by Gayle Greeno
Hands unsteady, she exhaled slowly through her mouth to center herself, then repositioned the bread, striving to appear natural. Sending her mind spinning out on the danger mode, she searched for Khar. None of the ghatti roamed within her line of vision.
“Here! What?”
“’Ware! Upwind from you. Alert the others!” She toyed with the fire, feeding a few twigs deeper into the center, reaching around the gray-ashed coals at the edge to turn the apples. That gave her an excuse to raise herself off her left knee and bend her right leg under her, ready to spring. One good-sized branch burned well; if she could grab that and thrust....
Jenret’s eyes flew open, but he remained relaxed, one arm curled under his head. He, at least, could see behind her, and she watched to gauge his reaction. Rawn had
’spoken him awake. The only acknowledgment of danger came when his eyes fixed on a spot behind her and to her right. At least she knew which way to pivot. A drop of sweat hung heavy and clammy at her hairline. She could feel it poised, ready to run.
‘Stay still! Coming around!”
A branch cracked in the undergrowth behind her and Jenret threw his blanket aside and sprang up, shirtless, chest bare. With one sweeping arc, his sword whistled free and he was tossing his staff in her direction. She caught it left-handed and whirled, staff in one hand, burning brand in the other. Two ghatti, one striped, one pure ebony, bolted in from opposite directions in a pincer move, their motions a fluid blur. She scanned for danger, eyes desperately raking back and forth, high and . . . low. Relief left her giddy, yet still appalled by what she saw.
Saam crouched low by a tanglewood bush, a limp, bloody rolapin hanging from his mouth. Its long ears draggled against the ground like furred mullein leaves. He growled deep and low in warning, the meaning as clear as if he had snarled, “This is mine!” Rawn and Khar stopped short, then Rawn began a slow advance, belly low, not in subservience, but creeping to the attack.
“Khar! Stop him! Stop them! Talk to Saam, remind him why we’re here!”
Jenret cursed and yelled at Rawn, but Khar had already run ahead, shouldering her way in front of the black ghatt. He stopped, reluctant, holding his ground but not retreating. Khar stood within a leap-length of Saam, and his growl rumbled higher, tenser.
Then the sound ceased and his eyes dulled, his body slackening. Khar raised one foot, then brought it forward, little hesitation steps easing her closer, not slinking but proudly erect. Doyce’s breath caught. He looked so wild! Dropping the rolapin, Saam shook his head vigorously, a look of bemusement on his face. He gazed off slantwise, away from the two ghatti, and licked a paw, then rubbed it against his bloodied muzzle. Khar stepped a few paces nearer, then stopped, waiting for Saam to look at her. When his head-turn acknowledged her, she wheeled back past Rawn, toward Doyce and Jenret. Saam stared down and began to scratch dirt, shreds of dried grass, twigs, over the dead rolapin. Then he followed after Khar, giving Rawn a wide berth and maintaining a respectful distance from the ghatta.
“Saam says he’s sorry.” Khar’s words came with formal stiffness. “He didn’t mean to scare.”
Rawn, usually silent amongst outsiders, spoke. “Well, he did. Did mean to or didn’t mean to—still had the same result. I want him gone.”
Jenret whistled the black ghatt to him and gave his ears a thorough rubbing in hopes of restoring his good humor, but the ghatt pulled back, unmollified. “His sense of purpose wavers. I can follow trail as well as he, maybe better. We don’t need him.”
Saam slumped disconsolately by the fire, near the other four but still at a painfully calculated distance of propriety. Reaching down to give Khar a hug, Doyce whispered, “What are we going to do? Are we losing him, do you think?”
“I don’t know.” Khar’s tail twitched at the tip, irritation showing only there. “I just don’t know. He doesn’t know why either. Something came over him just now, sang in his blood. He feels some things that we can’t. Rawn doesn’t want to believe, but it is so. He is more a ghatt, less a Bondmate, and the gulf grows.”
“But there must be something we can do? Can we trust him?”
“Yes. Stroke him, he feels shameful, disgraced. Breakfast?” The last on a rising, eager note. “Always helps!”
Doyce suspected that breakfast was designed to help Khar and Rawn more than Saam, but she refrained from saying so. A happy ghatt was usually a hungry ghatt, and Saam looked neither. A sharp charcoal scent warned her that her own breakfast scorched, the bread a dark brown on the bottom and the melted cheese running and dripping. At this point, the custard apples bubbled and hissed, ready to explode. “Go wash up and be quick,” she admonished Jenret and hoped he’d obey. She wanted a moment alone with Saam.
The blue-gray ghatt, still scruffy from his ordeals of the past few octs, examined the ground, feigned disinterest, but Doyce could feel his worried yellow eyes following her, just as before they had bored through her with blood lust. “Khar, I want to talk to him alone, don’t translate for him.”
“Don’t know how much he’ll comprehend.”
“I know, but I’ve got to try.” Moving toward the fire, Doyce removed their breakfast, talking softly to herself and, she hoped, to Saam. Ghatti understood verbal speech, or at least more so than most animals, but the special combination of verbal and mental communication afforded them full comprehension. Saam might understand only simple commands and tones of voice, or he might understand more. She had no way of knowing, or of knowing if he could still sense the truth behind her words.
“Saam, beloved ghatt. Saam, beloved Bondmate of my beloved Oriel.” A slight ear twitch and head jerk at the sound of a familiar name, but more so at the sound of Oriel’s. She knelt and stroked his head, her other hand lifting his chin. He flinched, tried to pull back from her touch; the action made tears well in her eyes. Never had he pulled away from her before. “Saam, I love you and I need you. You are good, Saam. Good. And I need you. I need your help so much to find out who hurt Oriel and you, who hurt Asa and Wwar’m and her little ones. You can Seek. You must Seek.” The word made him thrum with nervous energy. “And no more wildness like that, no more! Do you hear me!” She wagged a finger in front of his nose.
Rhythmically stroking the length of his body, she sighed at the thinness, stroking again and again, watching the dead hairs float off into the air. With a ragged breath the ghatt visibly relaxed, eyes half-closing and a wisp of a rough purr breaking and catching in his chest as if it had been too long since he’d tried.
“Poor old Saam, poor old ghatt. But a good ghatt. One of the best. Saam will help his friends Seek.” How much was reaching Saam? No choice but to wait and see, and she prayed that no one’s life depended on it, least of all Saam’s.
“Breakfast ready? I’m starved.” Jenret stood beside her, pale face and hands glistening with droplets of water, nature’s ephemeral diamonds, dark hair sticking up in wet spikes at his crown. His tunic neck buttoned crookedly, donned in haste. Blast the man, she thought, he’s done it again. She gave Saam a final farewell stroke and ’spoke Khar, curled up tail over nose, on her bedroll.
“Why didn’t you warn me he was back! I can’t stand him sneaking up on me like that!”
“Moves near as silent as a ghatt,” Khar noted with approval, widening her amber eyes and staring owl-like over the fluffed tip of her tail, using it like a fan to mask her smile.
Doyce handed up some of the singed bread and cheese to Jenret, poured cha to cool, and stuffed a bite of her charred breakfast into her mouth before she rose to portion out the ghatti’s food.
“Oh, cust-ables!” came the long, drawn-out word behind her.
“Cust-ables?”
“Cust-ables,” he repeated cheerfully. “That’s what we used to call them when we were little.”
“We who?” She put a double handful of trail food in front of each ghatti. Saam wavered, but at last dipped his head and began to chew methodically, eyes pinched shut in concentration.
“
Oh ... well,” he hesitated and picked up his mug as if hoping to divert her into pouring more cha. “My . . . my brother and I. Many children call them that. Didn’t you?” He had brushed by the personal to the general and then thrown the conversation back at her. As if he didn’t wish to reveal anything further.
“Fur rubbed the wrong way?” Khar questioned.
“Mmph.” The heavy, dark stubble of his beard after only a day unshaven made her wonder what he’d look like with a beard. Elegantly distinguished or piratical? Well, that would be answered soon enough. Assuming he didn’t irritate her so badly that she crowned him with her staff. Like a stubborn mule—first you have to attract his attention before he’ll even notice the carrot. And what was his “carrot?”
“So why are you with us, Jenret? A sense of adventure or something more?” She smoothed the pique in her tone until it sounded more businesslike, impersonal. After all, she was his senior in age—as he’d so carefully pointed out—and a full Senior Seeker with only somewhat less seniority. And she had a charge to fulfill: the Seeker General had instructed her to seek out evidence, to follow it through. He had not been so instructed.
Stung by her tone, Jenret’s face hardened, became masklike. “Hardly adventure. But I am a Seeker, and this concerns me as well as you. It concerns all Seekers and Bondmates, remember that. Our own have been killed and we must know why. That is enough of a reason for my presence and Rawn’s.”
Something more lingered behind his words, the same strange longing she had glimpsed before, but she could tell he had no plan to share it. Nor did she, perhaps, deserve to hear. For every step forward they made in trust, each took two steps back. Her mouthful of overdone toast and cheese stuck in her throat, scraping its way down, an insult to its careful baking. She gulped a mouthful of overhot cha to compensate, and her eyes watered. The heat, she told herself. Still, he had no right to insinuate himself into a situation where he wasn’t wanted or needed just because he wanted it his way, calling it duty. She knew what duty meant and the self-sacrifice it required. She’d let him play on her sympathies, a momentary lapse she could ill-afford. What had ever made her think that like called out to like?
Delicately wielding the point of his knife, Jenret punctured the tops of the custard apples and handed her one, sweet steam spiraling from it. Jenret ducked his face into the steam and slurped with noisy pleasure. “Is the ghatt going with us?”
“Who, Saam?”
“Yes, him. I’d feel safer if he’d stayed behind.”
“And I’d feel safer with him than letting him free on his own. Besides, he has even more at stake in this than I.” And implicit in that statement was that she had a greater stake than Jenret and Rawn, but she knew he had caught the implication.
Ears flaming red, Jenret rose and wiped his hands on his pants legs. “So be it. But keep him under control ... if you can. Now, let’s ride. Time enough we’ve wasted this morning over false alarms.”
They broke camp with brisk efficiency, two solitaries in unexpected harmony—or at least no outright discord over who took on what task. Boundary lines, invisible but real, directed what they would or wouldn’t do or say. She felt them, had helped draw them herself, despite her initial invitation to him. Saam cast about, darting ahead and back, fanning out to one side or the other, head in the air; then close to the ground as he sniffed for a deeper scent. Three men and a ghatt rode somewhere ahead, perhaps still riding, perhaps gone to ground, hidden while they quarreled. Did they think themselves safe from pursuit? Would they strike again soon? What did they hope to accomplish? She understood as little of that as she did her resentment of Jenret.
They were mounted now as Doyce awaited Khar’s translated instructions from Saam. Black-clothed rider, black stallion, black ghatt nearby, a dark parody of the mysterious menace they chased. Jenret reined in beside her as she pointed out their direction.
His face unsmiling, he asked, “So what did you call them?”
“Call what?” The man was making no sense.
“Cust-ables! When you were little!”
Despite herself Doyce grinned and clipped her heels into Lokka’s flanks, shooting ahead down the road. “Custies!” she shouted back over her shoulder. Jenret’s face remained solemn, and then she ranged too far ahead to see the smile that crinkled his blue eyes, sparked them to a brighter hue.
This day hung overcast as well, the air gravid with unshed rain. The only breeze that ruffled sweat-drenched clothes and hair came from what they created as they cantered along. An occasional shaft of sunlight speared down through the overhanging clouds and stabbed deep into the flank of the earth, only to disappear, swallowed whole.
Neither Doyce nor Jenret spoke any more than needful, both lost in their own private thoughts. Nor, Doyce decided as she started to speak, was there anything to say. Nothing to keep it light and cheery, to pretend they played at a morning’s ramble. She knew now that their path pointed toward the Greenvald River which divided the lower, more habitable stretches of the High Firs from their darker, overpoweringly dense cousins who guarded the Tetonord range. The Greenvald snaked through in a wild unpredictable torrent, wide and rushing with a force that kept inhabitants of each side of the river as separate and distinct as the armed boundary of two conflicting nations. Deutscher on the west bank boasted the only safe crossing for leagues, and owed that not to nature but to manmade compromise that paid its own inadvertent dues in life and supplies to the ever-hungry river.
The closer they came, the grayer and more overcast the sky appeared, bearing down with the weight of all-encompassing armor, until by late afternoon the gray-green light ineffectually forcing itself through the dense trees barely illuminated the road. Saam’s impetuous scream of outrage and his headlong leap from Lokka’s back left Doyce rigid with apprehension. Had he turned wild again or sensed some lurking danger?
“What is it? Why didn’t you warn me?” she protested to Khar as she swung Lokka to a standstill and watched Saam dash off the road’s shoulder and disappear into a thick copse of oak saplings and alder brush, their leaves, some already turning with the season, lank and still in the heavy air. She fingered her sword grip and put Lokka into a tight circle while she checked for danger. It could be anything, anywhere. She felt her throat constrict at the enormity of the thought.
But Khar charged after Saam, with Rawn arrowing in front of her, a body length ahead. “Not danger,” she flung back, “but something!”
Bringing Ophar around toward Doyce, Jenret dismounted and peremptorily threw the reins at her, dashing after the ghatti before she could form a protest.
Khar’s ’speech jittered with impatience. “Come look! We need you!”
A distant cannoning of thunder prickled the hairs on the back of her neck as she slid from the saddle. No need to tie the horses, both were trained to stand when the reins were dropped to the ground. “Stay,” she whispered to reassure Lokka and slapped Ophar’s shoulder before she scrambled and scraped her way down the bank to join the others. The thunder rumbled again, closer, and the air pressed deathly still.
“What is it?”
“A body!” Jenret called back as she crashed through the undergrowth.
She stopped short, avoided tripping over Jenret’s bent, dark-clad form as her eyes tried to adjust to the murkiness inside the stand of trees. Rawn and Khar sat on either side of the body, looking with fastidious interest, but Saam burrowed and snuffled through the dead leaves and fern bracken. She bent to study the face of the thing—the body—that lay crumpled in front of Jenret.
“Dead?” She didn’t want to touch it until she’d looked around.
“Aye. And recent, too. It’s still faintly warm, still flexible.” He prodded it in demonstration as a less than pleasant smell floated from it, cutting through the dried leaf, mulch scent. The features had frozen in pain and the taut lips shown pale blue, almost gray in the lack of light. Jenret tugged back the leather jacket to reveal a makeshift padding of bandages around th
e chest and midsection of the grimy, wizened form.
She bent closer, then halted in amazement. “It’s Cal. At least that was the name I was told, and I know his face.”
“Well, from the looks of it, Asa and Wwar’m didn’t die without at least giving back nearly as good as they got.” Jenret found a twig, used it to separate and shift the sticky, blood-encrusted bandages. “Looks as if Asa pronged him with the pitchfork at least twice, and those are Wwar’m’s contributions.” He pointed to the deep claw marks, so like the ones she’d seen on Asa’s body. “But how do you know this man?” The misgiving in his voice made her wonder what doubts he harbored about her.
“I met him briefly at The Cyan Inn. Offered to buy him a drink, but he refused when he saw that I was a Seeker.” She faltered, the realization of what she was about to say shaking her. “The tavern maid said that he ... he used to be a Seeker himself.” She reached to touch a leather thong around his neck, then pulled back the silver disk which had swung behind his shoulder.
“A Seeker? We’ll discuss this later. Now let’s go! Don’t you see, if he’s here, the others must be close by! They couldn’t have abandoned the body too long ago from the looks of it.” He was halfway back to the horses, confident she followed behind.
“Unless they left him here to die,” she shouted after him. Tarrying a moment to slip the leather thong over Cal’s head, she stuffed the disk in her pocket and then rushed after. Why did she tamely follow instead of searching further? But Jenret had the right of it: what if they pressed so very near and then let the murderers slip away? The thunder growled again, closer and deeper yet, and the air blurred and shifted as if she peered through water rather than air.
