[b]Garreth[/b] didn’t let the knife-man recover. He drove in close, caught the man’s forearm with the flat of his blade to keep the weapon-hand off line, then turned the hilt and cracked the pommel across the side of the bandit’s head. The strike was short, ugly, and final; the man’s knees buckled and he went down into the moss with a wet exhale. Garreth immediately melted into the brush, dragging the bandit with him, disappearing the way professionals do—no dramatic flourish, just a shift of weight and a vanishing angle between trunks.

At the clearing’s edge, the runner strained against the vines and brush [b]Fredrick[/b] had forced them into—tangled, off-balance, still armed and very much still fighting. The bandit thrashed and twisted, trying to free a knee, trying to find purchase for a boot, trying—most of all—to get enough breath to shout. Each attempt made the bind bite tighter and the struggle louder, and Fredrick’s presence in that same foliage turned “call for help” into a gamble the runner didn’t quite dare to take.

Then the forest signaled again. A clipped birdcall—wrong for any bird—answered from deeper east, followed by the faint rhythm of feet on packed ground. Not a stampede yet, but purposeful movement, closing. Whoever the runner had been trying to reach had heard enough to start reacting.

[b]Jilly[/b]’s “Plan J” took her low and fast, limited to short bursts—ten feet up at most, skimming beneath branches rather than soaring over them. 

From that height, the canopy still blocked the wider world, but it couldn’t hide everything: cart grooves that cut east, a strip of trampled fern where bodies had passed recently, and—through a thin slit in the trees—a darker pocket where smoke thickened and voices murmured around something larger than a lookout fire. A wagon silhouette, maybe. One or two shapes posted where the logging cut narrowed.