I saw dappled gold and black horsehair rippling over ribs.
I saw a pair of legs, cloth-covered, feet bound in leather, striding surely, just ahead. A boy. I remembered him, at least I thought I did.
The boy. The poachers’ guide.
Memories assaulted me. Poachers and arrows. Water and terror. A strange little wobbyk.
And something else . . . something terrible. So terrible my mind shut down.
The guide murmured softly and the horse halted.
With his hand on my shoulder, the guide steadied me. He lifted me up a little in order to see my face.
High above me, light stabbed through the thick overhang of branches. I felt it on my back. I saw the short noon shadows it cast.
I twisted my throbbing head and saw the rope holding me in place, the fat knot. I turned my head the other way
and saw the horse’s ears twitching. His mane was a tangle of shimmering gold and black.
The guide put a waterskin to my mouth. Just a bit to wet my lips, but I couldn’t swallow well at that angle. Gently he wiped away the drops slipping down my cheek. Cupping his hand, he poured water into it, and I lapped like a dog. I was desperately thirsty.
“If you’re awake, we need to get that arrowhead out of your side,” he said.
He spoke the Common Tongue, the speech of traders and travelers. It’s a mixture of words and phrases from a dozen different languages. Dalyntor had taught us pups how to speak it fluently, though among pack members, we spoke only Dairnish.
“The poison has worn off, and I suppose the numbing effect as well.”
He was right. I felt the barbed tines, sharply cold, and a dull ache. The impact had bruised me as well as penetrated my flesh.
The guide jerked his head right, left. He was taking in the threats, listening intently. Sniffing the wind with his feeble human nose.
He lifted me, grunting at my weight, and set me down against a mossy hillock in the shade of a generous elm. I dared to look down at my side. The arrow’s shaft had been
cut away, leaving only a few inches. Blood, once glistening pearl, was now crusting brown.
I looked at the guide, trying to search his eyes, to understand. I racked my fuzzy memory for all I knew of humans, all I had heard in poems, in lessons, from my—
From my—
It came at me like a boulder down a mountain, and I could not flee the knowledge.
My mother. My father. My brothers and sisters.
I remembered the rest.
The burning mirabear hive.
The soldiers and their spears.
I remembered it all.
I closed my eyes and heard the screams. I smelled brackish blood, steel and iron, sword and armor.
I saw a spear poking at the dead bodies, the pitiful dead piles of fur.
A terrible rage grew within me.
I wanted to hurt someone. I wanted to hurt this boy.
I wanted to tear his flesh apart with my teeth. I wanted him to bleed like my family had bled.
“I won’t lie to you,” he said. “This will hurt.”
Good. Let it hurt, I thought. Let me feel actual, physical pain.
The guide gathered dry twigs and a handful of dead
grass. He drew out his tinderbox and struck flint to iron. The sparks touched the grass and smoke curled.
“I couldn’t start a fire at night,” he explained.
His voice was strange. It was two voices. One was a gruff baritone, but beneath that, as if concealed, was a second, softer voice. “We won’t make much smoke, and the angle of the sun will blind anyone pursuing us.”
He drew a knife.
I drew a sharp breath.
But he didn’t stab me. He held the knife blade over the fire. “The weir women say a hot knife heals better,” he said.
I didn’t care. I didn’t want to heal. I wanted to kill, or to die, and the two things were one in my mind.
All dead. All of them.
All of them.
“I have to make three small cuts,” the guide explained.
I heard his words, but they were just empty noise.
My family. My pack. All dead.
The blade burned as it pierced my skin, and I couldn’t help flinching. Luckily, the guide’s hand was swift and sure.
The pain went deep, but I did not scream.
I would never be weak for this human.
The second cut was worse. I had to grit my teeth until I feared they would crack.
The third cut was easier to endure. I was adjusting to the pain.
It was nothing compared to the pain inside me.
“I have to wiggle the arrow a bit,” said the guide, “to get it out.”
He did, and it hurt, but he was able to remove the arrow quickly. He cut the arrowhead from the broken shaft, wiped off my blood, and dropped the sharp point into a pouch on the side of his quiver.
I made an inventory of his weapons.
The bow and arrows.
The rusted sword that was too big for him and awkward when he knelt.
The knife in his boot.
The guide opened a leather pouch on his belt and drew out a crushed green leaf. He placed it over the wound in my side.
“Hard to keep in place on fur, but it will help the healing,” he said. He tied it in place with a long rag wound around my chest. “I was aiming for your leg, but you moved at the last minute,” he added, as if by way of apology.
“I wish you’d hit my heart dead-on,” I muttered, surprised to find myself capable of forming words. “At least I’d be with the others, where I belong.”
The guide gazed at me. They were the first words I’d
spoken to him, and he seemed to be debating how to answer.
“I’m glad you survived,” he said at last.
I looked away. “I am not.”
With a sigh, the guide kicked the fire apart, scuffing dirt over it. “We need to move on,” he said.
Although he didn’t free my hands, tied uncomfortably behind my back, the guide undid the rope binding my back feet. He lifted me again, still tied, and with a heave that was at the limits of his strength set me astride the horse. I was sitting upright, no longer baggage.
With liquid grace, he leapt up behind me and reached around for the reins, and we were off at a quick trot.
We emerged from shadow into light. I didn’t recognize our location. This was not the forest or the meadow or the sea. We were in a dry place of low scrub and exposed rocks.
The boy kept his horse to the rocks as much as possible, making it harder to track hoofprints.
I told myself to see everything, that every detail would be useful for escape.
I tried to focus on the path ahead.
But it was no use.
No matter where I looked, all I saw were the piled bodies and sightless stares of everyone I had ever loved.
12.
Whispers
We moved on. Slowly our surroundings changed. The terrain grew rockier and more treacherous. The stand of pines that had been on our right thinned and finally ended. Every step, for both horse and guide, seemed to be a struggle.
The guide appeared tired. Yet he pushed on, urging the horse around outcroppings of glittering rock jutting so near that both the guide and I had to shift to avoid being scraped.
I studied the wind for something familiar, something knowable, and found nothing. It whispered and moaned but told me nothing of where I was or where I was going.