Chereads / Between Light and Darkness / Chapter 3 - Hunted

Chapter 3 - Hunted

After moving as quietly as he could for about twenty minutes, Sain slowly began to pick up his speed, tearing through the underbrush and disregarding the various nicks and cuts that began to appear along his unprotected arms and face.

"How am I going to get Mira to move?" Sain thought to himself in a panic. "If those gardeners find her…"

Judging from the youth Gile's description, they knew that Mira had been injured, and her general location. They were hunting her. Images of Mira with her crooked wing, her feathers matted in blood, crouching protectively in her nest over her egg, surged through his mind spurring him to greater speed. Almost imperceptibly, a cold sensation began to began to spread itself along his skin, as his mind continued to conjure the horrors of what could be. Breathing heavily, Sain finally managed to enter the clearing. When he had crossed about half the clearing, Mira's familiar beak emerged from the brush on the far side, and Sain felt his insides unknot slightly as he relaxed. Mira was looking at him in confusion at his shambling state as he bled from several fresh cuts.

"Mira we...have to...get you out of here." Sain huffed as he approached and rubbed her beak in greeting. "Some very bad men are coming after you, so we need to move!"

Mira simply cocked her head to one side confused by the urgency of in his tone and how exhausted he was, the feathers along her neck beginning to inflate sensing his unease. Sain began to tug her towards the nearby woods gently but she shook him off returning to her nest and sitting down.

"Stupid bird! The Gardeners are coming for you! We need to leave!" Sain exclaimed trying to push her bodily from her position in her nest.

Mira simply lowered her beak, catching the back of Sain's shirt with a ripping sound before bodily lifting him into the air and plopping him onto her back. Sain struggled to get off and was met with a sharp snapping sound as Mira sharply closed her beak in front of him. He stopped in the face of that large beak, and the frantic boy and the annoyed bird simply glared at one another for a moment.

"Mira won't budge," Sain thought exasperatedly as he racked his brains for a way to get her to understand. "She is determined to stay here...so I need to give her a reason to move."

Sain willed his frantically beating heart to slow down. An idea came to him on how to get Mira to move. The moment it did Sain couldn't help but audibly gulp. This could work. This could also really, really, hurt.

*********

The three young Gardeners quickly traversed through the woods, riding upon tendrils of roots that seemed to rise from the earth itself. Cain and Giles quietly glided by as their female companion seemed to float along distractedly with her eyes closed as if listening to something. On her shoulder, a large bee about the size of an adult's palm held on tightly, a purple insignia etched onto its head emitting a faint light. Trailing behind her the thousands of members of the swarm kept an appropriate distance. After about ten minutes, the three of them stopped as the root tendrils solidified beneath their feet, forming a platform in the air.

"Alright Kara, we have kept up our end of the deal." Cain said with an apparent tone of inpatients. "Locate that Hawk for me and I will put in a good word with head master Cypher about how talented you are."

"Patience, Cain," Kara purred in response, visibly taking pleasure in his agitation." You are sure the bird will be around here Gile?"

"By all our calculations it has to be." Gile responded meekly, looking slightly pale. "The troop of barbarians we hired lost about eleven men, but claimed they managed to break its wing and kill its mate. Based on the time of year, they should have nested in this area, and if we are lucky they may even have had a clutch of eggs."

"Leave it to the Barbarians to botch up a simple assignment." Cain grumbled loudly to the other two as they pointedly ignored him. "They were hired to track them and bring us word, but no! They had to go challenge the beasts before we found their nest!"

"Well boys, if you don't mind, this queen has some work to do, so I will begin" Kara replied with a flirtatious smile, and with a wave of her hand the swarm that had followed them began to disperse into the trees below.

A few moments passed in awkward silence as the two young men waited for Kara to gather words from her drones. After around ten minutes Kara opened her eyes and shook her head with a sigh.

"Well Gile, you were half right. The bird did have a nest here, but it looks like it left in a hurry." Kara said with a relaxed smile.

"It's gone?! Bu-but it can't have flown off! The Barbarians broke its wing!" Gile responded in a panic as Cain sent a glare full of enmity his way.

"If you have led me on a wild goose chase Gile, I swear-" Cain began threateningly before Kara interrupted him.

"Oh it has a broken wing alright. From the tracks it left in the woods as well as the musk my little ones could sense in the air, it hasn't been long since she left. We can definitely catch up. Still, this looks to be more effort than I thought it would take." She replied lazily.

"Just get on with it!" Cain snapped in annoyance.

***

Sain was once again making his way through the brush, although admittedly now at a much slower pace with Mira not much farther behind him. To be honest, Sain was just happy that his stupid idea didn't wind up getting him crippled and had turned out pretty well on the whole. Then again Mira had always seemed to trust him quite quickly. Still when Sain had snatched her egg and moved away she was not nearly as distraught as he had imagined she would be, rather she had simply tilted her head at him in befuddlement before making a deep rumbling sound in her chest and getting up from her nest to go retrieve her egg. Sain had moved farther and continued to watch her carefully, ready to bolt and hopefully lead her away but she continued to follow him at an even pace with an expression that Sain could only call exasperation and tolerance coming from the giant bird.

"Great job Sain," He thought to himself "Now you think you are a master on the facial expression of birds. Let's add that to my list of odd traits!"

Over the course of the last twenty minutes they had made some considerable progress as they headed towards the city. Sain figured that if it had been him trying to find an injured wild beast, he would likely check places further from human habitation, so he thought it might be safer to move that way. Considering how dense the Rosewood was, hopefully it would be enough to buy them some time. Checking his footing and the path forwards, Sain turned as a sudden woosh of air enveloped him as well as a feeling of weight and fresh feathers pushing him to the ground. Looking up Mira was crouched over him protectively, her good wing covering him and her gaze turning this way and that. Letting out a soft rumble from her breast, Mira once again grabbed the back of his shirt, lifting him from the ground. She began to softly move forwards through the brush in the direction they had been traveling until she found an open space, tucking Sain into some of the denser foliage. As Sain tried to rise, Mira snapped her beak at him before turning her head quickly to the sky. As she did so, a strange crawling sensation creeped across Sain's skin. A familiar sound was echoing out of the woods, one that he had heard nearly every day these past few weeks. It began softly and as time passed it only grew louder and more pronounced. A soft buzzing had begun to echo through the Rosewood. The swarm had found them.