David Farland - Brotherhood of the Wolf

“Hide for me, then,” Averan begged. Brand was everything to her, father, brother, friend. She had no family. Her father had died in a skirmish with reavers before she was born, and her mother perished from a fall when Averan was a toddler—a fall from a chair while lighting a lantern in the lord’s keep. Averan had seen her mother fall but had never quite accepted that someone could die so easily from a fall. She herself had dropped fifteen feet on more than one occasion when her reptile jarred her free on landing, but Averan had taken no harm from it.

“I promise that I’ll hide, if hiding will do any good,” Brand said.

She studied his eyes to try to see if he was lying. But Averan had always been terrible at seeing behind other people’s eyes. What other people really thought, what they meant, often seemed an unfathomable mystery.

So she had to satisfy herself with the hope that Brand would hide, or run, or somehow escape the reavers.

Brand had been staring at her, but suddenly his eyes focused on something behind her, and he caught his breath.

She turned. On a far hill up the canyon, she suddenly saw them, the reavers scurrying forward on their six legs. Their leathery hides were pale gray in the morning, and at this distance, one could not make out how many runes were tattooed into their skins. One could see only their blades flashing in the sunlight, and the gleam of fiery staves. From a distance, the six-legged creatures looked only like some strange insects, scurrying from beneath a rock. But Averan knew that every one of those fell beasts was three times the height of a man.

A dark cloud flew up behind, the gree swarming out in alarming numbers. The gree were smaller than bats, larger than June bugs. They flew out of caves sometimes. Averan had never seen so many that they darkened the sky.

“Go, now!” Brand said. The reavers would not be here in two hours. At the speed they ran, they would be swarming the walls in five minutes.

“Up,” Averan shouted.

The graak turned and leapt off the cliff. Averan felt nauseous for a moment when the lizard fell. She looked down over his neck to the jumbled rocks hundreds of feet below.

For a moment, she forgot about the reavers. Many a young skyrider had fallen to those rocks over the centuries. Averan had watched little Kylis fall last year, had heard the girl’s death scream. Now for one eternal moment Averan feared that Leatherneck would not be able to bear her weight, that she would carry them both to their deaths.

Then the graak’s wings caught on the air, and she soared.

She glanced back. Brand waved at her from the rocky perch of the graak’s aerie, as the morning sun glanced off his face. Then he walked manfully back inside the upper lofts.

It looked to Averan as if the mountain swallowed him. She felt half-tempted to circle the city for a few moments, to see what the coming of the reavers might bring, but knew that she did not want such memories to haunt her in years to come.

So with little nudges of her feet and spoken commands, Averan steered Leatherneck north, above the roiling fog that glistened like the waves of the sea. She wiped bitter tears from her eyes as Leatherneck bore her away.

“So then your son throws his javelin at the old tusker,” Baron Poll chortled at Roland, “and he thinks himself a marksman, aims right between the eyes. But that old boar must have had a skull as thick as the King’s fool’s head, for the javelin hits the skull and merely grazes the beast!”

Baron Poll smiled at the memory, and Roland looked up the road. They were still half a day from Carris, riding slowly in the mid afternoon, letting the mounts catch their breath.

“So the old tusker is mad, and he lowers his snout and paws the ground, blood flowing down over his tusks. Now you know that the boars of the Dunnwood are as tall as a horse and all as shaggy-haired as a yak. And your son, being only thirteen at the time, sees that this tusker is about to charge and hasn’t the wit to do what any man should.”

“Which is?” Roland asked. He’d never hunted boars in the Dunnwood.

“Why, turn his mount and run!” Baron Poll shouted. “No, your son sits there looking at the beast, making a fine target of his horse, and no doubt he’s peed his breeches about now.

“Well, that old boar charges and catches his mount right under the belly with a good upper thrust that disembowels the horse and throws your son about four feet in the air.

“Now, as I said, it was about an hour past that we’d lost the hounds, and we’d been riding to find them. We could hear them yapping off in the hills, you see.

“So your son comes down off his horse, and it’s sort of limping away, and the boar sees your lad standing there, and your son takes off running so fast, I swear by the Powers I thought he’d taken flight!”

Baron Poll’s eyes were wide with delight at telling the story. It sounded as if he’d told this one many a time before, and he’d honed it well.

“So then young Squire Borenson, upon hearing the hounds yapping, thinks to himself—as we later found out—run to the dogs! They’ll protect me!

“And so he takes off running through the bracken, with that boar right behind him.

“Now, at the time, your son had just taken two endowments of metabolism—so you can imagine how fast he’s running. He’s sprinting along at thirty miles an hour, shouting ‘Murder! Bloody murder!’—as if he’s raising the hue and cry—and every time he slows, that boar puts the fear of death into him.

“Now, he’s run about half a mile, all uphill, and I start to thinking it’s about time to save his life, so I go charging up on my own mount, right behind him and the boar. But they’re running so fast through the underbrush that I keep having to weave around them, looking for a clearer course, and so I never can quite get within throwing distance of that boar.

“And then your son reaches the dogs. They’re all sitting down at the base of this big rowan tree, their tongues hanging out, and every once in a while one of the hounds would howl as if to have something to do to pass the time, and your son thinks, Ah, I’ll climb that tree, and the dogs will promptly save me.

“Your son leaps into the tree, and all the hounds jump up expectantly, looking at him and wagging the stumps of their tails, and young Borenson shinnies up about twenty feet.

“And then the boar leaps in amid the thick of the dogs.

Now this old tusker had been around, it seemed, and it loved the dogs no better than it did your son, and seeing that the dogs were all fagged out and a bit astonished to find a fifteen-hundred-pound monster in their midst, the tusker lowers its snout and throws the first dog it sees about forty feet in the air and slices another two open before they can even get to their feet.

“So the rest of the hounds—there were only about five or six of them in this little pack—decide that it’s time to tuck what’s left of their tails between their legs and head for the nearest pub. Then Squire Borenson starts screaming for me ‘Help—you son of a whore! Help!’

“Well, I think to myself, that’s no way to address someone you’re asking to save your miserable life, such as it is. So since I can see that he’s safely up a tree, I proceed to slow my horse, as if giving it a breather.

“And just then, I hear this most peculiar sound—this deafening roar! And I look up, and see why your son is screaming. It turns out that the tree he’d climbed had bears in it! Three big bears! The hounds had treed them!”

Baron Poll laughed so hard at the memory that he roared himself, and by now he was nearly weeping.

“Now your son is stuck in this tree, and the bears are none too happy to have him there, and the boar is down underneath it all, and I start laughing so hard I can hardly sit in my saddle.