She pursed her lips. "Alot of bother for one boy, Sorcerer or no," she said.
"I know," he said. "That's why I don't understand it. What do they want me for, anyway?"
"That I can't answer, my boy," she said in her gravelly voice. "But you were right. It is time for you to move on. If you have that many people chasing you, Suld is the only place you'll be safe. Run for the Tower, boy. They'll protect you well enough."
"I'm already working on it, ma'am," he assured her with a smile. "How far am I from Suld, anyway?"
"It's two days from when you reach the High road," she told him. "You should steal a horse and just run for it."
"Steal?" he gasped.
"What, you've never heard of it? Well, you find someone with a horse, hit him over the head, and take his horse," she told him with a blunt grin. "You may as well take his money and his clothes, while you're at it."
"I know what it is, but I don't like to steal," Tarrin said. "If I did, I'd have stolen food off this farm."
"Boy, beggars can't be choosers," she said bluntly. "If it comes down to you living or dying, better someone loses his horse than you losing your life."
Tarrin nodded. That was just pure wisdom, and it would be foolish to ignore it. Mother Wynn may be old, but Tarrin saw that her mind was sharp, and she had the wisdom of experience. "I'll think about it," he promised, "but I don't like horses all that much. It's too hard to hide when you have a horse." Tarrin stood up and approached Mother Wynn, then knelt beside her and took her hand in his paw. "I appreciate your talk, Mother Wynn," he told her honestly. "You're a wise woman, and you made me feel much better."
"Glad someone around here appreciates an old woman's chatter," she said with a totally fake look of suffering. Tarrin had no doubt that everyone in the house hinged on her every word.
"Some of us can see past how someone looks," he said pointedly.
She harumphed, then shook her hand free of his gentle grip. "You'd best get on with yourself, boy," she ordered. "You're not getting any closer to Suld standing here, you know. Now scoot."
"Yes ma'am," he said with a smile. "Thank you, Mother Wynn."
"No need, boy," she told him. "Now scat."
"Yes ma'am," he said. Then he left the old woman sitting on the porch, rocking gently in the darkening evening with a plate of chicken on her lap and a faraway look in her clear brown eyes.
It was the feeling that he was too close for anything to go wrong that lulled him into a false sense of security, and he paid for it. It came in the form of something hitting him in the back of the head as he loped down the High Road towards Suld, well into the middle of the night. Tarrin saw nothing but stars and dropped to the ground like a felled ox, rolling several times before coming to a stop against a tree by the side of the road. Tarrin swam in a gray haze, as he hovered right on the edge of consciousness, not yet able to move but vaguely aware of what his ears were telling him. He could literally feel his skull start to mend the fracture created by whatever it was that hit him.
"Don't get too close," Tarrin heard one voice through the haze. "I wonder what it is."
"I don't ask questions," the other one said. "That man in the inn said anything that even remotely looks Wikuni, and this one is close enough for me. I just don't want to carry the body back. It looks heavy."
"Is it dead?"
"It will be in a minute," came the ominous response.
The haze parted like a curtain, but Tarrin didn't immediately move. He reached out with his keen senses, feeling the air, smelling it, noticing the shifts in air against his skin and fur. There were two of them, and they were right over him. Tarrin felt the air brush along the side of his long tail, and he used that as a guide to slowly slither his tail between the feet of one of them. Once it was in position, he slashed with it as hard as he could.
Tarrin's tail wasn't anywhere near as strong as the rest of his body. It was more for balance than for work, but the muscles in his tail had the same proportionate strength as the rest of his body, and that gave the slender limb formidable strength. That strength swiped the feet out from under one of the two men, who crashed to the ground in a heavy grunt. Tarrin rolled up on himself and slipped away from the other, springing up to face a smallish, dark-haired man with a narrow jaw and rotting teeth, who was holding a long dagger in his hand and a sling in the other. The other man was a shade smaller than this man, but maybe a bit heavier. Both of them wore common peasant clothing. The standing man gaped at him, and barely had time to gasp before Tarrin was on him. Tarrin's huge paw closed around his neck in a crushing grip, and Tarrin picked the smallish man off the ground by his neck and held him out at arm's length.
"The next time you hit a man in the head with a sling," Tarrin growled at him evilly, his eyes glowing from within with an unholy greenish radiance, "make sure he's dead before you get this close." Then he closed his grip around the man's neck, crushing it. The man gurgled once, then his head flopped limply to the side as the bones in his neck shattered.
The other man screamed in terror and scrambled to his feet as Tarrin threw the dead body aside. That sound snapped Tarrin out of his sudden desire for blood, and he hesitated as the other attacker turned tail and ran, blubbering and whimpering in abject terror. Tarrin let him go; it had been this man that had tried to kill him, and the fear would be punishment enough for the other. Tarrin was worried more at how easily he had killed the man, how he had done it without a second thought. Granted, he argued to himself, the man did try to kill him. But Tarrin had killed him out of retribution, not out of defense of his own life. And what scared him was that he had absolutely no remorse.
Tarrin put it out of his mind as he considered the situation. Someone somewhere was spreading some kind of story that got men out on the road hunting down anything that looked Wikuni. Wikuni were also known as the Animal People, so the resemblence to Tarrin was not even remotely a coincidence. Whoever was after him was trying another tactic to get rid of him, a tactic that had come very close to working. It made the road unsafe for him. He rifled through the pockets of the dead man as he considered his original plan to skirt the road from the safety of the forest. That plan was still workable, but it meant that he would have to go quite a bit out of his way, at least an hour's travel south.
The man had a few coppers and a silver coin in his purse. Tarrin took it, and his dagger, and took his leather belt as well. Tarrin's pants weren't quite so snug on him now that he'd lost weight, and he needed something to help hold them up. The money would get him a meal in the morning, and the dagger, like any knife, had a multitude of uses, and would save his claws. As an afterthought, he picked up the body and slung it over his shoulder. It would be better to leave it somewhere other than on the road.
He slunk across several farms until he reached the treeline, being careful not to alarm the dogs on many of them, then went back well and far enough so that the body would be eaten by scavengers long before it started smelling bad enough to attract attention, back where the signs of human passage were so old that it didn't matter. Then he looked up to the Skybands and aligned himself so that he'd be travelling west. Then he left the body, naked, the clothes neatly folded on a nearby log, and continued on towards Suld.
Tarrin's encounter with another farming family did not go quite so well the second time. It took three tries before he would find a farmer or farm member that would even talk to him without running away screaming. The screams and fear stung Tarrin terribly, but he had to admit that as dirty and bedraggled, and as non-human, as we was, it wasn't much of a surprise. He finally found a farmer willing to listen to him, a tall, burly man holding a pitchfork who was standing outside his barn. Tarrin offered to buy his breakfast, and the burly man simply gave him a gruff nod. He was given a loaf of bread, some cheese, and a few apples in return for the copper coins he'd taken from the assassin. Tarrin left the farm and the farmer behind, eating his meal in the quiet safety of the forest, then he moved on. It was important to get as far as he could before stopping, maybe even to within sight of Suld.