"Over_9780307446138_oeb_c23_r1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jeffrey Overstreet - Cynderes Midnight)23 RUNAWAYS
Emerging from the throat of the Longhouse, Jordam remembered the brascle. If he ran, Mordafey would turn that wretched bird loose to pursue him. He smelled the dust stirred up by Jorn’s escape and the guards’ pursuit, but the scent of fresh blood surprised him, and he turned. The brascle’s perch was bare, a ruin of feathers strewn beneath it. At every turn of his escape, Jorn was blazing the trail for Jordam’s escape. In dread of Mordafey’s rage, Jorn had run for that narrow gate through the Claws. He would escape. Jordam knew it. Even though alarms had reached the worriers, and Jordam could hear them laughing, Jorn would force his way through. He would survive their hail of arrows and spears. Outrunning the guards who pursued him, he would bolt away through the wasteland, unstoppable for the surfeit of Essence. A long chase would begin. Such a show of strength would impress Mordafey. Although Jorn would earn frightful new scars, Mordafey would terrify him into submission and whip him into obedience. Jordam would have to run farther, burrow deeper. The ramp guards were gone, drawn into pursuit. Two of the prongbulls’ keepers emerged from the rickety stables—hissing females with shields pockmarked from the bulls’ heavy hooves. Slyly they poked at the absent guards’ preyboxes, sniffing the live contents of those cages. But when they saw Jordam unattended, they rose and lumbered toward him. “rrStupid brother,” Jordam snarled, “trying to escape. Killed the Sopper Crone. I’m to catch him.” “Killed the Sopper Crone?” the bullmasters seethed, confounded. “rrChieftain calls you.” Jordam pointed back down into the pipe. “He’ll make one of you the new Sopper Crone.” The bullmasters climbed over one another, each declaring herself most deserving, all the way down the pipe. Worrier cries warped from bloodlusty howls to challenges of furious intent. Jorn had reached the gate. Rattling heavy chains, the last bullmaster—a brute of human features and crocodilian skin—muttered crude commands as he unlatched the harness lock of the first prongbull in the line. He meant to climb astride the monster and join the chase. With the eyes and ears of the Cent Regus Core intent upon Jorn’s disruption, Jordam grabbed a torch. When the bullmaster’s key snapped in the latch and he dragged the chain free of the prongbull’s tether, Jordam slammed the torch against the back of his head. He fell face forward into the bull’s feed trough but held the bullwhip fast. Jordam pressed his foot to the bullmaster’s elbow, grabbed his wrist, and snapped the arm like a branch. Screaming, the bullmaster let go of the whip. The bull bolted, a plume of ash and dust rising behind him. Enlivened by the thought of a chase, Jordam felt that slight swallow of Essence simmering beneath his skin. He clenched his teeth and ran, each step making his retreat through the Core indelible, irreversible. He hurtled forward as if driven by a gale. In six long bounds he leapt and landed astride the charging bull. The bull bucked and jerked, carving the air with its sweeping horns. But Jordam, fueled by new strength, gripped the whip in his teeth, wielding the torch in his left hand and holding the bull’s mane with the other. As the bull turned circles, kicking up cakes of earth, Jordam pressed the flaming brand into the animal’s side. Protests deepened to groans. Jordam dropped the torch, took the whip, and let the creature know that he meant to control it. The kicking stopped. The animal stood still, venting gusts of hatred through its teeth. Jordam pulled at its mane.
Never, the bull’s temper rumbled. “You,” said Jordam evenly. “rrGreatest prongbull in the Expanse. No more stables. Go free. Show them you are fastest. Strongest.” The bull, confounded, chewed on that awhile. “Are you slow?” said Jordam. “Can’t catch the runaway?” The bull coughed something like an arrogant laugh. Jordam turned it toward the alley, and it obeyed. When Jordam and the bull charged the gate, worriers threw themselves aside and clambered up the walls to their perches. They did not recognize Jordam until he passed beneath the arch. He caught up to Jorn and found him bleeding and panic-stricken, clutching a spear, skin already fading into the ash-grey of the dry riverbed. As the bull gained ground, bellowing a victorious cry like a horn, Jorn reared up and aimed the lance at the steed’s low crown. Jordam turned the bull abruptly and felt the spear sail past his ear. Bringing the animal back around, he caught his brother’s bewildered expression. Jorn’s face was lined with black veins thick as strands of ivy. He bent his knees, ready to leap in attack. Jordam recognized that savage courage. He knew how it felt. The bull bore down on Jorn, picking up speed. Jorn raised himself to his full height, arms outspread, and roared as if to intimidate the bull. Jordam could see right down his throat. One stride away Jordam pulled the bull’s mane sharply. “Show them now,” he barked into the bull’s ear. He left Jorn standing there, frozen. The bull galloped away from the Core and through the maze of farmland ruins. “I run up behind you!” Jordam caught the trace of his brother’s hysterical cry. “I finish you!” Wind combed Jordam’s mane. He rode against it. The boy. The Bel Amican woman. They gave him a simple plan, a map of his strange new future. Like two moons shining in a dark sky, he thought. Upon his arrival back at the snow-blanketed hill on the edge of the Cent Regus wasteland, Jordam tied the bull to a patch of bramble. “rrRest,” he said. “Run more later. Get stronger. Go back so strong. Make other bulls afraid.” The bull relapsed into a bluster of hateful rants, but those blasts seemed less fervent now. No one punished it. No chains held its hooves to the ground. It could breathe wild air instead of stale dust, watch trees and sky instead of stable walls. Jordam climbed the hill to the collapsing farm shack. Snow herons scattered. The old barn groaned. Outside, all remained as he remembered. But inside, the black stove lay on its side, the stovepipe bent like a broken limb on the floor. A hole in the ceiling spoke of the force that had ripped the whole thing down. The stove’s hatch door hung open. In its ash-dusted hollow, Jordam found only a crumpled, cracking scrap of parchment. He dusted it off, held it up to the grey glow of dusk. It was the message that the boy had pulled from the grip of the dead Bel Amican guard. “Partayn,” Jordam remembered. “Partayn.” He set the stove on its feet in the center of the floor and propped the scrap of parchment on the top, a sign marking the place where someone had been lost. An expression of failure and desperate hope. Searching for anything he might leave as a sign in case the boy returned, he found the half of O-raya’s scarf that Bel had told him to give to the boy. He whimpered, the pain of his failure worsening as he drew it from the pocket in his woodscloak and set it on top of the stove. After a few moments he took it back. Outside, on the old road where Mordafey had run the foremost wagon wheels into a rut, Jordam scooped away piles of snow until he uncovered Deuneroi’s woodscloak, the emblem, and the rings, and bundled them together. The bones he quickly covered in snow. Back inside the shelter, he scanned the hillside below, the dark sprawl of the Cragavar forest to the east. Something had taken the boy away. A search could take days, and the trail might lead to a dead child. Meanwhile, his brothers would reunite and plot their pursuit. The prongbull was fast, but it left an unmistakable trail. Mordafey would catch up. Jordam felt the pulse of new Essence coiling about his mind. His senses surged, searching for signs of prey. Smoke. A camp, nearby. Hunters, most likely, or mercenaries. Few beastmen built fires, even here. He could hunt and eat tonight. But he had talked in his sleep. Mordafey would make his way to Bel. He crawled out into the snow, pressed a handful of powder to his forehead, ran his fingers about the base of his shattered browbone, then drove that broken horn into the cold ground. The freeze burnt through the bone, and blue light flared behind his eyes. Jordam made his way back down into the bushes and found the bull uprooting the bramble patch in a fury. He won the bull’s attention with a crack of the whip. The bull answered with curses, and Jordam waited until the animal stood panting and confused. “rrBull goes back to stables? To masters’ beatings?” he said. “No, not you. You’re the strongest bull. You run wild tonight.” The animal shook its horns in pride, then lowered its head. On the eastern horizon, the moon gleamed like a bright green claw. Deep in the night, the frozen valley of Tilianpurth glinted in green moonlight. Jordam bound the exhilarated prongbull to a tangle of roots. Standing at the forest’s edge and gazing down across whitegrass, he knew he would have to be quick. He would plant a warning to scare Bel back within the safety of the bastion walls. Flares ringed Tilianpurth, torches burnt along its walls. And there, atop the tower, a blaze of light. The Bel Amicans were busy tonight. Hearing a shift in the snow, Jordam punched through the frozen surface, pawed through the powdery layers beneath, snatched up a sluggish yellow viper before it could flee, and wolfed it down. Then he reached into the tangle of twiggy boughs above and ripped a branch away. He began to probe his way down toward the trees. Seven soldiers stood in the green and blooming glen beside the well. Three saddled vawns shoved their snouts into the verdant ground, snorting and snuffling for insects. In hushed, conspiratorial tones, the soldiers muttered about ceremony, runaway, search, secret, heiress. No tetherwings perched in the trees; no one expected a beastman here. This was a search not a hunt. Jordam’s hunger intensified. The bullwhip grew restless in his hand. But when he shifted his gaze to the well’s blue light, the Essence within him recoiled. He choked as if someone were jerking an invisible leash to drag him away. A horn blast shattered the silence, sonorous notes echoing all around the valley. Dogs bayed somewhere in the trees. Jordam bared his teeth and waited. They did not come. They’re on leashes, he thought. The traps. They’re worried about the traps. He crouched lower, crawling halfway about the glen’s circumference, and came upon a familiar wagon, unhitched this time. As he approached, a soldier climbed out from the back of the canvas. Jordam slipped silently between the front wheels, cloaking his footfalls by matching the soldier’s steps. “Heiress?” the soldier whispered warily. Jordam heard a sword slide from its sheath. “Cyndere, is that you?” He watched the soldier’s boots. The soldier walked around the wagon. “My lady? We only want to take you back inside, where it is safe.” Jordam backed out between the rear wheels and glanced up at the tower. They were searching for Sin-der the heiress? Out here in the trees? Would Bel be out here too? His heel came down on a brittle root that snapped. The soldier stopped. “My lady?” Jordam seized the back of the cart and shoved it forward with all his might, knocking the soldier down hard. The man’s voice rose in anguish. Hounds barked. Soldiers in the glen shouted, scrambling up the rise. Jordam dove beneath the fanning leaves of a dragonfern. When the searchers gathered around the groaning soldier, distracted, he leapt out and bounded into the glen and across it. All around him the forest awakened with noise. The vawns shrieked, reared, and separated at his approach. Jordam paused only long enough to seize the bucket, which rested on the edge of the wellstones. Only a splash of water remained there, but he swallowed it. Then he bolted after a tall, black-scaled vawn that had paused to sneeze soil from her snout. He leapt into her saddle. She tried to buck him free, but Jordam had grown accustomed to the frantic, kicking prongbull. He whipped her, triggering her three-voiced howl, and spurred her up the glen’s slope and into the wood. When she veered toward the bastion, Jordam punished her and drove her out toward the edge of the wood. She ran a long while, dodging trees and tearing through curtains of ivy. In his haste Jordam forgot one of the dangers. Near the edge of the wood, the sound of twanging wire stung the air. The steed lurched, screamed, and fell. Jordam tumbled free of the collapsing vawn. When the world stopped spinning, he found himself face to face with a wide-eyed gorrel. He recognized it. The gorrel yelped in disbelief, sprinted up a tree trunk, and vanished. The vawn struggled while the wires tightened around her powerful legs. The yellow saddlebags had fallen free. Jordam saw the broken buckle, the flap flung back, the contents. He stuffed the bundle of Deuneroi’s garments inside, slung the heavy saddlebags over his shoulder, and stumbled through the trees toward the whitegrass, risking traps with every step. As the vawn shrieked, dogs barked and advanced. Another cry rang out, and everything changed. Jordam turned. “Bel?” A Bel Amican woman in a soldier’s woodscloak stood halfway across the thick, snow-frosted field. She stood still, grasping at her leg as if a snake had seized her. Jordam bounded through the grass, carefully following her path. Her blood smelled sweet. The woman suddenly straightened and aimed an arrowcaster directly toward his chest. “Stop!” she said. He stopped, not from the command, but for recognition. “Bel!” A gleaming wire twisted about her leg, and she did not fight it. One foot was clad in a tough slipper of glittering sea-gator scales. The other foot was bare. “Jordam,” she said, her voice softening. “Bel,” he said. She lowered the caster. “Help me.” Jordam crouched down, parted icy strands of whitegrass, and found the heavy metal pin and the powerful coil of retracting wire. He dug his claws under the edge, pried it out. “Free?” “Not yet. I’ve got to leave, Jordam. We’ve got to go away from Tilianpurth. Where can we go and be safe?” He glanced back at the trees. Any moment now, hunters. Arrows. Dogs—all teeth and claws. “Came to find you,” he said. “Trouble coming. rrBrothers. Cent Regus.” He found the trap’s switch, which disengaged the springs, and the line went slack. With curved claw tips, he pried the wire free from the layers of a towel she had tied around her legs. Wire had split the cloth, but it had not broken the skin anywhere but her ankle. His heartbeat raced as he pulled the wire away. “You can run?” he asked in Common. “Not fast enough.” She laughed a little, a response that bewildered him, and then she rose shakily to her feet. Back in the trees, the vawn’s cries increased in a sudden frenzy and then went quiet. “We go up,” said Jordam. “rrForest. I have help.” “Ryllion came to the well to find me. The Seer came with him. They know. They want to kill you and lock me up. Nowhere is safe now.” Even that slight smear of blood on her foot distracted him. He bit his tongue. “We go,” he said, forcing himself to look back at her face. “rrSomewhere far. Safe.” “Heiress!” The men were out of the trees, marching forward, holding the strained leashes of the hounds. One of the dogs squealed, snapping up the lost silver slipper from the snow and shaking it like captured prey. The guard took it, showed it to the others. Jordam saw the soldiers pause. Their faces changed when they saw the woman in the grass. They would not understand. They would see a woman and a beastman crouching over her. He growled, tensed, stood up, and cracked the bullwhip in challenge. Echoes of its sharp report clapped around the valley. Her hand gripped his arm. “No. You’ll be killed. I can’t bear it.” “rrWe go now. I carry you?” Trembling and wild-eyed, she gripped his arm with both hands and nodded. He turned his back and knelt. Her arms folded around his neck, her legs about his waist, her bloodied heel pressing into his belly. “Heiress!” The soldiers were running now. He turned his head, amazed to find her chin resting on his shoulder. “You. Heiress.” He breathed in the traces of incense in her hair. “Sin-der. Bel. The same?” There was a mystery here, but he had no time to untangle it. “I was afraid you’d treat me differently if you knew. I lied. I’m sorry.” “Heiress!” One of the soldiers was shouting. “Don’t!” “You’ll keep me safe?” she asked quietly. “Safe.” The hammer of the prongbull’s stride punished Jordam’s aching head. He began to wonder if the Essence would kill him for his defiance. Waves of pain dissolved his thoughts, and something stronger took over. Memory. Memory of safety. Of rest. He knew where he would take her. Before him on the prongbull’s back, the Bel Amican woman braced her feet against the yellow saddlebags. He showed her how to hold the whip so that its barbed tips clattered next to the animal’s ear. This freed his hands to grasp the prongbull’s mane and steer the animal through the forest. Even if winter unleashed another blast, a prongbull’s trail would be impossible to hide. Jordam would have to send the steed away, take Bel, and disappear. He drove the animal eastward, up the rising slopes of the forest, to the bluffs high above Deep Lake. “Where have all the animals gone?” the Bel Amican asked, turning and shouting to be heard. “These trees are empty.” “rrHigher,” he answered. “Higher ground.” He gestured eastward and then to the north. “To get away from something?” He thought about that, then nodded. “Away from what?” He could not explain the feelers. He did not understand them, how they grew so quickly underground, how they knew what to seize and what to let go, or what they did when they dragged their prey underground. And he did not expect the heiress would like such a lesson. She repeated the question, and he shook his head. “rrNot now.” When the prongbull’s hooves clattered on the bare stone of familiar cliffs, Jordam pulled him up short. The great white steed snorted, eyes ablaze, tail thrashing. Jordam climbed down, drew the woman into his arms, and set her on her feet, then removed the saddlebags. He told her to stay with the bags at the edge of the trees. Seeing her shivering there on the bluff, he wondered what the wilderness felt like for someone so small, with such a short yellow mane, hairless limbs, and delicate hands and feet. He removed his woodscloak and cast it about her. As it enfolded her, she wrinkled her nose, then smiled faintly in gratitude. Jordam steered the prongbull back into the trees and to a place where the ground spilled in a perfect river of snow that ran northward into another patch of lower forest. He grabbed a firm hold on a tree branch and lifted himself from the bull’s back. As he did, he shoved the bull’s back with his heels. “Go.” The animal stayed, glancing back at him uncertainly, confused by any gesture that lacked cruelty. “Go. Free.” He brought the whip down in as hard a blow as he could strike, raising a deep red stripe across the bull’s flank. The animal launched, bellowing, leaving Jordam to swing from the bough behind, and charged away, staining the snow with a trail of plowed earth. The brothers would have no reason to suspect that the rider had abandoned the steed. He concluded that the bull would find his way back to the familiar punishments of the Cent Regus Core, knowing nothing else. All Cent Regus creatures returned there eventually, no matter how many scars they showed for it. Groaning beneath the burden of freedom, Jordam would take a different path. 23 RUNAWAYS
Emerging from the throat of the Longhouse, Jordam remembered the brascle. If he ran, Mordafey would turn that wretched bird loose to pursue him. He smelled the dust stirred up by Jorn’s escape and the guards’ pursuit, but the scent of fresh blood surprised him, and he turned. The brascle’s perch was bare, a ruin of feathers strewn beneath it. At every turn of his escape, Jorn was blazing the trail for Jordam’s escape. In dread of Mordafey’s rage, Jorn had run for that narrow gate through the Claws. He would escape. Jordam knew it. Even though alarms had reached the worriers, and Jordam could hear them laughing, Jorn would force his way through. He would survive their hail of arrows and spears. Outrunning the guards who pursued him, he would bolt away through the wasteland, unstoppable for the surfeit of Essence. A long chase would begin. Such a show of strength would impress Mordafey. Although Jorn would earn frightful new scars, Mordafey would terrify him into submission and whip him into obedience. Jordam would have to run farther, burrow deeper. The ramp guards were gone, drawn into pursuit. Two of the prongbulls’ keepers emerged from the rickety stables—hissing females with shields pockmarked from the bulls’ heavy hooves. Slyly they poked at the absent guards’ preyboxes, sniffing the live contents of those cages. But when they saw Jordam unattended, they rose and lumbered toward him. “rrStupid brother,” Jordam snarled, “trying to escape. Killed the Sopper Crone. I’m to catch him.” “Killed the Sopper Crone?” the bullmasters seethed, confounded. “rrChieftain calls you.” Jordam pointed back down into the pipe. “He’ll make one of you the new Sopper Crone.” The bullmasters climbed over one another, each declaring herself most deserving, all the way down the pipe. Worrier cries warped from bloodlusty howls to challenges of furious intent. Jorn had reached the gate. Rattling heavy chains, the last bullmaster—a brute of human features and crocodilian skin—muttered crude commands as he unlatched the harness lock of the first prongbull in the line. He meant to climb astride the monster and join the chase. With the eyes and ears of the Cent Regus Core intent upon Jorn’s disruption, Jordam grabbed a torch. When the bullmaster’s key snapped in the latch and he dragged the chain free of the prongbull’s tether, Jordam slammed the torch against the back of his head. He fell face forward into the bull’s feed trough but held the bullwhip fast. Jordam pressed his foot to the bullmaster’s elbow, grabbed his wrist, and snapped the arm like a branch. Screaming, the bullmaster let go of the whip. The bull bolted, a plume of ash and dust rising behind him. Enlivened by the thought of a chase, Jordam felt that slight swallow of Essence simmering beneath his skin. He clenched his teeth and ran, each step making his retreat through the Core indelible, irreversible. He hurtled forward as if driven by a gale. In six long bounds he leapt and landed astride the charging bull. The bull bucked and jerked, carving the air with its sweeping horns. But Jordam, fueled by new strength, gripped the whip in his teeth, wielding the torch in his left hand and holding the bull’s mane with the other. As the bull turned circles, kicking up cakes of earth, Jordam pressed the flaming brand into the animal’s side. Protests deepened to groans. Jordam dropped the torch, took the whip, and let the creature know that he meant to control it. The kicking stopped. The animal stood still, venting gusts of hatred through its teeth. Jordam pulled at its mane.
Never, the bull’s temper rumbled. “You,” said Jordam evenly. “rrGreatest prongbull in the Expanse. No more stables. Go free. Show them you are fastest. Strongest.” The bull, confounded, chewed on that awhile. “Are you slow?” said Jordam. “Can’t catch the runaway?” The bull coughed something like an arrogant laugh. Jordam turned it toward the alley, and it obeyed. When Jordam and the bull charged the gate, worriers threw themselves aside and clambered up the walls to their perches. They did not recognize Jordam until he passed beneath the arch. He caught up to Jorn and found him bleeding and panic-stricken, clutching a spear, skin already fading into the ash-grey of the dry riverbed. As the bull gained ground, bellowing a victorious cry like a horn, Jorn reared up and aimed the lance at the steed’s low crown. Jordam turned the bull abruptly and felt the spear sail past his ear. Bringing the animal back around, he caught his brother’s bewildered expression. Jorn’s face was lined with black veins thick as strands of ivy. He bent his knees, ready to leap in attack. Jordam recognized that savage courage. He knew how it felt. The bull bore down on Jorn, picking up speed. Jorn raised himself to his full height, arms outspread, and roared as if to intimidate the bull. Jordam could see right down his throat. One stride away Jordam pulled the bull’s mane sharply. “Show them now,” he barked into the bull’s ear. He left Jorn standing there, frozen. The bull galloped away from the Core and through the maze of farmland ruins. “I run up behind you!” Jordam caught the trace of his brother’s hysterical cry. “I finish you!” Wind combed Jordam’s mane. He rode against it. The boy. The Bel Amican woman. They gave him a simple plan, a map of his strange new future. Like two moons shining in a dark sky, he thought. Upon his arrival back at the snow-blanketed hill on the edge of the Cent Regus wasteland, Jordam tied the bull to a patch of bramble. “rrRest,” he said. “Run more later. Get stronger. Go back so strong. Make other bulls afraid.” The bull relapsed into a bluster of hateful rants, but those blasts seemed less fervent now. No one punished it. No chains held its hooves to the ground. It could breathe wild air instead of stale dust, watch trees and sky instead of stable walls. Jordam climbed the hill to the collapsing farm shack. Snow herons scattered. The old barn groaned. Outside, all remained as he remembered. But inside, the black stove lay on its side, the stovepipe bent like a broken limb on the floor. A hole in the ceiling spoke of the force that had ripped the whole thing down. The stove’s hatch door hung open. In its ash-dusted hollow, Jordam found only a crumpled, cracking scrap of parchment. He dusted it off, held it up to the grey glow of dusk. It was the message that the boy had pulled from the grip of the dead Bel Amican guard. “Partayn,” Jordam remembered. “Partayn.” He set the stove on its feet in the center of the floor and propped the scrap of parchment on the top, a sign marking the place where someone had been lost. An expression of failure and desperate hope. Searching for anything he might leave as a sign in case the boy returned, he found the half of O-raya’s scarf that Bel had told him to give to the boy. He whimpered, the pain of his failure worsening as he drew it from the pocket in his woodscloak and set it on top of the stove. After a few moments he took it back. Outside, on the old road where Mordafey had run the foremost wagon wheels into a rut, Jordam scooped away piles of snow until he uncovered Deuneroi’s woodscloak, the emblem, and the rings, and bundled them together. The bones he quickly covered in snow. Back inside the shelter, he scanned the hillside below, the dark sprawl of the Cragavar forest to the east. Something had taken the boy away. A search could take days, and the trail might lead to a dead child. Meanwhile, his brothers would reunite and plot their pursuit. The prongbull was fast, but it left an unmistakable trail. Mordafey would catch up. Jordam felt the pulse of new Essence coiling about his mind. His senses surged, searching for signs of prey. Smoke. A camp, nearby. Hunters, most likely, or mercenaries. Few beastmen built fires, even here. He could hunt and eat tonight. But he had talked in his sleep. Mordafey would make his way to Bel. He crawled out into the snow, pressed a handful of powder to his forehead, ran his fingers about the base of his shattered browbone, then drove that broken horn into the cold ground. The freeze burnt through the bone, and blue light flared behind his eyes. Jordam made his way back down into the bushes and found the bull uprooting the bramble patch in a fury. He won the bull’s attention with a crack of the whip. The bull answered with curses, and Jordam waited until the animal stood panting and confused. “rrBull goes back to stables? To masters’ beatings?” he said. “No, not you. You’re the strongest bull. You run wild tonight.” The animal shook its horns in pride, then lowered its head. On the eastern horizon, the moon gleamed like a bright green claw. Deep in the night, the frozen valley of Tilianpurth glinted in green moonlight. Jordam bound the exhilarated prongbull to a tangle of roots. Standing at the forest’s edge and gazing down across whitegrass, he knew he would have to be quick. He would plant a warning to scare Bel back within the safety of the bastion walls. Flares ringed Tilianpurth, torches burnt along its walls. And there, atop the tower, a blaze of light. The Bel Amicans were busy tonight. Hearing a shift in the snow, Jordam punched through the frozen surface, pawed through the powdery layers beneath, snatched up a sluggish yellow viper before it could flee, and wolfed it down. Then he reached into the tangle of twiggy boughs above and ripped a branch away. He began to probe his way down toward the trees. Seven soldiers stood in the green and blooming glen beside the well. Three saddled vawns shoved their snouts into the verdant ground, snorting and snuffling for insects. In hushed, conspiratorial tones, the soldiers muttered about ceremony, runaway, search, secret, heiress. No tetherwings perched in the trees; no one expected a beastman here. This was a search not a hunt. Jordam’s hunger intensified. The bullwhip grew restless in his hand. But when he shifted his gaze to the well’s blue light, the Essence within him recoiled. He choked as if someone were jerking an invisible leash to drag him away. A horn blast shattered the silence, sonorous notes echoing all around the valley. Dogs bayed somewhere in the trees. Jordam bared his teeth and waited. They did not come. They’re on leashes, he thought. The traps. They’re worried about the traps. He crouched lower, crawling halfway about the glen’s circumference, and came upon a familiar wagon, unhitched this time. As he approached, a soldier climbed out from the back of the canvas. Jordam slipped silently between the front wheels, cloaking his footfalls by matching the soldier’s steps. “Heiress?” the soldier whispered warily. Jordam heard a sword slide from its sheath. “Cyndere, is that you?” He watched the soldier’s boots. The soldier walked around the wagon. “My lady? We only want to take you back inside, where it is safe.” Jordam backed out between the rear wheels and glanced up at the tower. They were searching for Sin-der the heiress? Out here in the trees? Would Bel be out here too? His heel came down on a brittle root that snapped. The soldier stopped. “My lady?” Jordam seized the back of the cart and shoved it forward with all his might, knocking the soldier down hard. The man’s voice rose in anguish. Hounds barked. Soldiers in the glen shouted, scrambling up the rise. Jordam dove beneath the fanning leaves of a dragonfern. When the searchers gathered around the groaning soldier, distracted, he leapt out and bounded into the glen and across it. All around him the forest awakened with noise. The vawns shrieked, reared, and separated at his approach. Jordam paused only long enough to seize the bucket, which rested on the edge of the wellstones. Only a splash of water remained there, but he swallowed it. Then he bolted after a tall, black-scaled vawn that had paused to sneeze soil from her snout. He leapt into her saddle. She tried to buck him free, but Jordam had grown accustomed to the frantic, kicking prongbull. He whipped her, triggering her three-voiced howl, and spurred her up the glen’s slope and into the wood. When she veered toward the bastion, Jordam punished her and drove her out toward the edge of the wood. She ran a long while, dodging trees and tearing through curtains of ivy. In his haste Jordam forgot one of the dangers. Near the edge of the wood, the sound of twanging wire stung the air. The steed lurched, screamed, and fell. Jordam tumbled free of the collapsing vawn. When the world stopped spinning, he found himself face to face with a wide-eyed gorrel. He recognized it. The gorrel yelped in disbelief, sprinted up a tree trunk, and vanished. The vawn struggled while the wires tightened around her powerful legs. The yellow saddlebags had fallen free. Jordam saw the broken buckle, the flap flung back, the contents. He stuffed the bundle of Deuneroi’s garments inside, slung the heavy saddlebags over his shoulder, and stumbled through the trees toward the whitegrass, risking traps with every step. As the vawn shrieked, dogs barked and advanced. Another cry rang out, and everything changed. Jordam turned. “Bel?” A Bel Amican woman in a soldier’s woodscloak stood halfway across the thick, snow-frosted field. She stood still, grasping at her leg as if a snake had seized her. Jordam bounded through the grass, carefully following her path. Her blood smelled sweet. The woman suddenly straightened and aimed an arrowcaster directly toward his chest. “Stop!” she said. He stopped, not from the command, but for recognition. “Bel!” A gleaming wire twisted about her leg, and she did not fight it. One foot was clad in a tough slipper of glittering sea-gator scales. The other foot was bare. “Jordam,” she said, her voice softening. “Bel,” he said. She lowered the caster. “Help me.” Jordam crouched down, parted icy strands of whitegrass, and found the heavy metal pin and the powerful coil of retracting wire. He dug his claws under the edge, pried it out. “Free?” “Not yet. I’ve got to leave, Jordam. We’ve got to go away from Tilianpurth. Where can we go and be safe?” He glanced back at the trees. Any moment now, hunters. Arrows. Dogs—all teeth and claws. “Came to find you,” he said. “Trouble coming. rrBrothers. Cent Regus.” He found the trap’s switch, which disengaged the springs, and the line went slack. With curved claw tips, he pried the wire free from the layers of a towel she had tied around her legs. Wire had split the cloth, but it had not broken the skin anywhere but her ankle. His heartbeat raced as he pulled the wire away. “You can run?” he asked in Common. “Not fast enough.” She laughed a little, a response that bewildered him, and then she rose shakily to her feet. Back in the trees, the vawn’s cries increased in a sudden frenzy and then went quiet. “We go up,” said Jordam. “rrForest. I have help.” “Ryllion came to the well to find me. The Seer came with him. They know. They want to kill you and lock me up. Nowhere is safe now.” Even that slight smear of blood on her foot distracted him. He bit his tongue. “We go,” he said, forcing himself to look back at her face. “rrSomewhere far. Safe.” “Heiress!” The men were out of the trees, marching forward, holding the strained leashes of the hounds. One of the dogs squealed, snapping up the lost silver slipper from the snow and shaking it like captured prey. The guard took it, showed it to the others. Jordam saw the soldiers pause. Their faces changed when they saw the woman in the grass. They would not understand. They would see a woman and a beastman crouching over her. He growled, tensed, stood up, and cracked the bullwhip in challenge. Echoes of its sharp report clapped around the valley. Her hand gripped his arm. “No. You’ll be killed. I can’t bear it.” “rrWe go now. I carry you?” Trembling and wild-eyed, she gripped his arm with both hands and nodded. He turned his back and knelt. Her arms folded around his neck, her legs about his waist, her bloodied heel pressing into his belly. “Heiress!” The soldiers were running now. He turned his head, amazed to find her chin resting on his shoulder. “You. Heiress.” He breathed in the traces of incense in her hair. “Sin-der. Bel. The same?” There was a mystery here, but he had no time to untangle it. “I was afraid you’d treat me differently if you knew. I lied. I’m sorry.” “Heiress!” One of the soldiers was shouting. “Don’t!” “You’ll keep me safe?” she asked quietly. “Safe.” The hammer of the prongbull’s stride punished Jordam’s aching head. He began to wonder if the Essence would kill him for his defiance. Waves of pain dissolved his thoughts, and something stronger took over. Memory. Memory of safety. Of rest. He knew where he would take her. Before him on the prongbull’s back, the Bel Amican woman braced her feet against the yellow saddlebags. He showed her how to hold the whip so that its barbed tips clattered next to the animal’s ear. This freed his hands to grasp the prongbull’s mane and steer the animal through the forest. Even if winter unleashed another blast, a prongbull’s trail would be impossible to hide. Jordam would have to send the steed away, take Bel, and disappear. He drove the animal eastward, up the rising slopes of the forest, to the bluffs high above Deep Lake. “Where have all the animals gone?” the Bel Amican asked, turning and shouting to be heard. “These trees are empty.” “rrHigher,” he answered. “Higher ground.” He gestured eastward and then to the north. “To get away from something?” He thought about that, then nodded. “Away from what?” He could not explain the feelers. He did not understand them, how they grew so quickly underground, how they knew what to seize and what to let go, or what they did when they dragged their prey underground. And he did not expect the heiress would like such a lesson. She repeated the question, and he shook his head. “rrNot now.” When the prongbull’s hooves clattered on the bare stone of familiar cliffs, Jordam pulled him up short. The great white steed snorted, eyes ablaze, tail thrashing. Jordam climbed down, drew the woman into his arms, and set her on her feet, then removed the saddlebags. He told her to stay with the bags at the edge of the trees. Seeing her shivering there on the bluff, he wondered what the wilderness felt like for someone so small, with such a short yellow mane, hairless limbs, and delicate hands and feet. He removed his woodscloak and cast it about her. As it enfolded her, she wrinkled her nose, then smiled faintly in gratitude. Jordam steered the prongbull back into the trees and to a place where the ground spilled in a perfect river of snow that ran northward into another patch of lower forest. He grabbed a firm hold on a tree branch and lifted himself from the bull’s back. As he did, he shoved the bull’s back with his heels. “Go.” The animal stayed, glancing back at him uncertainly, confused by any gesture that lacked cruelty. “Go. Free.” He brought the whip down in as hard a blow as he could strike, raising a deep red stripe across the bull’s flank. The animal launched, bellowing, leaving Jordam to swing from the bough behind, and charged away, staining the snow with a trail of plowed earth. The brothers would have no reason to suspect that the rider had abandoned the steed. He concluded that the bull would find his way back to the familiar punishments of the Cent Regus Core, knowing nothing else. All Cent Regus creatures returned there eventually, no matter how many scars they showed for it. Groaning beneath the burden of freedom, Jordam would take a different path. |
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