The groaning of the dying and the panting of the victorious were all Liethred heard as he went down onto his haunches to catch his breath. The skirmish was done and although it had been brief, the orcs had fought with a vigour he had never seen before. Wiping the grimy sweat from his brow with the back of a hand which rested upon the pommel of his broadsword, he caught a glimpse of the foe he had slain at the end. He was immediately forced to look again.
The familiar clatter of an orc's armoured body being turned over somewhere nearby (as its pockets and pouches were rifled) was followed by a shout that captured Liethred's surprise perfectly.
"What dark magic is this?" shouted one of his men, looking down upon the lifeless body at his feet.
Quickly, the rest of the small band gathered round the questioner and his dead foe. Concerned muttering broke out and quickly became wild speculation before Liethred had pushed his way through the throng to look down upon the evidence. It was as he had feared.
"That's not an orc," said one of his soldiers, unwittingly framing his commander's thoughts again.
"Looks like an elf," added a voice from the other side of the group.
"This is no elf," began Liethred as he bent down and grasped the dead creature by its long, lank, black hair. It may have had many of the features of an elf, but there was still a certain set to its features that even death could not remove, that suggested orchishness.
"This is no elf," he repeated as he let its head thump back onto the ground again.
"We must get out of here now," he said. "Back into the gulley the way we came in."
With that, his men, who six months ago had been farmers and bakers, blacksmiths and merchants, melted into the trees with a professionalism that belied their lack of long term training. They were chosen because they had taken to this life in the wilds more naturally than the rest of the men from their villages and had at the same time proven lucky in times of crisis. Liethred put a lot of stock in luck, especially when it came to this little job he had been given.
There were very few rangers left at the disposal of the army of man and so he had been given a unit of men drawn from the rank and file of that same army. It was his task to make for the Greenwood with the message and at the same time train these dozen men in the ways of the wilds. His prior position had allowed him some flexibility in choosing who he would take and so he interviewed fifty men that had been forced by the changing times to take on a life of military service.
As interviews go, Liethred's selection process didn't seem like much more than a conversation, but it was enough for him to determine that the men he was choosing were favoured by fate in some way. Whether they had been fortunate in business deals before the dark times or lucky in the final battles of what was now referred to as the war of the ring mattered little. it was more important that he find the kind of men that landed on their feet; and running.
Taking one last look around the site of the battle, Liethred jogged back toward the gulley, where his men waited, no doubt suspecting that he had seen something that meant that they could not go further. He had seen something and it disturbed him more than he realised. More importantly, he understood the effect it would have on his men. So he would not tell them that what he had seen was the elvish cast of the face of an orc he had personally slain. One elvish orc was a curiosity; two was the start of a pattern.