Derrek did not emerge from his tent until dawn. When he did, he looked somewhat worse for wear. He had bags under his eyes and his hands were shaking.
Rennin and Orland took one look at him, exchanged a glance, and sighed.
“I take it you’ve foreseen trouble,” said Rennin.
Derrek nodded.
“The movement in the woods is a pack of uurnigath that have appointed themselves guardians of the Wolfwood against Vencari incursions. We are obviously not settlers. I will try to speak to them, but I doubt they will care to hear anything I have to say.”
Elana looked to her knights, then to Veralar, and then finally to myslelf.
“Fuck,” she said.
I had to agree.
“We may yet evade them,” Derrek went on. “I do not know where the ford is in relation to local pack territories. Packs maintain dens for decades, but territorial borders shift from season to season, based on game trails and personal disputes. But we should be ready for trouble when we cross the river.”
We tried not to watch the woods that day, keeping our eyes on our own side of the riverbank. Knowledge that there might be a hostile force nearby kept Rennin and Orland closer than had been their habit. Elana stuck close to Rennin’s side, putting Orland on point and leaving me with Derrek. Peering into the future seemed to have exhausted him, for he spoke little and he lost the air of constant attention that had marked him before.
Not knowing what was coming, we camped early and took another opportunity to bathe. This time we went in shifts, so that only two were ever naked and unarmed at once. Veralar and Elana went first, Rennin and Orland trusting her to be the best of us to defend Elana while naked. The knights went next, confident in the ability of two wizards and a Shan Khul master to defend their prince during their brief absence, even taking the time to refresh Rennin’s shave. Derrek and I went last, slipping into the cold river water as the sun began to fade.
I tried to discretely get a look at the tattoo on his breastbone, but all I got was an eyeful of tit and a sardonic look.
“If you want a show,” he said, “just ask.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was trying to see your tattoo.”
“Ah,” he said. Was it my imagination or did he sound disappointed? But he stepped closer and turned so the fading light hit him more directly. The image was small, maybe an inch and a half across, done in intricate fine-line detail. It was a winged serpent coiled and looped in and around itself to bite its own tail. “A gift from the priestesses who raised me.”
I had read mention of serpent cults in the histories my old master had provided, but the symbol did not resemble any iconography that I could recall. I had already been rude enough, though, so I did not press.
“Thank you,” I said. “I didn’t mean to pry. It’s very well done.”
“Thank you,” he said, then looked me up and down – I stood straight for his examination, it was only fair – then turned his back and began to scrub himself clean.
The next day we came to the ford.
I laughed at the thought that we might have missed it. It was as if a giant had drawn a line in the land. To one side of that line, the land had thrust up. To the other, it had fallen. Along the edge all the soft earth had been washed away to reveal hard rock. The river had cut channels through the rock, and splashed up constantly over the top of what remained, but if we were careful and lucky we could make it across. We came first to the low side, where the waterfall made a small lake before rushing back the way that we had come. It was beautiful. It was terrifying.
Elana turned to Derrek.
“Did your divination say if we should cross immediately,” she asked, “or is it safe to make camp first.”
Derrek shrugged.
“My visions were not that clear,” he said. “For myself, I would climb the face today, while there’s still light, and then cross in the morning when we are most fresh.”
Elana looked to the rest of us. We all nodded.
So we climbed.
For this, Veralar took point. Even with her giant’s blade tied around her, she clambered up the damp rock face with an ease that put us all to shame. Then she stood guard at the top, ready for any trouble that might come while we ascended.
I went next. As I continued to live and travel with humans, I had yet to regain the strength and grace I had lost under my old master’s tutelage, but I was still second only to Veralar. The prince came next. There were moments that scared us, but only because our lives have come to revolve around her safety. Then Orland, the most likely of us to fall. Then Rennin, who struggled. Then Derrek, who didn’t.
It was only mid-afternoon. We could have pressed on. But we kept to the plan, setting camp and resting in anticipation of possible trouble tomorrow. Once again, Derrek asked our aid in erecting his tent so that he could perform further divinations – he and his tools safely sheltered from the eyes of the Sun and Moon, and we sheltered from the disturbing and harmful visions that could come to those exposed to divination spells without the protections inherent to the casting of them.
I did wonder about that. Though I, myself – perhaps my own fault, perhaps the fault of my master, before me – knew only the most basic clairvoyance and clairaudience spells, I knew that the arts of divining the past and future had been refined much over the last hundred years, and that the Councilors of the Naalar Republic had routinely called forth visions of the future to guide their governance for decades, now. Why had Derrek Rowan chosen to study and master the older, more dangerous divinatory arts?
While Derrek performed his divinations, Elana and Rennin sat close together, with Orland a little awkwardly off to the side, leaving Veralar and I to ourselves on the far side of the now-cold cook fire. She was a solid presence: quiet, as fierce in her compassion as in combat, and I had long enjoyed her company second only to that of the prince, herself.
“Do you trust him?” she asked, nodding her head toward the sealed and warded tent.
I looked over, as well.
“I like him,” I said, avoiding the question for a moment. “He has been good company so far. I envy his genius. And I know how desperately we need him.”
I paused, thinking back to our first meeting, and our earliest conversations on the road. No, your grace, he had said. I will not join your rebellion. You have convinced me of your goodness, and your sincerity, but not of your cause. And then, a few hours and a bloody battle later, he had joined us. How long had he lived there in So’renner, hiding under his real name and with that infamous scar visible to all the world, waiting to be recognized by chance or sought out by someone like us? And where had he spent the years between leaving the capitol and settling just on the far side of the border? Among the elves and the uurnigath was not much of an answer. He had loved our enemy, and had left him at the height of his power. He had loved that Georgi woman, Sara Kemm, and left her when we came to collect him. I thought of him standing in the river with me just last night, naked and vulnerable, a strength and beauty I had not expected.
“But I do not understand him,” I said at last. “And I can trust nothing and no one that I do not understand.”
Veralar looked from me to the tent, and then back to me.
“I agree on all points,” she said. “And I believe that the prince does, as well. I also think that she resents that she needs him, and that like and mistrust and need and confusion combine to eat away at her.”
I nodded.
“I agree on all points,” I said, smiling as I echoed her words.
Veralar smiled back, running a hand through her upswept hair.
“She should not have spoken to you so, the other day,” she said. “You have been a good friend to her, to all of us, and a strong ally. You deserve better.”
I smiled and looked away. They took their words very seriously in Namora.
“Thank you,” I said, taking her hand briefly. “To lash out is the privilege of the powerful.”
“The powerful should indulge their privileges less often.”
That was a perfectly Namoran view. It was why they had never had real kings, why the king appointed by the Compact was mostly a scapegoat for international diplomacy. The governors of the big cities, and the nobility that answered to them, were the real political power in Namora. Fortunately, they were largely kept in check by parallel power structure of the clan heads, and the independent, anarchist might of the Shan Khul monasteries.
This time, Derrek emerged from his tent before full dark. He nodded greeting to Veralar and I, looked at Elana, Rennin, and Orland – heads close together, speaking so that only I could hear them, and only if I tried – and then moved to join us.
“May I?” he asked, gesturing to the open spot on my left. I gestured for him to sit.
“Has the future revealed herself to you?” I asked. The prince and her knights looked over when I spoke.
He shrugged, holding out his hands in a gesture of resignation.
“This much is clear,” he said, loud enough to be heard on the far side of the fire. “We will be forced to fight before we find my friends. The ultimate victory of our quest depends, in part, on our ability to win that fight with as little bloodshed as possible.”
“Well, fuck,” said Orland, half joking. “Let’s just throw ourselves into their jaws and see how that works for us.”
Derrek responded with earnest seriousness that might have been very literal or intended as a mean joke.
“Oh, no,” he said. “If any one of us fails to make it to the Eastern Veil, we will not make the crossing.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it.
“No pressure,” I said. Had he been an elf, I’d have punched him. But human dignity was a tricky thing.
Fortunately, everyone else laughed, too.
“No pressure at all,” Derrek agreed.
We took down the tent that night, and slept in shifts as we had not done since leaving Liddarn. We ate a hasty breakfast of cold hardtack and crossed the rocky ford as soon as there was enough light that we felt we could do so safely. We crossed in much the same order that we had climbed, save that this time I went last, my wizard’s claw pressed against my palm in case of either a fall or an attack. Fortunately, neither was needed, and we all reached the far side only a little damper for our efforts.
There was a sandbar along the northern bank, and a narrow grassy stretch a little above that, and then the dense old growth of the Wolfwood, proper, all stretching in either direction as far as the eye could see. It was, in a sense, a familiar sight. Excepting the last year and a half, and a few ventures in-country to attend weddings or other social functions with my family, I had spent the whole of my life within sight of the Draddial. The trees were a little different: near my home, at the foot of Mount Kashrin, it was mostly oak, pine, spruce, and beech; here those noble giants shared space with locust, alder, fir, and others. The underbrush was different, too – thicker, mostly. But the knowledge that a pack of uurnigath, mistaking us for another wave of furriers or settlers, lay in wait added an alienating element of threat to what might otherwise be a profound sense of homecoming.
“Where now, wizard?” Rennin asked, trying and failing to hide his nerves in sarcasm.
“North,” said Derrek. “North by northwest. We will not find those we seek. We will be found.”
Rennin nodded, and took the lead, with Orland only a step behind. Elana, Derrek, and I followed just far enough after to give them both full use of their swords. Veralar followed a similar distance behind us.
The trees closed in around us, enveloping us in a twilight that I knew was unkind to human eyes. We made time as best we could, picking through the underbrush in search of a game trail or ridge that would take us in the general direction that we desired. The underbrush was not so thick that Rennin and Orland were forced to misuse their swords to clear the brush, but it was thick enough that I imagined them glad to have chosen their northern-Compact style boots, rather than the sandals that were more popular in Vencar and Naal, and traditionally associated with the hoplite armor they had chosen for the trip.
I considered joining the knights on point, but it would have been a futile gesture despite my better eyesight. I was a wizard, not a hunter. I could catch us dinner, but I could not protect us from this kind of threat. All the same, I could feel eyes on us. The forest was too quiet. A certain amount of silence followed the entrance of any human – even any elf – but this was more. This was the silence that surrounded a predator in waiting.
We hiked for hours, knowing that threats lay nearby, but we were unable to see them.
“Hold steady, friends,” Rennin called back to us. “We stop for lunch in the next clearing we see.”
There had been a handful, so far. The Wolfwood was thick, but by no means impenetrable.
“I could eat,” conceded Elana.
Derrek and I nodded. Wizards are almost always hungry. Even when we had performed no magic, the frequent bloodletting primed our bodies to constant need.
That was when the attack came.
The howls were fierce and sudden and came from all directions. To our great fortune, though, the first attack came from behind.
The Children of Enhyl were impossibly strong and fast, blurring across my vision. Veralar Tann was stronger and faster, whipping the giant’s sword off her back and swinging it so that the flat of the blade struck the first of the uurnigath and sent him flying back into the woods like a child with a stick striking a ball. She dropped the blade, then, letting it fall to the earth, and drew the lacquered wooden rods from the sheaths in her boots just in time to strike her next opponent in the chest.
Then the next wave came, rushing those of us in the middle. Derrek’s sword had cleared its scabbard in time to deflect the spear that had been aimed at him, but did him no good when the arm that had thrown it reached him only a moment later, the uurnigath raking her claws down the right arm he raised desperately in defense. I saved my own life by pure luck, turning from Veralar to Derrek to Elana in an awkward circle that my attacker failed to anticipate. The claws aimed at my neck missed by inches. The shoulder behind them struck me in the face, throwing me to the ground. I heard Elana scream, and Rennin curse, and Orland shout, and my only consolation, as I struggled under the strong arm of the surprisingly small hairy man who had struck me, was that none of them sounded mortally wounded.
The uurnigath were anthropoid – of the same general shape as humans and elves and dwarves – of a height with most rrotran, but shorter than most Vencari djuunan. The one atop me was lean-limbed but broad, his chest and arms and cheeks covered in thick, course, dark hair, with a massive mane growing from the top of his head. His teeth were bared, revealing sharp fangs. His claws dug into my arm. I felt my blood rise and I smirked as I spat the word of power into his face, throwing him off me and high into the branches above.
“Fuck!” I swore as I struggled to my feet. I turned my head back and forth as quickly as I could, trying to get a handle on what was happening.
Derrek was shouting, alternating words of power as he drew blood from his initial wounds, just as I had, and words in some other language that I did not speak. The blood from his arm was not burning away immediately; instead, it was curling into what looked disgustingly like a wrought-iron fence around himself and Elana, who was bleeding from a handful of wounds on her face, arms, and legs.
Sirs Rennin and Orland were fighting back to back. Somehow, they were holding off the three uurnigath that circled them.
Veralar was a whirlwind of motion, striking one direction then another, holding off four of the Children of Enhyl all on her own. Each of her enemies was clearly battered beyond their ability to really comprehend: limping, clutching wounded hands or heads.
Derrek Rowan continued to shout, and one by one the uurnigath began looking his way, rather than toward their chosen targets. There were eight of them, that I could see. Eight to our six. This battle alone was worthy of a bard’s tale, even if I didn’t feel particularly impressive in the moment.
Five of them wore only loincloths. Three more also wore breastbands. All of them wore knives at their waists, and two still clutched spears, but they seemed to prefer to fight with their prominent, long, dark claws. At the moment, I could see no sign of their infamous wolf companions.
Derrek kept talking, his arguments or enticements occasionally punctuated by more words of power. The bloody shield expanded to include me. Rennin and Orland, noticing that, maneuvered their way carefully closer so that he could extend the shield around them, as well.
When only Veralar remained outside the shield, leaving her alone to face the entire pack, she dropped her sticks and drew the Shan Khul sword from her back.
“Veralar, you fucking lunatic,” Derrek shouted, “I said no bloodshed. Get over here!”
Veralar Tann just smirked.
“Fuck,” Derrek groaned, then resumed speaking in – presumably – the uurnigath tongue.
To everyone’s surprise, the Children of Enhyl did not indulge Veralar’s clear challenge. They stepped back, forming a loose circle around all of us, and howled. A ninth figure, a woman, emerged from the woods, accompanied by a dozen wolves. She carried a sword, a xiphos almost certainly stolen from a Vencari hoplite, and wore a crown of antlers on her head. When she spoke, Derrek straightened and lowered his arms, allowing the bloody shield-ward to dissipate.
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