Chapter 16
SmugglersThe girl guarding the goats and sheep watched with some consternation as five riders cantered over the hill. Her immediate thought was “Bandits”, and she scrambled into a nearby thicket of gorse. Gorse bushes abounded here on the rolling foothills of the Mountains of Doom, and she did not heed the scratches she was getting.
The riders pulled up near the small stream running away from the mountains towards the bottom of the wide valley. She saw two women and three men with eleven horses. One of the men, or rather, boy, she amended, as he seemed very young, lead two animals and the other four had one each. They had a dog too, a rather fierce-looking black and tan animal. She cowered low in her thicket praying to the gods that the animal did not scent her.
The first th
