Page 51 of The Orc Chief's Baker
“Perhaps it’s aligning with these ones here? Though it’s not perfect.” Sythcol’s voice barely broke through the fog clouding him.
The pull was sovivid. Almost like a compulsion. The web strummed around him, vibrating like sound waves he could feel against his flesh.
And then he felt hisname.
Brovdir!
And he knew in an instant who it was.
He snatched up the map right out from under Sythcol and bolted for the stairs, ignoring the conjurer’s confused demands. There was no time to explain or stop.
He had to get to Trinia before it was too late.
Chapter
Thirteen
TRINIA
Water raged around her, threatening to pull her down. She was submerged in water to her ankles as it sucked her toward a blackened tunnel. Waves crashed and ripped into it like a deadly funnel. She clung to a root desperately. Her grip on the slippery wood was so strong, it’s a wonder she didn’t break it.
The underground current was dark and frothing. She’d be sucked deep into the ground. Into a hole that was growing bigger with every gasp of breath she took. Chunks of grass and mud splashed into the raging current, soaking her with each plunge.
She screamed, but she was too deep in the woods. No one could hear her!
She should never have come out here.
She was going to die.
She was going to die and Ronhold the asshat and his sniveling son were going to get her bakery!
Her throat closed up and her tears streamed down her face. Her mouth opened in a wail and spilled a name.
“Brovdir!”
She didn’t know why she called him. She’d met himtwice.He was just as far from her as Headman Gerald, or her sister, or literallyanyoneelse from Oakwall Village or Rove Wood Clan.
But if anyone would make it to her in time, if anyonewould hearher way out here in the woods, it would be him.
And she had so much she wanted to say to him! She’d thought of little else for an entire moon.
Fades, she wasn’t going to be thinkinganythingsoon.
The root started to give way.
She looked up and saw that the dirt had been shaved away to the bush to which the root was attached. It shook at the precipice of the cliff, slipping downward. The water was up to her calves.
She didn’t have the strength to pull herself up. Years of kneading dough for hours every day hadn’t been enough. She was going to fall in. She was going to get sucked down into the underground cavern below her and drown in the murky, pitch black water. No one would ever know what happened to her.
The bush jerked and her stomach plunged. The water splashed all the way to her thighs. The current was so strong!
The root gripped her wrist so hard she felt like it might break. But then she was being yanked swiftly upward.
The bush barreled past her, caught in her hair and scraped her already gashed cheek. But where it went down, she wentup.
Into a hard wall of naked green muscles.
Trinia gasped as the body holding her jerked away from the hole, ran backward past trees that were being sucked into the churning water. Over a massive, downed log covered in moss.
