The look of grateful appreciation on Tarrin's face made the fatherly man blush a little bit. The three young men gave their father a wild look, but said nothing. "Come on then, stranger," the man said, putting his iron rod back under one huge root. "Well, come on, boys, I'd like to get this done today," he prompted.
Tarrin put a foot down in a hole dug around the base of the stump, sunk his claws into the side of the stump, and braced his other foot against the ground. The young men all returned to their places, and the older man put his shoulder under his iron rod. "Alright now, all together," he said. "One, two, three!"
Tarrin felt his blood rush through his body and he put his inhuman strength against the side of the stump. It creaked, and groaned, and the rods and dowels used by the humans suddenly began to move, helping the main force of the movement, which was Tarrin, drive the stump out of the ground with raw physical force. The stump moved half a span with that first push. "Alright, again!" the farmer said, resetting his iron rod as Tarrin got a new hold on the stump. It groaned, and several smaller roots undergrond snapped from the strain. They stopped and reset the levering prybars, and Tarrin got a hand-paw up and under the edge of the stump. He set his shoulder against the stump and waited for the farmer to give the word. "This time may do it," the man said in his earthy voice. "Ready now. One, two, three!" Tarrin growled from the strain, and his vision blurred over as the blood pounded through his body. The stump shuddered, then there was a loud, deep snap as the main taproot broke. After that, the stump rolled out of the hole easily.
Tarrin sat down heavily on the edge of the hole left by the vacated stump, elbows on his knees and breathing heavily. That had been all he had in him. The farmer and the three young sons gave Tarrin sidelong glances, then the aged patriarch offered a hand out to Tarrin. Tarrin took it hesitantly, but the aged farmer just smiled and helped Tarrin to his feet. "The name's Kellen," he introduced. "My boys, Delon, Brint, and Ian."
"I'm-uh, call me Rin," Tarrin said. He didn't think it was wise to tell him his name, even though his physical description more than gave him away. "Why don't you have your horses pulling the stumps?"
The man's eyes hardened slightly. "Both my horses died last month," he said.
"I'm sorry to hear that," Tarrin replied. "Sickness?"
"Yah," he replied with a grunt. "Come on then, let's go see if Mother has dinner on the table."
The farmhouse was an impressively large affair, some three stories high, and it was teeming with activity. There were at least four generations of this family living in the house, two generations below Kellen the farmer and one generation above. The children playing in the farmyard all stopped and looked at Tarrin with undisguised curiosity, and the elderly woman sitting on the house's porch, with her knitting in her lap, eyed Tarrin suspiciously as Kellen brought him up to the front porch. Tarrin was filthy and matted, and he felt his indisposition keenly as the old woman stared at him with her hard eyes. "Mother Wynn, this is Rin," Kellen told the aged woman in a calm voice. "He helped us pull that big stump from the west field."
"That's nice," she said in a calm voice, continuing with her knitting. She was a very small woman, Tarrin noted, with silver hair tied back in a loose bun. Her hands were gnarled from age, but her fingers were still surprisingly nimble as they worked the knitting needles. She was wearing a plain brown wool country dress, and had slippers on her feet. Her face was very old, and wise, thin from the sunken cheeks of her advanced age, and she probably only had three teeth left in her mouth. But her eyes were clear and lucid, a chestnut brown that seemed to see absolutely everything with the most cursory of glances. "Your wife won't let him through the front door looking like that," she warned. "You need to clean yourself up, Rin," she told him.
"I know, ma'am, but I haven't had the time," he said shyly.
She gave him a calm look. "Ian, take him out back and show him where the wellpump is. Brint, he's about your size. You have a decent shirt and pants he can wear?"
"I think I have something, Mother Wynn," Brint replied respectfully.
"I'd appreciate the chance to bathe, but I can't stay long, ma'am," Tarrin told her, "so there's no need for me to get clothes. Master Kellen offered me a meal for my help. Once I get the meal, I'll be moving on. And I can eat on the porch just as easily as inside."
She gave him a simple look, and grunted in assent. "Have your mother fix Rin a plate," she told Brint.
Ian took Tarrin around to the back of the house. Tarrin was surprised that none of the children followed. There was a wellpump and a trough of water right behind the house, close to the door opening to the kitchen. "The water's not that warm, but it should be alright," Ian told him gruffly.
"Thank you," Tarrin said sincerely, taking off his shirt.
"Yer ribs are sticking out like branches," Ian noted.
"I haven't been getting much food lately," Tarrin replied.
Tarrin washed up as best he could in the trough, dunking his shirt and twisting out most of the smell and dirt, then scrubbing out the mats in his fur. His hair still had the same braid in it that Jesmind put in it, but he still tried to wash out his hair the best he could with the braid in it. He couldn't put it back, and it was much too convenient for it to stay in the braid. After he was done, he walked back around the house. Everyone else was gone, inside, except for the elderly woman Mother Wynn. She had a plate with roasted chicken and carrots in her lap. There was another such plate sitting on the porch by the steps. She motioned at it. "Have a seat, boy," she said.
"Thank you," he said politely. "You don't have to sit out here with me, ma'am," he said.
"Maybe not, but I always sit on the porch when I eat," she said. "An old lady has the right to eat wherever she wants." Tarrin sat down and attacked the large mound of roasted chicken pieces. It had been a very long time since he'd had a cooked meal, and even longer since he'd had that much food at one time. "Try not to swallow the bones," she remarked with a crooked grin.
"It's been a while," he said between bites.
"I gathered," she said pointedly. "Who are you running from?"
"I offended a large tribe of Dargu that decided that my home range belonged to them," Tarrin lied. "They decided to press the argument, even after I killed some of them. I decided to take a little trip into the human lands, since they won't come into the human lands, but I've not had much of a welcome from you humans either," he elaborated. "I have no money for food, and there's no game worth hunting so deep into the human lands, so I've had nothing to eat. Master Kellen is the first that's been nice to me."
"Kellen likes to feed strays," the old woman said with a shrug.
"I feel like a stray," Tarrin sighed. "I can't go back to my den til the Dargu aren't expecting me. Then I'll discuss the living arrangements with them one at a time," he said grimly.
"Sounds like fun," she remarked.
"Not for them, it won't be," he growled.
She cackled evilly. "I don't mind seeing a few less Dargu in the world," she told him.
"Try about fifty," Tarrin said.
"No wonder you decided to leave," she said.
Tarrin nodded. "I can handle three or four, but not fifty. I'm going to let them go back to my range and get comfortable, and then I'm going to start killing them one at a time," he told her. "Once I have them down to a managable number, then I'll start getting unpleasant. A few very messy and graphic object lessons should let them know that I'm back."
She cackled again. "I like you, strange one," she said. "You have a flair for the dramatic."
"Fear is a good motivator with Dargu," Tarrin told her, falling back on his many lessons from his father. "If I can scare them enough, they'll leave my home range without so much as a fare thee well. But they're brave in numbers, so I have to get rid of some of those numbers before I can start my little terror rampage."
"You know the dog-faces pretty well," she said clinically.
He nodded. "It's best to understand some of your more unpleasa
nt neighbors," he told her.
"Smart boy," she complemented.
"Thank you, ma'am," he said politely, tearing off another chunk of chicken with his sharp teeth.
"Sounds like you have a good plan there," she told him.
"I hope so," he replied. "We'll find out soon."
"I reckon you will at that."
They ate in silence for a while. "How long have you been here?" Tarrin asked. "If you don't mind my asking."
"I've been here all my life," she said with a dreamy smile. "I was born on this farm, in this house, eighty years ago. And I'll die here."
"Home is the best place to be," Tarrin agreed calmly.
"It is indeed."
Tarrin looked down at the plate, and was surprised that it was clean. The bones were all stripped totally bare, and he'd even found the time to eat the carrots, although he honestly couldn't remember doing it. "Well, that's about that," he said, looking at his plate. "I'd best be moving on. I don't want to upset your house any more than I already have."
"Not quite yet," she said. "Since I'm an old woman and it won't make any difference, why don't you tell me why you're really running?" she said with a mischievious smile.
Tarrin grimaced ruefully. "I thought I was a better liar than that," he said.
"You're a good liar, boy," she admitted with a grin. "The problem is, I'm better at seeing the truth than you are at lying. You wouldn't lie to a decrepid old woman, would you?"
"I thought I already did," he said.
She cackled loudly, slapping her hand on her knee several times. "I like you, boy," she repeated. "Now then, out with it. Who are you, and what's got you running so hard you don't have time to take a bath?"
"My name is Tarrin," he told her honestly. "I am running from Dargu. And Trolls, and Waern, and Bruga, and whoever else has decided to chase me today. I have no idea why they're chasing me, though. I came down into the human lands because they won't follow me. There are too many humans for them to hide." He put the plate down. "I'm supposed to be a student at the Tower of Sorcery. If I can ever get there, that is," he sighed.
She pursed her lips. "Alot of bother for one boy, Sorcerer or no," she said.
"I know," he said. "That's why I don't understand it. What do they want me for, anyway?"
"That I can't answer, my boy," she said in her gravelly voice. "But you were right. It is time for you to move on. If you have that many people chasing you, Suld is the only place you'll be safe. Run for the Tower, boy. They'll protect you well enough."
"I'm already working on it, ma'am," he assured her with a smile. "How far am I from Suld, anyway?"
"It's two days from when you reach the High road," she told him. "You should steal a horse and just run for it."
"Steal?" he gasped.
"What, you've never heard of it? Well, you find someone with a horse, hit him over the head, and take his horse," she told him with a blunt grin. "You may as well take his money and his clothes, while you're at it."
"I know what it is, but I don't like to steal," Tarrin said. "If I did, I'd have stolen food off this farm."
"Boy, beggars can't be choosers," she said bluntly. "If it comes down to you living or dying, better someone loses his horse than you losing your life."
Tarrin nodded. That was just pure wisdom, and it would be foolish to ignore it. Mother Wynn may be old, but Tarrin saw that her mind was sharp, and she had the wisdom of experience. "I'll think about it," he promised, "but I don't like horses all that much. It's too hard to hide when you have a horse." Tarrin stood up and approached Mother Wynn, then knelt beside her and took her hand in his paw. "I appreciate your talk, Mother Wynn," he told her honestly. "You're a wise woman, and you made me feel much better."
"Glad someone around here appreciates an old woman's chatter," she said with a totally fake look of suffering. Tarrin had no doubt that everyone in the house hinged on her every word.
"Some of us can see past how someone looks," he said pointedly.
She harumphed, then shook her hand free of his gentle grip. "You'd best get on with yourself, boy," she ordered. "You're not getting any closer to Suld standing here, you know. Now scoot."
"Yes ma'am," he said with a smile. "Thank you, Mother Wynn."
"No need, boy," she told him. "Now scat."
"Yes ma'am," he said. Then he left the old woman sitting on the porch, rocking gently in the darkening evening with a plate of chicken on her lap and a faraway look in her clear brown eyes.
It was the feeling that he was too close for anything to go wrong that lulled him into a false sense of security, and he paid for it. It came in the form of something hitting him in the back of the head as he loped down the High Road towards Suld, well into the middle of the night. Tarrin saw nothing but stars and dropped to the ground like a felled ox, rolling several times before coming to a stop against a tree by the side of the road. Tarrin swam in a gray haze, as he hovered right on the edge of consciousness, not yet able to move but vaguely aware of what his ears were telling him. He could literally feel his skull start to mend the fracture created by whatever it was that hit him.
"Don't get too close," Tarrin heard one voice through the haze. "I wonder what it is."
"I don't ask questions," the other one said. "That man in the inn said anything that even remotely looks Wikuni, and this one is close enough for me. I just don't want to carry the body back. It looks heavy."
"Is it dead?"
"It will be in a minute," came the ominous response.
The haze parted like a curtain, but Tarrin didn't immediately move. He reached out with his keen senses, feeling the air, smelling it, noticing the shifts in air against his skin and fur. There were two of them, and they were right over him. Tarrin felt the air brush along the side of his long tail, and he used that as a guide to slowly slither his tail between the feet of one of them. Once it was in position, he slashed with it as hard as he could.
Tarrin's tail wasn't anywhere near as strong as the rest of his body. It was more for balance than for work, but the muscles in his tail had the same proportionate strength as the rest of his body, and that gave the slender limb formidable strength. That strength swiped the feet out from under one of the two men, who crashed to the ground in a heavy grunt. Tarrin rolled up on himself and slipped away from the other, springing up to face a smallish, dark-haired man with a narrow jaw and rotting teeth, who was holding a long dagger in his hand and a sling in the other. The other man was a shade smaller than this man, but maybe a bit heavier. Both of them wore common peasant clothing. The standing man gaped at him, and barely had time to gasp before Tarrin was on him. Tarrin's huge paw closed around his neck in a crushing grip, and Tarrin picked the smallish man off the ground by his neck and held him out at arm's length.
"The next time you hit a man in the head with a sling," Tarrin growled at him evilly, his eyes glowing from within with an unholy greenish radiance, "make sure he's dead before you get this close." Then he closed his grip around the man's neck, crushing it. The man gurgled once, then his head flopped limply to the side as the bones in his neck shattered.
The other man screamed in terror and scrambled to his feet as Tarrin threw the dead body aside. That sound snapped Tarrin out of his sudden desire for blood, and he hesitated as the other attacker turned tail and ran, blubbering and whimpering in abject terror. Tarrin let him go; it had been this man that had tried to kill him, and the fear would be punishment enough for the other. Tarrin was worried more at how easily he had killed the man, how he had done it without a second thought. Granted, he argued to himself, the man did try to kill him. But Tarrin had killed him out of retribution, not out of defense of his own life. And what scared him was that he had absolutely no remorse.
Tarrin put it out of his mind as he considered the situation. Someone somewhere was spreading some kind of story that got men out on the road hunting down anything that looked Wikuni. Wikuni were also known as the Animal People, so the resemblence to Tarrin was not
even remotely a coincidence. Whoever was after him was trying another tactic to get rid of him, a tactic that had come very close to working. It made the road unsafe for him. He rifled through the pockets of the dead man as he considered his original plan to skirt the road from the safety of the forest. That plan was still workable, but it meant that he would have to go quite a bit out of his way, at least an hour's travel south.
The man had a few coppers and a silver coin in his purse. Tarrin took it, and his dagger, and took his leather belt as well. Tarrin's pants weren't quite so snug on him now that he'd lost weight, and he needed something to help hold them up. The money would get him a meal in the morning, and the dagger, like any knife, had a multitude of uses, and would save his claws. As an afterthought, he picked up the body and slung it over his shoulder. It would be better to leave it somewhere other than on the road.
He slunk across several farms until he reached the treeline, being careful not to alarm the dogs on many of them, then went back well and far enough so that the body would be eaten by scavengers long before it started smelling bad enough to attract attention, back where the signs of human passage were so old that it didn't matter. Then he looked up to the Skybands and aligned himself so that he'd be travelling west. Then he left the body, naked, the clothes neatly folded on a nearby log, and continued on towards Suld.
Tarrin's encounter with another farming family did not go quite so well the second time. It took three tries before he would find a farmer or farm member that would even talk to him without running away screaming. The screams and fear stung Tarrin terribly, but he had to admit that as dirty and bedraggled, and as non-human, as we was, it wasn't much of a surprise. He finally found a farmer willing to listen to him, a tall, burly man holding a pitchfork who was standing outside his barn. Tarrin offered to buy his breakfast, and the burly man simply gave him a gruff nod. He was given a loaf of bread, some cheese, and a few apples in return for the copper coins he'd taken from the assassin. Tarrin left the farm and the farmer behind, eating his meal in the quiet safety of the forest, then he moved on. It was important to get as far as he could before stopping, maybe even to within sight of Suld.
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