He hopes he's right about the kids being alive. "Odd how?"

"- Wasn't that clear, but...not totally right in the head? And they said strange things happened around her." 

"Could she have had Gifts coming in? With nobody to tell her what was going on or teach her control it might have looked like that."

"Huh. Yes, I'd wondered that a little." 

Herald Jores' Companion stops walking, and Jores points. "Here, that's where they found one of the bodies. More than a week ago, but there might still be magical traces of what happened?" 

"I'll take a look." He opens up his Mage-sight and stares at the area. The one good thing about blood magic is that it's hard to hide.

The nearby wrongbad feeling is unmistakeable. 

- and beyond it, something else. The broader pattern of ley-lines nearby also feels off, somehow warped out of shape. 

"Definitely blood magic," he says, swallowing against the wave of revulsion. "And . . . something weird is going on with the ley lines, it's like they've been--pulled out of shape. Have you heard of that happening before?"

Herald Jores gives him a blank look. "I don't have the slightest idea what that means. Some sort of mage-thing?" 

:Look further out, Chosen: Yfandes suggests, watching through his Othersenses. :It's some sort of distortion, but I think it might not be from the blood-magic here: 

He turns his head, scanning a larger bit of forest. The trees impede his Othersenses less than they do his eyes.

Further out, the leylines seem almost stretched, pulled towards something, like a piece of cloth with a heavy weight on it. And at the centre of the distortion…an odd blankness.

It's a little reminiscent of ley-lines near the Vale back in k'Treva, tugged by the powerful magic of the Heartstone inside. And even more like the ambient magic around a ruined stone fortress that he and Starwind once cleared out, which Starwind claimed must have belonged to a bloodpath mage. 

". . . I think I found their base." He points. "Or at least somewhere they've been doing a lot of blood-magic. About half a mile that way."

Herald Jores and the Guard are both looking at him expectantly. 

"...What, er, should we do?" Herald Jores says a moment later. 

Why are you asking me, he wants to say. "Um. We could. I could Farsee it and check if it's really their base and whether they're still there?" That's not really a plan, but it's at least a response; he starts doing it, aiming his Farsight at a point between him and the center of the distortion and moving out along that line, looking for any buildings or signs of human presence.

Forest, forest, forest - and then he's Looking at a cluster of huts, rough timber and thatched roofs. Scruffy horses grazing in a crude pen, the carcass of a deer strung up from a tree. More huts further off, on the side of a tiny creek, and two men perched on a log overlooking the water, one of them cleaning a boiled-leather armour chest-piece, the other drinking something from a waterskin.

"Definitely something there . . ." he mutters. What's in the huts? Biggest first.

A girl! She looks eleven or twelve, and reasonably healthy enough except for a few bruises. Also she's tied up on a dirty cot and her eyes are wide with terror. 

Abras startles out of the Farsight. "Found at least one of the kids, maybe the most recent one. She's alive. How do we get her out?"

Herald Jores and the Guard glance at each other. 

"We should get more people here," Jores says after a moment. "And then - make a plan and go in, I guess. What kind of defences do they have - can you tell how many mages...?" 

"I'll check." He pulls up his Farsight again and starts going through the huts systematically, counting prisoners and people who seem to be there willingly and reporting the results. "I think we need to take them by surprise. They have hostages, and we know they're willing to kill for power."

There are at least five or six children, maybe more, the lighting in most of the cabins isn't great. The others are mostly in visibly worse shape than the girl he saw first. Abras can eventually spot nearly twenty men, in cabins or at work in the camp, in mismatched leather armour and ratty clothing. 

Herald Jores nods, seriously, and then quietly instructs the guard to ride back to the town and request help, 'everyone they can spare.' 

"I can't tell which ones are the mages, but if we can somehow separate the kids from everyone else before they let spooked enough to start killing them--?"

"That makes sense. So we should...sneak up? Reckon they have any kind of wards that'd see us coming?" 

"We might be able to see their wards from farther out than the wards can see us, if they're not expecting Mage opposition. But I don't want to bet too much on that. Could we do some kind of distraction, lure one or two out and capture them and ask them about the rest under Truth Spell?"

"That's not a bad idea! Got any ideas for what the distraction could be?"