He woke with a start a little later, and then felt sick at the sticky blood that covered him. He made his way to the river and dipped his head in all the way, then plunged in fully, not bothering to drink, but just using it to scrub himself clean.
When he came out of the water again, though, he was as hungry as he had been before.
After he caught the next rabbit, he made a fire to cook it on, forcing himself to wait as it roasted on a stick. It will taste better, he told himself. But more importantly, it would prove that he was still human.
Satiated, he fell asleep as the fire turned to coals and ash.
In the morning he woke to the sound of snorting.
When he opened his eyes, he found himself staring into the face of a felfrass, its black snout gleaming, its sharp teeth darting in and out of view.
Jens kept very still. This was not Liva. There was no hint of humanity in those eyes.
The felfrass was smaller than he was, but it was a born predator and could make Jens bleed to death with one blow of its sharp claws or swipe of its mouth. In sleep, he had rolled away from his knife.
Jens tried to pull his hand farther from the felfrass.
It moved one foot forward, then nudged its head closer to Jens’s hand and began to lick it.
It was the hand Jens had used to hold the branch over the fire. The meat had sizzled and dripped juices down the branch and onto his hand.
The tongue of the felfrass felt rough on his skin. Jens had to grimace to keep himself from jerking his hand away. What happened if the felfrass rubbed his skin raw and tasted Jens’s blood?
But the felfrass became bored soon enough, and sniffed once more at Jens’s hand, then turned to the branch itself. Its teeth crunched through the wood as it ate the stringy remains of the hare. When it was finished, it sauntered off without a glance back at Jens.
Jens’s vision swirled with black. He steadied himself with a hand and bit back any sound.
As the felfrass disappeared in the distance, Jens got to his feet.
He put his arms around one of the smallest of the large trees and shimmied up its trunk. When he reached the first of the huge branches, he hung over it, his arms dangling, and thought of how many ways he could have died in the night.
Then he climbed several more branches, until he looked up and realized that the tree was so tall, he could not tell how close he was to its top.
His fear was transformed into curiosity.
He climbed branch after branch.
As he got closer to the canopy of the forest, the branches were so close together that he had to push several out of the way before he could move any farther.
He looked down and his vision swam. Now he could see how far up he was, and the world was very small below. His hands clutched tightly to the branches, and he had to breathe deeply to keep himself from fainting.
Then he looked up.
The sun bathed his face, and he could hear insects humming. He could see birds circling overhead. He could feel the sway of the tree with the rhythm of the forest. And he was no longer afraid.
No doubt the felfrass was below him somewhere. And there could be bears and wolves and any number of other creatures who would devour him at a moment’s notice, just as he would devour others, in his turn.
There was a hierarchy of life:
Wolves, lynx, bears, hounds, foxes.
Ermines, weasels, martens.
Moose, deer, chamois.
Falcons, kites, ospreys.
Quail, plovers, curlews, gulls.
Beetles, newts, wasps, midges.
Moss, rivers, stones.
He stood in the tree and felt a part of something larger than himself. He reached into his pouch and felt for the two feathers, the snowbird’s and the owl’s—Liva’s. It was a long time before he was ready to descend.
On the ground again, he put his hands to the dirt and ran them through the texture of it, taking pleasure in the feel of bark, bits of bones and teeth, droppings, fibrous roots, and thorns.
He lost himself in the feeling of oneness that had come without any magic at all. He was alone, yet not alone.
When he noticed he was hungry again, he followed the scent of a nearby stream that ran to the river. He waited there as stealthily as he could until he saw a pair of frogs making a meal out of a swarm of dragonflies.
He tried to make himself as small and inconspicuous as possible, crouching down and shuffling forward, his knees close to his chest, his hands in the dirt for balance. He fully expected the frogs to catch sight of him before he put out a hand to grab them.
He had seen boys from the village try to catch frogs before. They had rarely been successful. He had never tried.
But now Jens caught both frogs, one in each hand. One made a low noise, the other simply breathed quietly, and did not try to jump away. Jens killed them quickly.
He went back to the fire pit and stirred up the old embers, adding more wood. Then he roasted the frogs whole.
How was it possible that he had escaped the felfrass? And that he had so easily hunted with his bare hands? It must be as Liva said: His lack of magic made him invisible.
He could kill as many animals as he wanted to. It was a terrible kind of power.
In the morning Jens tested his theory. He hunted a mole, a hare, and a fox.
Silent, he did not exist to any of them until he held them for death, and then they struggled.
He had only to be speedy, or to set out a trap.
If only he had known it before! He could have gone out hunting alone and brought back a prize that would have astonished the whole village: a bear, a moose, a great buck. He would only have had to kill swiftly and with confidence. Surely that would have been enough to make the village call him a man.
But would that have made him a man? He did not think so anymore.
They might have made use of him, but he would not have been one of them.
By the end of his day’s experiment, Jens had enough meat to last for a week. He dragged the carcasses back to the fire pit, promising himself that he would not let the meat go unused. He would not kill again until he had to.
He enlarged the fire circle and managed to drag the log he had cut at several times to sit between the rocks. He lit it and while it smoked, he set up strips of meat to cure.
He scraped the fat off the skins with a sharp stick, then took off his old coat and trousers and wrapped himself in the skin of the moose.
He no longer saw a need to build a shelter. He did not need protection from these animals. If anything, they needed protection from him.
BOOK TWO
The Hunter
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Jens
IT WAS EARLY spring. After putting the dried meat for the coming week up in the branches of the trees, where animals could not easily get at it, Jens heard human voices on the forest floor below and stopped still. He looked around below and saw three of them, two smaller than the one in the center, who had graying hair and a long, stone hunting knife in his hand.
One of the smaller humans held a struggling polecat. A polecat was not a tasty animal. Even the people in his own village had not grown hungry enough in Jens’s memory to eat its gamy, tough meat. But it was one thing to kill an animal for food. It was something else again to torture a frightened creature like this one. It seemed very wrong, and Jens felt a splash of cold anger spread through his body.
He moved down three more branches and listened to the gray-haired man with the knife speak: “The stone in this knife cuts through the animal’s aur-magic and makes it flow away.” The man held out a knife that looked very much like the one that Jens’s father had used before it had broken. It was a layered white stone, touched with gray.
With a swift movement, the man cut into the polecat’s abdomen. Jens watched very quietly from the lowest branch as the polecat went still, just as the ram had when his father had used the stone knife on it.
“Do you feel it, Peer, Kar
l?” asked the older man. “If you close your eyes, you may sense the aur-magic flowing away out of the wound, never to be returned.”
The smaller one—Peer?—said, too quickly, “Yes. I can feel it.”
Apparently the man did not believe him. He took the knife and held it over the boy’s head.
Peer cried out in terror and tried to retreat.
The man grabbed Peer’s hand and brought it close to the knife. At the last moment, he let go of the wrist and held only to the smallest finger, twisting it on the blade. Peer went white, and his eyes rolled back in his head. He fell to the ground.
The other boy stepped back from him as if to separate himself from the misdeed.
The man wiped the blood off the knife onto his trousers, then tucked it away, though the hilt was clearly visible. “Never lie to me about the magics. You may think I will not know it, but I always do. A man who is deaf can feel the beat of the music in his bones. A blind man can see another’s face with his fingertips. In fact, I believe that I understand the two magics better than those who feel them from within. A man who is trapped in a cage may be the last one who can tell the dimensions of the cage, the material it is made of, and the height from which it is hung from a tree.”
“Yes, sir,” said Karl, staring at the captive polecat, and then at the fallen boy, Peer.
“Now—what do you feel? Think carefully and only then speak,” said the man—the Hunter, Jens thought him, for he had a knife that seemed to cut aur-magic, and he was cold and cruel as in the stories Jens had heard as a child.
Karl was cautious. With open eyes, he held still. Jens was careful that he could not be seen.
“I feel it,” said Karl at last. He chewed at his fingernails between words.
The Hunter said, “Tell me what you feel.”
Karl looked at Peer, who was still unmoving, and turned back to the Hunter. “I feel the aur-magic flowing away, like a stream.”
“Can you press it back into the cat?” asked the Hunter.
Karl hesitated, then made a face of concentration. After a moment he spoke softly, fearfully. “I cannot.”
The Hunter nodded. He reached out and touched the boy’s head, tousling his long, curling hair. “Good. You speak the truth. Now, think, why should that be the case? The polecat held the aur-magic once. Is it the aur-magic that has changed or the cat?”
Karl licked his lips. “The cat,” he said, more as if it were a question than an answer.
“Are you certain?” asked the Hunter.
Karl looked at the polecat.
“Look into the polecat with your tehr-magic. It is not the same, but it should show you what you need to see.”
“The polecat,” Karl said again, this time with a little more confidence.
Jens was fascinated by the discussion despite himself. He hated what the Hunter had done to the polecat, but he had never heard anyone speak of the two magics so clearly and openly before. In the village the aur-magic was never spoken of at all without being cursed or spat at. And the tehr-magic was simply expected.
“Tell me,” said the Hunter.
“The knife cut into its—shell, you might call it. The part that holds the aur-magic,” said Karl. “Because it can’t hold it anymore, the aur-magic spills out.”
“And what becomes of it?”
“It dissipates.”
“It does not become part of the forest magic again?”
“No. I don’t know why.” Karl had his eyes closed.
The Hunter nodded. “You are right. The knife takes the aur-magic, absorbs it, locks it in.”
“So the aur-magic is lost entirely?” said Karl.
“Yes; that is why the knife is so valuable. For thousands of years humans have thought they were proving their strength against the forest and its animals by changing aur-magic into tehr-magic when they could. But this was only the beginning, the first step away from the connection between animal and human. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” said Karl.
“And what will be the final step?” asked the Hunter.
Karl stared at the Hunter a moment. “No magic at all,” he said softly.
“Yes. And that is why I had to bring you here. So that you could understand the beginning, the middle, and the end that will come to be. I am the first of those born without any magic, but I will not be the last. The more there are of us, the further we will be from the forests and the animals. We will build greater towns. We will forget the magic entirely. It will be a wonderful day.”
“Wonderful,” echoed Karl.
Jens’s heart clenched. Yes, it was tempting to believe that having no magic made him superior to others. And if one had had the chance to take the magic away from other humans, to make them like he was, he thought there was a time in his life when he might have chosen to do exactly that. But that was before he had met Liva. Before he had seen the snowbird. Before he had come to make the forest his home.
Now he knew that having no magic was an emptiness he would have to live with all his life, but it was not something he would wish on anyone else. He loved the forest and wanted to protect it and its aur-magic. The Hunter, it seemed, had different, more terrifying plans.
If the Hunter’s future came to be, then every man would be like Jens’s father, with a knife like the Hunter’s. How his father had gotten the knife, Jens still did not know. But it had to have been from the Hunter.
The Hunter handed the knife to Karl. “It is the stone in this knife that helps us humans along the path. Some think that a knife made of stone rather than metal is a crude weapon. But it is not so. Try using it yourself. It is easy to use, but it works cleanly, without pressure or strength.” He motioned at a plant stalk, and Karl bent over it with the knife.
The stalk split evenly, then began to wilt quickly. It was unnatural, for normally it would take hours before the green would turn to brown.
The Hunter nodded. “What have you learned, then, Karl?”
“That this stone knife destroys the aur-magic of a plant or animal.”
“But not a human?” asked the Hunter.
Karl’s eyes went wide. “No. It would take the aur-magic from a human as well.” It looked to Jens as if Karl did not much like the knife after all.
“And tehr-magic? Would it do the same to it?”
Karl hesitated a moment and licked his lips. “Aur-magic and tehr-magic are but parts of the same thing. Two sides of a coin. Or two states of water, steam and ice. And so, the knife would be as deadly to tehr-magic, I think.”
“You see clearly, Karl. This is a great work. We will do it step by step,” said the Hunter, holding the knife. “But it begins here.”
Jens’s legs ached from staying in the same position so long. He wanted desperately to jump from the tree and attack the Hunter. But he had no weapon of his own. He did not fear the magic-killing properties of the knife, but it was still a knife.
He told himself that he would make a plan. He would find a way to defeat the Hunter, to destroy his terrible stone knives, and to protect the forest and the aur-magic.
The polecat twitched once and Jens realized it was not yet dead.
The Hunter let it drop to the ground next to the waking Peer, who started and gasped.
“That could have been you, if I were less forgiving,” said the Hunter. “Remember that when we return to Tamberg-on-the-Coast. Remember and tell the others who serve me.”
“Thank you,” said Peer breathlessly. “Thank you.”
As the Hunter and Karl began walking, Peer staggered after them like a blind man being led, touching his wounded finger over and over again, as if that would make it come back to life.
When Jens could hear no more of them, he dropped down from his perch and stood looking at the polecat, which had been left behind.
Its eyes darted this way and that. The Hunter had not cleanly killed it with the stone knife as his father had the ram–whether it was on purpose or not, Jens did not know.
Jens bent over and picked up the polecat as gently as he could, one arm under either part of its body. Jens felt the irregular beat of its heart, directly under his fingertips, the warmth and the shudders of its body. The polecat was white on its belly and around both eyes.
“You can survive,” Jens said. “Being without magic, that is. I’ve been like that all my life.” But he knew it was dying.
He petted the cat around one ear, and then the other. He did not know where this polecat’s home was, or how to contact another of its kind. He had no way of letting it die in familiar territory.
He was afraid he would have to smother the animal for the sake of mercy. But soon the polecat died without his assistance. Its eyes began to move separately, turning in circles in panic. Jens felt its heart gallop ahead. And then it frothed at the mouth like an animal gone mad.
“I am sorry,” said Jens, as he felt the polecat’s heart stop.
Jens found himself weeping, for the polecat had been part of his new, true village, and now he felt alone again. He wished he knew how to find Liva, but she was part of his life only in his dreams.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Liva
SPRING HAD FULLY come. Liva went out alone in the dusky hours of the morning while her mother slept inside the cave. She intended only to slip out, take in some sharp, fresh air. Since her father’s death, she hadn’t slept well. Nightmares had begun to plague her, dreams of those with the aur-magic who were being hunted.
That night she had dreamed of a little girl, no more than three years of age, who had enough aur-magic to allow her to change into a bird and fly around her mother’s head. The family lived in a remote southern village, and the mother had no idea that the aur-magic was hunted, that it might need to be kept hidden. In Liva’s dream a group of men took the family by surprise. They took a knife to the girl that made her scream, and though she lived, she did not change into a bird again. There was nothing familiar in the dream of the girl or her village, and so Liva had no idea how far away she was, but in any case, there was no way she could reach her in time to stop what had already happened.
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