by R. Lee Smith
“It still cuts,” said Nona, her hand going to her pocket as much for warmth as to touch the reassuring reality of the knife’s hilt.
“I have no doubt you would take it up and leap at a fellcat, were one to appear before us, but I think you would not go in search of one, if such was your only weapon.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t know what kind of idiot you think I am, but I don’t go looking for trouble.” On the other hand, the broken knife was her only weapon and she had no reason to think this world was running out of fellcats. Or marsh serpents. Or wyverns.
Or human soldiers.
“I don’t suppose you have a spare stone-thrower lying around somewhere that I can—” She couldn’t quite bring herself to beg for it. “—practice with?”
“One could be fashioned.”
“And you’d…” Again, pride locked down her voice. This time, she pushed through. “You’d be willing to teach me how to use one?”
“I? I have no skill. You will ask Kruin and he will send Madira or Gef to train you.”
Nona was already shaking her head, sighing out either relief or anger, and God alone knew which. “I’m not asking Kruin for anything,” she said and because that sounded rude (had she always been this rude? No wonder she had no friends), she added, “I’m asking him for enough as it is.”
“If you still intend to leave us, you must be better armed.”
“I can make a spear or something. That can’t be too hard. And what do you mean, ‘if’? There’s no ‘if’. We’re leaving as soon as it warms up.”
There was a distinct, ‘We’ll see about that,’ in the lycan’s pale eyes, but he said merely, “You should speak to our lord about a stone-thrower,” and started walking down the trail again.
“I said, I’ll make a spear.”
“Ha! And replace your one broken tooth with one long talon! No. You must learn to use a stone-thrower and attack from a distance, at least for now. I will speak to Kruin for you.”
“You don’t speak for me to anyone! I don’t need your fucking help!”
Nakaroth paused to look up, his ears following the echo of her challenge as it bounced around the clearing by the frozen pond, surrounding her with plaintive whispers for help, help, help. Only after it was quiet again did he continue on, leading her back to High Pack. He didn’t even glance around to see if she followed him.
Nona filled the hollow horn with water. She drank some. It did little to cool her temper. She filled it again and then, of course, she followed him. Where else was she going to go?
“I will speak to Kruin,” he said again once she had fallen into sullen step behind him, close enough for conversation. “But not soon. At dawn, I take some of the pack and certain of the Fringes into the wood. By the time I return, Kruin will be hunting. It may be dark again before I see him, but as you are determined not to need the thing I mean to ask for, it will not bother you to wait.”
“Only taking some of them, huh? What, like Hansel and Gretel? Take them deep into the forest and leave them?” she asked, not quite joking.
“Not yet. These are our unblooded youth and unproven Fringe-wolves. Our lord has appointed me to begin their schooling in the ways of the hunt.”
She picked up her feet a little, until she was walking at his side, trying and failing to catch his eye. “Can I come?”
“It is not for me to admit or deny you.”
“You mean I have to ask Kruin.”
“And he will refuse.”
“Why?” Nona demanded.
“You know why,” he replied placidly. “I like you and I see the strong heart of you…but it is not the heart that hunts. Your body is weak.”
Nona stared, but he wouldn’t stare back. Tight-jawed, she said, “I can hunt.”
“You can. With a stone-thrower.” And he made that barking sound again. “Even a cub can hunt with that. It takes no strength, only a good eye and the will to use it until you can use it well.” Now he glanced at her, just a glance and the shadow of a smile. “Tumbili and snowbirds are not as exciting a kill as fellcats, but they taste better.”
“I don’t care about excitement.”
“That is good.” Nakaroth returned his attention to the path before them. “You will find none at High Rock tomorrow. You may rest.”
Nona stopped walking to stare again, for all the good that did. He didn’t wait for her. He walked into the dark, wagging his tail behind him, and vanished right before her eyes.
10. Morning Hunt
The lycan were up with the sun, rousing from sleep with jaw-cracking yawns and bristling hackles, exchanging sniffs, licks, and snaps with those around them. Nona had been awake for some time already, the cold having broken her brittle sleep some hours ago. She was glad of the excuse to finally get up and move around. Winter bit into her joints the instant her fur was thrown back, but the pain and stiffness was eased away with a little lubricating activity. She watched the lycan assemble under their chief at the raised rock, dividing into groups under his direction. Nakaroth was heading one of them; he glanced her way, watched her come towards them, and smiled.
It was a distinctly predatory sort of smile. She returned a scowl. “I’m coming with you,” she said.
“As I told you,” he replied, “it is not for me to admit or refuse you. You must ask our lord.”
“I’m not asking anyone. I’m telling you.” Nona looked coolly up at Kruin where he stood on the steep slope that led to the caves, one arm still outstretched to make some gesture or another, motionless as he gazed down at her. “Kruin already said I was free to go wherever I wanted in his land.”
After a long moment, Kruin turned his head toward Nakaroth. After another moment, he moved his eyes, too. He did not say anything, not in English or in lycan. When this uncomfortable silence played itself out, he looked again at Nona. “I said that I would keep you safe.”
“And you also said there are no safe places, so one’s as good as the other, right? Come on, what do you think I’m going to do? Run off yodeling through the trees covered in barbeque sauce? I’m not stupid! I’ll stay close and keep quiet. I just need to see what’s out there.”
Kruin had tried three times to answer her rhetorical points. Now, as she finally stopped to take a breath, he said, “I do not say you will put yourself in danger. I say only that there are dangers. I trust Burgash to protect you from them.”
“Okay, well, first, I trust Burgash too,” said Nona, giving a nod to the wolf Kruin indicated. “I’m sure he’ll take good care of Leila. And second, you’re saying you don’t trust Nakaroth?”
Kruin looked at Nakaroth, whose left ear rotated back and down and around again in a singularly expressive flick.
“And third, if you really don’t want me to tag along on the Cub Scout field trip, that’s fine, I won’t go with them. I’ll just go on my own. I didn’t ask to come to this world,” she said as Kruin looked back at her. “But this is where I am. I need to know what’s out there.”
“This is where you are,” Kruin agreed. “And it is no land for the unwary to wander.”
“Then I should be with someone who knows his way around and can show me what to be wary of. The first time,” Nona added as Nakaroth grinned.
Some of the lycan looked up at Kruin with expectant expressions, waiting for him to continue this verbal tennis match. Most of them, however, just continued staring at Nona. Vru was among them, hunched and drooling slightly. Kruin glared for a while longer, more at Nakaroth than Nona, but at the end said, “As you will,” and turned back to the task of organizing hunting parties, leaving her to a smirking Nakaroth.
“Where do you want me?” Nona asked, since Nakaroth seemed to have been sorting the lycan around him into two groups.
“These are blooded,” he said, indicating the smaller cluster of lycan. “They have run Full Hunts and brought down game.”
Nona nodded her understanding and found a place to stand with the others.
For some reason
, this seemed to surprise them.
“You have hunted before,” one of the females said.
“No.”
“You killed a fellcat. Or claimed you did.”
“Yeah, I killed it. But I wasn’t hunting. That was an accident.”
“What of the humans you say you killed?” a Fringe-wolf asked, stepping in front of Mika. He sneezed in Nona’s face and as she wiped it away, said, “Or was that another accident?”
“It’s not the same thing as hunting,” Nona insisted.
Nakaroth’s pale eyes narrowed. He silenced the laughing Fringe-wolves with a glance, moved the now-docile wolf back and took his place before Nona. “How so?”
“I couldn’t eat them.”
Some of the lycan laughed, but uncertainly, eyeing her as if seeking evidence of the joke. Nakaroth only looked more intense, more thoughtful. In that same quiet voice, he said, “Why not?”
She thought that was the stupidest question in the world, but she found herself answering immediately and with a disturbing ring of sincerity to her tone: “Because they were poison.”
“Ah. Then you have already taken your first lesson.” Nakaroth lifted one finger. “We hunt to eat. And what, human, would you say is the second lesson?”
She tried to hold his light, unblinking stare, but couldn’t. Her eyes were taken, pulled back until she was looking at the twin lumps of Heather and Leila. She couldn’t see them breathing, couldn’t see anything but a flushed inch of fevered flesh on Leila. Cheek, brow, arm…she couldn’t tell. It was red as roses and waxy pale all at once. Dead flesh, stupidly clinging to life, like the hope she had and hated herself for having.
“It all ends in blood,” she said, somewhere in the world. “There is no life without death.” She wrenched her gaze back to Nakaroth, spitting her next words in senseless, despairing anger. “And they don’t give it! Forget singing lions and the Circle of Life, they never give it!” The storm died. She stood there, feeling tired and a little embarrassed, and shaking on her feet. Low blood sugar, she guessed. “It has to be taken. They make us take it. It’s messy and it stinks and there’s nothing glorious about it.”
No one spoke. Nona thought, ‘I was a cashier once. I paid my taxes. I was just going to the goddamn movies.’ The mind boggled.
“Good,” said Nakaroth. “Very good. You know much of what I have to teach already.” He looked the other students over—the three single ladies and about a dozen guys whose names escaped her for the moment—and growled under his breath. When he looked at her again, he was once more at his grimmest. “I will ask you once, will you stay? I would like to see you hunt. I think I would even enjoy the schooling, yet we have far to go over rough ground. You would do better to rest now. We can undertake your schooling in a gentler season. I will always be here.”
“I won’t. I’m leaving in the spring.” She crossed her arms, glaring at him. “You keep forgetting that.”
“Dark Water’s wolves do not forget.” Nakaroth flashed her a fanged smile. “Try to keep up.” He headed for the trees, the other young hunters at his heels.
As they crossed the clearing, Nona saw Heather push back her fur and sit up, shivering. The other woman huddled, rubbing her eyes into focus and frowning at Nona. “Where are you going?” she asked at last.
“Hunting 101,” said Nona. “You better come, too.”
Nakaroth glanced back, pausing mid-step to look first at her, then at Heather.
“I can’t,” Heather said.
Nona was too surprised to say anything for a beat or two, but when that faded, raw fury took its place in a sudden flare. “You can’t?!” she echoed, and Heather flinched at the anger sharpening her words “In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s not a hell of a lot of McDonalds in this neck of the fucking woods! We have to learn these things, goddammit! We have to start taking care of ourselves! Get up!”
“Please don’t yell at me,” Heather whispered.
Nona took a breath, ready to snap, and let it out slow. She was too irritable, she knew it. Hungry, cold, tired…they were all feeling it and they were all dealing with it in different ways. “Okay,” she said, and Heather stared miserably into her fur cover. “It’s okay. Stay here and…take care of Leila.”
Heather nodded, but Nona could not shake a flickering coal of resentment. Sangar would be taking care of Leila. Heather wouldn’t even look at Leila’s hand, much less touch it.
That wasn’t fair and she knew it. If it really bothered Nona that much, she’d be staying behind to learn how to take care of Leila herself. And she was still going, so either she was being a huge bitch…or deep down, she knew taking care of Leila was not something they were going to have do for much longer.
Nakaroth said nothing as Nona rejoined his party. He just started walking, a silent and sure-footed shadow moving into the trees for his clumsy novitiates to follow. Nona was the clumsiest, she knew, but she tried not to dwell on that. She’d get better. All things changed with time.
11. Lessons
Nona had never felt so entirely useless in her life. The lycan knew these woods; they moved through the trees like ripples in still water. They used every sense, their eyes and ears in constant motion, their nostrils flaring at every breeze. They were hunting. Nona was hiking.
In the beginning, she tried to learn, staring dutifully at whatever Nakaroth indicated—bark torn by ‘tuskers’ or eaten away by ‘treehorns’ or ‘blackneck’, droppings stamped into the mud and frozen over, hoof prints like smudgy holes in the slushy snow—but as the walk went on, exhaustion took its toll. Soon, she was only struggling to keep up, to breathe without panting, to stand without shaking. She was glad Heather wasn’t here after all, to see her being this weak.
A hand closed on her arm. Nona slapped it away without thinking and was briefly shocked back to lucidity by belated panic—good thing he’d caught her knife hand, or she’d have slashed him to the bone.
Nakaroth didn’t seem concerned, however. “Come,” he said simply. “You must see this.”
So she followed him on her aching, shaky legs, to stare at a savaged tree stump broken high over her head. There were tarry stains, long dried, and a lingering rancid stink about the whole place. She looked, smelled, touched the grooves left in the dead bark, and tried to file it away in a part of her brain that still focused on something other than her own petty discomforts.
“Wyvern,” Nakaroth said behind her. “Fresh spore means swift death to follow. Mark it well.”
Sure. Wyvern. Why not? She hadn’t really thought Kruin had been kidding when he’d mentioned them, but somehow seeing the evidence with her own eyes made it more real. She didn’t even know what a wyvern was, but judging from the size of the claw-marks and the broken trees around them, it was as big as a T-rex.
“Are there a lot of them?” Nona asked.
“Thousands.” Nakaroth lay his hand over the torn bark, demonstrating the depth of the scars left by the beast’s claws. “We slay them. Others come. They are unending.” He paused, then grinned. “So are we.”
She heard a panting sort of breath escape her. A laugh. Her first since…well, ever, or so it felt.
“Look here.” Nakaroth turned toward her, lifting a necklace of teeth from the black cloud of his chest for her to inspect. She looked at it. They were wide teeth, thin, serrated. A lot like a shark’s.
“Wyvern teeth?” she guessed.
“Yes.” He glanced around the snowy clearing. “I was here the day this one was killed.”
“Did you kill it?” Nona asked.
He looked at her, an oddly heavy and assessing sort of look. “No,” he said at last. “Although I leapt at it. It was slain by a human like you.”
Like her. Not just a human, but one like her. She wasn’t sure how to take that, so she said nothing.
“But I was among those who slew its mate at summer’s end,” Nakaroth went on.
“Are these from that one?” Nona asked, reaching up to finger his neckla
ce.
Nakaroth watched her hands. “No,” he said after a while. “Trophies such as these can only be taken if the hunter acted alone. Dark Water’s wolves often hunt young wyvern to end their cub-days. This trophy is from a hunt like that, my first Full Hunt.”
She looked away, at the fellcat tooth that hung around his neck, at the band of needle-thin teeth wrapping his left bicep, the unfamiliar claws dangling from a leather strap around his thigh. “Are these all trophies?”
“Yes.”
“Are they the only ones you have?”
He looked amused. On reflection, Nona realized she probably could have phrased that in a less condescending sort of way, but, “No,” was all he said.
Someone growled. They both glanced around, but none of the other hunters were looking directly at them. They all looked pretty sour, though, the females especially and Mika more than the other two.
It occurred to her only then that what she was doing might look like flirting. Standing so close, talking in low voices, feeling up his trophies…
Nona let go of the teeth and stepped back.
Nakaroth stood where he was, his ears flat as he stared at Mika. Only after the female lycan had slunk away did he return his attention to Nona and bring his ears back up to points. “Have you trophies?”
A pretty stupid question on the surface. Then she found herself looking at the broken knife in her hand, remembering, not the fellcat that had broken it, but the man she’d taken it from. And the men she’d killed with it.
Nakaroth’s claw appeared, pressing lightly on the back of her hand where she gripped the hilt. She smacked it away again, and again was a little appalled by herself for doing so. “I’m sorry,” she said, and immediately followed that with, “Quit touching me,” and turned her back on him.