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Luckily for him, the dwarf disappeared to the woods before Leanora recovered from her shock and started laughing, almost hysterically. The situation was so absurd. The nice stranger had been brutally slaughtered, they were all in danger and what was worst, they had Orin with them. And on the top of that, the dwarf had come and offered noble words and called her "my lady".
"Lea, are you alright?" a familiar voice asked softly from behind her.
"No, of course not. But don't worry about me," she replied, surprisingly calmly.
She turned to her other brother: "Orin, are you alright?"
"Yes," replied a small and shaken voice.
Suddenly, Lea turned and hugged both her brothers fiercely. "It's alright. We will solve this matter," she said.
"Of course we will", Ash said. Lea couldn't see it in the dark but she knew his face was far less confident than his words.
"Are we going on an adventure now?" Orin asked.
"Yes," Lea said at length, "but this is not playing. This is very dangerous. Orin, do as you're told and don't do anything stupid by your own. Otherwise..." She left the sentence hang in the air, both because she would not like to voice such threat on her little brother and because she was not sure if she woould have been able to finish the sentence without her voice breaking.
It was then when they heard Erling's words: "I wonder, is it really only one of these creatures? Or are there perhaps more? Isn't there a chance for us to be outnumbered?"
Lea and Ash both gripped Orin's shoulder instinctively. "Don't do that!" the lad hissed. Ash let go, Lea didn't.
She approved of Erling's practical manner. She was aware that the thought had had to be voiced.
But she didn't feel comfortable with planting such thoughts to Orin's head.
"He's as deep in this bog as we are," Ash said quietly, "we cannot shield him from it." Gritting her teeth, Lea nodded. Her twin was right once again.
She truned her gaze back to Erling. "I don't know if there are more than one of them," she found herself replying, "but I doubt it. If there had been more of them, there would surely have been more losses. You can't feed a pack of wargs with one sheep or one horse." She cut off her talk, fighting the impulse to add "or one human" to the list.
She had also deliberatedly kept to herself another thought that had popped to her mind. Wolves hunted in packs.
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