“Lord Ridley looked to her. This gate has had to be repaired and replaced a great many times,” he explained.

“Oh, I see,” Cerys said.

The party walked on, although the goblin resisted, snarling back at the bats, who were no longer interested in it, since they knew that it was being pulled away by the humans. Once it felt the scratches of being pulled over a few rocks, it quit resisting and trudged along with the group. The cave was cold and wet, slippery with moss, so they made their way carefully. It was not a very deep cave at all, and Cerys was relieved for the king’s sake that nobody would have been interested in exploring it, or else they would have easily seen gate from just a few feet inside (given ample firelight, of course).

There were some sparse bushes in front of the cave, but nothing too thorny or scraggly that would prevent them from passing through easily. Lord Ridley pulled the branches aside with his weapon and let the others pass through. Sir Carter stayed close to his king, clearly on his guard now that they were out in the forest. It was a heavily wooded area, and it smelled of rich soil and moss. It also seemed as if a light rain had passed though recently, that they had missed it while they were in the catacombs.

“It’s not very far through the trees,” Lord Ridley told them, “and then we’ll be on the shores of the lake. There will be a boat waiting for us.”

“And what do we do with this thing?” Sir Carter asked, the question coming out half as a scowl.

Before anybody could answer him, there was a rustling between the trees. Then something appeared before them, at least two feet taller than any of the men in the party, but looking more like a tree than anything else. It let out a mumbled sort of battle call and ran towards them. Then Cerys could see that it was not a tree, no matter how much it looked like a walking tree to her, brown as it was.