21. A Hunt and a Challenge
A HUNT AND A CHALLENGE
Isank ankle-deep in the dead leaves. Vrathgar watched me like I was going to fall apart, and he wasn’t wrong. “Are you ready?”
The forest canopy spread over us, choking out the light and leaving the earth barren, sloughed in thick drifts of decaying brown.
“I can do it,” I said. I didn’t say I was ready, I’d never be ready for this, but we were three days’ journey from the sanctuary in the stones. I could finally stand without pain. The others murmured and shifted. Vrathgar watched.
When I started singing, he was the only one who drew his sword.
My voice was rusty. I hummed to warm it, found low, round sounds before picking up a melody, an echo of the invitation to the robin, and I brought it higher, moved into trills.
I tried to focus on the complexity of the music, on what I could do with my voice, and ignore what was coming, the fear in my gut.
Nothing happened. No rustling in the bushes, no movement through the trees. I sang, and I sang, and I stopped.
“Let’s keep moving,” said Tyralk.
We moved.
Vrathgar had said that sometimes hunters got desperate and tried to bring in the creatures with their own blood.
It was a bad idea. Many of the wizards’ beasts grew frenzied at the scent, and the smallest injury brought down the efficiency of a warrior.
We walked, and I sang, and we walked, and I sang, and I hoped our quest would not become desperate.
And I began to lose track of why I was singing.
It felt like I hadn’t prayed in a while.
The focus on the song loosened my shoulders.
I started to feel my arms swing with my gait.
I was taking in more air, breathing clearer.
And into my silly call I started mixing in my own thoughts, the soreness of my hips from sleeping afraid to turn, my tendrils of feeling regarding the man who walked beside me, his hand twitching over a sword hilt, the way his eyes raked over me like he worried I’d fall.
Singing had always felt like reaching up, like pleading.
But at this point I didn’t feel like pleading anymore.
I wanted to protest. I wanted to scream.
Why put me in this world without the ability to do anything in it? Why give me someone I loved, without the ability to keep him?
Were some of us crafted as prey? Did the strong have to rule, and did God or Goddess look the other way?
Look at this. Witness me. Is this what we are? Is this a right fate?
My song trembled on the air, the last notes, and I stopped. A shaft of sunlight reached the ground, brilliant, a cascade. A waterfall over dark leaves.
Larrakh held up her hand, knifed it towards the undergrowth. Weapons slid quiet from their sheaths.
A small hog-like creature rushed out, an ugly pig with giant incisors and a long tail, like a rat. It rushed into the clearing, squealing, and someone cut it down.
Tyralk’s shoulders slumped. Someone touched his back. He shook his head, kept staring at the beast on the ground.
“We’ll keep searching,” Vrathgar said. “No one is going to call a halt yet.”
Tyralk shook his head again. “I never promised I’d succeed my father.” He took a breath. “I already got what I called a hunt for.”
One of the others stepped forward, as if to argue, but he turned away. “Let’s get the teeth and the hide. I’m weakened, not wasteful.” He stepped towards the carcass.
I heard something.
Leaves were moving, crushing, rustling and rushing, nearer and nearer, like the way a strong wind builds far away. There was a hiss, behind the trees, behind the brush. “There’s something coming.” None of them were listening. Only Vrathgar looked up. “There’s something coming! That way—”
He moved first. “Look out!"
A serpentine thing with a head the size of a draft horse spilled out between the trees.
They had warned me about aberrations, but nothing like this. It reared back, a massive hood spreading back from its blunt face.
The wizards’-beast would have been beautiful if it wasn’t horrible. The scales caught the light like leaves. Like a polished jewel.
Its first strike almost killed our youngest.
Tyralk rolled away, lurching up onto his good leg.
I realized I’d cried out in horror when those glittering eyes swiveled to me, like it responded to my voice.
It opened a mouth full of fangs— too many fangs, too many tongues.
Did snakes have mouths full of tongues? It hissed, the sound like wind shaking the trees.
“Annora, move!” Vrathgar knocked me away, his swords lunging up, slicing twice.
The slightest graze showed between scales on its nose.
“Stay back!” he yelled, and I scrambled and sank knee-deep in the detritus.
Larrakh launched in, next to Brezha and Hagnar, and it seemed they were spreading out to keep the distance to dodge.
Vrathgar was fast, baiting in its strikes, and one of the others got a strike at its belly.
“Its scales are armor!” Tyralk shouted. “It’s not a gnurthick—" and that’s where my understanding ended, as they shifted into their tongue, as I only understood the problem as the beast dove again.
The wizards had made the beasts that the orcs fought, that the orcs kept controlled, ages ago. If this wasn’t one of those, what was it?
“Get its eyes, get its mouth!” shouted Vrathgar. “They can’t armor an eyeball!”
Larrakh parried it off, her swords clacking on teeth that did not shatter. “Its mouth is where the fangs are, you ass!” She shrieked.
Then Hagnar didn’t dodge fast enough. His scream as the creature’s fangs sunk in would haunt my nightmares.
Tyralk hacked at it, cutting the corner of its mouth. One of its tongues was bleeding.
It was retreating. Hagnar was on the ground, blood, more blood. It was pulling back.
“We can’t let it get away! Thrak—"
They were doing their parts. I was supposed to do mine. Larrakh slid to Hagnar’s side, and we couldn’t let it get away. We were out here, in the middle of nowhere, because of me, because I was a person other people wanted to throw into pits.
I sang.
Harsh, piping. The wizard beast’s eyes centered on me, the head pulling back out of reach.
Its eyes fixed on me, and Vrathgar was twenty feet away. Its eyes fixed on me, and I didn’t even have a weapon.
I stopped singing.
“Someone cover Annora! It’s—"
Everything felt slow. The creature surged forwards. Vrathgar was sprinting. He wasn’t going to be fast enough.
Hagnar’s axe lay apart from where he was sprawled.
I lunged into the leaves, grabbed it. It was sticky in my hands; I could feel the hot blood on the handle, running from the blade, and my father’s eyes were staring, his mouth open, gaping, begging, and he was trying to stop his guts from spilling out.
“Annora—"
The snake and my father and the snake and my father and the snake the snake the snake—
Something hard shoved me to the ground. When I opened my eyes, Vrathgar was in front of me, his swords through the roof of its mouth. He ripped them back. The thing spasmed, flopping as it died.
“Annar-zha!” Larrakh skidded in the leaf-drift. “Are you alive? You are hurt?”
Vrathgar turned away from the thing, back towards me, blood spattered across his face and body. “Maybe you leave the snakes to us.”
I was shaking, and then I recognized the sound coming out of me, the wild, hiccuping breaths. I was crying.
Oh no, this wasn’t the time. I shouldn’t be crying. I had to stop and tell him I was okay. I was—
Larrakh pulled back. The others were running over to Hagnar. He was a shape on the ground. I should be doing that. I should be fine.
Vrathgar knelt in front of me. “Hey,” he said. His hand found my face. “Hey. You’re safe. I’ve got you.” Blood flecked his hand, up his arm.
The sound coming out of me was hissing, squeaking, and I couldn’t get my breath, couldn’t breathe.
“Easy,” he said, pulling me in, tighter. He shoved the axe away as he kneeled. “Easy.”
“I didn’t kill him,” I said, gasping, heaving.
“I got him. It’s fine.”
My voice pitched, panic, hysteria. He was going to hate me, and I still couldn’t shut up. “I didn’t do it.”
“A giant snake is a first for most of us, barbarian, you’re fine.”
“My father. I didn’t kill him. I just…”
His brow creased, and he pulled me up onto my feet. My back twinged, but I didn’t protest. Maybe I deserved this. Vrathgar was pulling me away from the others, and he pushed me down into the soft leaves again. “Some things aren’t for all ears, barbarian.”
I was shaking so hard my teeth clacked.
“Breathe,” he ordered. “Do you want to tell me what happened?” It didn’t look like hate on his face, just that same, cold mask.
“I didn’t go…for help. I just…” This must seem like nonsense to him. How did I explain the axe handle, the blood? I was retching in the leaves, and my hands looked clean but they felt sticky and cold, like they were smeared with blood and they’d always be.
His hand squeezed on my shoulder, tight. “It’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay. You’re safe.”
I shook my head. “I’m not…a good person.
I watched him.” He’d know I was the monster now.
He’d know it and he’d hate me and I still couldn’t lie.
“I didn’t…I felt nothing. He’d been drunk and he got the axe.
And then, then he fell…” His face was close, and I needed to stop, couldn’t.
“He was begging for help and he had my wrist, he wouldn’t let go, and his belly-ropes were hanging out and I just…
I watched. I watched the light leave his eyes while he cried, like some blubbering child, and he had my arm and I didn’t do anything or even comfort him, like he was just…
And then the men in the forest…and now…” My hands were shaking.
Maybe I’d never stop shaking again. “Vrathgar, I don’t know if I can kill again. ”
His face was still that mask, severe. “I don’t need you to kill, Nora.”