The four looked at one another in the sudden stillness, smiling for a moment in triumph, then they remembered their mission and rushed into the house, seeking the captives and answers to to the riddle of why this all happened.
The ruined cottage looked and smelled a bit like an ill-kept barracks inside, as it had been for several days now. Refuse, spoiled food and discarded belongings were scattered about the main room haphazardly, though one corner was more carefully tended with a neat bedroll and several satchels, seeming to be the domain of their leader.
The Lady Ahmo led Masin towards the back of the house where the prisoners were kept, even though the tall man could barely stand due to his injuries. Still, he insisted to see to the captives while Taphreille and Xanderian remained in the main room.
Taphreille looked around her in a soldier's disgust. "No discipline, look at this pigsty." As Masin's cry of horror and grief filtered to them from the back of the house, she stopped and looked away, her bronze face mirroring a dozen different powerful emotions. Moving slowly due to her own wounds, she went back to the porch, calling behind her. "I...I can't stay in here right now...I will see to getting that wagon back, we will need it."
Suddenly alone, Xanderian sighed and looked around, Her shoulder was growing achingly stiff from the wound but she ignored it, there was work to be done, and done quickly. Sifting through the belongings of the common thugs quickly, she discovered a handful of the coins of Angmar along with a portion of a half finished letter to a local sweetheart, promising that soon he would be home with enough gold to marry her properly. The Elleth shook her head, wondering if this farmgirl would be so eager to marry him if she knew the blood on his hands, or where his gold had come from.
A discarded flask in the middle of the floor caught her attention. A quick sniff betrayed that it had once held Tarack, a sweet Gondorian brew that brought great stamina but dark dreams. Pocketing the flask, she moved on.
In the corner that the leader had kept orderly, she found a large sack holding what must have been the belongings of the captives. A shoulder bag she had seen friend Addie bearing as well as armor and a weapon that she did not recognize, which must have belonged to her companion Nethrida. The leader must have intended to make a coin selling them onwards. Along the blade of the the weapon was inscribed, "In the Service of Gondor", marking the weapon as a gift of honor to a valued officer. Xanderian carefully set the large sack aside to be taken with them.
Turning to the leader's own possessions, he found more Angmar gold in a tight leather pouch. A fair amount of it from the weight. This she pocketed, along with a dagger of Gondorian make, purchased from the markets of Pelargir based on the forge marks, and a few bangles that seemed of Eastern design, perhaps Harad. A token of a casual love perhaps? Also amongst his goods but kept apart was a locket of feminine design that did not seem typical of him, crafted in gold with the White Tree of Gondor carefully inscribed on one face. Tilting her head suspiciously, Xanderian slipped the locket into her pouch.
Amongst his papers she found several lists, one bearing the seal of the Garrison Command of the Steward of Minas Tirith. This one listed several names, including one circled in jagged red pencil. "Nethrida, Rank: Captain, Deserter, presumed dead, Possibly Reported in Eriador. Bounty offered." Next to the circle, he had written BREE in the same blood red pencil.
Sifting quickly through the remaining invoices and notes, she noted that several seemed to have a few flecks of ash and soot on their surface. He had been holding them while burning something. Glancing around she moved to the broken fireplace, indeed finding a mound of ashes and paper scraps raked near the embers. One bit however, seemed large enough to be useful and hadn't fully burned. Quick fingers pulling it free she gently smoothed the foolscap to note it seemed to be at least a fragment of a letter, which read in Westron as follows:
"tasks at hand, throughout the region of Eriador. My colleagues to the North are ever in the market for healthy "found flesh" of hart, hind or foal and I would be happy to arrange a transaction to take off your hands whatever extra meat you may find yourself with while seeing to your contracts. The better the quality, the higher the price. No questions asked, of course.
Should Garon's work on your behalf prove as satisfactory as I am sure it will, I can arrange other similar workers at bargain rates, filled with the strength and cunning of their dual heritage.
Finally, if your labor bring you to frigid Forochel, I hope to...."
...and there the missive ended. The text itself was not unusual, carefully clouded but clear to those who understood the ways of bounty hunters and slavers. It would seem that in seeking to fulfill this contract from Gondor, poor Addie was swept up in a net to be sold onward. This was a sad story often repeated throughout the West.
What caught Xanderian and made her blood run cold however, was not what was written but the handwriting it was written in. The letter was penned in a heavy, dark, flowery script she had seen many times, in documents and ledgers ransacked from captured Dourhand watchpoints and fortresses, or taken off the bodies of slaver guards. The hand of Mans, slaver chief of the Dourhand himself.
Just as this fact was sinking in, Matis and the Lady Ahmo carried the two captives from the back room carefully, neither of whom had yet regained consciousness. As Xanderian looked at them, her heart with filled with a cold, brutal mania. Their wounds were horrifically extensive and at first they seemed already dead save for their harsh, stilted breathing. These were not the wounds of battle, but of days of torture, simply to cause pain, but why? What hatreds had taken hold of these bandits that they would willingly lower the value of their captives for these games?
The Elleth barely mastered her raging emotions and held the front door wide helping load Addie and Nethrida into the now waiting wagon gently, then shouldered the sack of their possessions, the letter from Mans safely tucked under her hauberk. At the reins, Taphreille refused to look back at her two wounded friends, but tears of rage ran silently down her face as she spurred the horses forward towards the healers of Bree.
In the back of the wagon, Xanderian rested a gentle hand on Nethrida's brow and watched the broken down cottage receding in the distance, her blazing eyes swearing out yet another call for vengeance against Mans of Kheledul and his evil works.
This battle was won, and Addie and Nethrida were safe...but a new phase of this war was just beginning.
