In which Gabriel rants a lot, Ren is way too responsible, and a troll makes an appearance. 

In the bright morning, with the little boys in school, Ren and Gabriel carried half of the bear meat, cubed and salted, into Crow's Corner. The people of Crow's Corner, those not fortunate enough to own store property, were poor and haggard, unable to hunt for themselves. Meat was an easy sell.

Before they could make it to any of the tin houses, the Bellican refugees found them. They could smell meat. Bone-thin, with hungry eyes that knew things no Draven had seen even in a nightmare, they swarmed around, heckling and bargaining. Dirty hands pawed at the game bag. Caper snorted and tried to back away, but he was closed in on every side.

Gabriel stubbornly held his ground. He shoved the meat bag into Ren's hand and shouted at the crowd. "There is no meat! Not for you, not ever!"

A particularly large man with tattooed arms grabbed Caper by the bridle. Coldly, he drilled his black eyes into Gabriel. "Give us the meat or we take the horse."

Ren slung the meat into the dust. The crowds pounced like underfed wildcats, and Gabriel attacked, shoving, kicking a man in the head. "Eat dirt if you're so hungry!" he shouted, ripping away what remained of the meat.

The crowd began to yank Caper from all sides. One man would not give up his share of the meat and Gabriel pulled back to swing at him but Ren stopped him.

"What do we have without a horse?" she said harshly, under her breath.

Gabriel looked hard into her eyes. She was unaffected. He let the meat slap the road.

"It's because of them Patch and Hollis go to school hungry!" he yelled. He jerked Caper's bridle out of someone's hand. "It's because of them we have to fight for food every day. It's because of them, leeching off of us, that we pay taxes for what we owned in the first place."

"No, it isn't," Ren muttered.

The refugees watched her, waiting for her to defend them. She did not raise her voice or lift her head. But she uttered words that had never before been spoken in public. "It's because of Conrad Daley."

It was as if she caused the world to crack in half. There was an astonishing explosion. The buildings were rocked. The people nearly rolled sideways. Every dog barked itself hoarse. And then came the hordes of eyewitnesses, on foot and on horseback, and a man stopped to breathe with his hands on his knees. "The school was bombed," he said.

It was pandemonium. Gabriel forgot about the meat. Ren forgot about Caper. Their feet churned up the red dirt, like they were children running a race against each other once more. The air at the far end of Crow's Corner was thick and gray. Half the school building, the largest building in the Low Country, was buried in orange, licking flames. A cavern yawned around its crushed remains like black teeth had chomped through the earth. There were people wounded, people white with ash, children screaming, parents screaming. Two old hands seized Gabriel and shouted for information.

Ren was gone without realizing she had left. She followed some deep instinct. Back on the main road she caught Caper and threw herself onto his back without ever slowing her run. They tore up the endless pathway into the woods of Fox Hollow, passing Old Caleb, out hunting with his red Labradors. Even from this far away, the hot wind smelled chokingly of smoke. Deep in the forest Ren drew up to a stop, feeling Caper's back heave beneath her. In the clearing on his hands and knees was a thick-haired boy, pawing at the ground.

Ren nearly fell off the horse. She went to Patch and grabbed him, turning him around. "Where is Hollis?" she yelled.

He dropped the stone in his hand. "We—" he said choppily, "Hollis wanted to find more medals."

The world stopped whirling. The smoke settled. The sky cleared. Ren crouched down and stared at the dust.

"Ren?" said Patch tentatively.

"Hmmm?" she said back.

"Patch!" Hollis's young voice broke the quiet on the other side of the forest. He appeared, crashing out of brush, dragging a big stick with him. "I have an idea of—" He stopped cold when he saw his sister. In annoyance, he let go of his stick.

"We're going to school this afternoon," he grumbled. "I just wanted to find something first."

"The school was bombed," said Ren, staring at the dirt.

She looked up to meet their faces, the faces she thought were gone forever. She stood and nearly fell over. Hollis looked up at her in alarm.

"That's what that noise was?" he said. "Who bombed it?"

"The Bellicans," Ren replied.

"They said it was Bellicans?"

"I want to go see!" said Patch, raring to run into town.

Ren stopped him. "They didn't say it was Bellicans. They'll never say it was Bellicans. But it couldn't be anyone else."

"Let's go look at the school," Hollis said.

"We're going home," Ren argued. She hugged Patch tightly.

Hollis kept negotiating. "We'll just quickly look. And then go home."

"We'll look later. They won't be letting people near it right now."

They went home. Ren didn't think about the terror pouring out of the school, nor did she worry where the Bellicans might smuggle the next bomb. She thought about her father and brother, due to come home tomorrow morning with oysters in the shell and pickled fish wrapped in brown paper and small round crackers.

Wait till you meet those two. They're unrecognizable. 

She and the little boys gathered food and stripped all the sheets off the beds to wash in the creek. In the afternoon, when Gabriel thundered onto the scene with his game bag over his shoulder, they were playing in the creek, stringing shells onto cord. "What did you take Caper for?" Gabriel bellowed across the field. "I had to gallivant across the country on feet. Had to go pay the Daley keg tax. Nothing shows patriotism quite like helping your king intoxicate himself." (This was a direct quote from the Lego game we played a million years ago.) 

"By the way, Patch and Hollis are fine," Ren said.

Gabriel's eyes landed on his little brothers, traveled to the laundry hanging to dry, the berries, mushrooms and dandelions in a basket waiting to be made into a salad. Ren came out of the cold water, drying her hands. 

"Look at this." Gabriel unfastened his game bag and withdrew two thick tomatoes. "While Ren was hiding here doing thirty useless things, I got us something to flavor the bear stew. It will hold us out until the seafood."

Um, I'm sorry, Ren is literally the only person who does anything and I'm getting sick of her compliance. 

He sent the little boys off to start a fire, and only then did Ren finally ask, "Did anyone die?"

"I don't know." He shoved his hair off his face, his habit when he was angry, which was nearly always. "It doesn't affect us."

Briefly Ren felt a weak, confusing mix of emotion inside of herself. Then it was snuffed out like all the rest. She had swallowed so much of everything over the years, she mostly just felt dead.

The stew simmered all afternoon, bear meat and tomatoes and mushrooms. Ren and Patch waded back into the river and washed the grime out of yesterday's clothes while Sable rested her bones in the hot grass. Gabriel watched them from a distance as he sat on the front stoop of the house, carving a new arrow. Hollis lay in the grass and watched cirrus clouds wisp across the sky.

"Why can't you skin all our meat yourself?" Hollis asked. The smell of the stew had put the thought of meat in his mind all afternoon. "It would save money. You wouldn't have to pay the taxes."

"Yes, we would." Gabriel turned the stick over and chiseled at it. "Everything we shoot or pick is taxed. And we're not allowed to prepare it ourselves."

Hollis looked confused. "You don't have to do what the rules say. No one is watching us."

Gabriel lifted his tanned face to the sky, as if the white-hot sun was a spyglass. He never knew when he was being watched. Eyes were everywhere.

"They watch you. They advertise you up in Terradon as the comedy part of their variety shows."

From the field, Sable let out a short, muffled growl, then staggered to her feet and erupted into snapping barks, unusual for the old dog. Caper's eyes had gone very white and he tugged on his rope. A flock of red birds, scared witless, shook themselves from the trees. In one motion they swooped over the sun and turned the world red as blood. Birds of every size and color rose up out of their perches. Their wings furiously beat the air with the sound of a thousand flags unfurling at once. Every bird was leaving the forest.

It was a full minute before the world returned to silence. In the back of the Dravens' house, where the Low Country met the remote portion of the Black Forest, was a wilderness so thick it took an athletic man a month to walk through it, and it was entirely still. Not even the wind blew. The dog and the horse breathed hard. The four human beings were as motionless as the woods.

"I want to go inside," said Patch in a tiny voice.

"Don't worry," said Ren. She touched his head with a wet hand. "They just got scared by an animal."

She was not sure herself. The Dravens, even the little ones, carried on through the rest of the day with a feeling that something or someone was coming for them.

In the middle of the night Gabriel went out and stood in the quiet front yard. Even the crickets and frogs had gone mute. There was only a light wind and the lingering smell of the day's fire and stew. Gabriel snuck Caper a bit of wrinkled apple and stood patting him as the horse chewed. He was going to ride somewhere. He could not think by sitting quietly. Maybe he would steal away to Brim's house, on the edge of the Black Forest with nothing behind it for nine hundred miles, to see what was going on. He had never been to Brim's house, but he had heard the rumors—purple smoke coming out of windows, plants turning black and brittle, trees growing unnaturally tall.

At once there came from the air a noise like a tea kettle whistling. There was a tiny breeze in Gabriel's hair, followed by a thump. A black arrow of steel had lodged itself into a tree trunk between Caper's brown ears. Oddly, Caper was still. He swallowed his apple and watched Gabriel with trusting eyes.

Gabriel turned without a sound. A black, empty landscape greeted him. He looked again at the arrow and very slowly reached out to grasp it.

Instantly it exploded into a hot blue light. The wilderness was illuminated. In the core of the glow, the arrow multiplied a thousand times, twisting and transforming into featureless black masses, and a multitude of shrill voices shrieked wordlessly. The air grew painfully cold. Caper whinnied frantically and tore away from his ropes.

Gabriel's head was a frenzy of senseless noise. He felt like he was falling asleep. Then he looked to the sky, and the thousands of black shapes had merged themselves into one enormous figure, hovering in the sky. Loud breath came from beneath the hood, but there was no face. A misty hand clutched a sword of bone, and without a thought, Gabriel ripped out his bow and shot. The figure let out a shriek of dying agony. It levitated backwards into the night, carried by the wind, and vaporized into pieces. Each piece of it became an orb of blue light. With a rustle of air, the lights went out one by one and then all was dark. The warmth leaked back into the air.

To be fair, I kind of like this part. 

Inside, Sable barked her throat out. The thunder of little boys' feet shook the stairway, but Ren was at the door, holding her spear.

"Nice of you to show up," whispered Gabriel breathlessly while turning in a slow circle.

"What happened?" shouted Hollis, colliding with Ren in the dark. Patch tripped up behind him.

Gabriel held out his hand. Something else was coming. The night was alive with noise again and a current of cold split the muggy air. Ren raised her spear but Gabriel said, "Wait."

But then, out of the other side of the woods, crashing and roaring, came a blue and gray troll, fifteen feet tall with scales as hard as armor across his shoulders and chest. Ren hurled her spear. The troll caught it and broke it with the ease of snapping a toothpick. Then he lowered his thick skull and charged like a battering ram.

As a random side note, the reason Ren had a spear was because Katniss uses a bow and arrow and I didn't want to be a copycat. 

Like Katniss is the ONLY FICTIONAL CHARACTER ON EARTH to use a bow and arrow.

Just..... -_- 

"Nice work!" Gabriel yelled as he and Ren dove for their lives in opposite directions.

It was a hopeless fight. The troll roared and swung its club, pounded it into the dirt leaving caverns as deep as graves. Gabriel shot a shower of arrows. One clipped the troll in the knee. The troll screamed in annoyance, ripped out the arrow, and flung it with astounding accuracy back at Gabriel. Gabriel ducked in time and the arrow wedged itself into a wall of the house.

With her spear gone, Ren shot with her own bow. Half the arrows ricocheted off the troll's scales. Gabriel was struck with an idea. "Hold him!" he yelled wildly, taking off.

He scrambled up a tree like an animal and surveyed the mad scene below. The little boys had vanished. The troll was in pain but angrily fighting with full strength. Ren was a proficient archer, but she was moments away from losing. Her quiver was nearly empty. Gabriel jammed three arrows into his bow and let them fly.

It was a beautiful shot. His height created such velocity that when the arrows hit the troll's skull, they sank to the barb. With a limb-cracking roar, the troll hit the ground on its knees and rattled everything within a mile. Ren took her chance and shot it between the eyes.

Hollis exploded into sight. In his hands was a metal pole, ripped out of the decaying fence. The troll lifted its upper body in a half-dead final stand, but Hollis beat the teeth out of its head. The troll did not have a chance to roar. It hit the ground, hissed like a locomotive as the breath left its lungs forever, and was still.

"Hollis," said Ren in amazement.

Hoofbeats shook the ground and Hollis, expecting Caper, turned around. Instead, strong, rough hands grabbed him by the shoulders. "That troll belonged to me! I could have brought it back!" someone yelled.

Before either of them could blink, Ren had her last arrow drawn and aimed at the stranger. It was a muscular boy of Ren's age, with blonde hair and a wound on his chin. Hollis had never seen blonde hair, but that was not what drew his eye. He gaped at the chain around the boy's neck.

This was another really, really weird plot point, but to be fair (again) it came out of the Lego game. Conrad Daley separated people who had brown hair from people who had blond hair, despite having brown hair himself. 

"I would not shoot if I were you," said the boy in a low, cold voice. "It would not be wise."

"Let go of my brother," said Ren.

"Ren, wait," said Hollis desperately. "Look! He's got a medallion, too."

The boy forgot his anger over the troll. He clapped both hands over the silver medallion that hung around his neck. "What do you know of that?" he snarled.

Gabriel hit the ground and joined his siblings. "Our horse ran off. We have to go find him. Whatever you want, we don't have it."

"Oh, I think you do," said the boy, pushing Gabriel aside to continue glaring at Hollis.

Hollis's chin nearly touched his chest. He had gone abnormally frozen.

Patch revealed himself from wherever he had been hiding and stood close to Ren's side, watching the strange guest in shy interest. Gabriel carried his gaze out to the meadow. Next to the river, under the stars, stood three white draft horses. Two of them bore riders. One was a girl. The other was a man, his head and back draped with a purple cloak.

"Who are you?" Gabriel asked.

The boy withdrew his sword. It glinted blindingly in the moonlight. "Does the name Huntian mean anything to you?" 

No. It means nothing to us. Because YOUR LAST NAME IS BLACKWOOD. Get out of this story and go to the one you belong in.