Finn and Adi continued talking quietly into the early morning hours, though the topics were significantly lighter than what they had started with. Finn learned that Adi had spent most of her time cooking and cleaning for the miners in her clan when they lived in the mines. As the daughter of the chief, she didn’t have to, but she liked cooking and she loved her fellow clans people. She showed the faint lines on her ribs that were actually her gills, allowing her to breathe underwater. She explained that she couldn’t handle the pressure of great depths, but being able to breathe underwater helped her to traverse flooded caverns. Finn had nodded and pretended to understand what she meant by pressure.

Adi also told her about her favorite food (meat buns), her best friend (a snarky know-it-all named Teresa) and how her father would sit late into the night and recount every meeting he had with neighboring chiefs to his children. She was meant to be the next chief, since one brother had aspirations to join the court and advocate for kobolds and other lower fae from there and the other seemed to be constantly away on who knew what. Adi knew a lot of the goings-on in court, even though she had never been and had no aspirations of ever going. Finn was impressed that the kobolds were so worldly despite their low status.

Finn tried to reciprocate as much as she could without giving too much away.

Hesitantly, Finn told Adi that she didn’t really have a favorite food. She liked to eat everything. Which was mostly true. She had to learn to eat whatever was in front of her if she wanted to make it in the barracks. She liked to try new food anyway and would often hang around the backs of the kitchens and try to charm leftovers out of the kitchen staff whenever a big, important dinner or banquet happened. Finn also told Adi that was friends with most of the other guards, but never got super close with any of them. She didn't say that much of that was because Finn was the youngest person in the guard barracks until just a few years ago. Because of that, she ended up left behind eventually as all the guards she grew up with either got married and moved away or got promoted into other positions while she stayed stuck in the same place. She told Adi about how she and her brother would hide in the corners of the court and make up stories about visiting dignitaries, recounting some of the most entertaining ones, especially the rare times they turned out to be right.

They didn’t have a lot in common, but their personalities seemed to mesh well.

After hours of talking, Finn’s throat began to get dry, and she felt the urge to broach the subject of her past fumbling with other girls at court. She could bring it up naturally, since they were talking about their lives before the whole mess of being captured by humans. She could say, "No pressure, but hey, I like girls, you know?" and put the ball back in Adi’s court.

Of course, that was when Finn spotted them. A small group of about four humans left the lodge below them in the faint glow of blue sunlight just peeking beyond the eastern horizon. They carried big heavy packs on their backs, bows slung over their shoulders and short hunting knives strapped onto their belts. They walked in an orderly line toward the path that Finn and Adi had used to find the lodge, and then split into two groups heading in opposite directions. Smoke still rose from the chimney, but it wasn’t as thick as it had been earlier in the night.

“Hey,” Finn said sharply, pausing Adi mid-story. Finn hadn’t been listening while she watched the hunters anyway.

Adi quickly cottoned on to what Finn was seeing, her body going tense and alert against Finn’s right side. “Shit,” she whispered. “Do you think that is all of them?”

Finn shrugged and continued to carefully watch the quickly disappearing backs of the human hunting party. “We should wait a while to see if anyone else comes out,” she whispered back, not taking her eyes from the clearing in front of the hunting lodge.

They waited maybe fifteen minutes before Finn figured that if anyone else was going to come out, they would have already done so.

“I’ll go down and check it out,” Finn whispered. “I’ll whistle if the coast is clear.”

“Finn, no,” Adi hissed. “I should come along,” she added with an indignant look.

Finn frowned. She had incredible respect for Adi, but she sounded like a battering ram pushing through the forest, and this was the home base of humans who fancied themselves hunters. If she gave them away, there would be another chase, and this one may end up more drawn out and difficult than their first flight.

“I won’t ditch you,” Finn said, trying to guess at the origins of Adi’s concern.

“I didn’t think you would!” Adi spat back, quickly angry.

Finn twisted her mouth, not sure what the issue was. She didn't want to offend Adi, but she was also not willing to budge on this issue. “Listen, it will be safer if I go first,” she decided on going with. “I’m just going to sneak around the outside, see if I can find a good way in, and maybe try to figure out if anyone is inside.”

It was Adi’s turn to twist her mouth in displeasure. “That sounds like you’re basically going to do all of it,” she replied sourly.

Finn felt the corner of her mouth pull into a smirk. She tried to smother it, but Adi wasn’t wrong. “I probably won’t be able to carry up all the supplies we’ll need. I’ll need your help for that, so long as the cabin is empty.”

Adi looked away angrily, vaguely in the direction of the lodge. She crossed her arms under her ample chest, and Finn had to avert her eyes so she didn’t get too much of an eyeful.

“You know what to get?” Adi asked after a long moment.

Finn nodded eagerly in response.

Adi gave her a measured look, her expression saying she still wasn’t psyched about the idea of Finn going alone. But, she ultimately folded, so maybe she was aware of her own lack of sneaking skills.

“Please be careful,” Adi said in a furtive whisper, good as permission for Finn and surely a phrase that would haunt her fantasies for many months to come.

Finn nodded brusquely, since she didn’t trust herself to reply verbally. She then dodged quickly and silently down the steep incline toward the cabin.

Finn wasn’t exactly a stealth expert, but she was very good at being fast and being quiet. Those were practically her specialties. So, she wasn’t especially worried about being discovered or attacked while breaking into the cabin. She was aware that her skin and hair were blindingly pale, which was not exactly the greatest camouflage when moving through the riot of forest greenery, even with all the dirt smudged and rubbed into every inch of her after days of hiking through the woods naked. She would just need to move fast and be quiet, and hope that her luck held out.

Finn reached the back of the lodge in almost no time. The back wall of the log cabin butted almost directly against the steep hill Finn had just slid down. There were no windows on this wall, and it was probably just as well that there weren’t. There wasn’t anything to out at but the hillside less than an inch from the building. Finn peered curiously under the eaves of the roof. There was a narrow crack between the wall and the underside of the roof that leaked the smell of smoke and a little bit of orange light into the early morning darkness. The crack was probably for ventilation. It wasn’t even close to big enough to squeeze through, though. Finn pushed curiously at the long flat boards making up the underside of the roof and found they had some give. She might be able to heave them loose if she used her full strength, but that would surely alert anyone that was inside. She made note of the possibility, but left it alone and moved on to the side of the cabin closest to Adi. From afar, Adi could likely just make out Finn’s pale back moving among the trees from the safety of her hiding place.

This side of the cabin was shorter than the back and also had no windows. The hill sloped sharply away from the back, and the front of the cabin was held up with straight logs framed up underneath. Curious, Finn ducked underneath the cabin once the gap was wide enough to admit her. The dirt beneath her feet changed in quality. It was wetter and softer, pure loam with fewer sticks and leaves to crunch, protected as it was by the cabin above. The smell of damp rotting earth and the sharp metal tang of animal blood was strong underneath the cabin. There was some split firewood stored there in the smallest highest part under the cabin, but it must have been long forgotten there, the wood having soaked up the dampness and rotted almost completely to mulch.

Looking up, Finn saw that someone had insulated the bottom of the log cabin, which was a shame. Finn was hoping she might get a hint to whether the cabin was empty based on the light coming through the floorboards. But, the dirty straw sticking out from between the rotting canvas strapped along the bottom of the building, just inches from Finn's head, made that an impossibility.

Finn carefully inched forward, taking stock of her surroundings. She tried to keep the wooden staircase that led to the front door between her and the clearing, peeking around it every few steps to make sure the clearing was still empty. Soon, she was crouching directly below the stairs themselves, the stinking deer carcasses hanging ominously to her left and faintly twisting in every breath of the wind.

Deciding that, so far as she could tell, entering through the front door was her only option, Finn quickly jumped up onto the stairs from the side. Her vertical jump was nothing to sneeze at, so she was able to jump up and grab the lip of the uppermost step with her fingertips and haul herself up under the handrail to crouch on the cabin’s front stoop.

The door was plain wood with a simple rope pull to open it. Looking at the hinges, it looked like it opened inward. Finn held very still and quiet and listened for any sounds coming from the other side of the door. All she could hear was the very faint crackling of a low fire. There were no sounds of movement, human or otherwise, that she could detect. That didn’t mean that no one was inside, just that if there were, they weren’t moving around enough for her to hear them.

As slowly and quietly as she could manage, Finn pressed on the door, and it popped loose from its jam with a small sound that seemed incredibly loud to her straining ears. She waited, expecting to hear some movement from the other side, but there was nothing. Still maintaining her caution, Finn pressed the door slowly open, until it hung wide on its hinges.