I WOKE TO find the cave wall inches from my nose, lit pale gray by diffuse daylight rather than by the yellow lantern-glow that had illuminated it when I’d closed my eyes. I’d slept through the night without waking. The new ability Karl had imparted to me still rested uneasily in the back of my mind.
I rolled over and sat up. Piotr was gone, and so was Karl, and I desperately needed to empty my bladder. I got up, pulled on my boots, and went to the mouth of the cave, to find Karl standing there, looking into the woods downslope. “Good morning,” he said as I emerged.
“Good morning. Where’s Piotr?”
“Hunting.”
I grimaced. “I’ll take cheese and sausage again, thanks.”
“Not for us,” Karl said. “For himself.”
“Oh,” I said. “Good.”
“He thought we would prefer the supplies in the cave, and he is able to sustain himself in wolf form just as well as in human form.”
“Great,” I said. “If you’ll excuse me . . .”
“Where are you going?” Karl called after me as I moved toward the woods.
“Think about it,” I called back without turning around. “You’ll figure it out.”
A few minutes later, much more comfortable, I returned to find that Piotr had also returned. He had blood on his muzzle. He flowed into boy-shape, and the blood stayed where it was, now smeared across his face. He licked his lips.
Well, that’s disturbing, I thought.
“No sign of pursuit,” he said. “I went way down our trail.”
“Excellent,” Karl said. “We should move out at once, then.”
A few minutes later, with Piotr once more a wolf, Karl carrying a bag with the cheese, sausage, and dried fruit that had been stored in the cave, and each of us carrying a rolled-up blanket and a wineskin (filled with water, alas, not wine), we started north again, paralleling the cliff in which the suspiciously convenient cave had been located.
Karl, I noticed, had also taken, and thrust into his belt, the largest knife from the cave, a utensil rather than a weapon, but sharp, and better than nothing . . . against humans. Pretty much useless against werewolves and vampires.
Once the sun cleared the cliff, late in the morning, and began both beating down on us and reflecting off the rock, the temperature climbed steadily toward uncomfortable. Still, we followed the rock face as far as we could, since the trees, not far below, hid the valley floor from us and therefore presumably also hid us from the valley floor. Those trees began to recede as the morning went on, though, leaving us no choice, if we wanted to stay hidden, but to descend.
Back in the forest, our northward progress slowed somewhat. Karl and I didn’t talk, in case there was someone unseen within hearing distance, although I hoped Piotr’s superior senses would give us advance warning of any threat.
Every now and then, Karl and I paused to rest, drink, and eat a little. Piotr took the opportunity during those short stops to range ahead and behind. Late in the morning, he reported a party of humans, heavily armed, mounted, and in a hurry, on a road far below us. “Caravan from one fortified village to another,” Piotr guessed. “And anxious to make it before sunset.”
“Shouldn’t we join them?” I said. “I wouldn’t mind an armed escort. And a horse.” I can’t believe I just said that. My nose tickled and I had to pinch my nostrils to cut off a sneeze. Apparently, I was not just physically allergic to horses, I was psychically allergic, too.
“I wouldn’t recommend it,” Piotr said. “They could be subjects of my mother.”
“How does that work?” I said. “Humans living inside the borders of the two kingdoms, I mean.”
“Werewolves and vampires aren’t much for farming or raising livestock,” Piotr said. “Humans do that for us. We pay well and offer security, and security has become even more important since the Pact broke down. Some of the humans who have fled the Lands Between, rather than join one of the fortified villages, have moved into one of the two kingdoms, instead, for protection from the rogues.”
I sighed. “I guess we can’t risk it, then.”
“Agreed,” Piotr said, and turned back into a wolf.
When night came, we were still high up the valley slope. With Jakob’s pack, my journey from Zarozje to the werewolf kingdom had taken just two nights. But we had been on horses, and we were following a road. The ins and outs of the valley wall, and the thickness of the forest, meant we were still far from Father Thomas’ village, never mind Queen Patricia’s castle.
There was no handy, comfortable cave for us this night. We just stopped, in a place where deciduous trees created a canopy to hide us from the sky, and spent a cold, cheerless, and mostly silent night, not daring to light a fire or talk. We spread the blankets we had brought from Piotr’s cave and all curled up together, Karl, me, and wolf-Piotr, whose furry body, as I’d noted the night he’d rescued me, put off a gratifying amount of heat.
I missed that warmth in the morning when he trotted off to reconnoiter. It was so cold I almost expected to see frost on the grass around us, and the stupid robe that was all I wore let in annoying blasts of icy air if I wasn’t careful to keep it tightly cinched. (Again, I was grateful Piotr had at least provided me with my boots and socks . . . and annoyed he hadn’t also brought me my clothes, filthy though they’d been.) Still, once we resumed our hike, I warmed up quickly enough, although it took a while for the aches left over from the previous day’s exertions, compounded by sleeping on the ground, to work their way out of my sore muscles.
The second day passed much like the first, until late afternoon. Then, Piotr stopped and raised his head, sniffing. Karl and I stopped, too, and did our own blunt-nosed feeble-senses version of that. “Smoke,” we each said, at almost the same time.
Piotr didn’t change. He just looked at us with his glowing red eyes.
“We’ll stay here,” I told him.
Karl glanced at me. “How do you know that was what he was trying to communicate?”
“I speak Lassie,” I said, which earned me the patented puzzled-Karl look for the first time in a while. I’d rather missed it.
We sat on the ground and waited for Piotr to return and report, which he did within a few minutes. “Cabin,” he said, once he’d turned into a boy. “Smoke from the chimney.”
“I don’t suppose we can knock on the door and ask to spend the night,” I said wistfully.
“No,” Piotr and Karl said together.
“There are no trees between it and the cliff, and the land below it is sparsely forested all the way to the valley floor,” Piotr said. “As we pass it, we’re going to be exposed.”
Since he was, of course, naked, I almost made a joke at that point, but restrained myself.
“I don’t suppose we could pass you off as a large dog,” I said, then shook my head. “No, of course not. I forgot about the glowing red eyes. Can’t you do anything about that?”
“Can you change your eyes just by thinking about them?” Piotr said.
I sighed. “That would be cool, but no.” If I had Shaping power in this world, I could change yours, I thought.
And then I second-thought. Or could I? Piotr was half-Shaper, half-Shaped. Could I Shape him?
Would I? Should I? Wasn’t he more “real” than the others in this world?
I hoped I wouldn’t have to face that particular ethical conundrum.
“We’ll wait until twilight,” Piotr said. “Poor light for human eyes, but no werewolves or vampires abroad yet.”
It was a fine plan, except that, just after Piotr turned into a wolf and trotted off into the forest for another check along our trail, and while Karl and I were sharing a meager ration of our meager rations, a man’s voice behind us said, “Stand up and turn around very slowly.”
In my experience (no longer entirely garnered from TV and movies, but still mostly so), that’s a phrase that means someone has a weapon aimed at you. I exchanged a glance with Karl, and then we both did exactly as we had been told.
A man stood at the edge of the clearing, a very large man, dressed in fur and leather, with wild, unkempt black hair and a thick black beard. He carried a basket-hilted sword on his left hip and a dagger on his right, but the weapon that captured most of my interest was the crossbow. It wasn’t pointed at either one of us, exactly: it was pointed between us, so he could shoot either of us with equal alacrity.
“Human?” the man said.
“Yes,” Karl said. “You have nothing to fear from us.”
“I have nothing to fear from you, whatever you are,” the man said. Sneered, really. “My weapons are silvered.”
“We’re just travelers,” I said. “If you’ll let us go in peace, we won’t trouble you again.”
“You’re not troubling me now. Quite the opposite. Your appearance has saved me trouble. Now I won’t have to hunt.”
Uh-oh. “We’ll be happy to share what food we have,” I said, although I was pretty sure that wasn’t at all what he had in mind.
“I have all the food I need.” The man jerked his head over his shoulder. “To my cabin. Now.” A wave of the crossbow emphasized the command.
Where’s Piotr? I wondered, but then, remembering the man had said his weapons were silvered, hoped, if Piotr were nearby, he had also heard that and understood the danger to him.
Although the dangers to Karl and me seemed substantial, as well.
Our bearded host stayed well clear of us as we passed him, so that even if I were the sort of person to execute some amazing martial arts move—which I most definitely am not—I would have been a pincushion before I got anywhere near him. Karl was apparently no more Jackie Chan than I, and so we meekly walked through the woods to the cabin Piotr had spotted earlier, while I lamented the lost pistol in my lost backpack.
The cabin looked cozy enough, built of pine logs chinked with moss. A steady stream of smoke rose from a stone chimney at one end of the rough-shingled roof. Attached to the back of the main cabin was a kind of lean-to, with no windows and no visible doors.
The bearded man opened the door and motioned us through. To my surprise, there was no bed inside: just a rough-hewn table and even rougher stool on the hard-packed dirt floor, a large fireplace, with a fire crackling in a fashion that, had I been in a made-for-TV Christmas movie, I would have called “merry,” but which, under the circumstances, I could only describe as “ominous,” a nest of blankets in one corner, some shelves along one wall piled with what looked like a random selection of old clothes, and a really remarkable, nearly eye-watering smell—an animal smell. A musky smell. Like the smell in Queen Stephanie’s palace, only more so, and with a different taint to it, a taint of corruption, of rotting meat.
“Dude, haven’t you ever heard of air freshener?” I said.
“Be silent.” Holding his crossbow on us, he went to the low door at the back of the cabin, which presumably led to the lean-to. He lifted the bar, setting it aside, then pushed the door open. “In!” he commanded, motioning with the crossbow.
I still wasn’t Jackie Chan, and apparently Karl hadn’t turned into him in the last five minutes, either. We both ducked into the lean-to.
The door closed behind us. The bar slammed shut. We were locked in.
It was very dark in the lean-to, and the smell was so strong now that I almost gagged. It would have been even worse if the room had been air-tight, but slivers of light shone here and there between the logs, and a little clean air made it inside along with the illumination. Thinking I could peek out and see if Piotr had returned, I took a step. My foot kicked something that rolled across the dirt floor. My eyes flicked down to track it. It brought up with a thump against the base of the far wall . . .
. . . and stared back at me with blank black eyeholes.
It was a human skull. A small one. Child-sized.
I gulped and stared around the floor. There were many more bones. Some of them still had bits of flesh clinging to them.
That explained the smell.
It also explained why our host had been so delighted to find us.
I glanced at Karl. “I have a bad feeling about this,” I said, but not even my favorite go-to Star Wars quip could allay the sinking feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach.
We weren’t the bearded man’s guests, and it appeared we would only briefly be his prisoners.
We were his dinner.