The creature’s bill opened again, but this time no cry issued forth. It was captivated by the simple magic of the light-ball, and its beak was open in surprise and awe, and its great, dark eyes locked on to the glow.
Alysen slid an arm around what passed for the creature’s shoulders. It did not break its gaze upon my magic, but it settled back a little, accepting Alysen’s gentle grip. Then it slowly raised a webbed arm, its small hand held out, palm up and talons flexing, reaching for the ball.
I wrapped my mind around the blue glow and tugged a piece of it away, shaping it into a ball the size of a cherry and letting that piece come to rest on the creature’s upturned palm. It purred softly and studied the small glow.
“Leafbud,” Alysen whispered. “Protect my new friend with a leafbud.”
“That is what I intend to do,” I returned, “if the powder Bastien gave me is strong enough. There is a fose-bear out there and…” I tasted the air, trying to determine how far away the bear prowled. I scented the monster, but it was not yet threateningly close. Perhaps it hadn’t picked up my own scent and I’d worried for nothing. Still, I’d already emptied the powder into my wyse-globe.
I sucked in a breath and looked to the larger blue glow. I changed its shape, forming a pointed stick that dripped dark blue motes and resembled a quill pen. I slid one hand under the creature’s left paw to steady it, then I mentally touched my magical pen to its right paw, outlining a leaf with a faint pulse of color. The sigil flashed bright then melted into its skin, leaving no trace. The intent of the leafbud enchantment was to cover the creature’s odor, replacing it with the scent of a fresh, green, uncurling leaf.
I did not stop there. Next I directed the pen to draw a similar symbol on Alysen’s forehead, then on mine. The horses across the clearing, my magic could not reach. Too, I sensed the powder had been used up on these three sigils, and so I let the pen dissolve.
The creature remained entranced with the small glowing orb on its right palm, apparently oblivious to the arcane mark I’d placed upon it.
“I’ve named it,” Alysen said. “Grazti.”
If the name carried some meaning or significance, I didn’t know it. I released the magic behind the small globe in Grazti’s hand. The creature blinked furiously, surprised and disappointed, then turned its attention to the other palm, sniffing where I’d penned the image of the leaf.
“The fose-bear.” I drew Alysen’s attention away from the creature. “The horses still carry scent, and—”
“I trust your leafbud, Eri.” She looked to the horses, then back to the creature. “Grazti is beautiful, don’t you agree?”
I didn’t answer that, but I stretched out my hands. The small beast did not avoid my touch when I set my fingertips against the greasy feathers just above and between its eyes. As with Dazon, I strove to communicate, desiring to learn the creature’s intelligence. I tried to pick up its emotions and the concepts it thought about. Words were meaningless, but I detected goodwill, the need for fellowship, uncertainty of the future, and the sense that it had made a promise. To Alysen? To another of its kind? The thoughts seemed distorted, like speech that sounded muffled. I picked up the hint of urgency or purpose.
I formed a message as best I could, that I would try to keep it safe, as I intended to keep Alysen safe. Perhaps I also would take the creature to the Nanoo.
“We will leave this place,” I told the creature. “Despite the coming darkness, we will travel around the weave and toward the Nanoo.”
I rose, and Alysen clutched the creature to her with one arm. With the other, she pulled a tuft of grass from the ground and rubbed it between her fingers and across her jerkin, then extended the blades to me.
I shook my head, and she looked perplexed that I didn’t understand whatever magic she evoked. I touched her forehead, flicking back the end of a wandering curl.
“I am remiss in my task to protect you, Alysen. I have let us tarry here too long, given the presence of a fose-bear.”
“I am not afraid of that, Eri. You cast the leafbud, and I have this.” She gathered more thick blades with her free hand, her mouth working as she did, reciting a spell.
Alysen stood and stepped close, brought the broken grass blades up, trying to wipe them across my forehead. Again I shook my head, wanting no part of magic I did not understand, or if it wasn’t magic, an unknown ritual. Perhaps grass-rubbing was a significant thing for the House of Geer.
I went to Dazon, opening my mouth and searching for evidence of the fose-bear. It was a little closer, and I knew Dazon sensed it, too; his nostrils quivered nervously and he made a soft snorting sound. I tasted his fear, then the fear of the other horses. They started nickering anxiously.
Would the monster come into the clearing? Was it tracking me, though it could not pick up my odor now because of the leafbud? Was it following something else or nothing at all? Had it heard the horses?
“Kyrols, neme’re. Kyrols.” Alysen spoke words unfamiliar to me, yet with the familiar ring of wyse magic.
She rubbed the grass blades against the forehead of her pony, Spring Mist. Then against the blaze on the muzzle of the draft and then the cob, all the while her mouth working, and all the while clutching the feathered creature to her. The horses whinnied and tossed their heads, the cob pawing at the ground. Certainly the fose-bear would have heard that.
Alysen came toward me, then past me, walking to Dazon’s front and extending the crumpled blades. Without asking my permission, she wiped the grass against his muzzle, then she whirled and brushed the grass against my exposed arm.
She might have held an icicle in her hand, so did that thrust of cold arc into my skin and travel up my arm and over my shoulder, settling in my head and causing it to ache briefly. It was a ward, not a ritual or simple magic she’d called. That a girl her age knew such startled me, as did her method of delivery. Had she proper manners in the wyse, she would have explained what the grass and her words were for … and the purpose behind the ward.
I caught my lower lip between my teeth, anger flaring at Alysen, then anger at myself—for I had a fleeting thought that it was wrong to spare the life of a rude girl like this over the life of Lady Ewaren.
Alysen’s eyes were slits staring at me.
How much of my mind was she reading?
7
“Green grow the leaves, strong grows the trunk.” Alysen was speaking the words in a singsong fashion to finish her warding. “Roar on, dread flyer, roar on needled wings. Ready your fangs to promise death. Breathe, breathe the cloud come to ground.”
I listened to her, hearing something else intrude, a chittering, light and distinct, like a squirrel might make. But it held to a pattern, and I realized it was part of the warding. Bastien had never taught me a ward spell; that magic was more the badge of the Nanoo. No doubt this was something she’d learned from Gafna.
Green, green, green grow the leaves
Strong, ever stronger grows the trunk.
Roar on loudly, dread flyer of the loam.
Roar on sharply needled wings.
Ready your fangs to promise death.
Breathe, breathe, breathe wildly the cloud come to ground.
I heard her whisper, “Protect us.” But I did not see her lips move. Then the chittering grew louder, and she hummed and rocked on the balls of her feet.
I had no clue what the chitterings and music meant, bonded to this ritual of hers. The horses were silent, engrossed in Alysen. The creature she’d named Grazti had its beak open, eyes fixed on the girl’s mouth.
Alysen repeated the words, varying them slightly and slowing the cadence. Around us a fog rose, thickening as it spread outward. I had no doubt it was caused by Alysen, but I did not know its purpose. A ghostly light shed from her eyes and flowed down her arms, then her legs, moving away from her and joining the mist, lightening it.
That the fose-bear had not yet reached us was strange. It must have picked up my scent when I followed the creek. Th
ere! At the far edge of the clearing the brush was quivering.
A roar deafeningly loud filled the clearing. I felt the earth rumble beneath my feet when the roar sounded again. As one, the horses reared. I lashed out, grabbing the reins of the cob and Dazon, seeing Alysen snatch the reins of the pony with her free hand. I called to the draft horse, demanding that she stay. She reared once more, then tossed her head back and whinnied fearfully. She held … but for how long?
I looked to the far edge of the clearing, just as the monster tramped through the bushes, cracking twigs and limbs and making the earth shake with each step. My throat tightened and my limbs went numb. Never had I felt such bone-chilling fear.
Giant eyes blazed red-orange like leaping flames, and when it opened its cavernous maw, I smelled an intense sulfurous stench. It had teeth longer than my hand, curved and yellow and shining dully in the lightened mist, and I knew one bite would spell the end of any creature. A mountain of furred flesh, it rose on its hind legs, more than a dozen feet tall and half again that wide.
The ground continued to tremble, the horses reared, and Dazon and the cob tore the reins from my numb fingers. I didn’t turn around, I knew they’d bolted. A great part of me wanted to flee with them.
I opened my mouth to say something, but no sound came out.
The monster roared again, spittle flying from its massive jaws, saliva dripping down to the ground and hissing in the magic fog. Its fur was at the same time brown and black, bands of darkness that shifted when its muscles tensed. Its forepaws crooked before its heavy paunch, revealing knifepoint claws.
At my side, Alysen fell to her knees, still managing to hold on to Grazti.
Every tale I’d heard about the fose-bear paled beside the real monster. I knew that the stories could not have been told by someone who’d been this close to one of the bears. Walking on its hind legs it took a step toward us, then another. My body shook, though my mind demanded that I act.
Run, I screamed to myself. Grab Alysen and run.
But my feet would not cooperate; they were rooted to the ground. A thought flickered—perhaps the magic of the monster let it trap its prey thus, deafening them and scaring them into total inactivity.
Somehow, over my pounding heart and the thrumming of the fose-bear’s footsteps, I heard Alysen.
Green, green, green grow the leaves
Strong, ever stronger grows the trunk.
Roar on loudly, dread flyer of the loam.
Roar on sharply needled wings.
Ready your fangs to promise death.
Breathe, breathe, breathe wildly the cloud come to ground.
This time when the fose-bear roared, it sounded different, menacing still—as even the exhalation of breath would sound menacing from such a mountain. But it had a different tone, and were I not frozen so, I would have used my wyse-sense to learn what that tone meant.
A moment more, however, and I guessed the roar was one of consternation and shock. Fear, too? No, I knew such a creature incapable of that.
The mist was losing its translucency. In the passing of a few heartbeats it became opaque, and it started changing from a pale white-gray to the dark gray of a rain cloud. It curled around the fose-bear, which had stopped walking toward us. It curled higher, wrapping around its huge waist and rolling higher still, thickening and climbing until only the enormous head of the monster remained clear to my sight.
Never did the fose-bear’s fiery red-orange eyes blink. But they simmered with fury, shining like glowing coals.
My tongue smarted under the heat of rage that emanated from the bear. Its fiery anger stretched across the clearing to hit me like a hard fist. The monster’s fury at its misty prison was boundless and as palpable as anything I’d felt.
Lines of light spiraled around the fose-bear in the solid mist, then spun faster and faster, wrapping tight and urging the mist up to cover the head and the blaze-bright eyes. I blinked and gasped, steadied myself, and pressed a palm against the heart thundering in my chest.
“Alysen.” It took me effort to get the word out. “Alysen, we need to…”
The mist had become a pillar, nearly twenty feet tall and looking like stone, cored by the fose-bear, which continued to roar, muted now but no less angry. The ground still trembled from its wrath.
The leafbud I’d fashioned kept the monster from smelling us, but it had sighted us. The magical ward Alysen had conjured was incredible, but I knew the fose-bear would break it down.
“Alysen, we must move. Now.” I tugged her to her feet and pushed her ahead of me. The fleeing horses had made a path, one easy to follow. “Hurry.”
She didn’t argue, just clutched Grazti tight and ran as fast as her legs could manage.
8
Finding the horses presented little problem. Following the trail they’d made, we came back to that part of the woods with the twisting vines and the wall of thorns. They were grazing on the very strands of grass that sought to hold them tight to the earth, and I wondered what the grass would do to their stomachs.
Alysen tried to hold Grazti, while at the same time pull at the grass around the pony’s hooves. I watched her hacking at the grass with my ax, then leading Dazon far enough away where the grass stopped grasping. I worked quickly to free the cob and the draft, then I helped Alysen with the pony.
“We need to move.” Again, I had to shout the words so she could hear them as whispers.
What was amiss with this part of the forest?
Again my mind whirled with the thoughts of what magic so possessed this place that it deadened sound and turned the grass into tiny snakes.
“That ward you called is powerful magic, Alysen, but I don’t trust it to hold that monster much longer.”
“Then where do we go, Eri?”
I barely heard her words, and so I gestured to Dazon. She followed me to the horse, struggling to tug the pony with her, while still carrying Grazti. I did not help her. When we could hear better, I pointed straight north.
“We can’t cut through that thorny weave, not in any amount of reasonable time, Alysen. That fose-bear will find us, and all of those thorns will be insignificant to the fangs of a beast that size. We cannot go back to the clearing where the fose-bear is, nor can we return to Nar. My intention still is to take you to Nanoo Gafna, and so we will go this way.”
We were so close to the Nanoo, about two miles. But it might well have been one hundred because of the thorns.
“Out of the way,” she said simply. “We have to go well out of our way.” She didn’t meet my gaze; she stared into the eyes of the bird-creature. “Certainly we won’t reach the heart of the fen until tomorrow at the earliest because we have to go around.”
“Better that than ending up in the belly of that monster.”
“Everyone dies,” Alysen whispered.
I glared at her, then looked to Dazon. He wore his fatigue like a second skin. “Come on, girl.” I got on the cob and watched Dazon fall in behind it. My stomach grumbled from hunger, and I thought about the meat I’d sliced from the curl-horn. The fose-bear so close, I wouldn’t stop to cook it tonight, and so with regret I reached behind me and pulled it from the pack and tossed it on the ground, hoping it would at least feed some insects.
“You don’t like me, do you, Eri?” Alysen had made no move to get on the pony.
I let out a great sigh and turned in the saddle, reaching both hands down and wiggling my fingers. “Give me that beast, Alysen. Easier for you if I carry it while we ride.”
“You don’t like me, do you?” Almost reluctantly, she handed me the creature, the greasy mixture she’d applied to its wounds smeared over my fingers, and I nearly dropped it. I settled it carefully between me and the cob’s neck.
“Alysen, I don’t really know you. We lived in the same village, but our lives were separate.”
“You were never around much, Eri. Always hunting or with Bastien. Even after he died, you went off hunting on your own.” She stood by
the pony, still making no move to get on its back. “Why don’t you like me?”
“Alysen, I don’t know you well enough to like you or dislike you.”
She looked over her shoulder, her eyes fixed steadily on the trail we’d made leaving the clearing with the fose-bear. “Can you tree-see, Eri? Is that beyond you?”
“Yes, I can tree-see, Alysen, but not now. There’s the fose-bear to consider. We need to—”
She rocked back and forth on the balls of her feet and brought her hands up. Facing the trail, she placed her thumbs together and started mumbling singsong words. I let out a great, exasperated breath.
“Alysen!” I said her name much louder than I’d intended. How did Nanoo Gafna and Lady Ewaren deal with this child? By the Green Ones, I hoped she’d minded them better. “Alysen, I will leave without you.”
She drew her hands apart, a wavering blue line appearing between her thumbs and stretching as her hands continued to move. Then she brought her hands down and in, effectively drawing a box in the air. The blue outlined it.
Standing on her toes, the words tumbled faster from her lips. A gesture, and the trees that shone in the outlined square grew transparent. She’d cast the tree-see enchantment despite my admonishment to leave. And though I opened my mouth to scold her, I said nothing. I looked through the outline and to the clearing that came into focus … the place where the fose-bear remained trapped.
The mist column still held the great bear, though it shook, and I imagined feeling the ground tremble. Or was I imagining that? I tasted the air and immediately picked up the monster’s scent, stronger in its still-growing rage. I felt the fear of the small woodland animals fleeing in all directions from it.
Overhead, hawks, crows, and small owls scattered. The shaking intensified, and I thought I saw cracks appearing in the solid mist. The pillar rocked back and forth, difficult to notice, but it was moving.
I gasped as the foggy pillar that held the bear fell forward, as if hurled by a giant shove. It rolled back and forth on the ground, wildly, and the cracks became more visible. My hunting knife was in my hand, the other was clenched on the cob’s reins. We were far enough from the bear—for the moment—but still I clutched the weapon.