Embra gave him a wry smile. "The next wolf we see, we must try this again, to see how we fare without knowing the proper human form we're trying to restore."
Craer rolled his eyes. "Exactly how many wolves am I going to have to cuddle for you?"
"How many fingers have you left to count with?"
Blackgult snorted as he handed Craer back the reins of his horse. "Now that's a waste of time, Embra: trying to trade witticisms with Lord Delnbone. I take it the only way of learning how to fight down the plague is the hard way-and through such battles coming to understand the Serpent-magics of the Malady well enough to break them?"
Embra nodded. "It… changes, each time I contact it. Except…" she frowned, and added slowly, "when the infections have come from the same source. I think. I'm not sure yet, beyond knowing the differences are there and that the Malady seems to alter itself when assailed. So each battle's different, but one learns what to do-the same way armaragors master their weapons, I guess."
Hawkril swung up into his saddle. "You forgot one small but crucial part of achieving weapon mastery that must prevail through all battleblood practice: staying alive."
They rode on, practicing staying alive as they crossed the wooded ridges that kept this part of Glarond little visited by outlander merchants. It was a country of small farms, rolling hills, and unmarked lanes-but now held a wearying harvest of corpses and fearfully skulking Glarondans, though overduke-seeking arrows became fewer.
The five rode even more warily as their trail descended into broader valleys where more prosperous farms sprawled, but not a single cart or traveler did they meet. It was as if the land had been emptied, everyone rushing off downriver to Sirlptar to some festival or other, leaving their farms and shops and smithies to-
Wolves! As Craer and Hawkril, in the lead, rode around a bend where the trail curved between two hills crowned by gnarled everember trees, three panting farmers sprinted across the road-with a man-sized wolf loping hard on their heels!
Its jaws were agape, the hindmost farmer only just ahead of them as he crashed through a blackthorn bush, stumbled on uneven ground, and then staggered on.
Craer sprang from his saddle, right into the wolf's path. The beast blinked at this obliging apparition, shied aside as if to race around it, causing Craer's riderless horse to rear and then bolt, and then whirled in at this new arrival from one side, biting down-onto the procurer's sword, helpfully slammed flat, edge-on, into its jaws. Its strike bowled Craer over, and he rolled over on his shoulders snarling like a wolf himself, putting his boots into the beast's ribs to keep it from pinning him with its weight.
His toe-blades made it yelp-and then Hawkril was there, bounding from his own saddle to pounce on the beast. Wrapping an arm around its neck, he shoved aside Craer's sword and used his weight to roll the beast over on its back, putting an ungentle knee into those same ribs-the wolf yelped again-and then ramming his armored forearm between its jaws.
"Forefather!" he yelled in pain, as it bit down hard enough to crush his bracer deep into his skin. "This one's a right monster!"
Freed from his own rolling on the road, Craer bounded up and reached a hand in to swat the wolf hard on the end of its nose, breaking its bite and sending it into a helpless flurry of mingled sneezing and growling. Hawkril shifted his grip, getting both hands firmly around the shaggy throat, and bent the struggling body back over his knee…
"I can't-" Embra gasped, as Dwaer-light washed over the struggling bodies. "I can't find a man's mind at all, inside that, that… thing…"
"Daughter, that's a real wolf," Blackgult snapped, keeping his own firm hold on the Dwaer, "not a plague-borne monster!"
"Graul!" she gasped in horror, staring down at the wrestling bodies in the road as their horses danced and Blackgult held them back from fleeing by main strength. "What'll I-?"
Her father gave vent to an exasperated growl of his own, and did something to the Dwaer that made it burn in Embra's grasp. She caught her breath and hissed in pain, dropping it-and as it spun out of her hand to hang in midair, linked to the Golden Griffon's fingertips only by tiny crackling tongues of energy, something like a flash of white lightning burst well beyond the fray, spitting bolts back toward them.
A moment later, Craer was hurled back between the horses like a small, ragged ball, voice rising in fear as he spat an endless stream of curses. Hawkril crashed into the ditch by the roots of an everember tree, and the wolf was flung the other way.
"What-?" Tshamarra cried, looking wildly around for Craer as the Stone flickered in midair, raggedly lighting a sudden mist of its own spinning.
"Use the Dwaer to quiet the horses," Blackgult ordered her, "before the pack beasts get all the way back to Stornbridge and Craer's mount finds the next barony or tries to leap the Silverflow and the mountains beyond, hmm?"
Tshamarra gaped at him.
"Use it!" he roared into her face-and she shuddered, gulped, and reached out for the Dwaer… which obligingly drifted toward her hand.
Embra was already scrambling down from her saddle, the Dwaer forgotten. "Hawk? Hawk!"
"That's right," Craer announced sarcastically from behind them all, making Tshamarra gasp in relief and evoking a growl from Blackgult as her Dwaer-guidance wavered, "run to see if the man as big as a horse and covered in armor as thick as a castle door is hurt! Don't bother about the acrobatic and incredibly clever Craer Delnbone, hurled away through the trees in great peril to life and limb! Spare not a thought for the brilliant mind that tricked the Tersept of Launsrar out of four horses and the pay-coach they were hitched to! Or the Seneschal of Mrorn Castle of his beautiful daughter! Or"-the trudging procurer caught sight of Tshamarra's startled look, and added hastily-"well, perhaps we'll not mention her, after all. Perhaps we'll dwell instead on…"
"Catching the horses and belting shut our overclever lips for a change," Blackgult snarled, leaning down from his saddle in a jangling of shifting armorplates to shake the procurer down to his fingertips.
Nose to nose they regarded each other for a moment, ere the Golden Griffon let go his tight grip on the procurer's throat, dropping Overduke Delnbone back onto the road with the comment, "Besides, you must have relieved Launsrar of his pay-silver whilst spying on him for me, so the chests in that coach should have been mine-and I don't recall seeing one thin coin from them!"
"Father, stop it!" Embra screamed from the ditch behind Blackgult, bursting into tears. "You may've killed Hawkril-using lightning when he's all in armor, you idiotl-and all you can-"
One great hand rose from the armored form she was draped around and patted her shoulder reassuringly, before lifting to stroke her hair. "M'lady," a familiar voice rumbled, "I live. I-"
"Hawkril!" Embra flung her arms around her man, heedless of the bruises his armor dealt her, and let loose a flood of tears.
"-confess that I can't hear you, just now… my ears seem to be all a-roar… Is the wolf dead?"
Craer looked up from his examination of the smoking beast in the far ditch, wearing a grin that wouldn't have looked out of place on the face of the wolf itself, and said, "Very." Then the armaragor's words sank in, so he stopped talking, lifted his hand in a salute, and then made the circling, pointing-at-the-ground hand gesture Aglirtan warriors use to denote death.
Hawkril lifted an arm out of Embra's swarming embrace to return the salute, and Craer's eyes, following the movement, found themselves looking straight into an unfamiliar face in the trees beyond. A dark-eyed, intent man, wearing-Serpent-robes!
The procurer's favorite dagger was in his hand in an instant, and out of it in the next, with a second fang coming to his fingertips even before he burst into a racing sprint that took him across the road, made Tshamarra's horse rear in startlement and Embra gape at him, and gained the far bank at a dead run, bouncing from tree to tree in his snarling haste to get to where-