No. Now it feels like more than that.
The sky was just beginning to hint of dawn. Patches of fog drifted along the ground like a ghostly blanket, carried by a draft moving down the ravine, blunting the shapes of trees, boulders, and mountains. She could feel the veneer of dew it had painted on her hair. A sheen lit by brightening east reflected off Toril’s shoulder, which rose and fell steadily as he breathed.
He lay beyond the cooling embers, half a dozen steps away, with Hika resting at his feet. She’d adjusted his blanket, but hadn’t been able to bring herself to lay beside him last night, even though she had imagined raised eyebrows from the older couple as she rolled out her own bedding, and even though she was certain Toril was too exhausted to attempt conjugal anything. The thought of proximity to a man—any man, even one who seemed inclined to kindness—was simply more than she could stomach.
So why did she now find herself regretting that decision? What exactly had panicked her awake, and why did she wish Toril’s eyes were not closed?
Her gaze flicked to the horses. They stood motionless with heads together, hind legs cocked, a few paces uphill...
A gap opened in the fog among the boulders down near the creek. Had she seen a flicker of movement? She craned her neck, her scalp prickling.
Just beyond Toril, a dark shadow clarified, and Malena found herself staring into the eyes of the largest wolf she had ever seen.
For a moment, neither of them moved. Then the spell was broken by a growl from Hika, who scrambled to her feet with hackles raised, interposing herself between wolf and humans.
The wolf snarled, but it never took its eyes off Malena. Instead of engaging the sheep dog, it gathered itself and lunged across the fire. At the same instant, Toril yelped, rolling into a crouch with the staff in his hands. As Malena twisted and raised an arm to shield herself, she saw more four-footed shadows materializing out of the mist.
The impact of the wolf threw her to the ground, knocking the wind out of her. She felt her head thud and her shoulder bend as fangs seized her forearm and crushed down. Claws raked her chest and pinned her; she squirmed but could not get loose. With her free hand, she dug fingernails into the beast’s snout, tearing as deeply as she could manage. No air would enter her lungs, but hot breath blew bellow-like as she stared into eyes pressing steadily closer.
The wolf released her arm without warning and made a lightning snap for exposed throat. Exerting all her strength, Malena used her clawing hand to skew the movement. Her wrist bent as teeth clicked a finger’s breadth from her skin. A drop of saliva blossomed above her collarbone.
Without warning, a dark streak slammed into the wolf’s head and flitted away again. Malena saw the shape of the skull deform with the blow, robbing life from the beast’s gaze. It slumped at her side without a sound, a trickle of red swelling from below its ear.
A horrible dissociating sensation—as if someone had seized her heart, her head, her very bones, and then wrenched them out of her body in a single, mangling motion—rocked her. She felt herself struggling out from under the weight of the dead wolf, and also, somehow, kneeling beside herself, curled fetus-like in agony. Her skin burn and crawled. The ground spun.
Odors of blood and sweat, ash and fatigue exploded, and with them came a perception of filth, invisible but overwhelming. Filth... and otherness. Some alien, malevolent other was clinging to Malena, entwined around and within her body, pushing her own core aside. It made her want to bathe and scream and cower and flee, all at once.
Then, like the recoil of a whip crack, she jerked back into herself, and the sensation vanished. Malena found that her lungs drew breath, her eyes blinked, her throat swallowed—all of her own volition. Her heart felt warm and familiar again.
Shuddering, Malena staggered to her feet. She retched once, twice into the grass at her feet. For a few heartbeats, she was too stunned to think. She forgot about the wolves; her only focus was the need for reassurance that the invisible presence was truly gone.
At length, she became aware of the retreating clatter of hooves. Through shifting gray, she glimpsed Shivi and Paka backed against an outcropping of stone. The old man stood in front of his wife, armed only with a bundle of blankets and a cooking skewer, which he thrust at wolves between kicks and desperate shouting. As Malena watched, one wolf seized the blankets and began to pull Paka forward; while the tug-of-war consumed his attention, the other darted past and fastened onto Shivi’s ankle, its neck shuddering but undaunted under blows from elderly fists.
Toril was twirling his staff, sweeping and thrusting like a madman. It had been his blow that killed Malena’s wolf. She saw a stain from oozing blood on the back of one of his thighs. He was limping. Three wolves faced him, alternating feints and charges from opposite directions to divide his attention. One seemed to have a broken foreleg, which slowed it down somewhat, but its teeth were bared for a fight to the death.
Hika was keeping him alive. Despite the reach and crushing power of the staff, Toril wasn’t fast enough to repel attacks from multiple directions, so each time a wolf leapt in, the dog nipped or slashed just enough to buy him time.
Shaking herself out of a stupor, Malena darted to the fire and seized a length of charred limb as long as her thigh. Knives were scattered through their belongings, but she could not afford the search time. She sprinted forward and cracked her weapon on the snout of Shivi’s wolf.
The limb crumbled, leaving her with nothing more than a short club as the wolf rounded on her, accompanied by its partner that had been occupying Paka. She backed toward Toril and flung her handful of charred wood.
Jurivna, to die like this!
A bass growl turned Hika’s high-pitched yip into a gurgle, and Malena had a glimpse of the sheep dog flung aside like a rat. Then Toril stumbled, his forehead slick with sweat, and wolves rushed in. But they didn’t dive at Toril; they bounded over him—at her.
What happened next was a chaotic jumble. Flashes of fur, canines, and claws tore across her vision so rapidly that she had difficulty making sense of the chaos. She found herself supine again, her head ringing.
As if from a dream, a boy—or a boy-sized shadow, anyway—seemed to materialize out of the mist, moving in a blur. He grabbed a wolf’s hind leg and brought the joint to his knee, wrenching bone through skin in a single brutal movement that finished before the beast could even react.
Immediately he spun to fling an arm around the head of another animal that sailed toward her. He caught it in mid-leap, curled undersized fingers over teeth that seemed to be closing in slow motion, then threw his weight sideways. An obscene crunch sounded as the beast’s neck snapped. Its body hurtled past.
Toril’s staff whipped overhead. Howls and snarls faded. Malena’s eyes fluttered shut.
The low thunk of hooves woke her. Malena propped herself on an elbow, blinking dully, in time to see a golden-skinned osipi vault off a horse’s back and hand reins to her husband.
“They hadn’t gone far up the canyon,” announced the warrior, white teeth flashing in the sunrise. “The hobbles slowed them. But it took me a while to get them calm.”
“It’s a miracle you got them to come back at all,” Toril said. “The scent of the wolves has to be driving them crazy.” He gestured downhill, to where a handful of grayish lumps sprawled motionless in the weeds.
“Horses aren’t dumb,” came Paka’s voice from the other direction. “They see the wolves are dead.”
“These wolves are,” Shivi corrected. “But at least one ran off to the north. And if the horses have any imagination at all, they’re wondering how many others are out there. I know I am.”
As Malena rolled into a more upright position, she became conscious of her forearm, throbbing and itching beneath a scarf that had been improvised into a bandage. Coming from the cloth, she could smell a pungent balm of some kind. Had Shivi tended the wound? She could see the woman rifling through saddlebags, apparently searching for something among the supplies.
>
Noticing that Malena was alert, Toril limped over and went down on one knee.
“How are you feeling?”
“I guess I’m in one piece,” Malena heard herself say.
“You have Oji to thank for that,” Toril said. He beckoned to the stranger. “Oji, I am Toril i Malena,” he announced, using the traditional formula for introducing one’s spouse via the pair name.
The pride in his voice was palpable. Malena touched her forehead with two fingers, as good manners required.
Oji bowed. “Lady. I am honored to meet the mother of Clan Kelun.”
Still processing her tenderness about Toril’s introduction, Malena felt resentment rise. She didn’t need a reminder about her duty to the clan, or about Toril’s responsibilities. Not now.
She swallowed.
“You are well met, Oji. Your arrival was a blessing.”
“But not an accident,” Oji replied gravely. “I’d been tracking those wolves. I would have helped sooner, but I’d dropped back so they wouldn’t catch my scent, and I didn’t realize they were attacking until it was almost too late.”
Malena digested this.
“How bad are everybody’s injuries?” she asked. “My arm’s a bit torn, I expect, and I’ve got a lousy headache and lots of bruises, but that’s about it.”
To her surprise, Toril turned expectantly to the osipi.
“The bite on the stonecaster’s leg was deep,” Oji answered with confidence. He gestured to strips of cotton bound around her husband’s thigh. “The teeth punctured without tearing. I think I have it all clean. The old man’s ankle was a mess; he’s going to favor it for a few days, but in the end it’ll come right, if Shivril has any say in the matter. The compress you put on it should help with infection.” He glanced sideways at the old woman, who was straightening stiffly to her feet among the gear.
“We were lucky,” Shivi summarized. “Considering the size of those wolves, we should all be dead.”
“Hika was dead,” Toril whispered.
Malena glanced at him sharply. What was that supposed to mean? Why had he used the past tense?
He nodded over her shoulder; Malena swiveled and saw the dog panting in a patch of sunshine, her throat and shoulder torn but washed clean. “She’s okay now. I’ll explain later.”
Shivi approached the group, a fistful of bark in her hand. “Budan tea. We could all use a cup, to take the edge off the bruises.”
“Ugh,” said Paka. “That stuff’ll curl the hair right off your toes. Can’t you save it for your next midwifery?”
Shivi stared at Paka until he rolled his eyes. “I’ll boil some water,” he sighed, reaching for a pot near the fire ring.
Malena realized she was shaking her head. “We don’t have time. The outlaws are probably already moving.” She rolled to her feet, surprised at how balanced and clear-headed she felt, and began folding the blanket that had been wadded behind her head.
“Outlaws?” Oji asked.
Malena’s eyes flicked to Toril, then Shivi, then Paka, in confusion. Judging by the brightness of the dawn, she’d been unconscious for maybe a third of an hour; if they’d had time to bandage her arm, and fetch horses, and make introductions, why hadn’t they shared their purpose with the osipi? Did Toril consider him untrustworthy?
“Oji has brought us news,” Toril explained, as he lifted a saddle onto one of the horses. “News that needs pondering. There are no bandits ahead of us.”
“But they kidnapped the children,” Malena stammered. “We even saw a few of their bodies, back in that meadow yesterday.”
Oji nodded. “You were tracking those filthy putos when you started; there’s no doubt they took the children. But they don’t have them anymore. That valley you crossed was a graveyard; the woods and hills nearby are full of corpses with tattoos and filed teeth.”
Malena’s mind was spinning.
“Where are the children, then? Who has them? How do you know all this?”
“A squad of soldiers has the children now. Royal Guard.”
Malena felt the tension drain from her forehead and jaw, but even as she finished exhaling, Toril was shaking his head. “That doesn’t mean they’re safe.”
“Why not?” Malena demanded. “The Royal Guard would protect them. They must have killed the outlaws.”
“The Royal Guard sent the bandits,” Toril corrected. “Or Gorumim did, anyway. It looks like the kidnapping was his idea.”
“And the yolk-suckers,” Oji added bitterly.
The epithet only added to Malena’s bewilderment. Why was Oji cursing his own kind? And what did osipi have to do with the Royal Guard, the outlaws, and this horrendous, inexplicable kidnapping?
While Shivi brewed tea, Oji explained how he’d met Toril, what his clansmen were doing across the border, and how he’d tracked them into the wilderness after leaving Bakar. Malena helped Toril saddle the horses and lash gear, her mind struggling to absorb the implications. She kept remembering her own assertion to Toril, about the evil in Gorumim’s heart...
“I know the valley you described because I trailed the ahu there,” Oji finished. “About the time I arrived, the bandits were all slaughtered by ahu.”
"You saw the three around the fire?"
Oji nodded. "I hid and watched. They were killed later. All the air in the valley tingled from Gorumim's magic."
"Gorumim's?" Malena asked sharply. "He hired the wizard?"
"He is the wizard," Oji replied. He held up a hand to forestall Malena's protest. "I know—he's got the white hair of a sata, and he's outlived plenty of royals. But he's cheated the three-fold path, and kept his magic, somehow."
Malena didn’t waste time debating the impossibility of this idea. "Did you see the children?" she asked.
Oji shrugged. "I had to stay out of sight, and that's not so easy when osipi watch. But I got a few clean looks. There are twenty-nine. Mostly between the ages of three and six, I’d guess. A handful might be older. They all looked terrified.”
“I have a sister...” Malena began.
Oji nodded. “The stonecaster told me. She might have been there; I can’t be certain. He also told me that your parents are missing. I saw no adults other than the soldiers and the ahu.”
“What could Gorumim possibly want with children?” Malena wondered angrily.
She noticed a haunted expression on Shivi’s face, then on Paka’s, then on Toril’s.
“What are you not telling me?” she asked.
21
oreni ~ Malena
When Oji disclosed what he’d overheard in a debate between Gorumim and the ahu, it left Malena stunned and sickened. She wrestled with it as they rode, willing it not to be so.
Part of her wanted to whimper behind bags of barley again.
And part of her was so enraged that she could scarcely sit. She needed a branch like the one Toril had used to beat his fury against the hilltop, when they found the first little girl. She needed to hit something. Or someone. She needed to fling her fist at the sky, and scream, and rail.
Instead, she tried distraction. When they stopped for a brief rest in the afternoon, Malena approached Shivi with another question. “Toril promised he’d explain about Hika,” she began. “But he’s been as silent as a stone.”
Shivi looked up from the stream, where she was kneeling to refill water skins.
“Can you blame him? It’s hard enough to sneak kids away from drunken halfwits bent on mayhem and plunder. Now he’s got to outfox a whole quiver of ahu, plus Gorumim and a dozen of his hand-picked guard. He’s been piling his rocks to mark our trail—but if the priest manages to get a rescue party together, and if they catch up to us in time to do any good, they’re going to think twice before attacking the raja’s own troops. Plenty to think about. And the stakes are higher for failure.”
“Higher? Nothing’s changed, Shivi. We just understand the danger better.”
Shivi stared at Malena for a long time. Her eyes flicked towar
d Toril. Twice she opened her mouth, then closed it again without vocalizing anything. Finally, she shrugged. “Fine. We understand better.”
Malena looked down, embarrassed at the disagreement in Shivi’s voice, but too angry to retract anything. The children had needed rescuing before; Gorumim’s gruesome plans just validated her urgency. It was still up to them. Nobody else was going to step in. Not in time, at least.
“Anyway,” Shivi continued, “You might have been curious about Hika, and you might have been annoyed that Toril was mum, but did you want your man whispering in an ear to explain?” She rolled her shoulders, groaned a little, and put a hand on her lower back. “I thought you looked petrified with his arms wrapped around you in the saddle.”
Malena squirmed. “It would have taken my mind off... other worries.”
Shivi looked downstream. Toril and Paka were gnawing at the last of the dense, dry baati in their provisions, while Oji stretched in a patch of sunshine, taking one of his race’s lightning catnaps.
Malena matched her gaze. A week ago, she could not have anticipated this wretched foray through the wilderness with three strangers and a husband that she couldn’t talk to. Her life had seemed... manageable. Hopeful.
All the adjectives that described her life today brought pain and fear.
The oddness of the osipi was a welcome distraction, and her mind automatically shifted to a different sort of vocabulary as she observed him. Half-life, hakufu, almost, yolk-sucker—she knew plenty of pejorative slang, and even now found that it rose easily to her lips. As a child, she’d used such language freely. She’d been well past her naming day before she realized that ugly talk didn’t fit with the manners expected of a lady with a genteel upbringing.
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