Tobry fled into the dark and wouldn’t let Rannilt come near him again.
He could have outdistanced her easily; he could have run so far and fast that she would never have been able to find him, but he had not. He would run for a mile or two, stop until she had almost caught up, then run on again, first heading north, then east into the most rugged section of the Nandeloch Mountains.
That was all she knew; she had never seen a map of this part of Hightspall and had no idea where he was leading her, save that he was running as far from civilisation and humanity as possible.
For the moment Rannilt was content to follow, scavenging off the land, and allow time to do what it could for him. She had been alone most of her life and did not miss the company of other people. Indeed, they would have been a nuisance, telling her what to do and undermining her confidence. She knew what she had to do better than anyone else.
“You can’t heal,” Tali had often told her. “Lyf stole your healing gift in his caverns, remember? Besides, full-blown shifters can never be healed.”
What would you know, you bossy cow? Rannilt had thought. Just because you couldn’t heal Tobry, it doesn’t mean no one can. It doesn’t mean I can’t. I know I can and I’m going to show you.
After following him for three or four days—or possibly five; she didn’t keep count—Tobry led her into another bat-infested cave. This one was a broad hole, forty or fifty feet wide but only five feet high, at the base of a limestone mountain. It ran into the mountain in sinuous curves for miles, and judging by rounded pebbles on the bottom of the cave it had once held an underground river, though only a rivulet flowed there now, barely deep enough to bathe her sore feet.
“You ache for the dark, don’t you?” she said to Tobry when she finally caught him. “You want to hide and never come out, to lie down and never get up. But it don’t have to be like that.”
He must have known she was coming by the golden light from her fingertips. This time he allowed her to get to within twenty feet before racing away, though he did not go far at all, not even out of sight. He was afraid of her touch, but he also wanted her.
He needed her. Perhaps he even believed that she could heal him. It made Rannilt feel warm inside.
“Your arm looks much better now. It’s almost healed,” said Rannilt when she was five feet away.
He just looked at her.
“First the body,” she reminded him. “Then the mind. And last of all, the shifter curse.”
Her stomach rumbled. She hadn’t eaten in the past day and a half. In the pursuit there hadn’t been time to hunt, and at this time of year there were no fruit, nuts or berries.
Tobry reached behind him, then held out a gruesome, bloody object, the head of a hare-like creature. Rannilt was not overly fastidious—slave girls could not afford to be—but the thought of eating it, raw or cooked, made her gag.
“No thanks,” she said politely. “I’m going to catch a fish… after I’ve done the next healin’.”
He stiffened, started to howl, but broke it off and savagely crunched up the morsel, spitting out the fur and bones. Rannilt allowed the light from her fingertips to die down so she wouldn’t have to watch.
He finished in a minute or two but it didn’t feel like the right time to try again. He was too tense; too afraid. The best thing she could do was talk, and see if it would put him at his ease.
“What are you lookin’ for, Tobry? Why did you come into this black cave?”
He stared at her. He did that a lot.
“What are you thinkin’? Sometimes I think you want to be healed, and sometimes I think you just want to run into a dark hole and bury yourself. What are you really lookin’ for?”
“Unh-unh!” he said.
“I don’t know what that means. Can you say it again?”
“Unh-unh! Unh-unh!”
Rannilt wrinkled her forehead. “Perhaps if you mimed it.”
He bent his arms, brought his fists to his shoulders, then flapped his arms up and down several times. His eyes were alive, yet he was trembling.
“You want to fly?” she guessed. “No, you’re thinkin’ about a bird. A big bird?”
He stared at her again, unblinking.
“All right, not a bird. But somethin’ with wings. A bat? A gauntlin’?”
He was silent, quivering ever so slightly. He looked down at his shaking hand and tried to steady it, but could not.
“Maybe a gauntlin’, and maybe not,” said Rannilt. “You’ve got to find it, but you’re scared of it, too. Why don’t I call it the winged terror for now?”
He howled and bolted. She went after him, following his shifter reek in the dark. It wasn’t hard. In this long, winding cave without any branches or side openings, the only way he could go was forward.
After an hour she was too tired to go any further, so she lay by the stream in the lowest part of the cave. The water was deeper here, hip-deep in places. By playing her golden light across the surface, Rannilt found she could attract small white fish, and after practice she learned to scoop them out of the water. She caught three, cleaned them and grilled them on a tiny fire she made from a piece of driftwood so white and smooth it must have been drifting down the underground stream for an aeon.
After she had picked the bones clean and returned them to the water, she lay down to rest, trying to work out why Tobry had come in here.
Why was he hunting the winged terror? What did he want from it? If it was a gauntling, she couldn’t protect him. She was unarmed save for a blunt knife with a blade no longer than her middle finger. She rubbed it on the rock, trying to sharpen it, but the soft limestone had no effect on the steel.
He reappeared, silently.
“What do you want from the winged terror?” said Rannilt. “How can it help you?”
He was as still as a sphinx.
“How are you huntin’ it, anyway?”
His eyes blinked, extinguishing the tinge of yellow and replacing it with the normal grey. Rannilt breathed out. Grey for the man, yellow for the deadly shifter cat.
“If it goes after you I can’t help you,” said Rannilt. “That golden magery I used to save you and Tali from the facinore, it don’t work no more. Lyf robbed it away.”
He bolted again. She followed wearily, for hour after hour, until her blistered feet were so sore she could walk no more. She lay on the bare rock, slept for a few hours and continued.
So it went on until she had no idea where she was, or if it was day or night outside, or even what week it was. She might have walked fifty miles under the mountains; she might have walked two hundred.
She came around a bend and his eyes reflected the glimmer from her fingertips. Rannilt stopped, uncertain now.
She couldn’t think of anything to say; she did not want to raise the topic of the winged terror again. But she remembered how keenly he had listened the other day when she had talked about her dying mother, and her own desperate need to heal.
“In Cython, if you’re an orphan everyone picks on you,” said Rannilt. “Well, almost everyone. Tali was nice, but she was so sad when I met her. Her friend Mia had got her head chopped off and Tali just wanted me to go away…
“I asked her if she would be my new mother,” Rannilt added dreamily. “I used to ask all the nice slaves that. She said, ‘Don’t be silly.’ ”
Tobry’s eyes had a peculiar shine. Rannilt could not read it but she felt he wanted to hear more about Tali.
“The other slave girls were the worst,” she said, without rancour. “When I was a water carrier they were always trippin’ me up and makin’ me spill my water. They used to whack me round the legs with a wet rope, or make little holes in my buckets so all the water ran out and I had to fetch it again. I was always gettin’ into trouble for bein’ late with the water.
“And once they put alum in the bucket I was takin’ to the overseer. It puckered his mouth up so bad he could hardly speak. Ooh, I got such a floggin’ that day I couldn’t sit down for a week.”
Rannilt rubbed her meagre bottom, smiling faintly. “I got them, though.”
He made a questioning noise in his throat.
“It wasn’t revenge, exactly,” said Rannilt. “Revenge is bad for you, everyone knows that. But you gotta defend yourself or they’ll get you even worse next time. I put bath salts in the girls’ dinner and they spent the next five days in the squattery, their bums flowin’ like drains.”
Tobry made a sound distinctly like laughter.
“ ’Course, they got even,” she said in a matter-of-fact way. “Broke all my fingers.” She studied her twisted fingers as if she had never seen them before, then rose. It was time to try again. “Don’t move. I’m gunna have another go.”
She eased towards him, holding her hands out, the fingers spread. He let out a muffled howl, quivered as if he was about to bolt, but managed to restrain himself. The faintest golden light limned her fingers and extended up her hands to her wrists.
“I went too far the first time,” said Rannilt. “Looked too deep. I’m not gunna do that again, don’t worry. I’m just layin’ my healin’ hands on your head, that’s all. Not lookin’ at all.”
Nonetheless, as she knelt before him and put her hands around his head, he flinched. She lifted her fingers away then brought them down again. He stared into her eyes, unblinking.
As she held her hands there she could feel the tension draining out of him. His hands rose, as if of their own accord, and rested on hers. His eyelids drooped; his head sagged a little, and she felt that he had found a kind of release, perhaps for the first time in weeks.
After a while her muscles began to cramp. She moved her left hand as carefully as she could. His eyes flew open, he whipped his hands away and hurled himself backwards.
“It’s all right, it’s all right,” said Rannilt, but he was gone, splashing up the underground river into the darkness.
Again, though this time she had done no physical healing, weariness overcame her. Her stomach was so empty that she could feel the sides rubbing together. There were blind fish in the stream but she did not have the strength to try and catch one. She lay on the stone floor, wrapped her coat around her, and slept.
He must have come back while she slept. Rannilt roused from an unpleasant dream about having her fingers broken by the water girls and realised that he was sitting close by, watching over her. Her mind heavy with sleep, she instinctively reached out to him for comfort.
Tobry stared at her, frozen, then took her in his arms and hugged her tightly. She clung to him for a few seconds, until the spell broke. He wrenched free and flung himself into the darkness again.
Rannilt lay down, smiling to herself, and slept the night away without dreaming at all.