Judith Berman - Lord Stink

Winter limped after Otter, cub in her arms. The enormous grizzly lay on its back, bristling like a porcupine with spears and arrows, twitching, eyes glazing. Bloody foam blew from its lips. Scattered around lay men and dogs, mauled, whimpering, dying. And bloody-handed Rumble and the exhausted, grim-faced woman stood in the midst of it all, facing each other without recognition.

Winter herself would not have known Thrush without her wizard’s vision. Thrush looked too young, like an eighteen-year-old girl, as if only a few months had passed in the last four years. But she also looked as if she had endured a hundred years in that time. Her hair was matted and filthy, her clothing in tatters, her skin a crisscross of scars and scabs and fresh bloody scratches. Thrush was staring wildly at something by Rumble’s feet. She sank down, into the blood and stinking entrails of men and bear and dogs, and pulled her dead cub into her lap, cradling its head, kissing its snouted face. And cheek against its bloody nose, she started to wail like an inconsolable child.

“But—” Rumble said, bewilderment setting in. “That isn’t—it isn’t—”

“Go away,” Winter said to her older brother. “Just go away.”

Winter released the surviving cub. She knelt down, and with her free arm pulled Thrush against her shoulder, stroking the tangled hair, wiping away the tears. She seemed to have finished hating Thrush. “It’s all right,” she said. “They’re free now. They’re immortal.” But she knew that would be scant comfort to a mother who had seen her sons killed. Thrush was not a wizard. She could not see the dark, wild souls of her bear children as they were: beyond form and beyond essence, ancient and young, eternal and ever-changing in their house at the very threshold of the world, where sky and mountain and bears alike become sheer, burning light.