The old Elliot and the young fled together into the night, their wounds poorly stitched and bleeding. The dark closed in around them, lit neither by candle nor by torch nor by distant hearth-fire. Scudding clouds veiled the stars and moon. A man could scarce see his hand before his eyes, and the Elliots' horses snorted and whickered uncomfortably as they found their footing in the dark. Several times, Rory's gelding - blown by his long galloping fight near the fringes of the battle - stumbled and almost fell.
Neither man could say what time it was, or how long it had been night, or how many more hours might yet remain before the dawn. Unable to see the stars, the Elliots could not be sure even that they were bound for safety; how could a man navigate unless he could behold the heavens? The wind blew slow and biting out of the north, and chilled the wounded reivers to the bone. And somewhere in the blinding dark, very close, the wolves snarled still, and made the Elliots' horses start with fear.
The hours passed. As the two men rode on, they became aware of an odor of rotten eggs, sulfurous and nauseating, that hung upon the night air. Step by step, the smell grew stronger, cloying at the nostrils, adding one more color to the palette of suffering: torn flesh, exhausted muscles, bitter souls, and now this stench.
But after an eternity of struggling onward over hill and dale, the character of the night changed: a faint, pale glow suffused the darkness, heralding the immanence of dawn. It was not light, not quite, but in the grey dimness lay the promise of the far-off winter sun hidden somewhere just over the horizon. And in the distance, the two men could just begin to make out a faint shadow in the night - a pillar of deeper darkness, a shadow against the veiled stars. A tower. Harelaw.
Then the left front hoof of Rory's horse sank into the earth with a wet squelch. A moment later, the other front hoof of Rory's horse went in as well, and then one of the hooves of Kenneth's gelding. The latter gave a dismayed whinny. And then, not a dozen yards in front of the two men, a plume of greenish fire exploded upward in the night, racing heavenward from the earth itself, blinding the Elliots with its sickly brilliance.
The smell of rotten eggs was unbearable. And for a Borderer, that stench - together with the suddenly shifting earth and the burst of spontaneous fire - could mean only one thing.
Rory and Kenneth were stuck in a peat bog. And behind them, growling softly in the darkness, paws treading invisibly upon the trail of the two wounded Elliots' blood - the wolves were closing in.