Slipping the rabbit into his pack, he looked at the warren entrance hidden in the lee of the boulder. The trapper had sought it out, placing his snare where the rabbits would pass it going in and out of their burrow. Placing death where an animal expected only the security of home.
That was humans, all right.
There was a bitter taste in Rugel’s mouth as he picked his way back to his little camp. He moved every night, caching his gear before setting out for the day’s errands. He’d never stayed so long in one place. But he’d never come back to this place before, never seen Bigs in the forest his people had replanted and nurtured. Stealing their catch and breaking their traps felt too right for him to just move on without doing so.
Rugel pulled the rabbit’s hind-leg loose of its flop-limbed body and began to gnaw it. Once he had eaten meat cooked well, spiced and sauced by his mother, the best cook in his village. But he’d learned early on not to risk fire. There’d been times men had found him, had taken one look at his lumpy face and tried to capture him.
They always wanted something. Gold, usually, the famed dwarven gold of all the stories, never mind that his people never had any use for that too-soft stone. And the Bigs that didn’t want gold wanted his luck. His little hands, his little feet, anything tiny and portable was fair game for a trophy, just like the rabbit’s foot he was carefully nibbling around; its claws were sharp.
He cast the paw deep into the brush. Soon enough something would clean it up. He had no fears humans would connect it to him. In the stories, dwarves never ate rabbit.
Rugel eyed the other rabbit leg, its lucky foot still hairy and dirty, and couldn’t bring himself to bite into it. He was old. He was sick of the taste of raw meat. And there wasn’t a soul alive who knew his name. He got to his feet. Maybe he’d try tickling trout for a real dinner.
The creek was cool, shadowed by thickets of willow grown tightly together, made impenetrable with lashings of vine and ivy. Here, where it meandered into a curve, the creek made a pool, deep and dark, overhung by an enormous alder. The alder’s pale trunk was lapped all over by the green tongues of lungwort. Rugel made a note to come back and collect the viridian lichen; it was good for bandaging wounds.
He was ashamed that such herblore was the extant of his healing practice, but life on the run precluded the use of greater magics. Once as a child, he had assisted his father as he healed a deer, its shoulder singed down to the muscle by the same wildfire that had swallowed the forest. Once he had helped his mother push disease out of an oak tree weakened by lightning strikes. But that was all earth magic, fed by the land itself. Every bit a dwarf used bound him more tightly to the soil he drew it from. When the Elders worked their great works, they became as rooted to the land as the alder with its lungwort.
He blinked up at the tree, and wondered who had planted it after the wildfires, which dwarf dead and gone. He had tried to keep all of their names fresh in his memory, but they had faded out one by one, till even his little sister’s name eluded him. It was something like Lily, he thought. He wished he could remember.
He hunkered at the edge of the pool, sharpening an alder stick in readiness as a spear. He was not a good trout tickler, and expected the need to fall back on the spear to supplement his fish dinner. It would be bloody and ugly, but he was used to that.
A scream from the willow thickets made him jerk his knife and jab the palm of his hand.
With a curse, he dropped the stick. He snapped off a strip of lungwort and pressed it against the cut, listening again for the voice in the willows. He didn’t need to hear it a second time to know it was the girl’s voice.
She was crying. The first sound had been a shriek of pain, but now she was sobbing, whimpering. She sounded badly hurt.
“Stay away from her,” he whispered to himself. “It’ll just be trouble. Look at all those fish, waiting for you to catch them.” He forced his eyes to the pond. A fish struck; he saw the ripples of it.
But the girl was still crying.
He put his knife in his belt pouch and ran into the thicket.
The willows grew densely, impenetrable for someone without Rugel’s woodcraft, but he barely noticed the branches clawing at his face or the vines twisting around his ankles. A sense of urgency pulled him forward. The image of the girl as he had seen her last rose up in his memory. She had stood there in her homespun shift, as eager and nervous on the forest path as a young hare, with the same dark and liquid eyes. Curiosity had made her brave back there. Curiosity had probably gotten her hurt.
He felt certain of it as he slipped through the last tangle of willow. He stood in a small bright space, a pocket meadow made when an ancient oak toppled, its body flattening the tender ash saplings around it. He couldn’t help noticing the fire scars on its aged trunk. It was older even than he.
The girl lay at the edge of the clearing in a snarl of the oak tree’s exposed roots. She had stopped shrieking. Instead, she was silent, and still.
“Girl?”
It came out in a whisper. He cleared his throat, surprised to find it so dry. “Girl?”
She moaned.
He dropped to his knees beside her. “What happened?”
She moaned again, and he let his eyes answer the question. Where the earth had been lifted by the upturned oak’s roots were dozens of small holes. Some had torn open, revealing tunnels the right size for burrowers, and when he looked at her hands, they were dark with soil. The right was particularly dirty and dark purple, with two red marks staring up at him like angry eyes. Or like the impressions made by a snake’s fangs.
He touched the girl’s face and was startled by how cold it was.
“Girl? Can you speak?” He tapped her shoulder with no response. He tapped again. “Rachel?”
“I saw a bunny,” she whispered. “But something bit me.”
He squeezed his eyes shut. She could have called that rabbit if she knew the trick. If he’d taught it to her. When he opened them again, the red bite mark stared back at him, reproachful.
Rugel knew a great deal about surviving in the woods. He knew lungwort for cuts and he knew clay mud for bee stings. He had once set his own broken leg with a yew stave and deer sinews. But snakebites were beyond his medical skills. He knew nothing beyond binding the bitten limb and prayer. He ripped a strip from the bottom of his tunic and knotted it just above her wrist, remembering those healings he had helped work as a child. Magic beat prayer when the gods he knew were as dead as his people.
He hesitated, his throat tight. He could not imagine using magic so close to the village. He would be trapped here. His spirit would blend with the spirit of the stones and soil and he would never get the stink of mandrake out of his nose.
No. He couldn’t do that.
The girl whimpered. He stared at her pale face, where the freckles stood out like flecks of dirt on white stone. She was dying. If he did nothing and just left her here, the snake’s poison would work its way through her body, turning it silent and swollen. She might die even if he managed to get her to the witch. Snakebites were beyond most witches’ power.
He imagined what would happen if he took her to her village. He was small and gnarled and ugly, as bad as a hobgoblin to people afraid of ill-luck creatures. She was just a little girl, gray and still and close to death. The humans would think the worst. He could still smell the mandrake-scent on the breeze. She might die anyway, he reminded himself. He didn’t need to face all of that. He could just run away.