Ghost Hunter (7 page)

"Are you all right?" she said.

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"Yes," he lied.

She took his hand. Her fingers were thin and warm. He drew strength from them.

"Torak," she said. "I don't know what Eostra means to do in the Mountain. But I know this. She wants to keep you apart from me and Wolf. She wants you alone. She won't succeed."

They sat side by side while the ice storm fought the Forest with unabated fury. Presently, Renn slept, but Torak remained awake. For now, he and Renn were safe. Wolf was not. It seemed to Torak that the bond between them was a fragile thread stretching through the night-- and that Eostra's icy hand was reaching out to sever it.

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ELEVEN

The Bright Hard Cold was savaging the Forest. It was crushing trees and hurling birds from the Up. It was attacking Wolf with freezing claws.

Let it. He didn't care what happened to him. He'd been running forever, casting for the scent of the eagle owl, trying to catch the least whimper from his cub. Nothing. The Bright Hard Cold had eaten hope.

He came to a hill of roaring pines where a boulder hid a small Den. Without pausing to sniff for bears, he ran in and slumped onto broken bones and ancient scat.

He knew that Tall Tailless was seeking him, but not even the thought of his pack-brother could rouse him.

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Darkfur and the cubs were gone. Wolf longed to be with them--but they were Not-Breath. He didn't understand how this could be. Darkfur and the cubs were ...
not.
Wolf shut his eyes. He wanted to be
not
too.

Torak was woken by silence.

He was cold--the fire was half-asleep--and the shelter had sagged till it was only just above him. His breath was loud in the stillness, frosty on his face.

The door had frozen shut. He hacked it open, waking Renn, who sat up before he could warn her, and banged her head.

Bracing himself against the cold, Torak crawled out-- into a piercing glare and a Forest turned to ice.

The storm had beheaded trees and transformed what remained to glittering spikes. It had flattened entire groves to mounds of twisted crystal. Tree, branch, leaf: all were caught fast in Eostra's prison of ice.

Slowly, Torak got to his feet. He took a few steps. The ice beneath his boots was hard as stone. The cold seared his lungs and crackled in his nose. The glare was a knife in his brain. Everywhere he turned, ruined trees flashed and glinted. The shattered Forest possessed a terrible beauty.

"Can you feel their souls?" Renn said behind him.

He nodded. The air shivered with the spirits of dead trees seeking new homes.

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"They can't get into the saplings," said Renn. "The ice is keeping them out."

"What will they do?"

"I don't know. Let's hope the thaw comes soon."

Torak didn't think it would. A dead, windless cold lay upon the land. The hand of Eostra.

Shading his eyes with his palm, he saw a reindeer calf on the slope below. It wobbled on spindly legs, frightened by this treacherous new world, while its mother, hungry for lichen, chopped at the ground with her sharp front hooves. She couldn't break through.

Torak thought of lemmings trapped in frozen burrows; of beavers sealed inside their lodges.

He thought of Wolf.

Rip and Rek flew out of the shelter and perched on a bough, loosing a clinking cascade of shards. The echoes took a long time to die.

Renn called Torak's name, her voice shrill with alarm.

She was crouching ten paces away in the lee of a boulder, peering through the tangle of a spruce that had fallen against it. As Torak approached, she warned him back. "Wait. Don't look--"

He shouldered her aside. Between the branches, he glimpsed a patch of gray fur tipped with black. Wolf fur.

Renn was pulling his arm. He shook her off. He tore at the branches, desperate to reach--to reach what lay

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entombed beneath the ice.

Renn wriggled past him and got there first.

Torak's world shrank to that gray fur under the rock.

Renn's voice came to him from far away. "It isn't Wolf."

She crawled backward, clutching a band of wolfhide in her mitten.

It was about the width of a hand: rolled up, frozen stiff. "It was staked in place," she said. "We were meant to find it. It's been tanned, the edges pierced for sewing. Looks like what's left of someone's clan-creature fur."

"It is." Torak took it from her and tried to unwind it. The frozen fur cracked, and something fell out. The world tilted as Torak picked up the little seal amulet. He knew the turn of its sleek head. He'd often counted the tiny claws on its flippers. He said, "It belonged to my father."

Renn stared at him.

"His mother was Seal Clan--he always wore it." He swallowed. "He left it as a sign. He's been begging me for help. And I turned my back on him to find Wolf."

"You had to," said Renn. "Wolf needs you."

"I turned my back on Fa. That's why he left me this."

"No." Her tone was hard. "This was left by tokoroths."

"You can't know that!" he cried. "How can you possibly know that?"

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"I don't, not for sure. But I know this. Eostra sent her tokoroths and her owl and the ice storm to separate us--but she
failed.
And she will fail to keep us apart from Wolf."

"And Fa?" he demanded. "What about Fa?" She turned to the ruined Forest, then back to him. "It might not be him."

"And if it is? What then?"

"And if it is," she said, unflinching, "you were
still
right to follow Wolf. Because Wolf is alive. Your father is dead. You cannot have dealings with the dead."

Torak glared at her, but she did not back down.

"He's dead, Torak. Nothing can bring him back. Wolf needs you more."

In prickly silence they returned to the shelter, where they gathered as much firewood as they could carry, and Renn made masks of slit buckskin to shield them from the glare. Torak checked their provisions: a bag of hazelnuts, some salmon cakes, dried horse meat, and lingonberries. He wanted to take Fa's clan-creature fur, but Renn shook her head. "No, Torak. You can't take a dead man's things."

He gave in to that, but determined to keep the seal amulet. When she saw his face, she did not protest, merely insisting that he wrap it in rowan bast before putting it in his medicine pouch. He could feel her wanting to make

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things better between them, but he stayed stubbornly silent. She hadn't heard his father's spirit calling in the night. How could she understand?

The ice storm had obliterated all hope of a trail, but the day before, Wolf had headed south, so that was where they went. It proved almost impossible. The ice was the snow's evil sister. When they broke through frozen branches, it sent shards flying at their eyes. It made them fall, and punished them when they did. Soon they were covered in bruises.

Now and then, Torak stopped to howl.
I
am seeking you, pack-brother!
The Forest threw back his howls unanswered.

At last they reached the frozen river. Torak saw the corpse of a mallard trapped in reeds, its brilliant green head carapaced in ice. He put his hands to his lips and howled.

No reply.

The river was so slippery, they had to cross it on hands and knees, but when they reached the opposite bank, they found the way blocked by a stand of fallen beech. They had no choice but to head upstream.

Torak howled till he was hoarse.

"Don't stop," said Renn. "He will hear you. He will howl back."

But Wolf did not howl back, and Torak feared that he never would. This was the valley of the Redwater, where

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the demon bear had killed his father. Maybe it was where Wolf, too, had met his death.

Around midafternoon, the trees thinned and a bitter wind rattled the leaves. It was the wind off the fells. They were nearing the edge of the Forest.

They came to a grove of crushed pines, and a boulder hung with icicles longer than spears.

Beneath the boulder, they found Wolf.

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TWELVE

Wolf was alive--but only just. Ice caked his fur, and his muzzle was white with frozen breath. When Torak swung his axe and sent the icicles clattering from the boulder, Wolf opened his eyes. Renn was shocked. His gaze was dull. It didn't light up when he saw his pack-brother.

Renn watched Torak crawl in beside him, trying to reassure with glance and touch and whine. Wolf's tail barely twitched.

"We've got to get him warm," said Torak, clawing ice from Wolf's pelt.

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"I'll wake a fire," said Renn. "You build a shelter around us."

They worked in silence, Torak dragging fallen saplings, chipping off the ice, setting them against the boulder to close in the space; Renn rousing a smoky, reluctant blaze. In the warmth, Wolf's fur began to steam, but his eyes remained incurious, their amber light quenched.

Renn set a salmon cake by his muzzle. He ignored it. Alarmed, she tried to tempt him with a few dried lingonberries. He ignored them too. When Rip and Rek stalked in and stole them all, he didn't turn a whisker.

"Thank the Spirit we found him in time," said Torak, dragging the door shut behind him. "He'll be all right once he's warmed up."

Renn bit her lip. "Give me your medicine horn. I'll try a healing rite."

Feeling Torak watching her, she shook earthblood into her palm and daubed some on Wolf's forehead, muttering a charm.

"He'll get better now," said Torak. "Won't he? Renn?"

She did not reply. Wolf was sick to his souls with grief. And from that you can die.

As the moon rose, they got into their sleeping-sacks. Torak lay with one arm over Wolf, trying to comfort by his nearness, as in the past, Wolf had comforted him. At times, Wolf's tail stirred listlessly, but Renn could see

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that he was giving up.

Next day dawned icily clear, with no sign of a thaw. As light stole into the shelter, Renn saw with a clutch of terror that Wolf was no better.

Torak saw it too, but said nothing. Renn guessed that he was staring into the abyss of a future without Wolf.

Worried about their supplies, she said she would set some snares. Torak would not leave Wolf, so she went alone, not going far for fear of tokoroths. When she got back, she tried every healing rite she knew. Wolf submitted without so much as a twitch of his ears. He didn't care.

"I've done all I can," Renn said at last.

"There must be something more," said Torak.

"If there is, I don't know it."