that she could make out. They had their noses up in the air, sniffing. Blinking rapidly and willing her vision to better adjust, Lilac eventually made out their stubbed ears, much too tiny for their gigantic bile-green heads.
Ogres.
Heartbeat rushing in her ears, she yanked her head back to conceal herself behind the tree. Had the rain awoken them? Or, she thought embarrassedly, the smell of her urine? Whatever the cause, they concentrated on tracking her scent, the task made difficult in the torrential downpour. Their vision wasn’t worth shit, her tutors had told her so. She would have to make a run for it—regardless of direction, anywhere, far away from the pack of green beasts. Knowing her luck, she would stumble into the nest of something else deadly and—
The thunderous, unmistakable crunch of wood and a loud thud, followed by a moaning screech interrupted her racing thoughts. Flattening her body against the trunk as much as she possibly could, she peered just a hair off to the right; two hundred yards away and across the clearing, an enormous beech had been ripped clean in half, its top now lying on the ground beside the base of its splintered trunk.
Another terrible cry of frustration pierced the woods—then, another ripping sound followed by the thud of a hundred year-old tree being picked and tossed aside as if it were a daisy. This time, it sounded closer. Trembling, Lilac pressed her bosom so hard up against the tree that it was painful. She shut her eyes, willing herself to remain invisible to the lethal giants.
A sudden buzzing from her belt almost caused her to yelp in surprise. Groping around her waist, her hand brushed the handle of her dagger. Then, she clasped her fingers around it. It was vibrating, clamoring violently inside of its sheath. Foggily, Lilac did recall her father once saying it occasionally had a mind of its own. If her ancestor’s dagger was somehow willing Lilac to face the ogres, it was crazy. She wouldn’t stand a chance. Either way, she couldn’t deal with it now.
A third tree, sounding much closer than the others, was ripped from its roots, and with bated breath Lilac waited for the thud. With a loud thwack, the trunk she’d hid against rocked violently, impacting her with such incredible force that she was thrown backwards into the dirt. Lilac bit her lip to stifle a cry of pain and shock—she gasped in terror as the metallic taste of blood flooded her mouth. Keeping her movements nimble and silent, she stayed low to the ground and scrambled out of the moonlight, leaves raining on top of her as she hastily shuffled into the shadows.
A glance back revealed an ogre swinging a broken trunk like a blind swordsman, globs of saliva flying from its yellowing teeth as it bellowed in frustration. The ogre’s weapon of choice was what had hit her tree, no doubt.
She would never escape alive if she only hid. The ogres would continue uprooting trees as long as her scent was near, and it didn’t matter if they never found her if she’d gotten squashed like a gnat by a thousand-live beech instead.
Pulling her bleeding lip into her mouth, she did her best to suck out all the blood she could and then produced as much saliva as she could muster. With all her might, she took a full breath in through her nostrils, and—as she’d watched her father do a million times into his goblet after dinner—hocked the biggest spitball she could manage off to her left. It landed not even two metres away.
Run. Run, run, run.
Although she’d spat much too close, her plan infallibly worked. When all five ogres whipped around and lumbered clumsily towards the scent of her saliva, she didn’t think twice to sprint in the opposite direction, into the thick of the woods. She didn’t care if they saw her, didn’t care if they were following her. There wasn’t time to check, and she refused to look back.
Lilac didn’t stop running when she almost launched herself headfirst into a pile of leaves after tripping over a robust root. She didn’t stop when low-lying branches swiped at her face—didn’t stop when the emotions caught up to her and the lump forming in her throat helped her choke back tears, the corners of her eyes shimmering in the moonlight. She ran until her mouth was completely dry despite huffing the moist forest air, and the sack had grown heavy upon her