Bloodraven

by Nunn, PL

  Bloodraven said something low and ogrish and the dog almost sighed, before lying down licking her chops.

  “She’s better at boar and deer,” he said. “We’ll eat better with her in our company. And sleep safer as well.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The wind came down from the northern heights with all the compassion of a knife blade. Cold, sharp and unforgiving, it brought weather with it that to a young man from the southern forests seemed harsh indeed. Bloodraven claimed it was nothing more than the mildest touch of the storm that obscured the peaks to the north.

  He was ruthless in his insistence on marching on, seemingly mindless of the icy, snow-laced wind.

  The horses and mules trudged steadily through the gradually thickening layer of snow, while the dog bounded ahead of them, a large dark shape that slipped in and out of the trees with alarming silence when she chose to employ it.

  Yhalen sat bundled atop his mount, hood pulled up to keep the wind from driving into his skull via his ears. Bloodraven had donned his coat, finally, but rode without gloves or hood. The tips of his long ears twitched occasionally as a wet snowflake landed upon them, but that was the most concern he showed for the weather. He had much more interest for the trail they traveled, eyes darting here and there, always aware and alert to what might be lying in wait. Yhalen might have been more alert himself, had he not been so busy bemoaning the weather and the assurance that it would only get worse.

  They had been following a steeply rising path most of the morning and had only recently reached a winding ridgeline that veered sharply north. Bloodraven seemed well content with this newly discovered path, even though the wind cut into them with a vengeance without the benefit of the mountainside to protect them from the full force of it.

  Yhalen pulled his hood as far down over his face as it would go, and rode with his head bowed protectively, blindly trusting his horse to follow Bloodraven’s steed. Bloodraven dropped back once, surprising Yhalen with a touch when the whistle of the wind ate his voice. He handed him a scarf, soft and thick, and indicated Yhalen should wrap it around the lower portion of his face. He did so, in no wise so prideful that he would refuse a method of alleviating the punishing wind. It made a difference, that soft wrap, protecting everything below his eyes and making the task of actually looking up to observe his surroundings not so painful.

  Towards evening, the wind lessened. It would have been a relief, but the temperature began to drop, which created a crusty top layer on the snow that the horses broke through with each step. They descended the ridge on the northern side, following what appeared to be a popular game trail. There were the small, hoofed prints of deer and the deeper cloven tracks of wild pig. The dog caught the scent of something and bounded off into the trees. By the time Yhalen and Bloodraven had stopped to make camp in the shelter of a rocky outcropping, they heard a great disturbance in the brush that heralded Vorja’s return. The dog appeared, muzzle bloody, and awkwardly dragging a young boar that was at least half Yhalen’s body weight.

  Bloodraven praised her in the ogre tongue even as he relieved her of the carcass, dragging it away from the area they had cleared for a fire. He used his hatchet to hack off the prime meat of both flanks, and tossed the remainder of the boar further into the trees for the hunter to devour. Vorja pounced upon it, growling as she ferociously tore into prey that she’d refrained from indulging in until she had presented it to her master.

  The two flanks Bloodraven had taken for them would provide meat for days to come, and in this weather it would keep well. Since Bloodraven seemed content to prepare the boar meat, Yhalen finished gathering sticks for the fire. The snow made for wet kindling that refused to easily ignite. The misery of a long cold day wore down Yhalen’s resistance to the notion of utilizing the dark arts Elvardo had revealed to him. He added just a tiny little nudge to the sparks he made the old fashioned way with iron and flint.

  Flame caught as if the tinder were dry as bone, flaring up enough that Bloodraven looked up from his work. Yhalen did not look up to meet whatever expression the halfling wore, staring studiously into the fire instead, which had died down to a satisfactory crackle in the center of the little pile of twigs Yhalen had stacked to start it.

  He was surprised and disturbed at how easily it had come. He felt at the edges of it, not sure if magically-induced flame were less malleable than the normal, mundane sort. Elvardo hadn’t mentioned it, had only instructed in the most basic methods of bending it to his will. Perhaps there was no difference at all. Perhaps fire was simply fire, no matter the method of its summoning. It certainly felt no different than any other fire he’d sat beside, but then again, he’d never had the occasion to study it with such intensity.

  They roasted strips of the mountain pig on a spit across the fire. The sound of the flames crackling with each droplet of fat that fell into the coals competed with the rustle of wind through brittle branches, and the contented cracking of bones as Vorja worked on her share of the carcass.

  Otherwise there was silence. Silence had come to rule their days, both of them caught up in their own thoughts and personal tribulations. If Bloodraven had broken into conversation that consisted of more than a few short commands to Vorja, or a warning to him to avoid this pitfall or that, Yhalen would have been dumbstruck. Though there was a certain comfort to the silence, and certain understandings that had come to exist between them, Yhalen missed sometimes the sound of a friendly voice. Of good-humored laughter. He’d been very carefree once. Very much a spoiled child of the forest, cavorting with his cronies with no more notion of what existed in the world outside than the midnight tree mole had of a sunny day on the plains. He’d loved to gossip and flirt and joke with his fellow Ydregi.

  Which thought made him remember Yherji again, so he pushed it away, blurting out words to chase away hurtful musings.

  “What is the ogre word for her?” he jerked his head towards Vorja. “For dog?”

  Bloodraven looked up at him, brows lifted in surprise.

  “Orag,” he supplied.

  “Orag,” Yhalen repeated, rolling the accent off his tongue experimentally. It was a guttural language, from what he’d heard of it, but it had always flowed more gracefully from Bloodraven’s tongue than from his larger brethren.

  “And the snow?”

  “U’ta.”

  Yhalen asked a few more, which Bloodraven gave him the translations for, correcting his inflection once or twice on the words that required sounds not generally used in human languages.

  It was a congenial enough way to pass the time, and something that Yhalen ought to know the basics of if he were to venture into the depths of ogre territories. It kept them up a little longer than usual, sitting across the fire from each other as the darkness overtook the world entirely, not even allowing the light of the moon to seep past the thick cloud cover. Only the small fire, to which Yhalen added fuel to keep alive, provided the least flicker of light.

  The dog had crept close, her big head upon crossed paws next to Bloodraven’s knee. When Bloodraven finally moved to unroll the bedding, she rose to her haunches and sat waiting for her master to settle, eyeing Yhalen intently until he did what she expected of him, which was to join Bloodraven under the blankets. Only then did she lay down with a sigh on the other side of the fire, head upon forepaws, her dark eyes with their drooping folds of skin watchful of the darkness surrounding them.

  Bloodraven was right. Intimidating as she was, Vorja’s presence was a comfort during the depths of night in an unknown territory. As much as the solid bulk of Bloodraven’s body beside him, and the hard strength of his arm that always draped across Yhalen’s body when he slept. Not, as Yhalen had assumed the first few nights, to dissuade escape, but to have his hand near the hilt of the sword that always lay between their bedroll and the fire.

  Bloodraven slept ever vigilant. And though Yhalen had been raised in the great forest as a woodsman, a hunter at one with the wood and aware of all of its nu
ances, he’d never had the need to be at guard during both waking and sleeping hours. Danger had never been so ingrained in the fabric of his life that he needed to sleep with a weapon at hand. Bloodraven, he realized upon sleepy contemplation, had always—save for those days when he had been under human guard and weaponless—slept with a blade within easy reach.

  It was pan bread for breakfast the next morning, and strips of cold, roasted boar from last night.

  Vorja went off to hunt for her own breakfast and came back an hour later when they were on the trail with spots of blood on her muzzle.

  They came to a stream, perhaps thirty feet wide and frozen over save for a few places here and there where the current was strong enough to fight off the incursion of ice. They rode along the banks of it, for it seemed to twine the way Bloodraven wished to travel. Bloodraven surprised him by occasionally pointing out something and naming it in the ogre tongue. It was a comfortable sort of non-conversation that eased the silence of a snow-covered mountainside.

  It wasn’t until Vorja stopped stiff-legged a dozen paces ahead of them, her ears pricked forward and the hairs on the back of her thick neck bristling, that Bloodraven jerked up a hand for silence.

  Yhalen reined in his horse and the mules crowded close to its flanks at the abrupt halt. He stretched out his senses, as he would have in the great forest, searching out the unmistakable essence of life. He ignored the small, single-minded scents that marked the smallest denizens of the wood and searched for a larger life force.

  He discovered the larger something even as Vorja began to growl and sprang off towards the trees upstream. A great many larger somethings that radiated hot hunger and consolidated purpose.

  “Wolves,” he said to Bloodraven, because of all the animals of the wood, only wolves had that collective mindset, or that focused pack attention. He didn’t see the danger to two men on horseback.

  Southern wolves would never be so bold to attack healthy men—they were shy scavengers that lived on the fringes.

  Bloodraven looked at him sharply, then back towards the wood where Vorja had disappeared.

  “Stay close,” he said and spurred his horse forward. “Don’t give them a lone target.”

  Yhalen opened his mouth to protest the seriousness of the threat when a great snarling tumult erupted from within the wood. Bloodraven swore something ogrish and drew his sword even as several gray shapes lunged out from the tree line, silent and intent in their attack.

  They were like no southern wolves Yhalen had ever seen. As tall as Vorja, but leaner and longer, with thick gray fur that bled to white at their chests and bellies. Their snouts were as long as Yhalen’s forearm and their teeth no less long and sharp than Vorja’s.

  He felt the impact of their hunger even as they rushed in concentrated force towards the horses, intent upon tearing out tendons and bringing down prey. Bloodraven roared a battle cry, swinging the great sword down in a long sweep that cut into one unfortunate wolf as it ventured too close and made the other three shy back. But only momentarily, and then they were back, snapping at the horse’s legs.

  Another two bled out of the forest from behind them and though Yhalen’s mount was well trained and held its ground, the mules were not so stalwart. As wolfish teeth bit into the haunch of one, they both shrieked and pulled desperately at the lead. Hooves slipped on the icy bank and the mules slid backwards onto the frozen stream surface, pulling Yhalen’s horse backwards. The frozen surface might have held one equine body—three were too many.

  The ice cracked and his horse slipped into frigid water, tangling itself with the mules in its panic.

  Hitting the water was like a physical blow, the cold so intense that it took his breath away although he was soaked only up to the hips, having kept his seat by the grace of luck alone. It numbed the flesh and sent fingers of ice clawing up his torso. He fought with the horse, trying to get it to make for the shore, hoping it had the strength to lunge back up the steep bank, but it resisted, as terrified and desperate and shocked by the frigid water as Yhalen was.

  He saw a flash of dark lunge out of the wood, Vorja rushing into the fray, saw Bloodraven slicing at wolves from the ground where he had better chance of causing mortal damage, and then a huge gray shape was leaping towards him from the bank, desperate enough in its hunger and frenzy to risk the frozen stream to get at its prey. Yhalen whipped out his dagger and slashed at it mid-leap, but its weight hit him hard, hurling him into and through the fractured ice, plunging him under bitingly cold, clear water. Nails tore at him as the wolf frantically clawed for the surface, pushing him down even as it surged upwards. Something harder struck his shoulder then, numbing it even more than the cold. A hoof, more than likely, for he was surrounded by twelve thrashing equine legs.

  It drove the air from his lungs, regardless. He felt the bottom, smooth rocks and silt, and pushed himself off from it, desperate for the surface. Something that could only be the flank or shoulder of a equine that outweighed him many times over, jarred against him and he clawed for a grip on saddle or reins, anything useful—but the beast was thrashing too much to gain a hold on anything but slick horsehide. His left arm was numb and useless, ringing hollowly from the impact of hoof to shoulder. He used the right to claw his way to the surface and cling desperately to slick ice to keep his place once he’d reached it. He couldn’t breathe properly. It was as if the cold had wrapped its claws around his chest and squeezed the air out.

  There was too much wet hair in his face to see properly, but he could hear the snarls and growls of conflict well enough through the chattering of teeth. He needed to get to shore and out of the water, but he couldn’t make his body move, couldn’t do more at the moment than hang onto the sheet of ice that supported him, and breathe and shiver with a cold he’d never have thought possible.

  He shut his eyes and the sounds faded.

  Came back again at the cracking of ice and the splashing of water, and himself coughing up parts of the stream that he hadn’t realized he’d swallowed. Hands he barely felt grasped him and pulled him up against a body as wet as his own. He was tossed upon the shore and lay there stunned, the gray sky blocked out by a thick, black dog chest as Vorja came to stand over him. He didn’t care. She could have torn his throat out, and he wouldn’t have cared in the least, he was so cold and numb and drifting. He turned his head so that his cheek rested against muddy snow and saw the inert, bloody shape of a wolf. Another beyond it. And between him and them, the small flakes of white blown diagonally by a wind that wanted to eat his flesh away.

  The world began to shake. Violently. Only it wasn’t the earth he lay upon, but his body. It was quaking so hard, his bones rattled. He couldn’t keep his jaw from clattering, couldn’t control the tremors that shook him to the core. He lowered his lashes, certain that the surface of his eyes would freeze over if he left them open. The darkness made the world spin, so he gave up holding onto awareness and let himself sink into welcoming night, but the burning cold latched onto him and followed him down, refusing him that retreat. How could it be colder now, out of the stream, than it had been immersed in mountain-fed water?

  The dog lunged forward, a nervous movement of thick legs that jostled his frozen body. Yhalen opened his eyes and saw Bloodraven pulling himself up onto the bank, hauling on the reins of Yhalen’s horse. Only one of the mules was still attached by the lead. The other was gone.

  Bloodraven was wet up to the chest, the ends of his dark hair clinging together and dripping. He shook himself once, like an animal shedding water from its fur, then said something low and unintelligible to Vorja that made her abandon her guard over him. Bloodraven dropped to his knees next to him, one big hand touching his cheek. But there was no warmth there, Bloodraven having so recently come from the water himself. Yhalen half sobbed at the lack, wanting a cessation of this miserable cold so badly that it drove all other thought from his mind.

  Bloodraven swept him up, holding him close to his own wet body and giving the dog
some sharp command before reaching for the dangling reins of his horse and swinging up with Yhalen in his arms.

  Bloodraven wrapped both an arm and the folds of his wet cloak around him, which did nothing to stave off the cold but did make a buffer between him and the wind. He felt sluggish and numb, and the sound of his heart beating was a slow, steady drum inside his head. He was going to die of the cold.

  He felt he ought to warn Bloodraven of this, but the most sound that escaped chattering teeth was a hardly recognizable jumble of simple words.

  “C-c-cold. So-c-c-cold.”

  Bloodraven made no comment, reining the horse to a sudden halt and swinging them both down, one hand scrambling to catch his balance against the arm-thick boles of saplings that grew along a rocky incline and into the earth itself.

  There was a grayness that bled to blackness in the back of the small cave. Vorja crowded past Bloodraven’s legs, busily investigating the depths. She made a quick circuit and apparently no living thing resided within, for she bounded back outside. Bloodraven sat Yhalen down, abandoning him to the cold hard floor and the shadows. He curled onto his side, body and limbs so heavy he couldn’t sit upright. Bloodraven was back in a thousand heartbeats—or a dozen, Yhalen couldn’t distinguish which—with the dry bedroll off the back of his own horse.

  He yanked Yhalen up, working at the wet fastenings of his coat, and pushing it off his shoulders, then tossing it away. He started on the tunic and Yhalen panicked at the notion of his last layer of protection being torn from him, leaving him bare and naked in the cold. He lifted his good arm and perhaps babbled some protestation, both of which Bloodraven ignored as he tore the shirt off over his head. He last divested Yhalen of his boots and trousers before encasing him in the bedding.

  It was dry, but hardly warm. Nothing could be warm enough to chase the chill from his flesh. He clutched the blanket to him, burrowing his head under it, only half hearing Bloodraven gathering dry deadwood from the corners of the cave and striking a fire close to one wall, out of the draft from the cave mouth.