her a stranger to be kept at arm’s length, mistrusted. But
she knew that Roulant loved Guarinn as truly as he loved
Thorne and had loved his own father. Though she’d heard
Thorne invite the binding, saw Roulant standing by in
silence, Una watched the dwarf with narrowed eyes.
Each knot he tied was strong, and as he worked,
Guarinn’s face was like a stark, bleak landscape, scoured
by sorrow, forsaken of all but the thinnest hope. Yet he did
the rough work carefully and, were it anyone else, Una
would have said tenderly. He took great care to cause no
hurt, and watching, unable to find any reason for what she
was seeing, Una swallowed hard against an ache of tears.
Tears for Thorne, bound; for Roulant, who stood as still as
the mage, watching. And for Guarinn Hammerfell who, of
them all, looked as if he alone hated what was being done.
And she wondered, what WAS being done? And
why? From the forest Una heard the clap of an owl’s
wings; hard on that, the faint, dying scream of a small
creature caught in dagger-sharp talons. The wind stirred,
cold from behind her as a long, low moaning slid across
the night. An uncanny sound, a grievous pleading.
Trembling, with cold fear, she saw Roulant pick up an
arrow, nock it to the bowstring, his stance the broad one of
a man preparing to put an arrow right through a straw-butt
at the bull’s-eye. Guarinn moved to the side, moonlight
running on the bitter edge of the throwing axe in his hand.
The mage, alone, wearing the light of the moons like a
shimmering cloak of red and silver, sank to his knees.
Guarinn took two more quick paces to the side, careful not
to get between the mage and the wall. Roulant stood
where he was, and, after he’d marked Guarinn’s position,
he never looked away from Thorne.
The night began to shimmer around Thorne, waver
like the air above a banked fire. Una, who’d been still as
stock, made a sound then, a whisper of boot-heel against
stone as she crept closer to the opening of her small shelter
to see.
Faint though the sound had been, it was heard.
Thorne jerked his head up, looked directly at her.
Cold fear skittered along Una’s skin, cramped her belly
painfully. She wanted to reach for her dagger, but she
could only sit motionless, caught and stilled by Thorne’s
eyes – the eyes of an animal lurking beyond the campfire’s
pale. And the shape of him, she thought, the shape of him
is somehow WRONG. Something about his face, the
length of his arms. But surely that was a trick of
moonlight and shimmering air? And crouching there, he
didn’t hold himself like a man, on his knees. He had hands
and feet flat to the ground, as an animal would.
Una pressed her hands hard to her mouth, trying to
muffle her cry of horror and pity when she saw Thorne
look away, turn all his attention to a feverish gnawing at
the rope that bound him.
The rope wasn’t doing a good job of holding him now,
for his shape was changing rapidly, and in some places the
coil was slipping away from what had once been a man’s
wrist or ankle . . . and were now the smaller joints of an
animal, a broad-chested wolf, its gray pelt silver in the
light of two moons, its dripping fangs glistening.
Guarinn cried “Now, Roulant! DO IT!” and
instinctively Una shoved herself far back against the
broken wall behind her, flinching as rubble slithered down
the hill, the clatter of stone loud in the night.
The sound did not distract Guarinn, his axe hit the
wolf in the shoulder, biting hard, though not lodging in
either muscle or bone. But Roulant hesitated, if only the
space of a heart’s beat, and so when the wolf leaped at
him, it was well beneath the arrow’s flight. Roaring, the
wolf hit him hard, sent him crashing to the stony ground,
pinned him there with its weight.
And then Una bolted out of her shelter, ran across the
moon-lighted ruin, her own dagger in hand, before she