Consumed by his rage, blinded by his fury, I spun and yanked in the same motion.
Tashira’s shattered leg snapped into place with an audible crunch.
Shocked, I dropped his hoof from my arms to land with a thud and a weak splash into the snowmelt and new mud. My hands raised, I backed away. My daemon, astounded, slunk away as though fearing he’d be punished for this latest atrocity.
Sidelong, I eyed the gashed, bloody, yet whole length of Tarbane foreleg and raised a single question in my head. How’d that happen?
I remembered trading insults with Darius, permitted my rage to rise and not much else. Ankle deep in mud and icy snowmelt, I blinked. Returning to myself, I knelt beside Tashira’s newly merged cannon bone. My hand stroked its clean, yet bloody length.
The wound, bleeding afresh, showed me where the break had been. Outside of that small problem, Tashira’s right foreleg appeared whole and sound. Not even a bump marred the straight even line from his knee to his fetlock.
“You were saying?”
“Gods above and below,” I muttered, cold leeching into my core. I did that?
“Whoa,” Darkhan breathed. “You are, like, one powerful brother.”
Ghost wiggled and wagged, her tongue hanging from her jaws. “I knew you could do it.”
“Thanks,” I murmured, running my hand up and down the former break.
Setting that stubborn idiot was my first priority. The second was healing it. I’d also need to heal all the rest of Tashira’s wounds.
“Keep the fires high,” I said, over my shoulder. “Be back in a bit.”
I dropped to my knees in the melted ice and snow beside Tashira’s breathing body and rested my hands on his head. Centering, I dropped swiftly into a deep trance. I no longer felt the winter mountain chill, nor heard the snap and crackle of the fires. I no longer saw my companions. Though my breeches soaked up deathly cold moisture, and no doubt my legs soon turned blue with cold, I swam within the inner waters of complete sensory deprivation.
I opened my inner eyes.
As though through a living veil, I saw Tashira in reverse, his black body now white. The dark muddy ground beneath him also gleamed a pale, washy silver. Above me, the stars within their eternal void appeared as glittering black diamonds while the sky itself had turned into a milky white.
I sent my will into my friend.
Remembering how I accidentally intruded upon Feria’s sleeping mind, I avoided contact with Tashira’s out of respect for his privacy. Instead, I focused my mind’s eye and magic on his injured leg. How easily the healing power flowed from me and into him. Under my hands, the bone smoothed, blended together, meshed itself into solidity one more. Under my hands, the wound closed, sealed and vanished. I sent warm healing into the outraged tissues, the overstretched and damaged ligaments and tendons. I sought any possible infection and burned it away with miniscule flame bursts.
Turning my attention to his other wounds, I searched first for any other broken bones. Caressing his spine, I danced my will over his ribcage and found a great bruising over several ribs, the swelling halted from the chilling cold of the snow he lay upon. That took less than a minute to soothe away the hurt and bring new blood to heal the area. His right lung bore dark marks of terrible contusions that needed a concentrated effort to fix. Under my power, it filled with new air and expanded with fresh healing.
Jumping from his ribs to his flanks, I healed several gashes and a yard-wide square of angry tissue where he no doubt struck unrelenting rock. His flesh knitted beneath my touch and my will, the inflamed flank soothed into somnolence. I found more bruising and scrapes over his rump and hind legs. His butchered left hind, tattered and torn, wasn’t actually broken, I felt grateful to discover.
Unfortunately, his thin skin was scraped down to bare bone over almost all of it. He obviously landed on that leg when he hit the ledge. How the leg itself didn’t shatter upon impact was a mystery unto itself. I pored over it slowly, patiently, and that limb alone took as much time as his broken leg.
Leaving it whole and sound once more, I moved on, repairing and knitting together gashes, cuts and scrapes, and soothing more bruising. Like his lung, his kidneys suffered from the impact and required soothing magic to ease the hurt and heal them from the deep damage. I even inspected his ears and found a cut on the right one.
At last satisfied I’d found and healed every injury, I sent him even deeper into unconsciousness. He’d need the rest after the toll the wounds and the healing itself took upon him. I hoped we’d find grazing in plenty for him, for he’d need the nourishment.
Backing my will out of his newly healed body, I woke from the trance.
Immediately, the icy night chill sank its deadly fangs into my body. Despite the blazing fires, the wet I knelt in remained cold and dank, and numbed my legs all the way to my hips. A wild wonder I hadn’t frozen to death, I thought, forcing my legs to move. I stood and staggered, leaning against a nearby tree to hold myself upright. Shivering uncontrollably, my teeth chattering, I glanced around.
Near midnight, I gathered from the stars above in their current course, and the moon hung far in the western sky. Darkhan and Ghost rose from their spot near the fire on my right, eyes bright and tails waving.
“Are you all right?” Darkhan asked, his worry clear. “You were kneeling there so long–”
“Will he be all right?” Ghost asked on the heels of Darkhan’s query.
I smiled, tired and cold beyond belief. “Yes to both questions,” I replied. “But I think I could sleep for a week.”
“You need food,” Darkhan said. “Ghost and I will hunt for you, won’t we, Ghost?”
“Of course,” she answered, her brown eyes still worried. “Perhaps you should, er, change back, Big Dog. Your wolf is much warmer than your human, isn’t it?”
“You are so right.”
My return to my wolf form felt like I descended into a warm bath. I sighed with relief, warm again within my fur, despite the pervading chill in my legs. If I slept close by the fires, I’d warm up through and through.
Finding a relatively dry spot between two blazing conflagrations, I lay down, exhausted. While I didn’t feel tired after healing Feria, I surely did now.
“There wasn’t so much to heal with Feria.”
“Perhaps not,” I sighed.
Noting a goodly pile of wood stacked near to hand, readied for tossing on any fire, I grinned at the pair. “Hunt well, kids,” I said. “Feed yourselves first.”
“We’ll bring you a haunch,” Darkhan said. “I promise.”
I didn’t even hear them leave.
“Do you think she likes me?”
I lay my head on my paws, wondering if I should give him a straight answer this time or tease him as I had the first four times he asked that question.
‘Does she like me?’ ‘Whyever would she?’ ‘Come on, think she likes me, maybe a little?’ ‘I doubt it, as you don’t have the brains the gods gave your garden variety vegetable.’
He remained silent for at least twenty minutes after that response. I even managed a light doze before the next one.
“She glanced at me, Big Dog,” he said, his voice hushed and excited. “Does that mean she likes me?”
“She seems like the kind of girl who could have her pick of mates,” I answered.
His ears dropped. I bit my tongue to stifle a laugh.
“What if she doesn’t like me?” he moaned. “But I’m a hero, I saved a unicorn–how can she not like me?”
“Girls like the touchy-feely, sensitive types,” I replied. “Blustering, bragging heroes are, like, so yesterday.”
He visibly drooped at my words, his ears slack, defeated.
Both Tashira and I needed a day of food and rest. Despite the haunch of feral cow the kids left for me, I’d drawn too much energy from my own body to heal Tashira. I felt weak, and as hungry as when I’d no hunting skills worth mentioning and nearly starved to death. Tashira’s once
glossy coat now hung on him, dull and limp.
The afternoon after Tashira’s desperate leap and my healing of him found us only a short league away from the canyon. Too weak to travel far, Tashira and I needed both food and rest. We, Ghost, Darkhan and I, hunted while Tashira grazed in a meadow not far from the canyon that nearly killed him. After eating our fill of a huge bull elk, Darkhan and I napped under sullen grey clouds and swirling light snowfall while Ghost filled Tashira’s ears with girl-talk. At least I tried to nap. Darkhan couldn’t keep his mouth shut.
Tashira didn’t seem to mind that Ghost spoke to him almost nonstop. I reckoned she found in him a confidante she couldn’t find in me, as I was the Chosen One. She dared not confide in Darkhan, as no doubt, he was the subject of such conversation. Tashira listened and replied around bites of snow and grass, then listened more.
While I tried to ignore Darkhan, he continually worried and fretted over what Ghost might think of him. I considered snapping at him and demanding he shut up. Though he’d obey, I knew such a demand on my part was petty and low-spirited. His youthful infatuation overrode all outside considerations; his worry she may not find him worthy brought him to the brink of outright panic.
Besides, I’m having way too much fun with this.
“Why wouldn’t she like me?” Darkhan muttered.
“Because you’re an idiot.”
He moaned.
Stifling a laugh, I glanced about by force of habit, sniffing the light snowy breeze for any hint of danger. The meadow lay ringed on the west and the north by a high ridge, the east and south dotted with heavy clumps of forest and scrub oak thickets. Once we rest enough, we’ll head east, the easier way for a time until we crest that smallish mountain there. After that, well, the last and steepest and most savage range of mountains stood just beyond. We’d travel down into the valley, then the real work began. I half-wondered if Tashira could survive up there. How can any of us survive on those jagged peaks? Perhaps once we reached them, I might convince all of them to go home and permit me to continue alone.
When Darkhan didn’t speak again, my eyes shut on their own accord.
“Big Dog, do you think she likes me?”
“She does–” I began, giving up the game.
What was that?
A slight sound, incredibly faint, tickled my ears. I couldn’t be certain, though it sounded like the click of rock against rock. A marmot perhaps, digging for edibles out of the high altitude tundra? Or a harmless creature walked nearby, and I heard the sound of a deer’s hooves sliding over stone as it tripped in search of moss and heather for its lunch? Any number of innocent reasons for that subtle sound and very few excuses for it being dangerous. So why, then, did my instincts scream a warning?
Whipping my head over my shoulder, I peered through the grey mist to the west. Something was just on the other side of the ridge. I sniffed the wind, but the push of air was against me. It carried my scent to whatever was out there.
“She does–yes?” Darkhan asked eagerly, evidently not noticing my rising hackles.
Movement. There. On the hilltop.
I rose to my feet, growling under my breath.
“I’m going to talk to her.”
Before he trotted away, I caught a glimpse of–what? Something in his eyes, anyway. Guilt? Worry over more than what Ghost thought of him? And why would he mosey off when he knew I sensed something dangerous?
I’d little time to think on his strange behavior when the swirling snow parted enough to show me two horsemen on the ridge. They sat their mounts, silent, unmoving, their horses as still as themselves.
Their bodies were clothed in thick skins of deer or elk with leather veiled across their lower faces to protect them from the chill wind. Hoods with the warm fur on the inside protected their heads. Farouk hunters? The resemblance was there, certainly.
I cast that notion aside almost immediately. Too far from their territory anyway, they’d never dare hunt me. Yet, perhaps there were other mountain people, kin to the Farouk, in these high ranges. More primitive folk seeking to skin my black hide as a trophy?
The light-colored horse on the left ducked its head for a moment. Its rider seemed a bit on the small side–
My eyes focused intently on the horse on the left. Despite the misty, swirling snow, it’s coloring showed clearly. Buckskin, I can see the black in its mane and legs. Its rider appeared small, dwarfed by the beast it rode. The horse on the right was a bay, its rider big, heavyset, with a spot of red beneath the hood’s furry fringe.
Another horse topped the ridge to stand beside the buckskin. Its rider sat even smaller than the other, aboard yet another bay.
I knew that horse. Despite the snowfall shrouding them, I’d no doubt at all. There was no mistaking that blaze, that flowing mane, or those high stockings. I trained that horse. I bloody love that horse.
Another silver-grey horse cantered up the far side to halt beside Rufus. That one I recognized in an instant. There was no mistaking a Tarbane, even with the distance and the drifting snowfall. Shardon.
And that could only be Rygel on his back. I sank back on my rock, my jaws slack. Gods above and below, that’s impossible. There’s no way they could have followed. No bloody way.
“Uh, oh,” Tashira said in my ear. “You are sooo busted.”
I wheeled, my fangs bared. “You knew they were following me!”
His eyes widened in such feigned innocence I wanted to bite him. “Did I forget to tell you?” he asked. “My bad.”
I turned on a fearful Darkhan, who slunk, grinning, forward. Ghost had vanished. “You also knew.”
“She commanded me not tell you,” Darkhan whined, cringing.
Growling, I turned back. The four on the ridge cantered downhill toward me when a shrill scream ripped apart the still silence of the valley.
Bar, on gigantic wings, swooped up from behind the low line of hills.
Blasting past the four, whipping snow into their faces, he dove toward us, his eagle’s beak wide. He screamed again, his eagle’s talons flat to his belly, his lion hind legs and black-tipped tail streaming long behind him. Hugging the ground, he shot past me, shrieking, a mere rod over my head. The wind of his passage blew snow and my own fur into my eyes. Yet, if he thought to intimidate me, he could think again.
Shaking my head clear, I followed his line of flight as he reached the end of the meadow and banked around. Lining himself up, I knew he’d amuse himself with yet another fly-by.
The four, now halfway down the hill, had been joined by others. More horsemen lined the ridge before cantering down in the wake of Ly’Tana, Kel’Ratan, Arianne and Rygel. The Kel’Hallan warriors.
I recognized Silverruff in the lead as at least seven wolves raced downhill past the horses and silver Tarbane. Their jaws wide, tongues lolling, they galloped headlong down the hill before speeding up across the flat meadow.
“Don’t look now,” Tashira warned. “You’re about to get tackled . . . again.”
I braced myself. I didn’t know till later that it was a bad mistake.
Silverruff hit me broadside, sending me rolling. Had I not prepared for impact and had instead rolled with it so to speak, I’d still have gone flying. Without the bruises, however.
Before I caught my breath, the others bowled into me, laughing, exclaiming, growling, nipping, tugging, licking, their exuberance an impediment on my ability to draw breath. Thunder sat on my hindquarters while Kip and Shadow playfully bit me before lunging away, allowing room for Black Tongue, Nahar, Kip, Digger and White Fang to assault me with feigned nips and wide grins, tails wagging furiously.
“You thought you were so smart,” Silverruff laughed, busy chewing my ear.
“Like you can escape my nose.” Kip shouldered him aside to lick my face. “More fool you.”
“Big Dog!” Digger yelled, lunging in to sprawl over my shoulders, grinning and panting. “We’ve so much to tell you.”
Like puppies jumping on their d
am, these huge wolves, veterans of many battles, jumped and yelped and wagged over my body, leaping away to allow yet another wolf to greet me. Beyond their grey, tan and silver bodies, dancing legs and waving tails, I caught a lightning glimpse of Tashira greeting his silver brother, muzzle to muzzle, reunited in joy and a bond stronger than flesh or blood. Amid dozens of legs, I saw Ly’Tana slide down from Mikk, a dark bundle in her arms.
“Papa!”
The bundle escaped her grip, leaped to the snowy ground. He fell head over heels and raced toward me. White screened its dark face. Sapphire blue eyes blazed. Stumpy legs carried it with zero grace and tons of happy energy across the short distance.
Thunder removed his heavy weight from my hind end as the others backed off from me, leaving me to lie half-buried in snow. Respecting Tuatha’s mad charge, they stepped politely aside as Tuatha the Younger cannoned into me.
Laughing, I rolled onto my side as my son, thrice as large as when I’d seen him last, burrowed between my front legs and forced his way past my neck and into my gaping jaws. His busy tongue, needle teeth and buzzing tail expressed more eloquently than words his feelings of love and simple adoration.
“I missed you, Papa,” he said, his teeth biting into my lower lip.
I pushed him down with my paw. “I missed you, too, baby. Gods know how I’ve missed you. You got so big. Look at you. You’re a big bad wolf now, so you are.”
“Mama said I’ll be as big as you,” Tuatha exclaimed. “I’m a good wolf, like you, Papa.”
Mama dropped the leather from her face, unsmiling, unshed tears standing in her emerald eyes. Just behind her shoulder, Kel’Ratan also dropped his facial protection, his red mustache bristling. Still, his white teeth gleamed as he grinned. Just beyond them, in my peripheral vision, Rygel helped Arianne down from Rufus as the Kel’Hallan warriors, Corwyn and Tor also dismounted in a loose circle. Behind the crowd of men and horses, Bar back-winged to land on a hillock, furling his wings over his back.
This is no way to greet her, I thought, unable to take my gaze from hers.
Rising to my paws, Tuatha dancing between them, I changed forms.
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