20

It came at a ground-eating lope, intent on the prey Feilan had habituated it to.

Despite his acceptance that there was more to the local stories than a rogue bear, he’d still developed a bear-shaped idea in his head, somewhat taller than a man, covered in thick hair, clumsy but fierce.

He couldn’t have been more wrong. It towered twice Torben’s height, maybe five or six ells, and was pale and scaly, not hairy. It had two legs, jointed strangely, and four arms terminating in claws as long and thick as Feilan’s forearm. Its head was elongated, and sleek as an otter’s. It moved with terrifying grace.

He’d assessed it within a few heartbeats, hand instinctively locked around his other wrist, mother’s talisman and husband’s charm under his clammy palm. He even had time to debate letting it go on past in pursuit of the bolting goat. That would give the other warriors a chance at it, but he was suddenly not convinced that even the bigger bloc was going to be effective. He certainly didn’t want Torben to face it with only him here to help.

Then the monster halted. It bent its neck as if peering down at them from its lofty height. It raised its narrow snout and sniffed the air. Strangely, it itself seemed to have no scent, or at least, not one strong enough to trigger colour.

It turned its head and looked along the invisible trail of the goat, long vanished back towards the familiar safety of the herd. A forked tongue flickered from its mouth, probing from between teeth as long and sharp as Micah’s daggers.

It swung its head the other way, and looked at Feilan.

He smelled of sweat and goat. He’d gone from training to goat pen to afternoon visit to nightmeal without ever having a chance to wash. If he hadn’t been inured to it already, his own stink might have left hazy hues in the corners of his eyes.

He smelled of goat, which he’d trained this thing to eat.

He took a step back, drawing his bastard sword.

‘Bigger than I thought it’d be,’ Torben said casually. ‘Get behind me.’

It was the same phrase he’d used to tease Feilan yesterday. This time he was deadly serious.

‘Wait,’ Feilan said, but his voice wasn’t working and it came out as the merest puff.

Torben strolled towards the monster, unsheathing his longsword.

Feilan heard a shout – Noura and Micah, running out of the mist. Torben had heard it too, and he’d even managed to grasp what it meant: Noura might be running to help them, but Micah wasn’t bound into the alliance yet, and he would be trying to take the head for himself. He’d either be expecting the others to honour his win, or willing to kill them if they wouldn’t.

Therefore Torben didn’t wait for their assistance but kept on with his approach, raising the sword, head tilted. Feilan guessed he was examining its pale armour-like scales, planning his attack for the gaps at the joints.

The monster roared, uncurling all four arms, jointed and muscular. The pale scythe-like claws seemed to glint in the starlight before it brought them down on Torben as fast and jagged as a lightning strike.

It threw him aside as if he were a discarded doll, ripped open in three ragged lines, sheeting blood.

Feilan couldn’t move for the shock of it, blinded by the bright coruscating blue that washed over his vision as the thick pungency of the blood hit him. It had been so fast. So easy. Torben hadn’t even got a single blow in.

His vision cleared. The monster stalked towards him, deceptively slow. Feilan thought, incoherently, Too fast, and charged at it. A figure thundered past: Noura. She struck with all her strength at its flank with her curved blade as Feilan went in low and tried to hamstring it on the same side. It shrieked and flailed, flinging them both away.

Feilan lay dazed; it had been a short flight and a hard landing. Noura had bounced onto her recently-injured side and was also slow to get back up. The monster circled, listing, favouring the side on which they had coordinated their attack, but very much not incapacitated.

Then Micah was there, coming from behind to spring lithely up its back. He leapt higher one, two, three times, and each time he landed, Feilan heard the meaty thunk, thunk, thunk as his wicked blades sank home in the joints between the scaly plating, the last into the tender skin between the shoulder and neck scales.

The monster screamed. It threw itself onto its back like a dog trying to scratch an itch. Micah rolled clear and balanced on his toes, more knives already to hand. Noura pulled Feilan to his feet and they moved to form the three points of a triangle with Micah, the monster at its centre.

It sniffed the air again. Then with one mighty bound, it cleared Micah’s head and cantered away into the mist.

They’d injured it, and made it easier for the uncle’s bloc to take it. It didn’t occur to Feilan that they had to follow it and finish the job. He dropped his sword and ran to Torben.

He couldn’t pray – the gods turned Their backs to the Cursed – but he did anyway, to any god that would hear him.

Torben was alive. He wouldn’t be for long. It was exactly as had happened to Remy’s brother, exactly as Remy had described.

Torben gripped Feilan’s wrist, so little strength in it that Feilan wanted to tear those calloused fingers from his skin so he wouldn’t have to feel the weakness.

Voice wavering, Torben said, ‘I have to tell you where my hoards are buried, Aleifr.’

Feilan said, ‘You will not,’ and he was almost shouting.

Micah pushed him aside. ‘Give me something to bind him with.’

Bind him, Feilan thought, bind him, he can barely move, why bind him?

Micah pulled a knife. Feilan wasn’t thinking. Noura held him back while Micah used the knife to cut Torben’s wrecked and bloody shirt free. She handed Micah her undershirt, and the injuries were so extensive that he simply folded it up and pressed it over all three gaping wounds. Feilan silently stripped off the leather jerkin and handed over his shirt, and Micah cut it into strips to hold the padding tight.

‘That is as well as I can do until I have the equipment to sew him up,’ Micah said. He rose and looked Feilan full in the face. ‘Courage, my friend. He’s not done yet. Let’s get him to the witch.’

Noura crouched and put an arm around Torben’s shoulders, getting ready to lift. ‘It’s going to hurt like shit,’ she told him. ‘But you might live. Ready?’

Torben made a grunt that might have been concurrence. Feilan, adrift in a situation he couldn’t think his way out of, got his arm around Torben on the other side, and together he and Noura lifted him. He screamed, and Feilan almost dropped him, which made him shout again, shorter.

‘Keep it together, Little Wolf,’ he said hoarsely, and that was enough to steady Feilan so he could actually be helpful.

Later, the trek back towards First Hill would be nothing but murk in Feilan’s memory, a nightmarishly endless slog, warm blood soaking his skin as the padding became sodden with it, Torben’s weight slumping heavier and heavier onto his shoulders, Torben’s feet moving ever slower, until Feilan and Noura were dragging him, their own strength flagging.

But Torben was still breathing. He was still breathing. He was barely conscious, his feet were dragging, he’d lost half his weight in blood, he was ashy from shock, he was still breathing. Feilan would not put him down until his breathing stopped.

Micah was saying something, and Feilan thought it was important, but he couldn’t make sense of it.

Micah punched his shoulder. ‘Listen!’

‘I’m listening,’ Feilan said dully.

‘We cannot go in past the spectators,’ Micah said, in tones that said he was repeating himself. ‘He must walk in, or be disqualified, and he cannot walk unaided tonight. Can you take us somewhere safe, where no one will see?’

‘Remy’s cave,’ Feilan said, and almost broke, because that felt almost as far as they’d already walked.

But walk it they did, step by agonising step, low across the sides of the hills to stay in the mist. Micah ranged about them, knives to hand, looking out for other warriors or the monster on the rampage, and if they’d met either of those, they’d have been done. As it was, Feilan could barely tell the difference between the occasional scream echoing out of the mist and the one long scream in the back of his head.

But at last they were dragging Torben’s weight up the slope to the cave, Micah scouting ahead to be sure none of the handful of Seven Hills guards were patrolling this far down the arcade. Feilan and Noura used the very last dregs of their strength to lower Torben to the stony floor, while Micah lit a lamp and did a fast reconnoitre of the benches and shelves.

‘No needles,’ he said. He tossed them a bundle of clean linens from Remy’s neat stores. ‘Rebind him. I’ll be back as fast as I can.’

Pulling the sodden, matted padding free made Torben groan but not stir. Working together, Feilan and Noura wadded fresh linen thickly over each of the three huge gashes, and held it firmly in place. Then silence reigned, a silence Feilan desperately wished to hear broken by running footsteps coming along the arcade above.

He closed his eyes, hands pressing down on the inadequate cloth trying to hold the last of Torben’s life inside him. The smell of blood with its tang of heated iron was strong in the air, tainting Feilan’s vision, even with eyes tight shut, with a haze of that unreal blue, purple-tinged, bone-white at the edges, the colour of the grip of Feilan’s father’s longsword.

‘All right?’ Noura asked.

‘I always knew he’d die,’ he said. ‘I just never thought I’d have to see it.’

‘Hurts like shit,’ she said again.

‘But I’ll live,’ he said, and he choked.

Like him, Noura couldn’t spare a hand off trying to staunch the bleeding, but she shifted her weight so that her shoulder was touching his, a solid point of warmth that made him realise how cold and shaky he was.

He opened his eyes and looked at Torben’s face. It was slack and grey.

After aeons, Remy was flinging himself down beside him. Feilan hadn’t heard the footsteps after all. Micah knelt on Torben’s far side, further from the injuries. With cool efficiency, he directed his helpers: Noura to hold the padding in place and inch it back from each gash, as Remy helped Micah sew it up.

That left Feilan, who knew Remy’s cave almost as well as Remy did by now, to fetch and carry. He fetched a lamp. And another one. And a bowl of water from the spring at the rear. And another one. A large jar of paste under Remy’s direction, that he put all over his and Micah’s hands before rinsing them off in the first bowl. A bottle of some thick liquid, smelling a vivid chartreuse that burst sharply into the dim air as Remy uncorked it and poured it over the first wound before Micah started in with the needle. More clean cloths. He took soaked-red ones away. The water in the second bowl became bloody. He emptied it out onto the grass, looking at its pale pink colour under the light cast from the lamps, and refilled it, and brought it back over. Another bottle of the viscous medicine to be poured on the second wound. Another fresh bowl of water. A third bottle. A third bowl.

And at last Noura was stepping back, her job done, holding the last bloody wads that had kept a little of Torben’s blood inside his broken body. And Micah sighed and sagged and sat back on his haunches, the hand holding the needle fallen to his side. His fingers were clamped so hard about the tiny sliver that he had to use his other hand to pry it free.

And Remy was sending Feilan for one last medicine, a small jar, a colour Feilan recognised: it was the same blue salve Remy had given Noura, for her comparatively minor injuries. Remy slavered the entire contents over a field of fresh stitches.

Torben hadn’t stirred once.

Micah touched his temple, his lips, his chest, some sort of silent prayer. ‘I will keep watch here. You and you’ – he nodded to Feilan and Noura – ‘go show yourselves, coming in off the hunting ground. Tell them the warrior and the eunuch are staying out there together. Let them assume what they will assume.’

‘You have to walk in,’ Noura said.

‘There is no rule that says it must be before morning,’ Micah said. ‘You and Feilan must keep us from being disqualified by attesting to our good health and our…’ He grimaced, and enunciated his next word with delicate distaste. ‘Passion.’

‘Darya…’ Remy said, without looking up.

‘Knows I am not given to such nonsense and further that my first loyalty will ever be to Afzal. She will assume I am ensnaring my closest rival, the better to pretend I am so enamoured as to allow him the win whilst in the meantime effecting that exact trap upon him.’ He turned to Feilan, and then, sighing, to Noura. ‘Confirm to them that we have not taken the monster’s head, so that they are reassured we are not illicitly hunting it outside the time set by the competition.’

‘They didn’t see you when you summoned the witch?’ Noura asked, when Feilan just stared at him limply.

‘No one had to see me. He was already on his way.’

Remy flushed under their sudden attention. ‘I wasn’t,’ he said. ‘I was fetching something from Third Hill.’ He touched his wrist absently – the protective talisman was missing. He’d forgotten to wear it.

Feilan took off his own, and tied it around Torben’s wrist. He tried to murmur an invocation to Njorda but the words wouldn’t come.

‘You must wash up and go back now,’ Micah said. ‘And you two, get moving.’

Feilan was bare-chested and covered in blood. He dimly heard the others decide this needed to be rectified: if the uncle knew they had had an encounter with the monster, he might suspect the lie behind Torben and Micah’s supposed interlude.

It might all be moot. They had injured it, and driven it into the hunting ground. The uncle’s bloc could easily have taken it. The subterfuge that had delayed Torben’s care could have all been for nothing.

Noura guided him to the spring, and helped him wash, while Remy ran to Third Hill East and came back with a fresh shirt, and a stack of extra blankets too, which he helped Micah spread over Torben until only his golden hair was visible.

Then Feilan and Noura plunged back into the mist and made their way across the curve of the hunting ground. They were both exhausted, and couldn’t move much above a walk, alert all the time for figures coming at them out of the white vapour. The most they encountered was a panicking flock of sheep, fleeing full-pelt. They must have forced their way through their pen’s fence, or battered it down, in their frenzy to escape the angry monster.

Noura, frowning, made Feilan sit in a sheltered hollow while she ran a brief errand, returning with the jerkin and sword he’d discarded by Torben’s body.

Once she’d got him to wear both, she looked at him closely. ‘You back with me? Or do I need to slap you?’

‘I could use a brisk maternal slap,’ Feilan said, which earned him a savage punch on the arm instead. ‘Thanks.’

‘Come on, you pillock. You’ll have to do the talking. Slaves don’t answer back.’

By the time they emerged onto the trodden grass before the barracks, the last of the surviving warriors to return, Feilan was calm enough to play the game. He was calm enough to think about that neatly sliced tether, too. He had known its implications the moment he’d seen it. It was time to think about them.

The spectators, the handful left of them, were long since bored of the lack of spectacle associated with the monster hunt. That they were still up there, listless, unimpressed when the two warriors came slowly out of the mist empty-handed, told Feilan immediately that no one had brought in the monster’s head yet. Barring further excitement tonight, the contest was on again, next new moon.

Remy, having run back along the arcade to rejoin the spectators while Feilan and Noura were inching their way tiredly across the hillsides, came quickly down the steps off the rooftop to greet Feilan with his usual kiss, exactly as per their established habit.

Then Feilan and Noura followed him back up. They separated at the top of the stairs, she to bend her knee to her master, he to explain Torben and Micah’s absence to the uncle before he could disqualify them for being dead.

When Bertrand made the predictable fuss, Feilan obediently trotted out Micah’s script: there was no rule that said they had to return before sunrise, they had no plan to hunt the monster, they had been overcome – this with a twist of a smile and a significant glance towards Adeline and Afzal to make it clear he couldn’t specify the precise nature of the overcoming in front of the children – and were best left to it.

And then, because he was calm enough to play the game – and he would yet play the game for Adeline, despite the inevitable conclusion he could draw from the severed tether – he added, with disgust, ‘That’s not to say I approve,’ so that Uncle Bertrand would think the alliance was fraying and so that the within-earshot Darya knew he wasn’t friendly towards Micah, perhaps because he was too clever for Micah to fool with wiles like the warrior.

Remy tucked himself under Feilan’s arm, own arm looped about his waist. ‘They’ll be back by morning, uncle,’ he said; he was almost mimicking Adeline’s usual sweet, obliging tone. ‘That’s all right, isn’t it? The rules of the contest say they have to be capable of walking back in. It doesn’t say when.’

Adeline said, ‘Oh, yes, that’s true, isn’t it?’ and Lady Rosmunda said, ‘Yes, it is, darling.’

Bertrand flicked an evaluative glance among the siblings, recognised that most would back their niece, and said only, sourly, ‘It best be by dawn, nephew.’ He dismissed them with a nod.

Remy’s hold about Feilan’s waist became support as they descended the stairs. Feilan wanted to go straight back to watch over Torben, but he couldn’t. Now the hunt was over for the night, the spectators would be filtering to their accommodations down each arcade, and so would be the network of spying servants. He couldn’t lead them straight to Remy’s cave. They had to do exactly as expected, and go to Remy’s room.

He was flagging badly, but he was buoyed, not by Remy’s support, but by a growing heat, flooding through him, stiffening his spine, imbuing his exhausted body with new energy.

In desperation over Torben’s torn and bleeding body, he’d prayed to the Vaer gods, who would never answer one such as he, Cursed and cast from the light of Their blessings forever.

Except one god had answered.

Torben’s god.

Feilan walked with Remy’s arm around him all the way back to their room, and the gift of the bear-god fell heavy upon him.