“Not exactly what I expected,” Jeanne said, as she and the others looked at an exceptionally untouched town before them. People walked about the street in casual paces. Idle chatter mixed with the sounds of tools being used and animals calling out to their heart’s content. The Wolves watched the scene around them, cautiously moving down the main avenue towards the reeve’s house, all of them with a look of unease on their faces.
“I thought I was losing my touch when I couldn’t smell any smoke,” Maeryn said them.
“Myself as well,” Gabriel said slowly.
“Keep your eyes sharp, and your heads on swivels,” Cid said to them. “This could very well be a trap.”
“One extensive trap, Cid,” Jeanne said, resting her hand on her hammer. Moving through the town, Jeanne fought the urge to jump back whenever a townsperson came near to them. She noticed her hand was tightly gripping the head of her weapon tightly, and she was summoning her stone scale underneath her clothing.
Reaching the reeve’s home they found Judith rummaging through several piles of papers on her desk in the main hall of the building. She looked up and spotted The Wolves, “Oh good, you all are here,” she said as she left her desk and walked over.
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“I’m glad we’re not intruding then,” Cid said.
“Not at all,” Judith said to them. “We got word from a couple of bounty hunters that they found the two blood suckers you lot were looking for.”
“Really?” Cid said, “how did they accomplish that?”
Jeanne cocked an eyebrow up and pressed her lips together, trying not to voice her skepticism. She saw Gabriel tapping her right foot down on the ground hard as she listened to the conversation. The other night’s conversation was beginning to come back to her.
Judith shrugged as she led them down towards a doorway along the back wall. “They told me was they had stumbled on the two while they were asleep, knocked them out, hog tied them and brought them over to us.”
“What about the body back at the camp?” Benkin asked the reeve.
Judith looked puzzled before shaking her head. “No, they didn’t say anything about a body.”
“We found one back at a camp a few miles away from town,” Cid told her. “Thought you’d want to know.”
“We’ll send someone out there to claim when we can,” Judith said, opening the door. “But in the meantime, let me show where we have two brothers.”
Inside they found a hallway with three ironed barred cells on each side of the walkway. Walking over to the middle cell on their left, Judith pointed to two beaten and bloodied men inside. “Here they are, Ollen and Guthrum Kolville. The Terrors of the Meadowlands, in all their wretched glory.”
Jeanne looked at the men as a cold shiver ran up her spine, she turned to the others who had the same reaction as her. Before she could speak, they heard another voice call out to them. “Please get me out of here!”
They turned and found Cyneswith behind bars, her hand gripping the iron rods tightly she tried to pull them back.