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. A scrap of
brown wool still fluttered in the sharp-toothed grasp of a young
prickly ash.
"It looks like someone went through here," Flint said. "And
recently, at that."
Tanis peered into the forest in the direction the lone traveler
had taken. The song of water racing and tumbling over rocks
played a faint counterpoint to the whispering rustle of leaves in the
cooling breeze. But then from nearer by he heard the soft sound of
something or someone breathing in the hard, short gasps that
clearly spoke of fear.
"Flint?" he whispered.
"I hear it."
Tanis reached for his bow and nocked an arrow with the quick,
almost absent moves of one who has used it with familiarity for
years. It took only a gesture and a nod from him to tell the old
dwarf to follow quietly.
Elf-silent, making no more noise than a hunted fox, Tanis
stepped off the path and into the darkening woods.
Close-growing oaks and then underbrush crowded together,
forming a broad wall of trunks and forbidding shadow. Tanis
moved quickly from one oak to the next, keeping cover. Several
growths thick, the trees ended abruptly in a clearing carpeted with
their wide-fingered bronze leaves.
The girl crouched at the edge of the clearing was the most
bedraggled creature Tanis had ever seen. Her hair, the color of
frost-kissed aspen leaves, tumbled around her shoulders and
straggled across her face. It did not hide the scratches and cuts,
signs of a careless passage through the prickly ash, that scored her
cheeks
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