With a jump that sent the poor industrious ants flying, Draven spun around, his fists clenched. He was prepared for the other young men of Rannul to hunt him down and try to make sport of him for his failure, and he knew in that instant that he would not succumb and permit them the pleasure, no matter how richly he deserved it. He would defend himself, coward though he was.
But it wasn’t any of his fellows who stood above him now, face shadow-masked. It was his sister, leaning upon her branch. He should have heard her dragging footsteps reverberate through the ground on which his ear was pressed. And yet here he crouched, his thigh aching where she’d kicked it, staring up at her in surprise.
“Gaho,” she began, “you must help.”
“No,” said Draven, his voice a growl. He sank down, relaxing once more into his despair, knees up, elbows propped, fists uncurling. He shook his head, and his hair fell into his eyes. “Not Gaho. I am Draven now. You heard our father make it so.”
Ita studied him silently, shifting her stance to take pressure from her ugly clubfoot. Despite the calluses and the wrappings of animal hide, it hurt her each time she took a step. In a rare moment of vulnerability Ita had told Draven that to put any weight upon that foot was to send scalding embers crawling up the inside of her bone. But after that whispered confession he had never heard her complain again. The villagers proclaimed it a marvel that she had ever learned to walk at all. Many had urged her father to dispose of her life quickly and kindly when she was still a swaddled babe, thus preventing both her lifelong suffering and the burden she was bound to be upon her people.
But Gaher had listened to her powerful cries and watched how she latched onto her mother and fed like a ravening wolf cub. And he had declared that she was a wolf indeed and would make him proud one day, twisted foot or otherwise. So, in a mingling of mercy and pride, he had spared her life.
Ita had yet to earn her woman’s name. But it was possible already to see a woman’s strength in the gaze she turned upon her brother just then. She offered him neither sympathy nor scorn, but her eyes urged him to action. He found that he resented her. Were it not for her words before his trial began, he would even now be a true man.
Moving with care, Ita balanced herself on her good leg and reached out with her branch to prod Draven’s calf. He wanted to snatch that branch away from her and break it in two. But she was his sister, and he kept his fury in check.
“Draven, then,” she said. “You must help. I’ve heard such . . . such terrible things.”
Draven did not respond. He didn’t care what she had heard. He could guess at what was being said among the people of Rannul.
But Ita persisted, her voice growing ever more tense as she spoke. “They’re going to punish him. To punish him for your mercy. At sunfall they’re going to—” Her voice broke, but the tremor told Draven all he needed to know. The old warriors had spoken before in his hearing of the interesting torments worked upon especially despised prisoners of war. He had yet to see it done, but he knew what pain every man—every true man—of Rannul was capable of inflicting. Pain that would continue long after the sufferer begged for death.
“They’re going to punish him for living,” Ita said, “when they believe he should be dead.”
They would spill their rage upon the head of a Kahorn man rather than on the more deserving head of their chieftain’s son. But it would not assuage Draven’s guilt.
“I should have killed him,” Draven said, still unable to raise his gaze, to look his sister in the eye. “It is my fault. He has lived beyond his time, and now he will pay the blood price in agony. I should have killed him.”
“But you didn’t,” Ita said. “And his life is now yours by right. Will you let it be so harshly treated? So abused and then wasted?”
Draven shrugged. “I gave up all right to his life when I refused to end it.”
Silence hung upon the air between them, filled only with the buzz of insects and the gentle shush of wind in the grass. Even the village was strangely quiet on this day of stunned humiliation.
Then Ita kicked him. She always kicked him with her clubfoot, for she needed the good one for balance. Draven knew that each kick, delivered with far more habitual accuracy than he liked, must hurt her a great deal, but this never seemed to stop her. She kicked him in the shin, startling him from his dour thoughts, pushing him into a flash of irritation. “Ow!” he growled, his eyes darting to her face.
Ita growled right back, her lips curled back. “If you won’t be a man, at least be my brother!” she said. “I know you, Gaho. Draven. Whoever you are, I know you, and I know you will not sit here in this forsaken field and let time crawl over you while the rest of us live and die. I know you, brother, and you are going to help me. You are going to help me deliver the prisoner back to his own people and prevent the—the things the men are saying. His life is yours whether or not you acknowledge it. And you will acknowledge it, and you will protect it!”
Draven wrapped his arms around his legs, guarding against future assaults. “Why do you care?” he demanded. “Why do you care what happens to one man from across the river? He’s not of our blood! He means nothing.”
“Perhaps,” Ita said slowly, her voice less furious than it had been but no less passionate. “But I do care. I care for your sake. The wounds they inflict upon him tonight will scar you forever. I do not wish to see that happen.”
She crouched before him then and, setting aside her branch, put out her hands and caught his face. He did not resist as she turned his gaze to meet hers. They were very alike, this brother and sister, easily recognized as kin. But while his face was strong and filled out, hers was always a little wan, a little peaked, with hollows under her eyes that betrayed unspoken suffering. But the eyes themselves glittered with a potency not even her bear-like brother could match.
“Help me,” she said. “I cannot do this on my own. But if you will not help me, I will try.”
“You will fail,” Draven whispered.
“But I will try.”
She held onto him a moment longer, forcing him to read the truth in her eyes. At last he drew a deep breath and gently removed her hands from his face, though he held onto them and rose, assisting her to her feet. He stood more than a head taller than she, for though he had only just that day become a man, he had already grown into his man’s height, if not yet his full breadth. And she would never be any taller or stronger than a child.
“Where are they keeping the prisoner?” Draven asked.
“In your house,” Ita replied.
He had built the house with his own two hands, and he knew all of its secrets. He knew the two soft places in the wall where the sod was loose and could easily be knocked through. It was customary among his people to build houses in this way, with only one entrance but several possible exists known only to the builder himself. One never knew when such exits would be necessary.
The sun was already high in the sky, and there was little cover to be had. But Draven’s house was built on the edge of Rannul village, for he had craved privacy at that time, his solitary nature eager for quiet after years of living in the large boys’ house near the village center. The men of the village, save for the guard set round the temporary prison, were all gathered at the central fire, chanting, praying, and vowing to each other what they would accomplish when the sun went down and could not bear witness to their dark deeds.
But there was a guard of four, one posted at each corner of the house. So Draven, crouched out of sight in a nearby thicket of fir trees, waited for Ita to accomplish her nefarious purpose.
She hobbled boldly through the village, nodding solemnly to her father and making signs of reverence as she passed by the men around the fire. Her progress was slow, for the weight of the waterskin she carried impeded her use of her walking stick. But no one moved to assist her. No one dared, for Ita was possessed of a sharp tongue and never shy to use it when she suspected anyone of belittling her.
So sh
e proceeded in plain sight toward Draven’s house. All four guards saw her coming and turned to face her. Even then Draven dared not make a move but waited to see what she would do.
“I am come to visit my father’s enemy,” Ita declared and lifted the heavy waterskin for the guards to see. “I will give him refreshment.”
“No,” said the foremost guard.
“His wounds are untreated, and he will surely die,” Ita persisted. “Let me through.”
The guard said nothing. His three fellows took a few paces from their appointed posts. Ita looked at them all, her gaze sliding from one face to the next. Then she adjusted her grip on the waterskin and started for the door.
The foremost guard intercepted her, putting out a staying hand. Ita flashed her teeth at him. “Do you want him dead before sunfall? Let me pass!”
The guards exchanged glances. One looked out to Gaher in the village center, who sat cross-legged in deep, dark meditation, his crescent ax, still stained with blood, across his knees. It would take more uproar by far to disturb the warriors of Rannul in their preparations for the coming night. The guards could expect no support from that quarter.
“You may not see the prisoner,” the foremost guard insisted.
“I will,” Ita replied. No woman of Rannul would dare speak to a man in such a voice, certainly no girl who had yet to earn her woman’s name. But Ita was not like others her age. And she was more than a little intimidating, despite her size and crippled foot. She took another step, prepared to force her way through. The foremost guard caught at her shoulder, and she shrugged off his tentative hand. The other three drew in closer now, forming a wall between her and her goal . . .
. . . while Draven slipped from the fir trees and, moving quietly despite his bulk, crossed the distance to his own house and pulled away the loose sod of the back wall.
Though he had slept here only the night before, the four walls of his chamber had become foreign to him in such a short space of time. Draven crawled through the opening he created, shivering at the stench of man’s blood. There was little light save that which came through the smoke-hole in the roof, but this was enough to illuminate the form of the prisoner lying bound upon Draven’s own bed, the blood from his shoulder matting in the sheepskin rugs. The prisoner lay so still that Draven wondered if he was dead already. A mercy if he was!
But no sooner had this thought crossed Draven’s mind than the prisoner’s eyes opened, bright in the dimness of that room. He said nothing, but his gaze fixed upon Draven without recognition. A shudder passed through his body, and he struggled to push himself upright, though his strength was far gone and his skin ghastly pale.
Draven crossed the room and knelt before him, a finger to his lips. An instant later the prisoner’s expression shifted to one of recognition. And fear. Had his burly enemy come to finish the task he had failed to accomplish a few hours ago?
“I’ll not harm you,” Draven whispered, answering the unspoken question. “Not unless you force my hand.”
“Liar,” the prisoner said, adding a painful curse. “Why else would you come?”
Why else indeed? Draven sighed. Then he motioned to the small opening in the back of the house. “Your freedom is nigh. Come with me.”
“Freedom to die by your hand?”
“Would you prefer that which you know awaits you come sunfall?”
The prisoner’s jaw set, but the shadows on his face could not disguise the sickening in his soul. Nevertheless he said, “I’m not afraid to meet my fate.”
“Now who lies?” said Draven. “But it is not the act of a coward to flee his captors if given the chance. Come. Someone told me that your life belongs to me. If that is so, I choose that you should live it. You’ll not have a second offer.”
The prisoner hesitated briefly. Then he heaved himself up from the low bed and turned to allow Draven to cut his bonds away. Draven felt the tension in the prisoner’s body, every muscle braced for a killing stroke. Though the temptation flitted through Draven’s mind, he knew still what he had learned about himself at dawn that day: He was no killer.
So he cut the prisoner free and, listening to Ita’s ongoing argument with the guards without (which began to wax most dramatic and verbose), Draven pushed his new charge ahead of him out the escape hole and into the open world beyond. Their danger was perhaps at its greatest in that brief space as they crossed from the house into the fir trees and the wild lands beyond. If Ita failed to hold the attention of the guards and an alarm went up, Draven suspected he would share the prisoner’s fate. His father would not move to intercede.
But they achieved the shelter of the firs and plunged on into the deeper forest beyond the fields and roughly cultivated lands of Rannul village. Draven knew where he must take the prisoner and there hide him until nightrise. A small culvert in a secret hollow where solitary young Gaho had often fled for much-craved quiet during his boyhood days. No one knew of this spot save perhaps Ita. (He never could guess just how much his sister knew.) Draven had a canoe moored there which would slide easily into the river, far downstream from where the hunt for the prisoner would begin. First the men of Rannul would check their own canoes and make certain none were missing. Then they would spread out into the forests and fields, little thinking that their quarry might have other means to cross the river back into Kahorn territory.
None would suspect Chief Gaher’s son of the treachery he even now committed.
The prisoner stumbled. Then he stumbled again, and his pace slackened more than Draven liked. Draven could not know when the search would begin, could only hope the prisoner’s loss would not be discovered until the sun was well on its way to rest. They may have hours, but they may have mere seconds.
The prisoner sank to his knees. His blood loss was too great for such exertion. Another moment and he would surely faint outright.
Grinding his teeth to suppress a doglike growl, Draven caught up the prisoner and slung him across his shoulders. The man was heavy but not too heavy, and Draven moved swiftly through the trees, off the beaten paths and into the deeper forest. He followed River Hanna downstream, keeping it ever on his right hand. The prisoner’s blood soaked into his own garments; he would have to rinse them as best he could before returning to Rannul. At least none in the village would look to find the chieftain’s disgraced son again for several days. Draven’s absence would be less noticed than expected.
His path took him uphill, and yet Draven bore his burden for some while before he began to lose breath. His was a strength to make a father proud, which only added to his shame. The prisoner was so limp and lifeless in his hold that Draven wondered if he had died. Good, if so! Someone should have died that dawn. Blood should have been spilt to appease the airy gods.
A low agonized moan told Draven that these wishes were vain. The prisoner may only just cling to life, but cling he did.
The river was now far below Draven’s feet, cutting through rocky outcroppings and careening at a wild, white pace through a harsher landscape than what lay further upstream. No one among the Rannul tribe took their watercraft this far downriver at this time of year. Only during the season when Hydrus was said to return and all the proud warriors sought to slay him did they dare risk the rapids in this quest. This time of year, months before any sighting of Hydrus might be hoped for, Draven did not fear meeting his tribal kin.
He came to a place where the ground gave way, dropping in deep rocky walls down to the culvert below. Many little streams rolled downhill to this place, plunging here and there in thin white spray to crash on the rocks, break into the culvert, and rush away into the rapids. An unfamiliar eye would not spy a path down, but Draven knew this spot quite well. He had never made this descent while so heavily burdened, however.
Draven slid the prisoner from his shoulders into the dry rustle of the forest floor. The prisoner’s eyes were open but glassy, and he collapsed under his own weight and did not move save to breathe.
“On your fe
et,” Draven said. “You’re not safe yet.”
At first he thought the prisoner would not respond. But then, with a shudder of resisting muscles, the young man pushed himself upright. Leaning heavily on Draven’s supporting arm—their enmity for the moment forgotten in the face of necessity—he allowed himself to be led to the cliff’s edge and down along the narrow track. If he wished to protest he swallowed it back, though his eyes became briefly more alert as they gazed upon the drop and the far-falling streams.
Draven led him carefully, however his conscience demanded otherwise. Sometimes he half-carried him and once caught him by the arm when the prisoner’s foot slipped on a moss-clad rock. But at last they reached the banks below and took shelter with their backs to the cliff wall, their feet close to the flowing water. Draven could see that the prisoner, along with his other many ills, was cold. Gooseflesh rose along his arms, and his bare feet were strangely blue.
Grunting, Draven removed his fur mantle and wrapped it around the prisoner. Bile rose in the back of his throat even as he performed this action. No true man was he to treat his enemy thus!
And so they waited.
Ita’s voice fell gently from above, drawing Draven from his intense contemplation of the moving water at his feet. He turned where he sat and looked up, surprised. There was his sister’s pale face gazing down at him from above. So she did know his secret after all.
“Wait, Ita!” he cried and scrambled to his feet, hastening up the narrow path before she tried to discover it for herself. She was never one to ask for help, and he did not doubt that she’d fall and break her neck before admitting she could not see the way.
By the unpredictable grace of the airy gods, Ita did as she was bidden and waited for Draven to reach her. “What are you doing here?” Draven demanded as soon as he was close enough to be heard without shouting.