Yes, I thought, it had been hide or die.
“Hide from herself most of all, I think. It is hard to accept being different, hard to have people avoid looking at you, and still believe in yourself.”
Yes, you’d know about that, wouldn’t you Kith? I thought.
His voice changed a bit, becoming almost playful. “I do know that every time I saw her playing the grateful, submissive wife to that arrogant pup she married—”
Arrogant? I tried the word on Daryn. It didn’t fit.
“I wanted to shake her. I kept waiting for her to wake up and put him in his place the way she always did Quill and me when we ganged up on her.”
Perhaps it was Kith’s voice that told me. It was just a shade louder than it needed to be. Perhaps it was the “arrogant”—Kith had liked Daryn as well as the next man. Kith knew I was listening.
“Daryn was just nicer than you two were,” I said.
“If you’d waited on us hand and foot, we’d have been nicer, too,” called Kith without pause. I heard Wandel’s snort of surprise.
I laughed and set off, pushing the moment of self-examination behind me. When I’d traveled a bit, I stripped off my clothes and washed off the trail sweat in the shallow water of the stream. I used my tunic to wipe off, then dressed again. I pulled the tunic over my shirt, disregarding the dampness. It would dry before I got back to camp.
I walked for a while without collecting any wood. The way back would be soon enough—no sense carrying it any farther than I had to. The late afternoon had the peculiar yellow tint that happens only in the spring when the afternoon clouds gather threateningly in the sky. The shadows were deep, but where the light touched down, the colors were dazzling.
For the first time since Daryn died, I felt at peace. I knew Moresh wouldn’t be back to kill Kith. Time would heal him. With aid from Auberg, the raiders would be driven away.
I stopped in a small clearing and decided that if I went any farther, Kith and Wandel were likely to come looking for me. I turned around and stopped abruptly. Standing on a downed tree, only a horse length from me, was a…well, a creature.
I felt no fear, only a surprised kind of delight. If he had been standing on the ground, he would have come up to my shoulder. The wildling was a fragile-seeming thing, his feyness blending into the odd light as if he, not I, really belonged to this world. His arms and legs were slender, almost spindly. The bones of his ribs and shoulders were clearly visible, though his belly was round.
He had the proportions of a child, his head too large for his small body. His skin was the warm brown of stained oak. If there were claws on the ends of his fingers, those fingers were long and slender like those of a great lady.
He wore only a pair of roughly made hide shoes and a loincloth. His pale, ash-gray hair was braided in complex patterns with colorful beads woven here and there.
His eyes were large, even in the oversized, inhumanly round face. Wide gray irises gave a strange beauty to something that might have been grotesque. His mouth balanced his eyes, being wider than any I’d seen on a human face. As I watched, a smile lit his eyes and touched the corner of his mouth.
“Hob?” I asked softly, half raising my hand to him.
His smiled widened, exposing the sharp, interlocking teeth of a predator. Before the significance of that registered, he launched himself at me. His arms closed with viselike strength on my shoulders as his head darted for my throat.
Somehow I managed to get the arm I’d been lifting between his face and my neck. His jaws locked on my arm with vicious force. I heard the crack of bone, shock momentarily protecting me from the pain. I noticed that the corners of his mouth were still tilted up in a smile.
He smelled of musty leaves and damp earth. I tried to dislodge him, but for all his lack of size he was much stronger than I was. I’d left my knife back at camp, and there were no sticks within reach.
He wrenched his head, twisting my forearm to an impossible angle. I remember hearing a loud ringing in my ears—then nothing.
THEY TOLD ME LATER IT WAS WANDEL WHO FOUND ME. Kith had come across the creature’s spoor and was tracking it when he heard the harper’s shrill whistles. By the time I woke up, my head was propped on Wandel’s leg and he was mopping my face with a wet cloth. I was quiet for a moment, more out of sheer surprise than anything else. I hadn’t expected to wake up at all.
When a cold drop of water hit my ear, I batted at Wandel with my unhurt arm and struggled to sit up. Upright, I was lightheaded and dizzy.
“Who’d you meet out here, Aren?” called Kith from somewhere a fair distance to my right.
I opened my eyes, but it was nearing dark and my vision kept trying to black out, so it took me a while to find Kith. He was kneeling beside something a short distance away. After a moment I decided it was a dead body.
“Don’t know,” I croaked, closing my eyes again. “What’s it look like?”
“This looks like some malformed human child with teeth like a shark,” he replied. “But you met something else, too. No way you could break its neck like this. Whatever did this is stronger than I am—came near to ripping the head off while he was about it.”
“Whoever it was, they bandaged her arm,” added Wandel.
I’d been trying to ignore my arm. I had a clear memory of bone showing through flesh. I looked down and saw that someone had wrapped it with strips of my tunic. It still looked like an arm ought to, and I didn’t think it should. It also hurt.
Kith swore softly. I raised my eyes from my arm and watched him pace back and forth, stopping here and there to examine the ground. My vision was better, but I was still dizzy.
“Look at the bruises. He snapped that thing’s neck with one hand,” Kith muttered. “Then he used a stick to pry its jaw open. He tossed it from here”—he stood, as far as I could tell, where the creature had attacked me—“to there.” He pointed to where the body lay, some distance away. “Now it’s not huge, but it weighs a good seventy or eighty pounds, and I don’t know a man alive who could toss it that far—not even a magicked one like me.” He said some more, but I started seeing black again and only caught something about soft-soled boots.
“A Beresforder?” guessed Wandel. “Some of those mountain folk are big enough to take a bear and toss it into the next valley. But then why didn’t he stay to meet us?”
“Not a Beresforder,” refuted Kith. “I don’t think a human could do this. Certainly no one I know from Beresford.” He went on mumbling to himself about wildlings, but I was paying more attention to my arm than to what he said.
After a moment Kith stopped speaking and knelt beside me. “How badly are you hurt?”
“I don’t know,” I replied, breathing through my nose like a winded horse. “I’m afraid to look.”
“So someone killed that thing and dressed Aren’s wounds,” said Wandel, sounding fascinated—but then it wasn’t his arm he was talking about. “I wonder who he was and why he didn’t stay.”
Kith shook his head. “I think we ought to get back to camp. Where there is one of those things, there might be more. If you’ll help me get her over my shoulder, I’ll carry her, and you can collect the wood we’ll need on the way back.”
“It’ll be easier if I carry…,” began Wandel. I had my eyes closed again, and I didn’t get them open fast enough to see what caused him to stop talking.
“I can walk,” I offered, squinting up at Kith.
Maybe the look that Wandel had gotten was similar to the one I received. It shut me up, too.
With considerable help from Wandel, I managed to get to my feet. Kith shoved his left shoulder into my midriff and heaved me up. The sudden change in position put me out faster than a candle in water.
WHEN I AWOKE, A FAMILIAR TUNIC WAS BOUNCING around under my face.
“I can walk,” I said groggily.
“No,” Kith replied firmly. “From the amount of blood you left behind, I’m surprised you awoke before morning. If I set
you down and you pass out, it’ll be twice the work to get you back up. We’re not far from camp, Pest. Just keep quiet ’til we get there.”
Of the rest of the trip back I have a hazy memory of watching the back of Kith’s calves gray in and out of my shaky vision. I really only recovered consciousness when the steady jolt of Kith’s shoulder in my stomach stopped, and I started to slip off.
He muttered a word I’d never heard him use before and made an attempt to forestall my fall. I ended up on my blankets beside the small fire pit. My arm throbbed, my rump ached where it had landed on a rock, my head hurt; but overall, I decided, I would survive.
He left me and fumbled a bit through my saddlebags until he came up with my extra sweater, which he dropped over my head. The additional warmth was welcome—with the sun down, it was a lot colder. The warm tunic I’d worn into the woods was less warm when it was missing the bottom third of its length.
“Kith…,” I began, feeling much better right side up, but he stopped me with a gesture.
“Rest a bit, Pest. We need to wait for Wandel, and I need to catch my breath.” He settled down beside me and handed me a small flask. “Take a drink of this.”
I don’t know what I expected—some sort of alcohol, I suppose, even though I knew Kith didn’t drink strong spirits. What I sipped wasn’t alcohol, but some kind of herb-laden apple cider. That and the stew they’d concocted for dinner had me feeling almost myself by the time Wandel made it back to camp with his load of firewood.
The men ate and I half-dozed by the fire. I should have gotten up and washed my bowl, but it was too much effort. When he was done eating, Kith took my bowl with him to the stream. Maybe I’d have to make sure I was wounded every time I traveled. It sure got me out of a lot of work.
When Kith returned, he sat cross-legged next to me, on the other side of the fire from Wandel. “Now tell me what happened.”
I sighed. “You already know most of it. I looked up, and there he was, the creature you found dead. I was so busy wondering what he was, that his attack took me completely by surprise.” I thought a moment. There was something odd about the fascination I’d felt for him, but it was too hard to describe, so I let it go. “He was aiming for my throat, but I got my hand in front. He bit it and shook his head like a dog killing a rat, and that’s all I remember.”
“You don’t remember anything about the…” Kith’s voice trailed off for a moment. “About whatever it was that killed that thing?”
I shook my head. “I don’t even know how badly I’m hurt. I could have sworn it nearly tore my—well, at least it did a lot more damage than it looks like.” I snatched Kith’s knife from his boot sheath and slid it under the strips of cloth that wrapped my arm.
It was a mess. On either side was a deep slice that ran the length of my forearm, but the splinters of bone weren’t there. It hurt when I closed my hand and started bleeding sluggishly—all right, it hurt more when I closed my hand, but that was all.
I’d butchered enough animals to know there was a lot more odd about my arm than the fact I knew the bones had been broken. For one thing, there should have been more blood. There were arteries close to the surface that should have been severed with cuts that deep. Without a pressure bandage, blood should be pouring out.
“When it bit down,” I said distinctly, as much to convince myself as anyone else, “it broke my arm; I heard the bones go. When it twisted its head, my arm bent here.” I didn’t quite touch the wound just below my elbow.
Kith held my arm still and examined it. When he was through, he shook his head. “I can’t tell that the bone’s ever been broken—and right here it should have cut through an artery”—he ran his fingers over one of the cuts—“and again here. I’d say he can work magic I’ve never seen a bloodmage do.”
“Not that they would feel inspired to help anyone,” I said. Kith smiled at me tiredly.
Wandel opened a pouch on his belt and took out a tin before rounding the fire to my side. He took the bandaging I’d cut off and spread a layer of salve from the container on part of it.
“Put this back around your arm,” he said, fitting the bandage back around the wound.
With my assistance, he tore another strip from my poor tunic and used it to hold the bandaging in place. “From all appearances, your wounds have already been cleaned—so there’s no use putting you through it again tonight. I have some brandy in my bags, and I’ll clean it again in the morning. Bite wounds are always difficult to get to heal if you don’t keep them clean.”
When he was finished with me, I stretched out on my blanket, staring up into the night sky. “Wandel,” I asked, “do you think that thing that rescued me was a hob? Like the runes we found?”
Wandel took up his harp and plucked a string delicately. “I don’t know. I told you, I only know a song about them.” He began to play a sprightly tune on his harp, one of the kind that’s difficult not to hum along with. By the third verse I was singing with the chorus. Kith didn’t join in.
The gist of the song was that there was a rich farmer who owed his success to the hob living in his barn. The farmer, due to his wealth, found himself a wife from a well-to-do town family. They lived happily enough until the hob surprised her in the barn. They disliked each other on sight; she tried to rid the barn of the hob, and the hob tried to rid the farmer of his wife. The wife was clever, but the hob was more clever still: everything she tried to do to him, he turned back on her. At last the farmer stepped in, kept the hob, and got rid of his wife. With the help of the hob he found a farm-bred wife who put out milk and bread every night for the fey folk, and they all lived happily ever after.
The most interesting feature of the song, as far as I was concerned, was the detailed description of the hob: a little man with skin like old oak, eyes blue as the sky, and a head too big for its body. It sounded like my attacker, but….
“So,” said Wandel, finishing the last chord with a flourish, “the creature who attacked you could have been a hob.”
“No,” I said, suddenly remembering something. “I named the wildling that, just before it attacked me. Then after…someone”—I remembered the dark gray skin and red eyes of my vision yesterday and a tone of dry disgust—“someone said, ‘That’s not a hob, Lady.’”
MY ARM WAS STIFF AND SORE THE NEXT MORNING. When Wandel offered to saddle Duck as well as Torch and the Lass, I let him do it and helped Kith pack camp—or at least watched while Kith did all the work, offering unsolicited advice until he threatened to toss his shovelful of dirt on me rather than the fire pit.
By the time Wandel had tied the small shovel behind Torch’s saddle, I was starting to feel better. Mounting was awkward, and Kith gave me a sympathetic glance.
“Well, at least it doesn’t hurt you when you do this,” I groused as I found my stirrups.
“Yours will pass,” he replied softly.
“You’re not going to make me feel guilty when I feel so bad are you?” I whined.
He laughed. “Let’s go.”
After the first few miles, my arm subsided to a dull ache that I could ignore. I noticed Kith wasn’t nearly as nervous today, and I wondered if the thing that had attacked me had been following us. With it gone, there would be nothing to set off his magicked senses. Maybe, I thought, but it was more likely that the day had relaxed him as much as it had me. It was hard to worry about wildlings with sharp teeth with the sun shining on your back.
It was warmer today than yesterday, and the scents of the early spring wildflowers were almost erotic in their fullness. The horses were feeling it, too; the Lass had managed to bite poor old Duck twice. He, for his part, seemed to take a masochistic interest in her. He kept trying to sneak closer to her when I wasn’t paying attention. If he hadn’t been a gelding, I would have thought he was courting the mare. Even Torch, the old campaigner, was dancing a bit more than usual.
It was late afternoon when we started down the slopes of the Hob into the valley where Auberg lay
, about the same time that we’d made camp yesterday. From our vantage point, the town didn’t look nearly as large as I remembered it—but it had been several years since I’d been there. As we started down the side of the mountain, I saw the bones of a winter-killed wolf stretched under the green foliage of a wild lilac. The climate was warmer here than it was in Fallbrook, and the lilacs were in full bloom.
The pastureland crept up the sides of the foothills of the Hob, and soon we were traveling along a shepherds’ track between the rock walls that fenced the pastures. Generations of farmers had combed the rocks from the land and used them for fences and buildings, leaving behind land well-fenced and less rocky. Land that once had been poor had become, over centuries of management, rich and fertile.
The grass in the pastures here were already three times as long as the grasses in Fallbrook’s fields. Even the pastures that had been recently grazed were longer than…
Torch halted, giving the Lass time to aim a nip at his rump—though even she wasn’t so bold as to actually bite him.
“What’s wrong?” asked Wandel before I could.
“You tell me,” answered Kith, his gaze drifting around the valley spread below us.
I followed his gaze, looking for something—but there was nothing to be seen.
“Faran’s breath!” I swore, standing in my stirrups for a better view. There was nothing to be seen.
“Where are the cattle?” asked Wandel. “These are cattle fields, you can see where they’ve grazed—but they’re all gone.”
“No sheep either,” added Kith softly. “Nor any people. We should be able to see the men in the fields and the people going in and out of town. Look down by that little croft. There’s laundry hung to dry and half of it swept loose from the pins.”
I knew the others were thinking raiders. It was possible the group harassing Fallbrook was part of a larger raiding party or even an enemy army—but a feeling that chilled me down to the bone told me the answer was worse than an army. A feeling and the memory of a vision of men dissolving into ash didn’t allow for so mundane an answer.
Patricia Briggs Page 8
