Upon reaching the outer edge of the Guild-patrolled area, she pulled up to catch her breath and take stock. While Ciudad Vaquero was close, it was still far enough away that there would be hardly any foot traffic.
The trees here were farther apart and the undergrowth limited to the occasional stickberry bramble or tumble bush, which grew in large clumps before breaking up and rolling away. But while there weren’t as many trees, they were bigger, taller and far, far older, making even some of the old-growth deep in the Green seem young by comparison. These were huge grandfather trees with trunks up to thirty-five feet around that soared higher than her eyes could see. Lichen and moss were thick around the exposed roots and trunk, especially on the northern face, and the absence of undergrowth made it seem as if the grandfathers had been granted greater living space in recognition of their ancient age and wisdom.
The ground was softened by a carpet of fallen leaves and needles, and the trees were mostly evergreen, thick overhead with loosely interlaced branches that still permitted light to filter through. The afternoon sun was warm on her head and radiated up from the ground beneath the soles of her soft boots. And when she spread her arms around one of the grandfather trees, the rough bark was just as warm against her cheek.
She gave herself a moment to enjoy the sensation of sinking into the tree’s awareness, feeling the weight of its tremendous age, the reach of its roots as they tunneled unseen beneath the forest floor seeking water and sustenance. She felt the peace of the forest seep into her bones, the serenity that came from knowing time passed at its own pace regardless of the lives that might scurry by in their hurry to fill the few short decades allotted to them. The trees had always been here. They had been the first, and they would be the last.
She reluctantly dragged her awareness back to the present, tensing almost immediately as the urgency struck her once more. She kept her connection with the forest, pulling back to a surface awareness, sensing the sun in its pale sky, the lives of animals big and small moving through the trees, burrowing beneath the ground. At the very outer edge of the tree’s perception was the city, a healthy gap in the whole of the forest, not a wound. There were trees aplenty even in the main square, and the people of Harp lived with the planet, not in spite of it.
Narrowing her search further, she concentrated on an area radiating out from the Guild Hall, which would almost certainly be the starting point of any shifter-led hunting party. The hall was easy enough to find. The forest saw the shifters as something special, like very favored children. They were always surrounded by a fond glow in the grandfathers’ perception, each of the shifters a beacon of his own light. The Guild Hall and its concentrated number of shifters shined brighter than any single location in the Green, with the Ardrigh’s palace and his shifter guards a close second.
By contrast, the deepest forest was cool and soothing and always made her think of great power concealed beneath a calm, unruffled exterior.
She’d often wondered if the shifters saw the forest the same way she did, if they were even aware of their rarified status. She’d never seen a shifter embrace the trees the way she did. Maybe because they didn’t need to.
She forced her attention away from the fanciful and back to a practical search for Rhodry and, more importantly, those who waited for him. There weren’t that many shifters out in the forest today. She identified the usual perimeter patrol by their predictable pattern of movement, then one or two others, clearly out for recreation.
Going back to the Guild Hall as a starting point, she searched outward, looking for a group of shifters, either stationary or traveling in a definite direction. When she found them, it was not so much the shifter presence that gave them away as it was the miasma of danger that they carried with them. They were angry, moving steadily out into the forest with murder on their minds. It was much the same dissonance she’d sensed from the trees before she’d found Rhodry way up north. At some level, the forest recognized the intent of these shifters and was troubled by it.
There were both shifters and norms in the hunting party, just as she’d expected. Only two shifters, probably Serna and Daly, so maybe the shifter part of the conspiracy was limited to those two. She couldn’t tell how many norms traveled with them, only that they did. The forest barely registered the existence of non-shifter humans on Harp, as if they didn’t matter.
Deep in fugue with the forest, she took a few seconds more, gathering information, then forced herself back into the real world. Normally, she took it slow, an easy drift back to awareness. Not this time. She was in a hurry, and the transition was like a sickening fall from a great height while the world spun around her, a jumble of color and light and sensation that left her reeling, barely able to remain upright. She leaned against the grandfather tree for support, swallowing several times against a nausea that threatened to relieve her of even the meager breakfast she’d managed to find.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered to no one.
Then, shoving herself upright, she checked her weapons, swallowed hard one more time, and resumed her headlong run.
Chapter Forty-Five
The sounds of the fight came to her first. She couldn’t run any faster, though she tried, racing toward the furious roars of enraged shifters, the shouts of humans who sounded as terrified of their allies as of their enemy, presumably Rhodry. She took to the heights when she got close enough, kicking off her boots and shimmying up the nearest tree, ignoring the growing weakness in her leg as the gaps and grooves beneath her questing fingers and toes proved deep and sure. Reaching several big branches, she moved with a reckless speed that would have impressed even a shifter. Unable to leap among the trees the way they did, she ran from tree to tree along the narrow, reaching branches of the upper levels, her lighter weight the only thing that made it possible.
As she drew closer to the fight, the trees thinned out even further to reveal a narrow clearing where one of the enemy shifters was already down, his belly scored in long bloody rows. She recognized Kane Daly, his unusual white-blond pelt streaked red as he leaned hard on the ground, struggling to shift and heal.
Rhodry and another shifter were fully engaged, snarling and slashing at one another in a blur of movement almost too fast for her human eye to follow. She didn’t recognize the second shifter—he wasn’t as big or as heavy as Rhodry, but his pelt was the same velvet black, and she assumed this was Desmond Serna.
They raged back and forth, dirt billowing around them in a golden cloud that hazed their movement while blood flew like raindrops. Furious snarls pounded the air, sending shivers up through the branches and leaves, the huge shifters slamming into one another, rolling across the small clearing with such force that Amanda imagined she could feel the tremors of their passing.
Her bow was in her hands, almost without conscious thought, an arrow nocked and drawn as she tracked the combatants, unwilling to risk hitting Rhodry in the tangle of bodies and speed. She caught a high-pitched whining sound and tilted her head, trying to isolate its location and figure out why it seemed so familiar. And vaguely threatening.
The whine changed pitch abruptly and a fine beam of light erupted from among the trees. A bright circle of fire blossomed suddenly on Rhodry’s rear flank and the smell of seared flesh stung her nose. He howled in pain, digging his claws into Serna and using his greater weight to twist the other shifter into this unexpected line of fire.
From her perch in the trees, she swallowed a scream of outrage. A plasma rifle. Some idiot had violated the first law of Harp and brought a plasma rifle onto the planet. And he was trying to kill Rhodry with it.
She searched the gaps between the trees, thinking this new attack had to have come from one of Serna’s norm allies. No shifter would be so stupid. Didn’t the shooter realize what could happen if he discharged a weapon like that out here? Had he learned nothing from the disaster that had sent the fleet back into space? He was lucky the weapon hadn’t already blown up in his hands and killed them all.
Kane Daly finally managed to shift back to human, and she caught a look of shock on his face when he stared at his norm allies. He was as surprised as she was by the rifle’s appearance.
Her anger grew as she searched for the foolish shooter. She found the man lurking half behind a tree with the gun still butted up against his shoulder, waiting for another shot. Her arrow sped across the clearing, whispering past the heavy black rifle to pierce his right shoulder through and through. The man screamed, eyes rolling wide with shock as the illegal weapon fell from suddenly nerveless fingers.
A second man appeared from behind him, dashing forward with a shout to take up the rifle. Amanda fired two more arrows in succession, stopping him from reaching the deadly weapon. He fell, shrieking as much in surprise as pain, clutching at the wooden shafts sticking out of his leg. He crawled away, sobbing noisily as he heaved himself over knobby roots to take shelter behind a thick tree trunk.
Slinging her bow quickly over her shoulder, she shimmied to the ground and raced around the clearing until she reached the first injured norm. The plasma rifle lay only inches away from his groping fingers, and she picked it up reluctantly. She hadn’t touched a powered weapon in a long time, not since she’d landed on Harp. She was surprised to note that it weighed little more than her solid wood bow. It should have been heavier, with its blocky construction and dull black finish, its ability to snuff out a life in seconds from afar. She carried it several feet away and laid it behind a tree, where neither of the injured men could reach it.
The shoulder-shot norm was swearing viciously at her, and she ignored him, only grateful that his aim was so poor. Rhodry would be dead otherwise. The more she thought about it, the more furious she became, until it took all of her restraint not to pick up his stupid rifle and beat him senseless with it.
Instead, she removed herself from the two norms by several feet and quickly regained the trees, climbing into the lower branches where she could see the entire clearing. Re-arming her bow, she studied the combatants over the arrow’s smooth length of wood, sunlight winking off the metal tip as if to grant the magic of flight.
Movement drew her eye to the far left and Kane Daly. He was still in human form, half lying on the ground, his mouth open and panting with effort. His wounds were long streaks of angry, torn flesh, starkly visible against his pale, pale skin, and already they were better than they had been. He lifted his head briefly to stare at the ongoing battle between Rhodry and Serna, snarling as best he could with his human mouth, before closing his eyes, clearly intent on shifting yet again.
Amanda took aim on him, and then waited. While Rhodry and Serna continued to fight, both were clearly weakening from exhaustion and blood loss. If Daly managed to shift once more, he could change the balance of the fight. She’d shoot him if she had to, but only if it looked like he was stepping in to help Serna. She’d already taken the norms out of the fight. It was important that Rhodry be the one to defeat his shifter enemies.
A cat’s howl of pain became a human scream as the tide of battle turned, and Desmond Serna surrendered his animal. His right shoulder was a gory mass of muscle and bone that was barely recognizable as human flesh, his arm dragging uselessly in the dirt. It was an injury even a shifter would have trouble healing, more than enough to take him out of the fight, and he lay on the ground, human belly bared, giving himself over to Rhodry’s mercy.
Rhodry’s cat loomed over him, his sides puffing like a bellows, his fur flat and dull with blood. A perfectly round hole of raw, burned flesh marred one flank. There was no blood to the wound, the veins having been cauterized even as the searing heat burrowed deep into muscle and bone. He lowered his head, massive jaws open and lips drawn back to reveal fangs hugely long and gleaming red with his enemy’s blood. He roared once, then swung around to challenge Daly…who promptly gave up his attempts to shift and rolled belly up in submission.
Rhodry grunted his acceptance, then turned and looked directly at Amanda where she was perched in the lower branches, standing guard over the humans. He stared at her for several breaths, golden eyes dull and unblinking, his head drooping as if he was too weak to hold it up. He collapsed with no warning, falling heavily to the ground.
“Rhodi!” Her hands were shaking as she slung her bow and slid down the gnarled trunk, heedless of the bright pain in her injured leg as she clutched the rough bark. She was on the ground and running for him when a crashing overhead announced the presence of yet another shifter. Rhodry surged to his feet with a rumbling growl of warning, feet spread wide against the sway of exhaustion.
Bow once again drawn and nocked, she hurried to his side, pushing against him angrily when he tried to get in front of her, to stand between her and the coming threat.
“At your side, shifter,” she snapped and turned her attention to the sleek, tawny cat dropping down from the trees far more gracefully than her own descent.
Rhodry yowled angrily, while she breathed a sigh of relief and let her bow fall to her side.
“It’s okay, that’s—”
He never let her finish, pushing in front of her and herding her away from the newcomer. She cried out when his big head butted against her injured thigh, and the new cat growled a low warning. His turquoise eyes shifted between Amanda and Rhodry and over to the two injured shifters, nostrils flaring when he caught scent of the two norms still hiding among the trees. He moved as if to interject himself between her and Rhodry, and Rhodry reacted immediately, his ruff standing nearly straight up, his powerful muscles bunched and lips peeled away from his teeth in a vicious snarl.
“Rhodry,” she scolded impatiently. She stepped between the two giant cats and pushed him away, then turned to regard the other one. “Stop it, Fionn,” she snapped.
The two men shifted almost simultaneously, and she found herself between two naked and very angry men.
“What the hell’s going on, Amanda?” Fionn demanded, his gaze raking the clearing before coming back to her once again.
Rhodry was too busy glaring at her to say anything.
She looked from one to the other in disgust, then slung her bow over her shoulder with a sharp, irritated movement, slammed her unused arrow down into the quiver, and, without a word to either of them, strode back the way she’d come. She had a trial to complete.
She was twenty yards away before they realized she was leaving. Rhodry caught up to her a few strides later.
“What the fuck was that?” he growled, limping along with her.
She stopped and stared at him. “Do you believe Fionn was involved in this mess? Any of it?”
He frowned, obviously thinking about Fionn whose first reaction had been to protect Amanda from Rhodry himself. “No.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“It wasn’t Fionn you pushed away like a troublesome kitten,” he muttered.
She thought he was joking, until she got a good look at his face and swallowed her laughter. He was jealous. Of Fionn. She shut her eyes for a minute, seeking her last scrap of patience, then walked over to him, not stopping until she was close enough to see precisely how deep the scratches were that crisscrossed his broad chest and arms, saw the thin runnels of bright red blood. She winced at the sight, then looked up and met his eyes.
“I pushed you because I knew you wouldn’t hurt me. I couldn’t be sure of Fionn. I trusted you.” She paused to make sure he was paying attention. “You should have trusted me.” Then she turned on her heel and strode away.
“Where are you going?” he called.
“To get that damned pelt,” she said without breaking stride.
Chapter Forty-Six
Rhodry stared at Amanda’s departing figure, not even turning when he heard Fionn approach.
“What the fuck,” Fionn muttered. “Shouldn’t one of us go with her?”
“I don’t think she needs either one of us.”
Fionn glanced at him, then at Amanda, and back to Rhodry. He scowled, then brightened
almost immediately. “So she made it through. I told you she was remarkable, didn’t I?”
Rhodry gave him a dark look as the two of them walked back to the clearing. “And you think that’s any credit to you?”
Fionn’s scowl returned. “What the fuck is going on around here anyway?” he snarled. “That was no friendly challenge. Those two are lucky to be alive. And, don’t take this the wrong way, de Mendoza, but you’re supposed to be dead.”
Rhodry gave him a very unfriendly grin. “Sorry to disappoint. So, you just happened to be in this particular clearing at the right time?”
Fionn shrugged. “Tonio and I were both sent south. I returned late last night, and this morning I discovered that Amanda was still out there somewhere. I sent for Tonio, and the two of us were going to go find her, except I decided I couldn’t wait for him. I left him a message and was heading out alone when I heard the fighting.”
They looked up in unison as another shifter arrived, circling through the trees several times before dropping to the ground with a soft growl. His fur was copper red and golden bright, and his hackles were standing straight up as he sniffed the air of the clearing. He immediately padded over to inspect the illegal plasma rifle and, nearby, the injured norms who cringed away from him. Pacing back to where Daly and Serna still lay recovering, he snarled menacingly, then shifted with sleek economy to reveal himself as Padraic Vaquero, first cousin to the Ardrigh and captain of his guard. Padraic was as close as anyone came to being in charge of the Guild shifters. Several inches shorter than Rhodry, he was just as broad, and hard with muscle. The silver winking among the gold in his bright red hair was the only obvious sign of his age. He faced Rhodry and Fionn, one side of his mouth lifting in a half smile.
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