“You could do something for me,” he said to the shape-shifter. “If you could draw its attention away, just for a moment, I might be able to catch it off guard.”
Truls Rohk stared at him. Bek couldn’t see the shape-shifter’s eyes within the dark confines of his cowl, but he could feel the weight of their gaze, hard and certain. For a long moment, Truls didn’t speak. He just kept looking at Bek.
“Don’t do this,” he said finally.
Bek shook his head. “I have to. You know that.”
“You won’t survive it.”
“Then you can do what you wish with my sister, Truls.” He gave the shape-shifter a defiant look. “I won’t be there to stop you.”
Another long silence stole away the seconds. Bek brushed at a stray lock of hair and felt a bead of sweat slide down his forehead. He was hot in spite of the chill in the air. He felt as if he might never be cool again.
The shape-shifter stood where he was a moment longer, still staring at Bek. “All right,” he said finally, his voice harsh and angry. “I’ve said what I needed to say. Staying with her is up to you.” He turned away. “I’ll try to draw its attention. Maybe that will help, but I doubt it. Good luck to you, boy.”
Bek watched as Truls Rohk angled down the gentle slope, moving with the grace and precision of a moor cat. Deformed and ill made, an aberration of nature, he was nevertheless beautiful to watch. Bek could not believe he was really leaving. They had been together since the beginning of the journey west out of the Wolfsktaag. Truls had saved him so many times Bek had lost count, had given him the insights he needed to come to terms with his heritage and his destiny. They had not always agreed on everything, and there had been a degree of mistrust and uncertainty between them, but the alliance had worked. It was shattering now to see that alliance end. Even watching the other go, Bek couldn’t believe it was happening. It felt as if the shape-shifter was taking a part of Bek with him. His confidence. His heart.
Truls, he wanted to call out. Don’t go.
The caull swung around to watch the shape-shifter; its powerful body flattened and tensed. Bek lowered Grianne to the ground, placing her carefully behind him before turning back to defend them. When the caull struck, it would do so swiftly. He would have only one chance to stop it.
He never got even that. Before he could prepare himself, the caull attacked, springing sideways with blinding speed and tearing across the stream and up the slope in a blur of churning legs and gaping jaws. Bek would have been dead an instant later but for Truls Rohk, who moved even faster. So quick that he seemed simply to leave one place and reappear at another, he intercepted the caull from the side, slammed into it, and knocked it sprawling.
Then he was on top of the beast, tearing at it like an animal himself, snarling with such ferocity that for an instant Bek wasn’t sure that it was Truls at all. The shape-shifter ripped at the caull using weapons that Bek couldn’t see—weapons he concealed beneath his cloak or perhaps just fashioned out of the mass of raw and jagged bone that comprised his ruined body. Whatever they were, they proved effective. Bits and pieces of the caull’s body flew into the air, and blood jetted in dark spurts of inky green. The fighters careened across the vale, locked in combat, joined in purpose, lost in their desperate struggle to kill each other.
Bek recovered himself enough to remember to use the wishsong, but he could not think how to use it effectively. Shape-shifter and caull were so tightly fused that there was no opportunity to bring the magic to bear without striking both. Bek darted right and left at the edge of the battle, enveloped by its sound and fury, desperately seeking a way to intervene, unable to do so.
“Truls!” he screamed helplessly.
Bright fountains of red spurted out of the tangle, the shape-shifter’s human blood released from a wound somewhere beneath the concealing cloak, a wound that Bek could not see. He heard Truls snarl in rage and pain, then tear at the caull with renewed fury, bearing it down against the earth. The caull screeched with a sound like metal tearing, writhing and snapping in a flurry of claws and teeth, but it could not break free.
Then Truls Rohk locked his arms about the caull’s head and hauled back on its long, thick neck, twisting violently. Bek heard cartilage snap and ligaments tear. The caull shrieked with such fury that the sound matched the howl of the worst storm Bek had ever witnessed, of hurricane winds tearing past windows and walls, of funnel clouds ripping at the earth. The caull heaved upward in one last futile effort to dislodge the shape-shifter, then its head separated from its body and exploded into an unrecognizable ruin.
In the ensuing silence, cacophonous and empty both at once, Truls Rohk threw down the remains of the body. Still twitching, it fell to the forest floor, dark blood spreading everywhere. The shape-shifter stood over it a moment, bent to the stream to drink and wash, then strode back up the hill to where Bek waited.
Without pausing for even a second, he reached down and picked up Grianne, lifting her into the cradle of his arms.
“I changed my mind,” he said, his voice harsh and broken, his breathing ragged.
Then he set off walking once more, leaving an astonished Bek to follow.
16
As the day went on and the trio climbed out of the foothills and onto the lower slopes of the mountains, two things became increasingly clear to Bek Ohmsford.
First, they had moved into shape-shifter territory. He knew this not because there were boundary markers or signposts or anything that would designate it as such. Having come a different way, he couldn’t even be certain he recognized what he was looking at from his previous visit. He knew where he was because he could feel the shape-shifters watching him. He could feel their eyes. It was broad daylight and the sparsely wooded slopes offered few hiding places, so it didn’t appear as if anyone was there. Yet they were, he knew, and not far away. He might have questioned this feeling once, but having experienced it not much more than a week earlier—having felt it so strongly he could barely breathe because the shape-shifters had been right on top of him—he wasn’t questioning it now.
Second, Truls Rohk was failing. He had come away from his battle with the caull winded and clearly hurt, but seemingly not in any real danger. He had walked strongly for several hours, carrying Grianne and setting a quick pace for Bek to follow. But over the last two hours, with the fading of the afternoon and the approach of nightfall, he had begun to slow, then to stagger, his smooth gait turned into an uneven lurch.
“I have to rest,” Bek said finally, in an effort to find out what was going on.
The shape-shifter continued ahead for another fifty yards, then all but collapsed beside a fallen tree trunk, barely managing to set Grianne down before dropping heavily beside her. He wouldn’t have thought to sit close to her before this; now, it seemed he could not find the strength to move away.
Bek walked up next to him and reached down for the water skin. Truls handed it to him without looking up. A ragged gasping came from inside the cowl, and Bek saw the rise and fall of the shape-shifter’s shoulders as he struggled to breathe. Seating himself, he drank from the skin and watched as Truls give a deep, involuntary shudder.
They sat together without speaking for a long time, looking out over the valley below, listening to the silence.
“We can camp here,” Bek said finally.
“We have to keep moving,” Truls said, his voice raspy and weak. It didn’t even sound like Truls. “We need to get higher up on the slopes while there’s still light.”
The cowl lifted, shadowed emptiness facing the boy like a hole dropping away into the earth. “Do you know where we are?”
Bek nodded. “In the land of the shape-shifters.”
A cough racked the other’s body, and he doubled over momentarily before straightening again. “We have to get deep enough in that they’ll have no choice, that they’ll have to come to us.”