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“Ruddy, coffin-dodging old Druid”, muttered Artume as she squinted against the sun.
Noon was no hour to be scavenging in Tanaris, when the sun was at just the angle to set the silica glinting in every direction. The twinkling stabbed Artume’s eyes as the sun continued to bear down like a weight upon her head. She fumbled in her panniers for a faded and badly misshapen pirate hat, jammed it as far down as her horns would allow, and then tugged the peak until it nearly touched her nose.
Her mount, a Winterspring cat, began to hop and prank in an effort to keep its paws lifted clear of the heat. Artume read the warning and gently pressed her knees to its sides. It bounded off at once on a haphazard course, which was as good as any, given that Artume could spot nothing to recommend a direction. With a squawk, a purple parrot broke from its hover and pursued the cat with zeal, overtaking it and circling its head like a bothersome fly. Pining was feeling positively solar-powered today, much to Artume’s relief.
Only a Druid would insist on scavenged hides, collected from beasts slain and left to rot beneath the desert sun. There was little point in Artume creating some skins, as the Druid could tell by smell the freshness of the leather. When desperate, a certain “fiddle factor” could be brought to bear, whereby Artume could argue that she had come upon a fellow Hunter and followed at his heels, collecting hides before the kills grew cold, but that lie was only credible to a certain point and she needed to be careful to never over-use it. She tried to keep her non-incidental hides to below twenty per cent of any total order, and only threw in fresh kills when the pickings were slim. As rotten luck would have it, the day was beginning to look like one for hunting … an activity that would make the feathered one the only happy creature of the three.
Leonie Winterborn was elderly, even for a Druid, and Artume thought of her as a living embodiment of petrifaction. There was a distinct tedium associated with doing business with her. Leonie’s evenness of temper and unhurried movement seemed to make time drag more slowly than the shadow that paces a circle around a standing stone. All she did was measured and predictable.
The Druid invariably looked at Artume with one crooked eyebrow, even if all the fortuitously fresh hides were genuine. She would then slip soundlessly in to cat-form and skim her muzzle over the merchandise, nostrils fluttering. Occasionally a pink tongue would dart out and a rasping sound be heard as she tested the raw side of the hide. The whole procedure made Artume shudder. These Azerothian creatures who at times went about on two legs and at other times on four unnerved the Draenei like nothing else on this planet.
The Frostsabre mount had caught scent of the faintest breeze and was now instinctively bearing toward to the coast. “No matter,” thought Artume, “Turtles give up hides too.”
Pining, who had not yet tired of dive-bombing and baiting the lavender cat, suddenly shot skyward. She whirled and hung as though tethered, almost silent as her wings lifted and fell in slow motion. Artume turned in the saddle to see what the bird had spotted, but was met with a glare so bright she had to look away. She turned again, and through narrowed eyes determined that a horse-mounted figure was advancing, clad in what had to be a considerable amount of plate. She could tell little more, but a feeling of cold suddenly gripped her heart. The speed with which the horse advanced meant that a Death Knight was riding her way.
