The next few weeks were incredibly busy. His de facto role as head of the impressors at the works was made permanent, which meant an increase in money, which hardly affected him, and a lot of time spent checking on the others. This ate into his free time as he was still expected to produce the same quantity of impressed boards as everyone else. Apart from that he still had a commitment to the children of the village, which were being added to by the arrival of families from Elseth. Then there was some socialising with the woodsmen. Nedric felt that it was important to keep these people happy, as they were the backbone to the whole operation, without them everything would stop.

Lastly there was a continual commitment to Rialto who expected Nedric to supply him with a list of new requirements for his store. Nedric wasn’t really sure why he had to do this, as there was a shopkeeper who controlled the day to day running of the place and had hired two assistants to help out now that the demand for goods had grown. If Elsebeth had not been prepared to go with Nedric and help him where she could, then he did not know when he would have had the time to be with her.

They managed to grasp a few moments together over meals and later on in the evenings. The other impressors did their best to help by not interrupting the pair during the few minutes each day that they spent together but even so it seemed like they had hardly any time to themselves.

For a while they stayed up into the small hours talking about everything and nothing. In theory Elsebeth was meant to sleep in one cabin and Nedric in another that was the other side of the site. However as no one objected they usually spent the time in Nedric’s room, as it was slightly bigger. They stopped the late nights when they realised that the lack of sleep was affecting their jobs.

Although they enjoyed their time together, neither of them indicated by their words that they wanted to make it a permanent relationship. Nedric having known no other women was unwilling to commit himself to his first relationship and Elsebeth probably felt the same. Still, despite occasional arguments, neither showed any inclination to leave the other.

Finally things began to slacken off a little. Supervisor Alhern had decided that the children of the village and the works were getting in the way as much as they helped around the place. He decided that they would all be schooled, partly to keep them out of mischief but also because it was in the companies interest to have better educated youngsters who would be able to take on some of the skilled jobs in a few years time.

This meant that Nedric didn’t have to spend so much time with the children as they now had to spend much of their time helping around their homes in the evening. He still spent one evening a week with them but they now met in a large hall in the works, which meant that it was only an hour or so he spent with them rather than the whole evening.

As the workload had increased the woodsmen found themselves with less time and so Nedric would only spend the evening of the end-week with them and as the impressors became better organised and relaxed in their role at the works the routine speeded up. By early summer Nedric and Elsebeth began to have some time for themselves.

Mostly they would go for walks through the woods in the warm evenings. The effect of the woodsmen had been to create a number of clearly marked routes as well as tracks that branched off from these to gradually become smaller and smaller. At each intersection was a post with a number and arrow carved into it. The number gave an idea of how far away from the village it was and the arrow pointed to the easiest route back. The idea was that even in fog or a snowstorm no one would be lost if they found one post.

All the villagers and woodsmen knew the surrounding area well but it seemed to Nedric that they rarely were able to appreciate the beauty of the place. There was an air of grandeur that filled him with a sense of profound peace. The woods seemed to affect Elsebeth the same way and so their walks were as close to idyllic as he could imagine.

One evening they were walking alongside the river that the woodsmen had previously used to send their logs to the nearest town. Nowadays the demand for wood was almost all local and the river was one of the quieter areas in which to wander. As they walked the sunlight would catch on the water and where the river passed over rocks the spray would glimmer like a rainbow. A cooling breeze came off of the river and sent errant strands of Elsebeth’s hair in all directions.

Nedric could not imagine anything more enjoyable. He pulled her over to the trunk of a fallen tree and they sat down. He wrapped his arm over her shoulder and she wriggled hers back between them so that she could hold him around the waist. She looked up at him with her deep dark eyes and he felt that he could lose himself in them. He kissed her and she responded in kind, a few moments when the world disappeared and there was just them.

“That was fairly pleasant.” Nedric said with a grin.

“Only fairly pleasant, you can’t have been trying properly.”

“Well I guess I’ll have to try again then.”

They bent to kiss again. As their lips touched Nedric thought he heard a rustle in the woods behind him and then the world went black.

It could not have been much later when Nedric came round to find his head thumping. He tried to feel it and discovered that his hands were bound together. When he tried to move he learnt that his legs were similarly bound and he realised there was a cloth in his mouth. From where he lay all he could see was the log on which they had been sitting and the bound legs of someone that he guessed was Elsebeth.

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“Are you sure that that is the right woman?” A male voice asked from behind him.

“She’s the only female impressor in the camp so she must be.” A second and slightly deeper voice replied.

“How can you tell she’s the impressor?”

“Well she’s obviously not a villager or a carpenter or smith.”

“She could still be a clerk.”

“They haven’t got any here yet, or so I’ve been told.”

“What should we do with him? Kill him?”

“Take them both with us, we can always kill him later and they might want him anyway.”

“Sounds good to me, letting them decide.”

Nedric heard one of the men moving back into the woods. He tried to wriggle round to see Elsebeth and was rewarded for his efforts with a kick in the back.

“You stay right where you are, or the next kick will be to your head.”

There was nothing he could do. He lay there as the other man returned with donkeys and was hoisted onto one so that he lay belly down across the saddle. The men tied him in place and presumably did the same to Elsebeth as they were soon moving off into the woods.

He tried to keep track of where they were going. It wasn’t easy as mostly all he could see was the side of a donkey. His head was killing him and the blood rushing to it was making him feel sick. They were soon off of from the paths he knew and were heading away from the river and into the deep forest beyond the near hills.

At some point Nedric must have passed out as when he opened his eyes it was to find that they had stopped. The ache in his head had dulled to a throb but that just let him feel other aches where his body had lain for far too long over the donkey.

“Dump them in that shed,” he heard the second voice say.

He felt himself being pulled off the animal and then he was being dragged by his arms, backwards into one of the buildings. The pain where his arms were being wrenched at the sockets was fairly intense as the man just pulled harder if Nedric snagged on the uneven ground. Eventually he was dumped inside some sort of shed and left there. He heard the sound of a bolt being thrown across after the door closed and he was left in darkness.

Nedric tried to think, he had to get away from these men but his mind did not seem to be working. Everything seemed fogged. As he lay there he could feel his stomach wanting to heave and was barely able to resist it. He tried to decide on a first step but even breathing was difficult with the cloth in his mouth. Finally he just gave up and let the darkness wash over him.

The cold of the night woke him up. It was summer so it wasn’t that it was excessively cold, but lying still and with inadequate clothing it was bad enough. Perhaps the sleep or the cold had cleared his head a little as he now saw that the first thing he had to do was to get the ropes off. He couldn’t see anything in the dark that might help so he just wriggled his arms around trying to ease the tension on the ropes.

Pulling on the ropes made the knots tighter but gave him a little extra rope with which to play. They had been tied around the bone of his wrist so gradually easing the strands over the bone and onto the flexible part gave him more rope to play with and loosened the grip the rope had on his arms. He could gradually feel the blood flowing back into his hands. This was almost as painful as the ropes.

Having eased the loops a little, Nedric then tightened the rope as much as he could stand in order to have enough slack on one side that he could ease that hand through the loops. Eventually by straining and grazing one hand raw he was able to get a loop over his thumb. Trying to get his fingers through the loop seemed an impossible task. Eventually he was managed it and one loop was free.

That made it simpler. The other loops came off much more easily than the first and with one hand free it was simplicity itself to free the other. Although the knots on the ropes around his legs were tight they came away quickly enough and the cloth gagging him came out with relief. He could move and that was one step towards being free.

He explored the confines of the shed. The building was maybe six foot wide and ten foot long. Made from half logs and securely nailed onto sturdy uprights. The roof was slanted so that on one side of the shed it was maybe six-foot high and the other eight-foot. He guessed that the shed had been used for storing firewood as their was sawdust on the floor and very little else. There wasn’t anything that he could use as a weapon other than the rope and there seemed no way out other than through the bolted door.

As he sat in the shed he was gradually aware that he was able to see the outlines of the logs in the wall opposite. There was a small amount of light coming in through the gaps between the logs but nothing from the roof. As dawn was breaking Nedric expected the men to start stirring at some point and was hoping to be able to get the jump on the one who at some point opened the door on him.

It seemed like hours later when he at last heard sounds of movement outside. He could hear two people moving around but the sounds were some distance away and no one seemed to be interested in approaching his shed. The two men talked as they worked, Nedric could guess from the sounds that one was looking after the donkeys whilst the other was chopping wood. Their conversation was mainly about how long they would have to remain in this place and what they would do with the money they were expecting when ‘they’ arrived.

When the two started talking about Elsebeth, Nedric pressed his ear to the door in order to hear as much as possible. A lot was inaudible through the other noise and the distance but the odd word and sentence drifted across to him.

“I wouldn’t mind impressing her with something!”

“Why do they want her?”

“Should lose him”

“need impressors”

“why not have some fun first?”

“they might not like it!”

Nedric wasn’t clear who ‘they’ were but it sounded like it could be people from Nothering. The two men had obviously been hired to get Elsebeth. Why her and not any of the other impressors he couldn’t explain apart from her being the only woman. He hoped that they would both be able to escape quickly. They might need impressors as was clear from the fact that he was still alive but the way they had treated him so far suggested that they didn’t care what condition they were in.

Finally someone remembered he existed. He could hear them moving closer and braced himself against the wall so that he could push forcefully against the door when it opened. He heard the bolt pulled back and flung himself at the door, hoping to surprise the man behind it.

The door swung back much more easily than expected as it failed to connect with anything other than the side of the shed. Nedric following after it tripped over something and found himself face first in the dirt. A foot slammed into his side and knocked the breath out of him and then a knee was planted firmly into his back whilst the man grabbed Nedric’s arm and forced it behind his back.

“So, you’ve got some spirit. Now get back into that shed before I break both your legs.”

With that, Nedric was shoved back into the shed where he sprawled on the wooden floor. Behind him he heard thumps as things were thrown in behind him. The door slammed shut and he heard the bolt slam. He turned around to see what had been left for him. There was bread, cheese, a wooden bowl of water and another larger wooden bowl that Nedric could guess how to use.

All in all Nedric’s escape attempt had not got very far, he hadn’t even had a chance to see how the other buildings were arranged. In fact he had learnt only two things. The first was about his captors, he now knew who they were. Holkum and Melkum were brothers and mercenaries. They hired out as guards to anyone who had the money to pay them. He had seen them outside the village tavern throwing out drunken woodsmen and easily handling the strong men as if they were children. The two had a bad reputation when crossed and were known to have broken the arms of anyone who pulled a weapon on them.

Nedric had also noticed that the shed was made of grey oak. He needed to use that fact and his brain against the brothers. Although good fighters, he doubted if either of them were overly endowed with intellect. If he planned correctly he should be able to escape. All he had to do was figure out how.