Emily starts humming to herself as she walks from pixie to pixie, holding her new sword out to the side as she tracks down the last of them. She spots one hiding in the bushes, the little green man watching her carefully for the perfect moment to pounce on her and sink its needle-sharp teeth deep into her flesh. With a confident step, Emily stabs her sword right into the center of it, the little thing wriggling on the tip of the sword for a moment before going still again.

  “Not gonna fall for that a third time…”

  Emily takes a deep breath, relieved that she managed to just barely dodge and avoid getting bitten like Tishia the two times that they managed to get the drop on her. She glances behind herself to look back at the party and check up on them, finding them in largely the same condition as the last time she checked on them.

  Tishia was collapsed on the ground, her leg having given up on her a while ago. Emily initially rushed to go check on it, pooling all of her knowledge on bites and wounds that she acquired from watching her mom work, but was given such a profound look of confusion and animosity from the wounded lady that Emily ended up retreating while stammering out an apology. The swordsman, ‘Jeff’, was crouched next to her, wrapping a piece of gauze around the wound tightly while the pair whisper secretly to each other, occasionally glancing at Emily before continuing to whisper.

  Emily would be more worried about that, normally. But the pensive, self-reflective look on Tishia’s face is enough to tell her that the lady is thinking more about how rude she was to her earlier on in the day than how to expose Emily’s secret identity to the camp and get her put in an interrogation cell, so she decides to ignore the sneaky glances and pretend she doesn’t see it.

  She likes to believe that she’s really good at sussing out other people’s intentions, after all. There was once this snake oil salesman that tried to sell her mom something called “penicillin” years ago that claimed it’d cure all sorts of illnesses, and Emily just knew that he was trying to con them out of one of their cows. Who buys some mould with a cow?

  The last person in their group, however, Emily’s not so sure about their intentions anymore…

  She glances at Bill and finds him still staring at her, a complicated expression on his face, the same way as he’s been looking at her since he snapped out of whatever fugue he was in and found Emily stabbing away at some pixies. He watches her sword carefully, tracking it with his eyes as she lifts it again, stabbing the last of the little guys before Blue sprints up and snaps the body up with a delighted coo.

  It turns out Blue really likes the taste of these things.

  She takes a deep breath and searches around the area for any more, finding the foliage still once again, not a peep to be heard, the normally eerie silence that befalls the forest when Blue’s around having returned once again.

  Emily wipes the sweat from her brow and wipes the blade of her sword off on the ground, trying her hardest to get off the green goo by scrubbing it in the brush. It seems to stick to it like glue, refusing to go.

  Just as she’s about to give up and sheathe the sword anyways - goo or no goo - she hears the lanky footsteps of Bill approaching her and looks up just in time for him to stop in front of her.

  “Hey, ma’am… If you’d like, I could clean up that sword for you.”

  Emily raises an eyebrow at the lanky man, trying to figure out the somber tone in his voice. “Are you sure? If you need some time to recover from uh… Whatever that was… I can just do it myself when we get back.”

  He shakes his head and lets out a small chuckle, his heart not really in it. “No, I’m good. Just… Didn’t expect them to mess with my head like that, is all.”

  Emily shakes her head, tutting at the nerve of them. “I warned you that mind mages are dangerous. You guys really should’ve listened.”

  Bill runs a hand through his hair, letting out a sigh as he looks sheepishly to the side. “Yeah, it’s just… Y’know. They’re supposed to be harmless. Just kind of… Tickles your emotions a bit. But that…”

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  He stares at Blue with a haunted look in his eyes, as Blue sniffs through the foliage for any more pixies to eat. He shivers in fear before turning back to Emily, a forced grin on his face.

  “Anyways, let me handle that for you. I do it for my knight all the time, you gotta get it all off before you sheath it or else it’ll take hours to pick it outta the grooves later on.”

  Emily shrugs and hands her sword over to Bill, who takes it in shaky hands and stares at the blade with a complicated look on his face. He walks off on his own, and Emily decides it’s time to see if they can move out.

  Luckily for her, it seems that ‘Jeff’ is better at wrapping wounds than she thought. Tishia manages to stand up on shaky legs, her arm wrapped around the shorter man for support but still able to hold up her weight without collapsing. The group discusses their options for a moment, the pair of strangers suddenly much more agreeable to whatever Emily says, all of them deciding that the mission was clearly carried out with impunity.

  They make their way back to the FOB, Emily opting not to put the bag back on Blue’s head just yet, giving the fluffy boy some freedom to hunt around and explore the forest. He turns his head to watch as the trio leaves him behind, getting up from the ground where he was digging in the foliage and going off on his own, disappearing swiftly into the foliage like a shadow in the night.

  It’s much more quiet and sullen on the way back, everyone currently occupied with their own thoughts and pain. Emily bites her lip as she looks at her temporary party, worried that whatever happened to them has left its mark on their psyche, and wondering why she wasn’t affected at all.

  And out of the corner of her eye, Emily sees the outline of Bill, slowly scrubbing the sword in his hands.

  After a few hours, they finally make it back to the camp, the whole party exhausted and sweaty from the hard march, Emily helping to support the injured crossbowmen. Tishia’s leg slowly became worse and worse as they went, the gauze wrapped around her leg becoming soaked in blood as the wounds reopened themselves from the movement.

  As Emily gets closer and closer to the camp, however, she can hear a commotion growing louder and louder. Looking up, she spots the guarded entrance, and a crowd forming in front of it. Dozens of people in the scouts uniform block their way in, crowding around something and making a ruckus that seems a bit reckless to make, considering the forest that they’re in. Getting nervous, Emily decides to cut Blue’s fun short, deciding to not risk him having another incident.

  She whistles for Blue, the ostrich sprinting towards Emily and reaching her in no time. Emily glances at Bill and he gives her a nod, sneaking up behind Blue with the sack in his hand, not noticing at all as Blue’s eyes track his every movement carefully, his beak slightly chattering at the excitement, before the hood goes on and he stills in calm serenity.

  Emily looks up at Bill, the tallest of the group, then gestures to the gate.

  “Do you know what’s happening over there?”

  Bill looks towards the crowd, standing on his tiptoes and covering his eyes with his hand. He squints into the distance, his tongue sticking out as he scans the crowd.

  Suddenly, he gasps in excitement, pointing towards someone in the crowd. “It looks like the Spymaster made it! And he’s got some people with him, hold on…”

  He squints some more, leaning forwards to try and get a clearer look. “I think he’s got some prisoners with ‘em. They’ve got chains around their arms and the one looks all beaten up…”

  Emily tries to go on her tiptoes to see where Bill’s pointing, but can’t see anything over the crowd of heads. “Prisoners? Here? What do they look like?”

  She starts hopping up and down, trying desperately to get a look at them. Bill looks down at Emily, his eyes softening and his mouth curling up at the sight of the great Archmage jumping up and down like a toddler, and leans down and grabs Emily underneath her armpits.

  Emily lets out an undignified squeak, as the ground suddenly disappears from underneath her feet, and before she knows it, she’s lifted onto Blue’s back like a toddler.

  “Here ya go, ma’am. You should be able to see better from there.” Bill tells her, a satisfied grin on his face. He spots Emily’s blushing face and his eyes widen in shock and horror, and he swiftly bows towards her, almost smacking his forehead against Blue’s talons as he does so. “I… I’m so sorry, Archmage! I acted without thinking! Please, forgive me!”

  Emily clears her throat in an attempt to calm the raging blush, and stands up a bit more on Blue’s back, finally able to peer over the crowd at what’s going on in the center. She spots a strong-looking man with blue eyes shaking the hand of the General, and assumes that that’s the spymaster. The two smile at each other as they seem to exchange pleasantries, both of them as pleased as the cat who caught the canary. The spymaster gestures to the side, and Emily follows where he’s pointing.

  As she sits up on Blue’s back, his fluffy feathers soft and comforting underneath her, Emily feels her whole world shatter and her breath seize as she gazes in shock at the prisoners the Spymaster has brought to the camp.

  There, surrounded by soldiers, their hands chained behind themselves and their faces bruised and bloodied, stands her best friends and the people she loves the most (besides Blue and her mom, of course), Nora and Alastair.