Gawain let out a startled yelp when he felt a hand catch hold of his shirt collar and tug him back down the alley away from the main road. He craned his neck to see who had caught him and found that it was one of the women he had observed by the side of the other road, and she didn’t look happy. She said nothing, but somehow her silence was more foreboding than any verbal threat. He pulled back against her grip in an attempt to break free, but suddenly remembered the possibility that she was a witch. Even if he got away, she could easily kill him with her magic. He swallowed and stopped struggling, deciding that it would be wiser to play along and hope that she would be merciful.

The white-haired girl dragged him over to the rest of her friends and finally broke her silence with a question, [color=fff79a][b]“Do those seem like the kind of embodiments of evil your kind is accusing us to be of?”[/b][/color]

“Um…” Gawain said blankly. He wasn’t focused on giving the woman an answer, as his mind was still lingering on the fact that she had just revealed that she and her companions were in fact witches. If they were as powerful as the royal family claimed they were, then he was in very real danger. For a moment, he toyed with the idea of calling out for help, but he knew that even if he tried, the women could shut him up before the knights had a chance to step foot in his direction. He was trapped.

[color=fff79a][b]“We are not causing trouble to anyone,”[/b][/color] the white-haired witch went on. [color=fff79a][b]“Our friend happens to be injured by one of those murderers you are glorifying for slaughtering us, while we were simply on our way to find a safe place to stay, where people won’t try to murder us just because we exist.”[/b][/color]

Gawain’s blue eyes flicked between the girls until he found one with a bloodied leg, verifying that there was indeed an injury among them. “That’s a lot of information to give a complete stranger,” he said, shifting his weight uneasily and looking back at the witch whom had grabbed him. He couldn’t imagine that she would tell him all of that and simply let him walk away, but he had to try to reason with her anyways. He didn’t want to die on some side road in the middle of the night. “Look, I don’t know what happened,” he went on, holding up his hands in a gesture of innocence. “I have no part in the royal family’s witch hunt. I just deliver their food from a nearby farm. That’s all, I swear. Now, if you would just let me go, I’ll walk away and pretend this never happened, alright? I’ll go back to the farm and you can go back to… whatever it is witches do, okay?”