by Jacob Cooper
“Hedron, I have to stop!” she cried out.
“No, we can’t. Not yet.”
“The sun is going down. We have to, please. I’m hungry and I can’t feel my feet.” Reign wasn’t sure if her feet were numb from the cold that had found them the farther north they traveled or if they were just unaccustomed to the near constant usage she had demanded of them recently.
Hedron stopped, to Reign’s surprise and relief. He put his hands on his hips and turned around, heaving for air.
“The air is colder. It feels thinner, harder to breathe,” he said in between gasps.
“It burns,” Reign said. “I don’t want to breathe.” She hunched over, leaning her upper body toward the ground and bowed her head.
Hedron laughed briefly before stopping and bringing a hand to his left cheek. It was chapped and almost cracked from the cold and wind. The laughing had aggravated it.
“We’re safest when traveling at night,” he grimaced, knowing the discomfort of being amid the dropping temperatures and wind.
“How much food do we have?” Reign asked.
Hedron took the coarse satchel he had stolen in Calyn their first day on the run off his shoulder and opened it.
“Not much. We haven’t passed a village or city for two days. A few apples, a crust of bread. At least there’s frost for water. One benefit of the cold, I guess.”
The twins were hungry, but not yet starving. The night they had barely escaped from their hold was spent deep in the forest outside Calyn. Before sunrise the next morning, they had ventured into Calyn in search of food. Reign knew they would have to steal but took no pleasure in such a thing. They had no krenshell with which to purchase goods or supplies. Hedron had left her secluded between several crates behind a building as he snuck through the alleys between merchants that were setting up for the day’s market. The young Kerr girl was devastated by what she overheard as she lay in the last moments of darkness before the sun bathed the world in light.
“Did no one survive?” she heard one voice ask.
“Not from what I have heard. They resisted when the Khans came,” answered another. “All the servants, Lady Kerr, everyone fought back.”
“All dead? The servants? The boy?” a third voice said.
The second voice answered: “To the last person, if the reports are true. It’s hard to believe Lady Kerr was part of her husband’s plotting, but why resist if you’re innocent? Even the servants were implicated.”
“Just a shame,” replied the first voice. “But the boy? The girl has been dead for cycles and now her brother as well? Is there no Kerr left?”
“No survivors,” the second said again. “But,” he continued with a conspiratorial tone, “there were Khans in the forest north of the hold for hours, say the rumors. Why do you suppose that was?”
“Searching?” the third voice asked. “But, searching for what?”
“For whom, you mean,” the second voice corrected. “Why search when all are being reported as ‘regrettably killed’?”
There had been no answer to this last inquiry, or none that she could hear as she sat hidden in an alley of Calyn. Reign felt sick and nearly vomited the nothingness in her stomach as she held in her grief. She had been clinging to the hope that her mother was alive, and thought of perhaps returning to find her. But no, she was dead and there was little time to grieve. In her solitude, she wept as silently as she could for her mother. She didn’t realize how much time had passed until Hedron returned with the same sack he now carried full of different food supplies.
“We need more food,” Reign said, stating the obvious. “How will we get more?” There was fear in her voice, the anxiety of a little girl. She knew Hedron felt much of the same inside him. It was impossible for one of them to shield feelings from the other.
“I’m not sure, yet,” he answered.
“Where are we?” Reign surveyed their surroundings and saw trees spread around but thinly populated. It was a forest, but too dispersed to be anything from their homeland. The ground was relatively flat with a few occasional rolling hills. Patches of frost clung to the ground and trees. She knew Hedron was listening, feeling as far out as he could through the ground, as was she. They would get no better sensitivity by attempting to speak with a tree. They were outside their forests and trees did not speak here. She felt nothing.
“I’m not sure of that either,” Hedron admitted. “I just know we’re two or three days north from the hold as the crow flies. But, we’ve been running for seven, I think.”
I was right, Reign realized. Closer to a span.
“If I had to guess I would say we’re somewhere in the Northern Province, maybe the north parts of the Eastern Province. But it’s just my guess.”
“Why? Why must we keep going?” Reign asked. “All we’ve done is run!”
“Because it’s what mother said to do. You were there, too. You heard her.”
“I don’t care, we should go back for her. She’s looking for us, she has to be.”
“She’s not looking for us, sister.” Hedron knelt down to look up at Reign as she was still hunched over. He could not see her face through her hair. “She’s not looking. She’s gone.” Reign stood up and turned away from him.
“I don’t believe you.”
“I don’t want to believe it either, but we both know it. You heard what they were saying in Calyn.” Dead…to the last person.
“It could have been just rumors!” Reign said stubbornly as her voice started to break.
Hedron didn’t answer. He stood up and turned his face north again. Without looking, he reached in the satchel and gave Reign an apple as well as the last of the bread.
“As soon as you’re done, we’re going to start running again. Eat slowly.”
After a couple bites into her apple, Reign stopped suddenly. She fixated her concentration on something, a sensation in the ground. Faint but there. Yes, it was definitely there.
“Hedron—”
“I feel it,” he whispered. “From the west.”
Hedron unsheathed his short blade and deftly scaled the tree closest to them for a better vantage point. He leaped about ten paces to another and continued to concentrate. Reign sat looking up at her brother.
“What do you see?” she called out to him softly. Try as she might, she could not accurately identify what they felt. It was difficult without the sensitive interlocking root systems of the forests in the west to aid her.
“Nothing. Wait…” her brother said. He looked back at his sister with wide and excited eyes. “It’s a deer!” he exclaimed. “A doe!”
Reign stood up and dropped her apple. She could see intent in Hedron’s eyes. “What are you going to do?”
“Get dinner,” he replied with a look that seemed to ask, What do you think? He jumped down from the tree and landed with a sound not audible other than to a wood-dweller. The doe, probably sixty paces away, looked up as Hedron hit the ground. He sat still, crouched in his father’s cloak. Slowly, he untied it from around his shoulder and let it fall to the ground. The doe went back to searching for food by breaking ground frost with a hoof and searching beneath. Hedron slowly advanced around the animal, closing in on it from the rear. The wind blew at Hedron’s back and he realized his mistake too late. The doe raised her head with a start and jolted forward, alerted by his scent.
“No!” he cried out and chased the deer. Malnourished and physically weakened, his pursuit presented a significant challenge. He kept his prey in sight but could not seem to gain ground. He was about to end his chase and give up when he saw the animal fall. Reign stood over it, her short blade buried in the deer’s neck. Hedron reached her a moment later.
“What? How? Where did you come from?” he asked, perplexed.
“You were losing our dinner,” she said. The doe was still struggling but weakly so. “Now what do we do?”
“I’ve only seen father do it,” Hedron replied. “I’ve never actually—”
“Are you all right?” her brother asked. She held out a hand behind her and motioned for him not to come nearer.
“Just figure it out,” she muttered.
The days turned to spans, and spans to cycles. For much of the time, the Kerr twins wandered aimlessly, well fed through the High Season as they adapted to life on their own. For Reign, living in the open was nothing new by virtue of the last many cycles. But, as the clouds changed with the waning of the Dimming Season and the Low Season being ushered in, Hedron and Reign found themselves with little food and no shelter in the freezing weather. Even during the High Season, the Northern Province barely received enough warmth to compare with the weather of the Rising Season they were used to in the West, where life became more full and blooming things manifested themselves. Game became less prevalent as the climate changed, most seeking hibernation or more southern parts.
Most nights they huddled together in some cave or crevice that gave insult to the word shelter, until they collapsed from consciousness in exhaustion from shivering, having no means to create fire. They awoke in blankets of snow and, though cold, the snow mercifully insulated them against the wind. Still, they continued north, clinging to the last plea of their dead mother.
Early one morning deep in the Low Season, Reign awoke startled, her hands and feet frozen to a point of numbness that she was almost used to. She brought a hand to her chest and rubbed gently. She had felt something, hadn’t she? Some pressure against her chest and head. A dream perhaps—but no, it was more than a dream. The light of a new day was starting to shine through the gray clouds and falling snow. Hedron lay still, sleeping next to her, curled into a ball. His face was pale, almost blue with cracked cheeks and lips.
Reign scanned their surroundings as she tried to shake the feeling that something real had just touched her. Pushed on her. It had to only be a dream. There was nothing—
Movement caught her eye. The sparse trees had no leaves where she lay. Nothing else save rocks and snow existed here. Nothing else except the gray wolves about a stone’s throw from their position. She counted five.
Reign shook Hedron. Then again. He protested by groaning, not wanting to awaken to another cold morning. Sleep was an escape, even if temporary.
“I’m scared,” Reign whispered, her breath’s vapor almost spelling fear in the air. She shivered, but not only from the cold.
“Go back to sleep,” Hedron mumbled in a daze.
“Wolves,” Reign whispered again. She did not take her eyes from the foremost wolf that stood in front of the others. In normal circumstances, even a child wood-dweller would likely be able to outrun a wolf or predator of almost any create. But the late Thannuel Kerr’s twin children were starved, malnourished, cold, and emotionally drained from their flight.
Reign pushed down on Hedron’s face with the palm of her hand. This time, Hedron sat straight up ready to slug his sister. Instead, he saw her face, pale as death. He recognized this particular shade of pale as fear, not cold. Following her gaze, he caught sight of the pack. The largest wolf, head lowered and shoulders hunched, bared his teeth and snarled.
“Don’t move, Reign.” It was not even a whisper that came from Hedron.
“I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” she said shaking her head. “I can’t…”
The wolves charged, snarling and snapping at one another as they closed the distance, each vying to be the first to reach their prey but not daring to pass the leader.
Hedron sprang up with speed, grabbing rocks in both hands. Fingers nearly frozen made precision challenging, but he hurled them nonetheless with all the force he could muster. His short blade had frozen to breaking several nights past, leaving him with only the weapons the earth put within his reach. Reign sat in what looked to be almost nonchalance until the last moments before the wolves pounced upon her. It pushed against her again, the same force that awakened her earlier, and somehow seemed desperate. She knew this time that it was something foreign, something real. It enraged her.
The wolf sprang directly at her, arms and claws outstretched with teeth gnashing. Right as the wolf should have throated her, Reign slammed her back down against the frozen earth too fast for the wolf’s teeth to find purchase. The wolf slipped a few inches forward from its momentum so that its belly was directly over her. Reign did not hesitate. With all the strength of an eleven-year-old girl, she grabbed her short blade from under her torn and tattered tunic, and slammed it upward into the wolf’s abdomen, its hot blood spilling onto Reign’s hands bringing temporary blessed relief from the cold. It howled with pain. Reign retrieved her blade and rolled out from under the bleeding beast. It collapsed down and whimpered in pain. She began to run.
Hedron screamed in pain. Reign turned to see one wolf dragging him by his ankle and another tearing viciously at his cloak. He was wailing on the ground, trying to free himself. Reign ran toward him with her blade in hand, but felt the warning vibrations too late. Another wolf jumped into her, knocking her down. Instantly yet another was on her back clawing at her clothing, digging to find hot flesh. She screamed in terror.
Hedron kicked violently, blood flowing from his lower leg. He managed a kick that caught one of the wolves square in the snout, sending it back whimpering, but only for a moment. Hedron rolled as the other wolf tore his tunic free from his torso, leaving only his cloak upon him, it being nearly shredded past recognition. He rose to his feet and stumbled as fast as he could toward Reign’s two attackers. He could feel his own two wolves practically at his back.
Tackling the wolf on Reign’s back allowed her a moment of respite to crawl forward and get her footing. The wolf threw Hedron from its back with little effort and clawed across his chest, finding purchase against his flesh. He grunted in pain, but the adrenaline dulled the full effect the wound would have normally carried. With no weapon of any create, Hedron bellowed a cry and attacked, driving all his weight into the beast, praying it would be enough.
Run, Reign! She can outrun them, he knew. It would only take a short amount of time to build up the speed necessary. Run!
Reign did run, but not away from the wolves. She sprang against the wolf that Hedron had charged, falling on its back, and reached her hand around front, driving her short blade into its throat. Hedron grabbed her hand to add his strength and pressed the blade until only the hilt protruded. He pushed the dead wolf from him, but loss of blood and exhaustion were overcoming him. Blood flowed liberally from the gash on his chest. He felt dizzy and weak in the knees. Only three left, he wearily thought. Just before slipping from consciousness and collapsing, he heard Reign scream.
The wolf’s jaws grabbed her leg, tearing flesh and yanking so forcefully that she fell hard upon the ice-ridden earth. Her short blade was knocked from her hands by the force of her fall. The wolves advanced slowly, encircling her. As she wearily raised herself to her knees, she pleaded for Hedron to come, but she couldn’t see or feel him. It pushed against her again, more urgently. Forcefully. Defiance still held her, and she fought back against it, even now in her exhausted state.
She felt the presence come toward her from behind, even through the frozen ground. The vibrations told her it was moving with intent and purpose. She could tell it was another wolf, a sixth. Reign sat with ironic calm and waited. It will only be a few moments, then over.
A wolf of size exceeding the others jumped over Reign and landed in front of her, placing itself between her and the remaining three gray wolves. The new wolf, whiter than the driven snow and the size of a small bear, pulled its lips back and uttered forth a deep guttural growl that gave the other wolves pause. The white wolf stepped forward, slowly advancing, forcing some distance between Reign and her attackers. Snarling and snapping in threatening gestures as they were driven backward, the gray wolves did not take kindly to this interruption. Still, the wh
ite wolf did not relent and continued to press them. Suddenly, one of the gray wolves made a start to run around the new wolf toward Reign. It was cut short in its effort, as the white wolf jutted to the side and flanked the wolf just as it jumped in midair, throating it before it hit the ground. The blood pooled around the now dead wolf and flowed to the paws of the white wolf, its pure white coat a stark contrast against the now crimson snow. It turned its attention back to the remaining two. With blood dripping from its white fur around its jaws, the wolf growled another deep warning. The two remaining gray wolves ceased their growling and lowered their heads toward the larger white wolf. Their ears almost lay flat against their heads. With a last deep bark, the bear-sized wolf sent them running away whimpering.
The white wolf stared after the two fleeing gray wolves for a time, then turned to Reign. Her adrenaline had faded and she was too weary to be afraid any longer. Again, she closed her eyes, knowing she was the prize won by the larger wolf. Just a few moments, then it will be over. No more cold. No more pain.
But the wolf did not attack. Instead, it turned from her, its nose searching for a scent. Finding it, the wolf quickly ran to where Hedron lay unconscious. With its snout, the wolf sniffed Hedron for a few moments, licked his face and then howled. It howled for several moments before Reign finally came to herself and realized she was not being eaten. She arose, shakily, and limped over to where Hedron lay nearly naked on the ice. He was wounded badly, but the blood had frozen upon his torn flesh, closing his wounds for the time. The white wolf howled again.
In the distance, Reign felt the presence of a human approaching. An elderly person, she guessed. She reached down for Hedron and lifted him to her, cradling him against the cold. Their innate bond felt frayed to the utmost tether, weakened and about to snap. His lips were blue and his cheeks purple and white. She tried to keep him warm, but she was smaller than him and had little chance of protecting him from the elements.
