Mikaya picked up the cloth with the cheese and shook her head with a huge grin still on her face.
Yevad sighed and focused on the flames.
"Yevad," Elena said as she shook her head, refusing to accept the birds from Danny. She nodded her head toward Yevad.
Danny looked puzzled for a minute, but got the hint pretty quickly.
"I can't kill these birds," Elena said. "I feel sorry for them."
Yevad looked her with a "yeah right" expression on his face.
"It's true," Mikaya said.
"Then you kill 'em," Yevad retorted.
Mikaya flinched. "We must have hurt his pride," she thought.
"I . . . I'm already gunna pluck and clean them. Why should it all be up to me? Everybody is going to eat here," she said.
"Then have the boy do it," he muttered.
"I . . . don't know how," Danny lied and held the sack out to Yevad.
"Fine," Yevad said as he grabbed the sack with one hand and handed Danny the quail on a stick. "Then roast this for me while I go, and make sure not to burn it."
Danny smiled and took Yevad's place as Yevad went off to kill the birds out of sight.
Mikaya looked at the cheese again and laughed quietly.
Elena shook her head and smiled.
"Cheese?" Mikaya offered some to Elena.
Elena took the mutilated chunk and chuckled.
Danny tried not to pay attention, but he was amused too, and he ended up burning a wing. "Crap. That guy's gunna be pissed," he thought.
Later that night, everyone except Elena had fallen asleep. She felt uneasy, so she decided to cast a protection spell over their campsite. However, she hesitated because the spell required her to tap into the magic of the Harvest Lands. Elena had specifically avoided casting this type of spell since they had gotten out of the inn. She didn't want to be absolutely sure that they were truly gone. Even though she'd seen with her own eyes that swamplands now stood where the Harvest Lands should be.
Swallowing her fear, she began to chant. A magic barrier formed around the campsite. The spell had worked.
Elena let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding. Her body shook involuntarily with relief.
Thinking about the Harvest Lands, Elena knew that the magic shouldn't have worked without the mystical life force present in the trees and other foliage there. The magic she tapped into was drawn directly from those plants, which had absorbed it through their roots from the depths of the planet over decades of growth.
Could the swamplands have been an illusion? Where the Harvest Lands really still there after all? No. Elena had not sensed any magic in those desolate lands, not to conceal anything, and certainly not the characteristic lush magical aura of the Harvest Lands.
So what had happened? Did the magic relocate to another place when the plants had been destroyed? Did it evaporate and spread into the air? That didn't seem to be the case, either.
Since Elena's thoughts were troubled, she could not rest easily. When she finally did fall asleep, it was fitful, and she was racked with nightmares.
Nearby, Danny also struggled against the terrifying images in his tortured slumber. For almost two years he had been running from those two monsters. No matter where he'd gone, they had always managed to find him again. His life had been a constant chase, and he'd managed to survive this long only because of luck or Divine Providence.
If his adoptive father had still been alive he would surely have attributed everything to God. Even this day Danny had finally been saved from the beasts once and for all. He had finally been freed.
Only Danny had forgotten how it felt to be safe and secure. Even with the defeat of Zuck and Grug, he had not felt liberated from them.
Now, in his dream, they grasped at him in the ruins after having turned on the Bishop.
Danny barely managed to avoid them and ran to where the horses had been tethered. He untied them all, and mounted one of the stallions. It didn't take much coaxing to get the horses to run away once they laid eyes on the horrific creatures that chased Danny out of the ruins.
The sound they'd made when they'd noticed he'd escaped was a cross between a growl and an unholy howl of anger and frustration. Only where had that emotion come from? Zuck and Grug didn't seem to be able to feel anything like what that terrifying sound expressed.
Shivering in fright, Danny gasped and came suddenly awake. The sun had just started to peek over the horizon, its rays worming their way through some of the leaves at the outskirts of the Death Woods.
It took him a minute to realize where he was, and the next instant Danny felt in the folds of his shirt to reassure himself that it was still safely hidden there, tucked away. The treasure Bishop Welffing had died to attain still remained in its hiding place.
As quietly as possible, Danny rose from his blanket and walked over to his horse. He took the wster skin and drank deeply.
It was not the same stallion he had originally escaped on. Danny had been forced to trade that horse in for some coins and this old gelding. The last two years had been very difficult for him.
At first, Danny had thought he had actually escaped that night. He had attempted to make his way back to the Church, where he'd grown up. Only then had he realized his mistake.
Zuck and Grug had come looking for him. They'd known exactly where to look, and though he had managed to get away from them again, the pair somehow kept finding him again and again.
Danny had never figured out how they did it. Maybe they were expert trackers as well as mercenaries, or maybe there had been some sort of tracking magic they'd used.
Still, what worried Danny more than how was why. Why were they after him? As far as he could tell, that night the men had been reduced to nothing more than puppets that needed explicit instructions from the Bishop in order to do anything at all. Why, then, did they suddenly make it their mission to track down and catch Danny? If they had not regained their minds and understanding, there was no reason for them to chase him at all.
Having watched the two men fighting at the inn, there had remained absolutely no doubt in Danny's mind that those monsters had never regained any consciousness of their humanity. In fact, they had even seemed to have been possessed by some awful dark magic. That magic had driven them to persecute Danny, and he couldn't help but reach the uneasy conclusion that someone else must have been using it to control Zuck and Grug.