by Barb Hendee
Magiere stood dumbfounded, glaring at him, covered in road dust and in need of a wash.
"We don't have time to rest. I've practically dragged you since midday as it is."
"I'm tired. Chap's tired. Even that ridiculous donkey looks ready to keel over." Leesil shrugged, unimpressed by her apparent dilemma. "You're outvoted."
"Do you want to be traveling after sundown?" she asked.
He took another drink, then noted he, too, was in need of good bath. "Certainly not."
"Then get up."
"Have you looked at the horizon lately?" He yawned and lay back in the grass, marveling at the tan-colored, sandy earth and salt sea smell in the air. "We'd best make camp and find your tavern in the morning."
Magiere sighed, and her expression grew almost sad and frustrated at the same time. Leesil felt a sudden desire to comfort her, until the ache in his feet reminded him what a pain in other regions she was being. Tomorrow would be-should be-soon enough, even for her. Let her stew over it if she liked, but he was not moving another step down the road until morning.
He watched Magiere's gaze turn toward the ocean, noting the clean lines of her profile against the brilliant orange of the skyline. She glared out at the horizon as if willing the far edge of water to deny the sinking sun access and hold it there. Her head slowly dropped, just enough for her hair to curtain her face from view. Leesil heard, just barely, the soft sigh that came from her lips. He gave an exaggerated sigh of his own.
"It's better this way. You don't want to wake the caretakers up in the middle of the night." He paused, waiting for acknowledgment or rebuke, but Magiere remained silent. "What if the place looks bleak and depressing in the dark? No, we'll arrive like true shop-folk at midday or so and assess the place in broad daylight."
She looked back at him for a moment, then nodded. "I just wanted to… something pulls me like a puppet."
"Don't talk like a poet. It's annoying," he retorted.
She fell silent, and once again they took up their familiar routine of setting up camp. Chap continued to sniff at and dig in the sand, thrilled to be released from his rolling prison.
Leesil occasionally glanced over at the sun. Perhaps they had been in the gray, damp world of Stravina too long. There was a definite difference between wet and damp. Wet was thin salt spray blowing inland from a fresh sea, with an offshore breeze to gently dry you off. Damp was shivering in blankets that brought no warmth in some mountainside hut and watching the walls mold.
"Will we see this every night in Miiska?" he asked.
"See what?"
"The sunset… light spreading across the horizon, fire and water."
For a moment, her forehead wrinkled as if he spoke a foreign language, then his question registered. She, too, turned toward the sea. "I expect."
He snorted. "I stand corrected. You are no poet."
"Find some firewood, you lazy half-blood."
They made camp on the far side of the road that divided them from the shoreline. In reality, it was quite a distance down to the water, but the enormity of the ocean created an illusion of closeness. The last hint of daylight dropped below the horizon, and thick, wind-worn trees provided cover from the evening breeze. Leesil was digging through burlap bags in the cart for leftover apples and jerky when Chap stopped sniffing playfully about and froze into a stance of attention. He growled at the forest in a tone that Leesil had never heard before.
"What's wrong, boy?"
The dog's stance was rigid, still and watchful, as if he were a wolf eyeing prey from a distance. His silver-blue eyes seemed to lose color and turned clear gray. His lips rose slightly over his teeth.
"Magiere," Leesil said quietly.
But his partner was already staring at the dog, and then at the forest in equal intervals.
"This is like what he did that night," she whispered, "back in Stravina near the river."
They'd spent a number of nights in Stravina near a river, but Leesil knew which night she meant. He pulled his hands out of the cart and put them up his opposing sleeves until he grabbed both hilts of the stilettos sheathed on his forearms.
"Where's your sword?" he asked, keeping his gaze fixed on the trees.
"In my hand."
Ratboy's eyes flicked open, and the black, damp walls of his tiny cave disoriented him for a moment. Then he remembered his mission. The hunter. Time to backtrack.
As he emerged into the cool night air, he rejoiced in the feeling of freedom the open land offered. This was a good night. Yet part of him already missed Teesha and the odd comfort she created in their warehouse. "Home" she called it, though he couldn't remember why any of their kind needed to make a home. It was her idea, with Rashed to back her up. Still, no matter how much he liked the open, he'd grown accustomed to the world they'd built in Miiska. Best find the hunter quickly so he could take his time killing, draining her, and then return home before dawn.
Below the cliff, the white sandy beach stretched in both directions, but he quickly turned away and scaled upward to the cliff's top, fingers gripping the rough wall of earth and rock effortlessly. The beach might be faster traveling, but it was too open. Reaching the top edge, he swung himself up and was about to gauge his bearings when the scent of a campfire drifted to his nostrils.
His slightly tapered head swiveled, and at the same moment, he smelled a woman, a man, and a donkey. Then his nose picked up something else. A dog? Edwan had made some ridiculous comment about a dog. Ratboy hated Edwan almost more than he hated Rashed. At least Rashed offered valuable necessities-a place to sleep, a steady income, and the shielding disguise of normality. Edwan merely sponged up Teesha's time and gave nothing in return. All right, so he had located the hunter and her companions, but that was a small thing. And what could he, Ratboy, have to fear from a dog, a tamed one traveling with its masters?
Quivering elation rippled through him. Had he found his prey so easily? Could this woman be the woman? Had she literally made camp within sight of his sleeping den?
Orange flames from the fire were just visible through the trees, and he wanted to get a better look. He dropped down to his belly and cast about for some way to cross the road unseen. The road offered no possibility of cover, so he decided to simply cross it quickly. In a blink, like a shadow from flickering firelight, he was across the hard dirt path, blending into the trees and brush on the far side. He crawled closer to view the camp.
The woman was tall, wearing studded leather armor, and looked younger than Ratboy expected. She was almost lovely, with a dusty, black braid hanging down her back as she poured a flask of water into a pot near the fire. Her companion was a thin, white-blond man with elongated ears and dressed almost like a beggar, who stood digging about in the back of a small cart and then…
A silver-gray dog, nearly the height of Ratboy's hipbone, leaped to its feet and stared right at him, as if the foliage between them did not exist. Its lips curled up. The growl escaping its teeth echoed through the quiet forest to Ratboy's ears. Something in the sound brought a strange feeling into his chest. What was this feeling? He hated it, whatever it was, and it made him pull back behind the thick trunk of a tree.
Edwan had said something about a dog.
A dog was nothing. Peering out again, he saw the woman grab her sword, and he smiled.
"What's wrong with him?" Leesil asked. Chap's low snarling continued, but he stood his ground, not attempting to advance in any direction.
"I don't know," Magiere answered, for lack of anything better to say. And in truth, she didn't know, but she was beginning to suspect the hound harbored some extra sense, some ability to see what she could not. "Get the crossbow from the cart and load it."
For once on this trip, Leesil didn't argue and moved quietly and quickly to follow her instructions.
Chap's growls began rising in pitch to the same eerie sound he had made that night by the Vudrask river. Magiere moved toward the dog, reached down, and grasped the soft fur at the back
of Chap's neck.
"Stay," she ordered. "You hear me? You stay."
He growled in low tones but did not move from his place. Instead, his locked gaze shifted to the left and his body turned to follow.
"It's circling the camp," Magiere whispered to Leesil.
"What?" Leesil looked about, foot in the crossbow's stirrup and both hands pulling on the bowstring to lock it in place. "What's circling the camp?"
She looked at her partner, at his narrow face and wispy hair. At least this time he wasn't drunk and had the crossbow loaded, but now she wished she'd told him more about killing the mad peasant. How strong the pale man had been, how terrifying… how she'd felt the strange hunger suddenly grow in the pit of her stomach. Afterward, the whole occurrence had seemed too unreal, and she'd passed it off as just her own mind mixing up all the trappings and tricks of playing the game too long. A bad encounter had made her slip into believing her own lies for a panicked moment.
And now she had no answer to Leesil's question.
Chap's white-and-silver muzzle rose, and she expected him to start wailing. Instead, his gaze started moving up and across, up and across, up and up.
"The trees!" she called out, crouching low behind the cart for fear of what a skulker might do from a high vantage point. She reached over the cart's side, pulling Leesil's belt until he crouched low. "It's up in the trees."
The dog's ability to follow his position was becoming more than a mere annoyance to Ratboy. There was no way to try a flanking or head-on attack, so he worked his way over and above his target through the tree limbs. He inched along carefully.
"I'm going to bring your skin home for a rug, you glimmering hound," he whispered, making himself feel better picturing the animal's bloody silver fur draped over his own shoulders. Teesha might even like the unusual, soft color.
But who to kill first? Ratboy had seen a few half-breeds in his time, and this male certainly carried some elven blood. The crossbow was little to worry about. It would hardly slow him down, even if the half-blood could shoot straight.
He could snap the dog's neck quickly enough, landing on it first, but that would give the other two time to set themselves for a fight. No, first priorities were best put first-disable the hunter, then kill the dog and the half-blood. That way he could play with the hunter as long he wanted.
From his position on a sturdy branch, he focused on the hunter and leaped.
There was no warning. Leesil caught a glimpse in the dark, the blur of a faceless form passing overhead and down.
A wiry, brown-headed figure dressed like a beggar slammed into Magiere, knocking her to the ground. Leesil expected the attacker to tumble to the ground himself but, to Leesil's surprise, the man did not fall, but landed firmly on his feet. And on impact, his fist was already in mid-swing downward.
"Magiere!" Leesil shouted. He barely finished spinning around to aim the crossbow when a loud crack sounded as the attacker's fist struck Magiere hard across the cheekbone.
Magiere's head bounced against the earth in recoil. Leesil fired.
The quarrel struck low through the beggar's back, point protruding from his abdomen, but he responded with only a quick shudder and turned toward Leesil.
A cry, high pitched enough to be human, burst from Chap's throat as he launched himself into the beggar. Both figures rolled across the camp and over the fire in a mass of rapidly moving teeth and fur that scattered half the burning wood and kicked sparks up around them.
Magiere lay on the ground unmoving, as Leesil leaped out the back of the cart. By the sound of the blow, he knew she was likely to be unconscious. For a moment he was caught between stopping to check on her and following his dog to help finish off the intruder. Between a crossbow quarrel and Chap's ferocity, the foolish intruder had only moments to live anyway. Still, he couldn't afford to be caught with his back turned. He pulled another quarrel from the crossbow's undercarriage, readying to reload as he started around the scattered fire, then skidded to a stop before he'd gotten halfway.
Dog and intruder had separated. The wiry little man-or perhaps teenage boy-dropped low as Chap charged again. The dog was in mid-air when the intruder lunged forward from his crouch, one hand swinging up with hooked fingers to snag Chap's belly fur. Chap lost his trajectory.
Perhaps it was the dark or scattered ash floating in the air, or the flickering half-light of the nearly snuffed fire playing mock images upon the fight in the scrub grass. But Leesil could swear the little man somehow reversed direction while Chap was still in the air. Whether he had landed in a blink to turn back, or never actually left the ground, Leesil couldn't be sure.
The filthy beggar's feet kicked upward into the dog's side, adding force to momentum. Chap snarled as he arched across the clearing, head over tail, and yelped in pain as he grazed the base of a tree and tumbled across the sandy ground. He was instantly on his feet again.
Leesil pulled the bowstring, trying to reload the crossbow, and nearly losing his grip when startled by a shout from behind him.
"Chap, no!"
Leesil turned his head just enough to see, but still keep the beggar boy in his view. Magiere was up, falchion in hand, though somewhat unsteady on her feet.
"Get back, Chap!" she shouted again.
Chap trembled and snarled, but kept his distance. Every muscle under his fire-singed fur tensed in protest, as if her order was not only unfair but incorrect.
No one moved.
The young intruder held up his hand and stared at the canine teeth marks on it.
"I'm bleeding," the boy said in puzzled astonishment. "It burns."
His dull brown eyes grew wide and uncertain. He was shaken for some reason, seeming to not have expected pain or injury. He looked no more than sixteen years of age and was built as if he'd spent half that time in near starvation. Calm appeared to settle upon him, but there was still apprehension in his stance as he shifted his weight lightly from foot to foot, perhaps caught between fight and flight. He grabbed the quarrel protruding from his abdomen, and pulled it out with a quick jerk and only the slightest flinch.
Taking in all of this at once made Leesil momentarily forget about reloading the crossbow. This strange youth should be dead, or near enough to it, and Magiere should be lying unconscious on the ground. But his partner stood beside him, gripping her falchion, knees slightly bent in a half-crouch, expression tense and purposeful. And the intruder who stood well out of reach across the fire was considerably less worse for wear than he should be.
"What's your name?" Magiere whispered though the darkness.
"Does it matter?" the boy asked.
Leesil could see that neither of them even noticed his presence anymore.
"Yes," Magiere answered.
"Ratboy."
Magiere nodded in answer. "Come and kill me, Ratboy."
He smiled once and leaped.
Leesil dropped and rolled. He heard the thump of feet landing right behind him and glanced back in time to see Magiere spin on the ground, coming up behind her attacker with the falchion already in motion. The boy twisted to dodge, but the blade still cut a shallow slash across his back, and he screamed out.
The voice was impossibly loud and high. Leesil flinched.
Ratboy started to fall, but caught himself on the cart with both hands. He propelled himself around to face Magiere. She rushed him before he fully regained his balance and kicked him in the upper chest. Ratboy's body arched over backward, feet leaving the ground, and Magiere's blade came rushing down at him while he was still in the air.
Leesil couldn't imagine the strength of an ordinary kick whipping someone's torso over in the rapid manner he saw. And Magiere was maneuvering faster than he'd ever seen her move before. But Ratboy's speed increased to match hers.
The blade cut deep into the ground where Ratboy should have landed. Instead, he now stood to the right of the fire, hissing and groping with one hand at his back where Magiere's falchion had cut into him.
"It burns," he screeched, astonished and angry. "Where did you get that sword?"
Magiere didn't answer. Leesil pulled himself up from the ground and glanced at his partner.
Her eyes were wide, locked on Ratboy. Her lips glistened wet as her mouth salivated uncontrollably. Leesil wasn't sure she could have spoken if she wanted to.
Magiere's breath was long, deep, and fast, and the smooth features of her face twisted, brow furrowing with lines of open hatred. Her skin glistened with a sweat she hadn't worked enough to build up.
Chap circled in beside her. A low tremble ran through his body that showed in the quiver of his pulled-back jowls. In his savage state, the resemblance between dog and woman was impossible to ignore. As Magiere's lips parted, her mouth looked like the snarl of the canine beside her. Her eyes refused to blink and began to water until small tears ran down her cheeks.
Leesil could not turn his attention fully back to Ratboy. He held his position to keep Magiere in his field of view as well. This was not the woman he'd traveled with for years.
Dog, boy, and woman all stood motionless, tense and poised. All watched for the first sign of movement. Leesil couldn't stand it all any longer and cocked the crossbow.
Ratboy feigned another charge, then darted away at the last second, absorbing the sight of Magiere and Chap, she armed with her sword and the dog with his claws and fangs. Ratboy's back and arms were bleeding badly now and the fear was plain on his face.
"Hunter," he whispered and then bolted for the tree line.
Leesil raised the crossbow and aimed at the fleeing figure, not believing it would do much good. Somehow Magiere's sword and Chap's teeth had been more damaging than a quarrel through the body at close range. Before he could fire, Ratboy was gone in the dark. Leesil stepped quickly around the campfire to put its waning light at his back, but there was no sign of the fleeing figure. Chap started to trot in the direction of the trees, but Leesil called the dog's attention with a snap of his fingers and shook his head. Chap whined and sat down with his attention still fixed out into the dark.
