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A strange tingling woke them both. False dawn lent the surrounding trees a grey corona against the pale sky above. Emyr lifted his narrow head and tasted the damp air with fresh senses. He’d hardly noticed the night before the panoply of scents and sensory input that assailed his new form.
He shook himself and wagged his tail at his brother as Idrys sat up. They were both stiff from sleeping on the ground and cold from the dew that now clung to their bodies and dampened their hair.
The tingling grew as Idrys scrubbed at his eyes with dirty hands. The fear and anguish of the day before combined with the intense physical exhaustion and left him empty. He shoved down the irrational and entirely childish hope that somehow this was all still a strange dream and that his true waking would come.
“Emyr. What do we do? Go back? Find her hut? Maybe she’ll change her mind.” Idrys looked at his brother but found no human expression to read on the narrow face that returned his gaze. Emyr yipped and turned his head to the east.
The first rays of sunlight slipped into the sky and with it came a strange pain riding the wave of tingling sensation in the limbs of each twin.
The change that hit them felt less violent than it had looked the night before, and far quicker.
Emyr knelt on the ground, human and naked in the morning light. Idrys stood entangled in his own pool of clothing, looking around with a very human, surprised expression on his narrow hound’s face. It almost made Emyr laugh. Almost.
“Idrys, it’s all right. Give it a moment. Your senses will be overwhelming for a moment if you’re feeling like I did.”
Emyr took a deep breath and tried to offer what comfort he could to his brother. Ever practical, and rather chilled, he gently pushed his brother out of the way and began to pull on his twin’s discarded clothing.
He stood and took in the forest. They were a long day’s travel from home, if his bearings were correct. Knowing by his own experience that his brother would retain his human mind while confined to the hound form, Emyr turned and spoke.
“We can’t go back to her. The gods only knows what else she might think to do. We have to go home. They’ll be worried sick. Mother must know, at the least. She’s clever, she’ll think of somewhat.” Emyr tugged on his boots, pulling the soft leather over his sore heels.
Idrys tucked his tail into his body without thinking and whined high in his throat. He walked forward and licked his brother’s outstretched hand. He knew Emyr was likely right, and the folly of not listening to Emyr lay fresh and painful in Idrys’s mind.
The brothers walked side by side toward the moors and the sea as the forest woke up around them and the sun rose to cast green and gold shadows among the turning leaves.
They reached the edge of the wood as the sun sank low. The weather held despite heavy clouds that blew in from the sea toward the distant taller hills of Eifon that rose like shadows against the mercurial sky to the north and east.
Emyr got their bearings again as the wood faded into the low heath and brushy grass of the moors that spilled from the tall old forests down to the rocky shore of the western sea. Near the edge of the forest stood a tall standing stone, called a carreg, bone white with its northern face thick with moss. It was a well-known landmark to the twins; the shepherds called it the talking stone, though the tales about how it came to be varied with the telling.
“There, Idrys.” Emyr pointed to the white carreg. “Though I think we should wait here for a while yet.”
The tingling had started again in his body strongly enough that he was able to differentiate it from the burning of his muscles. Night was coming and with it he’d change. They were only perhaps an hour out from Clun Cadair, but it was too close to dark to be sure they’d make it before the curse took its terrible effect once more.
Idrys stood alert next to his brother. His black form came to Emyr’s waist and a light wind lifted the dark fur from his long back. Swallows dipped and circled in the meadow ahead as the sun dropped down over their home.
He too felt the singing in his blood and tensing of his muscles as the light faded. He raised his eyes to his brother and nodded his narrow head in a very human gesture, trying to signal he understood. It was too frustrating, this inability to communicate. He was accustomed to the easy if sometimes argumentative banter that Emyr and he had always shared. Its loss stabbed keenly as despair threatened to fill the hollow of his heart.
The twins retreated into the trees and Emyr stripped off his clothing. He folded each piece carefully and laid them on his boots. Shivering despite the lingering warmth of the day, he sank down beside his brother and slipped an arm over the hound’s shoulders. Idrys licked his cheek, his tail thumping the packed earth.
“Tell them both, Idrys. Mother and father. We owe them the truth,” Emyr said as the sun dropped out of sight.
Again the strange shifting feeling, a pain that was both inside and out at once. The terrible stretching and the sudden sense of otherness as the change completed itself with the final dying of the day.
Idrys dressed quickly and walked back out to the edge of the wood.
“Tis only fair, I suppose, that you’d leave me the task of telling them,” he muttered. “This whole mess is my fault, after all.”
Emyr butted his sharp head into Idrys’s hipbone hard enough to stagger his twin.
“Ow. Leave off, you.” The gesture jolted Idrys out of his deepening self-loathing. A tiny smile shifted across his lips only to fade into a grim and determined line.
Together they set out for the holding, hugging the line of the trees as they made for Clun Cadair and a very strange homecoming.
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Want to read the rest of this novel? The first book in the Chwedl Duology is now available in trade paperback and all ebook formats.
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Also by Annie Bellet:
The Gryphonpike Chronicles:
Witch Hunt
Twice Drowned Dragon
A Stone’s Throw
Dead of Knight
The Barrows (Omnibus Vol.1)
Chwedl Duology:
A Heart in Sun and Shadow
The Raven King
Pyrrh Considerable Crimes Division Series:
Avarice
Wrath
Hunger
Envy
Lust
Inertia
Vainglory
Short Story Collections:
The Spacer’s Blade and Other Stories
Gifts in Sand and Water
River Daughter and Other Stories
Deep Black Beyond
Till Human Voices Wake Us
Dusk and Shiver
By Spell and Sword
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About the Author:
Annie Bellet lives and writes in the Pacific NW. She is a Clarion graduate and her stories have appeared in magazines such as AlienSkin, Digital Science Fiction, and Daily Science Fiction as well as multiple collections and anthologies. Follow her on her blog at “A Little Imagination” (https://overactive.wordpress.com/)
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