He never wanted to hurt Lorelei, not intentionally, and the hunt took just enough of the edge off that every night he could duck into the tent they shared, burrow down into the furs beside her and lay contentedly in the dark. For hours he could just lay there and feel her heartbeat, the shifting of her dream moods as he listened to the long, weary sound of her sleeping breath. Sometimes she would curl up to him, snuggle into his arms the way she’d done when they were sharing a bed in Logren’s house and tangle their fingers together.
He didn’t know for sure if she was asleep or awake when she did this, but he decided in the end it didn’t matter. Some part of her, conscious or unconscious, wanted to be near him. It was an obvious gesture. Even if she didn’t know it yet, she wanted to be with him, felt safe and comfortable enough to seek out his arms and share his warmth in the dark.
It wasn’t everything he wanted. It was hardly anything at all, but it was enough to keep the wolf at bay, enough to keep his thoughts about her on the level and far away from harming her just to make her so see how powerful the bond between them could be if only she just gave into it.
Not being one who let himself wallow in guilt, it was a new feeling for Finn. The kind of sentiment he imagined his brother entertained just about every minute of every waking hour. Vilnjar probably had guilty dreams, he was so uptight, but Finn wasn’t like that at all. He didn’t enjoy feeling that way, so he did his best not to indulge it, tried remind himself that though he and the wolf inside him were one in the same, his rational mind held sway over the animal. He was in control of himself, and he would not give in to its whims.
He wanted it to be her choice. For her to care for and love him of her own free will with the same ferocity he loved her. Forcing it on her just so she could see it more clearly was not love, and even as he was fairly certain he was supposed to die on their journey, if death took him before she realized she did love him at least he would be free.
And so would she.
Free to love whomever she chose.
He didn’t want to die, didn’t want her to be free from the choice, he just hoped if it did come to that she didn’t choose some pretentious, half-elven windbag mage as her mate.
Glancing toward the two of them riding side by side, they chattered back and forth about things he had no interest in. It was all they’d done since they left Dunvarak, chatter and laugh, make jokes and share soul-shattering stories about their lives before they met. Sometimes they sounded like two women talking together, spilling all their emotions and thoughts and feelings into the endless white snow all around them, and sometimes they even cried when the stories got too deep.
Elves… What ridiculous people.
Not that Finn had an aversion to crying, or talking about his feelings, but all the time? From dawn until dusk? For the love of the Ladies in the heavens! There were other things to talk about. Things he’d be happy to join in discussing, but even when the conversation shifted, it was to things in which he had little to no interest at all.
The mage tried to explain how magic worked, and then he talked about what it felt like to be bonded to a bird. Both topics Finn found beyond yawnable, but Lorelei was absolutely riveted, or so it seemed.
The dramatic change in the weather the further southeast they moved and the distant, mirage-like wavering of golden sea grass rustling dryly up ahead did lift his spirits. The air was still cold, but he could smell the salt, taste the tang of it on his tongue, see distant dots on the sky swooping low before they disappeared. Brendolowyn said they were birds, seagulls or something. Finn didn’t know; as soon as the word bird was spoken he started to tune the mage out again and listen instead to the distant, hushing sound of waves lapping at the shore, of the heavy clamor of ice crashing in upon itself as the ocean drew it into and away from the land.
Every time she laughed at something her clever mage friend said, her animated titter carried back to his ears and he felt the animal inside him tighten with unbridled rage. The fury was only tempered by the reminder of her animosity the day Yovenna died and before discovering the old woman dead, she shouted at him in the streets of Dunvarak and told him she was free to talk to whomever she pleased, whenever she pleased and there was nothing he could say or do about it.
He did not own her.
But she owned him.
It seemed unfair if he let himself think about it too often, and the more he thought about how unfair it was, the more he wanted to rage. But such fits were for children, or so his brother always said, and then his sister Ruwena would whisper, “And really angry warriors,” into his ear. But there was no need for the warrior, not for the moment and he really didn’t want to get called a child, so he said nothing at all.
Not that the mage would let him speak if he tried anyway.
Brendolowyn had boisterous opinions about everything there ever was, and it left little time for anyone else to speak. Except for Lorelei. He made plenty of exceptions for her, even coaxed her into talking whenever she grew strangely quiet, as she was sometimes prone to do.
Finn already made the mistake of mentioning how boring he thought the mage was to her while they were cozying down for the night and she’d said he was hopelessly incorrigible, easily jealous and ridiculously petty.
Petty?
Finn?
Never.
Clearly she wasn’t paying near enough attention to the mage she spent so much of their time conversing with. Brendolowyn had something arrogant and stuffy to say in regards to just about everything under the sun. He thought cities were abhorrent places where the scum of the world gathered to con and heist others into giving up things that shouldn’t belong to anyone in the first place.
Like land, for instance.
He believed the world they lived in was large enough for people to spread out without fighting over ever last plottable scrap of land on the planet.
Of course, he loathed stealing and hated the Kivtaryn, whom he believed to be little more than an entire race of scavenging brigands, pirates, thieves and con-artists who’d likely wither away and die if they ever topped stealing.
And Lorelei laughed at him.
She laughed at the mage, but she called Finn petty. He didn’t have anything against Kivtaryn, or any other race for that matter, but he was the petty one.
Women.
When Brendolowyn circled the conversation back around, saying something about how it was his belief all children should be taught the most basic magical practices from an early age, Finn tuned him out again.
The beast was agitated, playing over a dozen different ways it could tear the mage’s swollen head from his body, which would only make Lorelei mad if he mentioned wanting to do it. He said nothing.
He didn’t come back to the conversation until he heard Brendolowyn say in that smarmy voice of his, “Our world is a large enough place for everyone to share and we should all make more efforts to just try and get along.”
“Speaking of large worlds,” he slid off the side of his horse and felt the wet crystals of ice and snow slosh and crunch beneath his boots, “I’m going to head out into that large world and see what I can see.” Gathering the reins in one hand, he circled around and handed them over to Lorelei, whose face lengthened with unspoken trepidation.
“Where are you going?”
She didn’t like it when he took off. She said she understood the need for it, for him to give the beast time to be… well, a beast, but she was always worried he wouldn’t come back from a hunt. She fretted he would run into something he couldn’t handle, or something awful would happen to him out in the tundra and they wouldn’t be able to find him again until it was too late.
And maybe that was exactly what would happen to him. Maybe that was how he was meant to die. A momentary twinge of fear prickled along the back of his neck, but he shook it off and stepped away from her.
“There’s nothing out there I can’t handle, Princess. Don’t you worry about me.”
“We’re nearly to
the shore,” the half-elf told him. “We’ll be setting up camp…”
“Then I will find you there.”
He swore as he was stalking away he heard Brendolowyn mutter about how awfully convenient it was for Finn to keep ducking out whenever it was time to set up camp, and those final words pushed the beast over the edge.
He’d barely finished stripping off his clothes, hardly made it a stone’s throw away from where he’d left them before the transformation gripped him. Wrenching muscle and bone, stretching sinew, popping joints. He grizzled against it with snarling anger and cursed the god who made him for making it so bloody painful to embrace his own nature. It should have been the easiest thing in the world to welcome the wolf, but it was one of the most difficult things he’d ever endured.
Though the last few days it did seem to be getting easier. More tolerable the more frequently he underwent the change, and though his mind was not generally a place for rational thought, he tucked away the notion that spending more time catering to the beast within quite possibly meant less painful transformations over time.
Battling for space in his mind with the muddled and half-formed thoughts about the mage, the beast nearly doubled back to challenge him. Anger and discord rippled through him, and the sound of Lorelei’s laughter as he was walking away only added fuel to the fire of his rising rage.
How could she laugh at him? Take pleasure in someone else’s mockery of him, especially when the mockery came from one of the most pretentious, long-winded and arrogant beings he’d ever met in his life.
And she called him arrogant. Him!
Try and get along…
He realized it irked him so much to hear Brendolowyn offer that in solution to the world’s problems because it was the bloody same thing Lorelei muttered to him several times in the days since they’d departed from Dunvarak.
“Just try and get along with him, Finn. We’re all in this together. He’s actually very nice, once you get to know him.”
It was the kind of thing a mother would say to her two children after putting a single toy between them and walking away. Share and try to get along.
What kind of idiot even said something like that and expected anyone to take them seriously?
Not that Lorelei was an idiot, or a toy to be fought over, for that matter. She knew when she said the words to him, Finn would never take her seriously, but Brendolowyn apparently thought it was the solution to all the problems of the world. He believed it when he said they should all just try to get along.
He was judgmental and snooty and about a hundred other words Finn didn’t feel like searching for in his vocabulary.
Rising onto his hind legs, he stretched into the beast like a hand spreading into the fingers of a well-worn glove. He could still hear the rational thoughts in the back of his mind, but they were moving further and further away, barely audible and muddled by the overwhelming of his senses.
The black wolf lifted his face into the wind. The breeze tickled through his fur and filled his nose with so many smells. Lorelei dominated all of them; the familiarity of her always came first. Jasmine, white lavender flowers, the tang of her sweat. He could taste her on his tongue. He didn’t know how those smells were hers, only that they were, and he felt instantly drawn toward her. Dropping back down onto all fours, he loped in her direction but stopped himself when the wind shifted.
There were other scents just beneath his nose, only temporarily whisked away by the silver huff of his exhaling breath.
Troll dung. Goblin stench. So many goblins it was almost impossible to ignore, but their camp was further west, somewhere in the tundra at their back. They’d skirted far enough around it not to attract attention, thanks to Finn’s keen sense of smell. He caught bear scent and elk, and for a moment the elk intrigued him, but there was something else out there. Something strange and unfamiliar, further east. A sickening, sweaty smell, sour and pungent as rotting onions.
The wolf thought maybe it was city smells, the stink of the distant port drifting on the wind, but it wasn’t quite strong enough to equate with an entire city.
It was singular; no, not quite. The smell belonged to three creatures of similar ilk. But their odor was not one the wolf ever smelled before. Leather soaked in old sweat, it stunk of salt and sea, metal and blood. The fur along the length of his spine lifted in intrigue and trepidation, but never one to turn the other cheek to a challenge, he darted off in the direction of the smell like a child chasing a ball. He breezed past Lorelei and the half-elf, spooking the horses as he ran and laughing to himself.
He didn’t know how far he ran, or for how long. The wolf never kept track. It took in its surroundings, breathed in the air and came to know the land by the way it smelled and tasted on his tongue. The snow felt slushier beneath his paws, slipping and giving way as he jaunted forward almost playfully. He’d paid no mind to the tracks he was leaving in the snow, and hadn’t done at all since they’d left Dunvarak.
It never occurred to him something else out there might follow the trail he left behind him because he was the hunter, and all other things were prey. But there was something alarming about the trace he was tracking, something that spoke to his senses of a harsh cruelty unlike any he had ever seen, and reckless as he was, Finn actually started to slow down as he grew nearer and nearer to the source of the smell.
He’d gone so far he could barely smell Lorelei when he craned his head over his shoulder, only the barest hint of her on the wind as it moved told him she was far enough away he might not be able to protect her if she were in danger. Might not even be able to feel her fear if something were amiss and she needed him. Coming to a halt, he squared his shoulders, front paws still on the ground as he sat and felt the world around him.
The smell he’d been advancing on was on the move, broken off and separated into two parts. It was still a couple miles south of him, reachable in no time at a steady run, but he could smell its separation, knew a part of it stayed behind while the other half moved westward, heading toward Lorelei and Brendolowyn.
It was a herd of some type, he told himself, but even he didn’t believe that. Instinct told him he should double back, steer his companions away from whatever marched toward them, but the mad and reckless part of Finn that earned him his name when he was so very young felt challenged.
He wanted to know what it was first, would have felt incredibly stupid if he’d rushed back to find his friends marveling over some animal that could be easily avoided, warded off with magic or ignored. But he didn’t need to see it to know it wasn’t just some animal. It was something with a mind of its own, something filled with harmful intent. He felt the intention almost as clearly as he smelled the stink of sweat on skin, and once more he broke off into a run, racing toward the part of it that stayed behind to see what it was.
Closing in on the shoreline, the wind was sharper. Blowing in off the water, there was a different kind of chill to it, not as sharp or cutting as the frigid winds they’d been enduring for days, but enough to cut through the thickness of his fur so he felt the cold. Even as he ran, the blood pumping furiously through his veins, the heat of his breath escaping in long puffs of hoary steam, the chill he felt took on a new sensation.
It mingled with the prickling stab of intuition still tingling along his spine.
Fear.
He was closing in on something dangerous, and even as it hadn’t sensed his coming, when it did finally realize he approached it would stand to face him with a vengeance unlike any he’d ever met with in an enemy before. Skidding to a halt, he lingered behind a wiry, barren bush sprouted among the rustling grasses that lined the shore. The sound of the ocean was fierce in his ears, its smell almost so overwhelming it took him a moment to hone in on the thing that brought him to that place. Sharp eyes scanning the craggy shoreline, he spotted something out of place.
Nestled beside a tall stone jutting from the sea was a narrow, four-oar boat guarded by a single being with his sights set o
ut to sea. Black hair in a greasy, braided knot hung down its broad, bare back. Its skin was a dull, caesious color, more green than grey, that stood out against the black leather pauldron spiked across its wide shoulders.
The wolf searched its mind for memory of such a creature, finally settling on the only one that seemed to make sense.
Orc.
Finn sniffed the air again, leaning forward and narrowing eyes at the solitary figure guarding the boat. He’d never smelled an orc before, never seen one outside the crudely drawn pictures in books his brother kept on the shelf in his study. Slave-traders by nature, the U’lfer before his father’s time, before the War of Silence, often sold the women and children from the villages they raided to orc traders. Unfortunately, many of the images in those logs weren’t highly detailed.
Still, he knew what the thing standing in front of him was. He’d just always imagined orcs to be smaller, an only slightly larger, potentially cleverer version of goblins.
But the threat standing just a few feet from where Finn lingered behind the sparse cover of tall, dry grass and barren branch, was nothing like a goblin. Tall, well-muscled. The axes dangling from its belt looked as though they’d tasted plenty of blood in battle. A warrior the likes of which Finn had never seen.
Not that he was scared. Mad Finn feared nothing, but there was a moment when he found himself torn between attacking and retreating. The party that broke off from the guardian by their boat hadn’t been a large one, perhaps two, maybe three at most, but they were headed straight toward Lorelei and the mage.
On the other hand, if he left the boat guard, racing back to see to the safety of his mate, he would only have to face it again later.
It was better to act now, to remove a potential threat before it became an actual force.
Sorrow's Peak (Serpent of Time Book 2) Page 15