“What is it?” Jarden asked, dropping his voice, following Tolman’s eyes into the dark. Ever the fighter.
“Something’s moving out there,” the man said steadily, trying to peer into the space from where he sat.
Jarden tensed beside him. “Yes,” he hissed. “I see it.”
Tolman traced the champion’s gaze just in time to see an unnatural shadow flick through the next opening in the caravan ring. As one the two men got up casually, not wanting to alarm the others, and split around the fire. Jarden made for the place he’d seen the motion, Tolman for the space beside it in the direction the shape had been moving. They passed the tents and carts quietly. Ovan’s loud storytelling faded as they stepped out, one after the other, into the cool desert night. Their outlines danced across the sand before them, towering figures cast by the flames. Tolman kneeled to look under the closest wagon—Ishmal’s—but found nothing. He got to his feet, searching the oasis around him again before glancing back at Jarden, who shook his head, motioning Tolman to circle to the left. He would do the right. Nodding, Tolman made his way around the ring, careful to stay low and quiet.
The Garin was still, the lake a pristine sheet of liquid glass that reflected the Moon above almost perfectly. Crickets sang from the palms as he searched, orchestrating their evening chorus. Reaching the third wagon, Tolman peered beneath it as well.
Still nothing.
Jarden seemed to have taken more time, so Tolman moved on to the fourth cart, his anxiety fading. Likely it had just been a child from a new-come clan, curious to see other families. Or perhaps one of the dogs that some of the nomads kept. He knelt down one last time to examine the three-foot space between the wagon’s worn under-bed and the sand. Only darkness looked back at him.
Jarden appeared at that moment, coming from around the ring. He shook his head to indicate he’d found nothing out of the ordinary, and Tolman was about to return the gesture when he froze.
Beneath the cart the shadows twitched.
The man didn’t budge, hardly even breathing. Despite the precautions, Jarden saw his body language change and so, it seemed, did the thing under the cart.
There was a faint growl, building throatily as two points of glinting light cut through the black. The sound climaxed in a feral yowl, and the sandcat pounced. Tolman felt wide-set claws dig into his chest, and he was bowled backwards, his staff flying from his grasp. For a brief instant he could see the end of his life sitting atop him as the three-hundred pounds of muscle, bone, and teeth weighed him down. Then the pressure was gone, and he felt the cat spring away, its attention fixed elsewhere.
The camp.
“NO!” he yelled, scrambling to stand. Jarden cursed, already chasing after the animal, sand spraying from beneath his feet. He followed it between the wagons and into the caravan ring. Swearing to himself, Tolman followed, snatching his staff from the ground.
The first thing he heard was the women scream.
The scene was one of instant chaos, the fact that a birth was happening completely forgotten. The great cauldron lay abandoned over the fire, the makeshift cooks scattered. Jarden was pulling a flaming branch from the blaze, sending sparks jetting into the air in a thousand twisting directions. Ovan had somehow managed to get between the sandcat and the children, spreading his arms in an attempt to shield them.
Unsurprisingly, the animal did not seem to take this too kindly.
It was a massive thing, bigger than any Tolman had ever seen. Nearly eight feet long from nose to tail, sinewy muscle bunched under a light-brown coat. It circled the group on flat paws that let it move across even loose sand without leaving tracks. A hand-span of white fur, marking it as a fully matured female, encircled its neck. Tufts of longer white hairs protruded at the tip of each ear, like the smaller wildcats that prowled the North’s wild ranges. Yellowish fangs the size and breadth of a man’s thumb bared as Ovan kicked sand in its face and yelled, trying to scare it off. The cat snarled, black eyes glinting.
Then, before anyone could so much as yell a warning, it pounced.
Ovan went down, a paw catching him in the side of the head, claws extended. There was a snap and the man collapsed, his neck at an odd angle, falling into a heap in the sand. Without pausing the cat twisted, going for the closest child within reach. Mychal—Achtel and Iriso’s oldest—screamed as the beast’s jaws clamped around his left knee. At once it began shuffling backwards, dragging him kicking and shrieking out toward the edge of camp.
“NO!” Jarden screamed this time, leaping after the animal. It pulled the thrashing boy into the night, circling back around the wagons, heading for the trees. Jarden wielded his flaming branch like a sword, swinging it left and right before Tolman joined him, leaping over Ovan’s body in his haste to help. Behind him he heard a woman—Iriso, it must have been—screaming through her sobs.
Together the two men chased after the sandcat as it dragged the boy away, moving quickly despite Mychal’s added weight. It was nearly in the darkness of the palms when they finally caught it, and Jarden swung his fiery weapon at the animal’s head, intent on freeing the child. He missed, but the threatening blaze and showering sparks were enough to make the cat release its prey and snarl, baring teeth again.
“TOLMAN! GRAB MYCHAL!” Jarden yelled, swinging the branch around once more so that it whooshed through the air. Before Tolman could move to snatch the boy up, though, the cat roared and struck at Jarden, lifting onto its back legs to swipe with both front paws at the man. The first caught the base of the flaming limb, knocking it from his hands. The second caught his shoulder, dragging large black claws down Jarden’s left arm as the cat fell back on all fours between Mychal and his would-be rescuers. Jarden screamed in pain, stumbling backwards and falling into the sand, clutching at his mangled arm with his good hand. The cat left him, turning its black eyes instead on Tolman, who stood frozen, all strength sapped from his body. He clutched at the staff in his hands, wondering what good the thin piece of wood could possibly be against a monster such as this.
He could see the cat preparing to leap, see the legs tuck and muscles strain, claws extended. It was practically in midair, in fact, when a dark blur not even half-the animal’s size collided with its front shoulder. The sandcat yowled, knocked away from Tolman, twisting and spraying sand everywhere as it leapt to its feet again.
Waiting to meet it, teeth bared and clawed hands splayed in the air in front of him, was Raz.
The lizard-babe hissed, extending his wings to their full capacity so that their bluish skin glowed in the moonlight. His ears were spread, as was the neck-crest, a single pale blade rising behind his head in the night. He hissed again, taking a step forward and rippling his wings.
The effect was beyond frightening.
Through the confused haze of events, Tolman realized with a jolt that the babe had grown. Despite his poor health, in the three weeks since they’d found him Raz had sprouted an easy inch, maybe two. He stood taller now, perhaps four feet in all, with a bearing that promised a fight.
Even the sandcat seemed to hesitate, despite its greater size. It tried to circle the atherian, eyes darting between him and the crying form of Mychal, lying just behind Raz’s spread wings. The lizard-babe was having none of it. He feigned forward with a squawk, collapsing and extending his crest. Not once did his sunset eyes leave the cat’s black ones, even when Tolman scrambled to Jarden’s side. The man was still conscious, by the Sun’s blessing, watching the two beasts face off with a mixture of pain, anger, and intense relief streaked across his face.
After nearly a minute of testing and pushing, the sandcat seemed to realize the only way past the atherian was through him. With another roar it struck suddenly, launching itself directly at Raz’s small form. The boy was just as fast, though, darting forward to collide with the beast.
The fight that ensued was bloody and bone shattering. Like the wild animals they were the two forms writhed and spun in the sand, striking and biting and slashing
at each other whenever they got the chance. They thrashed, kicking and clawing, sometimes leaping away only to crash head-on again. Tolman and Jarden could do nothing but watch, useless and faintly aware of others running to meet them. Much of the family came—Achtel supporting a sobbing Iriso, Kosen and his daughters, Prida and Surah. There were other forms, though, people they didn’t recognize. A dozen members from the other clans camped nearby, alerted by the screams.
Everyone stopped when they got near, fixed with horrified fascination.
The fight raged as loud as a wartime battle, the two combatants screeching and roaring. At one point the cat managed to sink its teeth into Raz’s thigh. Tolman felt a sinking fear until the lizard-babe’s other foot caught the animal’s exposed neck, forcing it to release his leg as blood coursed through torn fur. In the faint light of the Moon the sand around the two creatures grew steadily darker and wetter, sticking to them and their wounds. Exhaustion seemed impossible for the pair, the fight simply growing wilder and more vicious as a minute passed into two, then three, then four.
And then it ended.
With a twist of his body, Raz slipped beneath the beast, clinging to its neck with both arms. A powerful kick of his good leg crushed one of the cat’s shoulders, and as the animal screamed in pain the atherian’s teeth found its throat, cutting the sound short. For a few silent heartbeats more the cat flailed and the lizard-babe’s torso strained, small muscles popping out of his back and neck. Then, with a sound like ripping parchment, the two fell apart. Ten long seconds the sandcat twisted noiselessly in the sand, blood spilling from the fleshy hole beneath its jaw. For a time after that it twitched, convulsing helplessly.
At long last, though, the beast stilled altogether.
There was a moment’s peace, a breath of calm stillness in which all watching registered what had happened. Then it broke, and the gathered Arros erupted into cheer. Over the jubilation, however, several outsiders’ yells could be heard.
“IT’S OVER! KILL IT! QUICKLY! KILL IT NOW!”
It was then that Tolman saw the blades bristling from the spectators who were not of the Arro clan. Their neighbors had come armed—with the best intentions, no doubt—and now they advanced as a group on Raz. The boy, battered and bloody as he was, leapt backwards. He landed on all fours in front of a feebly stirring Mychal, baring his fangs protectively, misunderstanding the strangers’ approach. His wide wings spread once more, their membranes torn and ripped like the tattered sails of some storm-tossed ship.
“NO!”
Four voices screamed it at once. Tolman’s was one, as was Surah’s, kneeling beside Jarden’s still form, her husband having finally passed out from the pain and loss of blood. Another was Achtel’s, waving his hands and yelling, running straight at the armed nomads.
The last was Iriso’s.
The woman slipped and tumbled in her scramble to get at her son. She ran toward Raz and Mychal, throwing caution to the wind. At first Raz spun to face her, crest flaring in defiance. When she got closer, however, the babe seemed to recognize her, and he calmed. On his hands and feet he shifted aside, letting the crying mother rush to her son, picking his slender form up and holding him fiercely to her. Then she lifted her tearful eyes to look at Raz.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you.”
And, before anyone could think to stop her, she reached out and pulled the atherian into her chest, holding the two children tightly as she started to sob once more.
Where Achtel had been able to do little to dissuade the angry group still trying to get at Raz, his wife’s action did everything. Almost to a one the men and women stopped dead, utterly confused, watching the three people huddled together just outside the darkness of the groves. Some of them looked disgusted, others curious, but regardless they all paused. For the first time they began to listen to the words of the man who had ridiculously tried to prevent them from defending their kin. Breathless, Achtel explained as best he could, hoping silently that he wasn’t dooming Raz even more by telling the boy’s story.
Behind him, though, while he spoke, the rest of the Arros watched in amazement as the unthinkable happened. Raz—whose small, scaly, beaten body had gone instinctively rigid at Iriso’s contact—relaxed. Then, incredibly, his infantile arms reached up awkwardly to return the crying woman’s hug as best they could, his wings wrapping around all three of them like a blanket. For a long moment they held each other, a faint cocoon of patchy blue, still in the night.
Then the wings fell limp, and Raz collapsed, unconscious, to the desert floor.
It was in that moment, at last, that everyone seemed to regain the ability to move. The other Arros rushed to help the injured, most running to Iriso and the children, Kosen and Trina to Tolman. Together, along with Surah, they managed to lift Jarden out of the sand, blood weeping from the gashes in his arm.
They were about to move him when the desert, quiet for the first time since that morning, was rent apart by a scream, agonizing and colored black with grief. With a creeping sense of horror, Tolman realized that Grea had been silent for some time, her pained cries at an end, and that the shriek, which rang clear from the deepest part of the human soul, was not a woman’s.
It was a man’s scream.
CHAPTER 10
The hours the Arros suffered following that night’s events were amongst their darkest. Mychal was safe, thank the Sun, but his left leg was beyond repair, torn and twisted at the knee where the sandcat had gotten its teeth around it. After a rushed deliberation—to which Iriso could only contribute blubbering tears and further denial—the Grandmother accepted the help of four healers come from several of the other clans. A concoction of ganet leaf milk and aramora was drafted, putting Mychal into a sleep from which he wouldn’t awaken for days.
Then the women removed the mangled limb, cutting it off just above the knee.
After cleaning the stump and bandaging it carefully, the five moved on to the less injured. Jarden and Raz were laid out on the ground inside the Grandmother’s tent, both unconscious, and both torn to shreds. Between them, a haggard Surah, Trina, and Prida had managed to stop most of Jarden’s bleeding. They could do nothing, however, for the four long slices that ran from his shoulder to elbow, two of which continued down his forearm. Eventually three of the more experienced menders kneeled around him, and within an hour they’d sewn shut most of the wounds with thin sinew string. Meanwhile the Grandmother and the last healer, a younger woman named Evano Ashani of the Ashani clan, tended to Raz as best they could.
“Her Stars,” Evano had whispered when she’d first laid eyes on the atherian, “so this is the cat-killer?”
“Raz,” the Grandmother reprimanded gently. “And born under the Sun, just as you were. Do not let your assumptions blind you, child. Keep that steady hand still.”
The woman nodded, and they’d gone to work, both silently wondering whether the babe would make it through the night even with their care.
If Raz had been a mess when the Arros first found him half-dead in the desert, then there was no word to fairly describe his current state. He was slashed and battered, hardly a part of him left unscathed. Parallel gashes crisscrossed his body. Small ribs shone in the lantern light from several of the cuts, many of which seeped blood through a thick cake of sand. His thigh bled continuously where the cat had sunk its teeth in, and one wrist looked to be badly broken. The claws must have caught him across the face, too, because three lines sliced diagonally down his snout, splitting his right lip completely in several places. His wings were even worse. Shredded in more than one place, there were whole slivers of membrane missing in several spots at the edges. It gave them a tattered look, like the worm-worried clothes of an old corpse. While Evano worked on cleaning and closing the wounds along his body, the Grandmother took on the delicate work of slipping the torn skin of his wings back into place. The flesh was almost all there, and slowly she flipped and flattened everything back together with bloody hands. This done
, she smeared ointment over every laceration, hoping against hope that infection wouldn’t set in and eat away at the delicate membranes.
Only those involved in helping the wounded hovered around the Grandmother’s tent. Trina, Kosen, and Achtel had taken the children to bed, though understandably not a one slept a wink the whole night through. Eara and Zadi accompanied Hannas and her twins to Tolman’s hut, donated as a place of mourning to house the souls the Moon had claimed that night until proper burials could be held. There the woman and her children wept over the still form of her husband, clinging to the cold hand that hung from under the white silk sheet covering Ovan’s body.
On the other side of the room, set on a small copper table borrowed from a dusty corner of the Grandmother’s wagon, was a basket, also covered in white. In it rested the small form of a baby girl, too still and too blue, swaddled in the comforts of an old woven blanket.
The Wings of War: Books 1-3: The Wings of War Box Set, Vol. 1 Page 9
