The Hunt (Halek, Shery, Tallys's Story)

[Content warning: discussions of animal death, non-explicit and non-gory discussions of animal sacrifice]

Part I: Tracks in the Forest 

Part II: In the Crosshairs 

Part III: The Wolf Within

Halek swam to consciousness with the worst gods-damned hangover he’d ever had in his life.

It felt as if Narthax himself had taken a hammer to his temples. He cracked open one bleary eyelid—heard a familiar voice exclaim—and thought, closing his eye again: That’s Shery, so—I must be in the infirmary. He must have gotten well and truly shit-faced if he’d ended up there. Probably Chase or Trouble (or both) had been involved. He couldn’t remember the exact details, but that made sense, given the context. But why did he feel as if they’d also dragged him through a bar fight? He hurt all over.

And—there was that roiling sensation under his skin. Nothing like the sour-mouth-I’m-gonna-throw-up feeling that usually accompanied a hangover, but…

“Halek? Can you hear me?”

“Keep back, Quartermaster. Even with those bindings, if the wolf has become ascendant…”

Higher, more frightened. “Halek?”

“Hrgghhh,” he said.

The sound of a blade being drawn. “The wolf,” a woman’s voice said sharply, in the tone of a warrior facing an implicit threat.

“No,” Shery said timidly, “that’s just what he sounds like when he’s not feeling well. Halek, could you please, um, use your words?”

“What the fuck happened? I feel like shit.”

A collective breath of relief. The light male voice who had warned Shery away—the twee little Elven Huntmaster, Halek recalled suddenly—said, with some measure of relief, “It seems he has not been overpowered by the kin-beast. Our measure of his strength was correct.”

The word kin-beast finally registered, and Halek’s eyes flew open as he sat up. “Tallys—” he began.

He immediately regretted it. All of it—opening his eyes, talking, regaining consciousness in the first place. Agony exploded across his sensitive vision; something in his skull howled. A dark tide seemed to overtake his mind like a torrent of blood. There were suddenly the scents of old leaf litter and campfire ashes and something shadowed and ancient filling his nose, fire and iron, hunt upon hunt, kill upon kill, the struggling grunt of a dying stag crushed beneath his jaws, a memory of the night sky, endless forest crusted with snow and moonlight… Something was using his throat to scream, and the instinct to gnaw and bite and rend at the ropes binding him, to tear them up like vines at the root and rip them to pieces with his teeth, was all-consuming…

Halek mastered himself, fell back into his body with a grunt, and snarled, “Get this thing out of me.”

Three faces—Shery, Hetwar, and the Sae Becha Keeper Clarin—stared at him soberly from where they stood over his bed. Early morning sunlight slanted into the room: his quarters at the main Holytree inn. Tallys was nowhere to be seen.

“Would that we could, Captain Prince,” Hetwar stated gravely. To his right, Shery’s face was frightened and white as she pressed her knuckles against her mouth. “Unfortunately, the only one who can place a kin-beast spirit inside of you—or beckon it out—is a weald-kinath Mage. The only true ones are in the Ivory Isles, a journey that would take several sennights, if not months, for you to complete—and in the meantime, you might fall to the wolf. And the only other person with the ability and knowledge in the area, albeit an impostor…”

“…has fled with our records,” Clarin finished flatly. “We need Elizora Thackery alive, for she is the only one who can return you and Tallys Ironwood to your former states… but we cannot find her. We do not know where she has gone.”

#

They filled him in as they brought him breakfast—some sort of Elven porridge, his oversensitive nose deduced—and cautiously untied him from the bed, now that it was clear he was currently in control of himself. (Though Halek didn’t miss how Clarin kept a hand on the knife at her belt at all times.) He and Tallys had burst in on Elizora Thackery mid-ritual, it seemed, disrupting whatever ceremonial rite she’d been performing. Shery had found them unconscious on the floor of the Mage’s cottage just a few minutes after, surrounded by bloody sigils; the Elven hunting party had arrived not an hour later and were left to put together the rest of the puzzle themselves. Elizora had fled into the night, spiriting the scrolls with the weald-kinathspells away with her.

“So her wolf-spirit ended up inside of me,” Halek said slowly, stirring the cooling porridge with listless inattention. Normally he would have been curious to try the new meal, for it was rich and hearty and well-flavored, and his nose caught the scents of honey and cinnamon and cardamom and wild pistachio—but he found that he had no appetite for it. Curiously, he would have been more tempted by a large steak. “How’d that happen? Was she trying to get it out?”

Hetwar and Clarin glanced at each other. “From what we can deduce, yes,” the Huntmaster said. “Perhaps your arrival in town frightened her, and she became anxious to remove her kin-beasts before she was found and caught with them. It was just poor luck that you happened to walk in during the process of extraction. The wolf fled into you, it seems.”

“Them?” Halek echoed. “Thackery had more than one?”

Hetwar’s face was very grave. “Yes,” he said heavily. “It seems so. We scarcely imagined it was possible—such a thing is never done in our country—but it seems Thackery was collecting an entire menagerie of kin-beasts, housing their multiple souls within her own. Your quartermaster had a theory about that—”

Shery stirred, blinking as if caught in a reverie; she’d been frowning at his half-hearted attempts to sculpt the porridge into a snowman. “If it were me,” she said slowly, “and I was suddenly given a very foreign and dangerous magic that I wasn’t sure I was capable of wielding, I would start with something very small and harmless as an experiment—like a sparrow, perhaps, or a rabbit or a butterfly. But from what Huntmaster Hetwar and Keeper Clarin have said, Elizora probably wouldn’t have felt the intended benefits from such a, um, melding—because the Spiritriders are supposed to be enhanced or augmented by their pact with their kin-beasts, and turned into great fighters, and a rabbit probably wouldn’t have been very useful to her. So perhaps she started with something small, but then decided she couldn’t stop there, and then kept collecting their spirits until it snowballed from there…”

“The wolf was probably the greatest among them,” Clarin cut in then. “As well as the latest. It was certainly the one who became ascendant, dominating both the human soul and the lesser animals’ and turning Thackery into this… ‘werewolf.’ She could probably only wrest control back from it after allowing it to feed the way it wanted to, sating it. All the while, she must have been studying the scrolls to understand how to get it back out—and then you came in.”

“But why did it go to me?” Halek asked. “Why not—I don’t know—go back into her?”

The golden-skinned Keeper made the familiar sign forservori, classic Elven ambiguity. “My guess? Like calls to like, and kin-beasts are drawn to the souls that are most like theirs.”

“I’m not particularly wolfish.”

“No, but you have experience in controlling… a wilder part of yourself. The nyrol.”

The Hunter blood-rage, in other words. Halek had to pause, then, to turn despairing eyes up to the ceiling. Fucking Narthax. Of coursethe god’s curse would have even more bizarre consequences than it already did. Of course his becoming beast-like and savage in battle would invite another beast into his soul.

“Well,” he said slowly, taking a very deep breath, “I suppose if you have any demons lurking around, a berserker wolf-man isn’t a bad thing to have on-hand.”

“This isn’t a permanent condition,” Shery broke in then, anxiously. “We’ll—we’ll find Elizora, convince her to turn you back to normal. You andTallys.”

“Where is she, anyway?”

“She’s agreed to stay in her room until we could evaluate the… safety of the situation,” Hetwar answered. “She, too, inherited a kin-beast from last night’s ritual. A deer, as far as we can tell.”

Ah. So they’d separated and quarantined them until it could be determined that… what, he wouldn’t attack her? That the wolf—his wolf—wouldn’t drive him to fall upon her, jaws slavering? The thought made him faintly queasy.

“At least deer are herbivores,” he said, taking another deep breath. “So. How are we going to track down this Mage?”

On that count, no one had any world-shaking ideas. Most of the Sae Becha Elves had dispersed to comb the area for signs of Elizora, but with both her magic and whatever weald-kinath abilities she now possessed, the task had so far proved fruitless. Word had spread throughout the town that the former barmaid was supposedly their mythical werewolf, but the Elves—outsiders and therefore suspects themselves—did not have a good sense on the public’s opinion of things. Nor did they feel that they had the authority or right to question the townsfolk safely.

Which means that it’s left to us, Halek thought wearily. He eyed Shery and said, “Weren’t you supposed to have left this morning with the blues?”

She flushed, then answered, a bit stiffly, “I was able to convince the Azure Traders to stay another day, on the basis of… your emergency. I couldn’t in good conscience leave you and Tallys here alone. They agreed to delay their journey until tomorrow morning, but then they’ll have to leave—with or without me.”

“Do they know what happened to us? Me and Tallys, I mean?”

She shook her head. “No one does, except the Sae Becha clan. Everyone just assumed that Elizora attacked you and knocked you unconscious. They don’t know any spirits are involved.”

He turned to Clarin and Hetwar. “You said that I could still fall to the wolf, if we were to make the journey to the Ivory Isles. What are the chances of that happening? Is it safe for me to walk around freely?” What if I attack a townsperson, or you, or Shery and Tallys?

He felt a horrible weariness at the prospect. It waslike the nyrol; he couldn’t remember how many times he’d come out of the red haze, shaking and gasping and wiping foam off of his mouth, clutching his gore-splattered spear and wondering how much of the blood on it had come from a friend or an innocent. Waiting on tenterhooks for someone to give him an accounting of what he’d done—waiting for the hammer to come down as they informed him he’d killed someone he wasn’t supposed to, torn through them like tissue paper in order to get to the demon. His muscles shaking with an effort he couldn’t remember expending.

Clarin was watching him seriously, perhaps guessing at the nature of his thoughts. “It depends on the strength of your self-control, of course,” she said, blinking solemn green-gray eyes. “My guess is that, if Elizora Thackery could conceal her affliction for so long, you certainly will be able to leash it for the time being: you have more experience in such matters, and you have an iron will besides. But time is of the essence. The longer you house the wolf, the more opportunities it has to wriggle free of your control. If your attention wavers or your energy flags at the wrong moment, it might try to seize control. That’s why we need to find the Mage as quickly as possible.”

“What does it feel like?” Shery asked him then. “Can you feel it now?”

Halek canted his head to the side, questing. “Not… exactly. It’s not like I can hear it talking to me, or anything.” Mostly it felt like he was a fat man buttoned up into a too-small suit; his skin, or his whole body, felt tight, slightly uncomfortable, as if he might burst out of it like a shedding snake. But other than that, he felt… mostly normal. There were queer impulses here and there, like the vague craving for red meat, but nothing uncontrollable. And certainly his senses felt sharper, more heightened, but it wasn’t too much of a leap from his usual Hunter capabilities. He hadn’t even realized it, but he could smell everything. The heady scents of sunlight on grass from Hetwar and Clarin, sweet vanilla and sugary soap from Shery—even the faintest chemical smell from the solution she used to clean her glasses. He could even hear a mouse scrabbling under the floorboards, somewhere in the left corner of the room. He scratched his left ear absently at the sound. And aside from his soreness, there was a kind of lean power coursing through him, as if his muscles could explode into ferocious motion at the slightest provocation. But it didn’t feel as if he were possessed by a demon, as if he had to constantly wrestle it for control. Mostly it was just a dim awareness that something new was there, a lingering presence that had soaked through his consciousness like a rain-soaked shirt he couldn’t take off, not an active wriggling parasite burrowed in the corner of his brain. And it seemed to have gone quiet, after his first few moments of surprised awakening.

Clarin nodded, seeming satisfied with his description. “It has retreated, then, and is likely adjusted to its new environment, the way an exhausted beast accepts its cage… for the moment. A weald-kinathkin-beast makes itself most apparent in times of battle, of stress and danger, or when it feels you’ll need to call upon its strength. That is when you’ll truly need to ride it. Until then… you will know if and when it decides to test its limits again.”

“Joy,” he drawled. “Let’s find the Mage and get it out of me before that happens.”

#

Meeting Tallys again was a test of all their nerves. When she cracked open the door to her room, Halek thought, That’s not Tallys at all, for the uncertain, skittish look on her face rendered her almost unrecognizable to his eyes. Beyond that, there was something luminousabout her, as if she were lit from behind by soft sunlight; the priests back home might have called her gods-touched. Then she caught sight of him, and froze, and that was when something in him—not in his mind, but somewhere in his chest—stirred and growled. Tallys, perhaps sensing it, quivered for a moment in poised, anticipatory flight, stepping slowly back into her room as if to slam the door shut between them.

They stared at each other for another long moment, nostrils flaring. Tallys smelled completely different to Halek, wood and leaf and musk layered over her usual basil and mint, but it was more of a mind-scent than a nose-scent, and he could tell too that her deer was a young one, coaxed to Elizora with the promise of salt. The thing in his chest growled again, and Halek clamped down on it, hard, and thought viciously, Stop it, you. I’ll throttle the life out of you myself if you make me try and attack one of our own.

The wolf settled, for the moment, feigning disinterest and seeming to lick its paw. It, at least, understood what it meant to run in a pack.

Halek held up his hands, to diffuse the sudden tension—Hetwar and Clarin were looking between the both of them with concern, and Shery looked like she wanted to throw up—and after a moment of blinking hard, Tallys relaxed too and said, lightly, “That was very odd. I had the sudden urge to leap through the window and take off for the woods.”

“And mine wanted to give chase,” Halek said, with a cheer he didn’t feel at all. “I think I’ve gotten it under control, though. You?”

She grimaced slightly. “The same, though I pity mine, because it thinks it’s obeying an instinct that will keep us both safe.” She shook her head wonderingly. “It’s a wonder that Elizora was able to keep so many contrary natures bottled up inside of her. I spoke to Mihris”—presumably another Sae Becha Elf—“and she estimated, from the sigils, that there could have been as many as nine animal spirits inside of her. How did she keep them from attacking each other, or driving her mad? It would be like locking a wolf in a cage with a deer, a hawk, a fox, and a raccoon.”

“She’s almost certainly a Wild Mage,” Shery said then, softly. “If she lied and does know how to use her magic, that could have helped her keep control of them. But… am I right that she would have had to killthe poor things to take their spirits? It seems so cruel, especially for someone who can talk to them…”

“The promise of power can make people do a lot of twisted things,” Halek said grimly, thinking of all the kind and well-meaning individuals he’d seen bargain with demons over the years.

“And in a way, perhaps she thought she was doing them a kindness,” Hetwar put in then. “She said something of the like when we were discussing the matter, did she not, Clarin? Something about helping the mortal beast achieve lasting existence beyond its brief life.”

The Keeper, her eyes shuttered, only nodded curtly.

Halek and Tallys glanced at each other. “That’s only assuming she’d manage to outlive them,” he muttered. Which she wouldn’t, if they found her and she refused to come in quietly. The color drained from Shery’s face at the implicit threat.

After a few more minutes of getting each other up to speed—and of ensuring that their kin-beasts would behave with each other—the group of them dispersed to see about hunting Elizora down. Hetwar vanished to meet up with his patrols, stating that he would send a hawk back to town if they found anything; Clarin, obviously reluctant to leave them alone entirely, stated that she would be studying Elizora’s cottage for clues and would be within shouting distance if they needed her. Halek and Tallys headed down to the inn’s dining room with Shery, quizzing her on Elizora all the way.

“I don’t know much more than you do,” the quartermaster admitted guiltily. “We made passing conversation last night, and she seemed kind, and eager to hear more about the Shepherds after we brought it up, but…”

“Did she ask you about anything specific?” Halek asked alertly.

Shery shook her pale head. “Not at all. It was mostly on whether we would truly accept someone with her skillset and interests, and what kind of educational opportunities we offered. She seemed very eager to prove that she could be helpful, and hopeful that she would be accepted… She said she didn’t have any combat experience, but maybe she could get a job helping in the cattery or the stables, and that she was brilliant with animals…”

Halek snorted.

“Did she talk about the ‘werewolf’ at all?” Tallys asked. “Or anything that could offer us clues on where she might have gone?”

Shery had clearly already thought of that. Her brow wrinkled as she said slowly, “She only told me that she’s been in this town for a few years, and that she fell in love with it because of its friendliness, and its central position in the patterns of migratory birds. I got the feeling that she truly loves this place, and would find it hard to leave it for the Shepherds unless her acceptance was fairly certain. I don’t know if she has any other relations in this town who could be hiding her—or if she fled elsewhere, where she could be heading—”

They stepped down into the tavern, which was dark and stuffy even in the hard morning light and suddenly smelled acutely of sticky spilled beer and old, moldering wood. Halek sneezed. There were only two people in the barroom this early in the day: an unrelated trader who cleared out as soon as he saw them make their way down the stairs, and one of the merchants from their caravan, who toasted them uncertainly with his mug of khav before turning back to his breakfast. The male barkeeper whom they’d shouted at the night before was nowhere to be seen. Instead, a burly-armed, scowling woman scrubbed at a stubborn stain behind the long counter.

Glancing up, she said bluntly, “Still on yer feet, I see. From the tales going around town, you’d think Elizora’d blown you two up, or something.”

“Where’s the barman from last night?” Tallys asked, in lieu of giving her a reply.

The burly woman raised a brow. “Ralf? Took today off and hauled me in to take his place. He was the one who hired Elly, after all; she was his favorite. He’s right upset about the things them Elves’ve been saying about her.”

The three of them glanced at each other. There was a probable hiding place if they’d ever heard of one. Halek said, “Does he not believe our accounting of things?”

The new barkeeper snorted. “You’d have to ask him. But truth be told, not too many do, at least not yet. Elly is a sweet girl who can hardly pick up the hatchet out back to cut wood, and the people who saw the werewolf said it looked a monster. Killed two people, for One-God’s sake. Beggars belief to think it was her.” She paused significantly. “’Course… not everyone saw what her shed looks like now. All that blood, and those wicked symbols…”

“Do you know where she could have gone?” Tallys asked. “Did she ever mention where she came from, where her hometown is, perhaps?”

The woman shrugged. “Think she came from somewhere West,” she said vaguely. “Across the Shield Peaks. Said her mamma died and her father’d beat her, so she stole their family mare and ran off. Been on her own ever since. Doubt she’d go back there.”

“Anywhere in town she could be squirreled away?” Halek asked again.

The barkeeper frowned; she clearly didn’t like the implication that she’d be required to tattle on one of her own neighbors or friends. “Elly had a lot of friends,” she said simply. “I don’t know who among them could harbor her without everyone else knowing, but you can check their basements and cellars, I s’ppose. But more likely, she ran off into the woods. She likes to spend a lot of time out there. Has a lot of practice in it.” She paused doubtfully. “I guess that’s what made it so hard for us to hunt her down ourselves.”

They asked around the neighborhood after that, but the responses were much the same: no, no one knew where Elizora Thackery went, or where she could have gone. No, they weren’t hiding her themselves, but they wouldn’t be surprised if someone else was. After the eighth or so encounter like this—deliberately obtuse, vaguely hostile—Halek felt a flare of impatience and said through gritted teeth, “You’d think they’d be more cooperative. She’s proven to be dangerous, and if any one of them was harboring her, that’s an active threat to their town. She killed two people, and over a dozen animals, besides.”

And just yesterday, the townsfolk had been tripping over themselves to talk to them, he thought. As soon as the “heroic calvary” had arrived, they’d been bombarded by both complaints—what had taken them so long? Didn’t they know this had been reported to the local garrison over a month ago?—and entreaties to get the case over as fast as possible. But now that it was one of their own, they were closing ranks—and acting as if it was the Shepherdswho were the enemy!

“Can you really fault them?” Tallys asked softly. “It’s easier to believe that we’ve gotten the case wrong rather than think the gentle barmaid they’ve known for the past few years is a monster who killed their livestock and kinsmen. We’re strangers to them, not her. Easier to think we’re to blame rather than she.”

They went to the home of the barkeeper Ralf next, and were vaguely surprised to discover that he was a husband as well as father to five children—and the owner of a lot of dogs. Tallys tensed in the doorway of his humble, two-story home when she caught sight of the white-furred, tongue-lolling hounds, trembling lightly; but it was Halek the dogs backed away from, their hackles up as they whimpered and growled in uncertain challenge.

Halek felt his lips moving back to bare his teeth and forcibly covered his mouth with his hand. His senses flared, taking in the scents of canine sweat and fur, the sour ale on Ralf’s breath, the flour dusting his wife’s hands, the sweet, powdery smell of their scab-kneed, giggling toddlers, the oldest of whom was five or six. The barkeeper glanced around at his dogs, saying harshly, “Leaper, Longfang, down, away with ye!” He glanced, half in apology, half in suspicion, towards his visitors. “Sorry. They’re usually as tame and happy as lambs.”

“I’m sure,” Halek breathed, staring down at the lead dog—siblings, four of them—as it half-cowered, unsure whether to rise in defiance of the newcomer or to slink away in deference. The thing in him surged—dominance, control, just a little snap of the jaws, show them—but Halek wrenched it back and looked away from the dogs, moving to stare outside the window. Eventually, the pack scrambled out of the room, followed by the laughing, puzzled children, who mocked and teased them in lisping voices.

Halek listened to them go and thought, I’m so focused on keeping this thing under control that I hardly have the time to be shocked about it being there in the first place, or to rail against it and lament my fortunes. I’m fucking possessed by a wolf and I’ve hardly batted an eye. Most people would be screaming and tearing at their hair by now.

Perhaps, he thought, he hardly had the time to pity himself because he was too busy pitying the animal first. The damn thing didn’t even know what had happened to it, not really. It was just being itself.

Tallys, who also looked like she was fighting the urge to spring away and down the street, licked her lips and went over the requisite questions with Ralf. He didn’t know much about Elizora’s past or likely places she could be hiding, not more than anyone else did, and he readily offered to let them search his home. Halek could tell instantly that he wasn’t hiding the Mage: his heartbeat as well as his countenance showed no signs of deception or nervousness, only distress and vague remorse. But when Tallys mentioned the rituals the young woman had been conducting in her cottage, Ralf stiffened and said watchfully, “I can’t be held accountable for that, can I? Sure, I hired her, but I never knew she was…”

He made an expressive, abstract gesture. Shery said shrewdly, “It’s your cottage, I take it?”

He opened his mouth, closed it again, then opened it; from the kitchen, his wife slammed together clattered together some pots, though whether it was a cheery, bustling sound or a warning, Halek couldn’t tell. Then Ralf admitted, a little guiltily, “Sure, I built it, rented it out to her. But…”

“You won’t get in trouble for whatever she was doing in there. You didn’t know,” Tallys said. Then she arched a brow at his uncomfortable expression. “Did you know?”

Halek heard the steady, persistent hum of the man’s heartbeat skip and falter; was he preparing to lie? He glanced at Halek—he must have sensed some tension from him, some shifting of his weight—then seemed to think better of whatever he was going to say. Finally he muttered, “I didn’t know a damn thing about this werewolf nonsense. I swear it. But, ah… I did know about the books. Walked in on her using them, once.”

Halek’s eyebrows climbed up. “The books?”

“Spellbooks, or whatever,” Ralf mumbled, avoiding their collective gaze. “Don’t know where she found them—didn’t want to know, didn’t ask. She probably collected them over the years, from wherever she could get them. They’re stashed under her floorboards. All she said to me was that she had to find some way to teach herself magic, and books were the only way she could piece things together. Begged me not to tell anyone, lest the Inquisitors hear about it. But she always said it was harmless magic, animal-speech and the like, things that could help around the inn or when Farmer Thom’s cows were feeling ill. Never anything to do with… with evil, curses or fire or Endarkened, or any of the like.”

This wasn’t too surprising: self-taught Mages had to get their instruction from somewhere. But then again, Elizora had shown a propensity to steal her arcane materials, even dabble in forbidden arts, already. They would have to check these spellbooks. “And you never put two and two together? Once the werewolf showed up, you didn’t suspect…?”

Ralf flushed a shade of mottled purple. “I thought that it was a beast of nature’s making, not magic’s,” he growled. “Like a—a hybrid, or summat. The offspring of a beast and a man. In fact, I thought Elly could use her powers to find it, talk to it. But she always begged off, afeared that others would learn what she’d been up to and condemn her for it. So I let it be.” He looked away with a scowl. “That was my mistake, I guess.”

He didn’t have much more information to offer after that. “Perhaps we should get a look at those spellbooks,” Shery suggested on their walk back to the inn, echoing Halek’s thoughts. “They might offer a hint as to where Elizora went. If we knew what kind of spells she had access to…”

“Pray she didn’t know how to translocate,” Tallys answered grimly. “Else she could be anywhere by now.”

The quartermaster bit her lip. “But—even if we can’t find her, surely if we were to go back to Haven, the Mages at home could cure you? The Circle Mages surely must have heard of this art, or have other ways of untangling it… And if you think of the tower defenses, and Riel…”

Gods, but he hoped it wouldn’t come to that. It might take monthsfor the Order’s Mages to pick apart this foreign magic, and even then, there was no guarantee they’d be able to manage it properly. What if he and the wolf ended up even more scrambled together than they already were? Or what if they went all the way back home, only to be told they should have gone the otherway, and sailed off for the Ivory Isles to seek help straight from the source? And all the while, he’d be trying to keep the wolf under control, and the same with Tallys’s deer, and the whole venture just sounded exhausting and wearisome. But perhaps the period of turmoil was only temporary, before ultimate synergy came: surely weald-kinath Spiritriders didn’t live like this all the time. There had to be a point when the animal spirit yielded to the human one, and they were able to live in harmony. But gods damn it, he didn’t want that, he wanted the thing out!

He'd been silent, thinking about all this, and so he hardly noticed when they arrived back at the inn. Shery was called over by a cluster of Azure Traders who were checking on their covered wagons, crammed into the inn’s muddy, reeking yard. Halek caught them talking to her about their urgent need to depart in the morning, and what her plans would be if she wasn’t able to go with them, on account of the ‘recent troubles,’ before Tallys drew him towards the shadow of the stable to wait. In an undertone, she said, “How are you managing it?”

He didn’t have to ask her to clarify what she meant. “Those dogs made it bristle a little,” he said dryly, “but otherwise I think I have it under control. You?”

Tallys shook her head slowly. “It’s… more of a strain than I thought. I knew the Spiritriders had to be exceptional in order to master their kin-beasts and bring them to heel enough to draw on their abilities, but I never imagined how easy it would be to slip into the beast’s mind. It feels like the briefest lapse in attention could have me snapping into… deer-mode. It’s not just fear, either: I’m suddenly struck by the wild, joyous impulse to run, to leap, just to feel the strength and freedom of it in my limbs, or to prance or feel the soft grass or to dip my head into a clear rivulet and drink. I feel like laughing for no reason, sometimes. It feels a little as if I’m going mad.”

“Shit,” he said eloquently, eyeing her with some sympathy. Tallys’s face seemed drawn with strain, but there was something else behind her eyes, too: something like wonder, or awe. “I don’t think mine’s like that. It’s more… withdrawn? I don’t feel it coming over me in waves, like a fit: it’s more that it just reacts to certain things. But the times that it’s not reacting, I don’t really feel it—except that I feel a bit crowded.”

She regarded him thoughtfully, her green eyes pensive. “Perhaps Clarin is right,” she said, “and it’s your experiences with mastering the nylol—or perhaps you simply have greater discipline of will—that make you more… acclimated.”

“Or maybe my soul is more compatible with a wolf’s than yours is with a deer, so we don’t feel the disruption as much as you do,” Halek added ironically. “I always imagined you as more of an owl, myself.” An idea struck him. “If I used the collar…”

But something drew his attention back to the covered wagons, his proverbial ears pricked. He couldn’t explain it, not exactly, but he suddenly knew that something was wrong. The other traders had gone back inside, leaving only Shery and a pockmarked young merchant with a patchy brown beard and sly eyes talking in the shadows of one of the caravans. Halek hadn’t seen him before—at least, he was pretty sure the man wasn’t one of Shery’s well-meaning but swoony admirers—and from their body language, the quartermaster didn’t know him well, either. Shery always held herself as if she was slightly uncomfortable and uncertain, her shoulders hunched, her elbows tucked close to her sides as if to protect herself, but now she seemed downright mortified; her eyes kept darting around, and she was backed up against the caravan as if she wished to melt into it. The man placed a hand on the wagon, resting casually above her head. It wasn’t overtly threatening, but it was deliberately ignorant of the fact that she clearly wished to extricate herself from the conversation.

The thing in Halek’s chest snarled, hackles raised. He must have stiffened, because Tallys glanced over to see what he was looking at. She was just beginning to frown in realization when he pushed past her. He heard her gasp, snag his arm; he shook her off. “Halek!”

He wasn’t quite sure what happened next: one moment he was standing by the stables. The next, he had the merchant pinned against the wagon by the throat. Some dog somewhere behind him was growling. The dark tide was blotting out the corners of his vision, and he was thinking, Protect the pack, defend, warn him, bite—

Shery let out a squeak of alarm; the merchant let out a strangled howl, more of outrage and surprise than genuine hurt. Halek’s consciousness felt it was receding, and it was as if from the end of a long tunnel that he felt the wolf suddenly come alert to something elsenearby, and it screamed in sudden panic and fury, Threat!

Threat, Halek thought, even as the scent of demon Rot invaded his nose, blanketing the black flow with red, what threat—?

The door to Elizora Thackery’s cottage on the other side of the yard exploded outwards, and Clarin staggered out, clutching her slashed throat. Her entire shirtfront was coated in blood, and all of Halek’s senses were invaded by the iron scent. She toppled to her knees into the mud just as Shery screamed, and there was a dark, oily cloud rising through the doorway, swirling and beginning to coalesce and solidify in the air above her…

Demon, Halek thought, numbly, and the wolf took up the chant. That’s a demon how’d it get here demon demon demondemondemondemo—

He threw aside the merchant and leapt.