Thorne – easily blown away.
And Roulant knew that if he failed again tonight, he’d
be forced to break a different promise, one that had
nothing to do with wolves and curses. If he didn’t kill the
wolf tonight, in the morning he would go to Una and tell
her that he couldn’t marry her. He would do that, though
both their hearts would break.
A dear and pretty girl, his Una, with her earnest green
eyes and her red-gold hair. He was no poet, but late at
night Roulant liked to watch the fire in the hearth and
think that the rosy flames, so lovely and generous with
their warmth, reminded him of Una. Whatever joy would
come on their wedding day would be swiftly
overshadowed by his terrible obligation to go up to the
ruin year after year, trying, as his father had tried, to bring
an end to the Night of the Wolf. How could Roulant come
back to Una every year, with blood on his hands as surely
as it was on Thorne’s?
And yet … how could he bear to look down the long
years of a life without her?
Roulant put his back into the last climb and soon left
the dark fastness of the forest to see Thorne and Guarinn
waiting in the paler light of the clearing. The moons were
rising, mere suggestions of light above the mountain. Soon
they would spill red and silver light on the bald hill
crowned by frost-whitened, shattered walls. Roulant left
the forest, trying to shut out the grim sense that the events
of this Night were fated.
From the obscuring dark at the forest’s edge, Una
watched him join his friends. Once Roulant and Thorne
and Guarinn climbed the hill to the ruin, Una went
noiselessly around the base, up the slope as silently as a
shadow, and entered at the opposite side to hide in the
small shelter of blackened beams and piled stone that once
had shaped a bridal chamber.
*****
Thorne stood in the center of the ruin, surrounded by
the broken stone, his back to the rising moons. He lifted
his head, sniffed the air. Guarinn tied a slipknot around
one end of the rope he’d carried. Roulant strung his bow
and placed three arrows in easy reach on the flat of a
broken stone.
“Time, my friend,” the dwarf said, his forge-scarred
hands shaking a little, though he gripped the rope hard.
They’d tried to hold Thorne with rope before, five years
ago. It was Tam who had stood readying bow and bolt
then, not Roulant. Guarinn thought it might be different
this time with a younger eye, a steadier hand to take a
well-timed shot at the instant of changing. Thorne closed
his eyes, shut out the sight of the rope that would hold
him, of Roulant readying a long, steel-headed shaft for
flight, and nodded to Guarinn.
“Do it, and hurry.”
When the noose passed over his head and settled on
his neck, Thorne heard himself panting hoarsely, like an
anxious beast mindlessly straining for release. The rope
stank of hemp and tar and the dark scent of smoke, fire’s
ghost. In moments, like the return of an unhealed malady,
he’d feel the bonds of humanity fall away from him:
compassion replaced by hunger, an imperative that knew
no mercy. Reason and skill changed by fast, fevered
degrees to instinct, which existed only to serve the needs
of survival. Even now, his senses filled with the complex
richness of scent only an animal knows. Even now the
scents aroused hunger.
The man knew the fear he smelled on Guarinn as well-
justified, not to be scorned. The wolf would only smell the
fear and know instinctively that this was a victim to feed
hunger. Thorne wished that Guarinn would hurry, for very
soon Thorne Shape-shifter, once known for his mastery of
this most difficult of the magic arts, would not be able to
hold back the changing.
*****
Crouched in her cold dark shelter, Una stared in
amazed alarm to see Guarinn place the noose round
Thorne’s neck. Like most people in Dimmin, she felt like
an intruder in Guarinn’s company, his glum silences made