by Gabi Moore
Seconds only had passed, and the grumble was escalating into an undulating growl.
Desperately, Laova whirled and brought up her bow across her chest. In a simultaneous blur, the great gray body of a mountain wolf lunged out of the scrub. With all her strength, Laova thrust the sturdy wood of the bow into the wolf’s jaws, past the gnashing teeth, as far back as she could get it, over the flatter back molars and gums.
The world disappeared as her back and head were ground into the thick snow; Laova blinked back into consciousness, fighting to hold the bow and to hold herself out of the limp blackness of a hard sleep.
The wolves of the mountains were not like their smaller cousins in the valleys, near Laova’s home. Wolves were grudging neighbors, and pests when they raided food stores or chased away game. Sometimes they killed children who wandered away. For the most part, they were a part of life, a dangerous part, but manageable.
The mountain wolves were different; they stood bigger than an elk, their hulking shoulders as tall as a man. Their jaws were easily wide enough to swallow a human skull, and strong enough to crush one in a few grunting bites. Thankfully they lived in the high places, and were few. But even a pack of four or five mountain wolves were death to any hunter caught alone.
Laova thanked the gods she was not alone. Several thick-throated whistles shook the stillness and the writhing monster, whose teeth were inches from her nose, shuddered and roared from deep in its belly. Laova clung to the bow, bracing her shoulders against the ground; her arms felt like they were about to break, and the ravaging claws of the wolf kept raking closer and closer to her sides as it scrabbled the snowy ground for purchase.
Taren had fired four arrows, one after the other. Drawing a fifth, he seemed to hesitate—in the back of her mind, Laova was well aware why. Taren had set out on the hunt with twelve arrows; he’d lost one in a bad shot for an elk that bounded away to live another day. He’d used a few since, bringing down rabbits and foxes for their meals, but he’d been able to recover and reuse them.
Now, this beast held four arrows sticking like crests out of its coarse gray fur, and if it bled at all, even Laova, struggling beneath it, couldn’t see. If Taren wasted any more arrows, they were both dead.
Shouts could be heard, now. The others were coming. The frozen mountain night seemed hot and sluggish as Laova’s heart stuttered overtime, crowing blood into her head and hands and eyes. She looked over at Taren; he asked a silent question.
It seemed outside her reach, but Laova tried anyway. Her bow was creaking in protest; it might already be damaged beyond use, but soon it would snap under the pressure. One last task for you, friend, Laova thought grimly.
She let her left arm crumple to brace an elbow against the ground. The wolf’s head tilted with it, still trying to dislodge the bow and get to Laova. Her other arm shot upward, and with the jaw of the beast now brushing her own cheek, spit flying, its rotten breath choking her, Laova nodded to Taren.
Now, the wolf’s head was squarely turned for an easy target.
Taren whipped up his bow and drew an arrow back to his ear.
Laova held her breath, knowing that if the shot was bad, she’d die in seconds, and even if it was good, she might still die soon after.
In the breath that Taren spent aiming, the wolf let out a growl and turned its eyes to Laova’s.
She gasped. They were gold, shimmering, shining gold. They glowed and rippled and… waved… just as the spirit lights.
Confusion and terror erased Laova’s sense, but at that moment, the shrieking war screams of her fellow hunters filled the night.
Suddenly, the wolf was gone, away from her, and Laova lay there breathing the clean ice of the forest night air. Was she alive? Was she unhurt?
In another heartbeat, none other but Nemlach himself was over her, asking exactly those questions. She’d never seen him so afraid, and it took a moment to connect that his fear was for her. His blue eyes searched her face, then her clothes for signs of blood, her body for signs of injury. It took seconds, and there were only seconds to spare, because the fight was not through.
“I’m fine,” Laova heard her voice claim. It sounded a little like a question, to her own ears.
Nemlach offered a hand; she gripped it like a lifeline and was dragged out of the snow.
Life roared back through her. She was back on her feet, all seemed right. Nemlach thumped her shoulder, shaking loose a fall of clumped snow from her coat and hood. He gave her a smile, raised his spear, and leapt into the fray with their fellows.
Before she joined, Laova gauged the situation.
Over the nearest rise, a figure was sprinting closer; Bamet, the last to arrive, had probably been ranging further away than the others. Around the wolf, five small human shapes darted and danced the dance of survival, of something very like savage determination to endure.
This was why she was a hunter, Laova knew in her soul as she surged forward across the sloping forest floor. She was made for this. She lived for this.
A scream cracked the air and bounced with almost physical force upward against the rising mountains around them. Laova’s blood chilled twice, first at the very real fear of snow-slide, and second, for the terrible whiteness of Taren’s face and redness of his blood as the wolf finally got its jaws around something solid.
Perhaps a snow-slide was coming, but there was no time to consider it. Bamet had arrived, and dealt a crushing blow to the wolf’s skull with his club. A valley wolf would be dead under such force; the wolves of the mountains were different creatures indeed, and this one did not seem any closer to death. It did yelp painfully, opening its powerful jaws and allowing Ghal and Khara to yank Taren to safety. He held in his screams, but it seemed to Laova that he was growing whiter, whiter…
And the Rell was advancing; her hand was on the hilt of the Scim, and Laova felt a shiver of something—something old, something deep inside them all—as the smooth surface of the Scim sliced out of its hide-wrapped home, tasting the night air.
It was a knife of some kind, Laova knew. But if you honed stone down so thin and so long, it would break. And the Scim could bend, it could flex like living thing. Rell held it steadily now, between herself and the wolf, between the wolf and Taren.
Laova took another running step, raising her bow, but the ground betrayed her. The snow bank crumbled too fast for her to even yell; her breath was knocked out of her against first a tree root curling upwards from the ground, then a rocky shelf that her back hit flat. She rolled off it and onward, picking up speed as she tumbled head over heels through the dark.
Her sense returned in spasms and Laova threw out all her limbs. After another few paces of half-hearted downward motion she finally landed on her stomach in the snow. A shuffling after-rush of loose snow and dirt ran over her, and Laova had to dig herself out when her breath finally returned in stopping, shocking gasps.
“Damn,” she muttered, collapsing beneath the hollow under-roots of a sturdy old pine. She was lucky she hadn’t snapped her spine in half against a tree trunk. Laova took a series of slow breaths, easing her bruised lungs back into working order.
Her bow was missing, and all but three arrows had fallen out of her quiver. Laova groaned. She might find a few while she trekked back up the hill, but her hopes were low. At least her bow would be relatively easy to find—three feet long and she had surely dropped it close to the others. Maybe they’d found it already. Maybe they’d already slain the wolf…
Laova froze; in the snow above her, something was walking.
She tried to control her breath; her chest protested, aching and burning and causing an impudent fuss. Laova calmed her heart and shrunk deep into the roots. Shrouded as such, still covered in snow and bits of icy dirt from her fall, her scent would not be easily detected. And to see her, whatever passed above would have to cross on this side of the tree. Surely, it would simply stride out into the night, away.
With a growl, the wolf leapt over the edge of
the hollow and landed before Laova, gazing again into her with its eyes of living gold.
There could be no question; it saw her, and not only that, it had followed her. Taren’s blood still darkened its muzzle, and his two of his arrows still fanned out from its shoulders.
Not it. He. It was a ‘he’. Laova didn’t know how she knew, but she was certain. And now, he was advancing, and there was something clipped in his jaws…
Laova’s bow knocked against her knees and fell numbly to the ground. She stared at it, far from having the courage to move and try to pick it up. The wolf stared at her with eyes that glimmered and danced in the dark, and if Laova was not mistaken he was brazenly daring her to try, to pick up the bow and try.
Laova shook her head.
A low growl rumbled out and over her. Unless Laova was quite mistaken, it was a laugh.
And then the wolf moved on. It shook its massive shoulders out, and the two clinging arrows flew off into the snow. Laova sat there shaking as it turned, impossibly graceful, impossibly fluid, and melted into the forest.
Time continued with or without her; Laova just sat there, quivering, for some time. She was flushed with fear beneath her clothes, but as the high of hot-blooded motion faded the cold returned to settle in her bones.
She began to cry. They were hysterical desperate tears, and Laova struggled through them to get back to her feet. She picked up her bow, retrieved Taren’s arrows. By the gods, he might be dead, and she was sitting under a tree, shaking and crying in fear like a child.
Was it fear? Laova began her trip back up the slope. The question rotated, slowly, in her mind, as if to give her time to examine every angle. Was it fear? Was she afraid? Or was it the feeling of the world raising its walls against her? Fear she knew; was she afraid, or was she merely striking out on a path from which there could be no deviation? For the first time, Laova wondered. Why had the wolf come just as Taren tried to open his heart to her? Had she tracked it? Or…
Ahead, movement. Laova had picked up a few arrows on the treacherous, slick hillside, and now her quiver was at least a little less pathetic as she staggered over the last shelf. She approached her small party; they were making camp, having decided that here was as good as there to set up, and Taren didn’t have an excess of time to zigzag this way and that scouting.
“Help Bamet with the tent,” Rell ordered bluntly. Laova hopped to immediately; they needed to get Taren somewhere warm so they could take off his coats and shirts and treat the wound. Khara was striking a flint to the best brush and kindling they could find, trying to get a fire burning. Nemlach and Ghal both knelt on either side of Taren, keeping him awake. Rell was standing guard, still armed with the Scim, which still bore streaks of ruddy red where it had scored the body of the beast.
“Wake up, boy,” Laova heard Ghal teasing. “It’s your night to forage firewood, lazy ass.”
Laova’s breath caught as she helped Bamet string up the tent frame between tree trunks, waiting and hoping and despairing that Taren would not answer. But he did, weakly.
“Sorry.” His voice a creak of a thing, but it was there. “I figured you could just talk the fire to life. You talk everyone else to death.”
Ghal roared with laughter. “Is it that way? Well, you can just go on and fletch your own arrows, from now on.” Laova caught Ghal exchange a look with Rell. It was a good look, hopeful and optimistic. The Hunt-Leader smiled a little, relieved.
Laova smiled, too, and reached for an edge of the hide walls of the shelter. She and Bamet stretched it over the rope frame, while Laova let herself forget about things. For at least the moment, she let herself forget about the wolf and feelings of decided fate, about the hunt, about the dreams, even about Star-Reach. Even about Nemlach.
Taren was alive, her best friend was alive.
Once more she felt rather than thought that perhaps it was not really dark.
Not yet.
Chapter 5
The fire was burning quite well when Laova finally stepped out of the tent where Taren lay, naked from the waist up. The meat of his shoulder had been savaged a little, but his thick winter clothes had taken the worst of the wolf’s bite. It was miraculous, really. If the wolf had put just a little more gruff into it, Taren would be not only headless, but likely snapped in two. Bizarre and blessedly fortunate that his injuries were so forgiving.
And yet, something in the back of her mind whispered still… Perhaps the wolf had not meant to harm Taren. Maybe, it had only come to deliver a warning.
“Laova.”
Beside the fire, Rell sat cross-legged. She’d been cleaning the Scim; a soiled rag was in one hand, and she was scrubbing with care at the blade. It gleamed, now, catching the firelight. It shone like sunlight off water. Nothing Laova’s people made could compare, and Rell cared for it with deliberate and delicate caution.
Rell’s eyes dropped back down to the weapon. Laova understood her perfectly, and took a seat beside her at the fireside.
For the few minutes that Laova waited, her stomach was sinking. She knew what was coming—what else could Rell possibly want to speak about? The fire crackled mockingly, and the wind sighed as if in reprobation. Laova tried and failed to recall how she had expected to explain herself, what she had planned to say.
Rell finished cleaning the Scim and sheathed it. But then she simply sat, staring at the firelight, catching it in her red hair and her stony eyes. Laova tried not to fidget. Ghal was in the tent caring for Taren. Khara and Bamet had watched first last stop, so now took the chance to disappear for the night into the second tent, wordlessly avoiding the conversation that approached.
Nemlach lurked quietly out of the firelight, whittling at the point of his spear. Laova saw him and felt something like relief. At least he was here with her; even he was certainly more ‘over there’ than ‘here’.
“What did you think would happen, Laova?” Rell asked finally.
Laova met her eyes; Rell’s were flashing and bright and hard, but Laova could meet them. At least she wasn’t stiff with fright, unable to react as she had been under the wolf’s stare. She took a deep breath.
“I was tracking the wolf,” Laova lied.
Rell did not move.
“I was looking for my ritual hunt to be… great. Maybe too great.” Laova watched Rell’s face.
“Taren almost died.”
“I know.”
“You almost died.”
“I know—”
“It is different to hunt something that will hunt us back.” Rell’s words were sharp as arrow-points, each one punched through the air. “Even an idiot can understand. Deer and elk will run away—that is what we all thought we were hunting. Because you said so.”
Laova swallowed; her throat was dry as grass in high summer. She waited to see if Rell had more to say, and in a moment more she apparently did.
“If that wolf had been part of a pack, we would all be dead. Did you ever consider that?” Rell snarled. “Did you consider the very likely possibility that the creature was returning to its pack? That we might come upon them any time?”
“Yes, of course…”
“So you meant to get someone killed?” Rell stood. “You meant to sacrifice one of your hunters so your kill could—could be a surprise?”
Laova opened her mouth, but found it mute. Tears sprang into her eyes, and she wished she had something, anything to say. But the only thing she could possibly offer in explanation was the one thing she felt sure Rell must not know.
“This is not how we hunt,” Rell’s voice lowered again, and Laova nearly wished it wouldn’t. She looked up at the Hunt Leader in dread. “As the wolf pack hunts, so do we. The wolf does not fool its pack-mates. The wolf hides nothing, because each wolf supports the next to survive.
“When you fool us, you fool yourself,” Rell hissed. “When you lead us to death, you walk into it yourself, as well.”
Laova trembled; she knew she wasn’t meant to speak, which was good, becau
se she felt she could not.
“Would it have been you that brought his dagger back?” Rell asked quietly, staring down at Laova. “Would you have presented Taren’s weapon to his mother? What about Ghal? Bamet? Khara? Nemlach? Myself? Would you have walked back alone with your kill, and presented the tokens of our deaths to the tribe?”
What a cruel thing to ask. As Rell said the words, they took shape in her mind, and Laova could see herself return to the village alone. Explaining to first Rell’s family, as the Hunt Leader. Then Taren’s. Then the others. Then the next tribesman who asked her quietly, in private, what happened. And then a dozen more. Until everyone knew…
“Childish.” Rell spat. “Childish. Selfish. Foolish. “
She crossed around Laova and the fire and stormed into the tent where Taren lay. She did not come back out, and Laova was left alone by the fire, tears streaming down her face. She refused to sob. If it took all the strength in her, she refused to sob. Her vision blurred and blinded and the fire became a great smudge of white-orange against a world of muted black. Still, not a sound.
Laova had never imagined a day when she’d hate him doing so, but eventually Nemlach came to sit beside her. He sat near, and set a hand on her shoulder.
She’d almost gotten him killed, too, didn’t he understand? When that thought surfaced, Laova finally coughed out an ugly, gurgling whine, and she bit her lip shut tightly to prevent another one escaping.
“Laova,” Nemlach murmured with a sigh.
“Please,” she hissed through her teeth. “Just go. I’ll sit the first watch. Please go. I can’t… I just can’t.”
“I understand,” Nemlach nodded.
And go, he did. Laova relaxed, out alone in the dark night, in the biting wind. Would Taren have left her in peace with so little resistance? No. She would have had to fight and scream and force him away, which would have made her more upset still. Nemlach was wise, where Taren was not, and Laova cherished that wisdom.
Eventually her tears dried, or perhaps they only froze. The shadows around her did not move, and yet… at times, Laova looked into the woods and seemed to feel something there. It would send a chill down her spine, but she was only a little afraid. After all, she suspected she knew exactly what watched her.