southerners

I had an interesting talk with Ellany the other night, one that has been on my mind in the last two days.

Annaliesa stood up, watching as the men with torches scattered with the rest of the raiders, flinging them at the barn and the outbuildings.

Annaliesa sat on the wooden chair, a half empty bottle of whiskey wedged between her skirt covered knees.

This evening 3 to 4 men in hooded cloaks and bearing crossbows fired from the roof of the armory across the town hall at Billium Cutting, Thomas Bristlebrush and Bill Cornman. All the men belong were struck with bolts, Bristlebrush and Cornman died at the scene and Cutting is being treated by a healer at the jail. His injuries are several and one of them very severe, a puncture to the ribs by a bolt.

The young woman crouched, her forearms resting on her thighs, her murky blue eyes taking in the gruesome scene. A dagger dangled from one hand, still wet with blood as she had the kindness in her stone heart to finish off one man who was dying too slowly. He had been impaled on a broken tree limb, in a rather vulnerable if not fatal place on his body. She spat at the roots of the old oak and turned at the sound of foot steps. 

The squint eyed southerner was bound and forced onto his knees in the stone floor of the ruins in Midgewater. Corrben stood just to the side of him, his hands streaked with blood, staining the leather bindings wrapped around his knuckles. He noticed the unusually dark color, nearly burgundy rather than crimson as it oozed from the broken nose of the prisoner. Splattered on the pale stone, it looked nearly black.

Corrben and the other scouts crept up on the camp site. The southerners were sitting on crates, drinking stolen ale and smoking stolen pipeweed. There had been a raid on a Staddle farm and likely this was some of the booty. He crouched, his spear gripped in his hand, feeling a trickle of sweat down the back of his neck. There were three men, including one of those squinty eyed ugly bastards who were notoriously cruel and good fighters. The other was a woman, though it was hard to tell if she was young because her face was lined and dirty, hard from poverty and war. 

"How long do you think it'll take them  brigands to find our hideout and kill us all?" Brittleleaf pondered as he scraped the whetstone along the blade, "I've got a whole gold coin that says three days, what about you?"

Oakdale hunched his shoulders, "How are you going to collect on that debt? I say two more days tops."