Now we get into the action I wewrey wewry wanna wight! 
Bon apetite!
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Chapter 9: Escape to Rescue
The darkness flickered. Moments before it had seemed absolute—now it was disturbed by something. The unease it felt angered the darkness; it roiled angrily, seeking to extinguish the source of the flicker that had disrupted its reign.
But the more it lashed out, the more the darkness flickered. More cracks of light shone through the blackness, and finally bright white light shattered the oppressive reign of shadow.
Voices crashed down on her all at once, though they were only of a level that could compete with the babbling of a tiny brook. Candlelight stopped at her eyelids, turning her vision a deep shade of red. She was lying on something soft, her head pillowed comfortably on similar material. The bandage on her arm had been changed sometime earlier.
Vanessa sat up quickly, then moaned and thought better of it when her head reeled with the movement.
“Ah, you’re awake,” she heard someone say. A gentle but firm and authoritative hand pushed the girl back against the mattress on which she lay.
“Wha’ ‘appened?” the girl asked groggily, blinking furiously to wake herself up.
The woman shook her head. “We don’t know. A group of soldiers were just going out on the first patrol when they found you unconscious on Seril.”
She put her hands over her face wearily, recalling the disastrous ride through the woods. ‘The dragoon was looking for me…of course it would be monitoring my movements as soon as he found out where I was,’ she figured. Vanessa felt completely stupid now; riding alone through the woods with sunset pending was a fool-hardy proposition at best—and that was while ignoring the fact she was wanted by evil for helping the Hero of Time. ‘But no—I had to go dashing into the forest all by myself and get caught. If it wasn’t for Teresa, I wouldn’t be anywhere near here right now.
‘Speaking of which…where is here?’ The girl voiced her question to the woman still standing beside her bed, though it came out more as a jumbled murmur than anything. Her head was aching violently; when she reached a hand to the hair on the back of her head, she felt a heavy lump. A sticky, congealed substance—probably blood—covered it.
“You’re in the infirmary, dear,” the woman—whom she now recognized to be her mother—informed her. “The healers got you patched up as best they could.”
“Then why is this lump on my head not bandaged?” Vanessa asked, finally managing to draw in enough breath to speak above a whisper.
Her mother shifted uncomfortably, twisting her apron as if wringing it out like a drenched towel. “You wouldn’t let them, to put it simply.”
Vanessa scowled, but before she could retort one of the healers bustled over. He and her mother exchanged a few words before the woman stepped to the side.
“Hullo—nice to see you something more than semiconscious,” he greeted, appearing somewhat edgy. A small, nervous smile twitched his lip, which Vanessa noticed had recently been split by an attack of some sort. “Please promise you’ll hold still this time? We absolutely must get that head bandaged.”
It took all of five minutes for Vanessa’s mother to shoo the visitors and others milling around out the door and for the healer to wrap a bandage and poultice-slathered cloth securely around her head wound. As soon as the man had left, the girl sighed irritably, put her elbows on drawn-up knees, and supported her chin with cupped palms. When her mother remained in the room but didn’t say anything, she frowned more deeply and said, “Let me guess—the healers don’t want me doing anything too demanding, right?”
The woman’s mouth twitched in a tiny smile. “I think they’re a little worried about that lump, is all.”
Vanessa snorted. “It’s not that bad.”
“Either way, you’ll be spending a lot of time in here,” her mother said.
“Being bored out of my mind, of course,” the girl grumbled.
Her mother’s smile widened subtly. “Then you won’t mind watching Soran for me, will you? If you need material to keep him occupied, just ask.” Before Vanessa could even try to form an objection—all she needed was a little kid traipsing around when she had things to do!—the woman had stepped through the infirmary door and the lock clicked shut.
The girl moaned again and hung her head, running her hands through her tangled hair. She sighed and flopped back against the cushions behind her back, staring at the dark ceiling as she contemplated her toddler brother. ‘My throat’s going to be sore halfway through tomorrow with storytelling if he doesn’t bring a ball or something with him,’ she lamented.
Her eyes widened when a thought struck her as suddenly as lightning.
One of her earlier conclusions after finding Teresa had been that she needed to learn more about her enemy. Few reasons, if any, for the sudden activity had turned up in her questing through the dusty parchment at the Town Hall. Even fewer had presented themselves in her questioning of various officials.
If she was to find anything that would remotely explain the sudden stirrings of evil, she should go to the source of its agitation:
The Hero of Time.
Where was the best place to get information on him—other than from himself?
The legends talking about the Hero, of course.
Vanessa smiled a feral grin.
Her mother had presented the perfect opportunity for her to learn more about her enemy. How delightful.
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Two days later, Vanessa began to move her plan forward. When the girl’s mother came back to the infirmary that evening to take her toddler brother home, Vanessa requested that her mother tell them both a story about the Hero of Time. The girl was greatly rewarded by the information she gleaned, and the woman didn’t appear the least bit suspicious.
Apparently, according to the legend which she told the children tonight, the Hero of Time had been given his particular title with the nature of his travels in mind. Ever since the power-hungry Gerudo named Ganondorf had attacked Hyrule centuries ago, Link had begun bouncing through time to battle him. His and his enemy’s battles recurred every generation with a darkness that sought to strangulate Hyrule’s common populace so they could not fight back. A ray of hope in the form of the boy’s continual resistance to any and all defeat at the hands of evil always shone through the darkness, though.
“I suppose one good thing has come of this predicament—because of the constant threat of invasion, Hyrule is more united than any known country. Its people have also become very proficient with weaponry of all sorts,” her mother commented when she had finished the tale. Soran had fallen asleep in her lap; the woman now spoke freely with her daughter, sure that the two wouldn’t be disturbed by unintelligible questions.
Vanessa’s lip twitched with a tiny smile. “If what I’ve seen of the Hero’s swordplay is any indication, you’re right on that matter.”
The woman eyed her with a stern look. “Vanessa, I know what you’re thinking, and I can’t let you do it.”
“What?” The girl blinked, confused by the sudden change of topic.
“My grandmother once did the same thing, dear, when she was young,” her mother explained. “It only makes sense that you feel the same way she did, since you share her blood.”
“What are you talking about?” Vanessa protested, still puzzled. What did her grandmother and Vanessa’s current thoughts have anything to do with the story she had just been told?
Then, suddenly, she remembered a story the woman had told her once when she was little. She had said that Vanessa’s great-grandmother—full of guilt for not being more supportive of her fiancé—had rescued her husband-to-be from certain death in the work camps that had slaved over Ambi’s Tower. That had been in the same age as when the sorceress Veran and then Link had traveled to in their less-recent battle for control of Labrynna, ironically.
Vanessa snorted, feigning offense. “You seriously think that I’d go by myself to Northern Castle and try to free Link, with the dragoon after me and all the monster activity?” She gestured to the bandages on her head. “And with this lump on my skull? I’m not that stupid, Mother, nor have my recent falls addled my wits.”
The woman’s gaze bored into her daughter’s defiant brown eyes, eventually making the girl uneasy. “Just please be careful. Don’t do anything out of your league, especially before you’re fully healed. Be easy and play it safe.” She stood, carefully shifting the sleeping Soran in her arms, and bent down to place a kiss on the girl’s forehead. “Now get some sleep. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
After the door had closed and her mother’s footsteps receded into nothing, Vanessa swung her legs out from under the sheets and lightly trotted over to the window at the end of the eerily empty rows of cots. Beyond the aperture, the faint light of a waning gibbous moon spilled lazily over the west end of Rolling Ridge’s foothills, highlighting the rhythmic rise and fall of trees and rocks in a milky pallor. Though the view would have been soothing to the girl on any other night, she scowled furiously as she realized that she couldn’t see the eastern end of the mountains where Northern Castle was supposed to be.
Vanessa closed her eyes and relaxed her body, reaching out with her mind for Teresa. She flew past the village, through the northern portion of Lynna Forest—the dragon’s favorite haunt—and circled back around to the northwest edge of town before finally spotting a large, dimly reptilian shape pacing through the woods in a southerly direction. With a tiny smile, she reached out and tapped lightly on the dragon’s mind.
“Ter? What are you doing?” the girl asked, a little perplexed about why she would be all the way out there at this time of night.
The dragon stopped beside an enormous oak to speak with her better. Vanessa caught an impression of herself, Seril, supplies, rations, and a scene of all of it put together and moving northeast in the dragon’s mind, but waited for Teresa to grasp the words needed to clarify the images before she asked questions.
“You say need to save person held in castle. Believe now is right to go. I find Seril and told him to wait in woods when you tell us we leaving. Now I hunt for us so we to eat when move,” she explained in a somewhat jerky manner.
Vanessa grinned at the dragon’s jumbled-up words and tenses of her verbs, feeling her mood lighten. The girl practically purred her satisfaction with and gratitude for the dragon's action before answering, “Not tonight, precious. Wait one more day.” She grinned. “And fix your grammar, please—we’ll work on that before we leave.”
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Corporal Jennifer Farynson felt herself beginning to droop at her post wearily; the woman angrily pinched herself to stay awake. The pain did little to actually wake her up—she’d need a good mug of ale to do that—but it was better than nothing.
“Oie, i’s gonna b’a long un tonig’, Jen,” her fellow guardsman Tanen grumbled, leaning on his spear. “Reckon I’ll b’sleepin’ th’ ‘ole day t‘morrow.” The older man attempted a chuckle, but it morphed into a yawn.
Jen tuned him out as he muttered something about being too old for a job like theirs and focused her attention back on scanning the landscape around them. The pair were stationed high in a tree on the fourth wood-plank platform in a series of similarly-occupied stands running around the whole village. They had only been installed a little over two months ago now, but were weathering nicely and didn’t creak as the woman shifted her cramped weight onto her other foot.
It was a good thing these platforms had been built when they had—if it hadn’t been for the soldiers stationed in them, that girl would never had been found. The more Jen thought about it, the more she was sure it was also a miracle that the teen had stayed on her horse. When the soldiers on watch that night had brought her to the healers to be examined, they had found the nastiest of blood-caked cuts just beginning to swell up on the back of her head. They also discovered an arrow puncture beneath the bandages on the girl’s shoulder.
Jen could only shake her head with wonder that the girl had survived the encounter with whatever had attacked her—then remember that the only thing likely to attack a Hylian in these parts was a monster. In the three days since the girl had, she’d redoubled her vigilance while on guard duty.
The woman was jerked out of her thoughts when a tiny motion in the corner of her eye caught her attention. Her head instantly swiveled in that direction like a predator that had spotted prey and her fingers twitched around the grip of her bow. She stared at the spot fixedly, watching for another sign of life, and was quickly rewarded. Something white flashed through the tiniest opening in the foliage and snorted once.
Tanen eyed her questioningly. Jen nodded curtly, held up a finger, and pointed from herself to the ground to where she had seen the creature. The man nodded; they traded weapons before the woman slid down a polished wood poll and dropped lightly to the ground. She stepped carefully through the high grass of the forest meadow at the edge of which their platform’s tree stood and scanned the tree-line for potential threats. When none appeared, the woman stepped quietly through the trees and into a tiny glen ten paces farther into the forest.
Jen stopped abruptly, perplexed, when she came face-to-face with a white horse. It snorted, shook its mane out, and returned to grazing without another thought for her. The soldier noted it was tacked but wore a rope hackamore instead of the leather bridle favored by Lynna’s cavalry. She tried to place the horse but came up empty-handed—the only white horse she could remember seeing was the General’s. If she remembered correctly, though, he had given away the stallion.
Then, all of a sudden, she recalled to whom Zirren had given that horse.
She cursed and whirled around, prepared to stalk back into the clearing and raise a ruckus, but was stopped short by a person standing in her way.
Vanessa resisted the urge to smile. The woman-soldier’s expression was caught between a scowl and a look of surprise—it was vaguely amusing.
“What are you doing out of the infirmary?!” the soldier hissed accusingly.
Her inclination to smile disappeared. “There’s things I have to do that no wound—and certainly no militia-woman—can stop me from finishing. I would greatly appreciate it if you’d let me go now, since you’ve been so kind as to lead me to my horse.”
A muscle in the soldier’s face twitched, though whether with amusement or anger she couldn’t tell. “I really should call the rest of the guardsmen down on you,” she commented evenly.
“And you would be right in doing that,” Vanessa agreed. This seemed to take the woman off-guard, for she didn’t have another witty comeback ready. The girl took advantage of her opening and continued, “Or you could be the loyal soldier hailed as the one to turn the tables in favor of good over evil. You see, I’m going to find the Hero and bring him back.”
This news shook the woman even more badly then Vanessa’s lack of resistance to her presence. “You what?” she exclaimed hoarsely.
Vanessa grinned. “I’m going to stick my hand in a wasp’s nest and steal honey without getting a single sting. If you want, you can come with me—I’d greatly appreciate the help, seeing as it’ll be rather difficult for a girl and an inexperienced dragon to sneak into Northern Castle alone.”
The woman spluttered. “A-a-a—a dragon? Don’t tell me you’ve been in league with that—that evil thing the whole time?!”
She hid a flinch—she had been afraid, ever since Teresa convinced her to ask the soldier for help, that this would happen. Someone fool had undoubtedly mislabeled the dragoon as a lesser dragon, and now the whole town had caught on the idea. The girl sighed.
“No, you’re thinking of the dragoon that—” Vanessa bit her lip before she spoke about the ill-fated mission of the past. “The dragoon is roosting in Northern Castle at the behest of evil. This is where I think the Hero is now, and my dragon and I are going to go rescue him.”
“How’d you get a dragon, then, if it not this…dragoon?” the soldier questioned skeptically.
Vanessa had been delayed long enough; in the back of her mind, Teresa was urging her to get going. Images of what the dragon was seeing flitted around the edge of her awareness—the soldiers that were supposed to replace the current sentries were stirring, and one of them was bound to check in on the infirmary. “Are you coming or are you not?” the girl snapped, sidestepping the frozen soldier to snatch Seril’s head up from the lush grass of the glen.
The woman answered as Vanessa was about to throw her leg over the horse’s back: “I don’t have a horse. How am I supposed to keep up?”
It was the girl’s turn to freeze. That was definitely a dilemma; she didn’t have time to go back for another horse, even if the soldier owned one herself and it was in the stables.
Finally, she had an idea.
“Go back to your post, and after you ‘turn in’ for the night, grab a horse from the public stable and meet me on the other side of the hill in that direction.” The girl pointed. “You can’t miss it, and even if you do I can find you pretty easily.” Vanessa didn’t wait for the soldier to answer or protest, instead swinging into the saddle and turning Seril into an enlarged deer trail.
The doubts began assaulting Vanessa after she had left the thick trees for another little meadow. Would the soldier actually meet her alone? Or would she be raising the alarm right now and mounting a cavalry expedition to retrieve her? The militia themselves probably wouldn’t bother with a renegade citizen on their own, but Vanessa knew the persuasive powers of her mother’s tongue. She could easily convince the mayor to order the soldiers after her daughter and have her put in protective custody.
She touched Teresa’s mind briefly for an update—luckily, she could have her fears confirmed or nullified in advance, before any disciplinary action would be taken. “Ter? Report?”
The dragon was smug. “Sentries have changed.” There was a moment of silence, then, “She is leaving the barracks for the stable. She look around for anyone who she not want seeing her.”
Vanessa nodded and mentally acknowledged the information. “Good. Tell me when she leaves—if anyone tries to stop her, do the best you can to get them away.” The girl hastily clarified the order when she felt the dragon grinning viciously. “Subtlety, Ter—be quiet about it!”
It seemed forever, waiting at the edges of the trees where light and shadow converged. The moon blinked down sleepily at her as dark grey clouds scuttled across the even-darker sky. A tiny breeze ruffled the quiet trees around her; an owl hooted quietly in the distance.
A snapped twig startled Vanessa from where she was sitting against a tree, Seril’s reins in the crook of her arm. The horse’s head jerked from where he was grazing to look behind him, ears pricked alertly.
The soldier stepped from the trees, a chestnut mare’s reins in her hand. “Th’ name’s Jen,” she said simply.
Vanessa smiled.
She had found someone willing to help her in her adventures at last.
) so you can analyse my new style and tell me if you think I should go back and rewrite or just continue with how I'm moving this draft forward. Reason being, I feel the continuity's a little messed up, especially...well, I'll talk about that that the end. If I mention it now, it'll give away the big twist in this chappie, hehe. 
I have read the first chapter and am reviewing that now before moving to the next, and I really like it so far! I certainly want to know what that gust of wind was- something evil no doubt 
Now I shall proceed to review the first piece in my overly-picky-ninja-style-mode 
I think you could also add a bit more to 'before she had to decide', just to make it clearer what she is deciding on, maybe something like 'whether to flee of stand her ground'. 
I think you could always rephrase it to something like 'you probably know her parents, don't you?' there are a number of ways it could be phrased but it's up to of course
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