[Tevildo]

"Are you mad, truly mad, to turn on a wild beast alone without even bothering to wake the rest of us?" Dorran muttered through gritted teeth. He had finally reached his breaking point, and his anger spilled over onto the woman. He stared out into the night but could neither hear or see the cat. "I do not pretend to have faced such a creature before, but I do know he is swift and ferocious and outweighs you by many stones. I don't doubt that you are a good shot, Vaenosa, but you are no professional hunter. And a creature like this has not been seen anywhere near our village in the past ten years."

"If you had hit him, but failed to strike a fatal blow, he would have turned on you or, more likely, murdered us as we slept in our bedrolls. There would have been no one to back you. You are lucky that you missed him and that he ran away."

"I am sorry," growled Dorran, "but ever since this day began your only aim has been to show us exactly how tough you are. We know you're tough and bright. Aldwulf would never have let you go on this trek had you been anything else. But our group will never reach Edoras, not one of us, unless we stop battling each other. And if we fail in our mission, many innocent people may die, struck down by these Orcs. You have never seen these creatures, but I tell you they will make mincemeat of us unless we start acting and thinking like a team. Orcs care not whether you are woman or man: they will rip your body apart and devour the flesh raw. I know. I have seen them do it."

With anger still glinting in his face, Dorran placed his hand over his eyes, rubbing away something that looked suspiciously like a tear. Then he glared down at the ground, knowing he had said and shown too much, "This creature is hungry and knows our horses are easy pickings," he continued in a calmer tone. "Surely he will be back. Will he not? So what do we do? How do we prepare? How do we take him on as a team?" He looked around the circle at the others, waiting for someone to speak. Except for the sound of the human's voices, it was deathly silent in the camp. There was no howling cat who sounded like a woman, but the usual background noise of frogs and other small night creatures was also ominously absent.