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As wren rested for a moment on the tip of a snowy fir, yet a second noise caught his ear, as if something were following behind the reindeer he pursued. The little bird pushed in among the shadows of the needles and stayed very still. ‘What if it’s that creature?’ he thought to himself. ‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ he muttered, shivering a bit. He was alarmed to find that his slight movement had shaken a bit of the snow down from his perch.
He watched with a horrified fascination as the falling flakes trailed down toward the floor of the forest, some of them falling on a cloaked figure below. He held his breath and snapped his eyes shut just in case the fading day’s light would give him away somehow.
Then a certain realization poked at his thoughts and he opened his eyes wide as the figure passed on beneath him. It was a rather smallish figure. Not that the wightish one need be large, but this one seemed fairly unimposing. And it didn’t glide along above the ground as he supposed a wight might do. No . . . there were definitely bootmarks in the snow.
Wren flitted on to another perch in front of the new figure. A low branch, hardly one wing’s span above the pursuer. He peered hard at him . . . No! Her! It was one of the women from the Inn.
His little bird’s brain began to put two and two together . . . or at least one and three. One of those reindeer was Wenda! And this other had gone after her. Now what was that name he’d heard the other two-leggeds call her? ‘Think, you addlepate!’ he chided himself. ‘Mara!’ That was it.
He was now in a quandary. What would a hero do? Should he follow them further to see their destination? What? What? In the end, he decided his little version of hero would need assistance. He knew the general direction the two women and the reindeer were heading. And he would be of no use if they were to be attacked. One cold look from the creature’s eyes, he imagined, and his stiff little body would be found feet up on the snowy ground. In the end he opted to fly back with all the speed he could muster to find Owl.
‘Owl! Owl!’ he cried, a bit surprised to find the old bird nearly to the forest himself. ‘You must turn round and tell the tall men I’ve seen Wenda and two of her deer crashing through the forest and behind them is the other woman following after them it seems . . . Mara.’ He gave Owl a bird’s eye description of where the women were and what direction they were headed. He stomped about on the branch he’d perched on waiting for the other bird to answer, all the while thinking that while Owl sped back with the news, he’d best be back on his way to keep an eye on those females . . .
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