Near Lorica – A Golden Bear
She was being hunted. She could smell the horse, hear its shod hooves moving on the spring earth, and she could feel its pride and its faith in the killer on its back.
After months of degradation and slavery, torture and humiliation she would happily have turned and fought the steel-clad war man. Glory for her if she defeated him, and a better death than she had imagined in a long time. But her cub mewed at her. The cub – it was all for the cub. She had been captured because they could not run and she would not leave them, and she had endured for them.
She only had one left.
She was the smaller of the two, and the gold of her fur was brighter, and she was on the edge of exhaustion, suffering from dehydration and panic. She had lost the power of speech and could only mew like a dumb animal. Her mother feared she might have lost it for life.
But she had to try. The very blood in her veins cried out that she had to try to save her young.
She picked the cub up in her teeth the way a cat carried a kitten, and ran again, ignoring the pain in her paws.
Lorica – Ser Mark Wishart
The knight cantered around the western edge of the woods and saw the river stretching away in a broad curve. He saw the shambing golden creature in the late sunlight, gleaming like a heraldic beast on a city shield. The bear was running flat out. And so very beautiful, Wild. Feral.
‘Oh, Bess,’ he said. For a moment he considered just letting the bear go.
But that was not what he had vowed.
His charger’s ears pricked forward. He raised his sword, Bess rumbled into a gallop and he slammed his visor closed.
Bess was faster than the bear. Not much faster, but the great female was hampered by her cub and he could see that her rear paws were mangled and bloody.
He began to run her down as the ground started to slope down towards the broad river. It was wide here, near the sea, and it smelled of brine at the turn of the tide. He set himself in his saddle and raised his sword-
Suddenly, the bear released her cub to tumble deep into some low bushes, and turned like a great cat pouncing – going from prey to predator in the beat of a human heart.
She rose on her haunches as he struck at her – and she was faster than any creature he’d ever faced. She swung with all her weight in one great claw-raking blow, striking at his horse, even as his blow cut through the meat of her right forepaw and into her chest – cut deep.
Bess was already dead beneath him.
He went backwards over his high crupper, as he’d been taught to. He hit hard, rolled, and came to his feet. He’d lost his sword – and lost sight of the bear. He found the dagger at his waist and drew it even as he whirled. Too slow.
She hit him. The blow caught him in the side, and threw him off his feet, but his breastplate held the blow and the claws didn’t rake him. By luck he rolled over his sword, and got to his feet with it in his fist. Something in his right leg was badly injured – maybe broken.
The bear was bleeding.
The cub mewed.
The mother looked at the cub. Looked at him. Then she ran, picked the cub up in her mouth and ran for the river. He watched until she was gone – she jumped into the icy water and swam rapidly away.
He stood with his shoulders slumped, until his breathing began to steady. Then he walked to his dead horse, found his unbroken flask, and drank all the rest of the contents.
He said a prayer for a horse he had loved.
And he waited to be found.
West of Lissen Carak – Thorn
A two hundred leagues north-west, Thorn sat under a great holm-oak that had endured a millennium. The tree rose, both high and round, and its progeny filled the gap between the hills closing down from the north and the ever deeper Cohocton River to the south.
Thorn sat cross-legged on the ground. He no longer resembled the man he had once been; he was almost as tall as a barn, when he stood up to his full height, and his skin, where it showed through layers of moss and leather, seemed to be of smooth grey stone. A staff – the product of a single, straight ash tree riven by lightning in its twentieth year – lay across his lap. His gnarled fingers, as long as the tines of a hay fork, made eldritch sigils of pale green fire as he reached out into the Wild for his coven of spies.
He found the youngest and most aggressive of the Qwethnethogs; the strong people of the deep Wild that men called daemons. Tunxis. Young, angry, and easy to manipulate.
He exerted his will, and Tunxis came. He was careful about the manner of his summons; Tunxis had more powerful relatives who would resent Thorn using the younger daemon for his own ends.
Tunxis emerged from the oaks to the east at a run, his long, heavily muscled legs beautiful at the fullness of his stride, his body leaning far forward, balanced by the heavy armoured tail that characterized his kind. His chest looked deceptively human, if an unlikely shade of blue-green, and his arms and shoulders were also very man-like. His face had an angelic beauty – large, deep eyes slanted slightly, open and innocent, with a ridge of bone between them that rose into the elegant helmet crest that differentiated the male and female among them. His beak was polished to a mirror-brightness and inlaid with lapis lazuli and gold to mark his social rank, and he wore a sword that few mere human men could even lift.
He was angry – but Tunxis was at the age when young males are always angry.
‘Why do you summon me?’ he shrieked.
Thorn nodded. ‘Because I need you,’ he answered.
Tunxis clacked his beak in contempt. ‘Perhaps I do not need you. Or your games.’
‘It was my games that allowed you to kill the witch.’ Thorn didn’t smile. He had lost the ability to, but he smiled inwardly, because Tunxis was so young.
The beak clacked again. ‘She was nothing.’ Clacked again, in deep satisfaction. ‘You wanted her dead. And she was too young. You offered me a banquet and gave me a scrap. A nothing.’
Thorn handled his staff. ‘She is certainly nothing now.’ His friend had asked for the death. Layers of treason. Layers of favours asked, and owed. The Wild. His attention threatened to slip away from the daemon. It had probably been a mistake to let Tunxis kill in the valley.
‘My cousin says there are armed men riding in the valley. In our valley.’ Tunxis slurred the words, as all his people did when moved by great emotion.
Thorn leaned forward, suddenly very interested. ‘Mogan saw them?’ he asked.
‘Smelled them. Watched them. Counted their horses.’ Tunxis moved his eyebrows the way daemons did. It was like a smile, but it caused the beak to close – something like the satisfaction of a good meal.
Thorn had had many years in which to study the daemons. They were his closest allies, his not-trusted lieutenants. ‘How many?’ Thorn asked patiently.
‘Many,’ Tunxis said, already bored. ‘I will find them and kill them.’
‘You will not.’ Thorn leaned forward and slowly, carefully, rose to his feet, his heavy head brushing against the middling branches of the ancient oak. ‘Where has she found soldiers?’ he asked out loud. One of the hazards of living alone in the Wild was that you voiced things aloud. He was growing used to talking to himself aloud. It didn’t trouble him as it had at first.
‘They came from the east,’ Tunxis said. ‘I will hunt them and kill them.’
Thorn sighed. ‘No. You will find them and watch them. You will watch them from afar. We will learn their strengths and weaknesses. Chances are they will pass away south over the bridge, or join the lady as a garrison. It is no concern of ours.’
‘No concern of yours, Turncoat. Our land. Our valley. Our hills. Our fortress. Our power. Because you are weak-’ Tunxis’ beak made three distinct clacks.