by Thomas Head
So, we did.
A wind rustled through the foliage as we banked that night, and when I came back to our little camp with a deer already skinned, I saw Cullie laugh as though I had brought him a basket of toys.
“Uncle Fie! Where did you find a deer without its skin?” he asked, then laughed again uproariously.
And I knew, or rather felt, two things then: My earlier suspicions were right, that Halvgar’s boy was a mage, a secret my old friend had not even revealed to me, and I might have saved his life, but I could not have done so if the boy had not been born with an unnatural strengths and magic that was unique to his kind.
The second thing was this: I loved this little lad. I loved him as surely as the cold wind that blew across the grass, as surely as the smell of a late spring snow in the wild air, and as surely as his little outstretched, star-shaped hands that reached up to me to hug my neck.
Chapter 40
For almost two weeks we stayed at yet another abandoned elf camp. It was a small place. It sat tucked away were some white-barked birches gave way to a forest of ferns, which concealed us in their deep foliage. The camp was not a hundred feet away from the river, though you’d never see it from the bank. Elves were masters as such things. I had only stumbled upon it by accident during my hunt. Poles were up for skin tents, and where the skins were taken down I put up a lashing of fern leaves. Cullie and I lounged around the place in lazy attitudes, making long days of simply relaxing by the fire. We ate three meals a day out of that deer for two solid weeks. We told stories. We laughed. We never talked about his father or his mother.
“Follow me, little fellow,” I commanded one day. We had been lounging all morning, and we had eaten well. It was already afternoon before we moved at all. We gathered our meager possessions, along with a few strips of smoked venison.
And we left out for the river, and I tried to think of what I’d say to Dhal.
Which was useless.
I stepped out on low rise of stone that was just high enough to see the river—and that’s when I saw something that shocked my already shaken mind.
Dhal.
It was Dhal.
She was rowing in a small elvish canoe, looking this way and that. And though it is perhaps a cliché to say that I rubbed my eyes and looked again, that is precisely what I did, then I did I yet again, for I could no more dispel the notion of her as a phantom than I could the notion that my senses had somehow gone awry of themselves.
“Dhal!” I cried out.
She tilted her head, as if she didn’t trust her senses, either.
“Dhal!” I bellowed, at which she gave such a start that she overturned her little vessel and went splashing about in the river, looking.
Chapter 41
“Gratitude is measured in blood and time. Never in gold.”
–Dwarven wisdom
Deep inside me was a merriment that stretched as wide as the land itself. The gloom of the trek lifted.
I paused, just briefly, looking down at the little face that smiled back up at me.
Cullie made a flopping motion toward her with his hand.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes! Go help her, Uncle!”
Winding down to the curve of the river, I called out her name.
She turned to me, shivering from the cold water. As she stared toward me, I shuddered, and I wish I could say that this new feeling down my back was awe and wonder, but it was just simple fear, for in those first instants she stared, Dhal did not seem to recognize me. Indeed, I had ended a dragon that had ended the fiercest dwarves in Yrkland, I had wrecked a drake, and torn apart savage goblins in a manner befitting their own. But I had never been more terrified than I was at that moment by damn — she seemed utterly confused as she looked at me.
All around her was the dip and lee of the water’s path, the roar of it, the chill and endless movement of all the cosmos, and it was all scrunched into a peculiar moment stillness, like that of a giant tree, just before it falls.
Then, it happened.
She smiled.
* * *
With a smile on my face, I waded out to her and hugged her. Kissing her, I felt blessed beyond words. But good thundering hell if that water wasn’t frigid. It was so cold that the practical part of my mind took over.
“Woo! Let me build you a fire.”
Dhal squinted.
“We can’t,” she said.
“Why?”
Dhal made an exasperated sound. She put her arms around herself and looked down in the blackness of a hole the vessel had sunk into. Then she reached out and turned me, and together we looked up stream.
We saw nothing.
“Dwarven rangers, “ she said. “They’re but a few miles behind.”
“Rangers?”
“Aye, and they’re the best in Yrkland, sent been sent by the Dwarf-King himself.”
“Coming for us?”
“Well, for the child. Your old friend Gilli had much to say about your adventures to the traveling troupe of dancing dwarf maids. I imagine, in the end, he thought they were whores of some sort, but they worked for King Bhiers, you know. The only reason they were there was so that he might hunt in silence in the forests north our little burg.”
“I don’t understand…” I said, but halted, for I suspected I already did. Dwarven mages were enormously powerful beings, albeit a strange and difficult power to understand. I once heard it explained like this: Just as cold might freeze water, turning it from one form to another without changing it fundamentally, so too can the wizard affect air; they can halt arrows, make a sword crash against the “frozen air”, and even immobilize entire troops of an enemy’s ranks. I heard other refer to “stopping light” or “thickening the ether”, but I believe they all had the same concept in mind.
“They learned, handsome, that the dragon made away with a child.”
“Which told him he was a wizard.”
“Aye. He’s already sent a small troupe of the maids for him. I take it they failed,” she said, smiling as little Cullfor approached.
“So now,” I said, speaking ambiguously now for Cullfor’s sake, “the old hunter himself comes for the wizard.”
She understood the way I was speaking and returned my words in kind as stepped out of the water and scooped him up in a hug.
“No,” she said, turning to me. “Bhiers himself is a wizard. He comes for the wizard’s blood.”
The bastard wants no rivals to the throne.
“We need to head east, through Delmark.”
“Surely he won’t follow us too far,” she said.
“You presume his ambitions are lesser than his malice. I hope you are right.”
Chapter 42
With my lips still fixed from the cold of the water, I kissed her forehead, and as we all three left the riverside, we paused for a moment in the dimming afternoon light. I had always sensed that, in life, there were very few people comfortable with silence, and I was pleased to discover that Dhal was among them. For a moment longer, she allowed me to just soak in the sight of her, and I found I was rapidly taking in her appearance again, and just as rapidly growing fond of it.
She had stepped back toward the river, staring into the strange little hole, in which her tiny boat had sunk.
“We’ll need to cross the river,” I said.
“Aye. And we may need the money that sunk with my canoe. But…”
“Yes?”
“I don’t know. Do you see something?”
“Where?”
“In there. In the hole.”
I looked and saw that there was all small torrent of eels swimming about the little vessel. I chuckled.
“My kind of serpents,” I said, and dived in, regretting it instantly.
The eels scattered, but it was deeper than I had imagined, tighter and darker, too. I tugged on the canoe, and was only just able to move it enough to see two canvas packs underneath. By pulling myself down along the boat, I gathe
red them up easily enough, and emerged with them, shivering.
“Oh!” she said, smiling. “Fantastic!”
And just as a single twig of hay can break the packhorse’s back, the smile a of a pretty woman can reinvigorate a soul with all the verve and strength of an old hero.
“Cullie, come closer, my lad. Hop on your old uncle’s shoulder. You too, Dhal.”
“Both of us?” Dhal asked. “Come now, I think I’m entitled to keep the secret of my weight.”
“It’s not you I’m worried about, but that strapping young lad, Cullie.”
She knew I had said in jest, of course, but she looked doubtful.
Cullie pulled at her waist. “He can do it,” he said.
She glanced at me with touch of playful scorn, then lay herself stomach-down across my shoulder. There was a moment of doubt on my part, and I hurried to get across before I started shaking with the strain.
Once across, I eased them down into some tall grasses on the bank.
“Again?” Cullie asked.
“Not on your life, big fellow.”
He gave an amused snort and shook his head.
“Now stay here,” I told him, “Keep a lookout while I go back and get our supplies.”
He nodded, rolling his eyes at Dhal, who giggled a bit, then gave him a stern shake of her finger.
I stared downriver as I crossed, making a point to look for any flushed game or birds rising in the distance. I saw none, as luck would have it. I daresay I felt good, perhaps dangerously good, as I took a lesson from the blustery, dwarven uncle who had all but raised me—I wrote the king a note in the sandbar.
It was a warning.
A forewarning.
But as I crossed back over and handed the gear up to Dhal, my vague panic grew more distinct.
I pulled myself up out the water, and tried not to dwell on it.
Then we set out, briskly.
* * *
Nearing dusk, we stepped upward through a tangle of maple, moving slowly toward the sound of more water. We traced uphill, close to a smallish hilltop, where we discovered a spring. The grass was cropped at the pool’s edge, the work of deer or wild goats. The spring sent a pair streams down a crevice of mossy wood and then back underground. There was a smell in the air like jasmine.
We sat , resting our sore feet in the streams. Dhal unclasped her hooded cape from around her shoulders. She slid it off, then extended it to Cullfor. The wind had picked up, and the slow-growing shadows gathered a shocking cool.
He grabbed the cape and looked down into the pool, staring at the moon reflected in it. Tying the cape around his shoulders, he thanked her.
I could not say what it was I found soothing about this, but while I could still sleep for a month, my body and mind felt suddenly better. Which isn’t to say I felt fine. My mouth had a burnished metal taste in it. I wondered, briefly, if I was getting sick, for in truth any adventure offers you a thousand ways to die. Dragons just happened to be among the quickest.
Dhal looked at me, then stood. Trekking deep into the small mossy hollow, she eyed me to follow her.
I went, slowly. When I paused, I looked back at Cullie. He was already falling asleep. Or at least he was pretending to. I looked at her while she strung the length of herself alongside a fallen log. It was not like reclining, more like she was placing herself there. There was something curiously engaging about her stillness. She had a certain dexterity in her lack of motion, folded and pleated as if tossed casually to the ground. But from the confusion of angles something perfect had emerged, like a piece of art.
She kept staring, and I was unable to break from her look—besides, there was no energy left in me for decorum and decency. I was so sleepy, and she was like the leafy edges of a dream, and it felt like something cracked inside my skull when she patted the ground beside her.
As I laid myself next to her, she whispered in my ear. “We may have to drink a drop or two of his blood,”
After another breath, the words hit me. One moment, I thought she wanted to kiss me, then next, she was telling me we might have to drink of drop or two of Cullfor’s blood.
I suppose she did her best not to look amused at the look on my face.
“Only a drop each,” she added.
This might have been some dwarven custom she had picked up. It might have been old human superstition I’d never heard about wizards. I had no idea. I put my arm around her, and I called Cullie to us.
Without discussing the nonsense any further, we slept.
* * *
I stirred at some point in the night, trying to pull some meaning out of a dream about blood, springing up out of the ground around us. Very soon after, I gave up. Dhal’s perfection had collapsed into something even more endearing and soft. Her face was bunched and snoring. A portion of skin was exposed and red against the log in front of her, but damn if I’d seen anything prettier in this life.
Shifting onto my side in the blankets, I detached myself from a tangle of her sweaty hair. Then she nuzzled closely again. I realized she smelled of new, green berries, and a little like jasmine.
I tried to go back to sleep, but beside me, Cullie woke with a start. He breathed in a high-pitched gasp like the call of a bird.
“What the icy hell?” Dhal said, half-dazed.
Cullfor’s breath was pushing his heart back down when he was seized on the neck. Dhal pulled his face toward hers and looked at him with a bulging, bloodshot eye. I grew tense for a moment, for one doesn’t know what a body can do in the half-dream state we sometimes wake in. But she merely smiled.
Cullie stared, smiling back. He pried loose of her grip.
She shook her head.
When she had fully emerged from her sleep, I ventured to kiss her mouth. When she offered no protest, I kissed her neck and the lobes of her cold ears. When I felt myself needing to do more, I paused.
I kissed her between the eyes, then stood. The ground was frosty, as if it had transformed into a placid ocean of sparkles. It dazzled the eye in spite of the low morning light.
I stretched. When Dhal emerged more fully into the waking world, she rose. She was beaming, an elegant and sure expression on her. Immediately, she knelt and breathed a small prayer under her breath.
Once we woke Cullie, we got moving. And we moved swiftly.
Chapter 43
A more desolate existence than a life in the Fell-Riding would be difficult to imagine. Trapped in these miserable southern wilds, hundreds of miles from a friendly face, the only other voices we heard that morning were the wild, distant orgies of the savage goblins, or grunts of wood trolls in the distance.
I had been on quite an adventure, but I was still easily filled with profound pity for myself at times. As we traveled, the peach line of dawn only just now radiant and soft ahead us, I wondered at the situation in which I had somehow gotten myself. Just weeks ago, I was drinking in my favorite tavern, waiting for my friend. I had everything in life and yet nothing to lose. And now, here I was, with the two people most dear to me in the world, trying to outrun the Dwarf-King of Yrkland himself.
Many and strange are the turns a life can take.
I shook my head, at nothing.
* * *
We trekked an eastbound path to who-knows-where, where we veered northeasterly. The only sound was the thin, crystalline patina of spring snow, crisp under out boots. At noon, we went carefully down a grassy stretch, and at the bottom of a long hill, I found we were approaching a placid sheet of water. It was clean, and the water was exploding with last rays of the morning’s sun, splitting with each wave to send a flume of sparkles ripping across it. And there was something else here. As we walked toward the water, the feeling grew. We approached a thin path at its edge.
There was something here.
I looked at the water, at the cool wet mud and green stones of the shore, and then up. I did not care for the look of the hill that rose to our right, for it was steep and long, and further down,
it formed a mile or so of cliffs. All of which seemed like a perfect spot for an ambush from above.
Abruptly, Dhal left our side and approached the water. She bent on both knees and quickly cupped up some water and lapped a delicate drink before sauntering back, quickly.
Did she sense something too?
We looked another moment. Her eyes moved back and forth across the water. She let the sun play on her face, making her all the more beautiful, but the feeling would not go away. As we got moving, she stayed unusually close to my side.
Toward the middle of the small lake, we heard something. We all turned and watched a school of fish scatter and jump.
Dhal stopped.
She shielded her eyes from the sun and stared. Then a sharp roil and fizz erupted from the water. Black humps of thick rubbery skin rose, and they turned. They were gliding toward us. For a second, I confess, there was just shock, and then before I realized it, I was running, struggling to keep up with Cullfor and Dhal.
I heard a wet slapping noise. It grew louder behind him. Then there were more, a great watery herd splashing alongside me. I ran, breathy and tense, then Dhal fell. I went sideways jumping over her, and when I landed, I found myself between her and an oncoming horror.
I was staring at something mustachioed, almost limbless. Thirteen feet long, the beast could have been the mating of a dragon and a whale.
“You two, run!” I squalled.
I fell, then grunted and rolled, scampering to my feet, but I was never upright before the beast began honking playfully, like some perversion of a goose. The eyes glowed dusky ginger against the sun.
