Deirdre jogs along with something approaching hope, riding in her back pocket. It has been a while she’s heard the hounds and worse on the trail behind her and that is a good sign.

But her nose hasn’t stopped running since her feet hit this ancient path. There is deep magic in this thing. Even if someone did not intentionally set here it, it exists. And it makes her life miserable.

Immersed in her misery, she nearly misses noticing that there is, suddenly, a low picket fence of bones lined up like soldiers alongside the path. But once she is aware of them, she sees that not one touches a single one of the white stones along the path.

And she knows also that her ears feel terribly stuffy and her face rather swollen in proximity to this row of bones.

It is hard for Deirdre to see, with her eyes dripping uncontrolled tears, and swollen nearly shut. But she spots an elderly woman who has fallen over in the path. Several objects litter the ground around the fallen geriatric, and she appears to be having some trouble picking up either herself or the scattered objects.

Despite her infirmary, Deirdre wheezes and sneezes and reaches down to offer a hand up.

The grip that accepts the wordless offer is like being grabbed by bands of steel, wrought immobile by a master smith. The vice-like claw of the old crone grips her arm and pulls.

It is all Deirdre can do to keep her footing. The old woman’s grasp attempts to unsettle her.

But there are two things Deirdre knows:

1. There is magic afoot.

2. Magic is always dangerous.

So Deirdre holds firm. She plants her feet and pulls back with a force greater than that which is applied in the downward direction. She is stubborn. She is determined to see through what she has started. And no one will bring her low.

Deirdre has had enough of suffering from someone else’s actions. She will instead not allow another to best her. Not at getting caught and brought down by the law. And not being literally tripped by a random stranger in the woods.

The force of her stubbornness is enough to shift the balance. The old woman scrabbles up onto her feet and then stands up and up and up and up to her full height.

The old ogre must be at least eight feet tall, Deirdre judges. She stares at the wrinkled, bony fingers that still grasp her arm and dribbles snot. A rash spreads, itching deeply across her hand where it has touched the old woman.

The old woman laughs.

It is a terrible, wicked cackle. It cracks across the quiet woods like a whip overhead. She laughs, and she laughs, continuing until she gasps for breath and grips her knees for support.

Deirdre reaches out her blistering hand to help hold the wizened crone steady on her feet. It was a terrible idea, as the woman’s hand brushes Deirdre’s cheek when she uses the young thief for balance.

“You,” the crone wheezes through her laughter, “you are a lot more brave than you are smart.”

“I,” Deirdre slurs through her runny nose as her cheek collects a rash of tiny blisters in reaction to the light touch, “mosh definitely am.”

The crone laughs the wicked cackle again and pats her on the back.

“Get out of here,” the crone commands. “Go and get and get and you’ll get what you need.”

Deirdre does not require additional instructions. She knows an order when she hears one and she is fairly certain that this giant of an elder is most definitely some kind of witch. There is no other explanation for the way her allergy reacts to this touch and that presence.

The terrible rash lingers, but stops spreading as Deirdre jogs away at a good clip. It is good that she left, because it felt like her very throat might close entirely with such proximity to the old witch.

When she has gotten a good bit of distance between herself and the threat of death via the world’s most inconvenient curse, Deirdre stops and steps off of the path entirely.

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

This is not working. The path is too easy to follow, and it is causing her too much hurt to stay on it.

There is no way that Deirdre will escape these woods if she stays on it.

There is no way that Deirdre will escape these woods if she just keeps doing the same thing that she always has.

Deirdre needs to change something.

She cannot change the fact that she must run to escape.

But she can change the direction she’s heading.

There are two ways to find your way out of the woods with absolute certainty. Deirdre knows that the further one gets in here, the harder it is to find one’s way around.

The clearly marked path is one way, though in normal circumstances she would instead simply not go so far into the woods that they become terminally disorienting. Or she’d follow natural paths and try to leave marks by which to find her way back.

But the other way is to follow the river.

Its source is high in the mountains, and she has heard that in the foothills the forest thins to empty green rolling hills, lush with grass and inhabited by more horses and sheep than people. There she can hide among the herdsmen and engage in the fur trade until the heat has died down enough to return for the goods she has hidden here.

Its mouth at the seashore has a great estuary and a city that is built on densely packed pillars sunk into the mud of the river’s bottom itself. There, she could easily sell the coin blanks and hire someone to bring the papers to her local fence where they would fetch a much higher price.

So there is a choice to make, but either way involves returning to the river she had only just recently finally seen the last of dripping out of her sodden clothing.

Stepping off the path has allowed her to breathe freely and cleared the running nose.

But it has also let her clear her mind.

And that is a priceless thing when one is at such monumental risk from simple mistakes.

Deirdre shakes her head, takes one deep breath, and turns back around.

She keeps the break between the trees where the path lies clearly within her line of sight. This helps her navigate through the dense undergrowth while not allowing her to be turned around now that she is clearly well into the part of the forest where the wilderness can disorient a person by choice.

She finds it strange that though she has definitely gone farther in reverse than she had while advancing along the path; she has not encountered the ogre and her bone fence again.

It is curious, but not curious enough to convince her to actually go looking for them intentionally. She was told to get going, and she is absolutely getting gone away from there.

Moving through these woods is slow going. There is no avoiding that. She has to maneuver around tall, thick trees, with trunks that reach high into the heavens. Their canopy is so dense, even at this time of year, that little light reaches the forest floor where she must tread.

In several places, she finds herself trapped with thickets of thorns - Devil’s Walking Stick trees and blackberry brambles that have never seen trimmers. It’s horrible.

But thankfully, it’s impenetrably dense.

While shimmying her way through a rabbit pathway beneath one of these said brambles, Deirdre hears an unmistakable sound.

A dog and a person are trotting along the gravel path, their feet crunching against the gravel. The vegetation in the way and the damp leaves strewn across the path partially muffle this sound, but it is distinct and it causes Deirdre to freeze instantly.

She holds her breath as the pair passes her location. They’re only yards away on the other side of a tree and one wrong movement of air and it’s over.

Deirdre waits.

And while the cadence of the footsteps against the crunchy gravel briefly slows, it does not stop. They do not turn in her direction.

She has momentarily escaped the notice of the deputy and his dog.

Now she only needs to decide which way she’s going to travel once she hits the river and all will be clear.

Since she’s definitely not going to make it to the safe house at the end of the path, there are lot more decisions to make soon, but that is something that future Deirdre will have to worry about. Past Deirdre will probably complain. But present Deirdre is moderately comfortable with this choice and has no desire to alter it.

Getting out from under the brambles turns out to be nearly more difficult than getting in was. Thorns catch hold of her hair and pluck strands of her clothing free. If it seems like she has become one with the blackberry bush, that is by no mistake. As the yearly growth leftover from decades previous remains in place, the cruel thorns in the dead canes collect on her clothing and prick fiercely at her flesh.

They are hard to remove without cutting herself. She does not avoid collecting additional splinters in her fingers.

Nor does Deirdre avoid catching the briefest glimpse of a second person striding confidently down the path.

Her second least favorite cousin - the sheriff himself - is following his deputy through the woods. Deirdre shoves herself back into the dirt and freezes, but his pace does not even slow in the slightest. There is no way that he has seen her at all.

They set her up on this heist. She knows they set her up, since there should have been no way for Derek Clarkson to show up so quickly at the scene. There are only a few people who would do such a thing. It is entirely possible that Cousin Sigi is one of them.