Dragon's Winter (27 page)

“Animal, human, or warg?”

“Not animal.” She shivered. “It called me cousin.”

She saw Azil Aumson’s face change. “Gorthas,” said the singer.

Karadur said curtly, “He shall not touch you.” He glanced at the sky. “Lorimir, we camp here. Whatever is out there can come to us.” He issued quick, pointed orders. Behind a bulwark of sledges and wood barricades, the men set a bristling hedge of spears. Bonfires blazed at the corners of the barricades. Lorimir doubled the watch. The dark came quickly. As if to torment them, a wind blew up. It ripped at the tents, and troubled the horses. The air seemed charged with a distant, ominous booming.

In the archers’ tent, the men talked little. Hawk lay on her bedroll between Edruyn and Huw. Her legs were twitching. Edruyn was asleep: she could hear his regular, shallow breathing at her ear. Huw, half-awake, was caught in night thoughts. She stretched a little. Her mind would not settle. Finally she sat up, and with a muttered apology, yanked on her boots and left the tent. Clouds scudded overhead, and shredded into starlit wrack. She went to the latrine pit, and then walked toward the eastern barricade. Gingerly, she let her changeling-sense extend into the wintry darkness, half-expecting to hear that brutish, vicious whisper... But it did not come. The threat had withdrawn. Some animal lurked out there, some fearful, famished predator, a lone bear, hunting across the ensorceled landscape, or perhaps a starved, angry wolf.

She heard a step, and turned swiftly. It was Rogys. He held a long spear in both his hands. While his fellows had been butchering the mule, he had begged the whetstones from Telchor Felse’s keeping, and sharpened the spearhead until its edge would shave a hair, or part a strand of windblown wool. He nodded to her.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said, looking into the darkness. The wind knifed at her bones. Sparks from the bonfires swirled hissing into the crusty snow. “Have you seen or heard—anything? Wargs, or ice warriors?”

Rogys shook his head. “No wargs, no ice warriors. Just shadows.”

Outside the camp, a bear crouched in a snowdrift. It was hungry and it was angry. Its head was filled with rage, like a gritty smoke.

At its back, the Black Place whispered, soft malevolent terrible noises that the bear could not understand. Ahead of it lay the human camp. The men had food, but they also had weapons, and tall yellow fires. The bear feared the Black Place, and it feared the fire. In the very deepest part of itself, where the noises could not reach, it remembered warmth, and healing laughter, and human fellowship. But the foul smoke filled its mind, and remembrance retreated before its desperate anger. It gazed balefully at the leaping yellow flames, and, growling softly, it bit the snow.

The night wind had chased the clouds: the sky was a bright cold blue. They rode in formation: pack mules in the center, officers and a picked band of men in front, archers forming a deceptively loose line in vanguard, sides and rear. Their shadows paced behind them, edges sharp as razors. Ahead stretched snow, pale as the belly fleece of new-sheared sheep. Hawk, Orm, Finle, and Edruyn rode in the vanguard. Directly in their path, ominous and sinister, the spires and ramparts of the windowless fortress gleamed like toothy lumps of coal.

Suddenly Finle halted. “Hoy!” His voice was sharp with excitement. Hawk rode a little ways toward him. Arrow on the string, he gazed to his left. “You see it?” he said softly. He pointed with his head. “In the tall drift. An animal. Perhaps a wolf—”

She smelled it then. It was not a wolf. The great red-brown bear rose suddenly out of the snowbank, its amber eyes glaring. Standing on its hind legs, it roared, a deafening, awesome sound. Finle’s mare screamed, rearing in terror, and Finle’s arrow went wide.

Sunflower’s muscles bunched. Hawk leaped from her back, as the yellow horse bounded away, reins trailing.

“Shoot it!” Finle shouted, fighting the bay mare as she danced and curvetted and tried to run. Rapid hoofbeats, coming fast, drummed over the ground behind her.

The bear dropped to all fours. Head lowered, weaving slightly, it stared dangerously at Hawk. Finle shouted at her again, urging her to kill. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the riders of the war band forming a wide circle about them. The archers had their arrows poised. Fur stood up like hedgehog quills on the great bear’s humped back. It crouched, ears back.

She called, “In the Mother’s name, don’t shoot!”

Dragon’s deep voice said, “No one will shoot.”

He was at her left elbow. “Tell them to keep back.” She heard him give the orders. “Bear,” she said. “Don’t worry, my friend, we’ll free you from this.” The bear regarded her fixedly. There was no sign of human sapience in the flat, feral, yellow stare.

Gently she touched the defended mind; felt fury, fear, and a vast confusion.

The dragon-lord said softly, “This is a friend of yours, I take it?”

“Yes. His true name is Ogier Inisson. But no one calls him that. He is Bear. He is friend to me and to Wolf Dahranni.” Again she touched Bear’s mind. She encountered bone-deep torpor, the fatigue of a beast hunted nearly to death. She reached beyond the miasma of fear and anger into human memory.
A fire in darkness, a flash of gold, the feel of coins in a palm, a woman’s musky scent, the welcome warmth of bare skin against bare skin, the tangy taste of wine on the tongue...

Bear
, she said silently,
come back. You are with friends. Come back.

A crimson mist seemed to float across the sunshine. The big bear became a bronze-haired, bearded man. He took a step, and folded full length on his face in the soft snow.

Kneeling, Hawk rolled him over and slid her hands beneath his shirt and jerkin, looking for blood. She touched his face. It was warm, but not hot. He was not wounded, not feverish. His eyes were closed. He mumbled, and moved one hirsute hand. Karadur knelt beside her. “He was the bear whose tracks Marek saw,” he said slowly. “And also the man?”

“Yes. We traveled together from Ujo, he and I. But he goes his own way; he always has. I would not leave Wolf and Thea unburied. I asked him to wait for me, but he would not. He is very stubborn.”

“He has pursued us all this time?”

“No, my lord. He went ahead of us. He crossed the mountains before we did.”

“You should have told me this before we left the Keep.” The words were mild enough. But beneath them the dragon temper smoldered. She waited, kneeling in snow, while sweat trickled down her sides and from her scalp. Finally she felt his anger dissipate. “Can you wake him?”

I can try.

She laid her palm over Bear’s heart. His thought was a jumble of sense and images:
a swirl of fetid grey fog, a red-eyed wolf crouched to spring, a corrosive whispering voice that burned like acid, a golden dragon...
She felt him wake, then. “Ungh!” His yellow eyes opened. She jumped back, as he surged to his feet in a great ursine rush. “Hawk?” He swayed, big-knuckled hands opening and closing on nothing. Then his shoulders lifted; she saw him take in the encircling riders, and, silent beside her, the big man in the dark cloak.

He drew a deep lungful of air. “Gods, I’m hungry.”

Karadur ordered a halt. They camped in the open, beside a huge weathered stone. The dragon-lord touched nothingness to flame, and Bear devoured three half-cooked mule steaks and drank a skinful of red wine with the air of a man who had not eaten for days. “I do not know when last I had a meal,” he explained apologetically. “I remember a day and night in which I ate nothing. I
think
I remember. I was almost wholly bear, then.”

“Tell us what happened to you,” Karadur said. There were six of them at the fire: Hawk, Bear, Macallan, Lorimir, the dragon-lord, and Azil Aumson. Sentries prowled the camp’s perimeter.

“It was the mist.” Bear lifted his hands, looked at them, laid them again in his lap. “I lost my stick,” he added sadly. “It must have fallen into the snow.”

“The mist,” Hawk prompted.

“Yes. I had heard stories of it, but I have heard many stories, and I have seen some sorcery—” He hesitated. “Tricks and fripperies, most of it. So I walked into the mist, cursing its stink, but unafraid, only a little troubled, for it was thick, and I thought that in the murk I might miss a step, and tumble into a crevasse. I kept my stick in front of me.” He mimed a man stabbing at the snow with a pole.

Karadur said, “What did you see in the mist?”

“Lights, and shadows. Bizarre faces; illusions. I saw a scaly, fanged beast, but I swung at it with my stick, and it disappeared, so I knew it was not real. Once I saw my mother’s face, as I knew it when I was a child. She has been dead over ten years...” He wiped the matted tangle of his beard. “Then the beast returned, and attacked me. It smelled foul, like something long dead.”

“Warg,” said Azil Aumson softly.

“I suppose. I changed, and we fought. It was a long fight. Peculiar. It clawed me, and I did not feel it, and the gashes it gave me did not bleed. And the beast, too, did not seem to feel its wounds, and it had many. At last I grappled with it, and broke its back. The body blew away in the mist. So I knew that it had been an illusion, though it had sounded and smelt and felt real. The killing seemed to make the mist angry. It muttered and hissed at me, in a language I could not understand. You know how it is in dreams? Someone speaks a language you do not know, and you almost understand it. It was like that. I continued north and east—”

Lorimir interrupted. “How did you know?”

“Know what?”

“Your direction. Hunters have told of wandering in circles in the mist for hours, even days.”

Bear smiled a little. “I always know where the sun is.” He reached for the wine, and drank. “Then the wolf appeared. I thought at first it was Wolf, alive again, as in a dream. It looked like Wolf, and it even smelled like him, a little. But its eyes were mad, and red, as the warg’s eyes had been red. It challenged me, crouching and growling. I fought it, too. Fighting the wolf was like fighting the warg, except that the battle went on much longer. I grew tired, but the wolf did not. But at last I broke its back. And as the wolf faded it grew to look more and more like my friend, until at the end it seemed wholly so, and it wrung my heart. That made me very angry at the mist, and I cursed at it, and clawed at it as if I could make
it
bleed. I walked for hours. It was still day, but night was coming. The mist muttered and grumbled at me, in that language I was almost able to understand. I tried to change, and realized that I had forgotten how. No, not forgotten; it was as if the way to change was in that other language, the one the mist was speaking, and I could not understand it.” He glanced at Hawk. “I should have stopped, then. But I did not. Then the dragon came.” Lorimir exclaimed softly. “It towered over me, three times my height. Its eyes were red, too. It glowed, like a star. It was gold, and breathed fire. It bellowed at me, a sound so thunderous I thought the mist would freeze and crack open like a shell. The dragon sprang at me like a great cat, with splayed curved claws, and so I fought it. I tore at its soft belly with my teeth and claws. I swiped at its head as it stooped, and blinded it. It tried to bite me, and I evaded its jaws, and finally I leaped upon it, and wound my arms about its huge head, and forced it back, and bit its throat, and its blood ran into my mouth. Its blood was honey-sweet, and hot. And it died.

“I was wholly animal, then. The mist voices taunted me, and I bit and clawed it. I walked northeast, but with no sense of purpose, other than to escape the mist. When at last I came out from it, it was dawn, and I was trapped in an evil wind. I dug a hole in a snowbank, and stayed there, with snow piling over me, and slept. When I woke, I was starved, and my mind was filled with the taste of blood, and the lust to kill.” His heavy face was drawn. “I did not know that I was more than an animal. Had you not found me, I might be bear still.”

For a little while, no one spoke.

Hawk said quietly, “I tried to find you. You did not hear me?”

“I heard the voices of the mist, and my own heartbeat.” Bear looked doubtfully at his hands. “I feel odd, without my staff. I feel as if a piece of me was left behind, in the mist.” He nodded toward the men and horses spread across the snow. “This is a fine little army you have here. With so many, men, horses, mules, how did
you
avoid the mist?”

“We burned it,” Karadur said. “It does not like fire.”

“Ah. I will remember that. I shall be more wary of wizards’ tricks in the future.” Bear shook his massive shoulders loose. “I owe you a debt for my rescue, my lord.”

“You were Wolf’s friend,” the dragon-lord said. “I count no debt.” For a moment, his eyes gleamed humor. “Besides, my soldiers nearly shot you.”

“But they did not. And in recompense I have eaten your steaks. You are generous.”

“I have reason to be so. My enemy obviously fears you, or he would not have expended himself so to trap you.”

“Where do you go now?” Lorimir asked.

“To that ugly black castle we see in the distance. It appears impregnable, but I suspect that is illusion, like the illusions in the mist. When I reach it, I will hunt a wizard, and when I find him, I will do my very best to kill him. Unless you and your fine little army are before me.”