Summerblood (20 page)

In any case, she was on her feet now, and dropped the reins. To her dismay, White Star
did
bolt then: jolting away to the left, crashing through the laurel there, and continuing on. She waited for the birkits to give chase but none did. She only hoped she could retrieve the horse eventually. In the meantime, Etti was getting even more fractious. “Kylin! Get off now!” she rasped. And heard him obey.

Heard, because she was still trying, very hard, not to take her eyes off the beast she was about to approach. Slowly, oh so slowly, she squatted, which put their heads nearly on a level, and with clumsy caution, began to ease forward on all fours. The birkit had been roughly two spans away when she'd begun. She covered one of those and stopped, then rocked back on her haunches and extended a hand, palm upward, wondering even as she did whether there wasn't some better way to access her blood.

None came to mind, so she tried, very hard, to think the word and image “knife,” while at the same time keeping her brain empty of any desire for violence.

And as she did, she reached for the blade at her belt—a gift from Merryn and Strynn upon her departure. If she was lucky, it would accomplish the task assigned. If not, it would be an interesting curio for someone to find. Eventually. Or not, for this way was rarely traveled.

Her hand had just brushed the hilt when the birkit moved. A breath, and it was before her; another, and those claws had raked her outstretched hand so quickly she barely felt the pain.

And so carefully there was no damage
but
the pain—and enough blood to serve their purpose.

She flinched back from reflex, and by then the beast was atop her, and Kylin, who must have heard the scuffle, was crying out and fumbling forward. “No!” she yelled—to him, the birkit, and the situation in general. Instinct made her bat at the huge head above her, while she felt her lower body pinned by massive legs. And it was opening its mouth, and all she could see was fangs sparkling in the sunset light, and a cavernous maw like the night to come.

“No,” she repeated, barely more than a whisper. And with that, the clogging in her brain intensified to the level of a headache, and the birkit's tongue lolled out and casually wrapped itself around the bleeding hand she discovered she'd extended toward its muzzle in a vain effort to fend off those fangs. It licked her flesh and with it her blood, and then, with a spring that took the wind from her, it leapt away.

For a moment nothing happened, and then, like a landscape slowly revealing itself through melting ice on a windowpane, came words.

You are We. You are the We who leaves and returns and has silences in Your head where We used to be, where We still are, and yet You are not. This confuses.

It is something My kind of We cannot help
, Div gave back.
We speak loud when We speak this way: when the blood is fresh. But when the blood grows old, We speak softly, and then We do not speak at all.

This confuses.

So does it confuse My kind of We. We are still learning to speak this way. We ask patience.

You remember We?

I think I do. I remember a We much like the one I see before me. I remember a den in the land near here.

That is Our den. That is the den where You and He-Who-Speaks-Loud and He-Who-Was-Weak denned with Us last Cold Time.

I—

This One with You … We do not know Him, but He is broken. Should He therefore live?

Only His eyes are broken. I would have no harm come to Him.

If You say so.
We
would put Him from His misery.

It is His choice. For now … We would crave shelter for the night. And We would crave the right to build a fire.

The one is Your right. The other We will endure.

And Our mounts—

Big Tasty Ones. Have You brought them—?

We cannot give them to You, for We must have their aid. We regret this. We ask that no harm come to them.

You ask much. They would feed the cubs for—

There was no word for the image that ensued, but Div got a sense that it meant something like “as long as it lasts.”

We would ask You not to. We are … hunting to aid He-Who-Speaks-Loud. We must hurry, or He will no longer be able to speak loud at all, and the friendship He has wrought between Our two kinds may end, for Those Who Would Harm Him would rule Our Tribe, and they would not be friendly to Your kind.

Silence followed—or the absence of the heaviness in her head, which was much the same. Div was startled to note that real sounds still existed in the world: water dripping from leaves, the harsh breathing of the birkits—three more of which had made their presence known and were even now crowding closer—and the sharper breaths Kylin was taking. She imagined he was scared to death.

“I've established communication,” she told him. “I think they'll give us shelter, and not hinder us. But the horses are a problem.”

Kylin didn't reply at first. Then: “How far is it to Grinding Hold?”

“Around three days this time of year, but it's out of our way.”

“Could one horse carry us that far?”

“If it was rested. But I don't like killing horses.”

“But you're under royal warrant, you could requisition more. Think of the men—and horses—who'll die if you don't.”

“So you're saying—”

“That you should offer them one of the horses when we leave. And—Wait, I'd forgotten that there's a ghost-priest messenger in transit somewhere out here. You should alert them that there's someone afoot who might do harm to us
and
them. We don't know when or if he'll be near here, nor what route he's taking, but if we could arrange for them to attack him …”

“You expect a lot from luck, but I'll tell them—later. For now—”

“Offer them the horse,” Kylin repeated stiffly. “I think it's the only choice.”

We accept Your offer
, the birkit agreed unexpectedly. And that was that.

The other horse—

We will find it for You. We will
fear
it back this way. It will be there for You when You leave.

That must be soon.

It will be when it will be. For now, be warm. Sleep well. Den with Us and be happy.

“Kylin,” Div sighed aloud, “prepare for what may be the strangest night of your life.”

(
NORTHWESTERN ERON—HIGH SUMMER: DAY XLVIII—NEAR MIDNIGHT
)

Bekkin could wait no longer. He'd hoped he was over the sickness—the gripping in his gut and fluidity in his bowels that had come upon him and his Fellows-of-the-Face three days into this journey, and which had cost them two days already. Most things one could endure on horseback—flux, one could not. So it was that they'd spent as much time out of their saddles as in them, and the only thing that made it tolerable was that Nyss
was as badly afflicted as her squires. It was balance, Bekkin supposed: The Ninth Face had attacked Gem-Hold unawares, and sickness had caught its emissaries unawares in turn.

Still, there was nothing to do but accept it. If nothing else, the ailment seemed to be shifting focus from his bowels to his stomach—which was suddenly threatening to rebel. He could feel the sweat starting now, the tightening in his throat, as possible approached inevitable—

Setting his jaw against the sour taste already flooding across his tongue, Bekkin scrambled out of his bedroll, sparing but the briefest attention to his three companions, who bracketed the other sides of the fading fire like logs. Birch logs, he supposed, what with the white cloaks they'd rolled around themselves.

Not that it mattered—as he clamped a hand across his mouth and staggered toward the deeper woods that surrounded the camp. A laurel hell walled it on three sides; he thrust through the fourth, angling toward the road, a shot away from which they'd camped—

He managed a dozen paces before his body overruled his mind and set him vomiting: long, aching spasms that brought up nothing but thin yellow bile that tasted like bitterness distilled. On and on and on—endlessly. Eventually, he finished— but had barely taken two steps toward camp before nausea ambushed him again. He slumped against a tree, seeking strength that had all but left him.

And in the ensuing pause, he became aware that new sounds now stalked the night. Troubling sounds, though no more, at first, than the patter of raindrops shaken from leaves that still held water from the earlier storm. But then came a pad of heavy feet, a snort from the horses; then a mad, loud scramble of leaves and twigs, followed by three thumps that merged at once with growls and tearing sounds, and one choked word that might've been “birkits.”

Then—worse—a set of screams from the horses, and— worst of all—a pad, pad, pad coming toward him. Quickly.

Blind with fear, he fled, hearing the deaths of horses, followed by a wild thrashing, predator yowls, and a louder crashing.

On he ran, blindly in the woods; forgetting his sickness, his fear—everything but the fact that he had to survive, because he was the only one who
had
survived, and Zeff's ultimatum had to reach Tir-Eron no matter what.

Twigs tore at him, laying his cheek open. Breath hissed harsh and loud in his ears, but atop it came the woody thunder of something smashing through the undergrowth behind. Something too big to be a birkit.

Horse
, instinct told him. He turned to confirm, not believing his luck. And doubted it again when the darkness spat out his very own steed: faithful Wyle. He whistled Wyle's special note—and saw her slow but not stop. Even so, she swerved close enough, for long enough, at a sufficiently viable pace for him to grab her mane as she passed and hurl himself atop her.

Already fearing attack from above, she bucked. Bekkin hung on grimly—and then there was nothing to do but let Wyle run herself out.

At least they were alive—for now.

Even so, he didn't return to camp until a hand past sunrise, and only then armed with a spear he'd made from a sapling. Wyle hadn't wanted to approach closer than a quarter shot, but he forced her, unwilling to go afoot longer than necessary. He found what he expected, too: his companions dead, with their throats torn out by carefully calculated bites from massive jaws. Even Nyss was dead—which would not please Zeff. The horses were dead as well—and
they
, Bekkin noted, were missing flesh.

Which was still strange, he reckoned. Birkits killed no more than they needed. Usually they killed men solely to get at horses, and then only one horse at a time. In any case, what mattered was completing the assignment. Steeling himself, and grateful that his stomach no longer rebelled, he searched the bodies, finding the document where he'd last seen it, in Nyss's saddlebags. He also found other things that he might
need to survive, and—efficient lad that he was—was on his way again a hand later, with three dead companions and three dead horses lying unburied behind him. He was hungry, he realized, and thirsty. But this time food and drink stayed with him, as he turned Wyle's nose toward Tir-Eron.

(
NORTHWESTERN ERON—HIGH SUMMER: DAY XLIX—MORNING
)

The sun was shining in his face when Kylin awoke, warm, well fed, and dry, with stone invisible above him, beneath him, and curving up to either side, save that which faced the light. Div was there as well; he could hear her breathing and stirring a pot of what smelled like stew. There was a scrambling at the cave's mouth, too, followed by a series of padded footsteps, that had to be a birkit returning from some all-night endeavor.

“What have
you
been doing, beast?” Div murmured amiably. Then, with alarm: “How'd you get all that blood on your fur. Are you hurt, or—?”

Perhaps it was the fact that Kylin was still half-asleep, and thus receptive; or perhaps it was simply the intensity of the birkit's reply, but he “heard” the reply even as Div did.
Three dead
, alien thought whispered through his mind.
One survived.

Then gone. From him—but not, apparently, from Div.

“Something seems to have delayed the messengers,” she informed him a moment later. “If we hurry, we
may
still reach Tir-Eron in time. The birkits say they—some of them—will follow us all the way to the Gorge.”

Two hands later, they were traveling.

“It's the smoothest thing in the world,” Avall murmured, letting his fingertip glide along the soft curve of Averryn's chubby cheek, where he lay, velvet swaddled, in Argen-a's family creche. The surrounding room was soft, too: soft with shadows wrought by a tiny glow-globe's dim but steady light.

Strynn, beside him, was a face melting into the warmer shadows of her maroon robe, shadows that merged with the dark folds of his own house-robe. She gazed a moment longer at the child—her child, by Eddyn's rape—then shifted her gaze back to him, a sly smile on her face. Lifting a slender hand that could nevertheless forge blades, she traced the line of his jaw. “Not much rougher here—for an old man, but a very young king.”