Werehunter (anthology)

by Mercedes Lackey

  He was too far away for her to see his face clearly, and she froze in place, following him intently without moving a muscle. The headman left him with a satisfied air, and the man gazed about him, as if looking for something—

  He finally turned in her direction, and Glenda nearly died of fright—for the face was that of the man in her dream, and he was staring directly at her hiding place as though he knew exactly where and what she was!

  She broke every rule she’d ever made for herself—broke cover, in full sight of the entire village. In the panicked, screaming mob, the hunter could only curse—for the milling, terror-struck villagers were only inte­rested in fleeing in the opposite direction from where Glenda stood, tail lashing and snarling with fear.

  She took advantage of the confusion to leap the wall of the courtyard and sprint for the safety of the forest. Halfway there she changed into human for a short run—there was no one to see her, and it might throw him off the track. Then at forest edge, once on the springy moss that would hold no tracks, she changed back to leopard. She paused in the shade for a moment, to get a quick drink from the stream, and to rest, for the full-out run from the village had tired her badly—only to look up, to see him standing directly across the stream from her. He was shading his eyes with one hand against the sun that beat down on him, and it seemed to her that he was smiling in triumph.

  She choked on the water, and fled.

  She called upon every trick she’d ever learned, laying false trails by the dozen; fording the stream as it threaded through the forest not once but several times; breaking her trail entirely by taking to the treetops on an area where she could cross several hundred feet without once having to set foot to the ground. She even drove a chance-met herd of deer-creatures across her back-trail, muddling the tracks past following. She didn’t remember doing any of this in her dream—in her dream she had only run, too fearful to do much that was complicated—or so she remembered. At last, panting with weariness, she doubled back to lair-up in the crotch of a huge tree, looking back down the way she had passed, certain that she would see him give up in frustration.

  He walked so softly that even her keen ears couldn’t detect his tread; she was only aware that he was there when she saw him. She froze in place—she hadn’t really expected he’d get this far! But surely, surely when he came to the place she’d taken to the branches, he would be baffled, for she’d first climbed as girl-Glenda, and there wasn’t any place where the claw-marks of the leopard scored the trunks within sight of the ground.

  He came to the place where her tracks ended—and closed his eyes, a frown-line between his brows. Late afternoon sun filtered through the branches and touched his face; Glenda thought with growing confidence that he had been totally fooled by her trick. He carried a strung bow, black as his clothing and highly polished, and wore a sword and dagger, which none of the villagers ever did. As her fear ebbed, she had time to think (with a tiny twinge) that he couldn’t have been much older than she—and was very, very attractive.

  As if that thought had touched something that signaled him, his eyes snapped open—and he looked straight through the branches that concealed her to rivet his own gaze on her eyes.

  With a mew of terror she leapt out of the tree and ran in mindless panic as fast as she could set paw to ground.

  The sun was reddening everything; she cringed and thought of blood. Then she thought of her dream, and the dweller-in-the-circle. If, instead of a false trail, she laid a true one—waiting for him at the end of it—

  If she rushed him suddenly, she could probably startle him into the power of the thing that lived within the shelter of those stones. Once in the throes of its mental grip, she doubted he’d be able to escape.

  It seemed a heaven-sent plan; relief made her light-headed as she ran, leaving a clear trail behind her, to the place of the circle. By the time she reached its vicinity it was full dark—and she knew the power of the dweller was at its height in darkness. Yet, the closer she drew to those glowing stones, the slower her paws moved; and a building reluctance to do this thing weighed heavily on her. Soon she could see the stones shining ahead of her; in her mind she pictured the man’s capture—his terror—his inevitable end.

  Leopard-Glenda urged—kill!

  Girl-Glenda wailed in fear of him, but stubbornly refused to put him in the power of that.

  The two sides of her struggled, nearly tearing her physically in two as she half-shifted from one to the other, her outward form paralleling the struggle within.

  At last, with a pathetic cry, the leopard turned in her tracks and ran from the circle. The will of girl-Glenda had won.

  Whenever she paused to rest, she could hear him coming long before she’d even caught her breath. The stamina of a leopard is no match for that of a human; they are built for the short chase, not the long. And the stamina of girl-Glenda was no match for that of he who hunted her; in either form now, she was exhausted. He had driven her through the moon-lit clearings of the forest she knew out beyond the territory she had ranged before. This forest must extend deep into the Waste, and this was the direction he had driven her. Now she stumbled as she ran, no longer capable of clever tricks, just fear-prodded running. Her eyes were glazed with weariness; her mind numb with terror. Her sides heaved as she panted, and her mouth was dry, her thirst a raging fire inside her.

  She fled from bush to tangled stand of undergrowth, at all times avoiding the patches of moonlight, but it seemed as if her foe knew this section of the wilderness as well or better than she knew her own territory. She could not rid herself of the feeling that she was being driven to some goal only he knew.

  Suddenly, as rock-cliff loomed before her, she realized that her worst fears were correct. He had herded her into a dead-end ravine, and there was no escape for her, at least not in leopard-form.

  The rock before her was sheer; to either side it slanted inward. The stone itself was brittle shale; almost impassable—yet she began shifting into her human form to make that attempt. Then a sound from behind her told her that she had misjudged his nearness—and it was too late.

  She whirled at bay, half-human, half-leopard, flanks heaving as she sucked in pain-filled gasps of air. He blocked the way out; dark and grim on the path, nocked bow in hand. She thought she saw his eyes shine with fierce joy even in the darkness of the ravine. She had no doubts that he could see her as easily as she saw him. There was nowhere to hide on either side of her.

  Again leopard-instinct urged—kill!

  Her claws extended, and she growled deep in her throat, half in fear, half in warning. He paced one step closer.

  She could—she could fight him. She could dodge the arrow—at this range he could never get off the second. If she closed with him, she could kill him! His blood would run hot between her teeth—

  Kill!

  No! Never, never had she harmed another human being, not even the man who had denied her succor. No!

  Kill!

  She fought the leopard within, knowing that if it won, there would never be a girl-Glenda again; only the predator, the beast. And that would be the death of her—a death as real as that which any arrow could bring her.

  And he watched from the shadows; terrible, dark, and menacing, his bow half-drawn. And yet—he did not move, not so much as a single muscle. If he had, perhaps the leopard would have won; fear triumphing over will. But he stirred not, and it was the human side of her that conquered.

  And she waited, eyes fixed on his, for death.

  :Gentle, lady.:

  She started as the voice spoke in her head—then shook it wildly, certain that she had been driven mad at last.

  :Be easy—do not fear me.:

  Again that voice! She stared at him, wild-eyed—was he some kind of magician, to speak in her very thoughts?

  And as if that were not startlement enough, she watched, dumbfounded, as he knelt, slowly—slowly eased the arrow off the string of his bow—and just as slowly laid them to one
side. He held out hands now empty, his face fully in the moonlight—and smiled.

  And rose—and—

  At first she thought it was the moonlight that made him seem to writhe and blur. Then she thought that certainly her senses were deceiving her as her mind had—for his body was blurring, shifting, changing before her eyes, like a figure made of clay softening and blurring and becoming another shape altogether—

  Until, where the hunter had stood, was a black leopard, half-again her size.

  Glenda stared into the flames of the campfire, sipping at the warm wine, wrapped in a fur cloak, and held by a drowsy contentment. The wine, the cloak and the campfire were all Harwin’s.

  For that was the name of the hunter—Harwin. He had coaxed her into her following him; then, once his camp had been reached, coaxed her into human form again. He had given her no time to be shamed by her nakedness, for he had shrouded her in the cloak almost before the transformation was complete. Then he had built this warming fire from the banked coals of the old, and fed her the first cooked meal she’d had in months, then pressed the wine on her. And all with slow, reassuring movements, as if he was quite well aware how readily she could be startled into transforming back again, and fleeing into the forest. And all without speaking much besides telling her his name; his silence not unfriendly, not in the least, but as if he were waiting with patient courtesy for her to speak first.

  She cleared her throat, and tentatively spoke her first words in this alien tongue, her own voice sounding strange in her ears.

  “Who—are you? What are you?”

  He cocked his head to one side, his eyes narrowing in concentration, as he listened to her halting words.

  “You speak the speech of the Dales as one who knows it only indifferently, lady,” he replied, his words mea­sured, slow, and pronounced with care, as if he guessed she needed slow speech to understand clearly. “Yet you do not have the accent of Arvon—and I do not think you are one of the Old Ones. If I tell you who and what I am, will you do me like courtesy?”

  “I—my name is Glenda. I couldn’t do—this—at home. Wherever home is. I—I’m not sure what I am.”

  “Then your home is not of this world?”

  “There was—” it all seemed so vague, like a dream now, “A city. I—lived there, but not well. I was hun­ted—I found a place—a woman. I thought she was crazy, but—she said something, and I saw this place—and I had to come—”

  “A Gate, I think, and a Gate-Keeper,” he nodded, as if to himself. “That explains much. So you found yourself here?”

  “In the Waste. Though I didn’t know that was what it was. I met a man—I was tired, starving, and he tried to drive me away. I got mad.”

  “The rest I know,” he said. “For Elvath himself told me of how you went were before his eyes. Poor lady—how bewildered you must have been, with no one to tell you what was happening to you! And then?”

  Haltingly, with much encouragement, she told him of her life in the forest; her learning to control her changes—and her side of the night’s hunt.

  “And the woman won over the beast,” he finished. “And well for you that it did.” His gold eyes were very somber, and he spoke with emphasis heavy in his words. “Had you turned on me, I doubt that you would ever have been able to find your human self again.”

  She shuddered. “What am I?” she asked at last, her eyes fixed pleadingly on his. “And where am I? And why has all this been happening to me?”

  “I cannot answer the last for you, save only that I think you are here because your spirit never fit truly in that strange world from which you came. As for where—you are in the Dale lands of High Hal­leck, on the edge of the Waste—which tells you nothing, I know. And what you are—like me, you are plainly of some far-off strain of Wereblood. Well, perhaps not quite like me; among my kind the ­females are not known for being able to shape-change, and I myself am of half-blood only. My mother is Kildas of the Dales; my father Harl of the Were­riders. And I—I am Harwin,” he smiled, ruefully, “of no place in particular.”

  “Why—why did you hunt me?” she asked. “Why did they want you to hunt me?”

  “Because they had no notion of my Wereblood,” he replied frankly. “They only know of my reputation as a hunter—shall I begin at the beginning? Perhaps it will give you some understanding of this world you have fallen into.”

  She nodded eagerly.

  “Well—you may have learned that in my father’s time the Dales were overrun by the Hounds of Alizon?” At her nod, he continued. “They had strange weapons at their disposal, and came very close to destroying all who opposed them. At that time my father and his brother-kin lived in the Waste, in exile for certain actions in the past from the land of Arvon, which lies to the north of the Waste. They—as I, as you—have the power of shape-change, and other powers as well. It came to the defenders of the Dales that one must battle strangeness with strangeness, and power with power; they made a pact with the Wereriders. In exchange for aid, they would send to them at the end of the war in the Year of the Unicorn twelve brides and one. You see, if all went well, the Wererider’s exile was to end then—but if all was not well, they would have remained in exile, and they did not wish their kind to die away. The war ended, the brides came—the exile ended. But one of the bridegrooms was—like me—of half-blood. And one of the brides was a maiden of Power. There was much trouble for them; when the trouble was at an end they left Arvon together, and I know nothing more of their tale. Now we come to my part of the tale. My mother Kildas has gifted my father with three children, of which two are a pleasure to his heart and of like mind with him. I am the third.”

  “The misfit? The rebel?” she guessed shrewdly.

  “If by that you mean the one who seems destined always to anger his kin with all he says and does—aye. We cannot agree, my father and I. One day in his anger, he swore that I was another such as Herrel. Well, that was the first that I had ever heard of one of Wereblood who was like-minded with me—I plagued my mother and father both until they gave me the tale of Herrel Half-blood and his Witch-bride. And from that moment, I had no peace until I set out to find them. For surely, I thought, I would find true kin-feeling with them, the which I lacked with those truly of my blood.”

  “And did you find them?”

  “Not yet,” he admitted. “At my mother’s request I came here first, to give word to her kin that she was well, and happy, and greatly honored by her lord. Which is the entire truth. My father—loves her dearly; grants her every wish before she has a chance to voice it. I could wish to find a lady with whom—well, that was one of the reasons that I sought Herrel and his lady.”

  He was silent for so long, staring broodingly into the flames, that Glenda ventured to prompt him.

  “So—you came here?”

  “Eh? Oh, aye. And understandably enough, earned no small reputation among my mother-kin for hunting, though they little guessed in what form I did my tracking!” He grinned at her, and she found herself grinning back. “So when there were rumors of another Were here at the edge of the Waste—and a Were that thoughtlessly preyed on the beasts of these people as well as its rightful game—understandably enough, I came to hear of it. I thought at first that it must be Herrel, or a son. Imagine my surprise on coming here to learn that the Were was female! My reputation preceded me—the headman begged me to rid the village of their ‘monster’—” He spread his hands wide. “The rest, you know.”

  “What—what will you do with me now?” she asked in a small, fearful voice.

  “Do with you?” he seemed surprised. “Nothing—nothing not of your own will, lady. I am not going to harm you—and I am not like my father and brother, to force a one in my hand into anything against her wishes. I—I go forward as I had intended—to find Herrel. You, now that you know what your actions should not be, lest you arouse the anger of ordinary folk against you, may remain here—”

  “And?”

  “And I sha
ll tell them I have killed the monster. You shall be safe enough—only remember that you must never let the leopard control you, or you are lost. Truly, you should have someone to guide and teach you, though—”

  “I—know that, now,” she replied, very much aware of how attractive he was, gold eyes fixed on the fire, a lock of dark hair falling over his forehead. But no man had ever found her to be company to be sought-after. There was no reason to think that he might be hinting—

  No reason, that is, until he looked full into her eyes, and she saw the wistful loneliness there, and a touch of pleading.

  “I would be glad to teach you, lady,” he said softly. “Forgive me if I am over-forward, and clumsy in my speech. But—I think you and I could companion well together on this quest of mine—and—I—” he dropped his eyes to the flames again, and blushed hotly “—I think you very fair.”