There must be a way, Kryssta thought. Don't rush. Look before you leap. Words that she'd been told scores of times during her training, perhaps just enough times for her to have learned the lesson, if the words came to her now. After all, Gandalf had not selected her for her strength or puissance but her cunning and stealth. The first thing would be to explore this row of guardian hedge-bushes. With silent steps she crept in a long path around the whole circle, returning to where she'd first approached just as the first faint sliver of moon was showing above the edges of the hills to the southeast.
She had been trying to find a way in, but studying the bushes had proven illuminating in other ways. Her footsteps had been subtle, yes, but not so much that she'd never once stumbled in the dark, or stepped on a dry leaf. And each time, the bushes had reacted, but had they charged over at her, roots churning the soil like the prints she'd seen before? No, they had strained, waved, their thorns glistening in the starlight, and done nothing. It was possible, she realized, that they might have sent some alert by silent leafy susurrations to someone or somewhere, but not only could they not come at her, but they fell back into their less agitated state after but a few moments.
And when she'd come the full circle, with less care to stealth now that she knew the pricker-bush hedge could not pursue her, she could see now that there was a narrow gap here. It must be how the creature whose tracks she was following had entered. It was narrow, but she was swift; she might be able to charge through the gap faster than the thorns could react.
Swiftness, though, is much harder on uneven ground in the darkness, especially the kind of uneven ground that had been rent by grasping roots. She fell to the ground gasping a scant half-dozen paces from the writhing, aggrieved thorn-bushes, with trickles of blood running down her arms inside her hunter's leathers. Duin made a vexed huffing in her ear; at first she was worried he had also been hurt, but no, he was only chiding her for doing a poor job of it. "Let's see how much better you would have done," she said, but with no heart in it -- the otter would almost certainly have done just fine.
She pulled herself to her feet, wincing, and began the last distance to the humped shape atop the hill, hoping to arrive before the moonlight grew too revealing. It might have been a ruin once, but the truth of that would take weeks with axe and fire to tell, for naught could be seen but a tangle of roots and vines, growing through and over one another with such a profusion of life that there might be nothing beneath but more woody growth, or a stone ruin, or caves, or even a lumberjack's shed. A great gap loomed, midway in shape between an archway and the round doorway of a Hobbit's home. As the pain in her arms was beginning to dull, she crept through this opening.
The inside was a rough dome-shaped space about the size of a pub's common room, and the inner surface was like the outside, nothing but interlaced, eutrophic vegetation. A soft sound reached her and she turned just slightly to see a figure -- Haleth, surely! -- held against the wall by snaking vines and tendrils. The elder Ranger was clearly injured, but struggled feebly against the creepers that covered her mouth and hands and most of her body. Unable to express herself any other way, the dark-haired Dúnadan flicked with her eyes to a point behind Kryssta, even as Duin turned on her shoulder to face the same way.
Slowly, the young Ranger turned to gaze at the great, gnarled, tree-like shape that was extricating itself from the vines and roots in which it had hidden. It knew I was coming. The bushes warned it. And it set a trap for me, Kryssta thought, as it loomed over her.
