The stopping was sudden, forceful, the kind of stop that happened when horses encountered a reason to stop that outranked their rider's instructions. Guinevere was thrown forward off the bench, catching herself on the bars with her manacled hands and colliding with the iron at a velocity that was going to leave marks.
"Oh, fantastic," she said from the floor of the carriage. "Now we've stopped. In the middle of a road. In a forest. This is exactly how horror stories begin, Bertram. I want you to know that if we are about to be murdered, I am going to be very annoyed about it."
Smoke.
The smell arrived before the visual. Thick, acrid, carrying the chemical signature of a mage-crafted incendiary rather than a natural fire. The smoke poured through the trees from both sides of the road, filling the air between the carriage and the guards with a grey opacity that reduced visibility to arm's length.
