It was such a prosaic injury that it startled a laugh out of her. The Companion’s head came up indignantly, but a moment later, she dropped her nose and shook her head ruefully.
:I know. It’s terribly . . . ordinary. Isn’t it?:
“Entirely. I assume he’s in Kettleford?”
:Matya has him put up on a featherbed by the fire and she’s warming the spare bed in the loft for you.: Well, that was a most satisfactory answer. :She said you were due today or tomorrow, but I didn’t want to chance his ankle setting wrong and came to look for you.:
“Then let’s not dilly-dally around here any longer,” she said firmly. “You’re right; we don’t want his ankle to set without proper tending, and I don’t want to be caught out on the road anywhere near dark.”
The Companion nodded in agreement, reared and pivoted gracefully on her hind hooves, and was off like a shot arrow. Brownie didn’t need any urging to follow, and increased his pace to a trot. His feet thudded heavily on the turf-and-dirt of the road, and she pulled her cloak tight around her as the wind picked up again.
There was still light in the sky as they came out from under the trees and into the cleared land around the hamlet of Kettleford. There were only nine houses, five on one side of the road and four on the other. There was a watering trough and a well in a widened spot in the middle of the road. There was no inn, though the sign of a shock of wheat above the door of Old Taffy’s house, and the presence of a couple of benches on either side of the door, would inform anyone passing through that he could get beer and something like a meal there. Locals would all gather in Taffy’s parlor of a night for a drink and a chat and perhaps a game or two. Each of the houses had a little cottage garden where folks grew their vegetables, but for the most part, people here hunted or trapped, with a couple of those who knew what to look for supplementing their income by gathering rare herbs and dye plants. There were hides and furs staked out in various stages of curing in every yard and on every bit of wall. Some of the hides were of odd shapes or very peculiar patterns or colors. This was the edge of the Pelagiris Forest, after all, and odd things prowled the paths, creatures whose furs were highly desirable just on the basis of their rarity or oddity. Matya was the sole holdout among the hunters, although her husband had been one of them when he was alive. She raised chickens and rabbits and had three cows. The entire hamlet got their butter, eggs, and cheese from her, as well as their potherbs. She was no kind of Healer though; herbs for the kitchen, herbs for tanning, and herbs for dyeing were her specialty. In season, she’d get at least a visitor a week from all over this area to trade for what she produced.
Matya’s cowshed was spacious—big enough for a half-dozen cows, though she only had three now. There was more than enough room for Brownie and the Companion. And like every building here, the word “shed” was something of a misnomer; it was built like a fortress, all of stone, with tiny windows that had heavy shutters, and a stout slate roof. Even the chicken coop and the rabbit hutch were built the same. It wasn’t safe, otherwise. Matya herself came out, wiping her hands on her apron, her shawl wrapped firmly about her shoulders, at the sound of the Companion’s bells.
“Nah, I told this one you’d be coming along shortly, Vixen,” was Matya’s greeting, as she opened the gate and let them into the yard with the shed in it. “But nothing would have it but that she go out looking for you.”
“She told you that?” Vixen raised an eyebrow.
Matya bellowed a laugh, tossing her weathered head back. “Don’t be daft! She mimed it, belike. Let’s get these creatures both comfortable, then ye can see to the lad.”
Together they untacked both Brownie and the Companion and let them find places for themselves among the cows, who amiably made way for them. Dividing the saddlebags and panniers equally, they closed a door built of planks a thumb-length thick, latched it up, and went in to the cottage.
Matya’s cottage consisted of two rooms with a loft. One room—just big enough for her bed—was where she slept. The other served every other purpose. The loft was over the bedroom. The floor was wood, for warmth; half-logs laid in sand and pegged together, gaps filled with a combination of sawdust and glue. Matya had once told Vixen proudly that her husband had laid it himself, not wanting his bride to have to cope with a pounded-earth floor.
There was a little table, three half-log benches, one corner was a kitchen with a pantry, a cupboard, and a stone sink, and that was all the furnishing. Right now the most prominent thing in the room was the bed made up of furs and blankets beside the fire, and the far-too-handsome, pale-faced, black-haired young man in Herald’s Whites lying in it. He raised himself up on his elbow and tried to smile, but it was obvious to Vixen he was in a lot of pain.
“You are a welcome sight, Healer Vixen,” he said.
He didn’t know her, of course; they’d never met, but they knew each other’s names, since they shared the Circuit. “I imagine I am, Herald Vanyel,” she said dryly. “Let’s see what kind of mess you’ve made of yourself.”
She laid her burdens down next to one of the benches, while Matya did the same, and pulled off her cloak and draped it over one of the panniers. She knelt at the foot of his improvised bed and pulled back the blankets. “Well, at least you got your boot off,” she remarked, cupping her hands around the misshapen ankle.
“I got it off as soon as I realized I’d broken something,” he replied. “I couldn’t see how I would make it worse, and I didn’t want to have to have it cut off.”
She just grunted. He could have made it worse, but, fortunately, either by skill or accident, he hadn’t. She closed her eyes, and . . . well, it was hard to describe what she did in words. She . . . sensed what was going on in there. It wasn’t like seeing, and it wasn’t like feeling; it was more like knowing.
Well, he had gotten lucky. The bone wasn’t broken entirely, it was cracked. If he’d tried to walk on it, he certainly would have turned those cracks into breaks, but he’d had the wit not to try. “Not so bad,” she said, opening her eyes. Then she went to her panniers for the plaster-powder and bandages. Only after she had the foot and ankle protected and immobilized did she cup her hands around the joint a second time and give the bones their first round of Healing.
And only after that did she make up a dose of painkilling tea, which the Herald drank down without a face and without a complaint.
Meanwhile, Matya had taken her bags and stored them out of the way, extracted the cold pocket pies, and warmed them next to the fire. Vixen was ravenous after the Healing session, of course, and she ate three to Matya and the Herald’s one each.
Then she sat with her back up against the warm stone of the right leg of the fireplace, cushioned by another thick fur, and sipped a cup of Matya’s famous chamomile-and-bee-bait tea. The Herald went supine again as soon as he had finished eating, and she didn’t blame him. That had to hurt, even with her nostrum in him.
“Terribly unheroic of me, I fear,” he said, his eyes closed. “Did ’Fandes talk to you?”
“She told me a plank gave way under you on a footbridge,” Vixen replied, as Matya settled down on one of the benches with some mending. “Your timing was good, anyway.”
“What the young fool isn’t telling you is that he did it in Ostcroft,” Matya said, “Then got his boot off and rode all the way back here a-purpose to catch you.”
That earned him a raised eyebrow from Vixen. Ostcroft . . . it would have taken her three days to get from here to there on Brownie. But then again, Companions were supposed to be ridiculously fast, and if he’d waited in Ostcroft for her, it could have been a week or more before she got there. “I hope you gave them a piece of your mind,” she said, dryly. “It could have been a child . . . and it could have been a broken neck, if it’s the bridge I’m thinking of.”
Vanyel opened one eye, and she noted with a start that his eyes were silver. “No scolding for not paying attention
to where I was going? Am I not going to feel the edge of the famous Vixen tongue?”
She snorted. “Not unless you tell me it was because you weren’t paying attention to where you were going,” she replied as Matya cackled. “Regardless of what you’ve heard, I don’t generally assume the worst of someone unless I already know he’s an idiot.”
That got a wan chuckle out of him. “I’m relieved,” he said, closing his eye again. “I was quaking with dread. Your reputation is formidable.”
“She doesn’t suffer fools gladly,” Matya put in, her strong hands making neat little stitches as she applied a patch to—whatever it was she was fixing. It was hard to tell, just seeing the fabric resting in her lap.
“I don’t suffer fools at all,” Vixen corrected. “But an honest accident is just bad luck.”
“To make up for the good luck of finding Jensen’s boy before he ran into something vicious,” Vanyel sighed. “On the other hand, if the bad luck had to go to someone, I’d rather it was me.”
Vixen rolled her eyes. “Well, maybe bad luck doesn’t have to go to anyone,” she pointed out. “Why aren’t you sleeping yet?”
Vanyel managed a slight laugh. “Because I’m not sleepy. The ankle isn’t hurting now, and I admit I’m more than a bit dizzy, but painkillers rarely put me to sleep, Healer. I’m odd that way.”
She snorted. “I’ve never heard of a Herald I’d classify as normal,” she pointed out. Vanyel seemed to find this very funny. Then again, it might have been the tea she had given him; it made some people giddy rather than sleepy.
And so things might have stayed, the Herald slowly succumbing to sleep, Matya and Vixen exchanging a little gossip before going to their respective beds.
That, however, was not to be.
Vanyel was just opening his mouth to say something when the night air was split by a sound that raised every hair on the back of Vixen’s neck.
It was something like a roar, and something like the sound made by tearing heavy canvas, and it sounded as if it was coming from the point where the road entered the village. In a flash, Matya was up and making sure the shutters over the windows were barred and blowing out all the lights. Vixen raced up the ladder to the loft and took a quick look out of the tiny window up there to see if she could spot anything.
The window had an excellent view of the road, and the full moon had just risen over the tops of the trees, pouring light down onto the village. The hideous sound ripped through the silence a second time, and . . . something lurched into a pool of moonlight.
Vixen could only say, “something,” because it wasn’t like any creature she had ever seen before. It was definitely bigger than two Brownie-sized horses put together. It had four legs, each ending in terrifying talons.
The head was blunt, with a mouth full of sharp, pointed teeth; in fact, it looked like a lizard, if a lizard happened to be covered in short, shaggy hair. As she watched, it made that terrible sound again. She closed the shutter over the window, barred it, and scuttled down the ladder again.
“Did you see it?” Matya whispered, as the three of them huddled close to the fire. Vixen nodded, and described it to them. Vanyel shook his head.
“I’ve never heard of anything like it,” he breathed. “It must be some sort of Change-Creature out of the Pelagiris.” He acted as if he was going to try and get up, and both Matya and Vixen both held him down.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Vixen hissed. “You can’t stand, and believe me, if you’re a Herald-Mage, you really don’t want to try any magic in your condition!”
“But—”
“Shut up and be quiet!” Matya and Vixen both said at the same time. They exchanged a look over the young man’s head.
“I’m going back up to the window,” Vixen whispered. “I’m going to see if it’s got a mind I can read.”
“Wait!” Vanyel interjected. “How—”
“Shhh!” Matya and Vixen hissed, and Vixen scrambled up the ladder again.
The creature was still down there, but now it was sniffing at the door of the cottage across the road. Vixen closed her eyes and let her mind go blank and lowered her shields.
She quickly picked up the nervous mutterings of the chickens in their coop, the frozen terror of the rabbits in their shed. Brownie was petrified, and so were the three cows, but the Companion was keeping them all quiet.
Whatever this thing was . . . it didn’t have a mind like anything Vixen had ever encountered before.
Well . . . it looked like a lizard . . .
It was hard to describe what she did next, though the closest she could have gotten was to say she was “listening harder.” Straining, trying to catch “notes” that were “lower” than she could usually hear, perhaps. Sometimes it worked.
This time, it did.
It wasn’t words so much as feelings. Hunger. Anger that the things it could sense were walled away inside stone dens. But what alarmed her most was that she sensed this creature was not going to leave until it had dug out every last warm-blooded thing here and eaten it. So far as this beast was concerned, this was a storehouse of food, and it was going to find a way to get at that food. There was nothing there to reason with, as she sometimes could with predators; the creature was mostly instinct and recognized only its own needs. She also got some very chilling images from the thing’s mind, memories of hunting humans. Armed humans. It had done spectacularly well against them; in those memories it was frighteningly fast.
She went back down the ladder and rejoined the Herald and Matya. “There’s nothing I can ‘talk’ to,” she reported grimly. “It’s hungry, and it intends to eat us, and that’s all there is to it.”
She looked from Vanyel to Matya. “I don’t think your hunters can kill it. It’s fast, and it’s strong, and it’s huge. The only chance they might have is if they can fill it full of arrows for a long while—that might weaken it enough that a concerted attack by everyone in the village on it might succeed. But from what I picked up, that might take a long while. How well stocked are people for food and water?”
“I’m fine, I could hold out for a fortnight, and I have the pump to my well right here in the kitchen,” Matya said after a moment of thought. “But the Corsons, the Lentoffs and the Derlys rely on the village well for water. And then there’s the animals. More than a day and a night without food and water, and I’m going to lose some, maybe all of them. I’m not alone, there are other horses, donkeys, goats . . .”
“I get the idea,” Vixen said.
Vanyel’s brows furrowed, and his jaw clenched. He squeezed his eyes shut and was obviously trying to do . . . something. But after a moment, he let out his breath in a disgusted sigh and opened his eyes again. “How long does this potion of yours last?” he asked Vixen.
“Six, eight candlemarks—” She bit her lip. “It’s not merely interfering a bit with your magic, is it?”
“I can’t hold the power,” he confirmed. “It’s as if I’m trying to hold water in my hands. Until it wears off, the best I could do would be to shoot at the damned thing. And it’s mucking up Mindspeech, too. I can barely talk to ’Fandes.” But then, his eyes widened a little. “I can’t reach anyone with Mindspeech who would be near enough to do us any good. But you can!”
Vixen stared at him. “I don’t Mindspeak to—”
“Animal Mindspeech. The Hawkbrothers aren’t that far from here, and a lot of them fly owls. Just send out a general call for help! If a bird gets it, he’ll pass it on to his bondmate!”
Well, it wasn’t the craziest idea she had ever heard.
“Meanwhile, Matya and I will figure out how to speak to and coordinate everyone in the village,” Vanyel continued. “If you aren’t able to reach anyone, well, we can wait until dawn, and maybe we can fill the thing full of arrows without risking anyone. By then, your potion will have worn off, and I’ll be
able to use magic again.”
Vixen gave him a very skeptical look. Personally, she didn’t think anyone would be able to use magic with a broken ankle. Everything she had ever heard said that magicians had to have very finely tuned concentration to use their powers, and how did he propose to concentrate when he was a scant breath from screaming with pain?
He apparently read that look and shrugged. “All right. Maybe I will be able to use magic again. But I’d rather try every possible approach than sit here and do nothing.”
“Aye, so would I,” Vixen agreed.
* * *
It felt as if she had been sitting there forever, trying all the ranges of Mindspeech she had ever tried before. Well, except one—she carefully avoided the one where she had sensed the thoughts of that monster. The last thing she wanted to do was to alert it further, maybe make it home in on Matya’s cottage. The problem, of course, was that she had never Mindspoken with a Hawkbrother Bondbird; she had no idea what their minds were like. Like regular raptors? Probably not.
And then, just as she was about to give up on one range and try a new one, she got a faint but clear response. A beautiful, silvery Mindvoice like nothing she had ever encountered before, and nothing like an animal’s. :I hear, Healer! I hear! Hold fast, I am coming!:
“I got an answer!” she exclaimed, her eyes popping open with the shock of how intelligent the responder had sounded.
“What was it?” Vanyel and Matya replied simultaneously. But she could only shake her head.
“I have no idea. But it sounded intelligent, and it said it was coming—” Then she faltered. “—but it was at the very edge of my range. And I have no idea how far that is. I never tested it before.”
Vanyel frowned a little. “Probably not far. Mindspeech doesn’t go all that far unless it’s boosted by a Companion, so I imagine that Animal Mindspeech is the same. Maybe a league? It will depend on how fast—”
The thing roared again—but this time there was a definite note of anger and challenge in the sound! Vixen raced up the ladder again and looked out the window.
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