Outside the cavern, a bitter wind howled through the darkness, but inside, it was warm and cozy. Hyden wished he had had the chance to make a kill. Fresh meat would have been a blessing, but dried meat and herbs would have to do this night. While Hyden helped Vaegon prepare the evening meal, Loudin joked with Mikahl.
“I would only give it to his grace!” the old Seawardsman said, in a mocking aristocratic tone, accompanied by a fancy bow.
“It’s formal courtesy,” Mikahl defended. “Manners and etiquette – things you’ll never understand.”
“It’s highfalutin nonsense,” the hunter laughed. “You should’ve just licked his boot.”
“Bah!” Mikahl waved him off. Then to the others at the fire, he said: “Did you see those skulls on his boots and belt? I wonder what sort of beast those are from.”
“Dread Wolves,” Hyden and Loudin answered in unison.
“When I was younger, they used to be as thick as the plague in these parts,” said Hyden. “They moved on, or died out after the bulk of them were killed off by the giant herdsmen.”
Mikahl suddenly remembered that some of the breed giants at Coldfrost had had big savage wolves for pets. One of them had torn Duke Silion, and two of his men, to shreds. Mikahl hadn’t seen it happen, but he had seen the aftermath. The bodies had still been warm and steaming in the crimson snow. A trail of silvery blue innards twisted away from the body of one man, who looked utterly shocked to be dead.
Mikahl had seen the wolf too. It had looked more like a huge porcupine, with all the arrows and crossbow bolts sticking up out of it. When the King’s guardsmen rolled it over, he saw the thing’s huge head and teeth. A man’s forearm was clamped in those jaws, the hand still gripping a nasty looking dagger hilt.
“I don’t think they died out,” he mumbled more to himself than the others.
“You don’t think that Pratchert’s wolf was a Dread Wolf do you?” Hyden asked the elf.
Mikahl looked at them as if their heads had just shrunken to the size of peaches.
“Not likely,” Vaegon answered. “Thanks to the giants, there are plenty of Dread Wolves roaming the Evermore Forest now. None of them seem to need to be shaved to survive the summer heat as Dahg Mahn’s wolf did. Pratchert’s wolf was most likely an Arctic Great Wolf, or one of its high range kindred.”
“Who in the Seven Kingdoms is Pratchert?” asked Mikahl.
Excitedly, Hyden goosed the elf.
“Go on, tell him the tale,” he urged. “I’d love to hear it again myself.”
“Yes Vaegon, tell us,” Loudin encouraged. “I’d be happy to get to listen for a change.”
“All right,” Vaegon conceded, “but after we’ve eaten.”
As Vaegon was telling the story, Mikahl often glanced at Hyden. He caught Hyden sneaking glances his way as well. Both of them were feeling a strange connection. Could Hyden be like the great wizard Dahg Mahn? Could Mikahl be the King who would someday need his aid to fight off the dark ones and unite the human kingdoms? On the surface, the idea of it was silly. There was no great evil loose upon the land for them to battle. King Glendar might be a horrible person, but Mikahl did not think he was a servant of evil. Likewise, Hyden couldn’t see himself leading an army of wild animals from the forest to save Mikahl and his kingdom men. Still, there was a bond forming and it couldn’t be denied.
Earlier, when they had pranked Loudin through Talon, it had been like they were reading each other’s minds. Everything Mikahl had intended, but didn’t say aloud, Hyden had understood clearly. Mikahl had known that Hyden would get the hint. It was strange, and even now as their eyes met, and each of them felt the odd connection gaining strength, they chose to say nothing about it.
By the time Vaegon had finished the story of Pratchert, Loudin was snoring softly by the fire. Not long after, the others were asleep as well.
Sometime in the early morning, the fire died out. The cavern was freezing when Loudin stirred awake. After he sat up, and bundled himself in his fur coat, he noticed that Hyden wasn’t in his bedroll. The hawkling and the man’s cold weather gear were gone as well, so he didn’t think much of it. He grunted his stiff, sore body into a standing position, and gave Mikahl’s sleeping form an angry scowl.
It was as if the boy’s constant joking about his age and condition was the reason he felt the pain and ache of every inch of his body. He liked the boy though, and was glad he hadn’t abandoned him back in the Reyhall Forest. Loudin found that he saw himself in the younger man. He wished he were still as young as these lads. He could tell that their future held many great adventures, but he didn’t know how much longer he would be traveling with them.
Once Borg paid him for the skin, and he gave Mikahl his share, he had a mind to build himself a little cabin and retire. He would clear a spot in the Reyhall; maybe just use that clearing by the pond where they had killed the big lizard. He would grow a garden and make a trip into Locar a few times a year to buy supplies. He could hunt for his meat. Maybe he would get lucky and find himself a woman that hadn’t had the dowry to get herself married off in her younger years. With his half of what Borg was bringing back, he would want for nothing. He might even get a place in one of the smaller towns, open a trading post, or something. He wouldn’t need to turn a profit; it would just be something for him to do with his time. The possibilities were endless.
The only thing he knew for certain was that Mikahl was right. He was getting too old to traipse around the woods all the time, and he was forgetting little things here and there. How long would it be before he forgot something important, something that put him in harm’s way?
Something Loudin had heard while playing a high stakes game of Rune Discs on the Isle of Salazar, kept coming back to him. A Harthgarian Sail Master had just won half the markers at the table, and was counting it up to cash out. One of his mates asked him why he didn’t stay and try to win more. The man chuckled, and shook his head. “If you don’t leave the table while you’re winning, then you don’t win.”
Loudin was winning now and he knew it. He would follow those words of wisdom, and with his prize, he would be able to live to a ripe old age in relative comfort.
“If I don’t freeze my fargin arse off first,” he grumbled under his breath.
He had to laugh then. He knew he would’ve never said those words aloud had Mikahl been awake to hear them. He would never hear the end of it. He leaned against the cavern wall for support as he pulled on his boots, then went to see if he could find some wood for the fire pit. He didn’t want to hear the spoiled castle born lump whining about the cold he told himself, but deep down he knew the truth was that he really wanted the boy to wake up warm.
Hyden had always loved the hunt, so much more so now with an elven crafted longbow to loose with, and Talon’s sharp vision to see by.
Hyden understood that Vaegon had lost his depth sight. The elf had to be deeply pained by the loss. Hyden understood, at least he thought he did. He couldn’t imagine how it would affect his mind if he lost his ability to aim properly. When Vaegon had offered him the bow, he had almost refused it. Something, some odd intuitive feeling, made him think better of denying it though, and graciously he accepted the gift.
The elf’s smug and superior attitude had all but disappeared, but that change had started before Vaegon had lost his eye. Vaegon wasn’t himself anymore. His wound wasn’t just of the flesh, and Hyden had spent a lot of time on the trail, and by the fire, thinking of ways to cheer his elven friend. It was the least he could do to repay Vaegon for the wonderful gift he had given him.
Vaegon was spending more and more time scribbling in his little journal, and it worried Hyden. He wished he could think of something suitable to do for his friend, something that would fill at least part of the void the loss of his eye had created. So far, nothing he thought of seemed even close in comparison to his gratitude towards Vaegon and his sorrow over his friend’s loss.
“Life is not kind, nor is it fair.” Hyden repeated the words he had recently heard his uncle Condlin grumble under his breath. “Sort of like now.”
A few hundred yards away, a ram was leading two of his females up the mountainside, completely unaware of Hyden and Talon’s presence. Through the hawkling, Hyden had watched the animals come up out of the distant valley and slowly make their way towards him. He could’ve killed one of them long ago, but had decided to wait. As long as they were moving towards him, he would let them come. If they started changing course, he would try to herd them his way with Talon. The swooping hawkling might be able to frighten them right up into the cavern entrance. It would take a while, but it would be faster, and far easier than having to drag one of the carcasses all the way back. If Talon couldn’t keep them on track, and they started moving away, then he would just have to kill one, and move it in the old fashioned way.
While he watched and waited, he found himself thinking about Pratchert again. The story was fresh in his mind, and the strange question kept forming in his head.
In the story, the wizard and his wolf had stopped at the Summer’s Day Spire, and a dragon had come. They had had a conversation that supposedly lasted several days. What kept nagging Hyden’s mind was the subject of that conversation. What would Pratchert have had to say to a dragon, or a dragon to him, and for days, no less? Hyden couldn’t imagine what he would want to say to or ask a dragon if he were given the chance. Knowing himself as well as he did, he figured he would ask the dragon to tell him a story.
What sort of story would a dragon tell? Maybe that’s what dog man had done. It would’ve had to have been an awful long story to last for several days, but then again –
“Still too long of a shot, eh?” Loudin asked softly, but with an intentional sharpness in his voice.
Hyden almost jumped out of his skin at the sound. He hadn’t heard the old hunter approaching at all. He took a moment to let his thundering heart settle before he replied.
“You startled me,” he whispered.
“Nearly scared a turd right out your arse is what I did,” Loudin chuckled. “It would’ve been far worse for you if you didn’t have my breakfast in your sights.”
He hunkered down beside Hyden, and patted him on the shoulder. Fog swirled from his mouth with his breath.
“Consider it payback for the knot you had your blasted bird put on my head yesterday.”
Hyden felt his face flush with embarrassment, but couldn’t help but smile at the memory. For a long while, neither of them spoke; they just watched the ram lead his females ever closer.
“They’ve been in my range for a very long while now, Loudin,” Hyden bragged the answer to the Seawardsman’s original question. “I’m just saving myself the work of having to carry one of them up that hill and back to the cavern.”
Loudin squinted at the three specks moving in the distance, and then turned to look at Hyden. He started to challenge the boast, but then caught sight of the hawkling soaring high overhead and held his tongue.
It was those hawk eyes that would allow Hyden to shoot so accurately, Loudin guessed correctly, just like he had put those arrows in that dark beast that took the elf’s eye and nearly killed Mikahl. Hyden had loosed from the opposite ridge Loudin remembered, and at night. He had had nothing but the faint glow of Mikahl’s sword to light his target, and he hadn’t missed. He gave Hyden a nod of respect.
“Aye,” he added. It was just another example of the power of youth that he no longer had access to.
Loudin raised himself back up to his feet, and managed to do it without an audible groan this time.
“I’ll have a fire waiting,” he said, then made his way back toward the cavern.
Hyden chided himself for letting the hunter sneak up on him like that. That kind of carelessness would not do. He hadn’t told the others yet what Borg had said about there being more of those dark creatures about.
It wasn’t until he heard the story of Dahg Mahn again, that he began to truly believe that the power of Mikahl’s sword had something to do with the attack. If the sword truly made Mikahl the King of Westland, then more of them would surely come for it. Hyden wasn’t learned in the way of kings and kingdoms, and he knew even less about magical swords, but it was obvious that whoever was running Westland at the moment wouldn’t want Mikahl showing up and ruining his plans.
A warning shriek from Talon brought Hyden’s attention back to the ram. It was getting closer to him laterally, but working its way higher up the mountain. He sent Talon to swoop down the slope at it. He was as anxious to see if the bird could harry the ram where he wanted it to go, as he was about to kill one of its mates.
Vaegon woke to the first crackling sounds of Loudin’s fire. The pain in his empty socket had lessened considerably, but not the pain in his heart. The empty space there was like a raw, open sore. He felt like part of him, the part that made him elven, had been ripped away from him by that beast.
None of his companions could know the true extent of his loss. Only an elf would understand. The night vision, the ability to see the life force of living things, and the currents of magic flowing around and through the rest of the world, was so distorted now, that it was useless. For him, seeing was now like a human trying to hear with his nose, or smell with his tongue; like trying to wield a sword with a booted foot, or trying to run with only one leg. He felt empty and useless.
As much as he had been missing the Evermore Forest, he no longer found the idea of going back there very comforting. His people would be accepting and loving of course, but the whispers as he walked past the flower gardens, without being able to tell the shapes the scents made as the sunlight reflected through them, would be unbearable. They would laugh, as he missed the signs of the trail that the forest showed him to follow. They would be consoling, polite, and their good intentions would be a constant reminder of the myriad things he could no longer sense with his elven vision. It was sickening to think about. Even now, the flames that danced to life before his eyes were like a single cricket call, where before, they would’ve blazed forth in his vision, like the entire nocturnal symphony of the forest.