Darin’s relief at seeing Ridahne was almost palpable. She sat straight up on Talbot’s back as the Elf came running up. She was slightly alarmed at the blood almost all over her, but the human soon figured out that it wasn’t her blood. Ridahne appeared uninjured. Darin let out a sigh of relief. She knew the woman had to have been lying.

Darin moved to get off Talbot, “Yeah, there was another woman with the same type of tattoos as Luke. Do you think it means anything?”

Darin was having problems getting off of Talbot. For one thing he really was too big for her to sit on comfortably. She had managed to somehow get astride him in the slight mess of the fight. She needed to get both legs on one side. Then she would need to drop down. Darin didn’t want to think about that at all. He was huge. It would be a long way down. Suddenly Talbot bent his knees. Darin let out a gasp. When he was as close to the ground as he was going to get, he bucked her off. Darin lost her footing for a moment before staggering to right in front of Ridahne.

It sounded like the Elf had figured out that Darin had lied to her. Well, lying was the wrong word. Darin just hadn’t told her the whole truth. Darin wasn’t sure she wanted to tell her the truth now. It was clear that people were looking for her. Mark and his people didn’t think she was The Gardener, but they did think that she had a connection to The Gardener. How they came up with that Darin didn’t have the slightest clue. The important bit was that they were prepared to kill her because of it. The less people who knew the safer The Seed would be. The only problem was Darin wasn’t sure she wanted to lie to Ridahne anymore. Plus, Darin was pretty positive Ridahne had killed for no other reason than Darin said they were evil. Would it be wrong to return that trust?

Darin scowled as she said, “To be fair. Even this morning I knew you wouldn’t die from withering. You’ll probably be stabbed in the back or something.”

To be fair Darin had known nothing about the woman except she claimed to want to help The Gardener. The human was not able to magically detect lies. It would be better to trust no one than to trust the first person that said they wanted to help. Darin was trying to be smart. Okay, smart was the wrong word. Common sense felt like it felt Darin better. She was trying to display common sense.

Darin continued to scowl, “And I’m not the ‘hope of many’ or whatever. I’m so incompetent that Astra might as well be doomed.”

Wasn’t that the crux of it all? Darin had felt woefully unprepared for this role the moment she got it. She was a farmer. She wasn’t a warrior or and adventurer or a hero. She didn’t want to fail but felt that her failure was inevitable. At least she could take steps to avoid being killed. Even then she was failing at that. Mark had one conversation with her before deciding she needed to be taken captive, and Darin didn’t know why. Darin was almost positive that The Gardener made a mistake. She would just never say it out loud.

Darin turned back towards Talbot. He had jumped the fence to help her, so she needed to find a way to get him back into his pasture. He had stood back up but wasn’t making any moves to return to where he belonged. The human looked over at the fence. Luckily there appeared to be a gate. Darin walked over to it to see that the latch was simple. She lifted it and pulled the gate open.

She whistled at Talbot, “Come on Talbot.” She gestured at the open gate, “In you get.”

Talbot shook his head in away similar to a person shaking their head no. Darin scoffed at the absurdity of it all. Odds were she would have to bribe him back in. To that she would need to find the farmer. She had no idea where to look for him, and she couldn’t leave Talbot unsupervised anyways. He might wander off if she did.