the Jonari-Chieftain. Well, kind of…

But tweaking the magic would require a bit of experimentation, thus my short-lived idea to use Rai as a guinea-pig.

Our day passed without incident, neither finding any tracks of the dryads, nor them finding us. We made camp in an out-of-the-way cave, well hidden and protected in a small gorge. Without Ylva stumbling across it, we would never have found it. Inspecting it, we decided that Rai would have to stay here, so we didn’t have to trust him. When he heard that, he was almost pitching a fit but the simple fact that both Sigmir and I were willing to make him stay by force ended any discussion on the matter. It also showed how problematic he truly was, his father had ordered him to obey our orders while he was out, guiding us.

After his fit was done, Sigmir and I both sat him down, explaining to him the facts of life. At this point, we hardly knew him and certainly did not trust him. What we were doing out here was not a game, I had to suppress a smirk at that, it was bloody serious. And it would be bloody. Unless some kind of miracle occured, we would have to wage a hidden war, kill some of their patrols, or maybe guards once we found their main-camp, and fade back into the woodworks. There was no way we could take an unknown into a situation like that, not until we had a better idea of their strength and composition. While that was a bit of a snub to him, it was not about him. Not in this case. It was quite plain and simply about survival. If we had someone with us that we could not trust, we would be hampered. So for the first few days, maybe the first week, we would leave him behind.

That was, of course, the story we had concocted before. Our plan was that we would incite the fighting between Jonari and dryads, presenting it as an coincidence to Rai and claiming that it was to be expected, that the dryads were not only pressing in on the area around Adernas, but also into the territory of the Jonari. As soon as the fighting was serious, we could move back to Adernas, report to Giro and claim that our job was done. I was not sure if it would be enough to erase the mark of cowardice from Rai, but frankly, I did not care.

At first, Sigmir and I debated for a short time, if she should wait here with Rai, because she had little training and knowledge of skulking and sneaking into a village. Give her some animal to stalk and she was quite adept at stealth, but sneaking up on sapient beings was different from sneaking up on a deer. I countered that I had only done so once, in Tegi, and that there was another thing to remember, neither Adra nor I knew the lay of the land in the Jonari-village. We would have to rely on a description or even blind luck, neither the best bet for a stealth-mission. No, she would have to go with us and our little annoyance would just have to babysit himself.

He also learned that life’s not easy at the bottom. On our original journey from the ambush-site to Adernas, we had taken it easy on him, not quite knowing what was going on. Now, we knew what was going on and gave Rai the tasks befitting of journeyman-hunter, sending him around for firewood, letting him go with Sigmir and Ylva as a gofer, making him gut and butcher their prey under Sigmir’s watchful eye, all those nuisance-tasks. I kept cooking, mainly because I did not want to eat his attempts but also because I enjoyed it and gained skill-points doing it. It was far from my other, main-, skills but it came along nicely, if slowly.

We spent some time on fixing up the cave, so that Rai was comfortable during his stay and to give us a place to return every night. There was simply no way to gauge how long it would take us to find a group of dryads and subdue them, without killing them all. By now, I was convinced that I wanted some serious evidence for the Jonari to find. Sure, some circumstantial evidence was not bad, footprints for example, but a nice, still-warm corpse was a lot better to stir up sentiment.

The next day was largely a bust. We searched the area but did not turn up a single dryad, just a few dead wolves, looking like they had been killed in a manner similar to what I would expect from a group using spears and bows. What clued us all in to the fact that it was most likely a group consisting of dryads was the fact that the pelts were still there. Dryads and nymphs used their strange, self-grown fabric as clothes and armour, so they had little to no use for pelts, everyone else would take the pelts as the most valuable part of the wolf. So, we had a starting point. Sadly, night was falling, so we returned to our camp and started tracking the next day.

Tracking them through the snow was not too hard, they left a rather obvious trail, if you knew what you were looking at. They simply used something similar to my Ice-Magic to smooth out the snow behind them, leaving it in a perfectly plain state. Even a little freshly fallen snow would erase the track, but as soon as we were on the start of it, we could easily follow. Guessing how far ahead they were, was sadly a thing of impossibility.

When it was almost completely dark, we finally saw a hint of them. Someone had killed a deer and gutted it on the spot, not unusual, as you did not want the blood and guts stinking up your campsite. But what clued us in that it had not been long, was the fact that the entrails were still warm and in the cold climate around us, that meant that it had not been long, not at all. We pressed on and were rewarded with a nice view of their camp-site.