The Wild

 

Amasa knelt behind his little son in the sun-dappled clearing, supporting his bow arm and showing him how to pull the string back. “Keep your left arm straight, Alec. Don’t let your elbow bend in or the string will hit it and it will hurt.”

“I can do it, Papa.”

Amasa watched proudly as Alec slowly pulled the bowstring almost back to his ear. His left arm was shaking—the bow was half Alec’s height, but Amasa had taken his measurements carefully while making it and Alec managed to hold his stance for a few seconds.

“That’s good, child. Now ease it back.”

Alec was only six, and hardly looked that, but that was old enough to start learning. Who knew when he would have to fend for himself? Skinny and sun-browned in his tunic and leggings, Alec had Amasa’s thick golden hair and blue eyes, but the older he got, the more he resembled his mother. At times it broke the man’s heart to look at his own son.

The clearing was loud with the sawing of summer cicadas. They were singing sooner than usual this year, thanks to the early spring. This was the danger season. They’d kept a cold campsite at night for several weeks already, drinking stream water and eating smoke-cured meat and what roots they could find.

Amasa had Alec pull the bow several more times, then handed him one of the short arrows he’d made for him. Alec nocked it to the string without being shown; he was smart and quick and had seen his father do this thousands of times. From the time he was an infant bundled on his father’s back, the song of the bowstring had been his only lullaby.

“Watch me, Papa!” Alec pulled the string back again, the arrow a little wobbly, and let fly. The shaft came off badly and skittered along the ground into a patch of tall grass.

 

 

Amasa handed him another arrow. “Try again. Keep your arm up.”

They practiced until Alec’s arms were shaking too badly to shoot any more, then went to check their snares by the river bank. It was a lucky day; they had six muskrat pelts by afternoon, and meat to dry. Amasa nailed the skins fur side down to trees around the clearing, then scraped and buffed them clean with his knife and a smooth piece of horn. Alec followed him, rubbing each hide down with the animals’ oily, cooked-down brains.

Amasa cooked some of the muskrat meat over the remains of the fire, then buried the embers and tamped the dirt down smooth.

“Time to move, child.”

He helped Alec shoulder his little pack and led the way down a game trail through the thick pine forest to another clearing half a mile off. They never slept where they spent the day. With any luck, the pelts would still be there in a day or two when it was safe to go back. Amasa missed the silence of winter. The Hâzadriëlfaie man hunters didn’t come looking for them then.

He and Alec were thirty miles south of Ravensfel Pass this year, but no matter how far they went, the hunters always seemed to find them. So far Amasa had managed to elude them, though he’d caught sight of them a few times from hiding places. Their leader was a slender man with grey streaks in his hair. The other riders, usually ten in all, were a mix of men and women of varying ages. They carried fine bows and long swords, too. Amasa had only his knife and bow. If it ever came to a fight at close quarters, he knew what his chances were.

He didn’t recognize any of them as kin of Ireya’s but it didn’t matter. They hunted his son and Amasa had no illusions as to what would happen to the child if they ever found him.

 

***

 

Until seven years ago, Amasa had never put any stock in the legends about the Elder Folk, or the stories of travelers disappearing if they got too close to the Ravensfel. The pass was high and difficult to reach, and no doubt treacherous enough to claim the lives of those unwise enough to chance it. There was plenty of game in the forested foothills; no need to go risking his neck.

It had been a litter of white lynx that took him into the heights that fateful winter. Just one spotted pelt would bring enough gold to live on for half a year, with some left over for new gear and maybe a woman now and then. He’d seen the spoor of half a dozen cats, probably a mother and her half-grown kits. He tracked them on snowshoes for days, going higher and higher into the mountains and closer to the pass. The foothills became mountains, and the mountains turned to wooded peaks stark against the clear winter sky.

In a steep, snow-choked cut flanked on either side by thick forest, and strewn with ice-covered boulders he spotted the lynx in the distance, sunning themselves on a rocky outcropping.

It took two hours of careful stalking to get within bowshot of them and he was losing daylight. He was taking aim at the mother cat when he heard someone yell and something cold and hard struck him in the back of the head, and then another. As he turned to see who’d struck him he got a snowball square in the face that nearly broke his nose. It hurt like fire and he tasted blood on his lips. Staggering backwards, he caught one showshoe and went tumbling ass over teakettle down the steep slope he’d worked so hard to climb. The cats were long gone. So were his bow and fur hat.

Spitting blood, he untangled his snowshoes and looked for his bow. His quiver was full of snow and most of the arrows had broken fletching.

Snowballs weren’t much of a weapon. Furious, he trudged back up the slope to find whoever had cost him a small fortune. As he toiled on, the thought that it might be a lost traveler leavened his anger a little, though not much. If they needed help, why annoy him first?

He found his hat and was almost back to where he’d dropped his bow when something moved behind one of the boulders up the slope near where he’d stood to shoot. Unarmed except for his knife, he crouched, watching to see if his attacker would show himself. After a moment the hint of movement came again and another snowball narrowly missed his head.

“Stop that!” he shouted angrily. “Show yourself like a man! I don’t mean you any harm.”

Silence followed, then his invisible adversary called out from behind the boulder, “Leave this place!”

It was a woman’s voice with a strange accent. Amasa was a stubborn young man and no bitch throwing snowballs was going to drive him off. He’d worked too long following those cats and he’d find them again even if it meant going through the pass, danger be damned.

“Leave!” she shouted again.

Ignoring the order, he made a run for where she was hiding. He was within twenty feet when the woman stepped out from behind it with a bow drawn, a nasty looking steel broadhead leveled at his chest. A long knife hung at her side. Amasa put his hands up to show that he wasn’t going to attack her.

She was young, and dressed in an odd fashion in a long white tunic that was split from hem to belt on either side, and worn over breeches under her white cloak. A blue-and-white striped cloth was wrapped around her head in a sort of cap with long tails. The long hair under it was dark, almost black, but her eyes were light grey. And even as he read death in those eyes, he decided that she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

Her bow arm was as steady as she held her stance. “Leave this place. Not your place, tear man!”

Tear man? What was that supposed to mean. He wasn’t crying, and wasn’t about to.

“Who are you?” he asked, still holding his hands out. She hadn’t shot him yet, and her arm must be getting tired.

She shouted something else at him, but he didn’t understand a word of it, except that she seemed angry, and perhaps a little frightened for all her bravado. Only then did it occur to him that maybe the stories of the Elder Folk were more than pipe talk. But they were supposed to have magic. This woman hadn’t worked any on him yet.

Slowly, he knelt in the snow and reached inside his thick coat for a bag of rabbit jerky. He took out a piece and ate it, then tossed the bag to her. She regarded it suspiciously for a moment, then kicked it back in his direction. “Leave, tear man! My fay tast.”

 

 

“I don’t know what you’re saying, except for the leave part,” he told her. “What’s your name?”

Her bow was beginning to shake a little. She released the string slowly, but kept the arrow ready on the string. “Nham?”

He touched his chest. “Amasa.” Then he pointed to her. “You?”

She regarded him a moment longer. “Ireya.”

It sounded like a name. “Ireya, I mean you no harm.” He picked up the jerky bag, took another piece, and tossed it back to her, smiling. “Eat. It’s good.” Sharing food was a sign of goodwill where he came from. He hoped it meant the same to her.

Still clearly suspicious, she nonetheless set the bow aside and drew her knife. Squatting down, she fished out a piece of jerky and nibbled at it, then popped the whole piece in her mouth. “Tank you.”

“So you know a little of my language. That’s good.” He pointed at the quickly setting sun. “Night’s coming. I think we’re stuck with each other ‘til morning.”

She glanced at the sun, then cocked her head, as if trying to puzzle out his meaning.

“Fire?” He rubbed his hands together and held them out as if over a campfire.

She hesitated again, then motioned him closer, though she kept out of arm’s reach. He could see beyond the boulder now; a single line of snowshoe prints disappeared into the nearby forest. She motioned with her knife for him to go that way and to take the lead. The skin between his shoulder blades prickled as he heard her fall in behind him.

The footprints led to a camp just inside the line of trees. There was a bedroll of furs and blankets spread on packed snow beside a fire pit and a pile of scavenged firewood. Clearly she’d planned to stay the night.

She skirted the fire pit and regarded him sharply. At closer range he saw that silver earrings shaped like crescent moons hung from her earlobes. What was a rich woman doing out here by herself?

She made no objection when he dropped his pack near hers and untied his bedroll. She built a fire and produced a loaf of bread and some dried fish from a leather bag. Tearing off pieces, she offered them to him.

The bread was a little stale, but made with honey and fine flour. The fish was rubbed with some sort of herb and salt.

“Good!” he said, chewing. “Thank you, Ireya.” She’d accepted his hospitable gestures, and now offered her own.

She pushed the long tails of her head cloth back over her shoulder and gave him the hint of a smile. By the Maker, but she was beautiful!

“Are you Elder Folk?” he asked, holding his hands out to the fire.

She seemed to consider the question, but did not answer. Given that she knew only a few words of his language and he knew none of hers, conversation was beyond reach for now.

The sun went down behind the peaks and the stars came out, sparkling sharply through the trees. It was going to be a cold night.

Ireya sat across the fire from him, feeding the small blaze from the woodpile, but never letting go of her knife. It didn’t look like she trusted him yet, but he felt no threat from her. He tried to stay awake, but it had been a long day and sleep overtook him. When he woke at dawn the next morning, Ireya was gone, but the fire was burning and there was more bread and fish set out for him.

 

***

 

Amasa and Alec were stringing the muskrat pelts together a few days later when the man heard a familiar whistle in the distance. If the breeze had been blowing the other way, he probably would have missed it. The riders were no more than a mile away.

“Get your pack, Alec.”

The boy was used to the terse order and asked no questions as they took up their gear and hurried down to the riverbank. Amasa picked Alec up and waded out into the current, pelts and all.

“Is the bear coming again, Papa?” Alec whispered, arms tight around his father’s neck as the man stumbled downstream over the slippery stones.

“Yes, child.”

Alec looked back over his father’s shoulder, no doubt hoping for a sight of the bear Amasa had invented to explain these sudden departures.

 

***

 

Alec wished he could at least see the bad bear. Whenever it came around, his father took him to a town and left him there while he went to hunt it.

His father carried him a long way down the river, until they came to the waterfall. Alec knew this place well. There was a little cave behind the waterfall, a good place to hide from a bear. His father carried him under the torrent and into the cave, then went back for their things. Alec sat very still and quiet, so the bear wouldn’t hear him.

They spent the whole day there. Alec slept for a while in the afternoon with his head on his father’s leg and woke hungry and damp. They stayed there all night, too. His father went out into the woods to check for the bear a few times. That was always frightening, but Alec knew better than to say so. Papa said you should never be afraid because it made you weak and foolish.

 

***

 

Amasa was tracking the spotted cats higher up the snowfield the next day when he happened to look back and saw that Ireya was back. She was running in his direction and waving her arms, trying to scare off the cats again.

“Damn woman,” he growled under his breath. One of the kits almost within bow shot, clearly visible in front of a rock face up the slope. He inched forward, gauging the wind. Close enough at last, he set his feet firmly in the snow and shot. The arrow struck the cat just behind the shoulder blade—a heart shot—The kit tumbled down the slope toward him until the arrow shaft caught in the snow. Shouldering his bow, Amasa began the short climb to fetch it. He could almost feel the money in his hand. Looking back again, he saw that Ireya had stopped some distance off, but was still waving her arms, frantically motioning for him to come to her.

Not without the valuable kill. Amasa was nearly to the kit when suddenly a section of glistening snow gave way beneath his feet and carried him down the slope like a wave. But waves of snow were hard as walls, and filled with rocks. It tumbled him down the slope like a man drowning in white water. Pain shot through his left forearm as he felt the sickening snap of a bone breaking. Then he and the snow were falling, falling, falling ...

 

***

 

Just after dawn Alec’s father came back to the cave. “Come, child, we have to move on.”

“Did you see the bear, Papa?” Alec asked, shivering in his damp clothes.

“Yes. He’s a big one, and mean, but he’s gone now. You were a good boy, keeping quiet for so long.”

His father carried him and their gear out from under the falls and led Alec down the riverbed for a long time before they stopped to eat. Even though the bear was gone, his father was keeping a sharp eye out. Alec stayed quiet so he could listen. His father was a great hunter; a woman who took care of Alec sometimes told him so. Alec knew it must be a very tricky bear, not to get killed. And smart too, to always find them again.

“Are we going to the town now, Papa?” Alec whispered as he ate his cold muskrat meat.

“Yes. You’ll have to stay there awhile.”

“While you hunt the bear?”

“Yes, child.”

“What’s a bear skin worth, Papa?”

His father smiled in that tight, strange way he sometimes did. “This bear? More than you can imagine.”

When they got to the town that night his father traded the pelts for silver and a few weeks of food. Then they went to the inn where they’d stayed a few nights when they came up here this spring. It was called the Coney and there was a sign shaped like a hare over the door, with painted eyes and whiskers.

The woman who ran it was kind enough, and Alec didn’t mind being left here, except for the worry of having his father go away again. But Papa always came back.

 

***

 

Pain woke Amasa. His chest, head, and left arm ached badly, even worse than the rest of him. He felt like he’d been beaten from head to toe. He started fully awake as the memory of the avalanche came back. But he wasn’t buried; he was lying wrapped in blankets and furs by a fire. It wasn’t the campsite he’d shared with Ireya, but a shallow cave, the mouth of it half-filled with snow. Pushing back the furs with his good arm, he found that his left had been set and splinted with thick branches and blue-and-white rags, the same as the head cloth Ireya had worn. The rags near the middle of his forearm were stained with blood, where a sharp end of bone had broken through the skin. He had a few cracked ribs, too.

He heard the squeak of snow under boots and a moment later Ireya appeared in the mouth of the cave, carrying pair of skinned rabbits. She didn’t look at him or smile as she knelt by the fire and began cutting up the meat.

“Ireya, did you bring me here?” he asked, though speaking made his chest hurt worse.

Again she didn’t look at him, or answer. She was angry.

Still muddled, he lay there watching her as she cooked rabbit over the fire on a green stick. Without the head cloth, he could see how her dark brown hair shone in the firelight. Even angry, she was beautiful.

She stayed angry as they ate the rabbit and some dried apples. She had a flask of beer and grudgingly shared it with him.

She’s an odd one, but must have a kind heart to dig me out of an avalanche drag me here, he thought, laying there in a nest of furs and blankets. Her furs and blankets. No doubt his were gone for good, swept away with all the rest of his gear.

“Thank you,” he said at last. “Thank you for saving my life.”

She seemed to understand, but it only made her madder. She spoke sharply to him in that language of hers as if she expected him to understand.” When it was clear he didn’t she said, “Autasa!”

 

 

“I don’t understand, Ireya.”

She snatched up the charred spit and with a few deft strokes drew the outline of a cat with spots in the dirt. “Autasa.”

“The lynx kit! You’re angry at me for killing it?” That was why she’d interrupted his hunt the other day. She was protecting the lynx.

“I killed your autasa. I’m sorry. I didn’t know they were yours.”

She just wiped out the drawing and went back to her side of the fire, but perhaps she’d understood; she now looked more sad than angry.

“Thank you for this.” He held up his splinted arm, grimacing with pain.

She passed him the beer flask again, motioning for him to drink. “Turab.”

He took a long swallow and felt warmth spread through him. It was strong stuff, this turab, and as good a beer as he’d ever tasted.

That night she surprised him considerably when she took off her heavy cloak and spread it over him, then got in under the bedding with him, nudging at him to give her room. Muttering something, she turned her back to him and pulled the cloak and furs up to her chin.

Amasa was in too much pain to feel any lust. Instead, he took stock of what he’d lost. Bed roll, knife, bow, extra clothing, flints, trap lines—everything that kept him alive. If it wasn’t for Ireya, he’d be dead already.

She cared for him for three days, feeding him and tending his throbbing arm with snow and some sort of smelly herb he didn’t recognize. She had a pouch of it and mixed up a fresh poultice each day.

On the fourth morning she brought in several loads of firewood, half a dozen skinned rabbits, and left.

She didn’t come back that day, or the next, or the next and though he ate sparingly, the food was soon dwindling and the beer was gone. She’d left a cup behind and he used it over the fire to melt snow for water.

His chest and arm still ached badly, but he was well enough now to move around the cave a little. Whatever had been in those poultices had kept away fever and rot. The skin was already healing, but he knew it would take a month or more for the bones to knit, and longer before his arm was strong enough for him to draw a bow.

Just when he’d begun to give up hope of living that long, she came back, laden with a heavy pack of food and clean clothing similar to what she wore, though the tunic was shorter. There was also a knife, enough twine to make snares, and a pouch with flint, steel, and tinder shavings.

She gave him bread and slices of a hard, sharp cheese, and a sip from a flask of turab, then checked his arm, pressing here and there and sniffing the wound.

“Good,” she said at last.

“Yes.” The pain was down to a dull ache today.

She stayed and began teaching him words in her language. Though not enough for a real conversation, he began to get a sense of the person she was. Her folk were called Hâzadriëlfaie, and she lived on a farm somewhere beyond the peaks. Apparently it wasn’t unusual for the women of her people to go off hunting.

She smiled often and sat beside him to scratch pictures in the dirt for words. He did the same with his good arm and often found himself laughing with her over his clumsy efforts. Now and then he’d catch her watching him and there was sometimes a look in her eyes that made his heart beat a little faster. He’d been with enough women to know when one fancied him. When she slept beside him again that night, Amasa was healed enough to wonder if she was doing more than keeping warm. The question was soon answered when she turned over and kissed him on the mouth, the ran her fingers down his bearded cheek and laughed softly. “Good?”

“Good.” He kissed her back.

Eyes half closed, she knelt and pulled her tunic over her head. Amasa stared up at her in wonder. Her smooth skin and small round breasts looked golden in the firelight. Her nipples were like tiny wild strawberries.

It had been a long time since he’d had a woman and his breath caught in his throat as she brought his right hand up to cover her breast. They needed no common language for this. She stood to pull off her trousers, revealing slender legs and a dark triangle of hair marking her sex. She helped him out of his trouser, laughing a little at the awkwardness of it, then lay down beside him again, stroking his thigh. He ran the fingers of his good hand through her long soft hair, then down the smooth skin of her neck to cup her breast again. She sighed and kissed him, then drew a sharp breath as he gently pinched her nipple. He chuckled, then ran his hand down to her waist, her hip, her buttock. She made no complaint, but instead caressed his stiffened cock and balls, making him grow harder under her touch.

“Good!” he whispered.

She parted her thighs for him and he explored the moist lips of her cunny. She was hot and slick there already, and moaned as he took her right nipple between his lips and his fingers found that tiny, hard bud between her legs that gave women so much pleasure, gently rubbing it. A widow in Silver Bridge had shown him that spot when he was hardly more than a lad and he’d never left a woman wanting since. Ireya moaned again, rolling her hips under his hand and tightening her grip on his shaft. The musky fragrance of her cunny rose to his nostrils and he nearly came just from the smell of it. Before he could, however, Ireya threw her head back and reached her climax with a long, ragged keen, surging under his fingers. Never had he wished more for two good arms to hold her properly. Then the keen trailed off to laughter. Ireya moved his hand from between her legs and kissed him deeply as she pushed him flat on his back and straddled his hips. Holding his erection at the base, she slowly lowered herself onto it, taking him inside, into the dark tight heat of her body. Amasa groaned at the pleasure of it as she rode him. Reaching between them, he found that little bud again and played with it as she thrust herself up and down on his cock. She soon cried out again as she came and the pure joy he saw on her face pushed him over the edge into a climax of his own so intense that he could hardly catch his breath.

As they lay gasping and laughing together afterwards, Amasa held her close with his right arm and knew he felt something more than simple lust toward this woman.

 

***

 

Ireya stayed with him for nearly a week, hunting in the daytime and making love to him by night, then disappeared as she always did, returning just before the food ran out.

 

 

“I’m going to marry you, Ireya,” he whispered to her as they lay together one night. “You’re going to be my wife.” He wove his fingers with hers. “Do you understand? Leave with me?”

She looked down at him and their joined hands, then laughed and kissed him. “My talí.”

By the time she left this time, he was well enough to go out and watch her trudge away. Her snowshoes sank deep in the glistening fresh powder and kicked up little puffs of it as she disappeared up the slope toward a small pass between two jagged peaks. There must be a town up there somewhere. Next time she went back, he meant to go with her.

But when she came back again, she wouldn’t hear of it. In fact, the subject quite clearly scared her. “No, no! Kill you.”

“Ireya kill me?” he asked, certain he wasn’t understanding her.

She shook her head, then took up the sharp stick they used and drew a figure and pointed to herself. That was her. Then she quickly scratched out four more the same size with bows, and two larger ones. Pointing to the four, she told him, “Mine. They kill!” and poked him in the chest with her finger.

Her people would kill him. For the first time in weeks, he thought of all those stories he’d heard. Why had she befriended him, if it went against the ways of her people?

“All right, then,” he sighed. “No go. You leave with me when my arm is mended.”

She kissed him for that, but her eyes were sad. He didn’t have the words to ask her why.

 

***

 

The bear came several more times that summer, and Alec’s father hunted it but came back empty handed each time. Winter came, and the bear went to sleep under the snow as it always did. His father always seemed happier in the winter, even though life was harder. They set their traps and sold the skins of the muskrat, otter, mink and fisher in the towns.

But summer came again, and with it the bear.

His father took Alec back to the Coney, where the boy earned his keep sweeping and working in the garden and stables for Carsi, the innkeeper. In return he was allowed to sleep with her two young sons, who were a little older than he was, in their little airless room under the eaves, where the mice rustled through the thatch close overhead each night.

The boys, Ors and Olum, played with him when he wasn’t busy. They went berrying in the forest meadows, and fishing and swimming in the river. He enjoyed it, but began to worry about his father. He’d never been gone this long before.

 

***

 

There was only one rider this year, the tall leader Amasa had seen before. The Hâzadriëlfaie was a cagey man, and it was clear he knew he was being stalked even as he stalked Amasa.

When Amasa did find a safe place to sleep, he dreamt of Ireya and what had happened that long ago spring. The last time she came to him in that cave had been a few weeks after the splint came off. They made love in the musky furs and then she began to cry. When he begged her to tell him why, she took his hand and placed it on her belly. The message was clear enough.

“Baby?” he asked, throat tight with emotion. A child!

“Yes,” she whispered, weeping. “Kill. They will kill!”

“Kill the baby?”

She nodded.

“Then you have to come away with me. Leave with me!”

She rested her head on his broad chest and nodded. “Leave with Amasa.”

But the next morning she was gone again.

He never knew if she’d changed her mind or gotten caught going back for more supplies. It didn’t matter. He was strong enough now to track her, and he did, all the way up a side pass so narrow he could hardly squeeze through, to a huge valley beyond. There were scattered stone cottages and farms all the way up its length, to what looked like a town in the distance, perhaps Fay Tast, as she’d said to him that first day. Looking down from the heights, he could see riders and carts on roads, and when he crept down through the forest for a closer look, he saw they all wore the same blue-and-white head cloth—sen’gai, Ireya called it.

He had no intention of being killed before he found her, so he skulked for weeks like a wolf in the night and finally caught sight of her in the yard of an isolated farmstead not far from the narrow pass. He watched for days, but she was never out of the cottage without an escort—brothers, most likely. At night she slept in a room with iron bars on the window.

He crept to her window late one night and scratched softly at the shutter. Her face appeared there an instant later and the look she gave him was one of horror.

She reached out through the bars for his hand. “Leave!” she whispered frantically.

“No. Not without you!”

“They kill you, Amasa. They kill me! You leave!”

“I’ll kill them!”

Her hand tightened on his. “No, Amasa. No kill mine!”

He could tell by her tone that she would never forgive him if he killed her kin, even to help her. “Do they know about me?”

“No,” she whispered. “They wait, to see the baby.”

“To see if it’s Tír.” He’d learned that word, the one that meant ‘outsider.’ “And when they do?”

“Leave,” she pleaded softly, but he could see tears shining in her eyes as she turned away and closed the shutters.

But Amasa didn’t. He came back night after night, but her answer was always the same. The bars were set in mortared stone. There was no getting her out that way, so he could only skulk and keep watch and bide his time.

Never once was she allowed further than the well, and not once alone. He’d come to recognize the four brothers, and the parents who lived with them. As spring gave way to summer Amasa narrowly evaded the brothers time and again and watched Ireya’s belly grow round and heavy under her long tunics.

 

On a warm summer night the sound of a woman crying out in pain drifted up the hill to where he sheltered in the trees. Creeping down, he found too many people out in the yard to get to the window, but as the cries continued, he guessed that his child was being born, here, among his enemies. He sat in the tall grass at the edge of the forest, keeping his lonely vigil among the crickets and weeping for them both.

He was there when the sun came up, and saw Ireya slip from the silent house with a tiny bundle in her arms. Her feet were bare, her skirt bloody, her face a mask of desperation. She was making in his direction and saw him when he started down to meet her. She waved him back to the trees as she ran through the meadow and up the slope toward him. She was nearly to Amasa when her brothers came riding after her with bows.

Reaching him, Ireya thrust the swaddled infant into his arms and gasped, “Leave! Leave, talí!”

And before he could stop her, she turned and ran back the way she’d come, arms thrown wide, as if she could stop the arrows from finding him. Amasa watched in horror as she fell, then turned and bolted for the narrow pass. All he could see of the tiny babe in the swaddling was a red little face and eyes as blue as his own.

 

***

 

Amasa tracked his Hâzadriëlfaie hunter that summer, and his hunter tracked him. It was only a matter of time until one of them won the contest.

The Maker must have known Amasa’s sorrow and taken pity on him. It was the month of Ireya’s murder when, one morning just before dawn, he met his pursuer face to face. Amasa was not helpless and unarmed today, as he had been seven years ago.

The Hâzadriëlfaie man was mounted, and couldn’t get his bow up in time before Amasa shot him through the lungs. Slumping over his horse’s neck, the man kicked the beast into a gallop and tried to escape through the trees.

The blood trail was easily followed for a tracker like Amasa. He found a bloody bow on the ground at midmorning, and a discarded pack soon after. Just as the sun tipped down from noon, he found the man dying on the ground in a small clearing, horse nowhere in sight.

Bow drawn, Amasa came closer. The man eyed him calmly, though he must have known he was looking at his own death. “You do not understand what you do,” he whispered with the same accent Ireya had had. His lips were foamed pink with lung blood, his chin crusted with it. “The child—” More blood bubbled from the corner of his mouth as he tried to speak. “Cannot be—”

“The child is,” Amasa growled.

“More will come—”

Pain and hatred and old, old sorrow boiled in Amasa’s heart as he spat in the man’s face, pulled his head back by the hair, and slit his throat.

The rest of the day passed in a strange sort of fog, but when it cleared in the late afternoon he was covered in blood and a hide very much like a bear’s was nailed to a large tree, scrapped and brain-tanned. The skinned carcass hung by its heels from another tree, gathering flies.

 

 

Let those who would come see that.

 

***

 

Alec was sweeping out the stable yard when his father appeared at the gate, dressed in new clothing and thinner than the boy had ever seen him. He had a string of fox and mink pelts on his belt.

“Papa!” Alec cried happily, running to him. “Did the bear get away again?”

“Not this time, child.”

“You killed it! Where’s the skin? How much can we sell it for?”

“It was no use for selling,” his father replied. Kneeling in front of him, he held Alec by the shoulders for a moment and gazed down at him with an expression of such fondness as Alec had never seen before. Then he saw the tears in his father’s eyes.

“What is it, Papa? What’s wrong?” he asked, alarmed.

His father smiled. “Nothing, Alec. Not a thing. Go gather your things. We have traps to set.”