It was late into the day when Kryssta, following the trail of Haleth's captors, came up short. The faint indications of footprints, and the drag-marks that resulted from lugging an unconscious captive, here stopped in a densely wooded forest in a smallish copse, its edges lined with angry-looking pricker-bushes. Something in those bushes moved contrary to the wind, but so dense was the foliage that in the waning light of the lowering sun she could make out nothing but vague shapes.
The tracks here were baffling at first. At first she expected the seemingly-tireless captors might have taken rest here, but the signs she saw did not fit this, or indeed, anything that made sense to her. As the sun was setting, her frustration, and certainty that the Wizard had chosen a poor helper, was reaching a feverish peak. She shook her head and took some deep breaths. "Focus on what you need to know," she said to herself, and began to search for the tracks, without regard for what they meant. Though the prints she now found and followed were not those of men or indeed anything she was familiar with, they were easily seen, large and gnarled, tearing up the ground as they vanished into a narrow gap between pricker-bushes.
It was not only ground, or even scrub, they tore up. The tang of blood caught her attention and she winced in fear; had her Dúnadan quarry been slain before she could catch up with the captors? The ruined body she found was almost too broken to be recognized; indeed, it was several parts scattered over and through many of the pricker-bushes, and it might even have been two or more bodies, somewhat picked over by carrion-crows. But the armor and gear she found amongst the wreckage had the unlovely practicality of orcish make, so Haleth must not number amongst these unfortunate dead.
Indeed, amongst the scraps she found something that could only have been a map, drawn with scarcely better than animal cunning and edged in script depicting words in an obscene language she could not make out, but which made her feel ill even to try to read. But when she turned her eyes away from these tengwar and focused instead on the map markings, the path she'd followed now became clear: the orcs had been, the whole time, making for a point marked with a red cross-mark, not more than a mile away and up a steep and heavily vegetated slope. Clearly they meant to take Haleth there, and now she knew the way to get there, even if all else about this remained a mystery.
