Maggie Furey - Harp of Winds

Then Gristheena was there. The First Female stalked into the center of the crater: fit and muscular, and as heavy and big-boned as a male. Shia remembered that even as a kit, the younger cat had been a swaggering bully with scant concern for others and an even shorter temper. According to Hreeza, little had changed.

As Contester and Chuevah, it should have been Shia’s place to speak first. Instead she remained obstinately silent, never taking her eyes from the hulking figure of the First Female, holding Gristheena’s glowering eyes with her own. Long minutes stretched by. The floor of the rocky bowl sank deeper into shadow. The two great females, hackles raised, stood eye to eye and glaring like raptors.

As Shia had expected, Gristheena was the first to weaken. “Chuevah!” She spat the word in contempt. “You do not belong here on Steelclaw, the territory and home of the Colony! Either fight or begone!”

Inwardly, Shia was laughing. By breaking the silence, Gristheena had lost face—and everyone had witnessed it. Ignoring the swaggering cat as though the First Female were beneath her notice, Shia lifted her head and addressed her invisible watchers on the spur. “I did not come here to fight,” she said, “and I am not Chuevah—for I was never expelled from the Colony! All of you except the youngest know me! I am Shia, First Female—returned from the dead!”

“Save your breath, Chuevah—to fight!” Gristheena sprang. Shia tried to dodge, but her weakened body betrayed her. The other struck her heavily, and they rolled over and over, locked together, clawing, biting, snarling, one on top and then the other. Fur flew up, floating like clumps of black thistledown, but neither cat could gain a solid purchase. They broke apart and circled one another, sidling, their eyes locked, fur erect, and lashing tails abristle. Shia’s flank was bleeding, scored and stinging, where the other cat had clawed her. Gristheena’s nose had been laid open; she sneezed, spraying blood, and in the instant that her eyes were closed, Shia cuffed her, left-right, across the head, ripping an ear. Snarling, her face contorted to a demon-mask, Gristheena lifted a threatening paw and yowled, a high-pitched, bubbling wail from deep within her throat.

Shia braced herself, expecting the heavier cat to rush her, but Gristheena was more wary now. Again, they circled.

“Listen, fool,” Shia told her. “There is no need for this! Had you but listened . . . Gristheena, I do not seek to be first. My path lies elsewhere—”

“Elsewhere, in truth!” Gristheena spat. “In oblivion, Chuevah, if I have my way!”

Again she sprang. There was no time to dodge—Shia met her headlong. Gristheena’s greater weight crashed into her and bowled her over. Shia, pinned and struggling, felt hot, wet breath on her neck as the other’s fangs sought her throat to crush and rend—but she had left an opening. Gasping, Shia embedded her hind claws in the soft flesh of Gristheena’s belly and ripped down—but she was gone.

Shia rolled over and scrambled after her. Gristheena whipped round to face her opponent—but just too late. Shia’s teeth met in her tail. Gristheena turned, hissing and screeching like a wounded eagle, but with her tail in Shia’s jaws, she could not reach her opponent’s body—nor Shia hers. Shia braced her legs and dug her claws into the crumbling stone of the crater’s floor, but because of her opponent’s greater weight and strength, she knew that she was likely to be overset at any minute. Regretfully, she chose her moment and let go of the tail.

Unbalanced, Gristheena went rolling over and over—right across the Staff of Earth as it lay on the ground. The great cat screamed as though she had been scalded and scrambled hastily backward, her whiskers bristling, her eyes flashing fire. The western route out of the crater—up and over the spur, turn back and down the canyon rim—was suddenly unguarded, for until the contest was settled, the other cats would not interfere. Shia seized the moment, snatched up the Staff, and ran.

Desperation gave such wings to her feet that she was on top of the spur in three great bounds, with cats scattering out from under her flying paws. But Shia had been mistaken in thinking her opponent had been cowed by the Staff. The breath shot out of her body as Gristheena hit her from behind with all the force of a snowslide. The impact knocked the great cat from her feet, and the Staff fell from her jaws and went clattering across the stones. Gristheena’s claws scored her flanks like firebrands, opening bloody gashes, and one great paw raked across her face, missing her eyes by a hairbreadth. Choking blood poured into Shia’s nose and throat. She felt Gristheena’s massive jaws, with their gleaming, ivory fangs, close around her windpipe . . .

Khanu had been watching the fight intently. He remembered little of the legendary Shia—he had only been a kit when she had been taken—but at the sight of her, his golden eyes stretched wide in admiration. The cat was lean and scraggy, but hard-muscled still—and oh, but she looked fierce! She was older than himself, but she was in her prime, at the height of both her fighting capacity—and her sexual potential. Khanu, leaning out from his ledge at a perilous angle to get a better view of the struggle, and forgetting, in his anxiety, that he had no right to be there at all, had willed her to win with all his heart.

Unfortunately, exhausted and half starved as she was, Shia could be no match for Gristheena. When the heavier cat brought her down on the spur, Khanu’s heart plummeted. It was all over now. No one was more surprised than he, when he found himself moving.

Aurian, I’m sorry. I failed you. Shia knew her death was very near now. Blue-steel claws pricked the tender skin of her belly, preparing to rip it open . . . And a massive shape, a blacker shadow in the gathering darkness, a whirlwind of teeth and claws, smashed into Gristheena from the side, sending her reeling, bleeding, toppling over the edge of the spur to the rocky floor of the crater below.

The furious protest of the watching females rose to a yowling crescendo.

“Run!” The voice came blasting into Shia’s mind. “They’ll be on us in an instant!”

“The Staff!” Shia cried, groping with flailing paws among the flaking slabs of stone on the ridgetop.

“This?” said another voice. “I have it safe! Now run!” It was Hreeza. Shia’s heart leapt with joy.

Wasting no more time, the three cats fled; Hreeza, Shia, and the strange cat who had saved her life. Leaping across chasms, streaking perilously between the boulders that littered the mountain’s ravaged western face, they ran as they had never run before, the horde of females surging and raging at their heels.

Hreeza staggered the last few agonizing steps up to the top of the bluff, and swept keen eyes across the broken slopes that they had just climbed with such difficulty. “I believe we’ve shaken them off our trail at last,” she panted. said nothing, but simply stopped amid the knot of wind-bent pines that crowned the bluff, and with a grateful sigh, allowed his aching limbs to collapse beneath him as he flopped to the snow-flecked ground. He looked hopefully at Shia, whose jaws were clenched in a deathlock around the glowing object that she had taken from Hreeza on the first day, and had carried ever since. Khanu knew that only sheer willpower had carried her this far.

Shia heaved a heartfelt sigh of relief at Hreeza’s words. “I truly hope so,” she muttered. “I can go no further!” She looked like death incarnate, and old Hreeza was little better. Khanu, a nonhunting male, who was unaccustomed to such exertions, admitted to himself that he too was in a woeful state.

For a day and a night, the furious cats from the Colony had clung to the trail of the three fugitives, pursuing them relentlessly down the shattered flanks of Steelclaw, and on through the canyons and passes that threaded between the two peaks to the west, where they had tried as best they could to keep below the snowline so as not to leave tracks for their hunters to follow. Since daylight, they had begun to climb again, and had penetrated into territories that were far beyond Khanu’s den. Above them loomed another mountain, a disquietingly different silhouette from the familiar shape that Khanu had been used to seeing all his life. Even as he watched, turgid snowclouds darkened the peak, rolling like massive gray boulders down the mountain toward him.