Even so they did, and then the wood-wife kissed them both and said: Now do I deem you earth’s very children and mine, and this desire of yours is good, and it shall be done if I may bring it about; yet therein the valiance and wisdom of you both may well be tried. For this have I found out by my messengers and others, that your friends are alive, all of them; and they have thought of you in their inmost hearts, and have long determined that they must needs go seek you if they are to live lives happy and worthy. Furthermore, their quest hath drawn them hither to Evilshaw (nor say I that I have been nothing therein), and they are even now in the wood. But ye shall know that peril encompasses them; for they fare but a few, and of those few be there two traitors who are minded to deliver them to the men of the Red Company, unto whom three women as fair as your she-friends were a prize indeed. Wherefore the Red Folk are dogging them, and will fall upon them when they find the occasion. But I shall see to it that the occasion shall be in time and place where they shall not be unholpen. Now what ye have to do for your parts, is to waylay the waylayers, and keep watch and ward anigh the road they must needs take, and to fall on when need is. But this again I shall see to, that your onset fail not. But now ye may say: Since thou art mighty, why shouldst not thou thyself take our friends out of the hands of these accursed, as thou couldst well do, and we to take no part therein? My friends, this might indeed well be; but thou, Birdalone, hast told me the whole tale, and how that there be wrongs to be forgiven which cannot be made right, and past kindness to be quickened again, and coldness to be kindled into love, and estrangement into familiar friendship; and meseems that the sight of your bodies and your hands made manifest to the eyes of them may do somewhat herein. Yet if otherwise ye think, then so let it be, and go ye back to the House under the Wood, and in three days’ time I will bring you your friends all safe and sound. Now they both said that they would not for aught that they should have no hand in the deliverance of them; so the wood-wife said: Come with me, and I shall lead you to the place of your ambush. Then all they went on together, and fared a long way west, and toward the place where erst they two had found Arthur; and at last, two hours before sunset, they came to where was a glade or way between the thickets, which was as it were a little beaten by the goings of man-folk. And the wood-wife did them to wit, that the evil folk aforesaid had so used it and beaten it, that it might just look as if folk were wont to pass that way, whereas it was not very far from their chiefest haunt and stronghold. A little on the north side of this half-blind way, and some ten yards through the thicket, the ground fell away into a little dale, the bottom whereof was plain and well grassed, and watered by a brook.