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I walked for a while without collecting any wood. The way back would be soon enough—no sense carrying it any farther than I had to. The late afternoon had the peculiar yellow tint that happens only in the spring when the afternoon clouds gather threateningly in the sky. The shadows were deep, but where the light touched down, the colors were dazzling.
For the first time since Daryn died, I felt at peace. I knew Moresh wouldn't be back to kill Kith. Time would heal him. With aid from Auberg, the raiders would be driven away.
I stopped in a small clearing and decided that if I went any farther, Kith and Wandel were likely to come looking for me. I turned around and stopped abruptly. Standing on a downed tree, only a horse length from me, was a… well, a creature.
I felt no fear, only a surprised kind of delight. If he had been standing on the ground, he would have come up to my shoulder. The wildling was a fragile-seeming thing, his feyness blending into the odd light as if he, not I, really belonged to this world. His arms and legs were slender, almost spindly. The bones of his ribs and shoulders were clearly visible, though his belly was round.
He had the proportions of a child, his head too large for his small body. His skin was the warm brown of stained oak. If there were claws on the ends of his fingers, those fingers were long and slender like those of a great lady.
He wore only a pair of roughly made hide shoes and a loincloth. His pale, ash-gray hair was braided in complex patterns with colorful beads woven here and there.
His eyes were large, even in the oversized, inhumanly round face. Wide gray irises gave a strange beauty to something that might have been grotesque. His mouth balanced his eyes, being wider than any I'd seen on a human face. As I watched, a smile lit his eyes and touched the corner of his mouth.
"Hob?" I asked softly, half raising my hand to him.
His smiled widened, exposing the sharp, interlocking teeth of a predator. Before the significance of that registered, he launched himself at me. His arms closed with viselike strength on my shoulders as his head darted for my throat.
Somehow I managed to get the arm I'd been lifting between his face and my neck. His jaws locked on my arm with vicious force. I heard the crack of bone, shock momentarily protecting me from the pain. I noticed that the corners of his mouth were still tilted up in a smile.
He smelled of musty leaves and damp earth. I tried to dislodge him, but for all his lack of size he was much stronger than I was. I'd left my knife back at camp, and there were no sticks within reach.
He wrenched his head, twisting my forearm to an impossible angle. I remember hearing a loud ringing in my ears—then nothing.
They told me later it was Wandel who found me. Kith had come across the creature's spoor and was tracking it when he heard the harper's shrill whistles. By the time I woke up, my head was propped on Wandel's leg and he was mopping my face with a wet cloth. I was quiet for a moment, more out of sheer surprise than anything else. I hadn't expected to wake up at all.
When a cold drop of water hit my ear, I batted at Wandel with my unhurt arm and struggled to sit up. Upright, I was lightheaded and dizzy.
"Who'd you meet out here, Aren?" called Kith from somewhere a fair distance to my right.
I opened my eyes, but it was nearing dark and my vision kept trying to black out, so it took me a while to find Kith. He was kneeling beside something a short distance away. After a moment I decided it was a dead body.
"Don't know," I croaked, closing my eyes again. "What's it look like?"
"This looks like some malformed human child with teeth like a shark," he replied. "But you met something else, too. No way you could break its neck like this. Whatever did this is stronger than I am—came near to ripping the head off while he was about it."
"Whoever it was, they bandaged her arm," added Wandel.
I'd been trying to ignore my arm. I had a clear memory of bone showing through flesh. I looked down and saw that someone had wrapped it with strips of my tunic. It still looked like an arm ought to, and I didn't think it should. It also hurt.
Kith swore softly. I raised my eyes from my arm and watched him pace back and forth, stopping here and there to examine the ground. My vision was better, but I was still dizzy.
"Look at the bruises. He snapped that thing's neck with one hand," Kith muttered. "Then he used a stick to pry its jaw open. He tossed it from here" — he stood, as far as I could tell, where the creature had attacked me—"to there." He pointed to where the body lay, some distance away. "Now it's not huge, but it weighs a good seventy or eighty pounds, and I don't know a man alive who could toss it that far—not even a magicked one like me." He said some more, but I started seeing black again and only caught something about soft-soled boots.
"A Beresforder?" guessed Wandel. "Some of those mountain folk are big enough to take a bear and toss it into the next valley. But then why didn't he stay to meet us?"
"Not a Beresforder," refuted Kith. "I don't think a human could do this. Certainly no one I know from Beresford." He went on mumbling to himself about wildlings, but I was paying more attention to my arm than to what he said.
After a moment Kith stopped speaking and knelt beside me. "How badly are you hurt?"
"I don't know," I replied, breathing through my nose like a winded horse. "I'm afraid to look."
"So someone killed that thing and dressed Aren's wounds," said Wandel, sounding fascinated—but then it wasn't his arm he was talking about. "I wonder who he was and why he didn't stay."
Kith shook his head. "I think we ought to get back to camp. Where there is one of those things, there might be more. If you'll help me get her over my shoulder, I'll carry her, and you can collect the wood we'll need on the way back."
"It'll be easier if I carry…" began Wandel. I had my eyes closed again, and I didn't get them open fast enough to see what caused him to stop talking.
"I can walk," I offered, squinting up at Kith.
Maybe the look that Wandel had gotten was similar to the one I received. It shut me up, too.
With considerable help from Wandel, I managed to get to my feet. Kith shoved his left shoulder into my midriff and heaved me up. The sudden change in position put me out faster than a candle in water.
When I awoke, a familiar tunic was bouncing around under my face.
"I can walk," I said groggily.
"No," Kith replied firmly. "From the amount of blood you left behind, I'm surprised you awoke before morning. If I set you down and you pass out, it'll be twice the work to get you back up. We're not far from camp, Pest. Just keep quiet 'til we get there."
Of the rest of the trip back I have a hazy memory of watching the back of Kith's calves gray in and out of my shaky vision. I really only recovered consciousness when the steady jolt of Kith's shoulder in my stomach stopped, and I started to slip off.
He muttered a word I'd never heard him use before and made an attempt to forestall my fall. I ended up on my blankets beside the small fire pit. My arm throbbed, my rump ached where it had landed on a rock, my head hurt; but overall, I decided, I would survive.
He left me and fumbled a bit through my saddlebags until he came up with my extra sweater, which he dropped over my head. The additional warmth was welcome—with the sun down, it was a lot colder. The warm tunic I'd worn into the woods was less warm when it was missing the bottom third of its length.
"Kith…" I began, feeling much better right side up, but he stopped me with a gesture.
"Rest a bit, Pest. We need to wait for Wandel, and I need to catch my breath." He settled down beside me and handed me a small flask. "Take a drink of this."